Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Battlefield by Marc Platt (featuring Michael Mills & James Lark)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Battlefield by Marc Platt (featuring Michael Mills & James Lark) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  A once and future king complained.
• 0:03
  Merlin dear, Oh dear, I thought we'd given up all that nonsense.
• 0:08
  He shook his head of unruly red hair in irritation.
• 0:11
  Isn't enough ever enough? Arthur raised himself painfully
• 0:16
  from the side of the chair where they had sat him.
• 0:18
  He slammed his gloved fist against the carved arm.
• 0:21
  You gave your word, I most certainly did not.
• 0:24
  You've been listening to those minstrels again.
• 0:27
  They always exaggerate. Teeth of heaven.
• 0:30
  A series of coughs tore up from Arthur's aching lungs.
• 0:34
  He pushed away the Queen, who moved in to tend him and wiped
• 0:38
  the fresh blood from his mouth himself.
• 0:41
  You will never hear when I have need of you, Merlin.
• 0:44
  The wizard shrugged and smiled weakly, revealing the laughter
• 0:48
  lines on his avuncular face. I can't be everywhere at once.
• 0:52
  But there was still mischief behind his eyes, and he still
• 0:56
  looked younger every time he returned.
• 1:00
  Arthur rested his head back on the side of the chair.
• 1:04
  He looked around the dark ribs of the King's whole ship that
• 1:07
  Merlin had cultured for him long, long ago in the VAT
• 1:11
  Cellars of the High Tadchel. The consoles bleeped quietly as
• 1:16
  they awaited his instructions, always ready to jump the stars
• 1:20
  or out fly the swiftest ornithopter. 10 years of war
• 1:24
  have we suffered. My wife and friend are lost to
• 1:27
  me. The alliance of the Round Table
• 1:30
  is broken. My Kingdom is slipping away.
• 1:32
  The land dies. Morgane has grown in power.
• 1:36
  She will destroy us all with her black hearts.
• 1:39
  I doubt that, Arthur, but it may be a long struggle.
• 1:43
  I thought I'd lost my tutor too. And then you return against all
• 1:47
  odds, but only to snatch away my remaining hope.
• 1:49
  Oh, don't be so gloomy and never trust people who make
• 1:53
  prophecies. Arthur lifted his eyes in
• 1:56
  disbelief. But you do naughty, else it's
• 1:59
  one of my more annoying habits. The High King of the 13 Worlds
• 2:04
  gripped the arms of the chair and struggled to rise.
• 2:08
  He cursed as his knees buckled under him.
• 2:11
  The dead armour was cumbersome and he was too weak to move
• 2:14
  against it. He sat back, temporarily
• 2:17
  defeated, but he would find a way.
• 2:22
  He missed Lancelot and he longed to see Guinevere again and ask
• 2:26
  for her forgiveness. Merlin took a salve sponge from
• 2:31
  one of the Queens and began gently to wipe the mud and blood
• 2:34
  from the aged King's face. My dear Arthur, I think it's
• 2:38
  time I came clean with you, Excalibur.
• 2:41
  He muttered. Where is it?
• 2:43
  You see, it's all very well calling me tutor, but I can't
• 2:46
  even begin your education until I find out how all this ends.
• 2:50
  To Merlin's surprise, the king appeared to rally from his
• 2:53
  misery. So it's true then?
• 2:54
  He said eagerly. True.
• 2:56
  Why? What else have the minstrel been
• 2:58
  saying? That you live your life
• 3:00
  backwards? No, no, no.
• 3:04
  From his tatty embroidered Afghan coat, Merlin tugged A
• 3:07
  floppy hat of brown felt. He flailed it into shape as he
• 3:12
  tried to contain his annoyance. Around its brim, the saffron
• 3:16
  Kathmandu bandana was creased and tangled.
• 3:19
  A pair of finger symbols tinkled to the floor.
• 3:22
  My life may be rather haphazard in a temporal sort of way, but I
• 3:26
  cannot predict the future. You deny it yet again.
• 3:29
  Of course I do, and you know that, so you cannot say the hour
• 3:33
  of my death. The wizard smiled inwardly that
• 3:37
  the old king could still beat his tutor into a corner.
• 3:41
  He looked forward to beginning the young King's education, but
• 3:45
  there seems no way to convince his old friend that time was
• 3:48
  passing. All things had their time, and
• 3:51
  that included the time to let go of what you loved.
• 3:56
  I shall rise again, continued Arthur.
• 3:58
  There is no question, and I shall see more gain defeated.
• 4:01
  And you, Merlin, I rely on to see me win through.
• 4:06
  Merlin's twin hearts sank. I'll see what I can do, my Lord,
• 4:10
  he said quietly. It may already be in hand.
• 4:15
  The king grunted, satisfied. At last, he leaned back into his
• 4:19
  chair. And finds my sword, too.
• 4:23
  There was a movement in the shadows at the back of the hall.
• 4:26
  One of the Queen's Belanger of Almond lifted Excalibur from a
• 4:30
  cavity into which it had been parastalted by the ship.
• 4:34
  She carried the ancient sword with reverence to Merlin.
• 4:37
  But there is no scabbard, she said.
• 4:39
  I'm sure it'll turn up again sometime.
• 4:43
  Merlin held the sword for a moment, recognising the filigree
• 4:46
  ganglia systems worked out in the hilt and the blade.
• 4:50
  I am height, Excalibur unto a king, fair treasure.
• 4:56
  Thank you, your Majesties, he said gravely.
• 4:59
  Your part in this will be remembered.
• 5:02
  The three attendant Queens bowed low to him.
• 5:06
  Then he turned to present the sword to it's true master.
• 5:12
  The King was already sleeping. A new serenity drained the
• 5:17
  aching weariness from his face. His breathing steadied.
• 5:22
  The Queens watched Merlin carry the sword symbol of the High
• 5:25
  Kingship to the central control console.
• 5:29
  He found the key input socket that he had grafted into the
• 5:32
  Obsidian unit because he remembered that long ago he had
• 5:35
  found it there in the future. He slowly, ceremonially lowered
• 5:42
  the blade into its place. So, my once and future friend,
• 5:48
  the Night Watch begins. The huge amethyst in the hilt
• 5:53
  glittered momentarily with fire. The gentle hum of the ship
• 5:57
  pitched up a degree. Hi, King Arthur shifted in his
• 6:03
  sleep. Thank you, doctor, he muttered
• 6:08
  through his dreams. Hamster Book Club, The Doctor
• 6:18
  Who Novel Review Podcast with Joe Ford, Michael Mills and
• 6:23
  James Lark. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 6:29
  Lab. My name is Joe Ford and forced
• 6:33
  against my will to read a target that I have never read before
• 6:38
  but have been particularly impressed with.
• 6:41
  I am here to Why are you looking confused, James Lark?
• 6:44
  Forced against your will. I need to choose.
• 6:46
  It hang on but that. But once when have you your
• 6:51
  fault? This one When?
• 6:52
  Have you ever been forced against your will to read a
• 6:55
  target? To read a target.
• 6:58
  To read a target, never the answer is never forced against
• 7:01
  your will. Bollocks.
• 7:04
  I'm literally chowing them down like you wouldn't believe.
• 7:06
  I've got five book clubs in the next two weeks.
• 7:10
  That was James Larks voice you heard being mercilessly rude to
• 7:13
  me there. Hello, James.
• 7:14
  Hello, Joe. And are you excited to be here
• 7:17
  talking about Battlefield, which turned up in your top ten Doctor
• 7:21
  Who book list? It did, didn't it?
• 7:23
  Yes. Yeah, yeah, I can see why it's
• 7:25
  good. You're going to have to justify
• 7:27
  that lofty position throughout this episode.
• 7:29
  Also with us, but no less important, with a microphone
• 7:34
  sitting on a total recall book, is Mr. Michael Mills.
• 7:37
  Hello, Michael. A vault, my Liege or something.
• 7:42
  Soon to be Arthurian. You know, given that you were so
• 7:46
  excited, Michael, about that wonderful panel in Liberation of
• 7:50
  the Daleks of the Dragon, you know, attacking the Daleks, that
• 7:53
  full page fabulous panel. Do you remember?
• 7:56
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a.
• 7:57
  Shame we don't get no Dragons in this, isn't it?
• 8:00
  Oh there are. There are dragon references.
• 8:01
  I feel like it's dragon adjacent.
• 8:04
  Oh, it's definitely dragon. There's a hint of Dragons, isn't
• 8:07
  there? Is that thing in the spaceship
• 8:09
  supposed to be a dragon? No, that's not a dragon, that is
• 8:12
  a ghost snake. A ghost snake, you say?
• 8:15
  And the book is quite specific that it is a ghost snake.
• 8:20
  Well, we are here today to talk about Battlefield as written by
• 8:25
  Mark Platt but scripted by Ben Eronovich for the TV show, and
• 8:31
  I'm fairly certain we're going to get into both the TV and the
• 8:35
  book version today. I do have a question for you
• 8:38
  both though. I'm prepared, unfortunately for
• 8:40
  the two of you before we head into Battlefield.
• 8:43
  And that is, do you think this is the the biggest gulf between
• 8:50
  what's on the screen and what's in the novelisation of all the
• 8:55
  targets? Let's go across to Michael.
• 8:59
  I mean, potentially, if you're excluding things like in an
• 9:02
  exciting adventure with the Daleks, where they do just take
• 9:05
  it off in a completely different direction.
• 9:06
  Well, actually, of course there's the Massacre as well,
• 9:08
  isn't there? Where famously John Lucarotti
• 9:10
  didn't like what they've done to his script so he just wrote the
• 9:13
  whole thing from first base anyway because no one had seen
• 9:18
  it, No one knew what the episode was like so he just redid it.
• 9:21
  So no is the answer to your question.
• 9:23
  But that it might be one of the biggest glow UPS I think.
• 9:30
  Definitely James. I, I, I think I agree it, it, it
• 9:36
  is quite a glow up. Quite a lot of the McCoy era
• 9:41
  books get a glow up. Paradise Towers.
• 9:44
  I seem to recall painting a pretty vivid picture of that
• 9:48
  story. That because because I did a lot
• 9:51
  of these in the wrong order, I read the book first or the right
• 9:53
  order for the age I lived. I grew up, read the Target book
• 9:57
  1st and then saw it on TV. And yeah, Paradise Towers
• 10:01
  definitely didn't live up to what I'd see on the page.
• 10:03
  But I guess in terms of the kind of the scope and ambition of the
• 10:07
  ideas in Battlefield and the many shortcomings in its
• 10:14
  realization, it's not just about shortcomings, though that's
• 10:18
  that's a very negative way of putting it.
• 10:20
  I do think the production leaves certain things to be desired.
• 10:23
  But Mark Plass has gone into this and novelized it as it's
• 10:28
  not even that cliche. It's not even the budget, the
• 10:31
  limitless budget that people talk of because it because a lot
• 10:34
  of this is very self-contained still.
• 10:36
  He just, he approaches it as a proper novel, doesn't he?
• 10:41
  I mean it, it, it reads like a fantasy novel in places and it
• 10:47
  reads like a proper science fiction novel in others.
• 10:50
  And it's very much paints it's own pictures.
• 10:54
  So when I did eventually see Battlefield, which was the 1993
• 11:00
  repeat, was it 94? I already had a firm idea in my
• 11:04
  head of what Battlefield looked like.
• 11:07
  And unlike say, Remembrance, where the the the book is has
• 11:13
  got a greater scope than the than what what we get on
• 11:16
  television. But what we get on television is
• 11:18
  still pretty darn good. Yeah, realisation of one of
• 11:21
  which ideas Battlefield just paled and and scene after scene
• 11:28
  didn't deliver what I had expected it to or wanted it to.
• 11:33
  In terms of like a glow up, like Michael said, like the thing I
• 11:36
  love about Battlefield on TV is the characters.
• 11:39
  I think they're just really is a great fun cast of characters,
• 11:44
  but they don't have the greatest amount of depth on screen
• 11:48
  because it's an action adventure and it's skipping from one set
• 11:50
  piece to another. But Marc Platt is aware of where
• 11:54
  all those characters are in this book and gives them all just a
• 11:58
  bit of back story. He doesn't forget any of them as
• 12:01
  they're leaving the story as well.
• 12:03
  We leave. I mean, there's some stuff with
• 12:05
  Shao Young that I absolutely love that we'll get into.
• 12:07
  That was the biggest difference I felt here was they all felt
• 12:11
  like real people in the book. Yeah, and I think the TV version
• 12:16
  of Battlefield, they were all young writers and new and big
• 12:21
  ideas. But I think it's one of the
• 12:23
  stories where perhaps you see that lack of experience in terms
• 12:27
  of what is actually achievable. What one should ask of ATV
• 12:30
  production with the resources that Doctor Who in in 1989 has,
• 12:36
  I mean, some of the issues with it in terms of realizing it's
• 12:38
  ideas are by all accounts, you know, simple production issues.
• 12:43
  Wardrobe didn't get the memo that the suits, suits of armour
• 12:48
  are meant to look medieval in effect, but actually be
• 12:51
  obviously sci-fi on closer inspection.
• 12:53
  So they're just they're just nice, but you can't blame it all
• 12:56
  on that stuff because there are things where I think a more
• 12:58
  experienced heads would have known you're not going to be
• 13:01
  able to capture this or or get these ideas across effectively.
• 13:05
  But you know, and when they do with things like the destroyer,
• 13:08
  which has a has a argument to be the finest realized monster in
• 13:13
  classic Doctor Who, one of the few I think that you could
• 13:15
  probably put on screen in 21st century Doctor Who and it not
• 13:18
  look shabby. You do you do see how the ideas
• 13:20
  are there, but equally you shouldn't have a script that
• 13:23
  asks for men in armour flying about and and crashing through
• 13:30
  brewery roofs if you've got a children's BBC budget boom.
• 13:37
  I also think, and I've said this before, about Cartmel as a
• 13:40
  script editor. I think he was writing for a
• 13:43
  different pace of delivery. I, I, I think the reason so many
• 13:48
  of his stories overrun is because they were designed to be
• 13:50
  spoken at a different speed with a different level of kind of
• 13:53
  understanding. And I sort of feel like this,
• 13:56
  the dialogue in Battlefield suffers from the kind of the
• 14:00
  rehearsal process and maybe to some extent the kind of
• 14:03
  expectations of actors reared in, in BBC productions.
• 14:07
  I'm not sure. It's all terribly well cast.
• 14:09
  And I certainly feel like a lot of the comedy lands very badly
• 14:13
  because they just don't know how to deliver it.
• 14:15
  And they labour it too much or they time it wrong.
• 14:18
  And actually it's written to be rattled through like it's like
• 14:21
  a, a Buffy script. It actually just needs to be bam
• 14:24
  bam, bam, bam bam. So you're so the, the, the, the
• 14:26
  people watching are, are still catching up on the jokes.
• 14:29
  Instead, every single joke. So we we see it thrown into the
• 14:32
  air and then it just sort of lands like a like a dead weight.
• 14:36
  There are hints of it, though, isn't aren't there?
• 14:38
  Like you dab it in the forest, you know where?
• 14:41
  Anna Smith. And they're very good, though.
• 14:43
  I mean they. Get back and forth, you know,
• 14:45
  you call me my lady once more and I'll break your nose and
• 14:47
  she's straight in with that line.
• 14:49
  They they get it, but the guy playing Peter Walmsley, for
• 14:52
  example, oh boy, you know, he's a lovely, in some ways, a lovely
• 14:55
  actor in a lovely performance, but he he wants to milk
• 14:58
  everything out of that dialogue. And actually it's written to be
• 15:00
  much frothier than that. And, and I think that the Marc
• 15:04
  Platt delivers the dialogue very well and he rewrites some of it,
• 15:07
  but I think that it's very well written in the book.
• 15:10
  So again, I knew these jokes well myself when I saw it on
• 15:16
  television being not terribly well performed in places.
• 15:19
  And so that was one of the things that disappointed.
• 15:21
  Like that was a really good joke, but it didn't land.
• 15:24
  Well, he omits dialogue as well, doesn't he?
• 15:27
  Takes out lies that don't work. He rewrites lines that I think
• 15:30
  he thinks don't work on screen. He changed the orders of scenes.
• 15:34
  He put scenes in different places in the book.
• 15:36
  Like he's had a good look at battlefield and gone.
• 15:39
  What's not working here? I've got a chance to give this
• 15:41
  another pass. And Ben Aronovich, who's so
• 15:43
  embarrassed by the whole thing as he hit the screen, go listen
• 15:47
  to that commentary. He can barely look at the screen
• 15:50
  and what has been delivered with his script.
• 15:52
  And he's hard on the script as well.
• 15:54
  I think he probably went Mark. But I think this is the argument
• 15:56
  for remakes in general, right? Which is that Hollywood TV or
• 16:01
  endlessly wants to remake things, which isn't a problem if
• 16:05
  you weren't remaking things that already worked.
• 16:07
  You know, take a take a film, a film that I was reminded of
• 16:11
  repeatedly while reading this is Highlander and what?
• 16:15
  And they keep saying every now again we're going to do a remake
• 16:16
  of Highlander. And there's probably goes, yes,
• 16:18
  yes, because you know what, when I'm not watching Highlander,
• 16:21
  it's the best effing film in the world.
• 16:24
  And then you actually watch. How do you remember all the, the
• 16:27
  music and the sweeping shots and the epic scale of it all?
• 16:30
  And then you watch it and you realise, Oh yeah, no, it's, it's
• 16:32
  not quite, is it? You could make that same
• 16:35
  argument for Battlefield. You know Michael, when you're
• 16:37
  not watching. It Joe OH.
• 16:39
  Well, off you go then. I mean, it's a kind of magic,
• 16:42
  isn't it, when you can take something that doesn't operate
• 16:46
  on on the screen in that way. And it maybe it did need a
• 16:49
  second one. Maybe it it took the person, the
• 16:51
  friend who saw that saw what they liked in it, but didn't
• 16:55
  have the sense of, you know, all the the baggage carried with it
• 16:58
  that that imagine Benedonovich did to go no, no, no, this is
• 17:01
  really good and I like this, but let's really make it work.
• 17:04
  But I also, I need to make this clear from the outset.
• 17:08
  I think Battlefield is some of the most fun you can have with
• 17:12
  Doctor Who. I love it for all of its faults
• 17:17
  and having kind of got over the way it didn't deliver on the
• 17:21
  book. I'm that that is one of my happy
• 17:23
  places. I'll happily sit down and watch
• 17:25
  Battlefield. I think it's I think it's up
• 17:28
  there with the the the best kind of comfort viewing.
• 17:32
  Do I need to just kick back and enjoy watching Doctor Who?
• 17:36
  And I would. Locations, you know, I mean, I
• 17:40
  think the music's great action, fun characters.
• 17:43
  It is a great. So much different and I've
• 17:45
  always been a bit baffled when people are down on it.
• 17:47
  Do you remember? Do you remember when it came out
• 17:48
  on VHS and Doctor Who magazine absolutely savaged it?
• 17:53
  Yeah, I I think there's people who who they look at ghost
• 17:56
  lightened and and and survival and Cursor Fenrick and they,
• 17:59
  they sort of view this one as being the disappointment of the
• 18:01
  season. Oh, bless them.
• 18:02
  I mean, this came very close to winning the Strictly Come
• 18:05
  Hamster season 26. I realise that's no great
• 18:08
  suggestion of quality, but. But, but, but which are you
• 18:13
  going to sit down and watch Ghost Light if you're feeling
• 18:15
  poorly on the sofa? No, you're going to watch
• 18:17
  Battlefields. It's it's so much fun.
• 18:19
  And it was, it was and it was an aggressively negative review
• 18:23
  from Doctor Who magazine. I remember reading it in, in, in
• 18:26
  WH Smith's where where I used to read Doctor Who magazine because
• 18:28
  I wasn't buying the thing. And I'm just being outraged.
• 18:32
  But also because it was a time when they were giving kind of
• 18:34
  really glowing reviews to quite plodding, worthy adventures.
• 18:38
  Like they would give Terminus an absolute rave just like, OK, so.
• 18:43
  They working from memory James. Have you forgotten how to have
• 18:47
  fun here? Because if, if it's a choice
• 18:49
  between terminus, I've got some time for, but if it's choice
• 18:53
  between Terminus and Battlefield, which is the one
• 18:55
  that I'm going to I'm, I'm, I'm going to relish watching
• 18:58
  Battlefield. Is, is, is one of my go to.
• 19:02
  I want to have a good time to and and and what am I going to
• 19:05
  watch? I think there's many reasons why
• 19:09
  Michael suggested that by the end of the read, it might be my
• 19:12
  definitive version of Battlefield.
• 19:15
  He was correct. It has been known to happen and
• 19:18
  I will have some things to say about things that the book does
• 19:21
  better than ATV show. My sort of last overly negative
• 19:24
  thing would be we almost got a Graham Harper directed
• 19:27
  Battlefield and that would have been great.
• 19:32
  Like that would have been fantastic.
• 19:33
  And what a shame, because I've Kerrigan just wasn't quite up to
• 19:37
  it, was he? No, no, I like like James.
• 19:42
  Yeah, I don't want to appear too down on it because this, this is
• 19:44
  what my happy place, Doctor Who was.
• 19:46
  Well, it was the second Doctor Who video I ever bought.
• 19:50
  Perversely, the first was The Curse of Fatal Death.
• 19:52
  But so I have seen this many, many, many times and love, love
• 19:59
  the normalization. We'll go on to that.
• 20:00
  But it's it's also part of that fun is that it's, it's such a
• 20:03
  witty script. And I do think one of the things
• 20:06
  that Andrew Cardinal brought to or he's encouraged in Doctor Who
• 20:09
  that we we hadn't really seen for a while is genuine wit.
• 20:13
  And it's just, it's not necessarily big jokes, but it's
• 20:15
  little lines like here. You Speaking of England?
• 20:18
  Or, or what does it say that in my handwriting?
• 20:21
  You know, just a little throwaway little.
• 20:23
  Boy, yeah. You're not, you don't have to
• 20:25
  like land on it or sell it, but it's just the little sort of
• 20:27
  overall back and forth and. Visual gags as well.
• 20:30
  Michael. Jeff Carson.
• 20:31
  Alternative universe. No good.
• 20:33
  Hold on to that wheel. No, no, no, no, no, no.
• 20:36
  I mean, come on. Wonderful.
• 20:38
  Well, shall we move on to the book?
• 20:40
  I'm sure we could talk about the TV battlefield till the cows
• 20:42
  come home. Even though there's no cows in
• 20:44
  it. Where would you like to start?
• 20:47
  OK, I would. I would like to start by
• 20:49
  throwing you both a question. Oh, OK, Silence.
• 20:52
  We're waiting for the. Question.
• 20:53
  Waiting for the question, Joe I. Know I'm just.
• 20:55
  Sort of that's how it works. I know there's a lot of timey
• 20:57
  wimey past coming before future coming before past here, but.
• 21:02
  Shout out Merlin, yes. Is this the doctor from the past
• 21:08
  or the future? I'm very confused.
• 21:10
  He could be suggesting it is the future because he he doesn't
• 21:13
  remember having done it before. But then we have since learned
• 21:16
  that there's an awful lot the Doctor doesn't remember from the
• 21:18
  past. So it could be the past and he
• 21:20
  does say it could be the past. Discuss.
• 21:23
  Oh, you think it's a timeless child thing?
• 21:25
  Well, no, but he does say it could be the future or the past.
• 21:30
  The Doctor, as Merlin, discuss. So the the opening chapter of
• 21:37
  the battlefield novelization is one of my favourites chapters in
• 21:41
  any Doctor Who book that we have read for this podcast ever.
• 21:46
  In terms of a single chapter. It's it's utterly, it's utterly
• 21:50
  brilliant. We open in a valion, a world
• 21:55
  outside, beyond the real world, with King Arthur dying after the
• 22:00
  for the final battle in which all has been put to rights and
• 22:03
  being carried by 3 Queens down to the lake for his final burial
• 22:08
  where awaiting him is Merlin. It's so evocative.
• 22:13
  And me, the the moment, the first sentences, the moment, the
• 22:18
  moment you begin reading this. I know Pete, I know we all,
• 22:22
  we're all meant to say through the ruin of the city walk the
• 22:25
  ruin of a man. But I mean, how about this?
• 22:28
  Three sisters bore him down to the boat, swan haired and regal.
• 22:31
  Each was crowned with a circus of silver and robed in seeds of
• 22:34
  dark weeds of darkest green sisters, yet each also a queen
• 22:39
  from one of the 13 planets summoned even in the final
• 22:42
  throes of war to another universe.
• 22:44
  The prophecy decreed 2 Queens to carry the High King, 1 queen to
• 22:48
  tent his wounds. That's good stuff, isn't it?
• 22:53
  I could imagine people were expecting, you know,
• 22:55
  novelization of the TV version, wondering where the garden
• 22:58
  centre is. It's full of it's the writing is
• 23:02
  beautiful. It's got sentences like it was
• 23:05
  full weary of the hatred that beset the world like a plague.
• 23:09
  It it it's written with enough of a kind of a a knowledge of TH
• 23:15
  White and Mallory to just sort of slightly lean into that
• 23:21
  archaic way of writing without being a tool, a parody or or or
• 23:28
  a without without coming across as wanky to to put it for
• 23:33
  exactly. It's, it's also a really deftly
• 23:38
  piece of science fiction oriented fantasy because you've
• 23:45
  got this beautifully Arthurian language, but you've also got
• 23:49
  references to a corridor gate and other dimensions and
• 23:52
  hydraulic muscles which had just slipped in there from the
• 23:56
  beginning. So it's so there's no point.
• 23:58
  He's not, he's trying to pull, He's not trying to trick the
• 24:01
  reader into thinking that it's a different kind of book straight
• 24:05
  away. He's establishing this slightly
• 24:07
  strange ancient world with elements of science fiction in
• 24:14
  there in a way that I think Eronovich wants to in his
• 24:19
  script. But it's it's so he's so much
• 24:22
  more able to hear with this prologue and when Merlin
• 24:27
  arrives, since you've asked the question, I mean, Merlin is
• 24:30
  basically written as Mccoy's doctor.
• 24:32
  He's described differently. He's got red hair.
• 24:34
  He's got an Afghan coat and a hat with a saffron Kathmandu
• 24:39
  bandana. But the the other descriptions
• 24:43
  that the he's called avuncular, he's called mischievous.
• 24:47
  It's said that he smiles impishly.
• 24:49
  And the dialogue all immediately calls to mind Mccoy's doctor.
• 24:53
  Which I think is true because there's not really time in this
• 24:57
  book to convincingly create a whole brand new character for
• 25:01
  the Doctor. And the fact that we recognize
• 25:03
  him immediately tells us what we need to know.
• 25:06
  And, and the prologue beautifully ends with Arthur
• 25:09
  calling him Doctor. So Doctor, the Doctor is
• 25:12
  definitely Merlin. And I think it's quite
• 25:14
  straightforward, really. He's Merlin in his future, but
• 25:17
  in the world's past. But it's it's, it's, it's a
• 25:21
  different world as well. It's another dimension.
• 25:26
  It's like a lot of like a lot of Moffett stuff.
• 25:30
  It's actually quite a simple idea.
• 25:32
  And this is the first time that we get, is it the first time the
• 25:35
  Doctor Who ever really capitalizes on this, where the
• 25:38
  Doctor can live his life in a different order and actually
• 25:41
  something from our past can be his future.
• 25:44
  It's certainly the first time we get a kind of ostentatiously
• 25:47
  River Song ish kind of character development.
• 25:51
  It's just, it's described in a way.
• 25:53
  I think it's there's an attempt to make it sound more
• 25:58
  complicated than it is, which is maybe unhelpful in explaining
• 26:02
  exactly what's happening. You know, that whole thing when
• 26:05
  the Doctor says my future, my personal future, that is, which
• 26:09
  could be the past. But actually, I think it's a
• 26:11
  fairly straightforward idea. And the thing in the book that
• 26:14
  is really satisfying is that he doesn't want to be Merlin.
• 26:19
  And it's, and he doesn't like that this future possibility is
• 26:23
  becoming clearer and clearer. You know, as the story goes on,
• 26:27
  it basically becomes obvious what he's going to become
• 26:30
  himself. And he doesn't like, I guess he
• 26:34
  doesn't like his destiny being controlled in that way.
• 26:36
  He wants to be in in control of it himself.
• 26:38
  Is delightful. I I said both of you a message
• 26:41
  saying the new adventures of riots.
• 26:43
  They just took, they took notes from this, but they took the
• 26:45
  wrong notes. In the new Adventures, the 7th
• 26:48
  Doctor is always about 15 steps ahead of everybody.
• 26:51
  And as planned, most of the story, the delight of
• 26:53
  Battlefield is the 7th Doctor's 15 steps behind, and it's
• 26:57
  himself from the future. Set all this up.
• 27:01
  He's being bamboozled by himself.
• 27:02
  It's wonderful. He does say at the end, doesn't
• 27:04
  he? You know, or maybe in a few
• 27:06
  regenerations time I'll be able to avoid this.
• 27:09
  Until then, there is like a he does explicitly say this will
• 27:12
  happen in the future, but who? I will say this line though,
• 27:16
  because I always say this and it's the one time when it's
• 27:18
  actually relevant. It's the last line he says in
• 27:22
  given this is a precursor to the New Adventures.
• 27:24
  The last line he has in Lungbarrow is Oh my God, I still
• 27:27
  haven't been Merlin yet. And that's it.
• 27:29
  That's how he goes out of the books, which is glorious.
• 27:33
  Yeah, it's, it's great, it is interesting.
• 27:35
  But we would have, you know, another five years of Virgin New
• 27:39
  Adventures and all the BBC books and all the big finishes and all
• 27:42
  the comic books after that, that would continue to promote the
• 27:46
  idea of the 7th Doctor as, as the grand manipulator and to
• 27:49
  take that ever further. And yet here one season, you
• 27:53
  know, a few books after they've really set that up properly for
• 27:56
  the first time with Remembrance of the Dialects, They're
• 27:58
  already, it's like, oh, we did, we've done that twice already
• 28:00
  with Remembrance and Silver Nemesis.
• 28:02
  They're already deconstructing it.
• 28:03
  They're sort of going, all right, clever clogs.
• 28:05
  What if you, what if your future self is up the line somewhere
• 28:08
  doing exactly the same to you? And it's a, it's a brilliant
• 28:11
  inversion. And yeah, like, like James, this
• 28:13
  idea that he is immediately wrong footed, it's the one thing
• 28:17
  you could do to the 7th Doctor to completely wrong foot him is
• 28:20
  to say no, no, you're, you're the porn here.
• 28:23
  Get running. And even the jokes around it are
• 28:25
  so great. It says dig hole here.
• 28:27
  What's he saying That in my handwriting?
• 28:30
  I mean, that's there's lots of great jokes like that.
• 28:33
  You were saying, Michael, that you cast the Merlin Doctor.
• 28:38
  Oh, yeah. So I was trying I when I read
• 28:43
  it, but the one I read it the first time, I remember
• 28:47
  deliberately trying to sort of conjure an image of my head.
• 28:49
  Oh, who could this be? What actor would I like to
• 28:51
  imagine? And I think I went through all
• 28:54
  sorts of all sorts of different people.
• 28:56
  I think I had like Brendan Gleeson in my head.
• 28:58
  I think I had, what's his name, the little Irish chap who
• 29:02
  auditioned for the 7th Doctor as well.
• 29:05
  He did the He did the screen test.
• 29:08
  Return of the Jedi. Luther Dermott.
• 29:12
  Dermott Yeah, the campist audition I've ever seen.
• 29:15
  Yes, so I, I, I pictured him and I saw when I came round to read
• 29:19
  it again, this time I sort of forgotten I'd done that the
• 29:21
  first time and I was rather caught unawares when I realised
• 29:24
  that I was picturing my head. You're going to hate me for
• 29:27
  this, Chris Marshall. Oh boy, that's not the
• 29:35
  eccentricities we might expect. I'm featuring Radagasta Brown
• 29:40
  from The Hobbit. Mostly, you know.
• 29:42
  Oh, so an actual future McCoy? With a massive beard?
• 29:46
  Yeah. What about you, James?
• 29:48
  Was you seeing it, or were you just seeing McCoy?
• 29:50
  I find it hard not to see McCoy. McCoy with red hair.
• 29:53
  I mean, it's one of those things where actually, I don't know if
• 29:59
  this applies to everyone, but sometimes I don't actually
• 30:01
  picture the face of a character in a book.
• 30:04
  And and I and I feel like the way the book is written it if
• 30:09
  you were filming it, you'd film him in shadows or with the the
• 30:14
  his back turns to the camera. Or do you just glimpse his face
• 30:18
  because the focus would be entirely on Arthur and you, you
• 30:21
  maybe you wouldn't see, you know, full on what he looks
• 30:24
  like. You just get, as you do in the
• 30:26
  prose, a glimpse of his his bandana and a glimpse of his
• 30:30
  coat and. It's.
• 30:33
  It's, you know, I quite like the mystery around it.
• 30:36
  I quite like not having too specific a picture of what
• 30:39
  Merlin looks like because because as well, there's all
• 30:43
  these associations with Merlin. I mean, Merlin is it's a cartoon
• 30:46
  character with a long white beard and Bermuda shorts.
• 30:49
  Merlin is, is Sam Neil, you know, it's and I quite like the
• 30:54
  the the the book allows for this kind of mythical nature for all
• 30:58
  that undercuts it as well. And there's some lovely
• 31:00
  references to, you know, Arthur reports on what he's heard.
• 31:06
  Oh, the minstrels say you live your life backwards, that kind
• 31:09
  of thing. There is a point where Merlin
• 31:11
  says to me, you've been listening to those minstrels
• 31:12
  again. They always exaggerate and, and,
• 31:16
  but I love that it's sort of it at the same time as as being a
• 31:20
  little bit postmodern, it's also embracing the, the whole
• 31:23
  mythical status of, of Merlin and, and, and allowing for that
• 31:27
  in the Doctor universe. Well, that's, that's straight
• 31:30
  FTH White, isn't it? The idea that Merlin, the sword
• 31:33
  in the stone, the idea that Merlin lives his life backwards,
• 31:36
  it's and that's, that is one of the things that I think is most
• 31:39
  referenced in in Battlefield. Interesting.
• 31:41
  You also, Joe, to your point, also referenced in Lung Barrow
• 31:44
  as well. All the stuff about the young,
• 31:45
  the young doctor being called worm.
• 31:47
  That's, that's straight out of the sword in the stone as well.
• 31:51
  But yeah, I think the idea was, and there's a reference, there's
• 31:53
  a reference here as well to yeah.
• 31:55
  Arthur says that Merlin seems to look younger every time he sees
• 31:59
  him. And I think Merlin has a has a
• 32:01
  reference to maybe it's all, maybe it's already in hand and
• 32:04
  he can't wait to start the young King's education and all the
• 32:07
  rest of it. And so I think, you know, 20
• 32:09
  years before Moffett, the idea was that every time the Doctor
• 32:11
  met Merlin, it was earlier in his own met Arthur, it was
• 32:15
  earlier in his own life. Until we get the first final
• 32:20
  meeting in Battlefield. There were other things as well
• 32:23
  in the book about Merlin that were made more explicit because
• 32:26
  in the TV show I, maybe I just wasn't paying attention.
• 32:29
  I don't know. It's possible.
• 32:30
  But all that stuff in the ship and that I just got lost as to
• 32:34
  why that ship was there, what was going on.
• 32:37
  Whereas it's all set up in obviously in the prologue that
• 32:40
  Arthur's there in the spaceship. And then whilst the, what did
• 32:44
  you call it? James Ghost.
• 32:45
  Worm Ghost. The ghost worm.
• 32:48
  Ghost. No, the ghost snake.
• 32:50
  Is sort of flying about the place the Doctor is so
• 32:53
  frustrated to realize that a future version of himself has
• 32:56
  set up this bloody trap that he's blundered into.
• 32:59
  It's so funny. It's.
• 33:00
  Very. That's but it's much clearer.
• 33:02
  But that's a very clear example of where the the book is able to
• 33:06
  do something that that is not available for TV production.
• 33:09
  Because you do have this thing where the doctors, you know,
• 33:12
  worried that this is going to be the point where he regenerates
• 33:15
  because he, he knows now that regeneration is going to happen
• 33:18
  because of Merlin. This, this, this future that he
• 33:22
  doesn't want to confront. But also there's a there's a
• 33:24
  point where he thinks that maybe he will die all together and
• 33:26
  actually create some kind of paradox that someone else will
• 33:29
  have to sort out and. There's a great line that his
• 33:31
  future lives flash before his eyes, which is if he's going to
• 33:36
  die. And that's, that's a wonderful
• 33:37
  little bit of time you whiming us here.
• 33:39
  I also like the bits in that same section with the ghost one
• 33:42
  where the doc thinks, well, I'd never set up a lethal trap.
• 33:45
  And then he tries to deactivate it and realize he's made it
• 33:47
  lethal. I'm just, I mean, that whole
• 33:51
  sequence in the book is just so much more dynamic than it was on
• 33:54
  the TV. But we're going to stop doing
• 33:56
  that. What's about what I think is
• 34:01
  possibly the best depiction of the Brigadier ever in Doctor
• 34:07
  Who? What do you guys think about the
• 34:09
  brick in this book? I just think it's so deftly
• 34:12
  done. His relationship with Doris
• 34:15
  coming out of retirement, his relationship with the Doctor,
• 34:18
  with Bambera is beautifully depicted.
• 34:21
  Anyone take the brick? Oh, you're both so kind, James.
• 34:27
  Let's take the brick. It's it's it's a gorgeous
• 34:30
  portrayal. And you know what, in a way, I
• 34:35
  mean, it's one of the pleasures of battlefield is just Nicholas
• 34:37
  Corney's back on the screen. You you don't really need much
• 34:40
  more than that on on television. His familiar, reassuring
• 34:43
  presence. But I love how much the the book
• 34:47
  fills in his background and ties it in with Morden undead, which
• 34:51
  seems like such a kind of illogical sideways step for that
• 34:54
  character. But that's tied in along with
• 34:57
  giving Doris and the Brigadier some back story.
• 35:00
  It's made clear that that she knew him from way back and has
• 35:05
  seen him in this documentary on television and made touch with
• 35:07
  him again. It just feels that it makes him
• 35:12
  feel like a real person. It makes those missing years
• 35:17
  post his retiring from unit and becoming a teacher it.
• 35:20
  It makes complete sense of that. It, it gives that side of his
• 35:24
  character depth. And there are so many little
• 35:29
  glimpses into how he thinks. And I remember these from
• 35:33
  reading the book. There's a bit where he's
• 35:34
  planting the plants that they bought in the garden centre.
• 35:37
  And the, the, the first scene in the, in that we got on
• 35:41
  television that we don't, we don't even see him, I don't
• 35:44
  think. But there's there's a there's a
• 35:45
  bit where he's making an effort not to plant them in too orderly
• 35:50
  A manner because Doris will accuse him of regimenting the
• 35:53
  garden. The lines there, James from the
• 35:56
  first scene, Sergeant Benton tree part, but it's in the
• 35:59
  garden rather than the garden centre.
• 36:01
  There's a sequence where he's thinking about the doctor coming
• 36:04
  back into his life. It goes like a summon, some
• 36:08
  something he'd always known would come again.
• 36:10
  A cold thrill that has also practical life could be
• 36:13
  perpetually linked with something so infuriatingly and
• 36:16
  gloriously unpredictable. And always it would be
• 36:19
  disruptive and bring chaos in its weight.
• 36:22
  And this time, there were things he he did not want to be hurt.
• 36:25
  But as always, his deepest, most secret reaction was at last to
• 36:31
  having the doctor back in his life.
• 36:32
  That's terrific. It's it we we talk about how
• 36:38
  this book and, and even more so in the novelization, sort of
• 36:41
  seems to cast forward to a lot of what would happen in 21st
• 36:46
  century Doctor Who or some of the types of stories they'd want
• 36:48
  to tell. And this time when it made me
• 36:50
  realise, it's really kind of an antecedent to School Reunion.
• 36:54
  Some ways, yeah, absolutely. Because he's they're bringing
• 36:57
  back the Brigadier, they're bringing back a companion, but
• 37:00
  for a real purpose and to say something about that character
• 37:02
  and their relationship with the Doctor and how it's changed.
• 37:05
  And you get this sense of the Brigadier in a way that I don't
• 37:07
  think you did any other point on on TV.
• 37:10
  And this is in the TV episode. It's even better here of this
• 37:13
  sense of he views himself and we get onto the the wonderful sign
• 37:18
  offline, but he views himself as the next best option.
• 37:22
  When the Doctor's not there. The Doctor can't always be
• 37:25
  around. And when he isn't, the Brigadier
• 37:27
  is the man who has to step in and has to and has to deal with
• 37:30
  it. And they start to construct in
• 37:32
  the same way they did with through little references in
• 37:35
  remembrance of the dialect, this kind of almost parallel history
• 37:38
  of what was going on in the world when the Doctor was
• 37:40
  jollying off to Zita Major and all all the rest of them and
• 37:45
  leaving the ball behind. What about the people who had to
• 37:47
  stay behind? So the enemy, Michael?
• 37:49
  Face of the enemy, but even more, but even more so you know
• 37:52
  what it's not just that we'll get the master to fill in and
• 37:56
  you get this actually quite sad but very dignified picture of a
• 38:00
  man who has his life's work has been to carry the weight of this
• 38:03
  with him to protect the world. And protecting the world in part
• 38:06
  means also carrying the secrets of it and letting people live
• 38:09
  the life not knowing what it is. And we get a gorgeous, gorgeous
• 38:13
  flashback because Doris is is really fleshed out here as well
• 38:15
  as this woman who just loves him.
• 38:17
  And for such a young writer, Marc Platt here, I don't think
• 38:20
  you know the, the depiction of just deep and honest love for
• 38:22
  another human being from Doris for for him, the one person he
• 38:26
  has let care for him in in his life.
• 38:28
  So we get this, we get this sort of flashback because she thinks
• 38:30
  she's going to lose him when he goes off.
• 38:32
  She thinks he's he's not coming back.
• 38:34
  And this is what she's always worried about.
• 38:35
  There's a there's a gorgeous line about his past always made
• 38:37
  her uneasy, which was why she talked about it incessantly.
• 38:41
  And she recalls how they were reconciled all those years
• 38:45
  later. And as James mentioned, there's
• 38:46
  this fact about at some point after Mordred and dead, there
• 38:49
  was a sort of expose secret state documentary in which they
• 38:53
  revealed that we don't know what it was that was going down in
• 38:56
  the 70s, but this man knows. And he being exposed to someone
• 39:01
  who is keeping secrets in the British people.
• 39:03
  And the story of her just hearing this on the television
• 39:06
  and the first time she's seen or heard of him in years and she
• 39:10
  immediately drops what she's doing, thinks he needs me,
• 39:13
  drives to the school from Walter and dead.
• 39:16
  And it says none of his position had left him, even when it came
• 39:20
  to making the tea. The pot warmed, 2 cups placed
• 39:23
  exactly on a tin tray, an open packet of biscuits set neatly in
• 39:26
  the middle of the plate, just as she remembered it from long ago
• 39:29
  in a Brighton hotel overlooking the sea front.
• 39:32
  The rain fell against the window and the cold grey sea crashed on
• 39:35
  the shingle. They were older, but nothing had
• 39:37
  really changed. Marry me, she said as he placed
• 39:41
  the tray before her. Of course, Said Alistair, and
• 39:44
  sat down opposite When term finishes.
• 39:46
  That is perfect that that figure, that last line is
• 39:50
  perfect. But then like just little bits
• 39:53
  as well, like when he's going. And that's from Doris's point of
• 39:58
  view. That goes what why wasn't
• 40:00
  Alistair too old for this, too comfortable in retired life?
• 40:04
  Surely they could have found someone else.
• 40:05
  She thought that if he didn't come back, her heart would
• 40:08
  break. And then we cut back to her in
• 40:11
  the climax or the. Climax.
• 40:13
  Trying to convince us that he is going to die.
• 40:17
  And the Lioness and I let out an audible SOB.
• 40:21
  And I know the Brigadier doesn't die in this story, but I was
• 40:24
  convinced for a second. Tell him he hadn't finished the
• 40:28
  Garden Boy. I that's that's really great
• 40:32
  character work. It really is.
• 40:34
  And, and, and Doris has given very little time in this book,
• 40:39
  rightly because she's a, she's a very minor character, but in in,
• 40:43
  in a very economical way, she's really fleshed out and, and her
• 40:47
  anxiety about him going back into this world is so relatable.
• 40:54
  I, I think the thing that's really impressive about this as
• 40:56
  well is that it, it, it would have been very easy, I think,
• 41:00
  particularly in the novelization written by a, you know, a proper
• 41:05
  Doctor Who fan for it to wallow in kind of the nostalgia of
• 41:09
  having the Brigadier and to put in lots and lots of references.
• 41:12
  There are a few, There's a nice line where he talks about
• 41:15
  remembering the Master's Greek accent and the Doctor says you
• 41:17
  should have heard his French one.
• 41:19
  There's a little kind of reference to the demons where
• 41:21
  they're discussing whether magic exists or not.
• 41:25
  There's a this, this paragraph is catnip as far as I'm
• 41:30
  concerned. The hell?
• 41:31
  The helicopter rose from the pad and took its flight due West
• 41:33
  over central London. The building has cast long
• 41:36
  shadows in the dawn light. The Brigadier stared down at the
• 41:39
  toy landscape, remembering action he had seen around Saint
• 41:42
  Paul's, Fleet Street and Covent Garden.
• 41:46
  That's all the that's it that it's just a short paragraph
• 41:51
  quickly kind of taking you back to those kind of, you know,
• 41:54
  Pertwee Trouten era stories. And what I love about it is that
• 42:00
  it's not the Brigadier remembers the Cybermen coming down the
• 42:04
  steps of Saint Paul's or or the Brigadier recalling the the Yeti
• 42:09
  on the underground. It it's far subtle than that.
• 42:12
  And it's from it's it's someone looking down at a changed city.
• 42:17
  It's, it's someone it actually very vividly paints the distance
• 42:23
  of, of time and, and how far back that memory is.
• 42:26
  The Brigadier that's being painted here is not a collection
• 42:29
  of, of clips from old Doctor Who shows.
• 42:33
  It's a, it's a different person. It's someone who's grown older
• 42:36
  and a lot of a lot of water has flown under the bridge since he
• 42:40
  he was properly involved in unit, which I think I think is a
• 42:44
  much more kind of mature and realistic way of portraying the
• 42:47
  character. Going to keep coming back to
• 42:48
  this point because a point that you, James Lark made many times
• 42:53
  in your wonderful ranty Goodreads reviews of the new
• 42:57
  early new adventures. Oh, everyone check them out.
• 43:00
  They're fabulous. Is that those early?
• 43:02
  They are continuity heavy. You know, those stories are
• 43:06
  built up out of they're, again, they're taking the notes.
• 43:09
  They're just taking the wrong notes from this book.
• 43:13
  And it happens again and again in this book.
• 43:14
  I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've kind of got the template
• 43:17
  for the new adventures perfect here.
• 43:19
  Why wasn't even Mark Platt doing this again?
• 43:22
  And the other thing that I mean, Michael is absolutely right.
• 43:26
  This is like School Reunion, only I think it's School Reunion
• 43:29
  done in a slightly more sophisticated way, to be honest.
• 43:33
  Like the. And I know Joe has some thoughts
• 43:35
  about Ace's character and characterization, but one scene
• 43:39
  where I think it really works is where he dismissively talks
• 43:43
  about the Doctor having many companions.
• 43:44
  And in a second she is forced to confront her status as just the
• 43:48
  latest one and and it's gutting for her.
• 43:51
  And rather than having a chance to kind of chat about it in a
• 43:54
  coffee shop and compare monsters, she is dismissed in
• 43:58
  the most kind of heartless way as the latest in a long string
• 44:02
  of companions about whom she can't really be all that aware.
• 44:07
  There's no suggestion that she knows a great deal about the
• 44:10
  Doctor's past. That scene, I think, you know,
• 44:14
  her anger and her petulant response actually seems to me a
• 44:21
  very realistic portrayal of, of someone put in that position.
• 44:25
  And the reason I think it's so powerfully done in this story is
• 44:30
  because the whole story is about legends and things from the
• 44:34
  past. So Brigadier Stewart is a
• 44:38
  legendary character for the new Brigadier and she's having to
• 44:42
  confront someone from, you know, her mythology, the mythology of
• 44:47
  UNIT, actually stepping into her world in the same way that the
• 44:53
  Warmsley is having to confront people he thought were entirely
• 44:57
  mythological, stepping into real life and and and challenging his
• 45:00
  whole understanding of something he studied his whole life.
• 45:03
  It's a lawyer, isn't it? Anslin says at one point.
• 45:06
  Auld Schleiden's return to find us.
• 45:07
  I have Erlin and Arthur. You have left Bridge Stewart.
• 45:10
  It's explicit in the book. And she says, Do you think we
• 45:13
  live up to their expectation? He grins.
• 45:16
  Do they live up to us? Yeah, yeah.
• 45:21
  You mentioned as well, Joe, about the way in which there's
• 45:24
  the big things that are introduced, the new mythology,
• 45:26
  whole new chapters, whole new sequences, but also the way that
• 45:29
  Mark Pat just takes, makes little changes that are so
• 45:32
  telling and, and read, bring and bring out and articulate some of
• 45:36
  what was trying to be said on screen.
• 45:38
  And I think with the Brigadier in the sort of final scenes, you
• 45:41
  say, I had that same experience of I I have seen Battlefield
• 45:44
  approximately 75 times. So I know that Brigadier as to
• 45:49
  Gordon left B Stewart does not die in the end of it, but it
• 45:51
  felt so much that that's where we're going to thematically.
• 45:54
  It's carrying us towards that. And on screen, of course, when
• 45:56
  he has what you expect to be his final scene and he gets his
• 46:00
  zinger sign off where the the destroyer says, can this world
• 46:04
  do no better than you as its champion?
• 46:06
  And he says, probably I just do the best I can and then Bang
• 46:09
  Bang, bang shoots him and he explodes.
• 46:10
  But Mark makes a tiny little change to that here, which is
• 46:14
  suddenly brings out and encapsulate so much what we've
• 46:17
  learnt about the Brigadier's feelings here, which is instead
• 46:21
  in the book. It goes.
• 46:23
  Beside its hooves, it noticed the figure of a human.
• 46:25
  With a convulsive movement it drew its power back into itself
• 46:28
  and fixed him with its eyes. It knew him.
• 46:31
  Little man, what do you want? The Brigadier levelled his
• 46:34
  pistol at the demon. Get off my world, he said.
• 46:37
  The Destroyer bared its fangs. Pitiful.
• 46:40
  Can this world do no better than you as a champion?
• 46:43
  Probably. Said the Brigadier and unleashed
• 46:45
  every round he had in the gun. They the impact tiny impact
• 46:51
  explosions flared on the demons armoured hide.
• 46:54
  The monster began to laugh, a laugh that sounded the death
• 46:57
  knell of all creation. The Brigadier lowered the gun in
• 47:00
  defeat. I just do the best I can, he
• 47:03
  said. So how?
• 47:05
  Don't stop there. Light flared from the bullet
• 47:08
  holes in its chest like lasers through the smoke.
• 47:11
  The glare burst out, flaring into a vast, cold green sun.
• 47:16
  I mean, how's he going to survive that?
• 47:17
  Well, no, but here's the thing. By breaking that line in two, by
• 47:21
  having him say probably and then literally take his shot and he
• 47:27
  thinks he's he thinks it hasn't worked.
• 47:30
  He thinks he sacrificed himself for nothing and he is going to
• 47:33
  die. And then he just says, and I
• 47:36
  just do the best I can. And that's his sign off.
• 47:38
  The doctor would have done this. I've done the best I can.
• 47:41
  And suddenly it's that scene is not, it's heroic because you
• 47:45
  know how it ends. But you get this tiny little
• 47:47
  moment of the Brigadier's tragedy, but also that honour,
• 47:51
  that chivalry that I go out to do the best I can.
• 47:54
  Brave bravery is is being scared and doing it anyway.
• 47:58
  That tiny little moment before he gets his reward.
• 48:02
  In a way, you know, it's a shame.
• 48:04
  It's a shame the book didn't come first, because it's got far
• 48:08
  more of a hope of convincing you we're going to lose left Bridge
• 48:10
  Stewart in this book than the TV show ever do ever would.
• 48:14
  Yeah, I was sold, and I knew. It's baffling.
• 48:18
  I love we want to move on something else as well.
• 48:20
  I only really caught the gag this time round that the
• 48:23
  Brigadier and Anselin, you know, companions from his ancient past
• 48:26
  and his future, both recognize the Doctor for the same reason.
• 48:29
  They both they have mirrored scenes where and you know,
• 48:33
  Anselin has this recognize you by your bearing and your manner
• 48:36
  and the Brigadier. And then when it's the
• 48:38
  Brigadier, he goes, how do you know what I mean?
• 48:39
  He goes, well, who else would it be?
• 48:40
  Which is the same line. It's just a.
• 48:43
  Oh, he says. Michael, your aspect that
• 48:45
  betrays you. Fabulous.
• 48:47
  Thank you, I'm not a good friend.
• 48:48
  Since James brought it up Ace, I think we should acknowledge as
• 48:53
  well that Mark Platt perhaps wonders if this is a fully
• 48:57
  convincing character as he has Xiao Yung take one look at her
• 49:01
  and go. Xiao Yung had to look twice at
• 49:03
  Ace is close to believe them. Surely nostalgia for the 80s
• 49:07
  wasn't back in fashion again. The clothes and attitude were
• 49:10
  all wrong. The vernacular was bizarre.
• 49:14
  Yes, you said it, Mark Platt, you said it.
• 49:16
  Now what actually baffled me was how little of this book was from
• 49:20
  an aces point of view. I would have thought that would
• 49:23
  have been a given. But he writes, I was counting as
• 49:26
  I went. He writes far more scenes from
• 49:28
  the doctor's point of view, which is unusual, than Isis.
• 49:32
  And that's got to be a choice, right?
• 49:35
  Except it's not really Ace's story of, of of all of the
• 49:39
  season 26 stories, it's the one that's not really about Ace.
• 49:43
  It's about the Doctor. It's about the Doctors past and
• 49:46
  the Doctors, you know, the Doctors past in the figure of
• 49:49
  the Brigadier and the Doctor's future and the figure of Merlin.
• 49:52
  And I don't know that it work. It works to tell that story from
• 49:57
  Ace's perspective. Well I think the weakest parts
• 50:01
  of the book, and they were really the only weak parts of
• 50:04
  the book are when we do go to Aces point of view.
• 50:07
  The sequence between her and Xiao Yung in the circle when
• 50:12
  more games trying to come in like that feels like a scripted
• 50:15
  scene and he doesn't change much of the dialogue and I wonder if
• 50:19
  he should have because it sounds pony on the page just like it
• 50:23
  did in the TV show. I know you know what I think
• 50:26
  about Ace I. She doesn't convince me at all.
• 50:29
  She strikes me as a young person being brought to life by older
• 50:34
  men, which is why she sounds so unrealistic.
• 50:38
  There was one bit in the book that I loved and it's right near
• 50:43
  the end of it where he says aces are rare and it leans into that
• 50:46
  chemistry between her and McCoy. And the line is ace, brimmed
• 50:51
  with something like love for him, which is just beautiful.
• 50:56
  But for the most part she is like, until she is sidelined,
• 50:59
  isn't she? He doesn't take the opportunity
• 51:01
  to be for up at all. I, I mean, I, I think there are
• 51:04
  quite a few moments where Ace it's, it's a weird thing to read
• 51:09
  kind of objectively. And you have to bear in mind
• 51:12
  that when I first read this book, I was young enough to just
• 51:15
  take Ace in my stride. And I think having been
• 51:20
  lambasted on your podcast very recently, Joe, for for taking
• 51:23
  things too seriously and being an old man, I should remind you
• 51:26
  that this is the children and the.
• 51:28
  Oldest. Well, when I when I watch
• 51:31
  Battlefield, I'm very much the 10 year old who wasn't able to
• 51:34
  watch it at the time because his parents watched Coronation
• 51:36
  Street. And I have to say we loved Ace.
• 51:39
  We loved Sophie Aldred as well. And of course, objectively, you
• 51:44
  look at that now, it's like hasn't aged terribly well.
• 51:46
  But at the time, to do this kind of comic book sort of sidekick
• 51:50
  for the Doctor Who blew stuff up and and had a baseball bat and
• 51:54
  had a ghetto blaster, that was what we wanted in the 1980s.
• 51:57
  And I have to say, like for the kids, Ace is a great creation.
• 52:01
  And yeah, it's it's embarrassing sometimes the way she's played.
• 52:06
  And yeah, it's embarrassing sometimes the way she's written.
• 52:09
  Would I want it any differently? Yes.
• 52:13
  No. I don't think I would.
• 52:15
  I'd like 10 year old me wouldn't want it any differently.
• 52:17
  So. So I'm going to be for once not
• 52:20
  the old man complete. Like if you can justify the
• 52:23
  bloody Suntar and stratagem as the kids love it, then I think I
• 52:28
  can justify Ace on the same line.
• 52:31
  I, I agree because when I was getting into, I am, as we've
• 52:35
  touched on in the podcast previously, a bit younger than
• 52:37
  James. So when I was when I was getting
• 52:40
  into Doctor Who, which I guess would have been around the turn
• 52:42
  the Millennium, and I'd never seen any of the McCoy stuff on
• 52:45
  UK gold because the Tom Baker stuff lasted for like 4 months.
• 52:48
  And McCoy was, was, was come and gone in a couple of weekends,
• 52:50
  right. Discovering remembrance of the
• 52:54
  Daleks. There was a reason Battlefield
• 52:56
  was the second one I bought on video because it felt exciting
• 53:00
  and engaging and close enough to modern still at that time to
• 53:05
  have, as you say, the kick ass comic book sidekick character.
• 53:08
  Especially, especially coming off the back of Mel.
• 53:10
  And I know we're all meant to love Mel now.
• 53:12
  We're all meant to pretend that she was always great.
• 53:14
  But I rewatched Paradise Towers recently and she she's not
• 53:17
  Bonnie Langford is a very fine actress and they got her back
• 53:20
  for the new series because Bonnie Langford is a very fine
• 53:22
  actress, not because there is anything to Mel as a character.
• 53:25
  You suddenly get a so you're like oh thank fuck for that.
• 53:28
  The reason the rehabilitation of Mel has happened and the down
• 53:32
  grading of ACE is Big Finish Sophie.
• 53:34
  Audrey is delivering terrible performances over there and
• 53:37
  Bonnie Langford is absolutely ACE in those scripts.
• 53:39
  That's not why I think that's turned around.
• 53:41
  Are you suggesting to me, then, Mr. James Lark, that in order to
• 53:44
  appreciate ACE, you have to be in an undeveloped state of mind?
• 53:51
  I'm just suggesting that you should see the world through the
• 53:53
  eyes of a child for once. I mean, I always do.
• 53:56
  Well, I thought you did well, you know, and, and, and I think
• 54:01
  our perception of Ace has been coloured by how much Sophie
• 54:07
  Aldridge did after the show being cancelled and out of pure
• 54:14
  generosity. So I think we have to remember
• 54:16
  this, that in the wilderness years, McCoy and Aldridge were,
• 54:18
  were so generous with their time and took on things that probably
• 54:23
  were unwise to take on. But they weren't looking at
• 54:27
  scripts and going, oh, this looks a little bit.
• 54:30
  This is a bit maybe I maybe I don't want to put my name to
• 54:33
  this and have this. Giant.
• 54:34
  She wasn't going to get any other work, was she?
• 54:36
  She had the table. She was.
• 54:37
  Oh, no. Excuse me, Sophie Aldred was.
• 54:40
  Sophie Aldred was, she was doing a lot of, she was doing a lot of
• 54:43
  television. I mean, it was all children's
• 54:45
  television. Which is the right place for
• 54:47
  her. She's a, she's a much better
• 54:48
  presenter than she is an actor. And I think I think so.
• 54:51
  Defensive. Honestly.
• 54:53
  Well, I thought about because, because, because I do think that
• 54:56
  generosity has kind of come back to bite, particularly Aldrid,
• 55:00
  but also McCoy to some extent in that they're out there now.
• 55:03
  It's like it's just there is so much subpar material with them
• 55:09
  and it's and it's easy to judge them by that and not what they
• 55:12
  actually did when in the three years that they were actually on
• 55:16
  Doctor Who, which for the most part is is is really decent.
• 55:20
  And actually, I think that Aldrich could deliver a good
• 55:23
  performance watch go slight watch survival that they're not
• 55:29
  embarrassing performances. I think she.
• 55:32
  Moments. I think she needs a good
• 55:34
  director and I think that the problem with Ace is absolutely
• 55:38
  the way it's written and it becomes more and more awkward
• 55:41
  the more and more she's a middle-aged woman delivering
• 55:44
  these lines written for a teenager who doesn't really
• 55:46
  sound like a teenager anyway. But I but I do think that we
• 55:49
  have to kind of again, look at it in context And and Michael's
• 55:53
  absolutely right. Mel is is a nothing character
• 55:56
  and it was a bit of a nothing performance.
• 55:58
  Like Bonnie Langford has said this.
• 55:59
  She didn't know what she was doing.
• 56:00
  And you can tell that it's it's not a great, it's not Bonnie
• 56:03
  Langford at her her absolute best.
• 56:06
  She's floundering on television that there are points where she
• 56:09
  suddenly gets it dealt from the bannerman.
• 56:11
  She's suddenly like in a song and dance episode.
• 56:14
  And she she knows what to do with that.
• 56:16
  And she's written better as well.
• 56:17
  But for the most part, Mel is, is not a great companion.
• 56:21
  And I would say the same about Perry, to be honest.
• 56:23
  Again, you've got a performer doing their absolute best given
• 56:27
  often really poor material and having been given a character
• 56:31
  that shows so much potential at the start, which which then kind
• 56:35
  of her characteristic becomes, well, she complaints a lot,
• 56:37
  doesn't she? So I do think that Ace may well
• 56:43
  have dated badly, but at the time it was introduced, I mean,
• 56:48
  thank goodness it paved the way for Rose.
• 56:51
  And I do. I mean, I genuinely believe
• 56:53
  that. Well, also just you know, you
• 56:55
  say the dialogue is not always great and it isn't.
• 56:57
  I'm not going to I'm not going to like come and defend it, but
• 56:59
  just to grab the sort of ace line that gets thrown about is I
• 57:03
  said I'm not a freak, right, I'm ace, you dumb or what you think?
• 57:06
  Now, yes, that's not age brilliantly.
• 57:08
  And yes, maybe that's a little bit embarrassing, but it's
• 57:11
  embarrassing in the same way that dialogue, I remember
• 57:14
  dialogue from Grange Hill and Biker Grove being of adults
• 57:17
  running teenagers. And you know what?
• 57:18
  Thank God someone is writing in that register because that's
• 57:23
  right. That's what kids that's what
• 57:25
  kids at the time here, that's that's how they're spoken to in
• 57:27
  these things. And maybe it's not perfect, but
• 57:28
  it does suggest someone is trying to bring some of that
• 57:31
  world into into Doctor Who. I mean, Joe, we touched on this
• 57:35
  one of the when we did Paradise Towers for the book club that
• 57:39
  there's the moment in that where you think, has anyone in the
• 57:42
  past seven years of Doctor Who done anything as normal as use a
• 57:45
  vending machine and. You know, remember I was utterly
• 57:50
  baffled by male motive to reach the pool against all sanity and
• 57:54
  then jumped in. I was like, she's just not
• 57:56
  behaving like a person on any level.
• 57:59
  And she's she's hard to write. I think she's hard to write than
• 58:02
  the Doctor. And we know from the New
• 58:04
  Adventures that the 7th Doctor is, is far from easy to write.
• 58:07
  And that is, you know, one thing that Mark Platt I think does
• 58:10
  beautifully in this book is characterized as the 7th doctor.
• 58:14
  The weird get there. The weird thing about Ace is
• 58:16
  that there are there are sections that are are really
• 58:21
  badly written for Ace and and there are sections that are that
• 58:24
  are not from the script. Like he introduces Ace.
• 58:28
  It's at the start she says something.
• 58:30
  Weird texture about all that, she says.
• 58:32
  He says yeah. He talks about sideways in time
• 58:35
  across the boundaries that divide 1 universe from the
• 58:37
  other. Ace tried to appreciate that
• 58:39
  this flowery simplification was for her benefit.
• 58:41
  She preferred to translate into something more clearly and
• 58:43
  scientifically defined. So what you're saying is that
• 58:46
  instead of the usual rectilinear propagation within the normative
• 58:50
  space-time continuum, this signals wavefront is
• 58:53
  omnidirectional along every axis of the temporal continuum.
• 58:56
  Now the joke is obviously that Ace is suddenly talking in a
• 59:00
  scientific way, but you can't. I mean, I find it impossible to
• 59:03
  imagine. Saying those lines.
• 59:07
  Oh boy. And it's just, it's, it's a,
• 59:10
  it's a not very good joke in the wrong mouth, you know, should
• 59:13
  not have been written, but they're not over the page.
• 59:16
  There's a bit where she says to him, why don't you decode the
• 59:19
  message or something? Then you'll know who it's from.
• 59:21
  He looks at her, startled by the simplicity of her solution.
• 59:24
  That's brilliant, Ace. He one way had never thought of
• 59:26
  it. Ace made a mental note to state
• 59:29
  the obvious more often. That is great characterization.
• 59:32
  I can that totally times with the Ace that you know the the
• 59:35
  best version of Ace. But it's exactly what Michael
• 59:38
  was saying earlier about, you know, Platt is a really
• 59:41
  thoughtful writer, even at this stage of his writing.
• 59:45
  But he's still a young man. And there are flashes of
• 59:49
  pretension and adolescence in this even as well written as it
• 59:53
  is. And that techno that will be,
• 59:55
  it's definitely a gag that and later Marc Platt would go, yeah,
• 59:58
  we'll take that out. That's it.
• 1:00:01
  There's a nice get as well where Ace and Shao Young work out what
• 1:00:04
  the sword is. It's a little bit like, it's a
• 1:00:06
  little bit like the Fenrik moment where she she works out
• 1:00:10
  that the that the runes are a computer code.
• 1:00:15
  I like Ace. I like a spit taking the
• 1:00:18
  initiative and working stuff out.
• 1:00:19
  That's, you know, that is, again, that's paving the way for
• 1:00:22
  companions who have something to offer beyond just asking
• 1:00:27
  questions. That's very strangely say piss
• 1:00:30
  off at one point, which made me like a what I think that get
• 1:00:36
  published and. I think she and show you should
• 1:00:38
  have snuck a couple of beers out of the pub into the garden as
• 1:00:41
  well. I think, you know, that would
• 1:00:42
  have allowed something. And she has the moment here
• 1:00:44
  where she she says, well, she gets that moment of realization
• 1:00:47
  of finding her place because she's been so, you know,
• 1:00:50
  dismissed by the Brigadier, not not not meaningfully, but in a
• 1:00:55
  actively very unkind way. And she finds her place by
• 1:00:57
  saying, well, you know, this is all King Arthur and he's Merlin.
• 1:01:01
  That makes me the sorcerer's apprentice.
• 1:01:03
  And that's the sort of that's the thing that it's hard that
• 1:01:05
  works about the 7th doctrine, 8th relationship and what it
• 1:01:08
  makes it compelling unlike any other in classic Doctor Who is
• 1:01:13
  again anticipating 21st century Doctor Who of the doctor seeing
• 1:01:16
  something in someone and them coming along, not just because,
• 1:01:20
  oh, they stumbled the board or for even less clear reasons,
• 1:01:24
  they can't get home from Lanzarote at the end.
• 1:01:26
  It's that he he sees something in her and that he has the
• 1:01:31
  opportunity to a get a home, but he's deliberately not taking her
• 1:01:33
  right home, right? He's he's helping her, he's
• 1:01:35
  educating her. He doesn't want her to be him,
• 1:01:39
  but she want he wants her to be something more that thing of
• 1:01:43
  being The Apprentice. And and yet that evolves and
• 1:01:45
  that changes. And I do think I'm not always
• 1:01:47
  the biggest fan of Chris Chipnall's script, but I do
• 1:01:50
  think that moment between the 7th doctrine A's in the Power of
• 1:01:55
  the Doctor where you know, it ended badly.
• 1:01:57
  And you know, it would have been so tempting to give us the back
• 1:02:01
  story to infer Dump about what happened, but she just finally
• 1:02:04
  says to him, I'm sorry we fell out.
• 1:02:07
  And then he has this moment of accept of accepting it, but also
• 1:02:11
  that accepting that actually what I became along the way was
• 1:02:14
  apparent. And that wasn't what he meant to
• 1:02:16
  do, but that's what their relationship became.
• 1:02:18
  And it's it's really beautiful and it's really quite subtle and
• 1:02:22
  it's absolutely here. And that is why Ace is
• 1:02:25
  brilliant. Yes, yes.
• 1:02:28
  No, well, I mean, it's going to leave me on to to very
• 1:02:32
  tentatively make another suggestion now, but entirely in
• 1:02:35
  the book's favor because I do think, and I know you guys are
• 1:02:39
  both enormous 7th Doctor fans before I say this, but I think
• 1:02:44
  Battlefield is one of his most under rehearsed performances.
• 1:02:48
  He has a lot of dialogue to say and much of it is garbled or
• 1:02:53
  stressed in unusual ways. You know more if they're dead.
• 1:02:57
  And it just says lines in bizarre ways, which kills a lot
• 1:03:01
  of scenes. Not all, but some, but I do
• 1:03:04
  think as depicted on the page, he's really powerful in this
• 1:03:09
  book. I think this might be the best
• 1:03:15
  rendition of the 7th Doctor I've read.
• 1:03:20
  As you mentioned, an astonishing amount of the story is told from
• 1:03:23
  his perspective when that was something the New Adventures
• 1:03:25
  writers would be told not to do. And who knows why in this sense,
• 1:03:29
  because it makes him, he isn't human, obviously, but it
• 1:03:32
  introduces A vulnerability there.
• 1:03:33
  And I think there is that. It's really interesting to
• 1:03:37
  compare this story, as we've already touched on, to Silence
• 1:03:40
  in the Library, Forest of the Dead, that they have that very
• 1:03:43
  similar idea of the Doctor running into his own future, not
• 1:03:47
  liking, not trusting what he's being told about his future.
• 1:03:52
  Because he is the character who has agency in every situation,
• 1:03:57
  right? He's a bit of a Mr. Billy big
• 1:03:58
  balls. He's a bit of a Dick in many
• 1:04:00
  ways. The Doctor, right?
• 1:04:01
  He just walks into every situation and takes control, you
• 1:04:03
  know, toxic masculinity right there.
• 1:04:06
  And here we have two stories of which the agency is taken away
• 1:04:09
  from him by him, in which he becomes a victim of himself.
• 1:04:13
  And then you have at the centre of the story this tension
• 1:04:16
  between what we know the Doctor to be and the legend of him.
• 1:04:20
  And that's something that Steven Moffett would run with a lot.
• 1:04:22
  And that would be a recurring theme throughout his stories,
• 1:04:24
  Right. But that tension between who,
• 1:04:28
  who am I? Who do I know myself to be and
• 1:04:30
  who do I affect myself to be? And in Silence of the Library,
• 1:04:33
  yeah. You know, David Tennant gives a
• 1:04:35
  much more human performance as the Doctor and Sylvester McCoy
• 1:04:37
  does, but you also have River Song there through Donna giving
• 1:04:40
  these constant insights because she knows him.
• 1:04:43
  There isn't quite the same character here.
• 1:04:44
  I don't think Anselin has that relationship.
• 1:04:46
  In fact, it's made clear that Anselin hasn't met the Doctor
• 1:04:48
  before, but he knows of him through legend.
• 1:04:51
  And a lot of both stories becomes about the Doctor trying
• 1:04:55
  to wreck, being forced to consider and to reconcile his
• 1:04:59
  view of himself and his behaviour with the effect he
• 1:05:02
  then has on others. I think the biggest example of
• 1:05:07
  what I was trying to say is this line.
• 1:05:10
  Are you ready? And now think about how this is
• 1:05:12
  depicted on the screen. He did not shout.
• 1:05:15
  He simply said with quiet authority, there will be no
• 1:05:19
  battle here. But I mean, so yes, it, it, it,
• 1:05:24
  it, I mean, we're back to reasons.
• 1:05:27
  When I first saw it on television, it everything that I
• 1:05:30
  remembered being great about this story was was not quite so
• 1:05:33
  great on screen. I, I sort of feel like I was
• 1:05:37
  reading the book and I was thinking there are so many signs
• 1:05:40
  that this is not just kind of an actor or a director or some
• 1:05:47
  special effects that are not quite up to translating this
• 1:05:49
  story. I just, I was reading it going,
• 1:05:51
  I think that the this story has an ambition and a scope that
• 1:05:55
  that they were not able to put on TV.
• 1:05:59
  So I don't know what what a Rodovich's script it says at
• 1:06:04
  that moment and whether it specifies.
• 1:06:06
  And you know, Mccoy's been directed to shout that line.
• 1:06:09
  But also how else would they have done it at the time, you
• 1:06:11
  know, to to set it up for him to be able to speak, but for his
• 1:06:14
  voice to kind of resonate across.
• 1:06:16
  They could have done it that way, but that would have been a
• 1:06:18
  directorial decision rather than an acting decision, I think.
• 1:06:21
  And so that's one instance. Why it?
• 1:06:23
  Just doesn't help that it's a tiny field right?
• 1:06:25
  With 15 extras. No, right?
• 1:06:28
  And, and in the book we're told there are one and Morgaine and
• 1:06:30
  Morgaine's got one troops of 100 soldiers.
• 1:06:34
  So I get straight away the, the scale is different and you're
• 1:06:37
  picturing something that, you know, again, just it, it's, it's
• 1:06:41
  epic. Actually, it was the scene where
• 1:06:43
  Morgane arrives whereas reading it and it's told in a series of
• 1:06:46
  very short paragraphs. And we get the kind of the image
• 1:06:48
  of Lethbridge fury in the, in the helicopter, his, his eyes
• 1:06:52
  popping open and he, it says he felt a sudden chill of anxiety
• 1:06:57
  and shuddered. It's able to fill in things that
• 1:07:00
  you know this clunky TV production cutting from 1
• 1:07:04
  lumbering camera to an to another to it's it tries to do
• 1:07:07
  it, but it just, it doesn't have the the right pace and energy.
• 1:07:11
  But it does show that Eranovich was on to something with Oh
• 1:07:14
  yeah. Absolutely.
• 1:07:15
  And I plan things out. I think that Eranovich, I can I,
• 1:07:19
  I think it's a writer, you know, I don't think it's a writer
• 1:07:23
  writing something impractical for his resources.
• 1:07:27
  I just think he's and I think you this could sum up all of
• 1:07:32
  season 26 in a way. I think the ambition is like
• 1:07:35
  they've seen what they what they pulled off in season 25 pretty
• 1:07:39
  successfully and they're going OK, this is how good this
• 1:07:42
  program could be. And I'm going to write it in
• 1:07:44
  this way. And the fundamental they don't
• 1:07:47
  have time. And it's, you know, it's, it's
• 1:07:50
  all very well saying that McCoy comes across as under rehearsed,
• 1:07:53
  but they were all under rehearsed.
• 1:07:55
  I feel like He's His is not the only performance in Battlefield
• 1:07:58
  that falls so far short of of where these characters could be,
• 1:08:02
  given that the material they've been handed.
• 1:08:04
  But he is the star of the show and he does have the most
• 1:08:07
  dialogue, so I think it is the most obvious.
• 1:08:10
  I mean, I don't think Jean Marsh comes across as under rehearsed.
• 1:08:12
  I think she's fabulous. Yeah, and and and.
• 1:08:16
  Yeah. But Jean Marsh, she's Jean Marsh
• 1:08:20
  and also she's not. She's not doing 4 three other
• 1:08:22
  stories that year. There is.
• 1:08:24
  There is that aspect as well. You gotta bear in mind what a
• 1:08:26
  punishing program it was to work on for.
• 1:08:29
  There was just what you just said, that it was so many
• 1:08:31
  moments in the book where I was like, God, yeah, he's seen
• 1:08:33
  what's on the screen and he's like, right, okay, now this is
• 1:08:37
  what Aronovich was going for. This bit here, Death had to be
• 1:08:40
  laughed at. That's what we're paid for.
• 1:08:42
  So let's do it with some style. His eyes had glory in it.
• 1:08:46
  She felt sick. Together, they ran into battle.
• 1:08:49
  That that in my head is like a movie, you know?
• 1:08:53
  Well you meant you mentioned there James, the bit where more
• 1:08:56
  gain arrives, which I think for me is is absolutely sums up what
• 1:09:00
  they were reaching for and couldn't have achieved.
• 1:09:02
  Because in in the book it's you and try and remember what you
• 1:09:05
  saw on screen and then you read this.
• 1:09:08
  Blooms of energy spiralled like snakes along the blade of
• 1:09:11
  Mordred's raised sword. Lightning played among the bare
• 1:09:14
  Timbers of the Priory roof. It cracks between the two light
• 1:09:17
  rippled orbs. The Prince yelled and plunged
• 1:09:20
  the steel blade into the flagstones with a shower of
• 1:09:22
  sparks. The grinding mechanics of two
• 1:09:25
  cosmoses in spiralling collision began to grate out of the air.
• 1:09:29
  The Oxagamatron before him surged with lights like the
• 1:09:32
  furnace of a Dragon's heart. Dragons, as a child, delights in
• 1:09:35
  playing with fire. So Mordred played with natural
• 1:09:38
  energies, the science of magic. The flames of creation was
• 1:09:41
  summoned and focused between the two orbs bound to his will.
• 1:09:45
  The forces coalesced and ripped a hole in the fabric of
• 1:09:48
  existence. A burning wind blew into his
• 1:09:50
  face. He clung to the hilt of his
• 1:09:52
  sword and stared into the gaping abyss between realities.
• 1:09:56
  Lit by the harsh glare of his power, he began to laugh with
• 1:09:59
  elation. His summons was a hand that
• 1:10:01
  reached in need from one world to another, as light calls to
• 1:10:05
  darkness, as hunger calls to greed, and as a boy calls to his
• 1:10:09
  mother. Which isn't quite what you got.
• 1:10:13
  Although James used that to me when we were messaging about the
• 1:10:18
  transformation of the destroyer, when he turns up in the humanoid
• 1:10:23
  formula, Sergeant is like, yeah, they never could have done that.
• 1:10:26
  They couldn't have afforded. To I think that's how I do think
• 1:10:28
  that's how it's written in the script, though.
• 1:10:29
  I think that was the original conception.
• 1:10:31
  Yeah. So the so the idea is that he
• 1:10:33
  comes on and he's just a businessman.
• 1:10:36
  The book describes him as too good looking, so good looking.
• 1:10:40
  He's ugly. And he would gradually
• 1:10:44
  transform, you know, the, the, the, the blue skin destroyer
• 1:10:47
  would gradually kind of push through the skin and break out
• 1:10:50
  of the, out of the suit. How it's written as well.
• 1:10:53
  Very simply, she had opened the gates of hell, and a foul chill
• 1:10:58
  freight issued forth Somewhere cruel.
• 1:11:01
  Somewhere cruel. Hidden eyes were watching her,
• 1:11:03
  but the demon could not resist her summons.
• 1:11:07
  There was another one. Hang on, I'll cut around this.
• 1:11:11
  In the shadows behind the woman, the darkness was rising.
• 1:11:14
  Just lots of little lovely bits that were like, my, my mind was
• 1:11:19
  doing most of it. And he was absolutely bloody
• 1:11:21
  terrifying. There's a bit, isn't it, where
• 1:11:24
  like he's, he's talking about devouring the planet and there's
• 1:11:28
  like draw all over his business suit.
• 1:11:31
  He's really scary in the book. I mean, he's great in the TV
• 1:11:35
  show, don't get me wrong, but it's on another level.
• 1:11:39
  How yeah, how how they would have pulled it off and and and
• 1:11:42
  they were never going to waste that just having having built
• 1:11:46
  that monster, they were going to give it the screen time that it
• 1:11:49
  deserved, I think, but. Let's swing around and talk
• 1:11:54
  about some of the guest characters in the book.
• 1:11:59
  Let's talk about Bambera, Xiao Young, some of some of their
• 1:12:02
  guest characters. Bambera, Michael.
• 1:12:06
  I love the introduction of Bambera James mentioned right
• 1:12:10
  back at the start of the episodes about the way in which
• 1:12:13
  the story brings together so many disparate elements, and yet
• 1:12:17
  the way that it is successful in doing that.
• 1:12:20
  Doctor Who does juxtaposition a lot, but that can just mean, oh,
• 1:12:24
  we've got a Dalek in a Renaissance fair, you know, that
• 1:12:27
  deliberate kind of dissonance. But here it is remarkably well
• 1:12:34
  aligned and and and mixed together.
• 1:12:37
  It has a very particular flavour to it, this book, which is kind
• 1:12:41
  of drawing on the macho 80s science fantasy aesthetic of
• 1:12:45
  Highlander, of legend, of Excalibur and and all the rest
• 1:12:51
  of them as well. But with the Bambera bit here,
• 1:12:54
  suddenly you go from from the fantasy world to this near
• 1:12:58
  future kind of techno thriller. Her introduction is written like
• 1:13:02
  something from an airport thriller like John Gardner could
• 1:13:04
  have been writing this of her, you know, being being pulled out
• 1:13:07
  of her operations in Africa to board a plane flying wherever.
• 1:13:14
  And, and it's really good and also made me really quite sad
• 1:13:17
  about the optimism that we all had for the world in the 1990s
• 1:13:21
  because we're touching on Barbera being military figure
• 1:13:24
  here. The the TV show was on in 1989.
• 1:13:28
  Novelization came out in 1991. It set circa 1990, seven, 1998.
• 1:13:33
  So you have this image of the of the late 90s from the point of
• 1:13:37
  view of the early 90s, this post Cold War world.
• 1:13:42
  This is deliberately international.
• 1:13:43
  So it makes the point about everyone she works with is from
• 1:13:45
  a different country, that units aren't meant to use national
• 1:13:48
  designations anymore, that she's travelling alongside a German
• 1:13:51
  businessman and she's drinking Japanese whiskey.
• 1:13:54
  And there's this real hope for the future as well.
• 1:13:57
  I mean, the, the, the TV show adds 2 months before the Berlin
• 1:14:02
  Wall fell and this book came out, I checked a month before
• 1:14:07
  the Moscow coup attempt, which precipitated the dissolution of
• 1:14:10
  the Soviet Union. You know, I'm, I'm not trying to
• 1:14:13
  wait the argument too much, but there's a real moment in history
• 1:14:15
  captured with Battlefield here that basically everything's
• 1:14:18
  going to be all right forever. I've got a suggestion of you
• 1:14:21
  really like that Bambera from that opening passage.
• 1:14:24
  You do check out a Big Finish series because I was seeing that
• 1:14:28
  Bambera. That's the one they captured in
• 1:14:30
  that audio series, and the tone of it is wonderful.
• 1:14:33
  Spy thrillers Fabulous. But but I've realized I've
• 1:14:36
  spoken a lot about the world, but I do like hearing this as
• 1:14:39
  well. And I think they get this idea
• 1:14:41
  of someone who is they manage a very difficult balancing act
• 1:14:46
  here of making her clearly the less experienced element.
• 1:14:50
  I mean, she's got a lot of experience.
• 1:14:51
  This is made clear. The number of operations that
• 1:14:54
  she's been on, she's worked away all the way up to to Brigadier.
• 1:14:57
  But she's not encountered this sort of threat before.
• 1:15:01
  She's dealing with the new, you know, the sort of new global
• 1:15:05
  world of the 1990s. And yet at no point, even though
• 1:15:09
  she's on the back foot, she also has this agency and this ability
• 1:15:13
  to think on the back foot. And she's kind of she and
• 1:15:17
  Anselin, but who even more so are the real action heroes in
• 1:15:21
  this action adventure piece. The the bit where they're
• 1:15:24
  driving the car along and she's she's machine gunning out of the
• 1:15:27
  top window and stuff like that. But it's a little bit almost, I
• 1:15:30
  almost want to say it's a little bit lethal weapon.
• 1:15:32
  Let's. Not say that isn't great on TV
• 1:15:34
  as well, though. Angela Bruce with that machine
• 1:15:36
  gun. Come on.
• 1:15:38
  Although I got to say I actually this is in praise of the TV
• 1:15:42
  episodes now and that is divorced of Angela Bruce and
• 1:15:47
  Marcus Gilbert. I felt less of an impact with
• 1:15:50
  their relationship in the book, whereas I think it beams on the
• 1:15:54
  TV screen because their chemistry is so wonderful.
• 1:15:57
  But I, but I think there's, I think there's something lovely
• 1:16:00
  about the way it's it evolves and the way it's written.
• 1:16:03
  I mean, her anger feels more authentic in the book because
• 1:16:06
  it's more explicable in the on television, She's she's just
• 1:16:11
  kind of grumpy. Whereas here we see someone
• 1:16:14
  who's kind of out of their depth, but also feeling
• 1:16:16
  undermined and out of control and suddenly confronting things
• 1:16:20
  that they've never expected to see and don't know how to deal
• 1:16:24
  with. So all of that kind of, you
• 1:16:26
  know, comes out in in a brawl with Anselin.
• 1:16:30
  And the more time they spend together, you just, you do get
• 1:16:33
  the little glances between them written out in just very, you
• 1:16:37
  know, subtle little sentences in between bits of dialogue.
• 1:16:40
  You you see that relationship grow.
• 1:16:43
  I mean, whilst we're talking guest characters, Michael, you
• 1:16:46
  sent me a message saying that the death of Lavelle, if people
• 1:16:50
  could get over themselves, is one of the best written pieces
• 1:16:54
  of Doctor Who prose. Absolutely.
• 1:16:57
  That scene is utterly devastating and the power of it
• 1:17:02
  here. So this is more game has arrived
• 1:17:04
  in the world. And you remember the scene from
• 1:17:05
  TV and she goes to the to the hotel where Mordred has been
• 1:17:09
  drinking in search of her son. And in the same scene kills
• 1:17:13
  Lavelle really quite callously and then and then restores
• 1:17:18
  Elizabeth's sight. And much has to do with Doris.
• 1:17:22
  Lavelle is very much a supporting character here.
• 1:17:24
  And yet that's that's her tragedy.
• 1:17:26
  So she cut, she's not meant to be a part of the story.
• 1:17:29
  She's just meant to get the Brigadier there.
• 1:17:31
  And yet they end up crashing. And in that scene, Morgane is,
• 1:17:35
  is is taking all of the information from her minds.
• 1:17:39
  It's the sense of the scale we get the Morgane is working on
• 1:17:43
  here is it's, it's, it's kind of nothing to her.
• 1:17:46
  This is just something she needs, she needs to do.
• 1:17:49
  And yet we see it from Lavelle's perspective.
• 1:17:52
  And so as as her memories are being drained, we live those
• 1:17:55
  memories more gain is just like someone listening to an audio
• 1:17:59
  book on on two times speed. So they just get the info.
• 1:18:02
  She's just wanting the facts. What does all this mean?
• 1:18:04
  What's the context? I need to understand this world.
• 1:18:06
  But for Lavelle, it's it's her whole life.
• 1:18:08
  It's running along a beach as a little girl.
• 1:18:10
  It's it's surprising her parents are getting the job in unit and
• 1:18:13
  we are being delivered that as it is lost and it's utterly
• 1:18:17
  tragic and then makes the the this darkly cool powerful thing
• 1:18:22
  about then at the end of the same scene, the scene ends with
• 1:18:26
  Elizabeth saying I can see again because she has restored
• 1:18:29
  Elizabeth sites to pay for a bar bill and the the immensity and
• 1:18:34
  the scale of the threat that Morgain represents on a really
• 1:18:38
  human level, because the characters are so well captured.
• 1:18:40
  We do view this on a human level is I actually felt quite shaken
• 1:18:47
  by that scene if I'm being completely honest.
• 1:18:49
  And it's it's got a brutality, which is quite how invasive.
• 1:18:55
  What more gain does she's not just taking information, she's
• 1:19:00
  stealing someone's memories. They become her own.
• 1:19:03
  It's basically implied that those memories become more
• 1:19:06
  gains. They're hers now.
• 1:19:08
  It's, it's the, the worst kind of theft and, and before, but
• 1:19:18
  before she destroys Lavelle's body, it's described, it's
• 1:19:21
  described as, Oh well, there was a blaze of light in which the
• 1:19:24
  mindless body of Francois Eloise disintegrated and dismissed to
• 1:19:28
  nothing. The mindless body that it's the
• 1:19:31
  fact that she, she leaves, she leaves her without a mind.
• 1:19:35
  It's, it's very powerfully written and her dismissiveness
• 1:19:39
  to the, the enormity of what she's just done to a person is
• 1:19:43
  absolutely chilling. I'm so sorry.
• 1:19:47
  I said there's a tiny moment then when Morgane asks for the
• 1:19:50
  for the bill to pay and she has to correct herself for not
• 1:19:53
  saying it in French, and it's that little reminder of how
• 1:19:56
  little she's actually got for that.
• 1:19:59
  I mean that's what I was going to ask about.
• 1:20:00
  Sorry to reduce this all to a joke.
• 1:20:02
  This very. Chilling moment.
• 1:20:04
  But does she still say in the book I must get the tab?
• 1:20:08
  No, no, because it's not. Because in the book she's she's
• 1:20:12
  said it in French. It works better in the.
• 1:20:14
  Book I mean it is a great scene on TVI think as well.
• 1:20:18
  It is, but it's a greater scene as written.
• 1:20:21
  And I was going to talk about Elizabeth as well.
• 1:20:24
  Again, a very minor character given just a few paragraphs, but
• 1:20:29
  the portrayal of her reaction to be able to see again is so
• 1:20:35
  beautifully written. This paragraph here as as as
• 1:20:38
  they're being evacuated. Elizabeth stared through the
• 1:20:41
  minibus window. Colours and shapes she had
• 1:20:43
  forgotten over 22 years of darkness paraded before her
• 1:20:46
  eyes. Movements have been instilled in
• 1:20:49
  her memory as a series of tiny frozen photographs that
• 1:20:53
  progressed with jerky grace. Like an animated film or flick
• 1:20:56
  book. Real life flowed seamlessly.
• 1:21:00
  The day was dazzling. Light on the grass, shadows
• 1:21:03
  among the trees, thousands of shadow, shades of shifting
• 1:21:07
  colours, straight, angled and tangled, hard and soft faces and
• 1:21:12
  bodies, all part of a giant glowing kaleidoscope.
• 1:21:17
  At last things made sense. Dear.
• 1:21:19
  Pat was looking tired and Peter had the sort of kind face she
• 1:21:22
  had always envisaged. Cerberus dribbled along the
• 1:21:26
  drive with dark rhododendrons, pale multi green dogwoods and
• 1:21:30
  two girls darting for cover. Elizabeth met the eye of the
• 1:21:35
  English looking girl and smiled. The other girl had long black
• 1:21:37
  hair, almond eyes and could only be Xiao Yung.
• 1:21:41
  Pat squeezed Elizabeth's hand. He was looking the other way.
• 1:21:46
  She had seen something he had missed.
• 1:21:49
  Now she had her own secrets again, not just what she was
• 1:21:53
  told. That last two, those two lines
• 1:21:55
  at the end, I, I, I sort of put the book down for a second.
• 1:22:00
  They were so powerful. There's lots of moments like
• 1:22:03
  that in this, isn't there? There's a great moment for Shell
• 1:22:05
  Young at the end of the book as well, when she's left alone.
• 1:22:09
  And I did make a note of it, but I can't find it now.
• 1:22:11
  It's annoying me. Suddenly she wanted to go home
• 1:22:15
  and have a good row with her parents.
• 1:22:17
  She's alone, she's a bystander and the action has moved
• 1:22:20
  elsewhere. She's aware of her part and this
• 1:22:22
  story is over, and yet it just gives her a little moment of
• 1:22:27
  humanity. I know she's there in The Lost,
• 1:22:29
  but I don't know. In the TV story, it does feel
• 1:22:32
  odd that characters are just shipped off.
• 1:22:34
  You know it. Unfortunately, you know Eric
• 1:22:37
  isn't right in the script, so they're not all murdered.
• 1:22:41
  They're at least carted off or just left in the pub.
• 1:22:44
  I don't know. I just like those little coders
• 1:22:46
  for all those characters. Really beautiful.
• 1:22:49
  I I like the moment as well where they he does he does
• 1:22:52
  correct. One of the slightly more cringey
• 1:22:54
  bits in the in the TV series with the Doctor.
• 1:22:56
  The Doctor calls Shao Young Little Cloud, and she basically
• 1:22:59
  just internally rolls her eyes. Well, should we sort of round
• 1:23:05
  out the characters by talking about the character of the book?
• 1:23:09
  Morgaine herself, ageless and deathless.
• 1:23:12
  Oh, it's brilliant. She's portrayed as such a real
• 1:23:16
  person with real ambitions and anxieties.
• 1:23:21
  I love the bit where she knew what he feared for she had faced
• 1:23:26
  Merlin long, long ago. So she's talking about the, the
• 1:23:28
  night commander, his fears and it's and it and it grounds it
• 1:23:34
  all in the in past. And and she has memories of of
• 1:23:38
  what Merlin has done and and the reasons why her, her soldiers
• 1:23:42
  would fear him. She, Morgane, the Rose of Hell,
• 1:23:45
  feared none of that infernal regions horrors and infections
• 1:23:49
  as much as she dreaded one glance of Merlin's mocking eyes.
• 1:23:55
  I love that and I and I love how how human that is.
• 1:23:59
  She doesn't fear what's going to happen to him.
• 1:24:01
  She doesn't fear the battle, the the, the the deal with her
• 1:24:06
  power, the fact that she's in a weakened state in this universe,
• 1:24:09
  but is is able to to draw from the other universe.
• 1:24:12
  That's that's all very kind of mysterious, but but but clear
• 1:24:16
  enough that you know she's got limited power.
• 1:24:19
  It's that, you know, the helicopter would have just
• 1:24:20
  exploded in mid air had she had her full powers.
• 1:24:24
  But, but, but fundamentally you're getting a, a, a really
• 1:24:28
  complex character and someone who is frighteningly portrayed
• 1:24:36
  as a, a real tyrant in her universe.
• 1:24:39
  And, and, and we get a, a real sense of the context of the, the
• 1:24:43
  iron rule, kind of it's like Narnia under the White Witch.
• 1:24:47
  It's, it's tyrannical rain that she has.
• 1:24:51
  And yet the Doctor gets under her skin for reasons that are
• 1:24:55
  completely understandable, because he's he's the one who
• 1:24:58
  kind of teases his umbrella on her sword.
• 1:25:01
  James, did you say the Rose from hell?
• 1:25:04
  The Rose of Hell. Oh, that's gorgeous.
• 1:25:06
  I'll miss that completely. That is gorgeous.
• 1:25:09
  Sorry, Michael. And we get the her relationship
• 1:25:12
  with Mordred is is is fleshed out.
• 1:25:14
  Terrific. And there is some very
• 1:25:16
  interesting stuff going on with all this.
• 1:25:18
  I mean, I'm, you know, I know you're both probably up on your
• 1:25:20
  Mallory, but. Shut up.
• 1:25:23
  They have this kind of kind of self dual consuming relationship
• 1:25:32
  where she has she has been forced to recognize him as her
• 1:25:37
  heir. And there's a point where he get
• 1:25:38
  he had everything that came with that and that he was allowed to
• 1:25:41
  have, but he'd never earned any of it, even though there were
• 1:25:43
  100 braver Knights who would have who would have merited all
• 1:25:47
  of those. But then he knows that she he
• 1:25:49
  has never fulfilled what she would want of, of him as an heir
• 1:25:55
  and so knows that he and he cannot progress while she
• 1:25:58
  remains. And she is an immortal as well.
• 1:26:00
  And there's a such such a fascinating little moment here
• 1:26:04
  as well where it says she's thinking about Arthur and she's
• 1:26:07
  thinking about Mordred. And she says, yet there had been
• 1:26:10
  one time, 1 moment when all gallantry had failed behind
• 1:26:13
  King. And that moment of dishonor
• 1:26:15
  burned daily in her heart. And for those who know, there
• 1:26:20
  are the mythology. One of the things about who
• 1:26:23
  Morgain is, who Mordred is. And Morgain is, interestingly,
• 1:26:26
  one of which makes the decision to use one of the slightly more
• 1:26:30
  less common forms of her name. She's usually called more Goose
• 1:26:33
  or Morgan La Faye or Morgana within the mythology because of
• 1:26:38
  the way the mythology has evolved over time and sort of
• 1:26:41
  twisted things. More Dread is After Sun by
• 1:26:45
  Morgaine, and Morgane is also Arthur's sister.
• 1:26:50
  Oh boy. And so that is and that is, that
• 1:26:54
  is what that paragraph is referring to.
• 1:26:56
  And that is what is at the heart of their relationship, that
• 1:26:59
  Mordred is Arthur's son, the man she both hates and loves.
• 1:27:03
  And I do think you get the sense in the book of she, she wants
• 1:27:06
  Arthur to return to defeat him, but also because she needs
• 1:27:09
  Arthur. And that is why she both loves
• 1:27:12
  and hates Mordred as well, because he he is the memory of
• 1:27:16
  Arthur. He is her son, but also the
• 1:27:18
  product of her deepest shame. And obviously they're not going
• 1:27:20
  to say that outright in what is a kids book, but I find it
• 1:27:25
  fascinating that it's alluded to.
• 1:27:27
  Jed Marsh always in these Doctor Who stories with these dodgy
• 1:27:31
  leanings to them. I do like as well though they
• 1:27:34
  really stressed that Mordred is a wrong own right and he's a bit
• 1:27:38
  of a rogue and there's AI don't really know how to get into the
• 1:27:41
  head of an ancient sorceress with all this power, but I do
• 1:27:45
  know how to get into the head of a frustrated mother.
• 1:27:47
  So this sequence here where she had waited, she had waited.
• 1:27:51
  A son with a dedication to his duties as a Prince, not a
• 1:27:54
  wayward who uses rank to behave like a noble ruffian.
• 1:27:58
  Time and again for 1000 years, Mordred's indiscretions and
• 1:28:01
  immodesties cause embarrassment to the royal household and
• 1:28:04
  always seemed unerringly aimed at her.
• 1:28:08
  There's just levels to this that just isn't there on telly and I
• 1:28:12
  really appreciate it. Michael Amoris, in thinking that
• 1:28:15
  you are quite clued up on your Arthurian mythology.
• 1:28:18
  I've I've worked very hard to give you and the listeners that
• 1:28:20
  impression. If I can just give you an
• 1:28:24
  opportunity to to reinforce that impression.
• 1:28:26
  I mean, obviously there are references to Mallory, there are
• 1:28:30
  references to THY and there are the, you know, the occasional
• 1:28:35
  reference to Lancelot and to Bedevir.
• 1:28:38
  And we we get we get the sense that there this is grounded in
• 1:28:42
  some of the actual mythology. I just wondered if where where
• 1:28:46
  I'm less clear on whether it's just Aronovic stroke Platt
• 1:28:50
  making stuff up like the the the the various Queens that tend to
• 1:28:55
  Arthur at the at the start. You know, it it Yeah.
• 1:28:58
  Is that authentic? Well, that's really interesting.
• 1:29:01
  That opening scene, the very opening line that you mentioned
• 1:29:04
  earlier about 3 queen, three sisters bore him down to the
• 1:29:07
  lake. That's actually based on a
• 1:29:09
  painting, The Death of King Arthur by James Arthur from the
• 1:29:12
  19th century, which which you can find online.
• 1:29:16
  But no, there are lots of little bits that that put on things as
• 1:29:19
  well that it it is it is very literate as well.
• 1:29:21
  So Anselin is, is an original character.
• 1:29:24
  He's sort of Lancelot, but here he's, he's, I think on TV you
• 1:29:27
  sort of wonder, did they just not want to call him Lancelot
• 1:29:29
  because it, it carries a bit too much weight.
• 1:29:31
  But here he's amped Anselin AP Guelkamayi, which is Guelkamayi
• 1:29:35
  is Gawain. So it's he's the son of Gawain,
• 1:29:39
  who's another figure as well. And his name is a reference to
• 1:29:41
  Roger Lancelin Green, who wrote the Knights of the Round Table,
• 1:29:45
  the the Puffin classic, every kid of a certain generation.
• 1:29:48
  It's how they learned about King Arthur and all the rest of it.
• 1:29:51
  I think Aronovic says in the in the documentary that that Anselm
• 1:29:54
  was meant to be a kind of Lancelot figure.
• 1:29:56
  And obviously Winifred is Guinevere and I, but the book
• 1:30:02
  does something more sophisticated.
• 1:30:04
  It makes Anselm a descendant of Lancelot, and it and it and it's
• 1:30:08
  drawing parallels and the names thing is actually referenced by
• 1:30:12
  the doctor. And his sister is his old and
• 1:30:15
  he's a bit worried about her going off with Tristan and stuff
• 1:30:18
  like that. And then there are things like,
• 1:30:20
  I mean, so I love that at the start.
• 1:30:22
  And, and I, I think it's worth pointing out in terms of
• 1:30:24
  proportions, the what on television is episode 1 takes up
• 1:30:29
  well over the first third of the book.
• 1:30:32
  It's it's really beefed up and actually the the story as is on
• 1:30:36
  television, it doesn't really kick in until about kind of 30
• 1:30:39
  pages in. There's an awful lot of.
• 1:30:41
  I was really going to kindle James.
• 1:30:43
  I messaged Michael and I said I'm 11% into this book and
• 1:30:47
  Battlefield hasn't started yet. But it's great and we see hi
• 1:30:52
  Tadjel, we actually get to see the other universe.
• 1:30:54
  I mean again that the naming convention there in so Avalon is
• 1:31:00
  an island. It's so originally Avalon in the
• 1:31:05
  originally in the mythology, Avalon is an island and it's the
• 1:31:08
  island where Arthur is buried. Right as as one of the
• 1:31:12
  fascinating things about the Arthurian mythology is the way
• 1:31:15
  in which it's sort of built upon existing mythology, but absorbed
• 1:31:18
  others and been retold and those have been absorbed back in.
• 1:31:21
  So there's, there's, there's Welsh stuff in there, there's
• 1:31:23
  Anglo-Saxon stuff, there's Viking and something we get
• 1:31:25
  reference to Igdrasil in there as well.
• 1:31:29
  But the, the other thing about Avalon is what interestingly is
• 1:31:32
  in some interpretations, it kind of gets merged with the Celtic
• 1:31:37
  idea of the other world, which is in Celtic mythology, you
• 1:31:39
  know, the faith folk and all the rest of it, that there's a
• 1:31:41
  parallel reality. And so, and I think that's what
• 1:31:45
  he's playing on here, that it literally is a parallel world.
• 1:31:49
  And so a valley on is is their whole world, rather than just an
• 1:31:53
  island. Yeah, and, and, and we get to
• 1:31:55
  see Mordred having a drink in gore.
• 1:32:00
  That's again, Gore is a kind of locale, isn't it?
• 1:32:05
  Yeah, as well. And it's also Lake Vortegan.
• 1:32:08
  And because King Vortegan is the cruel king that Arthur overthrew
• 1:32:12
  to become King of the Britons. That's where it gets a bit
• 1:32:15
  dragon adjacent. You sort of, you have this one
• 1:32:18
  scene where Mordred, it's perving over the landlord's
• 1:32:21
  daughter, but it's this potent mix of magic and mythology and
• 1:32:24
  technology. It's it's kind of a bit Game of
• 1:32:26
  Thrones, but with a bit of steampunk in there as well.
• 1:32:29
  There's a way kind of forward thinking.
• 1:32:31
  I don't think this was unlike the bits of remembrance that we
• 1:32:35
  felt were kind of the the sci-fi that Aronovich was reading at
• 1:32:38
  the time. I feel like this book is quite
• 1:32:39
  prescient in what's going to become trendy, you know, a few
• 1:32:43
  years down the line. We all love an ornithopter now
• 1:32:47
  with those two movies. Well, Bellas, thank you for that
• 1:32:54
  education. I knew nothing about any of
• 1:32:55
  that. That's the most quietest I've
• 1:32:57
  ever been on a call. I was, I was sucking in the
• 1:32:59
  knowledge there. Thank you, Michael.
• 1:33:00
  Thank you. James, Anything in your notes
• 1:33:03
  that we haven't covered from Battlefield?
• 1:33:04
  I'm sure there's many, many things.
• 1:33:06
  Let's just bounce around a bit and and let people know,
• 1:33:10
  Michael. Peter Wormsley, another, another
• 1:33:15
  little character who gets so much more to do here that he's
• 1:33:19
  it's a wonderful little portrait of this man who's who's a boyish
• 1:33:24
  love for our theory on a kind of drove him to this career in
• 1:33:28
  archaeology. But now as a grown man is, is
• 1:33:31
  deliberately making a point of oh, but I don't believe all
• 1:33:34
  that. Oh, but it's all rubbish.
• 1:33:35
  I'm here, you know, investigating.
• 1:33:37
  Oh, he would have been some, some Celtic Chieftain against
• 1:33:40
  the Anglo Saxons. And then he finds out it's all
• 1:33:42
  real and it's just brilliant. This, this, you have this
• 1:33:47
  portrait of this, of this rough old bloke who spent 10 years
• 1:33:50
  digging next to a lake and it all falls away because it's,
• 1:33:54
  it's all act. Everything he believes as a boy
• 1:33:57
  was real. Isn't the dog a nice touch as
• 1:34:00
  well? Lovely touch, yeah?
• 1:34:01
  Really. Well, is this the 1st Doctor Who
• 1:34:03
  story ever to have scenes from the Tardis's point of view?
• 1:34:07
  There's a very early scene all told from the Tardis's point of
• 1:34:10
  view, which was gorgeous. It's.
• 1:34:12
  A good scene, isn't it? It's so it's so dramatically set
• 1:34:16
  up. And again, I like so there's a
• 1:34:19
  whole thing going on in this book where that thing of old
• 1:34:24
  legends, that thing of, of the past and the present kind of
• 1:34:28
  meeting on the same battlefield. You know, it's it's made
• 1:34:30
  explicit early on as the as the the Knights of screaming into
• 1:34:37
  our universe. It says the battle lines were
• 1:34:40
  being drawn. It would be a final glorious
• 1:34:42
  battle between the past and the present.
• 1:34:44
  And so that's a very explicit theme and it's beautifully
• 1:34:47
  highlighted in in some particularly, particularly this
• 1:34:49
  opening section, we get a satellite conversation as as
• 1:34:55
  this entry into our universe is, is messing with the satellites.
• 1:34:59
  And we get this very kind of surveillance satellite now sat
• 1:35:02
  61 in geostationary orbit. It's very sci-fi for a
• 1:35:05
  paragraph. And it's the satellites talking
• 1:35:07
  to each other and and not understanding what's going on,
• 1:35:09
  which ends an unbidden alien presence had slipped through the
• 1:35:13
  surveillance net, as it had been accustomed to do for longer than
• 1:35:16
  the scribes could recall. Like even that the surveillance
• 1:35:19
  net, you know, round up against a reference to the scribes.
• 1:35:24
  And and then the following paragraph is the sword Excalibur
• 1:35:29
  recognizing the same activity. So you get the you know, the
• 1:35:32
  future, the satellites, you know, science fiction imagery
• 1:35:34
  and then the ancient past. And every this this book is, is
• 1:35:40
  broken into four parts, more or less along the same content as
• 1:35:45
  as the four episodes on television.
• 1:35:48
  Each one is headed with a scenario, which is a unit
• 1:35:50
  scenario, although the scenarios have got kind of ancient names,
• 1:35:53
  so dull swords and Broken Arrow and Ben spear and then a quote
• 1:35:58
  and it's a quote from a bardic ballad or I think there's later
• 1:36:03
  on a quote from Mallory. So again, this the the the
• 1:36:05
  present, the unit calls the scenario names next to kind of
• 1:36:10
  ancient texts. It's it's, it's quite magical
• 1:36:15
  and and actually it makes that quite complex balancing outlook
• 1:36:20
  look effortless, but I think it's really well conceived.
• 1:36:24
  If you don't want me. Those those scenes from the
• 1:36:27
  satellite and the TARDIS point of view had been written by
• 1:36:29
  Eronovich, I would have believed you.
• 1:36:31
  It reads like Eronovich, doesn't it?
• 1:36:34
  Sorry. About that that's gonna say and
• 1:36:35
  then the and then as James says, we get those quotes from from
• 1:36:40
  Tennyson and Mallory and others. But then for part 4, we just get
• 1:36:44
  scenario muke flash when all else fails, duck.
• 1:36:47
  It's not practical, but it can be momentarily comforting.
• 1:36:50
  Unit procedures, manuals and division.
• 1:36:52
  Platt has a way of opening a chapter as well, doesn't he?
• 1:36:55
  With a really simple punchy line.
• 1:36:58
  Like the Weathermen were embarrassed Spring had been
• 1:37:01
  postponed the whole book. Every chapter started with a
• 1:37:05
  simple, punchy sentence. And he writes a good joke in
• 1:37:09
  prose as well. The bit where Ace is under the
• 1:37:12
  pub and you just hear from underneath the rubble, He writes
• 1:37:17
  that stuff brilliantly. I like the bit where all of Is
• 1:37:20
  This in the TV version where the other characters have lost sight
• 1:37:23
  of Anselin and Bambera and briefly stopped to basically
• 1:37:26
  wonder if they're having a shag. That's not.
• 1:37:31
  That's not on television, no. Lavelle is a is, is a Breton,
• 1:37:37
  which is another just tiny, perfect little reference.
• 1:37:40
  You know, of course, another Celtic nation, the displaced,
• 1:37:42
  the Britons who were displaced by the Anglo Saxons, which is
• 1:37:45
  part of the whole basis for, for the King Arthur mythology is the
• 1:37:50
  idea that after the Romans left, the Britons were left
• 1:37:52
  defenseless. The Anglo Saxons came in, they
• 1:37:54
  had a mighty king who held them up and drove them back and the
• 1:37:57
  rest of it, which is why Morgane is battle queen of the Cyrax.
• 1:38:01
  That's that's reference to Saxons and there's just, you
• 1:38:06
  know, there's there's so many little bits of this that it's
• 1:38:10
  you never get the sense that they're showing off, but they
• 1:38:12
  deeply understand this. This isn't the sort of storybook
• 1:38:15
  King Arthur version where you would have you would have had
• 1:38:18
  the round table and you'd have had Lancelot and you'd have had
• 1:38:21
  Excalibur. But but they they really know
• 1:38:24
  their stuff instantly. 11 conceit it does make is that
• 1:38:26
  Excalibur and the sword and the stone are the same, which
• 1:38:30
  they're not in the mythology, but they should because that's
• 1:38:33
  more that's more dramatically correct.
• 1:38:36
  We do. We glimpse the round table
• 1:38:38
  though, and it is this, it's been hacked a bit, has been
• 1:38:42
  hacked out to include a throne. It's it's that a thing that
• 1:38:44
  happened? Oh, now, now we are going beyond
• 1:38:47
  the edges of it. But it's it's even if it's not,
• 1:38:49
  it's definitely in keeping with the sort of legends that were
• 1:38:54
  told for essence. Because the other thing with
• 1:38:55
  King Arthur mythology is it has it is that it has continued to
• 1:38:59
  evolve and be fed into a change. So you're sort of invited to
• 1:39:02
  make your own changes to it, to bring it up to date.
• 1:39:05
  I don't apologise, Michael. This is the one time you can
• 1:39:07
  talk about this stuff. I was since since you brought up
• 1:39:12
  Peter Walmsley as well, I think one, it's worth noting that Ace
• 1:39:17
  blowing up his archaeological dig, you know, it's kind of
• 1:39:21
  played for last on television, probably rightly so.
• 1:39:23
  I don't, you know, there's the joke where he lectures them on
• 1:39:28
  archaeology and he plays it as a man who's just slightly shell
• 1:39:31
  shocked. In the book, you get the sense
• 1:39:34
  of the the passion he has poured into this project and the very
• 1:39:39
  real response to someone blowing a hole in his archaeological dig
• 1:39:42
  is genuine grief. And you see a man who is
• 1:39:45
  absolutely broken. I think it's, it's a really
• 1:39:48
  moving portrayal of someone who's basically kind of his, his
• 1:39:52
  passion project is, is is one of the victims of this, of this
• 1:39:56
  conflict. I really liked how the book
• 1:40:00
  acknowledged the insanity of the ending on TV where the Doctor
• 1:40:06
  says I doubt the Tower will hold her, treat her with honour
• 1:40:10
  anyway. But it also acknowledges as well
• 1:40:14
  the potential ruin of removing more gain from that universe as
• 1:40:18
  well, and that there'll be a power imbalance and at least
• 1:40:21
  things on a on a bit of a. A more interesting that than
• 1:40:26
  just, you know, lock up it, lock up his mother, OK?
• 1:40:29
  This, I mean, and it's even more egregious in the book because
• 1:40:32
  she's so powerful in the book. It's like she's heartbroken.
• 1:40:35
  OK, so she's just going to walk into a cell.
• 1:40:38
  Well, you know, I am in many ways very happy that we have not
• 1:40:42
  had the Big Finish Merlin box set because I do think it is
• 1:40:47
  more evocative not knowing don't.
• 1:40:49
  Say it, don't say it. Now you have to say it three
• 1:40:52
  times. You said it being.
• 1:40:54
  That's right. But I do there is a part of me
• 1:40:58
  that wants in that, you know, that Big Finish Bambera series
• 1:41:01
  to there to be a scene where she goes into the deepest vault
• 1:41:04
  beneath unit HQ when Morgane is there in a circle of salt, you
• 1:41:08
  know she. They had G miles for a while
• 1:41:11
  because they could have done it. Well, you say about the power
• 1:41:14
  imbalance because but the I mean as spoiler as we can get here,
• 1:41:18
  the very last lines of the novelization are the Brigadier
• 1:41:23
  saying, I'm glad of a free moment.
• 1:41:25
  Doctor, you see, I've just had a job offer.
• 1:41:28
  It would be hard to turn down. Now that intrigued me.
• 1:41:32
  The Shadows of Avalon, the 8th Doctor book.
• 1:41:37
  Does that pick up on this? It does the same thing again.
• 1:41:42
  It, I don't think it deliberately picks up on that,
• 1:41:44
  but it has the idea of the brigade.
• 1:41:46
  The Shadows of Avalon is a weird book because it sort of behaves
• 1:41:48
  as if Battlefield didn't happen in some ways, you know?
• 1:41:51
  Oh, I'd quite like to do a King Arthur story with parallel
• 1:41:53
  dimensions, please. And it has the idea of the
• 1:41:58
  Brigadier going and becoming the legislator or the, you know, the
• 1:42:03
  High Sheriff or something of that world.
• 1:42:05
  Doris is dead, isn't she? And he's mourning her throughout
• 1:42:09
  the entire book. I'll.
• 1:42:10
  Paul Connell. Why are you shitting all over
• 1:42:12
  Battlefield? Come on now.
• 1:42:14
  Did did any companion or bit part character come out of those
• 1:42:18
  years unscathed? Anji Kapoor.
• 1:42:21
  That's the only one. Well, that's why they had to.
• 1:42:24
  Eventually it got to the point where with sometime never, they
• 1:42:26
  had to. They had to acknowledge it and
• 1:42:28
  make a plot point out of the fact that everyone was being
• 1:42:30
  killed. And brought them all back to
• 1:42:33
  life again. That was wonderful.
• 1:42:34
  Anything else from your notes gentlemen?
• 1:42:36
  And please summarise your thoughts.
• 1:42:38
  On Battlefield, I think it is just worth kind of noting that
• 1:42:42
  if like I, I feel like this this book is, is it's Mark Platt's
• 1:42:48
  homage not just to Doctor Who and this this story, but to Ben
• 1:42:52
  Aronovich. It's it's clearly written by
• 1:42:55
  someone who is a fan of Aronovich's writing.
• 1:42:57
  And I, I presume what happened is Aronovich was offered the
• 1:42:59
  novelization and said no, that was a disaster.
• 1:43:01
  I hated it. I could, I couldn't possibly go
• 1:43:03
  back to that. And Mark Platt has kind of
• 1:43:06
  generously channeled Ben Aronovich.
• 1:43:09
  Like there's so much of it reads like someone who's read
• 1:43:11
  Remembrance of the Daleks and Gone.
• 1:43:13
  This is how we need to be writing these novelizations.
• 1:43:17
  And I'm going to do my best to do the version of Battlefield
• 1:43:20
  that I would have liked to see on television, but also that I
• 1:43:24
  would like to read. And as you say, there are there
• 1:43:27
  are passages that read like they could have been written by
• 1:43:29
  Eronovich himself. You track the books from
• 1:43:32
  Remembrance to Battlefield, Happiness Patrol, Silver
• 1:43:34
  Nemesis. Great show.
• 1:43:35
  They're good books, but they're not like Remembrance.
• 1:43:38
  This is the first one. It's the first remembrance,
• 1:43:40
  light remembrance it is. And it's got a reference to
• 1:43:43
  Chunky Gilmore as well, who it turns out, lectured bamberers.
• 1:43:48
  So there's, you know, there there are a couple of Cole Hill
• 1:43:51
  references, which I which are entirely appropriate because I
• 1:43:55
  think the two stories were kind of conceived.
• 1:43:58
  You know, Ronovich just said that he he was looking for to to
• 1:44:01
  do the other. The flip side of of the the cold
• 1:44:04
  emotionless logical Daleks was to do someone complete sorry,
• 1:44:09
  emotionless was to do someone like more gain emotional and
• 1:44:13
  complex and beautifully illogical.
• 1:44:18
  And so the two stories do do work together and and it's
• 1:44:21
  lovely to have a kind of looking at the build up of soldiers and
• 1:44:25
  thinking that reminds me of the activity I saw at Cole Hill
• 1:44:27
  School. It it draws some nice parallels
• 1:44:29
  between the two. It is just funny, isn't it?
• 1:44:31
  All these years later when the Doctor thinks the Brigadier has
• 1:44:35
  died. And what does he say?
• 1:44:37
  He says you were supposed to die in bed.
• 1:44:41
  Doesn't that? And weirdly, with the future
• 1:44:43
  looking back at you like deja vu seen from the wrong ends,
• 1:44:45
  doesn't that suddenly feel like a throw forward?
• 1:44:50
  Although, you know, given I've criticised him so much, his line
• 1:44:53
  reading of You're Supposed to Be Dead in the TV version is
• 1:44:58
  hilarious. Really, Doctor, have a little
• 1:45:01
  faith. I mean, there's I love the TV
• 1:45:03
  version. I know I've been very mean about
• 1:45:05
  it, but I do love it. King died in final battle.
• 1:45:09
  Everything else propaganda is. Oh yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:14
  And your overall thoughts, Mr. Michael?
• 1:45:18
  This is one of my favorite Doctor Who books of all time and
• 1:45:20
  remain so in terms of the book club, it's up there with Father
• 1:45:23
  Time and Damaged Goods as one of my favorite books we've covered.
• 1:45:26
  I think it's probably my favorite target.
• 1:45:30
  I think it deserves a place on any Doctor Who fans shelf.
• 1:45:34
  If you can get the much more attractive 1990 James Lark
• 1:45:39
  edition, please do. But if you have to make do with
• 1:45:42
  the The Sad 2010's Michael Mills edition, then it it it feels
• 1:45:47
  nice in the hand. James honestly, you're such an
• 1:45:50
  artist. Beautiful.
• 1:45:51
  That cover. You know, the next the next book
• 1:45:56
  Michael and I are covering is a short story collection, but the
• 1:45:59
  next book after that is Neil Penswick's The Pit.
• 1:46:04
  So yeah, I've been saying quite a lot.
• 1:46:06
  Maybe this is sort of paved the way to the new adventures.
• 1:46:09
  So Michael, I think you and I should read The Pit and think
• 1:46:11
  back to Battlefield and see what sort of lessons they learned
• 1:46:13
  from this book as we read that one.
• 1:46:16
  I think that that whole too broad and too deep for the small
• 1:46:20
  screen is in this book and then some, but there's still enough
• 1:46:26
  of what was on the screen there for it to feel like Doctor Who.
• 1:46:30
  And if the New Adventures had gone more down this route of
• 1:46:35
  fusing those two things, I don't think they would have
• 1:46:38
  hemorrhaged listeners, sorry readers, in the way that they
• 1:46:41
  did. I don't want to be too mean
• 1:46:43
  about the New Adventures. They did their own things, and
• 1:46:45
  they did them well and poorly. But Battlefield is one of the
• 1:46:50
  best New adventures I have read. Yeah, on this book club.
• 1:46:56
  And I think because I haven't done Long Borough yet, it's
• 1:47:00
  easily the best Mark Platt book I've read.
• 1:47:02
  It is beautifully written This. And it is interesting, isn't
• 1:47:06
  that Mark Platt is one of the first authors who writes for New
• 1:47:08
  Adventures. And what they should have said
• 1:47:11
  is can you do another of those, please?
• 1:47:14
  And probably they should have said that to Ben Aronovich as
• 1:47:16
  well. Can you do another remember.
• 1:47:17
  And instead they, whatever they said, the brief is, well, this
• 1:47:21
  is you can. It's too broad and too deep and
• 1:47:25
  taking itself far too seriously for the small screen.
• 1:47:29
  And Mark Platt, I said this to you.
• 1:47:31
  I think his is the strongest of the 1st 8 new adventures.
• 1:47:36
  Objectively, as a piece of writing, I think it's the most
• 1:47:38
  consistent. I think it's a brilliant piece
• 1:47:39
  of writing in some ways, but bloody hell, it's it's.
• 1:47:43
  There's no way into it, James. There's no way in penetrable.
• 1:47:46
  It is impenetrable. It's terribly, terribly clever
• 1:47:49
  and it's beautifully written, but it's impenetrable.
• 1:47:52
  It's certainly not the most fun of the 1st 8 new adventures in
• 1:47:56
  it's own terms. I think it's it's a, it's a,
• 1:47:58
  it's a very finely crafted book. But why was there no one saying,
• 1:48:02
  but you remember that thing where you wrote the Doctor
• 1:48:04
  really well and it was action-packed and entertaining
• 1:48:08
  and, and the easiest prose to read?
• 1:48:12
  Why, why? Why weren't they?
• 1:48:14
  Why didn't they send it back and say make it more like that?
• 1:48:17
  It says something about Platt's generosity as a as a writer to
• 1:48:21
  take somebody else's script, which is good, and make it this
• 1:48:26
  great. It's fabulous.
• 1:48:28
  You two were both right. Was it in your top ten as well,
• 1:48:30
  Michael? I think it was.
• 1:48:32
  Yeah, it was. Yeah, I mean, it would probably
• 1:48:34
  sit in mine now as well, the definitive version.
• 1:48:41
  Well, Michael, since you came up with our top three for this
• 1:48:44
  episode, I'll suggest you better let us know what we're doing
• 1:48:48
  today. Gentlemen, can you please give
• 1:48:51
  me your top three parallel worlds?
• 1:48:56
  And when you say parallel worlds, alternative universes,
• 1:48:59
  is that the sort of thing you're talking about?
• 1:49:01
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sideways in time sort of things,
• 1:49:04
  obviously excluding Battlefield. Oh, OK, I might have a few
• 1:49:07
  surprises on this list then. Well, let's go round in a circle
• 1:49:10
  shortly. Let's start with James and then
• 1:49:12
  tell you Michael and then I'll come up the rear.
• 1:49:14
  James. I'm going to take Inferno before
• 1:49:16
  anybody else does, partly because my other two are very
• 1:49:24
  unexpected, but also I think Inferno is brilliant.
• 1:49:27
  And I was thinking about this. I was thinking that Inferno also
• 1:49:30
  it, it just arrives at a real sweet spot in terms of where it
• 1:49:35
  comes. I can't imagine Inferno a series
• 1:49:39
  later. I think it has to come where it
• 1:49:42
  comes at the end of Pertwee's first season.
• 1:49:48
  Because I don't think you can do that thing where you've got the
• 1:49:51
  evil Brigadier and where you've got the the the evil list shore
• 1:49:57
  without having established that that those those characters.
• 1:50:01
  But I think it also plays on the kind of edgy relationship the
• 1:50:04
  Doctor has with the Brigadier in that season that very quickly
• 1:50:07
  becomes cozy. It's impossible to imagine
• 1:50:10
  Inferno with an evil Captain Mike Yates and an evil Joe
• 1:50:14
  Grant. It just doesn't work.
• 1:50:15
  And and it probably would have been a much more, much sillier
• 1:50:20
  adventure. The thing that's impressive
• 1:50:22
  about Inferno is how crap it could have been and actually how
• 1:50:26
  it absolutely works like gangbusters.
• 1:50:29
  And it's partly just the the, you know, the the tone of that
• 1:50:32
  season is that they are all taking it seriously.
• 1:50:35
  Courtney plays it so well. He plays that version of the
• 1:50:38
  Brigadier as a bully and a coward.
• 1:50:42
  It, you know, just a little bit. Either way, it could have been
• 1:50:45
  PO faced or it could have been ludicrous and it's not.
• 1:50:48
  It's really compelling and the brilliance of actually telling
• 1:50:51
  the exact same story that's being told in our universe.
• 1:50:54
  But showing like this is what happens when when it's gone too
• 1:50:57
  far, you know, then gives you the, the, the jeopardy for the
• 1:51:01
  rest of the story. So I think Inferno is one of the
• 1:51:04
  one of the absolute greats and I think everything about it works
• 1:51:06
  really well. Can you imagine how Benic, the
• 1:51:10
  evil Mike Yates would have been? Oh, it would have been dreadful,
• 1:51:14
  wouldn't it? He would have been a camp
• 1:51:15
  sadist. Michael, what's your first
• 1:51:17
  choice? Well, I'm going to go for,
• 1:51:20
  before anyone takes it, Doctor Who in the Iron Legion, a comic
• 1:51:26
  book. I think when Doctor Who
• 1:51:31
  magazine, Doctor Who Weekly, started with its comic strips,
• 1:51:35
  we talk about too broad and too deep.
• 1:51:37
  I don't know about too deep, but definitely too broad and too
• 1:51:39
  big. And too bad it had for the first
• 1:51:42
  time Doctor Who could have a maximalist sensibility.
• 1:51:44
  You know, forgets having to make do with studios and everything
• 1:51:50
  going off at 9 and dealing with unions.
• 1:51:52
  Well, this is going to be Doctor Who where more is more.
• 1:51:55
  And I think it has so much fun with itself.
• 1:51:59
  It is wonderful to see that kind of 2000 AD.
• 1:52:02
  But it's the Romans idea. I think it feels overused term.
• 1:52:07
  It feels epic how much of that universe we get to see in such a
• 1:52:12
  breakneck story where you're literally thrown into the middle
• 1:52:15
  of a motor chariot race. And then we go, we go to the
• 1:52:17
  slave galleys and we meet the emperor as well and all the
• 1:52:20
  ancient armies locked away. I I am amazed that we haven't
• 1:52:25
  had five more stories set in that same universe because you
• 1:52:30
  could do so much more actually say.
• 1:52:32
  It awful. You're going to say a big
• 1:52:34
  finish. Well, no, but Lance Barkin, our
• 1:52:37
  Lance friend, friend of the podcast Lance Barkin did do a
• 1:52:40
  sequel for Warp Warp called the Iron Empire, which is really
• 1:52:45
  worth checking out if you can get the back issues.
• 1:52:47
  It's about the the Barbarians at the gate and the the Roman
• 1:52:52
  Empire having to ally with the Cyborg Egyptians.
• 1:52:54
  It's it's brilliant, but I love the Iron Empire.
• 1:52:57
  That's with the 12th Doctor, isn't it?
• 1:52:59
  Yes, yeah. And there's a little, there's a
• 1:53:03
  little Cleopatra is in it and she has a canopic jar that's
• 1:53:08
  basically acts as her sort of little Droid assistant.
• 1:53:10
  It's lots of lovely little touches.
• 1:53:14
  But but it's been and I I love the Iron Legion and I think
• 1:53:19
  arrived with such confidence and it's such a massive and fun
• 1:53:23
  world. I love that where more is more.
• 1:53:27
  We don't have enough of that. Well, as a peek into the
• 1:53:30
  consequences of a Dalek attack, the Earth that we see in Jubilee
• 1:53:36
  is absolutely terrifying. Dark, insidious, wickedly funny,
• 1:53:41
  absolutely terrifying, encapsulated in Martin Jarvis's
• 1:53:46
  mad, mad turn as Rochester in that story.
• 1:53:51
  It's doing Inferno in a way, but it's doing it in a very black,
• 1:53:59
  very witty way. I think it is one of the most
• 1:54:03
  disturbing Doctor Who stories of all time.
• 1:54:06
  That bit where Rochester has his little Midget delivered to go
• 1:54:11
  inside the Dalek casing, but it doesn't fit in, so he chops his
• 1:54:14
  leg off, or is it his arm to get him inside?
• 1:54:18
  It's just such a dark peek as to what the English Empire could
• 1:54:25
  have been had things been different, and I'm very pleased
• 1:54:29
  we go back to how things are at the end of that.
• 1:54:32
  Fabulous. Story is there a better Big
• 1:54:34
  Finish guest performance than Martin Jarvis in that because he
• 1:54:38
  he's genuinely unhinged and it's scary and funny and pathetic and
• 1:54:44
  it an astonishing. Just doesn't hold back, does he?
• 1:54:47
  No. I love the bit we were talking
• 1:54:49
  about. Is is Dad rebuilding the city?
• 1:54:52
  So he destroyed the whole city. Well, what happened?
• 1:54:55
  It's the little rubble. Well, we got bored.
• 1:54:57
  You know, it happens. Well, James, what's your second?
• 1:55:01
  Oh, I wish I'd thought of Jubilee now, but I've got got
• 1:55:03
  another Rob Shearman story because my 2nd parallel world is
• 1:55:08
  the one where Doctor Who was cancelled after one episode,
• 1:55:12
  very much to the disappointment of writer Martin Bannister.
• 1:55:16
  Deadline. I love deadline.
• 1:55:20
  I mean, it's, it's, it's very Rob Sherman and it's a very much
• 1:55:26
  a statement on the the nature of writing.
• 1:55:28
  And it's, I think it's written by a writer who's been burned a
• 1:55:31
  couple of times already, even though he was quite young when
• 1:55:34
  he wrote it. And it's, and, and it's witty
• 1:55:37
  and it's dark and it's painful and, and it's, and it's this a
• 1:55:44
  glimpse into a, into a totally plausible world where Doctor Who
• 1:55:48
  just didn't happen, where, you know, and it's got references
• 1:55:52
  and an earthly child and also the dialects and the masters of
• 1:55:55
  Luxor. I think his reference.
• 1:55:57
  And I mean, apart from the fact that it's an absolute Tour de
• 1:56:01
  force for Derek Jacobi playing that this disembittered writer,
• 1:56:06
  you know, raging at what he could have been and what didn't
• 1:56:10
  happen in his career, You've also got you've got the
• 1:56:13
  character, the kind of real, as it were, characters in that
• 1:56:16
  universe. Also read lines from Doctor Who
• 1:56:19
  scripts and you get the 1st Doctor as played by Derek
• 1:56:21
  Jacobi. I mean, so for that alone, it's
• 1:56:26
  worth it, Yeah. But clenchingly uncomfortable at
• 1:56:29
  times. That's a bit where his son
• 1:56:31
  breaks down and just goes Doctor Who, you utter bastard.
• 1:56:36
  Oh, it's just glorious. Far be it for me to besmirch the
• 1:56:39
  name of our Dylan Reece Who our door when we did covered the
• 1:56:43
  unbounds on finish big. He said he had no idea why that
• 1:56:47
  belonged in that season. And I said that's the ultimate.
• 1:56:50
  What if it is? Yeah.
• 1:56:51
  What if Doctor Who never existed or only existed for one episode?
• 1:56:56
  Oh great. Choice James, I mean Michael,
• 1:57:00
  Michael, I've just done mine. Unless you unless you want the
• 1:57:03
  James from the the parallel world to step in at this point.
• 1:57:07
  Oh yes please. Well, Hamster with a Knife had
• 1:57:10
  one episode edit point I'm going to get for my second choice.
• 1:57:17
  I'm going to go for the Star Trek universe from the Doctor
• 1:57:20
  Who universe because I reread A simulation squared a year or two
• 1:57:26
  ago and this is the Doctor Who Star Trek TNG crossover comic
• 1:57:30
  from 2012. And oh, it's joyous fun.
• 1:57:34
  And I feel a little bit robbed. As geek as as Doctor Who fans,
• 1:57:37
  we don't get to have the fun. But if you are a fan of almost
• 1:57:40
  any American franchise you have on the regular got to see what
• 1:57:44
  would happen if they met Batman or what happens if the car was a
• 1:57:48
  Transformer. And we've never really got that
• 1:57:51
  sort of fun in Doctor Who, despite the fact that Doctor Who
• 1:57:54
  has the best format for Doom and crossovers in and I I the way it
• 1:58:02
  is done in a simulation squared is really quite thoughtful and
• 1:58:05
  is really very interesting. It's a it's a eight part comic
• 1:58:09
  book series, which is quite long for these things.
• 1:58:11
  And they really spend a lot of time using those two characters,
• 1:58:16
  those two sets of characters in those two different series
• 1:58:18
  meeting each other to kind of give a view on them that we
• 1:58:23
  don't often get. So there's some wonderful stuff
• 1:58:25
  about Picard being very suspicious of the Doctor because
• 1:58:29
  he's exactly the sort of mad in who turns up on the bridge of
• 1:58:33
  the Enterprise every other week and tricks him into doing
• 1:58:36
  something he shouldn't. And, and but then there's a
• 1:58:39
  wonderful scene with Amy Pond coming to his ready room and
• 1:58:42
  saying, no, look, I'm I'm human, I'm normal.
• 1:58:45
  I trust him. You need to trust him.
• 1:58:48
  And having very differing views of how to deal with with these
• 1:58:50
  threats of the Cybermen and and the Borg and the, and the
• 1:58:53
  Doctor's all about compromise. And Picard can't possibly
• 1:58:56
  compromise because he's done that in the past as well as then
• 1:58:59
  we get a little Doctor Who adventure within Star Trek
• 1:59:01
  history where you get the 4th Doctor.
• 1:59:03
  They have flashbacks to the 4th Doctor meeting the original
• 1:59:07
  series crew and a bit where there's a brilliant little twist
• 1:59:10
  of one of the things you need to have in crossovers is what are
• 1:59:13
  the stories and what are the moments that we couldn't have
• 1:59:15
  individually, but by bringing them together, we're allowed to
• 1:59:18
  have where are the points of overlap and difference?
• 1:59:22
  And there's a brilliant bit where they realise they need a
• 1:59:24
  copy of the Borg of some Borg programming and say, well,
• 1:59:28
  there's no way we can get a board a Borg cube.
• 1:59:30
  We need to know one of these things would be.
• 1:59:32
  And they say, well, we do know where one of these was and
• 1:59:36
  you've got a time machine. So the Doctor goes back in time
• 1:59:39
  to the Battle of Wolf 359 for the best of both worlds.
• 1:59:42
  Because because they've got a time machine, they can think 4th
• 1:59:45
  dimension. And it's, it's just, it's, it's
• 1:59:48
  brilliant. I'm all overcome here.
• 1:59:52
  You're fusing together two things I adore.
• 1:59:55
  And it is a crying shame that IDW lost the Doctor Who license
• 2:00:00
  so we didn't get the the. Plan.
• 2:00:01
  Don't say it. Don't say it.
• 2:00:03
  Go say it. Clara Oswald would have walked.
• 2:00:06
  The would have walked along deep space. 90 boy.
• 2:00:10
  Wonderful. Well, I've got nothing to rival
• 2:00:13
  that, I'm afraid. My second choice is the the Book
• 2:00:17
  That Everybody Hates and Only I Lord The Last Resort by Paul
• 2:00:22
  Leonard. It's not so much an alternative
• 2:00:24
  universe. I mean, it starts off that way
• 2:00:27
  in that we've got time travel, tourism and McDonald's popping
• 2:00:30
  up at the pyramids, you know, in ancient Egypt.
• 2:00:33
  But by the end of the book, it is every single alternative
• 2:00:37
  universe smashed together into one in a series of weird, scary,
• 2:00:44
  hallucinogenic scenes where you've got millions and millions
• 2:00:48
  and millions of Tardises all in the same place, millions of the
• 2:00:51
  Doctor, Fitz and Angie all like growing like massive crustaceans
• 2:00:56
  around the planet. And it just blows.
• 2:00:59
  The universe blows apart as every single version of reality
• 2:01:03
  exists in the same space. It is mad.
• 2:01:07
  It's Pope Leonard doing his finest Jim Mortimer, and I might
• 2:01:12
  say even besting him. But yeah, it's a it's a
• 2:01:14
  wonderful take on the alternative universe idea,
• 2:01:18
  James. Well, Speaking of MAD, my third
• 2:01:22
  favorite alternate universe is the one where the 8th Doctor was
• 2:01:26
  not a humanoid figure at all, but was in fact an
• 2:01:30
  anthropomorphic a cat called TARDIS Tales.
• 2:01:36
  Who says things like curses. I'm done by my own culinary
• 2:01:40
  convivialities as glimpsed in the Omniverse in the Glorious
• 2:01:45
  Dead. I mean, I take all of those all
• 2:01:47
  of those different versions. The Doctor, to be honest.
• 2:01:50
  And and one of the most stunningly drawn installments of
• 2:01:56
  the The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip ever.
• 2:02:00
  I think absolutely. The private eyes.
• 2:02:02
  You remember the Private Eye. The Marvel superhero.
• 2:02:06
  The Peanuts comic strip. The Peanuts, Ronnie.
• 2:02:08
  Is in the Ronnie is in yes. We covered that, James didn't.
• 2:02:13
  We we did. We did.
• 2:02:15
  Fabulous, fabulous comic. Well, Michael, back to you.
• 2:02:19
  Well, for my final apparel universe, having set the
• 2:02:21
  question, I'm going to cheat some more and give myself
• 2:02:24
  hundreds of parallel universes because I'm going to have all of
• 2:02:28
  the Romas and all of the Germanias from Lance Parkins
• 2:02:31
  Warlords of Utopia from the faction Paradox range, which is
• 2:02:35
  This is a proper sci-fi novel. OK, this asks the question, what
• 2:02:41
  if every alternative reality in which Roma never fell, one of
• 2:02:44
  the big cliches went to war with every alternative universe in
• 2:02:49
  which Germany won the War. One of the other big cliches.
• 2:02:53
  It is about a Marcus Americana script.
• 2:02:56
  Or is our hero travelling across this multiverse as worlds go to
• 2:03:01
  war as part of the play some small part in the Great War in
• 2:03:05
  heaven from the faction Paradox series.
• 2:03:08
  It is I Claudius meets Fatherland by way of his dark
• 2:03:15
  materials. It is a it is a huge, vast scope
• 2:03:19
  of a book which also has a lot of fun with parallel
• 2:03:22
  universities. I mean, you know, Lance parking
• 2:03:23
  clearly knows his history in both of these subjects because
• 2:03:26
  what's clever about these alternative worlds is in every
• 2:03:29
  one of them. The headline is the same, but it
• 2:03:33
  happens in slightly different ways.
• 2:03:35
  So all the different ways in which Germany might have run the
• 2:03:38
  won the war, all the slightly different ways in which the
• 2:03:40
  Roman Empire might have carried on going, We visit so many of
• 2:03:46
  them, but we also get glimpses, just passing references to even
• 2:03:50
  more huge ideas. As a reference to a world in
• 2:03:52
  which the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires are in a
• 2:03:55
  state of Cold War in the 20th century, we visit a version of
• 2:04:00
  London where the Zeppelins are dropping nuclear bombs on on the
• 2:04:05
  cities. It's it's a huge book that is
• 2:04:07
  told a remarkably human scale. It's not still in print.
• 2:04:11
  Most of those Faction Paradox books are available to buys
• 2:04:14
  Kindle. Walls of Utopia isn't.
• 2:04:15
  I don't know why, but I hope it gets a reprint someday as
• 2:04:19
  Faction Paradox or even just as a novel in its own right,
• 2:04:22
  because it's a genuinely impressive piece of work.
• 2:04:26
  You should seek it out. Michael, we might have to cover
• 2:04:28
  that one day. You make that sound absolutely
• 2:04:30
  enticing. Does it make more sense than of
• 2:04:32
  the city of the same which I abandoned halfway through?
• 2:04:35
  I just was so baffled by it. It's a it's a it's a great book.
• 2:04:40
  And one of the things that is impressive about it is how that
• 2:04:44
  scale is is intelligible. And being Lance Parking, there's
• 2:04:47
  100 million little Easter eggs and hidden away details and
• 2:04:51
  facts for you to spot as well. And you will sift them all out.
• 2:04:54
  I know for a good book club episode, I've baffled no one
• 2:04:57
  mentioned Blood Heat, the new adventure.
• 2:05:00
  I figured that was 1. I don't.
• 2:05:02
  I don't love blood heat, Joe. Oh, I mean, I'm about to read it
• 2:05:06
  for a book club, so tell me why. Well, it's partly just it's it's
• 2:05:11
  nastiness and it it's a good idea.
• 2:05:14
  The the the the 3rd Doctor defeated by the Silurians, and
• 2:05:20
  that's where it branches off. But it's got the early new
• 2:05:23
  adventures thing of, of let's punish as many characters as we
• 2:05:29
  can. Let's and it's and it's an
• 2:05:31
  exercise in sort of anti nostalgia, isn't it?
• 2:05:34
  Because you've got a feral Joe Grant who's clearly had a, a
• 2:05:37
  miscarriage. You've got a, a Brigadier who
• 2:05:41
  kind of reverts to, to the kind of cowardly Brigadier that we
• 2:05:46
  see in Inferno. It just everything about it
• 2:05:49
  leaves a rather bitter taste, I think.
• 2:05:51
  And it, and it's, it's unnecessarily graphic and
• 2:05:54
  violent. It's also the actual thing where
• 2:05:56
  the, the TARDIS breaks apart and they end up in the universe is
• 2:06:00
  completely incoherent. So it sort of starts off on a
• 2:06:02
  bit of a bum note for me. I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's got
• 2:06:05
  qualities. I I I found it kind of a a
• 2:06:09
  difficult read I'd say. I look forward to that.
• 2:06:12
  Then I really couldn't think of a third one.
• 2:06:16
  So I I set upon my favorite creative or one of my favorite
• 2:06:20
  creative decisions that Chris Chibnall ever made in his run as
• 2:06:24
  Doctor Who. Yes, you're both looking
• 2:06:26
  absolutely baffled right now, aren't you?
• 2:06:28
  And that is the the, the alternative world that we see in
• 2:06:32
  War of the Sontarans. Fabulous episode, the second
• 2:06:35
  episode of Flux and just in a moment where the Doctor looks
• 2:06:38
  down at a map and Russia doesn't exist.
• 2:06:41
  I just absolutely love that moment.
• 2:06:44
  But that's just me being facetious.
• 2:06:46
  I couldn't think of anything else.
• 2:06:47
  Sorry guys. You could have had Whatever
• 2:06:49
  happened to Sarah Jane? Oh, that's a great idea.
• 2:06:54
  I know me and Mark were talking about ones earlier.
• 2:06:56
  He named a few and then I forgot them by the time I made my list.
• 2:06:59
  Nevermind. There's a good a good selection
• 2:07:01
  of alternative universes there. Boys, where exactly are we going
• 2:07:07
  next now? James, I believe that you have
• 2:07:09
  requested a retake of a book that's already been covered on a
• 2:07:15
  book club because you were so appalled.
• 2:07:17
  When you listen to the episode. You said no, no, no, no, no.
• 2:07:20
  They're not getting this. I'm going to put them right.
• 2:07:22
  What's that? So yeah, well, if if Battlefield
• 2:07:26
  is Michael's favorite target novel, then I think what
• 2:07:31
  slightly pips it to the post of my list is Donald Cotton's The
• 2:07:34
  Myth Makers, which I think is the greatest piece of writing
• 2:07:40
  printed under the Doctor Who target.
• 2:07:43
  Did I not say that in the episode?
• 2:07:44
  You did say that and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
• 2:07:47
  And I also, I think the Romans is a brilliant, brilliant piece
• 2:07:52
  of writing and listening to the the podcast on it was just it
• 2:07:56
  was it, You know, when you know, when people someone has a
• 2:07:59
  response to something and you think, did we did we look at the
• 2:08:02
  same thing frequently? Yes.
• 2:08:06
  Was you shouting at the speakers when you were listening?
• 2:08:09
  I was listening. I was listening on headphones.
• 2:08:12
  So actually I was, I was on a walk at the time.
• 2:08:14
  I was just, I was just yelling into an empty field.
• 2:08:17
  I mean, I mean, I'm very happily doing retakes even though
• 2:08:20
  there's so many books I haven't covered because I always think
• 2:08:23
  there's new things to explore with new readers.
• 2:08:27
  But I think because there was such a negative reaction to
• 2:08:30
  that, there is a very positive episode to be had.
• 2:08:33
  With well, and indeed, the group that had the negative reaction
• 2:08:36
  to the Romans in particular have already done a redux on one of
• 2:08:41
  the books that I covered. So I think it's only only fair
• 2:08:43
  that I come back and and give my.
• 2:08:46
  Perspective and let's be honest, Michael Mills is going to end up
• 2:08:49
  covering every book so you know you'll get his say I.
• 2:08:51
  Don't know not if not if the next one's the pit that might,
• 2:08:54
  that might turn into it might all ends here.
• 2:08:57
  It's never want to read again. Now the only other short story
• 2:09:01
  collection covered on the Hamster Book Club was Tales of
• 2:09:04
  Terror, done the superlative Mr. James Lark with massive insight
• 2:09:10
  into short stories. Now, Michael, what about you and
• 2:09:12
  me? Oh, we're, well, we're going to
• 2:09:15
  be doing the adventures before scarily modern Doctor Who book.
• 2:09:20
  Really, George? James, go on.
• 2:09:22
  You say what you said when I suggested that me and Michael
• 2:09:26
  was doing that. Let's be honest on the call.
• 2:09:29
  I just I said it sounded like the worst idea for a collection
• 2:09:33
  of short stories. I mean, it's not, it's not
• 2:09:37
  hugely promising on the face of it, is it?
• 2:09:40
  What happens at the garden centre?
• 2:09:45
  I mean, I'll give you a very small spoiler.
• 2:09:47
  A very small one. Yeah.
• 2:09:49
  The first short story is potentially the single worst bit
• 2:09:55
  of writing I have ever read. In Doctor Who terms.
• 2:10:00
  I do. I just was baffled by it.
• 2:10:03
  I didn't understand it at all. Well, I'm glad that we're doing
• 2:10:06
  that before we move on to the pit.
• 2:10:08
  So what was it when you when you texted me?
• 2:10:10
  I, I, I, you asked me if I'd read it and I wrote back.
• 2:10:14
  Why, oh why, oh why when I pick up an anthology called Before
• 2:10:17
  the Adventures. Before the Adventures, How you
• 2:10:19
  even read your title Mr. BBC person who reads titles.
• 2:10:22
  It conjures an image of stories like it was just a normal day
• 2:10:27
  for Rex Farrell. He went to work in the Trustix
• 2:10:30
  factory, had a lovely lunch with McDermott, how well they got on,
• 2:10:34
  but he popped in on his par and mar on the way home.
• 2:10:36
  A good day overall and how he looked forward to more of the
• 2:10:39
  same for a long time ahead. The end.
• 2:10:41
  Now I realise you were being a bit naughty when you wrote that
• 2:10:44
  message, but you weren't too far from the truth.
• 2:10:49
  Once there were two yellow kangs.
• 2:10:54
  Yeah, well, read it, Michael. I, I, I, I keep messaging him
• 2:10:57
  going. I cannot wait for you to read
• 2:11:00
  some of these short stories. Well, I look forward to that.
• 2:11:04
  I bet you do. I mean, people know where you
• 2:11:07
  people are on social media these days, don't they?
• 2:11:10
  I think you're Mr. James Lark. No one.
• 2:11:12
  No one. Nobody knows where anybody is
• 2:11:14
  these days. Well tell them, well, I'm
• 2:11:17
  hanging out on Blue Sky more than the other place at the
• 2:11:21
  moment. Are you under Mr. James Lark?
• 2:11:24
  I don't know, just James. James Lark.
• 2:11:29
  James Lark. You'll find me.
• 2:11:31
  And James, the podcast as well. Neurotic literature.
• 2:11:35
  There will be some new stories coming this year.
• 2:11:37
  Oh please, it's been a while. Yeah, well, they they take a
• 2:11:41
  while to to write. Oh no, wait, I'm sorry to
• 2:11:43
  interrupt you. I just have to say this.
• 2:11:46
  Please check out the 10 part YouTube series.
• 2:11:52
  What's it called, James? My teenage Diaries.
• 2:11:55
  Martin So this is James in a gloriously twisted moment during
• 2:12:00
  the pandemic, creating sort of three to four minute.
• 2:12:04
  You sort of ain't going to take out much of your time, but trust
• 2:12:07
  me, you will have a blast of him of diary extracts from when he
• 2:12:10
  was a nipper. Oh, James, they are fucking
• 2:12:14
  delightful. I I did that whole lot in one
• 2:12:17
  go. Yeah, that's that my my 1993
• 2:12:21
  diary dramatized. Will they?
• 2:12:26
  Won't they? Will she even acknowledge it?
• 2:12:29
  I mean, she won't, but you will see Doctor Who that night.
• 2:12:36
  And Michael, whereabouts are you?
• 2:12:39
  I'm also on Blue Sky at just Michael Mills.
• 2:12:42
  One word like Madonna. I I have no other creative
• 2:12:46
  endeavours. I'm not.
• 2:12:47
  I'm not clever like James. But you'll hear me back here
• 2:12:49
  soon enough. Slagging off other people's hard
• 2:12:51
  work can. I just say, please, if you've
• 2:12:55
  enjoyed this recording, which I know you will have check, just
• 2:12:58
  put James like or Michael Mills in a podcast catcher and you
• 2:13:02
  will find a plethora now of other episodes of this podcast
• 2:13:06
  with them on it. Ignore me.
• 2:13:08
  Go and listen to their what they've got to say on those
• 2:13:10
  episodes. They are absolutely some of the
• 2:13:12
  best things I've put out. So go to it.
• 2:13:15
  How do we end this thing? Someone do a battlefield quote?
• 2:13:20
  These are weapons you would use to do the whole speech.
• 2:13:25
  Come on. No A.
• 2:13:29
  Child looks up to the sky, his eyes turned to cinders.
• 2:13:33
  It's this horror. It's this war.
• 2:13:35
  All these are weapons you would use.
• 2:13:38
  Tell me. Shame.
• 2:13:42
  Oh noise, I've got it there. The.