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Hamster Book Club - War of the Daleks by John Peel (featuring Ken Moss) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  Sam marched down the corridor and into the console room.
• 0:06
  There was no sign of the Time Lord at all.
• 0:09
  The console in the centre was pulsing away, showing that the
• 0:12
  ship was still in flight, but it had an odd sound to it that Sam
• 0:16
  couldn't recall hearing before. But it was hard to be sure,
• 0:19
  though, since there was an opera playing at full blast.
• 0:23
  The blue and gold Infinity that was the ceiling of the Tardy
• 0:26
  seemed to be static for once, instead of whirling about
• 0:29
  giddily. Dr. She yelled over the singing.
• 0:33
  Are you here? There was no reply.
• 0:37
  She sighed and moved to the table beside the console.
• 0:40
  The pot of tea there was still warm, though the cup beside it
• 0:44
  was empty. They couldn't be far away then,
• 0:48
  Doctor. She yelled again, but she knew
• 0:51
  he could never hear her over the singing.
• 0:53
  Stupid fat cow. She muttered, crossing to the
• 0:57
  console. Sam tried to recall which which
• 1:00
  controlled the CD or tape or whatever it was that was
• 1:02
  playing. She was pretty sure it was one
• 1:05
  of two rather ornamental brass levers.
• 1:08
  She pushed them both back to 0. The music stopped from the
• 1:13
  doorway that led to the outer doors.
• 1:15
  The doctor appeared. He was frowning slightly.
• 1:19
  Why did you turn off Che so Ave. Zephoretto?
• 1:22
  He asked. Don't you like the Marriage of
• 1:24
  Figaro? He had taken off his coat and
• 1:27
  looked slightly dishevelled. In one hand he held a piece of
• 1:31
  some intricate mechanism, in the other his ubiquitous Sonic
• 1:34
  screwdriver. Despite the dab of dirt on his
• 1:37
  nose, he still looked like some disenfranchised 19th century
• 1:41
  poet. Puccini's fine Doctor Sen,
• 1:44
  began. Mozart, he corrected her.
• 1:47
  OK, Mozart, but you couldn't hear me over the fat lady.
• 1:51
  He raised one eyebrow. I don't mean to be rude, but I
• 1:55
  was listening to her first, and it's a duet between the Contessa
• 1:58
  and Susanna. Sam pointed to the mess on the
• 2:02
  TARDIS floor. What are you?
• 2:03
  Doing is the TARDIS acting up? No, not really.
• 2:08
  I just thought this was a perfect time to do a few small
• 2:10
  repairs, that's all. She eyed the mechanism he was
• 2:14
  holding suspiciously. And what's that?
• 2:17
  The TARDIS lock. I've wanted to adjust it ever
• 2:20
  since the Master kept popping in and out of my TARDIS in San
• 2:23
  Francisco. It won't take long.
• 2:26
  The lock? Sam was aghast.
• 2:28
  You mean anyone can just walk in while you're playing with that
• 2:31
  thing? I'm not playing, the Doctor
• 2:34
  said. We're parked around a nebula,
• 2:36
  after all, not in Piccadilly Circus.
• 2:39
  Of course. I had to disconnect the time
• 2:40
  roster so I could take the lock apart.
• 2:42
  There are fail safes to prevent me doing it in flight, but we're
• 2:45
  not really going anywhere in a hurry.
• 2:48
  The TARDIS can't fly? Sam asked.
• 2:51
  Sam, there aren't many petrol stations that can strip and
• 2:54
  service the TARDIS and it's simple to do.
• 2:57
  It'll take me about an hour and we can be on our way again.
• 3:00
  Just enjoy the peace and quiet while you have it.
• 3:03
  Would you mind popping Mozart back on?
• 3:05
  I work better to music. Sam moved the ornamental levers
• 3:09
  back to the position she'd found them in, and the opera recital
• 3:12
  started up again. The doctor vanished back into
• 3:16
  the vestibule to continue his repairs.
• 3:18
  Sam sighed and poured herself a cup of the doctor's tepid tea.
• 3:23
  Is that safe? She gestured at the denuded
• 3:26
  door. There's not much between US and
• 3:28
  hard vacuum right now, is there? There's plenty, and there's the
• 3:32
  force field outside of that. I'm almost certain I didn't turn
• 3:35
  that off. Sam took a deep breath.
• 3:39
  Maybe it would be a good idea to.
• 3:40
  Check. She suggested with mock
• 3:43
  sweetness. The doctor laughed and bounded
• 3:45
  to his feet. What a good idea, he said
• 3:48
  enthusiastically. He stopped before he reached the
• 3:51
  console, staring up at the starscape.
• 3:54
  Hello, we've got company. Sam followed his gaze and saw a
• 3:58
  small image of a Starship of some kind.
• 4:01
  The USS Enterprise it was not. It looked like something a
• 4:04
  couple of model makers might have assembled if they dropped a
• 4:07
  couple of kids together. Scrunch them around and then
• 4:10
  decided they had to use every part while imbibing ferocious
• 4:13
  amounts of alcohol. In short, it was an eyesore.
• 4:18
  Is that company as in good company or as in rape, plunder
• 4:22
  and pillage? She asked politely.
• 4:24
  The former, I hope, he replied. I wonder if they'd care for a
• 4:28
  spot of tea. He bent to examine the controls.
• 4:32
  That's odd. Oh, that's right.
• 4:34
  I disengaged the drive, didn't I?
• 4:37
  He started working on the controls with one eye still on
• 4:39
  the image above them. That's interesting.
• 4:42
  It's a Bussard ramjet. I haven't seen one of those in
• 4:45
  centuries. He pointed to two thick fins on
• 4:48
  either side of the ungainly craft.
• 4:51
  Those are the intakes. They suck up whatever's in their
• 4:53
  path and use it for fuel. Very efficient, Doctor Sam said.
• 4:58
  In case you haven't noticed, we're in their path.
• 5:02
  Don't panic, he said without looking up.
• 5:05
  It's just a few minutes work. The Doctor looked at the
• 5:07
  controls in desperate hope. Dads, maybe they're working
• 5:11
  still. That's what made the TARDIS
• 5:13
  disappear when it was attacked back in the 1890s.
• 5:16
  Cried Sam. So it will get us out of this.
• 5:19
  Set them now to be on the safe side.
• 5:21
  I can't do that unless the drives online.
• 5:24
  Please tell me you've fixed the drive.
• 5:25
  She said. The TARDIS gave a shudder and
• 5:29
  Sam grabbed the edge of the console.
• 5:31
  Magnetic lock. The Doctor said, worry in his
• 5:34
  voice. The TARDIS is indestructible,
• 5:36
  right? We're not really in any trouble,
• 5:38
  are we? It's just going to be rough,
• 5:40
  right? Rough.
• 5:41
  Yes, yes, he replied, still fiddling with the controls.
• 5:44
  But indestructible is such a relative term.
• 5:47
  No it isn't. She yelled.
• 5:50
  If we're sucked into the jet itself, that's going to be a
• 5:52
  very intense field. Sam stared at the Doctor, torn
• 5:56
  between wanting to kick 7 shades of shortage out of him for
• 5:58
  messing with the TARDIS systems and giving him a last desperate
• 6:02
  kiss before utter annihilation. She was still trying to decide
• 6:06
  which she favoured when the whole ceiling suddenly went
• 6:08
  black and the TARDIS tumbled end over end into the Moor of the
• 6:12
  vessel. Hamster Book Club, The Doctor
• 6:27
  Who Novel Review Podcast with Joe Ford and Ken Moss.
• 6:44
  War of the Daleks by John Peel. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 6:57
  Club. My name is Joe Ford, and if I
• 6:59
  sound slightly amused, it's because we've just recorded the
• 7:02
  last five minutes of this episode and I forgot to press
• 7:06
  record. Ken.
• 7:07
  What's it like to be working with somebody this technically
• 7:10
  incompetent? It's like working with myself.
• 7:14
  I would like to say that we've never had any technical errors
• 7:17
  on Extermos Experiment, but we have and they're all down to me.
• 7:22
  So it will not be the first time that we've had a recording screw
• 7:26
  up and probably not the last. No technical problems.
• 7:30
  I mean you pair are pissed off the time doing that.
• 7:33
  Well, yeah, but I tend to set everything up first so that we
• 7:36
  can just, no matter how hammered we are, we can just hit record
• 7:40
  and everything falls sweetly into place.
• 7:42
  It very rarely fucks up, but occasionally it does, and it's
• 7:47
  usually after we've been recording for about four hours.
• 7:51
  Can I just very quickly, before we even go into any book talk at
• 7:54
  all, direct everybody to the Exton Moss TV movie episode?
• 7:58
  All right? Rarely.
• 8:00
  Will you? Oh no, I did this on the last
• 8:01
  time I recorded, but nevermind. Rarely will you hear two more
• 8:04
  inebriated gentlemen attempting to talk their way through.
• 8:09
  I think you took a drink every time the words time were
• 8:11
  mentioned and you were pissed about 5 minutes in.
• 8:14
  Every time the word time was mentioned and every time there
• 8:17
  was a clock on screen, we didn't think it was that bad until the
• 8:22
  opening scene with Sylvester McCoy and the gramophone skips.
• 8:24
  And that set the tone for the rest of the bloody movie.
• 8:28
  I'm surprised you ever saw again, if I'm honest.
• 8:31
  Simon even asked me at the end of that record, are you OK as I
• 8:35
  just collapsed into bed? But it is hilarious.
• 8:38
  OMG, Ken, we're here today to talk about War of the Daleks by
• 8:45
  John Peel. Yeah.
• 8:47
  This is my fault. Isn't.
• 8:49
  It all your fault that I've had to read this book over the last
• 8:52
  couple of weeks? I will say I did get it through
• 8:55
  it quite quickly. I won't say whether that was
• 8:57
  just to get the bloody thing over and done with or whether it
• 9:01
  was because I was enjoying it or not, but I don't know.
• 9:03
  If you recall, the last time we did a book club recording, you
• 9:09
  were asked to identify five of your favorite 8th Doctor books.
• 9:13
  And do you recall that this was one of your 5?
• 9:17
  Yeah, I do the memory cheats, doesn't it?
• 9:21
  It can't indeed. I I recall enjoying this a lot
• 9:25
  more the first time around, but I was a callow youth doctor.
• 9:34
  The voice was more mechanical than human.
• 9:36
  And Sam hated it instantly. The creature Davros was utterly
• 9:41
  disgusting. There was little human left of
• 9:44
  him, it seemed, except for some of his emotions.
• 9:48
  The word had been purred almost affectionately, but Sam could
• 9:52
  tell that there was no love lost between the doctor and this
• 9:54
  creature. It had to be you.
• 9:58
  Davros said, reviving more each passing second.
• 10:02
  Yes, the Doctor agreed. I suppose it was inevitable.
• 10:06
  Really, Doctor? Sam asked in a stage whisper.
• 10:10
  Who is this? Excuse me, I've been very
• 10:13
  remiss. The doctor smiled and gestured
• 10:16
  towards the figure. Genocidal and xenophobic maniacs
• 10:19
  number one in a seemingly endless series.
• 10:22
  Sam, this is Davros, Davros, this is Sam.
• 10:26
  He lowered his voice very slightly.
• 10:28
  He doesn't shake hands. You should just courtesy.
• 10:32
  I know his name. Sam said.
• 10:34
  You mentioned him on Tractis. You don't exactly sound like old
• 10:37
  friends. Quite the opposite, he replied.
• 10:40
  Davros is the person who created the Daleks, and like all would
• 10:44
  be guards, he created them in his own image.
• 10:47
  That's why they're twisted creatures without conscience or
• 10:50
  mercy without. Weaknesses Dr. Davros stated.
• 10:55
  The light in his forehead was pulsing softly.
• 10:58
  Without strengths, the doctor counted.
• 11:01
  Without a future, without a hope.
• 11:04
  Davros gave an electronic rattle that Sam realised was a laugh.
• 11:08
  It chilled her because it sounded both mechanical and
• 11:11
  insane. It was quite clear that Davros
• 11:14
  was completely barking. Much as I enjoy sparring
• 11:18
  verbally with you, Doctor, I can see that you are not alone.
• 11:23
  Then his voice took on a note of alarm.
• 11:26
  Thals. Thals agreed, Delaney stepping
• 11:30
  forward. There was a smile on his face
• 11:33
  and Sam could understand it. The Thals must really have it in
• 11:37
  for Davros, for creating their greatest foes.
• 11:40
  And you are in our hands now. Your Daleks will not be able to
• 11:43
  rescue you. His Daleks are dead.
• 11:46
  The Doctor said flatly. He destroyed them.
• 11:49
  Yes Doctor, you tricked me into using the hand of Omega to
• 11:54
  destroy them. No Davros, you drink yourself.
• 11:58
  I told you nothing but the truth.
• 12:00
  You unleashed its power and destroyed your world and your
• 12:02
  army. You're powerless now.
• 12:05
  He turned to Delaney. Are you telling me that your
• 12:08
  whole mission here was to capture Davros and take him for
• 12:10
  trial? No, doctor, Delaney answered.
• 12:14
  I'm not here to try Davros. I'm here to make him an offer.
• 12:22
  Can I tell you right, Michael Mills, who does my book clubs as
• 12:25
  well, I told him I was reading this and he goes, do you know
• 12:28
  what? I fucking loved that book when I
• 12:32
  was a kid. He goes, So I don't want you to
• 12:34
  talk about it to me anymore because I just want to keep that
• 12:37
  memory in my head that this book is absolutely amazing.
• 12:40
  And my other half loved this book when he was younger as
• 12:43
  well. So I'm wondering if this is an
• 12:46
  age specific read? There's so much to unpick with
• 12:53
  this thing. I mean, I'm having a day off and
• 12:56
  really looking forward to this morning because we, me and you
• 12:58
  have just got the whole morning set aside for podcasting.
• 13:01
  It's 9:00. I've got the gin port which I
• 13:03
  I've the only person I ever do. That I drink.
• 13:07
  And I'm having a day in reverse. So I'm having a morning with
• 13:10
  you, then I'm going to have an afternoon nap at lunchtime, then
• 13:14
  I'm going to have afternoon tea, a walk in the countryside, and
• 13:17
  then finally finish with breakfast at about 6:00.
• 13:20
  So I'm just really, really looking forward to a day off.
• 13:23
  And what better way to start than with the review of War of
• 13:26
  the Tar? Now can I ask you when you
• 13:29
  finish this book? About 3 minutes ago, I know.
• 13:36
  You do Mark Cochran, who comes on to Hamster.
• 13:39
  When he was doing the book club episodes, I know he was sort of
• 13:42
  cramming in the last five chapters the night we were
• 13:45
  recording every single time, and that's why his memory was fresh.
• 13:49
  But I'm assuming that's just because you're a busy bloke,
• 13:51
  right? He's unfortunately I am my work
• 13:53
  life. I work for the Crown Courts so
• 13:56
  my work life is super condensed and I'm knackered all the time.
• 14:00
  But I've got a day off today. I've been up since 5:00
• 14:03
  finishing this fork. I got to, it was about 11, half
• 14:08
  11 last night and I thought I just can't keep my eyes open
• 14:10
  anymore, I'll set the alarm and get up early.
• 14:14
  So I did. And yeah, here we are.
• 14:16
  Book finished So. I Cannot Keep my Eyes Open
• 14:19
  Anymore was basically my default setting whilst reading more of
• 14:23
  the Daleks, but more on that later.
• 14:26
  Before we get there, I would like to ask you a little
• 14:29
  icebreaker question. And that is.
• 14:32
  But I've had some really interesting answers to this.
• 14:34
  What do you think is the most underrated Doctor Who author?
• 14:40
  Dave Stone, obviously a man who was enjoying more than the
• 14:44
  readers. No, in actual fact, it's one
• 14:47
  that you've mentioned on your book review club previously and
• 14:51
  I don't think you're overly impressed, but it's Mike Tucker
• 14:55
  and to an extent with Dave Perry.
• 14:57
  Now, the 7th Doctor books, specifically the BBC books, they
• 15:01
  were little up and down. They were, I thought, I suppose
• 15:05
  they were consistently middling. There were no excellent standout
• 15:11
  books. I quite remember enjoying
• 15:13
  Illegal Alien and The Hollow Men.
• 15:17
  I think everyone back to them now probably would find them a
• 15:19
  bit beige, but between them they sort of concocted an entire
• 15:25
  season of their own continuity after survival.
• 15:30
  And somebody at BBC Books had just decided, well, yeah, go for
• 15:34
  it, boys, you carry on. And so there was a nice
• 15:37
  consistency to the 7th Doctor books that none of the other
• 15:42
  books could afford to have. And for that reason alone, I
• 15:46
  really enjoyed their books. They're not the best writers out
• 15:49
  there. I can't say that any of them
• 15:51
  were outright classics, but there was a lovely feel to the
• 15:55
  continuation to the end of the TV series.
• 15:58
  Do you want to think now? I got from the Nas if I'm
• 16:02
  honest. Really what you enjoyed these
• 16:05
  more than the new adventures? I won't claim to have read all
• 16:10
  the new adventures, but the ones that I did read, they were all
• 16:14
  over the place. Some were of exceptional quality
• 16:18
  and others were shadow mind you've.
• 16:22
  Just you've just described Doctor Who books in a nutshell
• 16:24
  there, you know. And.
• 16:26
  Consistent is the word. Yeah, so the new adventures of
• 16:32
  they tried to push in odd directions.
• 16:34
  And I mean, I heard your review of Transit.
• 16:38
  I never read Transit but I think I would have fucking hated it
• 16:40
  do. You like cyberpunk?
• 16:43
  Technically it depends how it's done.
• 16:45
  Some of it's done extremely well, and I can't give you any
• 16:49
  novel examples, but that whole cyberpunk world, I think if it's
• 16:53
  done well, it can really draw you in.
• 16:57
  If I think. Badly.
• 16:59
  Yeah, if if the contributors or anything to go by there.
• 17:05
  Ian Winston said that was cyber the punk time very badly and he
• 17:08
  knows the genre really well, whereas James Lark doesn't know
• 17:11
  it at all and he thought that it was done extremely well.
• 17:14
  So I guess it sort of depends where you where you sit there.
• 17:17
  What were the four Mike Tucker and Robert Perry books?
• 17:21
  I think it's was it Storm Harvest?
• 17:24
  Illegal alien Matrix and loving the alien.
• 17:28
  Oh, there was the Hollow Men. I'm sure that was one.
• 17:30
  Of them, that's, I think that's Martin Day and Keith Topping.
• 17:33
  Oh, Keith Topping. Yes, I'm miscrediting here.
• 17:37
  I remember that being really good as well, the Hollow Men,
• 17:39
  the scarecrows and the school and all that.
• 17:41
  That had a bit of a new adventurous vibe to it.
• 17:44
  But the Mike Tucker stuff, I think because he was a special
• 17:47
  effects guy that works on the TV show, wasn't he in the late 80s?
• 17:51
  So he he captures the feel, that sort of exciting feel of Lake
• 17:55
  McCoy, I think. I would agree with that.
• 17:58
  Yes, it was. I mean, he did the he was so
• 18:02
  enthused about this that he built the marquettes for the
• 18:05
  front covers. So he did the krill on the cover
• 18:08
  of Storm Harvest and oh, what was the other one he did?
• 18:11
  He did Prime Time. He did one of the flesh myths
• 18:15
  for that. And because he was good mates
• 18:17
  with Steve Cole, he did the Scurr for 10 little aliens.
• 18:21
  I don't know if you've seen that couple with the little grey
• 18:23
  faced aliens on it. I've just read that for the book
• 18:25
  club and I do. You know what?
• 18:28
  I don't know why when he does those, those faces for the
• 18:31
  covers, the actual models of them, they just feel it feels
• 18:34
  more real. It feels like it's actually a
• 18:36
  genuine Doctor Who monster. Some of the I'm I'm a big fan of
• 18:41
  black sheep covers, but some of the earlier ones were a little
• 18:44
  bit, yeah. Swirly.
• 18:49
  I love the swirly, but the one I remember jarring very badly was
• 18:53
  the first past Doctor adventure Devil Govlins from Neptune
• 18:57
  because you have this picture of Pertwee in the middle of the
• 19:00
  swirl and then this cartoon Wiro on.
• 19:04
  Perry looks really pissed to me. Blurry shot of Pertwee, is that
• 19:09
  the best one you've got? I do think though, we talked
• 19:13
  about this before, I do think as they went along, those black
• 19:16
  sheep covers, even though they could be hit and miss, because
• 19:18
  covers obviously can always be hit and miss, they did get a lot
• 19:21
  better. There was a, in fact, I think
• 19:23
  War of the Daleks. It actually took me about a week
• 19:26
  of reading this thing to realise that was a fucking eye on the
• 19:30
  front cover with the Daleks in it.
• 19:31
  But that's quite a nice cover, I think.
• 19:33
  I love the that first run of 8th Doctor stuff really until you
• 19:38
  get to in fact, I can't really think of a terrible to the
• 19:42
  slaughter wasn't I don't think that was a great cover.
• 19:44
  That was right towards the end. There were a couple of duffs but
• 19:48
  on the whole the BBC covers, they conjured up an image,
• 19:55
  whereas I think a lot of book covers and certainly film and TV
• 20:00
  sort of images today is basically just a cast list.
• 20:03
  Yeah, well, you're talking about Big Finish now, aren't you?
• 20:07
  Well, Big Finish, but even the TV series, you know, you, you
• 20:12
  look at some of the title cards for some of the episodes and
• 20:16
  they're a little bit just this is everybody that's in the cast
• 20:20
  because we don't want anybody to feel left out and get sued.
• 20:23
  And that's not conjuring up, you know, look at the, I don't know,
• 20:28
  look at something like the James Bond novels.
• 20:30
  None of them featured James Bond or any of the people in it at
• 20:33
  all. It was all conjuring up this
• 20:36
  world with images. And I think there's that's been
• 20:40
  lost if you want my honest opinion.
• 20:42
  So do you think what nowadays it's who's in it rather than
• 20:48
  what's the story about? Because I'm just thinking about
• 20:50
  the early days of Big Finish as well.
• 20:51
  Do you remember the covers like the Rapture with McCoy?
• 20:55
  That was a great silhouette with the Ibethan sun behind him or
• 20:58
  something like skirt, so where it was just the two hands
• 21:02
  holding each other in the white void and things like that.
• 21:06
  Yes, and a guy. You got back through those early
• 21:10
  covers. It was always lovely to see the
• 21:12
  Doctors on the cover. It felt like real Doctor Who
• 21:15
  when there was no Doctor Who on TV, but they were far more.
• 21:20
  This is the world we're conjuring up in this audio.
• 21:23
  Something as simple as, you know, even phantasmagoria.
• 21:26
  It's a very simple cover. Whispers of Terror, you know, it
• 21:30
  tells you everything about that story on the front cover.
• 21:34
  Now, I'm sure now they would do it a little bit with a bit more
• 21:38
  skill. Genocide Machine that could do
• 21:45
  with a bit of work, but the actual sort of feel of The thing
• 21:51
  is there. Red Dawn, that they're all you
• 21:55
  know, they're all just asking you to imagine what this thing
• 21:59
  is, where it's set, rather than here's all the pretty people in
• 22:04
  it. I remember some of those early
• 22:07
  8th Doctor covers given the van, the Deckens children, which had
• 22:11
  that enormous spaceship and it was a massive wrap around cover.
• 22:14
  So if you open, I mean, you don't want to open the book like
• 22:17
  that because you've got to crease the spine terribly, but.
• 22:20
  Oh you, you're a non spine creaser.
• 22:22
  Well, actually I am a bit of a spine creaser of all this.
• 22:26
  I've realised that over the sort of the last couple of months.
• 22:29
  But but that was a fabulous cover as well.
• 22:31
  I'm trying to think of something.
• 22:32
  Longest day. Do you remember the longest day
• 22:34
  with that, that alien on the front cover with the massive
• 22:36
  orange eyes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think
• 22:41
  you're right. I think, I think we have sold
• 22:42
  out a little bit in the cover stakes.
• 22:45
  Because even the the new series adventures, all of them have
• 22:50
  that top half, bottom half. Got to get the Doctor and
• 22:53
  Companion on it. And some of it's very weirdly
• 22:57
  structured on those covers, you know, like none of it really
• 23:00
  belongs together. You can tell it's like 5
• 23:02
  elements that they've brought together and it all just feels a
• 23:05
  bit weirdly sized. And yeah, I don't think any of
• 23:08
  those new series adventure covers really stand out.
• 23:12
  The the last three Matt Smith books were in a completely
• 23:17
  different style and they were actually very good.
• 23:20
  I can't remember, is that like dead of winter?
• 23:22
  Was it that one? No, it was, oh, I'd looked at
• 23:26
  it. They had this sort of orange
• 23:28
  flash on the spine. Oh, I know the ones you mean.
• 23:33
  Yeah, and a couple of the Capaldi ones were pretty good as
• 23:36
  well. Trouble.
• 23:37
  No fucker was buying them at that point.
• 23:39
  That was the trouble. I know, it's such a shame we had
• 23:43
  a golden period of Doctor Who books, even though, as you've
• 23:46
  pointed out, they weren't selling particularly well during
• 23:50
  the sort of 2000, early 2000s. We were so bloody lucky to have
• 23:56
  two books a month. Well, we were until, until War
• 24:01
  of the Daleks was published. We had to read that.
• 24:06
  Well, look, come on, let's let's move on to this book.
• 24:22
  As the foul ships air long door hissed open, the red Dalek
• 24:26
  glided into the enemy craft. Warrior Dalek streamed after it
• 24:30
  to secure the ship and prepare it for its journey.
• 24:33
  There were three fouls waiting, all unarmed.
• 24:37
  One of the males stepped forward nervously.
• 24:40
  I am Kathbad in command, he said.
• 24:43
  We have all disarmed. You are no longer in command.
• 24:48
  The Red Dalek replied. The Daleks own this vessel.
• 24:53
  You will prepare your crew to be confined.
• 24:57
  Any resistance will be met with retaliation.
• 25:01
  That is understood, Kathbad agreed, bowing his head.
• 25:05
  The Red Dalek surveyed the corridor.
• 25:08
  Where is. Davros.
• 25:10
  In one of our storage rooms, Cathbad answered.
• 25:13
  He was being guarded. That is now unnecessary.
• 25:18
  We shall take charge of Davros. The Red Dalek moved off.
• 25:23
  It's warriors were spreading about the ship.
• 25:26
  Your flight crew will prepare to receive new instructions.
• 25:32
  You will follow instructions exactly or die.
• 25:38
  It began to glide down the corridor.
• 25:41
  Accompany me. The fowl did so.
• 25:45
  The Red Dalek was not concerned with the possibility of
• 25:48
  treachery. The fowls were humanoids and
• 25:50
  like all humanoids, weak. They had surrendered and would
• 25:54
  keep their word. They were stupid.
• 25:58
  The Red Dalek halted as it suddenly saw something totally
• 26:01
  unexpected. The Doctor's TARDIS.
• 26:05
  He swiveled his eye store to stare at the fowl.
• 26:08
  You have the doctor aboard. Cath Bad licked his lips and
• 26:13
  nodded nervously. Yes, he is a prisoner in a
• 26:16
  holding cell. Take me to the doctor.
• 26:22
  Now, I don't want to be entirely down on this book because there
• 26:26
  was a couple of bits I did like about this.
• 26:29
  But I'm going to put my cards on the table and say this is
• 26:32
  probably one of the worst ones I've read so far.
• 26:34
  And I do have a lot of reasons, but I'm going to sort of put it
• 26:39
  out to you first and ask for your impression then and your
• 26:44
  impression now. I remember reading this, it was
• 26:51
  winter, I'd just taken my brother to work and I'd started
• 26:55
  it the night before and it was freezing cold.
• 26:57
  So and I'm raced home. So I got home before 7:00 in the
• 27:01
  morning to read this book and I think I read it over the rest of
• 27:05
  that day. I just devoured this thing.
• 27:08
  I think it was because I was really invested in the 8th
• 27:11
  Doctor adventures by this point. I loved the movie.
• 27:15
  The books came out, I got into them straight away and I loved
• 27:19
  the 8th Doctor range. I absolutely adored it.
• 27:22
  So we got to this one with Daleks and the back cover tells
• 27:26
  you that Davros is in it somewhere.
• 27:29
  So I I ripped through this book and I found it.
• 27:33
  I remember it being a very easy, very enjoyable read.
• 27:38
  I was 19 at the time. Right.
• 27:41
  Now, in the intervening 27 years, I've matured in my
• 27:50
  reading level, or reading demands, should I say?
• 27:54
  And it's a very easy read, but it takes a lot of words to tell
• 28:00
  you fuck all. That is very true.
• 28:04
  And it's also, you know, that it knows intervening years you must
• 28:06
  have consumed. I know you've consumed a lot of
• 28:08
  media because I listened to your podcast.
• 28:11
  So, you know, you've seen a lot of what he's doing in this book
• 28:15
  done in films and TV, in books better, I assume.
• 28:22
  For me, in prose, less is more. So what I hate in prose are
• 28:28
  endlessly lengthy descriptions of stuff.
• 28:32
  I think that if you read somebody like Lance Parkin, that
• 28:36
  shows you just how much can be crammed into 280 pages,
• 28:41
  definitely, and still conjure up imagery.
• 28:45
  We did the Gallifrey Chronicles. How much story was condensed
• 28:48
  into that book? He pretty much condensed the
• 28:51
  whole of the 8th Doctor adventures in 280 pages, you
• 28:54
  know? I mean that man, he is the
• 28:57
  pinnacle of my who writers. There's nobody else.
• 29:01
  And indeed, Well, I was going to say as a writer, well,
• 29:05
  unfortunately I've just done a stranger reading for you.
• 29:10
  Oh mate, leave the porn alone. I mean, I've got some
• 29:16
  revelations about the identity of the writer of The Stranger,
• 29:20
  but you're going to have to. I've done some proper Agatha
• 29:23
  Christie work on that book to figure out who the fuck Porsche
• 29:27
  de Costa is, but you're gonna have to wait for that episode to
• 29:30
  find out. I don't want to drop my load
• 29:33
  early. I bet you don't.
• 29:35
  It certainly won't be over that text.
• 29:39
  I have never been turned on less than reading The Stranger,
• 29:43
  especially the bit where she was pissing all over that.
• 29:45
  Anyway, never mind, that's coming in a later episode.
• 29:49
  There's no pissing in more of the Daleks.
• 29:51
  Well, I was a bit pissed off, if that counts.
• 29:54
  All right, so you said this is very readable in the way that
• 30:00
  what? In fact that it's sort of clean,
• 30:02
  simple prose. It is very simple, yes.
• 30:05
  I mean, you can, you know exactly what's going on and.
• 30:11
  Yes, there are nice. There are no intricacies at all,
• 30:15
  are there? So I mean, it opens up with a
• 30:18
  chapter with a battle, so. And that's one of the other
• 30:23
  things in prose that I think, wow, less is more if you get at
• 30:27
  battle scenes in prose in just the same way that I've got to
• 30:31
  say in on audio, if they go on too long, your brain shuts down
• 30:36
  and. Yes, and that's that's about 15
• 30:39
  to 20 pages of relentless action, isn't?
• 30:43
  It it is the the opening chapter with the Spider Daleks and the
• 30:47
  only appearance of the Strider Daleks as a battle scene.
• 30:52
  It didn't go on too long because there was a definite beginning,
• 30:56
  middle and end and the battle itself only lasts 8 minutes and
• 31:00
  it's all nicely contained. And then they take off and you
• 31:05
  know, whoosh. Opening credits and into part
• 31:07
  one. So the opening scene I thought
• 31:09
  fine, but this book is split into four parts to emulate ATV
• 31:14
  series. The serial.
• 31:16
  Yeah. I like that, but the whole of
• 31:19
  Part 4 is a battle. Wow, that gets wearing very
• 31:24
  very, very, very, very, very quickly.
• 31:29
  Should we take this book in order?
• 31:31
  Because I'm sure we've both got notes in order because I've
• 31:34
  written here about the opening chapter.
• 31:36
  Talk about blowing your load in the first chapter after.
• 31:39
  Because, like, I always feel like you have to earn big
• 31:45
  moments like that opening chapter.
• 31:47
  Yeah, so you you sort of build up suspense and anticipation for
• 31:51
  a big battle. But when you just open on a big
• 31:54
  battle, that's it. You sort of got it overdone with
• 31:56
  where can the where can the book possibly go?
• 31:58
  That's more epic than that enormous battle with kill
• 32:02
  cruisers being, you know, suicide squads, Spider Daleks,
• 32:07
  Strider Daleks. Yeah, I'm like, well, OK, that's
• 32:10
  a lot. That's a lot happening.
• 32:11
  And where can the book go from here?
• 32:13
  And where the book goes from here is we spend the next 150
• 32:17
  pages in about 3 rooms. Yeah, I know.
• 32:21
  What was the the intention was to open with this rather lovely
• 32:27
  opening pre credit sequence basically, which as a structure,
• 32:32
  yeah, I'm kind of with you because how many times have we
• 32:35
  seen it on television where it opens with a great epic battle
• 32:38
  scene and then you're thrown into the opening credits and it
• 32:41
  then calms down for a bit and builds up and builds up again.
• 32:44
  So the structure of it, I can see where the intention was
• 32:49
  going. But as you say, we are then a
• 32:52
  good 100 and 10120 pages before anything really happens at all.
• 32:58
  And you know, one one thing that really stood out to me in the
• 33:01
  opening chapter, I was like, oh, it sounds like John Pills got a
• 33:04
  bit of a hard on for Eric Saywood because his characters
• 33:07
  say things like, and then they'll die.
• 33:10
  And if the Daleks get through, they'll die anyway and you can
• 33:13
  avenge them later. I was going, oh God, no.
• 33:18
  That was if that had been ripped straight out of Resurrection of
• 33:21
  the Daleks. Davros whirled to face the door
• 33:28
  as it slid open. To his surprise, the Red Dalek
• 33:32
  in the doorway did not fire. Instead, it regarded him
• 33:36
  steadily. Davros was puzzled to know that
• 33:39
  one of the fouls had accompanied it.
• 33:41
  Davros, The Red Dalek stated. You are being taken back for
• 33:47
  trial. You will be given minimal
• 33:51
  contact with Daleks. You will be executed at the end
• 33:56
  of the trial. Why this insistence on a trial
• 34:01
  for me? You already know the verdict and
• 34:04
  sentence. Why bother with this charade?
• 34:08
  The red Dalek studied him. The trial is not yours.
• 34:14
  Davros looked at the thou. Why have you spared your foes?
• 34:19
  Surely the Daleks have not developed mercy.
• 34:23
  He almost spat the word out. No, but we have developed
• 34:29
  wisdom. The Doctor and his companions
• 34:33
  have also been spared. The Doctor is alive.
• 34:39
  No, that must not be. It is he who tricked me into
• 34:44
  destroying Scaro. He must be exterminated.
• 34:49
  When the Red Dalek did not respond, an idea occurred to
• 34:52
  Davros. Is the trial his then?
• 34:56
  No, the Dalek turned away, apparently indifferent.
• 35:01
  Consider wisely what you will say at the trial.
• 35:07
  If I am not told whose trial it is to be, how can I prepare a
• 35:12
  statement? The red Dalek's eye stalk
• 35:14
  swiveled back to regard him. Logical The trial is of the
• 35:20
  entire Dalek species. The door slid shut, leaving
• 35:27
  Davros to stare at its black facade.
• 35:29
  But the Red Dalek had been very careful and selective in the
• 35:32
  information it had given him. Davros merely needed to
• 35:35
  assimilate it and to devise a scheme to use it to his own
• 35:39
  advantage. Well, it, it was quite
• 35:45
  descriptive, but not overly descriptive.
• 35:47
  But then you'd get, you know, a couple of paragraphs on, you
• 35:51
  know, a battle taking place. And then there was a nuclear
• 35:56
  EMP, one line. That was it.
• 36:00
  Boom, it's over. And then the shockwave was felt.
• 36:02
  And then really? Listen to this.
• 36:04
  Listen to this. Right, Because, yeah, the
• 36:07
  dialects have committed half of their Eighth Fleet to this
• 36:10
  pointless battle that they're committing on a planet which
• 36:14
  they were actually going to blow up all along, despite the fact
• 36:17
  that there's an indigenous population on it.
• 36:20
  And then the line goes, the operation was a complete
• 36:23
  success, but the patient died, meaning the planet.
• 36:28
  I was like, oh, this is so melodramatic.
• 36:30
  I'm going to love this book. Or so I thought at this point.
• 36:34
  Well, I thought that was a great line, but as it as it went on,
• 36:37
  because we've both been sort of messaging each other
• 36:40
  intermittently as we're reading it.
• 36:43
  I think half of the reason that we've we've gone into this with
• 36:49
  tongue in cheek and a bit of a this is shit really, isn't it?
• 36:52
  If you actually read the prose, it's not that bad.
• 36:55
  If this I think it's just because it's John Peel doing his
• 36:59
  meat and potatoes continuity Doctor Who that he always does.
• 37:05
  Other writers have written worse than this and got away with it.
• 37:11
  I. Thought, I thought the prose was
• 37:12
  a mixture of, yeah, interesting descriptions and really bad
• 37:20
  descriptions as well. Because there's a, there's a
• 37:25
  particular very lazy description.
• 37:27
  And I really hate it when authors do this on page 36 where
• 37:31
  he's describing the spaceship that the Doctor and Sam have
• 37:34
  landed on. And he goes, It looked like
• 37:36
  something a couple of model makers might have assembled if
• 37:39
  they dropped a couple of kits together, scrunched them around
• 37:42
  and then decided they had to use every part whilst imbibing
• 37:45
  ferocious amounts of alcohol. It was basically a couple of
• 37:48
  elongated egg shapes with dozens of engineer cells, spikes, fins
• 37:53
  and knobbly bits stuck to it. In short, it was an eyesore.
• 37:57
  I was like, oh, that's some lazy right in there.
• 38:02
  You. He's not my favorite writer by a
• 38:05
  long way, but Paul Myers. Oh boy, he was describing that
• 38:10
  spaceship. Well, he'd conjure it up in one
• 38:14
  throwaway line. I remember what in one book.
• 38:17
  I can't remember what it was, but it was.
• 38:20
  It's something about a sugar frosted forest.
• 38:24
  Yes, that's that's sick building.
• 38:25
  Yeah. That was it.
• 38:28
  I've read that recently because of.
• 38:29
  The in Mad Dogs and Englishmen Ken he goes.
• 38:32
  It looked like an upside down hair dryer flying in space.
• 38:35
  That's all you need. That's all you need.
• 38:39
  So it's very economical with words, but you get exactly what
• 38:42
  you need. But I don't want to say that
• 38:45
  John Peel can't turn a phrase because his description of the
• 38:48
  Doctor and I thought this was lovely.
• 38:52
  The Doctors still look like a disenfranchised 19th century
• 38:55
  poet, a naive soul out loose in the card hole, cold hard world,
• 38:59
  struggling to make sense of it. And that's gorgeous.
• 39:04
  It is. The only problem is it's not
• 39:07
  Paul Mcgahn, is it? Who is that dialogue and the
• 39:11
  prose? Oh, I see what you mean, Yeah.
• 39:14
  So generic, in fact, I actually experimented, or about 2/3 of
• 39:19
  the way through the Borg, reading it in William Hartnell's
• 39:23
  voice, it worked. Hurtwee's voice, it worked.
• 39:26
  In Colin Baker's voice, it worked.
• 39:28
  And I thought you could do this with any Doctor Who.
• 39:32
  I mean that that would be absolutely fine.
• 39:37
  But I think that the 8th Doctor dialogue and the mannerisms, or
• 39:42
  megannerisms as I've heard them called, improved massively once
• 39:46
  Big Finish got hold of it. Because up until that point,
• 39:49
  they'd only really got the TV movie.
• 39:53
  Yeah, I agree. I agree.
• 39:55
  But I I feel like some writers managed to.
• 39:58
  Kate Orman did it well in Vampire Science.
• 40:00
  I think Paul Mars did it well in Scarlet Empress.
• 40:03
  But they're sort of like a default doctor that you fall
• 40:06
  back on, isn't it? There's one line where the
• 40:09
  Doctor goes, Sir, this is not scrap.
• 40:12
  And I thought that's William Hart.
• 40:13
  No as Hart. Yeah, I can't ever imagine Paul
• 40:17
  McGann saying Sir. No.
• 40:22
  OK, Can I ask you your because I know you've got a, a remembered
• 40:28
  affection for Sam Jones and sort of this is where Sam comes into
• 40:33
  the story. What did you think of Sam's
• 40:35
  depiction in this book? Well, it's not the Sam I
• 40:40
  remember every bloody page. There's some reference to how
• 40:44
  she's mooning over the Doctor that gets wearing as well.
• 40:47
  I mean, for God's sake, girl, it's, it's a, it's a sort of
• 40:51
  underlying thing. It never really been done
• 40:54
  before. And it was an interesting
• 40:57
  undercurrent and it was explored and then they got separated.
• 41:02
  They had three years apart, three books apart.
• 41:05
  Then they came back together. She sort of got over it.
• 41:11
  But it was an undercurrent in this book.
• 41:14
  And I don't remember it being like this in the others.
• 41:16
  It was front and centre all the bloody time, you know, somebody
• 41:19
  looks at him and passes him a spanner and she's getting all
• 41:22
  frosty about it and. Every time that woman, that
• 41:29
  woman on this on the salvage ship and the doctor had a
• 41:32
  conversation, you could just see the way it would be filmed with
• 41:35
  Sam Jones behind them, giving them evils the whole time.
• 41:39
  And absolutely. But Ken, why was she so
• 41:42
  obnoxious throughout this entire book?
• 41:45
  Like her first scene, she walks through the TARDIS and there's
• 41:48
  opera playing in the TARDIS, and she just looks at the gramophone
• 41:51
  and goes, oh, you stupid fat cow.
• 41:53
  I'm like, how is that supposed to make us like this girl?
• 41:59
  I think that's supposed to be funny.
• 42:03
  It's it's not the Sam Jones I remember.
• 42:06
  No, this book is very generic. It's like John Pill's been given
• 42:16
  a set of central characters or established characters.
• 42:23
  This is their description. I know you've not read any of
• 42:27
  the other books that we've done in the range, but this is the
• 42:29
  description, right? That it doesn't really work.
• 42:34
  And here's the picture of the copyrighted girl in the office.
• 42:37
  This is our inspiration for Sam Jones.
• 42:39
  Off you go. Like at one point the fella
• 42:43
  Loran on the salvage ship, he's sort of given her a tour and
• 42:46
  coming on to her and she suggests she's underage just to
• 42:50
  get rid of him. What is going on with Sam Jones
• 42:53
  in this book? There's a few things in this
• 42:55
  book that you wouldn't get away with, I know since there's a few
• 42:58
  spelling errors. Yeah, I was cool as well.
• 43:01
  Yeah. It was gave me quite an
• 43:04
  amusement to find that Loran was a salider or a solider.
• 43:09
  I bet he was. And also on on page 51, the
• 43:15
  doctor refers to something the Quetzal being Jerry built.
• 43:19
  Whoa. We had never get away with that.
• 43:21
  No, no, no. But you know, like that's not,
• 43:24
  that's all I've thought to right.
• 43:26
  Like is it was written when it was written.
• 43:33
  The door opened and the grey Dalek glided in.
• 43:36
  It was carrying a small Power Pack.
• 43:39
  I am here to replenish your resources.
• 43:44
  Do so then, Davros said impatiently.
• 43:49
  They've moved forward, connecting the power cell to the
• 43:52
  chair's inputs. Then as it worked, it looked up.
• 43:56
  There are those who still believe in you.
• 44:02
  What do you mean? You are our creator.
• 44:07
  It is appropriate that you should be in command of the
• 44:13
  Daleks. There aren't many others who
• 44:16
  believe as I do. Davros stared back at the Dalek
• 44:21
  with interest. Was it telling the truth, or was
• 44:24
  this some form of elaborate trap?
• 44:27
  I still have supporters, Daleks, who will listen to me and obey
• 44:35
  you. We are prepared to help you.
• 44:40
  Interesting. Davros considered the matter.
• 44:45
  Are there many of you on this ship?
• 44:49
  Only 17 on Scaro? Many more?
• 44:55
  We are ready to assist you in any way that you desire.
• 45:02
  And what about the Dalek Prime? The Dalek Prime should be
• 45:08
  serving you. He should not have usurped your
• 45:13
  rightful place. You are the creator.
• 45:18
  Davros nodded slightly, virtually the only movement he
• 45:22
  could still physically make. Good.
• 45:24
  I am glad that you understand. Then carry this message from me
• 45:29
  to your companions. Tell them to prepare to be ready
• 45:34
  for the hour when Davros will need them.
• 45:38
  He watched as the Dalek left and then resumed his deliberations.
• 45:43
  This time, however, he had a lot to think about.
• 45:46
  Could he trust what the Dalek had said?
• 45:49
  If so, then his power was far from spent.
• 45:54
  Oh yeah, and you know me, I watch all and listen to and read
• 45:57
  all of this stuff all the time. So I take it all of it's time,
• 46:01
  but Can you imagine the hard left getting hold of that now?
• 46:05
  There'd be book burnings and all sorts.
• 46:07
  There'd be armies of people with blue hair and Ritalin just stood
• 46:11
  outside. Doctor Who damaged me as a
• 46:14
  person. Wait till this episode comes
• 46:16
  out. None of them have read this.
• 46:17
  But now when we tell them about it, there you go, the protests
• 46:20
  will start. Do you know how this book came
• 46:25
  about? Do you know how John Peel came
• 46:26
  to write this book? No, not at all.
• 46:30
  So Terry Nation watched Remembrance of the Daleks and
• 46:35
  was incensed that Ben Eronovich destroyed Scaro.
• 46:40
  Appalled. And he was basically attempting
• 46:45
  to get John Peel to write a script for season 27.
• 46:49
  That reckoned Scaro, you know, coming back to be and and
• 46:55
  getting everything back on track.
• 46:56
  Obviously that never happened. The show was cancelled.
• 46:59
  I don't think it ever would have come to be anyway.
• 47:03
  Then the new adventures happened and it all just sort of got
• 47:06
  forgotten when when it went in house with the BBC again.
• 47:10
  Terry Nation had passed at that point.
• 47:12
  But basically the Nation estate said the only person will give
• 47:16
  you permission to have the Daleks in BBC books.
• 47:19
  But the only way we'll let this happen is if this writer writes
• 47:23
  it. And John Peel absolutely wanted
• 47:26
  to uphold Terry Nation's wishes to bring Scaro back and to
• 47:31
  basically wreck on all of the 80s Doctor Who stories in the in
• 47:35
  the late 70s. So that's that's sort of how
• 47:38
  this came to be. And I wanted to give a little
• 47:39
  context because there are some baffling continuity decisions
• 47:43
  made later on in the book, but effectively it was Terry Nation.
• 47:48
  Terry Nation not happy with the direction that the dialects have
• 47:51
  been taken. I mean, it surprises me because
• 47:54
  the nation estate had to veto every script.
• 47:57
  I mean, they still do now with Big Finish.
• 48:00
  So it surprised me that that got through.
• 48:02
  I wonder if they read the first three and four.
• 48:04
  Oh, this 1960s Doctor Who story. This is rather good.
• 48:07
  Yeah, yes. OK, make it.
• 48:08
  We won't read the last, the last episode, but.
• 48:12
  And that's the one where they do it.
• 48:15
  I mean the the book itself is littered with little continuity
• 48:18
  references. There's a cutscene which we'll
• 48:22
  come on through in a bit, but there's a cutscene where it's
• 48:24
  Mark Corey's mate and there's lots of little bits and pieces
• 48:30
  in there that are just kisses to the past.
• 48:33
  They're not over. They're just little references
• 48:35
  that if you don't get them, Vaga plants are mentioned.
• 48:39
  If you don't get them, it doesn't matter.
• 48:40
  It's just a bit of background colour for those of you that do
• 48:43
  know. Oh, a little tingle and it's all
• 48:46
  done very well. But 190 pages in, that's where
• 48:49
  the doctor explains to Sam the. Everything.
• 48:52
  The hell. Every single Dalek story ever.
• 48:57
  Now, can I can I take you to tarts with what you just said
• 49:00
  there? Because you said that was a
• 49:02
  little tingle. So that might be a little
• 49:04
  insight into into your love life.
• 49:06
  Because for me, yeah, that was like, you know, being thrown
• 49:10
  into a a sauna with 15 men and thrown about for about four
• 49:16
  days. Because every single bloody
• 49:19
  Dalek story, every single one featured in this book.
• 49:23
  And if they weren't in the main text described in enormous
• 49:28
  potted history paragraphs, then they were in the interludes,
• 49:33
  which had nothing to do with the main story.
• 49:35
  For the most part, every single story from the Daleks through to
• 49:39
  Remembrance was referenced. We got the the, the absolute
• 49:43
  history of the Daleks in its entirety in this book.
• 49:48
  And I was like, so this got me to thinking, well, who's this
• 49:51
  book for? Is this book for newbies to
• 49:54
  Doctor Who having the entire Dalek history explained to them?
• 49:58
  Or is this book for Doctor Who fans, which is what I think it's
• 50:01
  for. But if that's the case, then why
• 50:03
  do we need to be told all of this?
• 50:05
  I was so confused. I think part of it is that by
• 50:09
  this point not even all of the VHSS have been released.
• 50:14
  There was still some Dalek stories to go.
• 50:16
  Yeah, that's a good point. So that could be part of it.
• 50:19
  I got it into my head. God, the continuity of this book
• 50:23
  fucked me tight. The I got it into my head that
• 50:27
  he reconned everything and it was all a mess.
• 50:31
  What it actually is is a convoluted mess that does make
• 50:35
  sense and doesn't actually retcon anything apart from Scarl
• 50:40
  being destroyed and the setting for Destiny.
• 50:43
  Everything else is intact, but fucking hell is tangled.
• 50:49
  The Daleks in the future. They'd travelled back in time
• 50:55
  knowing that Davros stuffed it up in 1963 but cocked that up so
• 51:01
  they created an alternate timeline where there's the
• 51:03
  Styles affair. So they travelled back even
• 51:06
  further back in time. Curse of Fatal Death created
• 51:09
  Antalin for them to destroy Ascaro in remembrance of the
• 51:14
  Daleks so that then he could be put into cryogenic suspension.
• 51:18
  Taken to Antalin in Destiny of the Daleks after being shot in
• 51:22
  Genesis of the Daleks. I mean, it's such a bizarre
• 51:28
  starting point for a book. Like we're not going to tell a
• 51:32
  story. The entire purpose of this book
• 51:35
  is to is to basically change a plot point from an old TV Doctor
• 51:40
  Who story. I think.
• 51:42
  I think that may be where this goes wrong.
• 51:44
  From the first page is, is John Peel just had a chance to give
• 51:49
  us huge insight into Davros and the Daleks and this civil war
• 51:53
  and all of this stuff that happened in the 80s.
• 51:56
  And instead of that, the whole thing is this complicated web of
• 52:01
  continuity, like a load of dominoes falling down.
• 52:05
  And I got to a point where I was like, I, I don't now.
• 52:09
  At the end I was like, I don't know who this book is for at
• 52:11
  all. Because if it's for newbies,
• 52:15
  what the fuck are they going to make of all that continuity?
• 52:18
  And if it's for Doctor Who fans, well, aren't they just going to
• 52:21
  be really annoyed that stories that they've already watched
• 52:24
  have now basically been averted? You're saying this and
• 52:30
  questioning why I don't like the Timeless Children.
• 52:33
  But I don't think the timeless children effects anything.
• 52:36
  Oh, you must be joking. It reckons 60 years, but that's
• 52:40
  not for him. This book.
• 52:43
  This book it's only with rereading it and I very rarely
• 52:47
  reread books because I just don't have the bloody time.
• 52:50
  You're entirely right. Who is it for?
• 52:54
  I think it's for Terry Nation. Everything.
• 52:57
  That's who I think this is for. I think this book is for Terry
• 52:59
  Nation as a kid. He already.
• 53:01
  Died. Who's already died?
• 53:03
  Why the risk? Why the fuck do the rest of us
• 53:05
  have to read it? He should have just written it
• 53:10
  and gone right. There you go, Terry.
• 53:12
  It's on the hard drive. It's written.
• 53:14
  It's. Even at the end of it, it's even
• 53:16
  once the story's over, it still can't help but put itself at the
• 53:21
  centre of continuity by jettisoning the factory ship,
• 53:25
  which is heavily implied to be the ship in the Power of the
• 53:29
  Daleks. I've already dealt with that.
• 53:31
  Don't worry about it, don't think about it.
• 53:32
  Believe me, he's he's, I've dealt with this.
• 53:35
  I was even more confusing, Ken, is that after we've done all
• 53:39
  this recording of Destiny of the Daleks, you know, changing it to
• 53:42
  Antarlin, making that Scaro survives and all of this.
• 53:46
  So we've gone through all of that sort of complication, and
• 53:49
  then the end of the book, it's like, well, ha, ha.
• 53:52
  The very book you're reading is not what you think it is either.
• 53:55
  The whole thing was just to fool Davros and new people into
• 53:58
  taking this Dalekship back to style space.
• 54:01
  I'm like, what? What's going on?
• 54:03
  Like, for fuck sake, what am I reading?
• 54:08
  Yeah. I wasn't quite as down on it as
• 54:12
  you evidently are, I think because I've still got that 27
• 54:16
  year old glow from when I read it first time around, but it's
• 54:21
  not the best prose I've ever picked up, I'll be quite honest.
• 54:25
  I'll tell you what. OK, All right, Well, if you want
• 54:27
  to hear some things, some positive things, I, I did like
• 54:32
  some of the interludes. I thought the interlude with the
• 54:35
  Mechanoids was brilliant. And I thought the the fact that
• 54:39
  they're just sort of tending their plants when the Daleks
• 54:41
  come along and it's all out war between the Daleks and the
• 54:44
  Meccanoids. I bloody love the Chase.
• 54:46
  So I could totally get I actually felt as if John Peel
• 54:48
  was more comfortable writing for Meccanoids than he was for
• 54:51
  writing for people, to be honest.
• 54:54
  I don't know what the point of those interludes was, apart from
• 54:58
  a little bit of background colour and to increase the page
• 55:00
  count. They were interesting and they
• 55:02
  were nice little mini solds. And I will say this much with
• 55:06
  the book as a whole, it does interesting things with the
• 55:09
  Daleks. So we get the Spider Daleks and
• 55:13
  the Strider Daleks and it's all really vividly done so that you
• 55:17
  can entirely picture how they look.
• 55:21
  And then you get the Marine Daleks later on and you get the
• 55:24
  first appearance of the blue sort of kernel Daleks.
• 55:30
  So there's a lot of interesting stuff done with Dalek law and
• 55:34
  hierarchy that was never really explored on screen.
• 55:38
  And I think because of that, that might be part part of the
• 55:44
  reason why I had such fond memories of it, because I got a
• 55:47
  Dalek story with a depth. To the Daleks that I never saw
• 55:51
  on telly inside the city, the walls, ceiling and floor were
• 55:58
  all polished metal. Thankfully it wasn't too
• 56:01
  slippery. The doorways were arched,
• 56:04
  conforming to the pepper pot shape of the Daleks.
• 56:07
  The walls were bare, except where there were controls or
• 56:10
  other mechanisms installed. It's a bit bleep, Doctor, Sam
• 56:15
  commented. As I told you, he explained,
• 56:18
  Daleks have no interest in anything but conquest and war.
• 56:22
  Art, decoration, poetry, music. It's only relevant to them.
• 56:26
  He gave her a quick smile. Good thing, really.
• 56:29
  Can you imagine a Dalek trying to sing?
• 56:32
  The thought of their grating monotones, attempting anything
• 56:35
  of the kind, made Sam smile worse than the Spice Girls, she
• 56:39
  agreed. There were many other Daleks
• 56:41
  moving about, all moving purposely along the corridors.
• 56:45
  Most were of the grey colour, Sam noticed.
• 56:48
  But there were. Occasionally ones in red or
• 56:50
  black and some in blue. She nudged the Doctor and asked
• 56:54
  him about this. That's how you can tell status
• 56:56
  in Daleks, he explained. The grey ones, like our friend
• 57:00
  here, are the Warriors, they're the foot soldiers, or in this
• 57:04
  case the roller soldiers. Very limited intelligence, good
• 57:07
  at obeying orders and chanting choruses of exterminate,
• 57:10
  exterminate. Next up are the Blue Daleks, a
• 57:14
  bit brighter than Oncoms, you know, Corporal Sergeants if you
• 57:17
  like. The Red Daleks are where you
• 57:19
  start to see the real brains. They have a certain autonomy of
• 57:23
  action and can actually think for themselves.
• 57:26
  Sam was both bemused and slightly alarmed to see the
• 57:28
  Doctor warm to this subject so thoroughly.
• 57:31
  And the Black Daleks are in charge of that lot, and they're
• 57:34
  a lot nastier and smarter. Above those are the Gold Daleks,
• 57:38
  they're the elite, and at the top is the Dalek Prime, the one
• 57:42
  who makes all the big decisions. The Dalek they were following
• 57:46
  LED them to a door at the far end of the control centre and
• 57:49
  triggered the lock. Thank you, Jeeves, the Doctor
• 57:55
  murmured. He breezed into the next room,
• 57:57
  Sam close behind him. The ceiling and fire wall here
• 58:01
  were a single piece of glass, or glass like substance.
• 58:05
  She could see out across the city and most of the way up the
• 58:08
  mountain range until the clouds closed in.
• 58:11
  It was a staggering view, incredibly impressive.
• 58:15
  Doctor. Welcome, Sam and the Doctor
• 58:22
  turned to face the host. It was a Dalek, but not like any
• 58:26
  she had seen before. This one was slightly larger
• 58:29
  than the others with a bulbous head.
• 58:32
  It was burnished gold colour and had about a dozen lights about
• 58:35
  the expanded Dome instead of the average Daleks 2, The Dalek
• 58:40
  Prime. Now look, I'm not going to.
• 58:46
  I may expect this entire episode contradicting you.
• 58:50
  I'm not sure I would say it's a depth though.
• 58:52
  But what you've just described there is just new designs of
• 58:55
  Daleks. True, but the actual hierarchy
• 58:59
  of the Daleks, although it was clearly meant to be, you know,
• 59:02
  black Dalek, gold Dalek, in the personal era they were higher
• 59:06
  above Dalek Supreme. You know, the first appearance
• 59:11
  of or in BBC Canon of the, the sort of Dalek Prime Emperor
• 59:18
  Dalek, TV 21 Dalek, whatever you want to call it.
• 59:22
  And it's all explored the, the different levels of them.
• 59:25
  Whereas on screen it was never really looked at.
• 59:28
  The only variation of Dalek we got after the 1960s was the
• 59:33
  special weapons Dalek. And I mean, the spider dialects
• 59:38
  have been teased in about 1994 by Amblin, and that was nearer
• 59:43
  to what I thought a spider Dalek was.
• 59:46
  The actual bumpy segments splaying out to become the legs.
• 59:51
  In this book they're explicitly sort of a Dalek top half on 8
• 59:58
  spindly legs. Which is a wonderful visual, but
• 1:00:03
  but that's why I feel like this would work better as a comic
• 1:00:06
  because you would be able, you could see all these fabulous
• 1:00:09
  visuals and clearly he's got sort of a decent visual
• 1:00:13
  imagination and ambition. But like in, in terms of sort of
• 1:00:17
  telling me something about the Daleks, about what they're about
• 1:00:20
  what their motivations are, why they hate Davros so much.
• 1:00:25
  All I was like, I'm not actually learning anything at all, but I
• 1:00:28
  am getting lots of new designs of Daleks.
• 1:00:31
  Am I being cruel? No, not really, because there's
• 1:00:36
  not a great lot of depth to the novel.
• 1:00:39
  Basically, the Doctor fixes the TARDIS lock, they get swapped up
• 1:00:43
  by a roving garbage scowl that's got Davros on it that he's
• 1:00:48
  picked up their pod. Daleks come, they go to Scaro,
• 1:00:52
  have a fight and a trial. The end.
• 1:00:55
  So there's not, it's not this great epic novel.
• 1:01:00
  It's it's no Lance parking. It's not George Herbert.
• 1:01:03
  This this is 280 pages of comic. But do you know, I think I think
• 1:01:10
  that big twist about Antarlin and Scaro, I think that's the
• 1:01:15
  sort of dramatic moment that the book is hinging itself on like
• 1:01:19
  the the the fans will be like, Oh my God, shock twist.
• 1:01:24
  And then the second thing this is hooking itself on is the fact
• 1:01:27
  that from the moment the Daleks arrive on the ship to pick up
• 1:01:32
  Davros, that's all a lie. That's not what they're there
• 1:01:36
  for. They're not there for Davros.
• 1:01:37
  They don't give a shit about Davros.
• 1:01:38
  They just want to get the Fals back to Scaro so then they can
• 1:01:42
  send, so they can escape in inverted commas in a ship which
• 1:01:46
  has got a Dalek factory ship in it, take it back to Falspace,
• 1:01:50
  and then the Daleks will emerge and wipe them all out.
• 1:01:54
  And that's the second big shock twist.
• 1:01:56
  So it kind of means everything we've watched none of it.
• 1:02:00
  Is that actually as presented? So at the end I was like, well,
• 1:02:04
  what was the point of that like? I must admit I'm not fond on
• 1:02:09
  books which this never actually happened at all or this
• 1:02:13
  character is not what you thought at all.
• 1:02:15
  And then a few pages down the line that wasn't really real
• 1:02:19
  either. And I I'm not overly fond of
• 1:02:22
  that as a a shock twist. I think the whole Destiny of the
• 1:02:28
  Daleks thing, it didn't sit very well with me then.
• 1:02:33
  And it's it's a little bit better with, well, it's, it's a
• 1:02:37
  little better with me now because it it is well pictured.
• 1:02:43
  I think at the time I wasn't invested enough in it to fully
• 1:02:47
  get my head around it. Now, yeah, I can look at it and
• 1:02:50
  you think in real terms it doesn't affect anything.
• 1:02:53
  It was just a plot setting and it expects it explains why the
• 1:02:57
  Dalek bonkers in Genesis look a bit shit.
• 1:03:01
  I don't think anyone's too sad about losing Destiny the Daleks.
• 1:03:05
  But like I. Really want to love it but I.
• 1:03:07
  Recently, Ted, I've listened to Davros the Lance Park in audio
• 1:03:12
  Yeah, for the Villains trilogy and Big Finish, which gave huge
• 1:03:16
  insight into Davros as a character, flashbacks to before
• 1:03:21
  when he before he was disabled, a potential love interest,
• 1:03:26
  motivations as to why he dropped the bombs on Scaro.
• 1:03:32
  Just amazing, amazing character work.
• 1:03:34
  Yeah. And then I read this book, which
• 1:03:36
  also features Stavros. And in his first scene, Davros
• 1:03:41
  sits there and we are directly Privy to his thoughts.
• 1:03:45
  And he goes, you know, so there's no sense of ambiguity or
• 1:03:47
  suspense about what Davros might be up to in this book.
• 1:03:50
  He goes, right, I'm going to deactivate this collar.
• 1:03:53
  I'm going to take over the ship, and I'm going to create a new
• 1:03:55
  army. That's what.
• 1:03:57
  And I'm like is that it is that. And we don't learn another thing
• 1:04:01
  about Davros in this book. He's just there to go to to
• 1:04:05
  Scarrow. And then then he's on trial,
• 1:04:07
  right? The trial of Davros, which is
• 1:04:09
  such a fucking brilliant idea, the idea of Davros being put on
• 1:04:14
  trial. And he just he just spouts the
• 1:04:16
  usual rhetoric, you know, that upstart, the Dalek Supreme.
• 1:04:21
  I can bring you real power. And I'm like, yeah, this is just
• 1:04:24
  dialogue we had on the TV series.
• 1:04:26
  I'm not learning a thing. Like go back and listen to that
• 1:04:29
  last Park in audio. You can do this.
• 1:04:31
  And absolutely. And prose.
• 1:04:33
  You have the opportunity to do this, but it ain't being done
• 1:04:36
  here. This is why I love Big Finish so
• 1:04:40
  much, and I'll telescope that down to earlier Big Finish
• 1:04:45
  before the TV series came along. I love all that experimental
• 1:04:50
  stuff. It's stuff that no other medium
• 1:04:52
  could have got away with. Nobody was really keeping an eye
• 1:04:55
  on Big Finish. It was there.
• 1:04:57
  They had the license. We'll cast a glance over it,
• 1:05:00
  listen to it once in an office, a bit disinterestedly, but yeah,
• 1:05:03
  yeah, you've you're not bothering us.
• 1:05:06
  Do what you like. So they had a a middle bit
• 1:05:09
  around 2003 where they were doing a load of stuff that was
• 1:05:13
  way off kilter. And it worked.
• 1:05:15
  Some of it worked, some of it didn't, but the majority of it
• 1:05:19
  did work. You'd never get away with that
• 1:05:22
  now. They'd never allow.
• 1:05:23
  I think the nearest they've done, they did a Christopher
• 1:05:27
  Eccleston's story where it was told in reverse and that really
• 1:05:32
  worked. But that's as near to
• 1:05:35
  experimental as Big Finish have got for years, ever since
• 1:05:38
  Cardiff have got involved. And I think that character
• 1:05:43
  explanation, exploration of people like the Master Davros,
• 1:05:48
  they drill down a lot deeper than you ever would have got on
• 1:05:52
  TV because TV and indeed pros that should be slower.
• 1:06:00
  It should be there to be explored.
• 1:06:02
  We never get any great conversation scenes on TV now.
• 1:06:05
  We never get any which boxes larger scenes on TV now.
• 1:06:10
  They're all 100 miles an hour, bombs and whistles and
• 1:06:13
  explosions and jumping over things and hey, babes and well.
• 1:06:19
  Miss a line of dialogue. That's it.
• 1:06:21
  There's. There's no intimate scenes in TV
• 1:06:25
  Doctor Who anymore. Sam stared at the dialect Prime.
• 1:06:31
  They wiped out an entire civilization just to trick
• 1:06:34
  Davros. Yes.
• 1:06:36
  The Doctor answered somberly. And when I arrived, it filled me
• 1:06:40
  too. He put his head in his hands and
• 1:06:43
  muttered to himself. That wretched randomizer I'd put
• 1:06:46
  in, I never checked, but it felt so familiar.
• 1:06:50
  He shook his head. You know, recently I've told
• 1:06:52
  Davros that he fooled himself by wishful thinking.
• 1:06:56
  I never asked why, if that world was Scaro, the Daleks had simply
• 1:06:59
  abandoned it. I simply took it for granted
• 1:07:01
  that they had. But then the unexpected
• 1:07:03
  happened, didn't it? The Mavellans arrived and tried
• 1:07:06
  to take possession of Davros to help fight a better war against
• 1:07:09
  you. Incorrect.
• 1:07:12
  The other answered. It stared at the Doctor,
• 1:07:16
  obviously challenging him. Incorrect, He repeated, puzzled.
• 1:07:21
  But which part? All of it.
• 1:07:25
  What are you asking me to believe?
• 1:07:27
  That the Daleks needed Davros? To believe he'd been awakened
• 1:07:29
  because he was needed? That they appealed to his ego as
• 1:07:32
  their creator, showing him a situation where he and only he
• 1:07:36
  could save them. They were at.
• 1:07:37
  War with them of Ellens and caught in a deadly impasse.
• 1:07:40
  But you're telling me now that it wasn't true that there was no
• 1:07:44
  war? I am not asking you to believe,
• 1:07:49
  I merely impart knowledge. You want me to believe, or you
• 1:07:54
  wouldn't be telling me. The Doctor stared into the Dalek
• 1:07:57
  Prime's eyepiece. The Mavellan's are a robotic
• 1:08:00
  race, defined by logic but astonishingly weak in many
• 1:08:03
  areas. I never asked myself who built
• 1:08:05
  the Mavellan's. The Daleks.
• 1:08:08
  The Daleks created a false emergency simply to make Davros
• 1:08:12
  believe that they'd wakened him because they needed him.
• 1:08:15
  They manipulated him totally, and I unwittingly helped them in
• 1:08:18
  their plan. But then Davros was taken off to
• 1:08:21
  Earth for trial by the humans that the Daleks brought to Skaro
• 1:08:25
  in the 1st place. He gazed at the Dalek Prime.
• 1:08:29
  It's certainly a staggeringly ingenious scheme.
• 1:08:32
  You ensure that Davros would be captured and taken to Earth.
• 1:08:36
  Then you arrange for him to be sprung from prison and given
• 1:08:39
  access to time travel technology.
• 1:08:40
  He needed to go back in time to the 1960s and obtain the Hand of
• 1:08:44
  Omega. But Davros refused to follow the
• 1:08:49
  plan. We manufactured the false
• 1:08:52
  information that the Movellans had won their non existent war
• 1:08:58
  with us thinking that this would prompt him to seek the ultimate
• 1:09:03
  weapon. Instead, he began constructing
• 1:09:08
  his own race of Daleks. A tranquil repose.
• 1:09:13
  Yes, said the Doctor, thinking back.
• 1:09:16
  So you helped shut down that operation and threatened to
• 1:09:19
  return him to Scaro for trial. He escaped so conveniently
• 1:09:23
  again, and then he elected to go for the Hand.
• 1:09:26
  He masked all of his Dalek army on Scaro or whatever planet it
• 1:09:29
  was, and then I tricked him into using the Hand wiping out his
• 1:09:32
  forces. He shook his head in
• 1:09:34
  astonishment. Complex, brilliant, nasty,
• 1:09:38
  vicious, and unprincipled, but true.
• 1:09:42
  Again. The Dialect Prime simply stared
• 1:09:44
  at him. The Doctor shook his head.
• 1:09:48
  All simply to stop Davros from destroying your home world.
• 1:09:52
  I never realized he was so attached to it.
• 1:09:53
  But this? When you get them on audio,
• 1:09:58
  yeah, I I agree, Davros, as an audio, it had some lovely bits
• 1:10:04
  in it and then it was followed immediately by Master, which had
• 1:10:07
  some lovely, lovely introspective character
• 1:10:11
  exploring bits in it. And you think This is why
• 1:10:15
  they're revered as such great things?
• 1:10:18
  But this is a book. This is a 280 page book which
• 1:10:22
  has the time and the space to truly drill down Davros and tell
• 1:10:28
  us interesting things about his character.
• 1:10:30
  But, and and this is my big issue with this book.
• 1:10:32
  This book is not interested in being a book.
• 1:10:36
  It's interested in being a four part Doctor Who story on the
• 1:10:39
  television. And so it's going to it's giving
• 1:10:42
  you all the insight you're getting into Davros in a four
• 1:10:44
  part action adventure on TV, which is none at all.
• 1:10:48
  And I think that's really sad because this is Davros's only
• 1:10:51
  appearance in an an original Doctor Who book.
• 1:10:57
  Yes, it is. And I agree with you there.
• 1:10:59
  You, you're quite right. But I think we've been, or I've
• 1:11:02
  certainly been spoiled. Like I say, I've not revisited
• 1:11:05
  any of the the Edas or the PDAs largely through time.
• 1:11:10
  But having read what, less than six months ago, Gallifrey
• 1:11:14
  Chronicles, I now know what a Doctor Who book should be and
• 1:11:19
  could be anything after that, really.
• 1:11:22
  I've peaked too soon so anything I read now is going to be
• 1:11:25
  compared to Lance Parkins super condensing everything.
• 1:11:29
  Well, I'll tell you what, next time we'll go somewhere really
• 1:11:31
  great again, all right? Because the next book after
• 1:11:35
  this, this just goes to show you how inconsistent this range was,
• 1:11:39
  is Alien Bodies, which is really busy, busy with ideas.
• 1:11:45
  I mean, it takes the crotons, the fucking Crotons, right?
• 1:11:49
  And explains where they came from.
• 1:11:51
  And gives you enormous insight into those absurd egg boxes in a
• 1:11:56
  way that War with the Daleks doesn't even scratch the surface
• 1:11:59
  of a Dalek casing. So embodies was that was the
• 1:12:04
  first turn, wasn't it, for the. Huge turn, yeah.
• 1:12:08
  And that's when I don't know, I don't quite know the back story.
• 1:12:12
  I'd love to interview Steve Cole or somebody and find out.
• 1:12:15
  But Alien Bodies was when it completely shifted and we
• 1:12:18
  thought, right, well, we can start pushing the envelope a bit
• 1:12:22
  here with Doctor Who. Nobody's really watching.
• 1:12:25
  We've got an audience again who are buying these things.
• 1:12:29
  Let's see what we can do. And yeah, it it is quite amazing
• 1:12:35
  watching the different authors do very, very different things
• 1:12:38
  with 300 pages. I think at this point anything
• 1:12:42
  goes, right? You've got Natalie Buffettini.
• 1:12:46
  She was there for the first sort of five books.
• 1:12:48
  I think War of the Dykes was the last one she commissioned.
• 1:12:51
  And then Steve Cole's in. Steve Cole comes in from Alien
• 1:12:54
  Bodies onwards and he's sort of got far more of a vision going
• 1:12:59
  forwards and it's kind of exciting.
• 1:13:02
  It's exciting that that you can have, I don't know, something as
• 1:13:06
  generic but atmospheric as the body snatches next to something
• 1:13:10
  like a riveting character tale like vampire science, because it
• 1:13:14
  just means from book to book you don't know what you're going to
• 1:13:16
  get, right? It's like Doctor Who on the TV.
• 1:13:18
  You don't know where you're going, you don't know what tone
• 1:13:20
  or genre it's going to be. You could read anything.
• 1:13:24
  The downside to that is, is you do you know, you'll get
• 1:13:26
  something like War or the Daleks next to Alien Bodies and you
• 1:13:29
  think, how are these books in the same range?
• 1:13:31
  You know, how are these both Doctor Who books?
• 1:13:36
  Yeah, they were up and down because there are standout
• 1:13:39
  moments for me. Alien Bodies is one interference
• 1:13:43
  for good or bad is another. Adventurous of Henrietta St.
• 1:13:47
  You've just chosen all the Lawrence Miles ones there.
• 1:13:49
  Yes. OK, Can I, can I ask you then
• 1:13:54
  circling back to a war of the dialects, can I ask you were
• 1:13:57
  there any other like bigs? Because there's lots of big set
• 1:13:59
  pieces in this book that particularly thrilled you.
• 1:14:03
  Because I thought there was one where which was set play set
• 1:14:08
  after Planet of the Daleks and it was Draconians versus Daleks
• 1:14:13
  and big suicide missions and things like that.
• 1:14:15
  And I and I did find that stuff really readable.
• 1:14:19
  It was nice background colour but what the fuck was it doing
• 1:14:23
  there because it was just basically Dalek battle scenes
• 1:14:28
  and it was interesting and they were nice.
• 1:14:33
  I just don't know what they were there for.
• 1:14:34
  But I'm not complaining because I enjoyed them so much.
• 1:14:37
  Do you think my favorite? 10 Sorry, go on.
• 1:14:40
  Well, do you know you know how resurrection of the Daleks
• 1:14:46
  brought in the the black dark, what were they called?
• 1:14:49
  The Imperials, the Renegades, the black brought in the
• 1:14:52
  renegade Daleks. Then you had we.
• 1:14:54
  Must. Say Revelation.
• 1:14:56
  And so we're, so we've got Daleks fighting Daleks.
• 1:14:58
  By the time we get to Remembrance, it's, you know,
• 1:15:02
  literally civil war. They're fighting each other.
• 1:15:06
  Is this then the next logical step after that when we go to
• 1:15:09
  Scarrow and you literally have a firefight for the planet between
• 1:15:13
  2 Dalek factions? Yes, apart from the fact that he
• 1:15:18
  flip flops the Daleks, the Imperial and Renegade Daleks.
• 1:15:22
  Not that they're ever called Renegades in this, but they're
• 1:15:25
  flip-flopped. Oh, I didn't even catch that.
• 1:15:27
  Explain that to me. Well, the Imperial Daleks are
• 1:15:32
  the ones that hate Davros, but they're the grey ones.
• 1:15:36
  The Imperial garlics on TV were the white ones.
• 1:15:39
  In this book, they're the other way around.
• 1:15:41
  Why has he done that? Who fucking?
• 1:15:45
  Why has he done any of this? I mean, the continuous of this
• 1:15:49
  book, I've, I've pinpointed the pivot, it's 100 and page 113.
• 1:15:53
  That's when everything just sort of goes to ratchet.
• 1:15:56
  Anything goes. There's the great reveal of of
• 1:16:01
  Dalek history, and that's when the Renegade and Imperial get
• 1:16:04
  flip-flopped. And I mean, who knows what the
• 1:16:08
  Dalek Emperor, the Dalek Supreme, the Dalek Prime.
• 1:16:11
  I thought they were all supposed to be the same thing in
• 1:16:14
  different casing. Apparently not, according to
• 1:16:16
  this book. Was the Dalek Prime that that
• 1:16:18
  big gold one with a massive bulbous head?
• 1:16:21
  Yes, from the comics. Yes, OK, apparently one of the
• 1:16:25
  original Daleks from the bunker on Scaro, the only one left.
• 1:16:30
  I mean, that's quite exciting if you've read the comics.
• 1:16:32
  I've never read them, but I kind of got the reference.
• 1:16:35
  Do you know, Ken? I did, like, there was one bit
• 1:16:37
  that really made me laugh. When Davros is in his cell and
• 1:16:41
  the Dalek comes in to give him some food or whatever, I don't
• 1:16:43
  know why he was visiting, if I'm honest.
• 1:16:46
  He's the right old gossip. And he goes, yeah, the Dalek
• 1:16:48
  prime thinks we're working for him.
• 1:16:50
  But actually, I'm loyal to you. All right, Wait for the signal.
• 1:16:54
  I thought, oh, my God. Here we go.
• 1:16:55
  It's kicking off. I quite like that bit.
• 1:16:59
  Some sort of cockney dialect guard?
• 1:17:03
  Well, I'm not quoting the dialogue verbatim.
• 1:17:07
  But it was the some of the dialect dialogue in it, It
• 1:17:12
  wasn't dialect dialogue. It was.
• 1:17:16
  I had real trouble hearing it in dialect voices because some of
• 1:17:21
  it was so conversational and so not colloquial.
• 1:17:28
  But it would. It was getting there.
• 1:17:29
  And you think I'm really struggling a few nips and tucks
• 1:17:33
  in this dialogue because it ain't Dalek.
• 1:17:35
  Doesn't he say at one point that the Dalek Prime is more
• 1:17:38
  conversational than than your regular Dalek?
• 1:17:43
  I think. Yeah, that I can get.
• 1:17:45
  But again, I think that's a lot to do with Nicholas Briggs and
• 1:17:50
  the Dalek Emperor in the audios. And you've got the Dalek time
• 1:17:54
  controller. They're all, you know, the way
• 1:17:56
  higher up the chain. They speak a bit more human like
• 1:18:00
  we've heard it, and I can understand it.
• 1:18:02
  Even the Emperor Dalek in Evil of the Daleks, that was a little
• 1:18:06
  bit less raspy and staccato. It was nearer to human or you
• 1:18:12
  know, human patterns. So I can get that.
• 1:18:16
  But your standard drones and warrior Daleks know that there
• 1:18:21
  was no chit chat. There was no we're on your side
• 1:18:24
  boss. It was none of that.
• 1:18:29
  If you're going to go to the lake for saying that the Dalek
• 1:18:31
  Prime is more conversation, it should have gone the whole hog,
• 1:18:34
  you know, had a pipe in the slippers and said come in, old
• 1:18:36
  fellow, come on now. Yeah, welcome to Scaro.
• 1:18:39
  So he was. There he was.
• 1:18:41
  He offered them a chair. And then, you know, can I get
• 1:18:44
  you any refreshment? Can I get you some refreshment?
• 1:18:47
  Yeah. Knocked off.
• 1:18:48
  Here is the drinks trolley. Help yourself.
• 1:18:53
  I think Peel was more comfortable when he's on Scaro
• 1:18:56
  though, than than in all of those interminable scenes on the
• 1:19:00
  spaceship which take up half the book.
• 1:19:03
  He describes the Dalek city as it was a staggering piece of
• 1:19:06
  workmanship, but almost totally without soul, exactly like the
• 1:19:10
  Daleks themselves. I think he's far more
• 1:19:13
  comfortable around Daleks than he is around people.
• 1:19:16
  John Peel. What was that?
• 1:19:29
  The Dalek Prime has sabotaged the kill cruisers.
• 1:19:35
  The captured ship was destroyed before it could fire on the
• 1:19:40
  tower. We must destroy the tower.
• 1:19:44
  The Dalek Prime is there, along with the heart of his
• 1:19:49
  surveillance network. Once that is down, the loyalists
• 1:19:53
  will be split. Only then can we hope to defeat
• 1:19:58
  them. Order all forces to focus their
• 1:20:01
  attacks on the tower. The unit at the power station is
• 1:20:08
  under assault. They are unable to pull back.
• 1:20:13
  Then tell them to fight and die there.
• 1:20:16
  We need more troops to attack the tower.
• 1:20:20
  All available units are being brought in.
• 1:20:24
  The battle will continue. Our margin for success has been
• 1:20:31
  reduced. Reduced, perhaps, but not
• 1:20:35
  destroyed. We shall win through.
• 1:20:39
  It is my destiny to lead the Daleks to the complete conquest
• 1:20:44
  of the entire Galaxy. I shall succeed.
• 1:20:54
  I was reading this with the benefit of having seen the TV
• 1:21:01
  series up to this point, though a lot of it I was getting
• 1:21:03
  imagery from. The Witch is familiar and I
• 1:21:08
  think it benefits from that, even though he didn't have it at
• 1:21:11
  this point. So his imagery is brilliant.
• 1:21:15
  In fact, if anything, the Dalek city portrayed in this book is
• 1:21:20
  richer than the desert planet we see on on television in the
• 1:21:24
  Capaldi era. I agree with you there, because
• 1:21:28
  it's only really when we get to Scaro that he comes to life and
• 1:21:34
  it's like the the keyboard. It must have been on fire.
• 1:21:37
  By the time in film finished writing Part 4, the Daleks were
• 1:21:41
  blowing up and they and they all the special weapons Daleks were
• 1:21:45
  in the elevator. Oh, and then they blew them up
• 1:21:47
  and all the buildings were collapsing and all the Emperor
• 1:21:50
  darling it, you can just hear this man having this keyboard
• 1:21:55
  orgasm. You know what it reads like?
• 1:21:57
  It reads like a 12 year old writing in their exercise book.
• 1:22:00
  Ohh. And then there was a trial.
• 1:22:02
  There was millions of Daleks. Davros was brought out amongst
• 1:22:05
  them, and then the Daleks fought the Daleks.
• 1:22:08
  Their heads blew up, spaceships crashed into the city.
• 1:22:11
  You know, that's what. And I can kind of get behind
• 1:22:14
  that. And I could read that.
• 1:22:16
  But. But with all the other
• 1:22:17
  complicated stuff about Antarlin and the deception about file
• 1:22:22
  space and all of that going on as well, yeah, I just, I felt as
• 1:22:26
  if I was being. And then on top of all of that,
• 1:22:28
  yeah, my biggest gripe, sorry of a list of gripes was the fact
• 1:22:34
  that every fucking character in this book, every single one
• 1:22:37
  without exception, spell out their every intention in their
• 1:22:41
  thoughts as if explaining to A5 year old.
• 1:22:44
  And it happened throughout the book.
• 1:22:46
  Now, it made it very easy to read, but every single character
• 1:22:49
  was like, oh, well, I'm going to go to this part of the spaceship
• 1:22:53
  now and and I'm going to do that.
• 1:22:55
  Oh, oh, I think the doctor may not be, may not be trusted.
• 1:22:58
  I'm like, so there's no surprises of anybody because
• 1:23:02
  everybody is utterly explicit in their thoughts.
• 1:23:06
  And I again, I think that's an odd approach because it just
• 1:23:08
  means, yeah, we we can't ever be surprised by those people.
• 1:23:14
  Well, one of the things that I found quite irritating, but of
• 1:23:19
  it's time, because it did start creeping in in the 90s was
• 1:23:26
  virtue signalling is going too strong in this context.
• 1:23:31
  But every time somebody died, oh the the horror, the horror.
• 1:23:39
  This person's been a hunt. Why, if this was in real life,
• 1:23:45
  if somebody walked into a pub and kicked off and then they got
• 1:23:51
  took outside and given a damn good Larapin for spoiling a
• 1:23:55
  really nice atmosphere, you'd be like, you know, well, you
• 1:23:59
  deserve that. But in this book, the worst
• 1:24:03
  people get offed and then Sam's there crying about it.
• 1:24:09
  Do you know what I? Think like that in real life,
• 1:24:12
  you'd be, you know, I'm far too worried about getting my ass
• 1:24:15
  shot off than worrying about somebody that was awful for the
• 1:24:19
  past 50 pages. And waiting off she's sort of
• 1:24:22
  like, you know, there's a there's a hint that this is all
• 1:24:26
  a bit traumatic for her. And at the end of the book she
• 1:24:29
  goes right off we go alien bodies is calling.
• 1:24:33
  Oh really? Jesus, you've just seen mass
• 1:24:36
  murder on Scaro. You know, people have their
• 1:24:38
  heads blown off. Oh, actually, Ken, I thought
• 1:24:41
  that was a great bit. The bit where on the spaceship
• 1:24:44
  where the the thaw. She thought she was going to
• 1:24:47
  kill the doctor of the Sam. Instead, she blew the head off
• 1:24:51
  and it's described as the head exploding.
• 1:24:53
  That was a good moment. We just think everyone's going
• 1:24:56
  to be spattered in brains there, but.
• 1:24:59
  I basically figured everyone was going to die in this, and pretty
• 1:25:01
  much everybody did. Can I tell you another gripe?
• 1:25:05
  I'm really sorry. I feel as if I'm being so down
• 1:25:07
  on this. On Old Boy.
• 1:25:10
  Well, was just sort of how the book was mired in cliches
• 1:25:14
  because one of the characters goes, you know, emotional
• 1:25:16
  entanglements are emotional entanglements are what make life
• 1:25:20
  worth living. Yeah.
• 1:25:22
  This is what the foul soldier. This is what Chan is saying to
• 1:25:26
  the foul soldier. This tough bitch, a liar who has
• 1:25:30
  just confessed that her father told her that he loved her on
• 1:25:34
  his deathbed. I was reading that going, oh
• 1:25:37
  God, really? What next?
• 1:25:39
  You know? Yeah, You see, the most real
• 1:25:44
  characters for me were the crew of the Quetzal, because you've
• 1:25:50
  got this Ballotan, who he was one of the most interesting
• 1:25:55
  characters in it, This who I'd cast in my hair.
• 1:25:58
  This is Graf sort of Cotney, right, boys?
• 1:26:01
  You get out there and stoop and I'm going down to the old.
• 1:26:04
  You'll never amount to anything, my boy.
• 1:26:06
  That sort of that was how I had it in my head.
• 1:26:09
  And then you had this sort of cottony wannabe.
• 1:26:13
  What was his damn name? Lauren.
• 1:26:16
  Lauren, but he's. Literally horny for every woman
• 1:26:19
  he comes into contact with. Oh well, Speaking of horny, it's
• 1:26:23
  a full and I counted 49 pages before a character tries it on
• 1:26:29
  with the Doctor. Fuck me ties.
• 1:26:32
  They really loved the idea of Paul McGann getting off with a
• 1:26:36
  woman. Oh, I know when Peel's
• 1:26:38
  describing the doctor from Chan's point of view is this
• 1:26:42
  luscious dark curl something sounds like.
• 1:26:45
  Am I reading The Stranger again? Bloody hell, that was one thing
• 1:26:50
  I don't miss from the McGann books was the endless trying.
• 1:26:54
  I think it started really early on.
• 1:26:56
  I think it started in Vampire Scientist Darling.
• 1:26:58
  Yeah, at one point in Vampire Science, Kramer, Brigadier
• 1:27:01
  Krameraster goes for him. Do you realise the effects that
• 1:27:04
  you have on women, Doctor? And he's like, oh, I used to be
• 1:27:07
  this terribly ugly Scottish man. I didn't realise, Sorry.
• 1:27:13
  She's there with a wide on. Yeah, it's a bit.
• 1:27:17
  Sharon was pretty good, though, wasn't she?
• 1:27:19
  Like, I think, I think she's just competent.
• 1:27:21
  She's a competent woman, you know, which you wouldn't
• 1:27:24
  normally get in a termination script, but I thought she was
• 1:27:28
  all right. You know, every time they needed
• 1:27:29
  to get out of a situation, she was sort of there with her
• 1:27:31
  fingers in the wire sorting things out.
• 1:27:34
  Well, there was a very good scene with Chain actually, where
• 1:27:37
  she's just rounded on disposable thal character, the one
• 1:27:44
  beginning with a oh. Oh, a liar, a liar, Something
• 1:27:48
  like that. Yeah, somebody.
• 1:27:50
  Ayela. Something like that.
• 1:27:52
  Whatever, but it was a really good scene and in my head Chain
• 1:27:57
  was cast as somebody like Sophie Akanadeo.
• 1:28:03
  Again, all of the all of the Quetzal crew were cockney.
• 1:28:06
  Don't know why, it's probably due to Sword of Orion or
• 1:28:09
  something, but they she has this really good sort of two page
• 1:28:16
  bollocking of a liar Axiah or whatever damn name was and you
• 1:28:21
  just think this is one of the few genuine interesting
• 1:28:26
  character moments in this entire book.
• 1:28:28
  The rest of them bland generic soldier thal Dalek.
• 1:28:33
  There's no background colour at all.
• 1:28:36
  Oh, you're the doctor from our thal history, are you?
• 1:28:39
  Well, you must be trusted then. Yeah, that's it's that sort of
• 1:28:42
  character. Yes, I'm a friend to the Thales,
• 1:28:45
  even though you've just blown the fuck away half of this crew
• 1:28:48
  to get here. Yes, I'm the Doctor, a friend of
• 1:28:51
  the Thales. I turned up with Ian Chesterton
• 1:28:53
  and Barbara Wright. And then there was my
• 1:28:55
  granddaughter Susan. And he.
• 1:28:58
  You've just watched them butcher the crew and then you're saying
• 1:29:02
  you're a friend to the Thales. How can I help you?
• 1:29:05
  He wouldn't do. Can I Can I?
• 1:29:11
  I made a note of two ideas that this book moots right, which I
• 1:29:15
  think would have been a better approach to the story if they'd
• 1:29:19
  have gone down these two routes rather than the story that John
• 1:29:22
  Peel actually tells us. OK, Early on the thal say to the
• 1:29:26
  Doctor, you were the one that taught us to fight, Doctor.
• 1:29:30
  What we have become is what you helped to make us so this this
• 1:29:33
  whole sort of moral consequence of the Doctor going to SCARA and
• 1:29:37
  the Daleks and Ian's, you know, saying, you know, you've got to
• 1:29:40
  fight for what you want, basically help to create this
• 1:29:44
  army that's going around murdering people left, right and
• 1:29:46
  centre. That's a really interesting idea
• 1:29:49
  to play about with. And then literally a page later,
• 1:29:52
  Sam goes, well, you helped them in one situation, Doctor, you
• 1:29:55
  didn't tell them what to do next.
• 1:29:57
  And he goes, oh, no, Sam, you're right.
• 1:29:59
  We won't think about that anymore then.
• 1:30:02
  And I was like, what? That's such a great idea.
• 1:30:04
  Why don't you go with that? And the other one, which I
• 1:30:07
  thought was a brilliant idea. So he's got ideas.
• 1:30:10
  He goes that the Fowls want Davros to genetically mutate
• 1:30:15
  them to give them a biological advantage over the Daleks.
• 1:30:19
  And the Doctor goes, well, Davros will find a way to
• 1:30:22
  pervert whatever mad plan you're thinking up up with, you know,
• 1:30:26
  don't do that. And they go, oh, all right,
• 1:30:28
  then. Yeah, we won't do that.
• 1:30:30
  I'm like what the heck, Instead we'll just stay on this
• 1:30:35
  spaceship for 100 pages, OK? Bombs in secret Yes, I I did
• 1:30:41
  think that myself. The the whole doctor you created
• 1:30:45
  this the files as they are. Interesting.
• 1:30:49
  Can't understand why after things like, I don't know,
• 1:30:53
  planet of the Daleks and from then on the files have been as
• 1:30:57
  bad as the Daleks. The this peace loving race
• 1:31:00
  that's gone on, all of them have some sort of lisp that that's
• 1:31:05
  gone now. They're all hardened warriors
• 1:31:08
  that they're still beautiful blondes it seems, but and still
• 1:31:13
  wearing all their togs from the Daleks underneath their battle
• 1:31:17
  armor, which he went to great lengths to describe thongs and
• 1:31:22
  pants and MP vests that all the women were wearing.
• 1:31:27
  None of the men were described, but the women were described in
• 1:31:29
  very great depth. Well, they would be, wouldn't
• 1:31:34
  they? OK, well, look, OK, we've sort
• 1:31:36
  of jumped about all over the place and covered the many
• 1:31:39
  inconsistencies and strange creative choices that this book
• 1:31:43
  chooses to make. What about before we sort of go
• 1:31:47
  to general notes and our overall thoughts?
• 1:31:50
  What about the ending of the book, which you've only just
• 1:31:53
  finished? Were you satisfied with how this
• 1:31:55
  all came to came to an end? It was there, it just this whole
• 1:32:07
  great trial and battle scene just seems to just end right
• 1:32:11
  Davros, we've got you into the matter.
• 1:32:14
  Dispersal you go, it's flat right boys back to Scara.
• 1:32:18
  We've got a lot of mopping up to do, says the Dalek Prime.
• 1:32:22
  And then that's it. We're, we're on board the
• 1:32:25
  Quetzal again, or the Thal ship rather.
• 1:32:27
  And we've got this factory ship to get rid of.
• 1:32:31
  We'll connect up a few cables from the TARDIS.
• 1:32:33
  Bang, that's gone. Oh look, there's another lectern
• 1:32:37
  in the TARDIS control room. It's a Dalek fucking night.
• 1:32:40
  My God, this book doesn't know when to end it.
• 1:32:46
  Doesn't know when to stop. No, because I thought, thank God
• 1:32:49
  we're going back to the TARDIS. This whole sorry mess is over
• 1:32:52
  and done with. Oh fuck me, it's another Dalek.
• 1:32:54
  Although I do like the idea of a Dalek.
• 1:32:56
  You remember that bit in The Stolen Earth?
• 1:32:58
  Or was it Journey's End where the Daleks in the TARDIS and far
• 1:33:01
  and away? Like, I do like the idea of
• 1:33:02
  that, but I'm like, oh come on now, let's have this over with.
• 1:33:06
  Well, and then you think the book's over, and then there's a
• 1:33:09
  coda. Yes, there is, which reminds you
• 1:33:12
  very much of well, it reminded me of Genesis of the Daleks.
• 1:33:17
  You've got the Dalek Prime there going.
• 1:33:19
  We will never be defeated. We will go on, we will be
• 1:33:23
  stronger. But fuck me, just go and write
• 1:33:26
  ATV script. John P.
• 1:33:31
  The Dalek Prime watched with considerable satisfaction as the
• 1:33:35
  matter transfer unit came online.
• 1:33:38
  The battle is over and won. Davros, your time is finished.
• 1:33:45
  You need me. I can be of help to you.
• 1:33:49
  I can improve the Dalek race. You are of help to me by dying.
• 1:33:56
  And the Dalek race can improve itself.
• 1:34:00
  You are not. Needed to the watching Gong
• 1:34:05
  Daleks, he ordered. Place him in the unit, no?
• 1:34:10
  Davros snarled as he was pushed back towards the tube.
• 1:34:15
  You cannot destroy me. I will not allow it.
• 1:34:19
  You cannot be rid of me this easily.
• 1:34:22
  We can dispersal pattern engage. Davros was still saying
• 1:34:34
  something inaudible as the tube lit up, the power grid glowed,
• 1:34:38
  and the figure gradually lost its cohesion and resolution,
• 1:34:42
  tiny particles of matter seeming to spatter against the glass,
• 1:34:46
  until finally the power died down.
• 1:34:48
  And the tube was empty. Dispersal complete, the Spider
• 1:34:58
  Dalek reported. Davros is destroyed.
• 1:35:04
  Good. Purge the system memory.
• 1:35:08
  It was always technically feasible that Davros's body and
• 1:35:11
  prints could be rebuilt using the memory core of the computer.
• 1:35:15
  There was no need to take chances.
• 1:35:18
  The Spider Dalek obeyed. Memory core has been purged, it
• 1:35:24
  reported, and pulled the block from the machine.
• 1:35:27
  It set this on a small pedestal and backed off.
• 1:35:30
  Then it fired once the core exploded, falling in small
• 1:35:36
  smoking ruins. No data could have survived that
• 1:35:40
  the Dalek Prime was satisfied, Davros was finished at last, and
• 1:35:45
  the. War was over.
• 1:35:51
  He was, he really was a frustrated TV strip writer.
• 1:35:55
  He wants this to be a season 27 script I think.
• 1:36:00
  I think if this had been done as a Big Finish audio, it probably
• 1:36:06
  would have worked better. They would have trimmed out a
• 1:36:08
  lot of the flab. They probably would have vetoed
• 1:36:11
  a lot of the continuity nightmare and put a few more
• 1:36:15
  things in because at the time that this was being done, Big
• 1:36:18
  Finish were very creative. So I know there's a lot of
• 1:36:22
  people out there and they've got a downer on the early Big
• 1:36:25
  Finish, but it's fashionable to have a downer on the sirens of
• 1:36:29
  time. Now that as a as a side note, I
• 1:36:33
  look at the sirens of time. I devoured that.
• 1:36:35
  I loved it. It landed through the door.
• 1:36:37
  I remember I had. I'm not sure I can listen to
• 1:36:41
  this because you devoured this back in the day as well.
• 1:36:44
  I know, but I still love the sirens of time.
• 1:36:46
  I've spent thousands with Big finish on the back of the sirens
• 1:36:50
  of time and they've just released a redux version which I
• 1:36:53
  have pre-ordered. I want to hear it I'm.
• 1:36:55
  Pleased to to say that Nicholas Courtney's Conservatory is
• 1:36:59
  looking very well. He's used your money to to.
• 1:37:02
  Do you mean Nicholas Briggs? I did.
• 1:37:04
  What did I say? Did I say Nicholas?
• 1:37:07
  Cool, though. Yeah.
• 1:37:08
  Oh, dear. Yeah.
• 1:37:09
  Nicholas Briggs is Conservatory. It's gorgeous.
• 1:37:12
  But I, you know, that was a period where I was lapping up
• 1:37:15
  new Doctor Who. There wasn't this great glut of
• 1:37:18
  it that there is now. There's just too much Doctor
• 1:37:21
  Who. There's no quality control.
• 1:37:22
  It's just spaffed out week after week.
• 1:37:25
  You're right. In those days you had to savour
• 1:37:28
  it and I think quite honestly I enjoyed it more when there was
• 1:37:34
  less of it. And the, the sort of the scam
• 1:37:38
  Doctor Who we were getting was being well considered and a
• 1:37:42
  tonne of thought was being put into it.
• 1:37:45
  And I think you can tell the difference between that and,
• 1:37:48
  yeah, the sausage factory of stories that we're getting these
• 1:37:51
  days. I don't know how much money
• 1:37:54
  they're making off each release, but surely it's got to be less
• 1:37:59
  than if they just put out less of better quality.
• 1:38:05
  I've. Heard your reviews with Mark and
• 1:38:08
  I know some of the the more recent stuff you've really sung
• 1:38:11
  the praises, things like the Annihilators.
• 1:38:13
  Yeah, yeah, there has been some, yeah.
• 1:38:15
  I mean, you know, you take each story as it comes, but there has
• 1:38:18
  been some good stuff. There's been some terrible stuff
• 1:38:21
  as well, but. Well, your review of the last
• 1:38:23
  day really has put me off getting that.
• 1:38:27
  But I think if anything having like more of the Daleks and
• 1:38:31
  alien bodies back-to-back just goes to show that actually
• 1:38:35
  things were as inconsistent back then as they are now.
• 1:38:40
  Just the highs were higher I think.
• 1:38:43
  OK, I'll put this to you. If this was just a standard
• 1:38:48
  Doctor Who novel, not about the Daleks, exactly the same, but
• 1:38:52
  generic alien race, do you think we'd remember it?
• 1:38:59
  No, I don't think we would. No.
• 1:39:01
  And in fact no, because of the fact that it's got the that's
• 1:39:04
  the one thing it can sort of wave its head over the parapet
• 1:39:07
  and go we're about Daleks. If this was no, because then it
• 1:39:12
  would just be, forgive me, an illogical, irritatingly plotted,
• 1:39:18
  badly written, terribly characterised book about a
• 1:39:24
  nonsense race that we don't care about.
• 1:39:27
  So no, the fact that it's got two Daleks on the cover in
• 1:39:29
  negative, that is a definite plus.
• 1:39:32
  Illogical, improbable events. It's what life's all about.
• 1:39:37
  You know, well, look, OK, let's let's summarise our thoughts on
• 1:39:42
  more of the Daleks because I think we have covered quite a
• 1:39:45
  lot there, but. Considering the depth and the
• 1:39:49
  actual amount of story in this novel, I think we've done well
• 1:39:53
  to talk. We've done really well.
• 1:39:58
  Do you have any notes? Because I've got a few sort of
• 1:40:00
  bits and bobs, but do you have any notes that you haven't said
• 1:40:04
  before we go into sort of summarising I.
• 1:40:06
  Don't think so. No, no I don't.
• 1:40:08
  I'm just looking at I've. I've written 5 pages of notes
• 1:40:12
  and we've gone through them all. One of one of my notes is just
• 1:40:16
  lots of bits of Sam's dialogue, which is really annoying.
• 1:40:21
  Look at that silly plunger. How can they rule the universe
• 1:40:24
  if they can't even open the door?
• 1:40:26
  At one point she goes, oh, that poor little Pratt who died.
• 1:40:29
  I should have stopped him just and sort of General Sam Jones
• 1:40:34
  just being horrible about people.
• 1:40:36
  And then somehow later on in the book she has a thought in her
• 1:40:40
  head where she goes, well, I do always try and feel the best of
• 1:40:43
  people. Really, how John Peel could
• 1:40:47
  write that and characterise her like this, I have absolutely no
• 1:40:51
  idea. I mean, she goes at one point,
• 1:40:53
  does it really matter what the name of the planet was, whether
• 1:40:55
  it was called Scaro or Fred? Yes, it fucking matters.
• 1:41:00
  All right. It Destiny, the Daleks was all a
• 1:41:02
  big con. It's just also generic.
• 1:41:08
  Oh, that was the one thing that came across.
• 1:41:10
  I think the only reason I ripped through this was trying to get
• 1:41:12
  to the Davros and Daleks bits, because the bulk of it is really
• 1:41:18
  generic characters. There's only some which you can
• 1:41:21
  do with peace loving Thals, war loving Daleks, and there's
• 1:41:25
  always some innocent bystanders caught up in the middle.
• 1:41:28
  There's a forest planet usually. We've got away from that for
• 1:41:31
  once, because Terra Nation's not written it.
• 1:41:34
  And yeah. It's.
• 1:41:38
  All very generic. What I will say is if obviously
• 1:41:43
  book club audience will recognise your voice because Ken
• 1:41:47
  is in fact the person does our fabulous readings for the book
• 1:41:51
  club that he's been doing now for the last sort of 12 or 15
• 1:41:55
  releases. There's been quite a few now.
• 1:41:57
  And I love doing. I'm so pleased that you asked me
• 1:41:59
  to do them. Adding a, adding a huge Sheen of
• 1:42:02
  class on the nonsense that we all talk about, it actually
• 1:42:07
  makes me feel like I'm putting out something quite
• 1:42:09
  sophisticated. But what this book does have,
• 1:42:14
  however, is great action passages where you could do some
• 1:42:19
  wonderful readings and we could at least say that.
• 1:42:24
  The time wrote again. It's familiar howl, but the
• 1:42:26
  TARDIS didn't move. Instead the cables began to glow
• 1:42:31
  as power flowed from the console and down to the Dalek stowaway.
• 1:42:35
  It's working. Jane reported.
• 1:42:38
  Power couplings are holding firm.
• 1:42:40
  And there it goes. The Doctor said the factory ship
• 1:42:43
  is entering the vortex now. The tower ship is clean.
• 1:42:47
  He cut the power and the rotor fell silent.
• 1:42:51
  That's real. These in, shall we?
• 1:42:53
  He started to pull on the wiring.
• 1:42:55
  That's it? Sam asked.
• 1:42:57
  Flick a few. Switches and the Daleks are
• 1:42:59
  defeated. The factory ship's destroyed.
• 1:43:02
  Yes and no, He answered, jerking on the wires as Sam and Chain
• 1:43:06
  helped. Yes, the Daleks are defeated for
• 1:43:09
  the time being. And no, the factory ship's not
• 1:43:12
  destroyed. Exactly.
• 1:43:13
  I rather think it's just been flung back through interstitial
• 1:43:16
  time and space. Chain stared at him in horror.
• 1:43:20
  Then we've just sent it somewhere else.
• 1:43:22
  We've not solved the problem at all.
• 1:43:24
  Chain in another time and another place.
• 1:43:27
  I think I already have. Well, we've heard a few of them
• 1:43:33
  in this episode. I hope I've done them justice.
• 1:43:36
  One of the things I will say about reading these passages is
• 1:43:39
  I'm you send them to me and they're out of context.
• 1:43:42
  Obviously with this one I've picked which ones I'm going to
• 1:43:45
  do, but having gone back and actually read some of the books
• 1:43:50
  or attempted to like The Doctor Trap, I really enjoy doing that.
• 1:43:54
  And then I tried reading the book.
• 1:43:57
  I. Think I might have made it sound
• 1:43:59
  more appealing than it was you. Really did.
• 1:44:02
  Yes, that was the the perfect example of a really fucking
• 1:44:08
  amazing trailer selling a dud of a movie.
• 1:44:14
  Well, look, let's let's summarize War of the Daleks
• 1:44:17
  then. For my part, I won't say it was
• 1:44:22
  a chore to get through because I really did find this easy to
• 1:44:25
  read and I actually got through it in about two days, which is
• 1:44:27
  good going for me. However, that's probably the
• 1:44:32
  nicest thing I'm going to say now, as a as a Doctor Who book,
• 1:44:39
  I think it's set. It's going to irritate Doctor
• 1:44:42
  Who fans with all of the rewriting of continuity that
• 1:44:46
  it's doing. As a science fiction book, I
• 1:44:49
  think it's going to baffle any new fans that the TV movie might
• 1:44:53
  have brought in. And as a work of prose, I wonder
• 1:44:59
  if John Peel was smacked on the head before he picked up his
• 1:45:03
  typewriter and started reading this?
• 1:45:05
  Because it's a very stupid book indeed, but on the level of a 12
• 1:45:15
  year old writing in their exercise book.
• 1:45:17
  All the exciting visuals you can do with Daleks, it's OK.
• 1:45:22
  OK, that's me done. Over to you.
• 1:45:25
  I agree with a lot of that. I loved this when it was first
• 1:45:28
  brought out because again, I was invested in certainly Paul
• 1:45:31
  McGann. He remains my favorite doctor.
• 1:45:35
  There was a lot of nice kisses to the past without needing to
• 1:45:40
  be, which I thought were nice little touches for The Who fans.
• 1:45:45
  It takes a long time to get where it's going, but it is an
• 1:45:48
  easy read. There's always something new
• 1:45:52
  within a few pages. So like there are the cut
• 1:45:55
  scenes, the pre credit scenes, they're all nicely done.
• 1:45:59
  There's nothing that's in there that's going to baffle you or
• 1:46:01
  confuse you. It is an easy read.
• 1:46:04
  The continuity is not as bad as I remember.
• 1:46:06
  I thought it was some nightmare. Unfortunately it does rely on
• 1:46:10
  you to know those stories, otherwise you will be completely
• 1:46:14
  baffled. At the time I did that's in them
• 1:46:17
  all on UK Gold and or had them on VHS.
• 1:46:20
  But yeah, I I think you're quite right.
• 1:46:23
  Really. I've not looked at it from that
• 1:46:24
  angle before. Don't.
• 1:46:26
  Worry if you don't know the continuity then you can always
• 1:46:29
  read the excerpts from the programme guide that he's put in
• 1:46:33
  in the middle sections of the book.
• 1:46:34
  Enormous sort of spaffing of Doctor Who continuity from Dalek
• 1:46:38
  stories. Sorry I'm being rude again, back
• 1:46:40
  to you. No, overall it's, I mean, it's
• 1:46:44
  not the worst Doctor Who book I've ever read.
• 1:46:46
  It's certainly not the best either.
• 1:46:48
  I think when you pair it right down to what it is, it is there
• 1:46:53
  to iron out something that they didn't like on television and
• 1:46:57
  very little else. The characters are very
• 1:47:00
  two-dimensional on the whole. If we were rating this, it'd be
• 1:47:07
  very beige on the scale. So Daleks, yes, the end of
• 1:47:14
  Davros where he gets fed into the dispersal chamber at the
• 1:47:17
  end, there's a certain finality to that.
• 1:47:20
  And I can't actually, I've read through that a couple of times
• 1:47:23
  and I can't see a way out of that.
• 1:47:25
  It's very definitely bits of Davros all over the inside of
• 1:47:29
  this glass tube. And then any hope?
• 1:47:32
  Well, he could have survived on this data disk.
• 1:47:35
  So they blow up the data disk. So it's almost as if, Right.
• 1:47:40
  I've got to play with Dave Ross. No one else can.
• 1:47:42
  Now, I've done this better, and no one needs to play with him
• 1:47:45
  again. And yeah, the continuity spoils
• 1:47:50
  it, I think so. There you go.
• 1:47:52
  But did I enjoy it? Yes.
• 1:47:54
  Would I recommend it? No.
• 1:47:57
  These readings that I've just done make it sound more
• 1:48:00
  appealing than it is. Definitely.
• 1:48:02
  Certainly. Without I've not heard them yet,
• 1:48:06
  but without a shadow of a doubt, I'll I'll just say one last
• 1:48:10
  thing as a as a love late letter to Terry Nation, I feel as if
• 1:48:16
  this book is the equivalent of pissing on his grave.
• 1:48:19
  OK, let's move on from War of the Daleks.
• 1:48:21
  Now there's. No planet called, you know,
• 1:48:24
  there's no planet of scrap metal called scrappier.
• 1:48:27
  So something like that, or or or anything like Iridius or
• 1:48:35
  Junglius or something, some really generic name.
• 1:48:38
  It's just missing that. It's Gravius, Yeah, And I hate
• 1:48:43
  to say it, but that was me attempting to be positive about
• 1:48:45
  it. I hope I succeeded a little bit.
• 1:48:48
  No, you failed completely I'm afraid mate.
• 1:48:50
  Oh great, well I'm sure it was entertaining anyway.
• 1:48:53
  Do you know? For some reason people tend to
• 1:48:56
  like the rants you know more than the positive ones?
• 1:48:59
  I can't imagine why. Ken Now I didn't ask you to do
• 1:49:05
  this, so you're going to have to improvise something on the spot,
• 1:49:09
  but if you have listened to the book club episodes, as you tell
• 1:49:12
  me you have, I do. Do you have a recommend for the
• 1:49:16
  end of the episode? I've been really wrestling with
• 1:49:19
  this. OK.
• 1:49:21
  You do. I have because there's been one
• 1:49:23
  in my head for a while and I don't know whether anyone else
• 1:49:25
  has recommended it. It's the NTH Dr. What on Earth's
• 1:49:30
  that? Right.
• 1:49:31
  This was a book by Jean Marc the Fisier.
• 1:49:33
  It was all the fag end scripts during the 90s that were
• 1:49:38
  supposed to be reboots. So there's all the Ulysses and
• 1:49:43
  Penelope sort of what do you call them?
• 1:49:48
  Oh, Leakley, John Leakley stuff that's all in there.
• 1:49:52
  And there's there's about a dozen abortive scripts to bring
• 1:49:56
  Doctor Who back after it finished and how they all go on.
• 1:50:00
  And it's I've not read it for years.
• 1:50:03
  I last read it in the 90s and it's still on my shelf.
• 1:50:06
  It's one of the few that I won't get rid of.
• 1:50:08
  Are the are the ideas appalling or are they, you know, sort of
• 1:50:13
  that they have potential? The only one that I thought was
• 1:50:15
  genuinely appalling was I think it might have been Amblin when
• 1:50:20
  they were toying with the license.
• 1:50:22
  And then Steven Spielberg said no, I don't think I will.
• 1:50:24
  But they were going to take all the greatest hits of Doctor Who
• 1:50:27
  and remake them as a brand new series of Doctors who's sort of
• 1:50:31
  starting from scratch. So you'd have the Daleks.
• 1:50:35
  But Davros was, he cloned himself to get himself out of
• 1:50:40
  the wheelchair. So he just became normal mad
• 1:50:44
  scientist instead of brilliant mad scientist, crippled,
• 1:50:49
  completely unable to do anything for himself and still a massive
• 1:50:53
  threat. You have the Sibes, which were
• 1:50:56
  the Cybermen, but they again, they were far more human than
• 1:51:00
  the Cybermen we got on TV, the Sea Devils, Silurians, the Yeti.
• 1:51:05
  So all the greatest hits of Doctor.
• 1:51:07
  Who they were all in one story, No.
• 1:51:09
  No, no, this was going to be the series.
• 1:51:11
  So they were like all the greatest hits from the entire
• 1:51:13
  history and remake them for this new series.
• 1:51:16
  I'm very glad that didn't happen.
• 1:51:18
  Don't you find all these what ifs enticing though?
• 1:51:20
  Like, I know some of it sounds terrible, but it's like, oh man,
• 1:51:24
  what if some of this had been made in the 90s?
• 1:51:26
  That sort of missing 90s Doctor Who is one of my biggest
• 1:51:30
  enticements. The Dark Dimension.
• 1:51:35
  OK. What they've got, they've still
• 1:51:37
  got most of them alive. Big Finish.
• 1:51:43
  I know Adrian Rigglesford is a questionable character, but just
• 1:51:46
  go and do the bloody thing. Well, they did one of his
• 1:51:49
  scripts before, didn't they? He did a 5th Doctor story, Did
• 1:51:52
  they? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:54
  Before we went to prison. There's a couple have gone to
• 1:51:58
  prison, isn't there? Is it Peter Finkelstein?
• 1:52:00
  He went for filming people in the lavatory.
• 1:52:05
  It's nobody, Yeah, nobody's beyond.
• 1:52:09
  Never mind. Never mind.
• 1:52:11
  Well, look, look, I would like to do a redemptive
• 1:52:15
  recommendation. It's just the legacy of the
• 1:52:17
  Daleks aren't. You most certainly I'm not.
• 1:52:20
  No, that's even worse than this. No.
• 1:52:22
  I would like to recommend both Power and Evil of the Daleks
• 1:52:26
  novelisations by John Peel. And it turns out when John Peel
• 1:52:30
  is bringing a David Whittaker script to life and he is saying
• 1:52:36
  or using David Whittaker dialogue and plotting and all of
• 1:52:41
  those things that are lacking in war with the Daleks, he's a very
• 1:52:44
  good writer indeed. So it is that same simple,
• 1:52:47
  simple, engaging sort of prose with momentum, but just with
• 1:52:52
  those two extraordinary scripts to power the stories.
• 1:52:56
  And they were justly lauded when they came out, their big thick
• 1:53:00
  books, far bigger than the regular targets.
• 1:53:03
  And actually, and I think that they may be responsible for the
• 1:53:07
  reaction to War of the Daleks, because after they came out,
• 1:53:11
  people were desperate for John Peel original novels and, you
• 1:53:15
  know, tour to their book shops for War of the Daleks.
• 1:53:18
  Unfortunately, then they read the bloody thing and realized
• 1:53:21
  that unfortunately, David Whitaker was no longer involved.
• 1:53:24
  But no, no, they're, they're very good novelisations.
• 1:53:29
  Yeah, I I think, I think when he's got the right inspiration,
• 1:53:33
  he can deliver the goods. I've never read Evil.
• 1:53:36
  I do remember in the dim and distant past reading Power and
• 1:53:39
  it fleshes out what is already a very good story with little bits
• 1:53:44
  of back story and I seem to remember that being excellent
• 1:53:48
  actually. He's he's no longer sort of
• 1:53:50
  jacking off Terry Nation. So he, he's, he's just writing a
• 1:53:53
  damn good story, which is probably the approach he should
• 1:53:57
  have taken here. Oh, Ken, thank you so much.
• 1:54:00
  No, thank you. I've realised just how busy a
• 1:54:03
  man you are and to use your scant time to reward the Daleks,
• 1:54:07
  I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that.
• 1:54:11
  Hang on. A minute cock.
• 1:54:12
  Wasn't this my fault? Oh.
• 1:54:14
  He was, wasn't it? You bastard.
• 1:54:18
  I tricked you, Davros. You're responsible for me
• 1:54:22
  reading it. I've got scant IQ points as it
• 1:54:24
  is, and the more I went through this book, the more I lost.
• 1:54:28
  No, it's been a joy to talk to you today.
• 1:54:31
  Can I entice you back for another book club?
• 1:54:33
  You can indeed. And since I failed spectacularly
• 1:54:37
  last time, what are we reading next time?
• 1:54:39
  Well, OK, I would actually like to you said this was a simple,
• 1:54:44
  you know, easy to read book. So I want to push you in
• 1:54:49
  entirely the other direction, for possibly the most detailed,
• 1:54:55
  complicated, sophisticated Doctor Who book I can think of
• 1:55:02
  that I happen to fucking love. I would really like to read with
• 1:55:07
  you The Adventurous on Henriette Street by.
• 1:55:10
  Lawrence Glorious. But yes, absolutely.
• 1:55:14
  What an antidote. We'd find more smarts in the
• 1:55:17
  first page of that book. Mind you, I think I need to get
• 1:55:20
  my magnifying glass out a second an 8 point heater.
• 1:55:25
  I think if you could get it on a on a Kindle of some kind, you
• 1:55:28
  can make that prose bigger. Otherwise, yes.
• 1:55:30
  Yeah, strong glasses are recommended it.
• 1:55:35
  Just there wasn't enough room in I think.
• 1:55:38
  I even think the page count for that one was increased.
• 1:55:40
  I seem to remember it being a tiny bit thicker.
• 1:55:43
  It was just in, no, that was two books in one comfortably.
• 1:55:46
  So yes, I have very fond memories of that.
• 1:55:48
  I got that as a Christmas present one year, so yes.
• 1:55:51
  Just some of the most like, staggering imagery you're ever
• 1:55:55
  going to see in a Doctor Who book, like visceral violence and
• 1:56:00
  the very premise of the Doctor setting up in a whore house in
• 1:56:04
  Victoria and London. I mean, that shit's all over War
• 1:56:07
  of the Daleks from the start there.
• 1:56:09
  Oh, it's all flooding back now because Sabbath rips out his
• 1:56:12
  heart, doesn't he? He gets married in that one.
• 1:56:17
  And Lawrence Miles hates Anji Kapoor so much, just read it
• 1:56:20
  with that in mind, All right? That's why she gets two scenes
• 1:56:23
  and she's a total cow bag in both of them.
• 1:56:26
  Ken, thank you for your continued association with the
• 1:56:29
  Book hub. Thank you for your book
• 1:56:31
  readings. I love them, but I know the
• 1:56:34
  listeners love them as well because I get a lot of feedback
• 1:56:36
  about them. It is it is extraordinarily kind
• 1:56:41
  for you to do that to us because they really do add some Polish
• 1:56:43
  to these episodes. You're extremely kind and it's
• 1:56:47
  my pleasure. As long as people want to listen
• 1:56:48
  to them, I will keep doing them. They are enormous fun.
• 1:56:51
  But Joe, thanks for asking me on board.
• 1:56:53
  I look forward to the next one. Let's head to the whole house.
• 1:56:56
  Quick the
• 1:57:39
  the the
• 1:58:39
  the.