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Hamster Book Club - The Scarlet Empress · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:08
  My name is Joe Ford and once again The Avengers have
• 0:11
  assembled Luke, Andrew and Mark. On our previous episodes we've
• 0:20
  covered Alien Bodies and The Day of the Doctor, and this week we
• 0:25
  will be covering The Scarlet Empress by Paul Mars.
• 0:29
  Oh, I'm glad no one looks scared then.
• 0:31
  And then read something else. Very interesting book and we've
• 0:39
  kind of gone there because Andrew expressed in a previous
• 0:43
  episode that this was one of his recommends.
• 0:45
  So it's a book that he likes a lot.
• 0:48
  Before we start on that, can I ask you all, I always do this
• 0:53
  bit of an icebreaker question at the beginning of the episode
• 0:56
  we've covered. You know, who's your favorite
• 0:58
  writer? What's your favorite book?
• 1:00
  Let's go to the other end of the scale now and talk about the
• 1:03
  most turdured Doctor Who in pros.
• 1:08
  What's a Doctor Who book you struggled with?
• 1:11
  Or I think the way I worded Will, that you struggled with
• 1:14
  the most. And I'm going to throw it out to
• 1:17
  Andrew first. Yeah.
• 1:19
  So my one, it's not necessarily a bad book.
• 1:23
  I think it's more kind of where it came in release order.
• 1:28
  So the one that I'm singling out is a book called The Sleep of
• 1:32
  Reason, which is a very late 8th Doctor novel, which it was like
• 1:40
  it came really late in series. And at the time, I knew they
• 1:44
  were coming to an end. They'd kind of gone bimonthly
• 1:46
  rather than monthly. And this book arrived and I
• 1:50
  normally taught. I normally took Tore through the
• 1:52
  88 Doctor books in like 2 days. But then this one, like the
• 1:56
  characters weren't really in it. It didn't really connect to the
• 1:59
  story arc. It was very like Doctor Light.
• 2:03
  And I think I got about halfway through and gave up.
• 2:07
  And the thing was, I just wanted more of the main 3 characters.
• 2:11
  I wanted more of the Doctor fits and tricks, like tricks
• 2:15
  basically. They never went into any depth
• 2:17
  in her character. And it was kind of, there's only
• 2:19
  a few books left and you're still not doing anything with
• 2:21
  this character. So yeah, I mean it's not
• 2:25
  necessarily a bad one. I think it just for me, in my
• 2:28
  kind of reading journey of that series, it was just kind of the
• 2:32
  wrong format of book at the wrong time and I just gave up on
• 2:38
  it. Did you ever go back to it?
• 2:40
  No, it's probably still got the bookmark in it from when I
• 2:43
  finished it. I think because the books that
• 2:45
  came after it were kind of a bit more arc focused.
• 2:48
  I just sort of I was like Oh well, you know, that one didn't
• 2:51
  have any influence on what came later.
• 2:52
  So I kind of never went back to finish it.
• 2:55
  Coming in six months time from the Hamster Book Club starring
• 2:58
  Luke, Andrew and Mark The Sleep of Reason by Martin Day Luke,
• 3:03
  you looked appalled when Andrew said that then.
• 3:06
  All right, I get it. It took me a while to finish
• 3:08
  that one too. But for me, it wasn't that I
• 3:12
  disliked it. It was.
• 3:14
  And yes, far bad from Andrew to expect Doctor Who in his fucking
• 3:18
  Doctor Who book. But I'm the same way.
• 3:21
  It's most of the time when, when that happens, I'm like, Oh my
• 3:24
  God. Don't read the new adventures,
• 3:26
  then you'll be in a lot of. Trouble.
• 3:27
  That's right. You got to prepare yourself.
• 3:30
  You know, when you're reading a new adventure, that's going to
• 3:32
  happen. But for me it was a subject
• 3:34
  matter with mental illness and things like that.
• 3:36
  I found like, oh that was a bit heavy.
• 3:37
  I'll I'll put this down for a couple of days and I'll pick it
• 3:40
  up in a in a couple of days time.
• 3:42
  So, and that was my experience reading The Sleep of Reason.
• 3:46
  You know, I won't go into a lot of detail.
• 3:47
  Why? Because I think I will cover it
• 3:49
  one day. Absolutely fucking love that
• 3:51
  book. I can't remember anything about
• 3:53
  it really. I should go back to.
• 3:55
  It it's all told from the point of view of a patient in a mental
• 3:59
  asylum that's been slashing her wrist, called Laska and I think
• 4:03
  my day said that he wanted to write a book about Laska.
• 4:07
  So, and the only Ave. he had was to write a Doctor Who book.
• 4:12
  So he does that. And you're right, the Doctor
• 4:14
  fits and tricks. They're not even named as the
• 4:16
  Doctor fits and tricks until halfway through the book.
• 4:20
  They're there as sort of working in the insane asylum.
• 4:23
  But yeah, it's it's very experimental.
• 4:26
  It'd be interesting to cover that one again.
• 4:28
  Oh, good choice. OK, what about you then, Luke?
• 4:31
  Sky pirates. OK.
• 4:35
  Will you explain that please? Yes, all right.
• 4:39
  I loved Original Sin and I don't.
• 4:42
  And I had. I didn't read them all.
• 4:44
  That was all coming out. I was a bit young, but I had
• 4:47
  that chunk and I was like, all right, Sanctuary.
• 4:50
  Yes. Human nature.
• 4:51
  Yes. Original sin.
• 4:52
  Oh my God. I really like this.
• 4:55
  Sky pirates. I've still never finished it by
• 4:59
  Dave Stone. So Dave Stone has two modes for
• 5:02
  me. Unfinishable and Oh my God,
• 5:05
  thank God for that. I made it and I get what people
• 5:09
  like him. For some reason, I gel with his
• 5:11
  Benny novels more than I do his. Stuff.
• 5:15
  Yeah, he's he's early. I haven't read all of them, but
• 5:18
  the the Virgin, Benny stuff. But yeah, Sky Pirates.
• 5:22
  I love the cover. I love the blurb.
• 5:25
  I get 50 pages in, maybe 100 and I'm coming out.
• 5:30
  It's too much. That's in my review of that one
• 5:32
  is 2/2. Everything's 22.
• 5:34
  It's too funny. It's too silly, It's too epic.
• 5:38
  It's that everything's taken. It's like that person at
• 5:41
  Christmas said, it's got to be the best Christmas ever and
• 5:43
  makes it absolutely interminable for everybody by trying to make
• 5:47
  it 2. Two.
• 5:48
  Yeah, that. I struggled with that one as
• 5:50
  well, although I do like his quirky sense of humor coming in.
• 5:55
  Mark, what? What have you got for us?
• 5:58
  Well, I'm not as widely read as all you guys, but I feel like
• 6:02
  you might be able to identify with this one a little bit.
• 6:04
  Joe, I'm going to not recommend Resurrection of the Daleks by
• 6:11
  Eric Saywood. Osno.
• 6:12
  Wrote that one. I didn't get very far into it.
• 6:16
  The prose is really turgid LED and it's just so bloody boring.
• 6:23
  And he can't even blame JNT this time round because he was long
• 6:26
  dead when he decided to novelise it dreadful.
• 6:30
  I didn't finish it. I didn't get very far into it at
• 6:32
  all. He'd.
• 6:33
  Find a way. You know Mark.
• 6:34
  He'd find a way to blame John Nathan Turner somehow.
• 6:36
  He would, yeah. No, it's one of the very few
• 6:39
  times I've actually returned. You didn't take it back?
• 6:43
  Well, it's one of these digital purchases within a certain time
• 6:47
  frame. You can just say I didn't like
• 6:48
  that and they'll give you your credit back.
• 6:50
  So that was it. Oh, Eric, is it true there's a
• 6:54
  sequence in the middle, you know, that bit where the Doctor
• 6:56
  takes Stein in the TARDIS from London to the ship, where we
• 7:01
  explore the TARDIS and go into all those different rooms?
• 7:03
  It's. Actually, I didn't make it that
• 7:04
  far. Oh, like I said, it was
• 7:07
  dreadful. I mean, to be fair, people had
• 7:10
  said it's really, really bad and I thought, no, I'll give it a
• 7:13
  chance and it was really bad. My other half put the audio
• 7:18
  version of Revelation of the Daleks on one night and about 10
• 7:23
  minutes in I said turn this off. I love this story so much and
• 7:28
  this is spoiling any enjoyment I could ever have.
• 7:32
  Did did the novelisation feat just focus completely on all the
• 7:36
  other characters and not one mention of the Doctor?
• 7:40
  Well, yes, because that's the story.
• 7:42
  But but also, like, it seemed to be compiled by somebody that's
• 7:46
  never actually spoken words out loud before.
• 7:49
  It was just such a bizarre use of language.
• 7:53
  Oh, it was, yeah, it was terrible.
• 7:55
  Which brings me to my choice, which is another new adventure.
• 8:00
  Oh, I feel like I'm picking on the new adventures because I do
• 8:02
  like quite a few of them, but I'm currently reading a book at
• 8:07
  the pace of a page a day at the moment.
• 8:09
  I've got to finish it for next week, so I need to pick up my
• 8:12
  pace. And it's a bit of a spoiler for
• 8:15
  that episode, I guess. And that is Ben Aronovich's
• 8:19
  Transit. Oh yeah, I've heard of.
• 8:22
  Yeah, I'm aware of the reputation for this one even
• 8:25
  though I haven't read it, but yeah.
• 8:27
  And do you know what? It's got a brilliant premise of
• 8:30
  this. As Ben Aronovich, you kind of
• 8:32
  think, oh, it's going to be great.
• 8:34
  Yeah, and he wrote the also people, which is a superb new
• 8:37
  adventure. But it's man, it's so miserable.
• 8:40
  This book, it's all prostitutes. And you know the doctor getting
• 8:46
  the doctor gets drunk right and and he's under the table.
• 8:48
  He's drunk out on vodka or stomach and wakes up in bed with
• 8:52
  Brigadier Leftbridge. Stewart's great, great, great,
• 8:54
  great granddaughter. I'm like, what is this?
• 8:57
  There's a scene where a woman's got cum in her mouth.
• 9:00
  I'm not even joking. People are saying fuck on every
• 9:03
  other page. We know you don't like Smart
• 9:06
  Joe, so obviously it didn't go down very well with you.
• 9:09
  The baffling choice that he made is that the biggest and best
• 9:12
  character in that book is the transit system.
• 9:14
  That's what all he's interested in, in telling a story about
• 9:17
  this transit system. And the characters are just
• 9:20
  ciphers to that. And so you don't get to know the
• 9:23
  characters, but boy, you know every fucking planet that our
• 9:26
  transit system is on. Every nut and bolt of every
• 9:29
  line, you know? There we go.
• 9:30
  We've we've just saved you from having to do the episode now.
• 9:33
  Because you. No, Because.
• 9:34
  There's someone on there like Andrew the Scarlet Empress who
• 9:37
  absolutely loves it, so I'll have to.
• 9:39
  Oh, fair play. Or derate myself a little bit,
• 9:42
  but have any of you read Transit?
• 9:44
  No. Oh, Lucas, how did you?
• 9:47
  Find it. Yeah, just read the Also people,
• 9:53
  yeah. It is, it's.
• 9:54
  It is a chore, isn't? It, and especially since, like
• 9:58
  everything about the also people so delightful.
• 10:00
  Like, it's like the complete opposite of transit.
• 10:03
  I feel like the editor read Transit and when God, that's
• 10:07
  fucking grim, will you chill out a bit?
• 10:09
  And then he did. And then he wrote the also
• 10:11
  people, which is just complete. There's almost a vacuum of drama
• 10:15
  in the also people. It's it's all about like this
• 10:18
  Dyson sphere and world building and just lovely people on it and
• 10:23
  fabulous robot characters. And somewhere along the line, I
• 10:25
  think a robot gets killed or something and there's a murder
• 10:28
  mystery around the robot. And that's as sort of dark as it
• 10:31
  gets. It's the complete opposite of
• 10:33
  transit. But yeah, Well, may I suggest,
• 10:36
  Andrew and Mark, that you do not read transit anytime.
• 10:40
  Just listen to the episode, All right.
• 10:41
  OK. Never miss one.
• 10:45
  OK. Thank you very much for that
• 10:47
  gentlemen as some really interesting choices as well.
• 10:49
  Not at all what I was, I thought somebody was going to say the
• 10:51
  pit or like the longest day from the EDA range.
• 10:56
  Do you remember that one? I mean, I don't.
• 10:58
  Vaguely. I don't tend to read the crap
• 11:01
  once. I tend to go to shore doesn't.
• 11:04
  It ban consensus and if look, if somebody's got a bad reputation,
• 11:08
  I'm not really a completist. So it's only really the kind of
• 11:12
  second-half of the EDAS, I think, where I've read
• 11:13
  everything because I was reading them as they came out, but
• 11:16
  mostly I just kind of cherry picked like, oh, which one?
• 11:19
  Which one does Doctor Who Magazine poll say is good?
• 11:21
  That means you must have had the best experience of all of us, of
• 11:25
  Doctor Who books, and also a completely armed representation
• 11:29
  of what those books are actually like, you know?
• 11:31
  I I own most of them, but they just sit there on the shelf as a
• 11:35
  one day thing. Don't worry how some of them got
• 11:38
  shovelled into a a furnace overseas.
• 11:40
  Did you hear about that? The the basically they they
• 11:43
  weren't selling around the sort of the time of the burning, so
• 11:46
  they were sending thousands of copies of of EDAS off to another
• 11:51
  country and they were being shovelled into a furnace and an
• 11:54
  orphanage to keep them warm, these little pee wigs.
• 11:57
  Right. That's going to make the eBay
• 11:58
  prices go up even more. That's awesome.
• 12:00
  Jesus, that's what. They've all gone well.
• 12:03
  Thank you very much for that, guys.
• 12:06
  Let's move on to the Scarlet Empress.
• 12:15
  Come with me to a land of spirits, flesh eaters,
• 12:19
  werewolves, tattoo guards, alligator men, intelligent
• 12:24
  birds, hydras, empresses in glass jars, glass men and giant
• 12:30
  spiders. A world of magic, of mysticism,
• 12:33
  of myth. Welcome to High Spiro, home of
• 12:37
  the Scarlet Empress. We're going straight over to
• 12:41
  Andrew immediately because he is responsible for this.
• 12:46
  So kick us off, Andrew, with a sort of overview of why you like
• 12:50
  this so much. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I just
• 12:54
  absolutely adore this book. And I've got such good fond
• 12:59
  memories of the first time I read it, which was the Summer of
• 13:03
  the Phantom Menace, So I could really like, pin it down.
• 13:09
  I must. I think it was about 12, and
• 13:12
  this was the book that I chose to get with my holiday allowance
• 13:17
  of my book to take on my summer holiday.
• 13:19
  Doctor Who Magazine said it was a great summer holiday read.
• 13:22
  And as I've just said, I did what Doctor Who magazine told me
• 13:26
  to do. It's my summer, summer holiday
• 13:28
  read and I think as a kid I just loved kind of classic fantasy
• 13:35
  but kids fantasy stuff and and this book kind of has a really
• 13:41
  strong vein of that running through it and it's just so, so
• 13:46
  packed with ideas and images. And yeah, like the first time I
• 13:53
  read it I enjoyed it just on kind of a level of it being a
• 13:56
  really thrilling kind of Rd. movie story through this
• 14:00
  fantastical planet. And then rereading it slightly
• 14:05
  older. You kind of get more from it in
• 14:08
  the way that it's kind of a story about storytelling and
• 14:11
  kind of a kind kind of a meditation on Doctor Who itself
• 14:17
  and how the the show kind of, well, the the show and the books
• 14:23
  and everything kind of are about reiterating the same stories,
• 14:27
  telling them in slightly different ways and doing it and
• 14:30
  bringing in different elements of storytelling and adjusting
• 14:34
  things. And yeah, it's great.
• 14:36
  I love it. I'll tell you what, there's not
• 14:38
  many Doctor Who books you can read, or plenty of Doctor Who
• 14:41
  books you can read twice, but there's not many you can read
• 14:43
  twice and get a completely different reading.
• 14:47
  I actually think this is a book you can read a third time and
• 14:49
  get another reading again. You can start picking out the
• 14:51
  influences from the book and things like that.
• 14:55
  OK, Luke, what's what was your reaction to reading The Scarlet
• 14:59
  Empress this time? I I loved it as a teenager,
• 15:03
  which surprised me, and I love it as down as an adult, which
• 15:06
  also surprises me because I've never had a high tolerance for
• 15:09
  fantasy like Wizards and Dragons.
• 15:12
  No, but if you swap Wizards and Dragons with Merca and Doctor
• 15:16
  Who and Sonic screwdriver, I'm in so fantasy world.
• 15:24
  I think. I think maybe as a teen I even
• 15:26
  held this off a little bit because I'm not a fantasy guy.
• 15:30
  I loved it. Now there are a few stages.
• 15:34
  On my second read through, I was like, oh, it's a little long,
• 15:37
  But those thoughts never lasted too long because by the time I
• 15:40
  thought that, oh, that's the new chapter.
• 15:41
  Oh, OK, we're good. And it switched it up enough.
• 15:44
  And I was just like, right. So yeah, as a guy who's not
• 15:48
  usually into magic, it's the other stuff that kind of brought
• 15:53
  me in, which was the the ideas of the book, the characters, the
• 15:57
  doctors. Absolutely wonderful in this.
• 16:00
  All the little, I wouldn't say digs but all the little kind of
• 16:04
  Nuggets and references and if you if you know a little bit
• 16:07
  about Doctor Who on the telly or just something about the books
• 16:10
  like Iris doesn't like the 7th Doctor like.
• 16:13
  No. Oh, we've got a.
• 16:15
  Cancer that later there we go. And Paul Bars was not a huge fan
• 16:19
  of the new adventures and little things like that too.
• 16:21
  So I I noticed a lot more of those little tiny things now.
• 16:24
  I guess having read a lot more about Doctor Who and books and
• 16:30
  and what people think of stuff. So yeah, it is.
• 16:33
  There's so many Nuggets. I felt like even though it had
• 16:37
  that disadvantage, it was so well written and so charming
• 16:40
  that it won me over. It was a bit of a feast.
• 16:42
  I liked it. It doesn't really hang, like you
• 16:45
  said, like it can sag a bit, but it actually doesn't really hang
• 16:48
  around in one location long enough, does it?
• 16:51
  That you're suddenly in a completely different landscape
• 16:54
  with completely different creatures, you know?
• 16:57
  And that happens sort of throughout this book.
• 17:01
  Most definitely. So that's that's it was it was
• 17:05
  always really good to kind of all right.
• 17:07
  I feel like we've done this a little bit too long but then you
• 17:11
  also get the other things that make me laugh and that's the all
• 17:13
  the kind of perspective changes like the the guy makes me laugh
• 17:17
  the most I think is I can't remember his name.
• 17:20
  He's frozen in ice for 10 years and no one likes him.
• 17:23
  Because he's really. And he he's telling everyone
• 17:27
  what's going on. And the solution is simple.
• 17:30
  Well, you've got the low level telepathy.
• 17:32
  Why aren't you using it Like he's like, I'm awesome and
• 17:36
  everybody should like me. And then, as you keep reading
• 17:39
  his point of view, you just think to yourself like this
• 17:41
  guy's a total. Dickhead.
• 17:45
  Oh, I forget about the characters, but we'll we'll get
• 17:47
  into that. Mark.
• 17:49
  All eyes are on you. I fear you may be the voice of
• 17:53
  of difference here. Well, I certainly didn't hate
• 17:58
  it. It's a good start.
• 18:01
  Yes. I'm not super familiar with Paul
• 18:03
  Mars. I've never read one of his books
• 18:05
  until now. I probably know his work best
• 18:08
  from the Do you remember those Tom Baker audios before he went
• 18:13
  in with Big Finish? And they, they had the what was
• 18:16
  it, the hornet's nest and the serpent Crest and the jacket and
• 18:21
  vest or whatever it was? There's there's there's a
• 18:23
  running thing, wasn't there? I found them quite entertaining.
• 18:28
  So I was certainly up for his style of storytelling.
• 18:34
  I like the scale of it. I just think one of the things
• 18:37
  that you can really do with pros that you certainly couldn't do
• 18:41
  back in the classic series is really give it that a sense of
• 18:43
  epic scale. And I like the idea.
• 18:45
  I'm a big Tolkien fan, so. This should be right.
• 18:50
  Having a quest was really good, and I like the fact they're
• 18:54
  meeting all these random characters along the way.
• 18:56
  So yeah, certainly, you know, it's not necessary.
• 19:00
  One I might go back to again for a while, but I didn't actively
• 19:05
  hate it, you know, It was good. It was a good read.
• 19:08
  I was desperate to know what you thought.
• 19:10
  You know, because I know as a fan, as we discussed in the last
• 19:13
  episode of Stephen Morphy era, you like a good robust plot that
• 19:18
  makes sense and ties everything up.
• 19:20
  A lot of logic and all of this and this book don't have none of
• 19:23
  that at all. It almost has careless
• 19:26
  abandoned. Yes, yeah, I did.
• 19:29
  Going back to what Luke was just saying about the little digs, I
• 19:34
  I did find it particularly funny when Iris is talking about how
• 19:37
  the Doctor had a midlife crisis and he started wearing any old
• 19:40
  shit. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:46
  So yeah, I enjoyed it. I had a good time with it.
• 19:48
  I I must admit it's it's it's a me thing rather than necessarily
• 19:53
  a Paul Mars thing. But just through various other
• 19:59
  commitments and things, it meant that my time to to read it was.
• 20:04
  Somewhat limited, so I had to take advantage of some of the
• 20:10
  the benefits of of modern technology.
• 20:13
  So I was using my e-reader to read it.
• 20:16
  But when I realised that we were getting fairly close to the
• 20:20
  recording date and I still had quite significant amount to go,
• 20:24
  I realised that I could actually have a a computer voice read it
• 20:30
  to me from Apple Books. So I just copied it over to
• 20:34
  Apple Books and chose a a pleasant voice.
• 20:37
  You can choose from about 30 odd different voices and what did
• 20:41
  you? Choose there?
• 20:42
  I asked. I had a lovely northern lady.
• 20:44
  Northern, Yeah, it's very nice. Little peek into Mark's
• 20:49
  personal. Life.
• 20:49
  Yes. Yeah.
• 20:50
  Anyway, yeah. Moving on.
• 20:52
  Yeah. So yeah, that helped me to just
• 20:54
  power through it so I could listen on the way to work.
• 20:56
  And yeah, that just helped. And I've.
• 20:58
  I've read the last a couple of chapters before we start
• 21:02
  recording this. So yeah, literally just snuck in
• 21:05
  over the line. I didn't.
• 21:06
  Know you could do that with ebooks.
• 21:08
  That is a game changer. I'm gonna start doing yeah.
• 21:10
  Honestly, it saves tons of time. And of course you don't.
• 21:14
  When you're reading something, you really have to think about
• 21:16
  it, don't you? Whereas when something's being
• 21:18
  read to you, you can just knock it back.
• 21:20
  It's going. To take it in, it's good.
• 21:21
  By complete coincidence, you know Paul Mars does happen to be
• 21:24
  northern, so it was a northern voice right in this book.
• 21:28
  For for my part I I was really surprised by this actually
• 21:32
  reading this again because I've not long found Mad Dogs and
• 21:35
  Englishmen and this is nothing like Mad Dogs and Englishmen at
• 21:38
  all apart from in it's tone at times and and it's humour.
• 21:43
  That's a really quick and the font is massive in Mad Dogs and
• 21:48
  Englishmen, whereas the font on this one was so small I was
• 21:51
  thinking about getting a magnifying glass at one point.
• 21:53
  Know the benefit of ebooks. And Mad Dog skips across all
• 21:58
  these different time zones and has tons of characters in it.
• 22:02
  It's doing all sorts. Whereas this is all set on one
• 22:05
  planet. He he just wants to create a ton
• 22:09
  of atmosphere, which like in that first chapter, he does so
• 22:13
  brilliantly with Sam and the Doctor walking around the souks
• 22:17
  and all of that. I was like, I want to be there
• 22:19
  so badly how he's describing it, the music coming at them,
• 22:23
  drunken revellers and oh please can I go on holiday to high
• 22:26
  spirit And it it is probably like the ultimate fantasy Doctor
• 22:35
  Who book isn't it? Like, it is leaning in a lot of
• 22:37
  those tropes. I loved it.
• 22:39
  Oh, I love. I love his imagination and his
• 22:41
  creativity and I love how ballsy is.
• 22:43
  He ain't scared to just go for it, you know, and think well,
• 22:47
  and I think they still have a bit of a kickback.
• 22:49
  When it came out, some people loved it and some people hated
• 22:52
  it. Because if you're going to do
• 22:52
  something different like this, what it feels like to me is I
• 22:58
  won't be rude to say this, but a massive finger in the eye to the
• 23:01
  new adventures because it feels like it's doing the complete
• 23:04
  opposite of what they're doing, which was very gun, very
• 23:07
  serious, very analytical, very psychological.
• 23:10
  There's even a bit in this where he says, oh, I don't like people
• 23:14
  probing into my mind. It's very nosy, you know, like,
• 23:17
  and they're completely pushing away from all of that.
• 23:20
  And instead he wants to do something a bit more lyrical, a
• 23:24
  bit more sort of sumptuous and just massively creative.
• 23:31
  I feel very confident as well, doesn't it?
• 23:33
  It feels like Paul Mott has come in with like a real idea of this
• 23:36
  is what I want Doctor Who to be, This is what the 8th Doctor
• 23:39
  Adventures should be. And in a lot of ways it has
• 23:43
  similarities to Alien bodies. I think in that kind of really
• 23:48
  confident tone that it has. And then also the kind of
• 23:50
  shifting narrative perspectives which feel like maybe, you know,
• 23:54
  Paul Mars had read that and then kind of took his own take on on
• 23:58
  that. And we kind of get the Doctor as
• 24:02
  a narrator in this one as well as we did in Alien Bodies.
• 24:05
  So it's kind of interesting that.
• 24:07
  Which was forbidden in the New Adventures.
• 24:09
  It was actually in the Bible that you could not have seen
• 24:12
  from the doctor's point of view. So that yeah, that's an
• 24:15
  interesting touch, fellas. I went online and looked at Paul
• 24:20
  Mars's block and he's got a blog piece all about the Scarlet
• 24:25
  Empress. So I'd like to read you a couple
• 24:29
  of excerpts and then ask you. Basically, Paul Mars is going to
• 24:34
  create some of our discussion points today because he's very
• 24:37
  smart man, far smarter than I would ever be.
• 24:40
  So here we go. The Scarlet Empress was one of
• 24:43
  those books I wrote as if it was going to be the last book ever.
• 24:46
  I pulled everything into it. Childhood love of Marvel Comics,
• 24:51
  Angela Carter stories and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights and
• 24:54
  Hanna Barbera cartoons, Ray Harryhausen monster movies and
• 24:58
  Cilla Black, LP's Marlon Dietrich and Vladimir Prop, Mae
• 25:02
  West and Lewis Carroll. Looking back, I was thinking of
• 25:05
  assembling all my favorite things, the sounds, textures,
• 25:08
  colours, in order to fight off anxiety.
• 25:10
  He was going for a tough time. He talks about he was going for
• 25:13
  a tough time. When he was reading this, it was
• 25:15
  to be very much my take on Doctor Who.
• 25:18
  I wanted to write as if this was my one and only chance to write
• 25:21
  for the series. I wanted to say the Doctor Who
• 25:24
  had given me so much in my lifetime and I wanted to give as
• 25:27
  much as I could back to it. And a question I'd like to ask
• 25:31
  you is what's your response to his style of writing, which is
• 25:36
  very unique, and sort of how would you describe it?
• 25:39
  Let's go run in the same order again.
• 25:41
  So I'll go straight across to Andrew.
• 25:44
  Yeah, I guess sort of idiosyncratic.
• 25:49
  Yeah, it's very, it's very identifiably Paul Martin.
• 25:54
  If you're if you were reading a Doctor Who novel with the author
• 25:58
  taken off, you could probably identify this as a Paul Mars
• 26:02
  novel. He has certain turns of phrase
• 26:04
  and tone of voice in the way that he writes and also in the
• 26:07
  type of characters that he that he uses, particularly IRS.
• 26:12
  And there's that real kind of playful tone and elements of
• 26:17
  camp, but also kind of pathos and serious bits.
• 26:22
  And you know he's the character work is really good and I think
• 26:26
  we talked about Sam last time as a companion and I think she
• 26:29
  really shines in this book. And you can tell that he kind of
• 26:32
  likes her as a character and treats her as a real person
• 26:34
  rather than a kind of something that has to be dealt with that
• 26:37
  you don't really like, which is what it sometimes feels like
• 26:40
  authors of the 8th Doctor novels did.
• 26:43
  So yeah, sorry, I don't know if that actually answered the
• 26:48
  question. Absolutely did.
• 26:50
  If this. If this was the only Sam Jones
• 26:52
  novel, right, I think she'd be heralded as fabulous.
• 26:56
  One shot, lovely companion from the Scarlet Empress.
• 26:59
  Wasn't she lovely to hang out with?
• 27:03
  OK, Luke, describe Paul Mars. Go.
• 27:08
  Interesting. I I don't love, love, love,
• 27:12
  love, love everything he does. But I'm interested in all the
• 27:16
  things that he does, especially the Doctor Who stuff, because
• 27:20
  it's going to be chock full of ideas.
• 27:21
  It's going to be well written whether I drill with it or not.
• 27:24
  He's there, a Doctor book. I know some of you guys love it.
• 27:27
  I found it a little. Maybe I need to go back and give
• 27:30
  it another shot, but I found that was a little too much for
• 27:32
  me and I feel it's amazing. You say that he was having a bad
• 27:38
  time writing this because and I get get the vibe that like, I'm
• 27:43
  having a ball reading it, no. He didn't have a bad time
• 27:47
  writing the book there. He was having a bad time in his
• 27:49
  life and he actually says the book was like an escape.
• 27:53
  Well, that makes sense because it's it's, it's.
• 27:55
  There's some dark shit in this book, but it's still quite a
• 27:59
  joyful read. It still manages to and how he
• 28:02
  manages to get all these different styles and things that
• 28:05
  should clash, like, you know, Iris and her boss and all the
• 28:11
  singing ABBA down, that's just going down a rope trip or
• 28:14
  something like that. And then you've got like genies
• 28:17
  and all this other kind of stuff.
• 28:19
  So all of these should not work. And he managed to kind of, well,
• 28:24
  make it work. So I thought it was awesome.
• 28:28
  Mark. Yeah, as the guys were saying, I
• 28:30
  think you just have a very distinctive voice.
• 28:34
  I I enjoyed the humour. I was expecting it to be a bit
• 28:39
  more comedy, LED from from my experience of those Tom Baker
• 28:44
  audios, but what there was there I really enjoyed, particularly
• 28:49
  the the comment about they'd worked out that the the Death
• 28:54
  Zone was nowhere near as big as everyone thought it was on
• 28:57
  Gallifrey. It was roughly the size of North
• 28:59
  Wales. Like Port Marion.
• 29:02
  Yeah, yeah. I did say he was cheeky, didn't
• 29:04
  I? Yeah.
• 29:06
  So yeah, I had a great time with it.
• 29:08
  The characters I thought were really good, and I maybe I'm
• 29:14
  being spoiled by you guys, but my 2 books I've read with Sam
• 29:19
  Jones, maybe they are the only two good ones, but she seems to
• 29:23
  come across really well. It's doing the best, all right.
• 29:27
  Maybe you guys can answer something I'm I'm obviously
• 29:29
  familiar with Iris Wild Time, mainly because you know, I quite
• 29:35
  often see Big Finish saying they've got stories going or
• 29:42
  whatever, or Katy Manning will be talking about playing the
• 29:44
  character. Is this her first appearance in
• 29:47
  the in the books, or is this an ongoing character that gets
• 29:53
  referred back to just in in this one?
• 29:55
  Or has she been in previous like?
• 29:58
  There was 1 short story before this, so that BBC books
• 30:02
  collection Short Trips. There was a Fourth Doctor story
• 30:06
  with her in which probably a few months before this came out,
• 30:11
  which yes, 4th Doctor Sarah Jane Smith, Iris.
• 30:15
  And she's sort of a bit of a antagonist, but old friend.
• 30:18
  In that story, there's a. Little bit at the end of the the
• 30:22
  novel where he talks about how he'd written a book with Iris,
• 30:26
  that she wasn't a Time Lord. This was just a character, but
• 30:29
  very much the same sort of character.
• 30:31
  Said she was hundreds of years old and going around, you know,
• 30:34
  getting involved in scrapes and things, and decided to introduce
• 30:38
  her to the the world of Doctor Who.
• 30:40
  So I wasn't sure whether this is where she comes in, but yeah,
• 30:43
  that's that's. Interesting.
• 30:44
  She flourished ever since I I would describe his style as
• 30:50
  having like a sense of grandeur and ambition to it, but weirdly
• 30:55
  married with a working class sensibility and sense of humour.
• 31:00
  And those two things should not work together.
• 31:03
  And they work together. I don't know if it's just The
• 31:05
  Clash because you've got Iris Wildtime in this great,
• 31:08
  brilliant fantasy novel, smoking her fags and listening to Dusty
• 31:12
  Springfield. It just shouldn't work at all.
• 31:14
  And it's glorious. So.
• 31:16
  And he brings that to pretty much all of his work.
• 31:19
  Yeah. So I think he's from a working
• 31:21
  class family originally. And so he brings that
• 31:24
  sensibility. And do you know what?
• 31:26
  So many Doctor Who books writers don't write like that.
• 31:30
  They don't write about sort of real people.
• 31:33
  And from that experience. And he really brings that to the
• 31:35
  novel. OK, well, let's let's move on to
• 31:38
  Iris. Who is this Iris on the front?
• 31:42
  This eye. I think it's meant to be the the
• 31:45
  Scarlet Empress sort of looking out of her jam jar.
• 31:48
  Yeah, is it someone giving two fingers?
• 31:52
  I think, I think is a meant to be like up against the glass,
• 31:55
  but the way that they've done it definitely looks like she's just
• 31:58
  giving you the V sign. Well, it was either that or
• 32:01
  something very rude, and I ain't going there.
• 32:06
  OK, so Paul has this to say about Iris, and I wanted to give
• 32:10
  him Iris Wildtime. She was a character who would be
• 32:14
  a female counterpart to the Doctor.
• 32:16
  One who seemed to know more about his past and future than
• 32:19
  he did, and one who had tatty Diaries to prove it.
• 32:22
  One who undercut his Time Lord bluster and called him Sweetie,
• 32:28
  a woman who dressed like a homeless drag queen, so we're
• 32:31
  not with her anymore, and who travelled the cosmos in a
• 32:34
  miraculous double Decker. She was mysterious, amoral and
• 32:38
  possibly sinister. She was the Doctor's unwanted
• 32:41
  love interest. His Irene Adler, his Catwoman,
• 32:44
  his Missus Slocum, all rolled into one Divine and profane
• 32:48
  package. Andrew Irish Wild Time.
• 32:53
  Yeah, I love her. I mean, I I actually, I love her
• 32:56
  more in the books than I do in audio.
• 33:00
  I think because I got so used to her being a book character, then
• 33:04
  having someone come along and play someone who you kind of are
• 33:06
  already familiar with. Like, I think yes to to me, I
• 33:10
  much prefer her in the books where you can kind of imagine
• 33:12
  who she is and and those kind of things.
• 33:16
  Yeah, she's she's great. Like she's she just cuts through
• 33:19
  all of the Doctor's bullshit, doesn't she?
• 33:21
  Like she just, she just, she's so brash and just, yeah,
• 33:26
  brilliant and just the kind of conceit of her being in this
• 33:30
  this London bus And you've got this brilliant image of a bus
• 33:34
  driving through the desert which oh, I wonder where the latest
• 33:38
  series. I think Russell and Moffett were
• 33:41
  both paying attention to this book, you know?
• 33:44
  Yeah, and I just. I kind of love that she's just
• 33:46
  so she's. There's so many parts of a
• 33:50
  character that are like kind of flawed and unlikable.
• 33:53
  Whereas I think when you kind of get these female counterparts to
• 33:56
  the doctor, they're often these kind of hyper competent, you
• 33:59
  know, River Song type characters where they're very sassy and
• 34:03
  they're always kind of right and kick ass.
• 34:06
  Whereas you know she just wants to knock back a gin and have a
• 34:10
  fag out of the side of the bus and kidnap gay men in her in her
• 34:14
  bus and go off on adventures, so.
• 34:16
  Yeah, she's she's really up for the adventure though, isn't she
• 34:19
  as well? Yeah, yeah.
• 34:22
  And I think, yeah, also that the fact that there's this kind of
• 34:29
  tragic sense to her, and particularly in this novel, in
• 34:32
  that she is, she's dying, basically.
• 34:36
  So there's this kind of desperation to her character,
• 34:38
  which kind of adds to that sense of danger around her.
• 34:42
  So she's not this kind of easy, likeable, Time Lord funny
• 34:46
  character all the time. She's this, yeah, kind of
• 34:50
  marginal dangerous figure where you kind of she's kind of a
• 34:54
  little bit of a dark mirror of the doctor of, you know, if he
• 34:56
  didn't have all these morals and if he was just, you know, in it
• 35:00
  for himself or willing to just cut the others and run halfway
• 35:04
  through the adventure. So she's not just a female
• 35:07
  doctor. She's a kind of, yeah, a kind of
• 35:10
  amoral Dr. But that doesn't. Necessarily make her evil like
• 35:14
  she's she's just yeah, got these facets.
• 35:18
  She really wants to shag him as well, doesn't she?
• 35:20
  I mean, there's Paul McGann. Why wouldn't you?
• 35:22
  You know, Luke, what do you feel about Iris Walker?
• 35:27
  And do you hear Katie Manning's voice when you're reading this
• 35:29
  book? I did this time in certain
• 35:32
  parts, but this the Iris in this novel doesn't say Chuck 100
• 35:37
  times, so wasn't always there. But but Speaking of amoral,
• 35:44
  sometimes I really love Iris. Like, I like the character, but
• 35:47
  I mean, in the context of this book, I found it at points just
• 35:51
  as frustrating as eight did, just as funny as some of the
• 35:56
  other characters did. And then, you know, all right.
• 35:59
  So a lot of writers don't like Sam Jones.
• 36:01
  Well, neither did Iris gets in the bus.
• 36:03
  Just fucking bitches their asses and just, I'm like, oh, wouldn't
• 36:10
  it be great to go on time and space and just have drinks and
• 36:13
  fags all the time? Yeah, I wouldn't.
• 36:14
  Until Iris got in trouble and then suddenly you've just been
• 36:18
  left there while she's driven off in the bus.
• 36:20
  So, you know, it sounds like might be fun to travel with her,
• 36:23
  but. You know the you know the Doctor
• 36:26
  does. You know all these irritating
• 36:28
  kids like Dodo and Adric in the TARDIS with him.
• 36:30
  You think, What are you doing? Why do you want to have them tag
• 36:33
  along with you? There's a passage in this where
• 36:35
  Iris goes. No, no, She's quite happy on her
• 36:37
  own, travelling about in the TARDIS, drinking.
• 36:39
  Her gins like human beings irritate her.
• 36:42
  I was like, yeah, that's the that's the time that I would be,
• 36:45
  yeah. Right there.
• 36:48
  Mark, what do you think about Iris?
• 36:50
  And what do you think Paul Miles is trying to do by having Iris
• 36:56
  recount adventures that are very familiar to us and putting
• 37:02
  herself in them? What's?
• 37:03
  Going on, Yeah, he gets, he gets very shirty with her for trying
• 37:08
  to take the credit for his past glories.
• 37:10
  Yeah. I think it goes back to what
• 37:12
  Andrew was saying about the nature of storytelling and how
• 37:17
  we sort of reuse the the same tropes and and stories over and
• 37:22
  over and they end up getting sort of blurred together, so to
• 37:28
  speak. Yeah, I think.
• 37:29
  When you've seen in there about it that random story generation,
• 37:34
  like the Doctor's getting pissed off telling all these birds of
• 37:36
  stories, so he pretty much comes up on the spot with the season
• 37:41
  five story generator insert. He's letting it out to be
• 37:45
  finished, don't worry. And what about Horace herself?
• 37:52
  Yeah, I really like the character.
• 37:54
  I just think she's just a fun, bonkers kind of, yeah.
• 38:01
  As you were saying, you can see where, you know, you don't
• 38:04
  really have to look too far to to see the inspiration for
• 38:08
  certain other characters that come along to a degree.
• 38:11
  I know that she and River are quite different, but obviously
• 38:14
  you've got Bernice around as well, which is another sort of
• 38:19
  inspiration for that kind of character.
• 38:21
  But yeah, I thought she was really fun.
• 38:25
  It's just another I don't know how.
• 38:27
  How often does she crop up? Does she come back again and
• 38:30
  again or? She's in about four or five
• 38:32
  books, and she's in tons of audios, loads of audios,
• 38:35
  Companion Chronicles, main range audios, her own audios.
• 38:38
  So she's really has taken off? So, spoiler warning, if you're I
• 38:43
  don't know why you'd be listening to this if you hadn't
• 38:45
  read it, but so she regenerates at the end.
• 38:48
  Does that mean that? She's is.
• 38:51
  Is there a drastic change to her character when we see her again
• 38:54
  or is it very much the same character but she's just she's
• 38:57
  had a bit of a a touch up and she's not quite so old as she
• 39:01
  was a bit of a touch up. Well, that sound a bit dodgy.
• 39:04
  Yeah, she's there's. Definitely.
• 39:05
  There's a different makeup. There's a different artist in
• 39:07
  Mad Dogs and Englishmen. She's sort of like a lounge,
• 39:10
  this sexy lounge singer who straddles a feather boa like
• 39:15
  she's strangling an Anaconda. I think that's how he describes
• 39:18
  it. And there's a different there's
• 39:21
  there's one called Bianca in the Wormery.
• 39:23
  The audio, The Wormery, which I've now just revealed the twist
• 39:26
  that she, but the whole idea is she's like Iris's valley art.
• 39:32
  She's the evil Iris, which is a very funny idea.
• 39:38
  And there was 1 description. I mean, I love Iris.
• 39:40
  I love Katie Manning as Iris. And basically all I can hear is
• 39:42
  Katie Manning. Now, every time I read her
• 39:45
  there, there's a description here about her leaving Gallifrey
• 39:49
  and why she left Gallifrey. She embraced the stink and
• 39:54
  swelter of the everyday. And that's why she left
• 39:58
  Gallifrey, because it was, you know, grandiose and stuffy and
• 40:01
  sort of the opposite of the Doctor.
• 40:02
  Like we've already said, I just love that about her, that she's
• 40:05
  so down to earth. She has a companion at one point
• 40:08
  who every time they go for the Time voice, he gets the rums.
• 40:11
  Like the Doctor would never have that, would he?
• 40:15
  Only Iris? Oh no, I think she's fabulous.
• 40:19
  We did have Adric peeking in the Bushes, didn't we?
• 40:21
  In Castro Valva. Off screen?
• 40:23
  Yeah, OK, well, let's let's kick back to Paul Miles then.
• 40:29
  Who says I also wanted to mess about with The Shape of Stories?
• 40:34
  Much is said about Doctor Who's endless flexibility, but mostly
• 40:37
  they are adventure stories. Even when they're not strictly
• 40:40
  linear, they are just shuffled about a bit.
• 40:42
  I think I wanted to think about other kinds of tales.
• 40:45
  Musings. Rd. movies.
• 40:46
  Meanderings. Picturesque.
• 40:49
  Picturesque twiddles. Not sure what that means.
• 40:52
  Epic journeys. Tales within tales.
• 40:54
  Whispered legends. Gossip diary entries, Interior
• 40:57
  monologues. Doggerel.
• 40:59
  Pointless flashbacks. Or at least have the characters
• 41:02
  entertain these ideas. How so?
• 41:05
  How did this book read for you? Insofar as it did all of those
• 41:10
  things, Andrew. Yeah.
• 41:14
  So it's it's very much kind of piece meal.
• 41:19
  It's kind of pieced together from lots of different
• 41:22
  narratives and perspectives. You've got bits narrated by
• 41:26
  different characters. You've got bits which are kind
• 41:28
  of filmed on a camcorder and then we're kind of told what the
• 41:34
  camcorder is seeing. And yeah, there's kind of
• 41:39
  individual stories for each of the the people that they're
• 41:43
  meeting on their quest that they're trying to collect in a
• 41:45
  similar way that the the alien bodies does it.
• 41:50
  And then it's kind of all reflected back in this book,
• 41:53
  which the Doctor finds in a market in the early chapters
• 41:57
  called I hope I'm pronouncing this.
• 41:58
  Crazy. Are they someone to pronounce
• 42:00
  this for me? Someone say that loud.
• 42:03
  The Agile IB, which is, which is sort of this Arabian Nights type
• 42:11
  collection of stories, but they're all clearly stories
• 42:15
  about the Doctor. So they're kind of it's also,
• 42:18
  it's really interesting the stories that he picks to choose
• 42:21
  that because there's loads of the time monster and that you
• 42:24
  know if you were thinking a kind of iconic Doctor Who, you
• 42:27
  probably wouldn't go there. It's I think it's that kind of
• 42:30
  high and low within Doctor Who itself as well.
• 42:33
  Like that the time monster is as important as Dalek invading of
• 42:38
  Earth in this in this story. So yeah, you've got the Doctor
• 42:41
  kind of reading this book, not really recognizing himself
• 42:44
  within it because of his slippages of memory.
• 42:47
  And it's never really explained what this book is, where it came
• 42:50
  from, what it means, why the Empress wants it.
• 42:54
  So you've kind of got Doctor Who being told in parallel with this
• 42:58
  story, which is this kind of fantasy, Arabian Nights, which
• 43:02
  brings in elements of other fiction and Alice in Wonderland
• 43:05
  and yeah. Total Paul Mars, isn't it?
• 43:09
  What what you just said there about he doesn't explain it.
• 43:12
  It's just there. It's part of the story he's
• 43:14
  making, the point he wants to make and you're not going to get
• 43:16
  an explanation and he don't care that you're not going to get an
• 43:18
  explanation. That's what he wants to tell.
• 43:21
  But again, also about that whole, this whole port man, two
• 43:24
  of the thing of just throwing everything in and just making it
• 43:28
  work. Oh, fabulous.
• 43:31
  It's another thing. This never would have been in it
• 43:33
  and you would venture would it Like if they hadn't commissioned
• 43:37
  this, that would have been like, yeah, that's sweet Paul.
• 43:40
  Now I in the last 30 pages put a sci-fi explanation on this and
• 43:44
  that would have just ruined the whole book.
• 43:47
  Killed it. Please go into the doctor's mind
• 43:50
  on page 107, please. Actually, I think we do go in
• 43:55
  the doctor's mind in this, Don't worry.
• 43:56
  So there we go. Yeah, I know.
• 43:57
  There's a there's a couple parts that are written from his point
• 44:01
  of view and it wasn't too dissimilar from the day of the
• 44:06
  Doctor is just got this kind of rambly improvised like James
• 44:12
  Joyce esque stream of consciousness way of of thinking
• 44:16
  and writing that that that's on the page is one thing that I
• 44:20
  could tell. And I can tell this from a
• 44:22
  certain amount of authors from this period because it's the
• 44:25
  time they grew up with. But you read this book and you
• 44:28
  know Paul Mars. Yeah, he he loves the Pertwee.
• 44:31
  Era Big time. It's very obvious, but it's it
• 44:37
  doesn't never felt like he'd rather be writing a Purwi novel
• 44:41
  like this very, very much feels like an Eighth Doctor story.
• 44:45
  It's very it's very him and it's absolutely amazing character
• 44:50
  moments. One of them does touch back on a
• 44:51
  Purwi story, but it's it's the first they want to go through
• 44:54
  this portal and there's. A.
• 44:58
  Giant spider there. And the Doctor's just like, hey
• 45:02
  Sam can can you come with me? And just that was just like
• 45:07
  this. It was another moment point, you
• 45:09
  know, where he gave the great blue crystal.
• 45:10
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 45:11
  And the. Oh, I could have the mind of the
• 45:13
  great one. Yeah.
• 45:15
  Thank you very much. And that's how they got out of
• 45:17
  it. He's been hanging around with
• 45:18
  that crystal for the past five. You must be joking.
• 45:24
  There was something in the pros that suggested that wasn't
• 45:27
  actually the legit one and he just picked up like a knock off
• 45:29
  copy somewhere or something. I'm sure I remember that.
• 45:32
  It's how you tell it, yeah, yeah.
• 45:35
  What about you though, Mark? Did you like all the the various
• 45:38
  sort of POV? Yeah, I think the style of it,
• 45:41
  sometimes, you know, when you get these shifting narrators, it
• 45:45
  can be a bit jarring. I didn't really feel impinge,
• 45:50
  the story at all. It gets quite trippy in places,
• 45:54
  the whole bit where Iris's spirit kind of goes onto this
• 45:58
  astral plane and starts, you know, visiting other characters.
• 46:02
  It's pretty pretty full on. But yeah, I I quite enjoyed that
• 46:07
  part of it. I'm going to park Paul Mars for
• 46:11
  a second, although he has got one more fabulous quote, which
• 46:14
  we'll come back to because I want to ask because we, we
• 46:16
  haven't really talked about the Doctor or Sam, really.
• 46:21
  And this is a second book we've done with the two of them.
• 46:23
  Well, we've got somebody who's barely touched the books at all
• 46:26
  here. We've got somebody who's read
• 46:28
  the lot and we've got somebody that's dipped into some of them.
• 46:31
  So how did they fare in this book, Andrew?
• 46:37
  Yeah, I think they're just, they worked really well as as a team
• 46:41
  in this book, as a as a pair of characters.
• 46:43
  And it's interesting that we get a different Sam to the one that
• 46:47
  we had in Alien Bodies and that it's quite a long time since
• 46:50
  that book for her. She's older.
• 46:53
  She's a bit more mature. She's kind of doesn't really
• 46:55
  have the crush on the Doctor anymore.
• 46:57
  So she's she's got a kind of a level of maturity and it kind of
• 47:01
  feels like she's just in it for the joy of the adventure and and
• 47:06
  and the fun of it. And the thing that I really like
• 47:09
  about Sam, I think I mentioned this point when we talk about
• 47:11
  alien bodies is that she has this 90s frame of reference
• 47:15
  which you kind of really lost with the new Adventures
• 47:18
  characters because they were all future gun people.
• 47:22
  So you know Sam can have can crack jokes about Munchkins from
• 47:25
  The Wizard of Oz. She can be belting out Shirley
• 47:29
  Bassey songs and and ABBA with with Iris which kind of adds to
• 47:35
  that like sort of domestic normality when we're talking
• 47:39
  about kind of the the fantasy knocking up against the normal
• 47:42
  in the everyday. And yeah, it's nice to have a
• 47:45
  companion that you can do that with in this era.
• 47:48
  She's got a throwing muses T-shirt which certainly rang
• 47:52
  some bells with this old. He keeps throwing out references
• 47:57
  and I can't. I want to say his name right.
• 47:59
  Is it Gila? Gila.
• 48:01
  Gila. Yeah.
• 48:03
  He keeps going. Will you stop throwing out
• 48:05
  references I have no understanding about?
• 48:08
  Yeah. And yeah, the the Doctor as well
• 48:11
  is a joy in this one. He's just got so much kind of
• 48:14
  love of life and you can definitely see that kind of the
• 48:18
  TV movie doctor in there a bit. And, you know, he's this kind of
• 48:21
  impulsive, younger version of the Doctor, who's just got so
• 48:26
  much kind of joy in him, but also this kind of uncertainty
• 48:31
  about himself and the not really knowing himself in terms of
• 48:35
  losing his memory and, yeah, having some having an Iris
• 48:40
  figure who knows more about him than he knows about himself.
• 48:44
  So yeah, lots, lots of really interesting stuff with both of
• 48:47
  the characters. And it feels like the book kind
• 48:49
  of engages with both of them as characters.
• 48:52
  I've got a theory, you know, about him having a bit of a
• 48:55
  foggy memory in this because Paul Ma said when he did an
• 48:58
  interview recently on this, said that they were basically shaping
• 49:02
  a Doctor Who had one appearance. So they were creating a doctor
• 49:05
  from scratch effectively, because you don't get too much
• 49:08
  from the TV movie apart from the fact that he's a bit romantic
• 49:11
  and full of energy. And I really feel like what he's
• 49:17
  trying to do is distance this series of books from everything
• 49:21
  that's come before. So he even mentions Lung Barrow,
• 49:24
  he, he and a couple of the 8th Doctor books and he says before
• 49:28
  that he can't really remember any of it and it's a bit
• 49:30
  worrying for him. And it's almost like the books
• 49:32
  are saying that. Don't worry about all that
• 49:34
  that's happened. We're doing our own thing now
• 49:36
  and we're going forward. It's just a theory, anyway.
• 49:40
  Luke, the Doctor and Sam. Sam's Sam's great in this and I
• 49:47
  think I might not like him more in this.
• 49:48
  Shocking, isn't it? And in Alien Bodies.
• 49:51
  And it's not a decent Lauren smiles at all.
• 49:56
  It's just this is after seeing I.
• 49:59
  Is that correct? Yeah.
• 50:00
  Yeah, so which is another one of the rare Amazing Sam books.
• 50:06
  If if that still holds up, I'm not too sure.
• 50:09
  So she's a little older so she's less annoying and I don't have
• 50:13
  to listen to her talk about Greenpeace for like 30 pages.
• 50:18
  Not for long though, because I've done one since and she's
• 50:21
  going on. She's wearing her Greenpeace
• 50:23
  teacher again. So.
• 50:24
  Oh look, I don't mind like you can like that stuff.
• 50:27
  It's fine. But don't make it your whole
• 50:30
  personality. For God's sakes, just be bloody
• 50:33
  annoying. So she's absolutely a delight
• 50:35
  for this. Her reactions feel, even if it's
• 50:38
  a crazy magical world, who reactions always feel real.
• 50:42
  I really felt that at the start as well.
• 50:45
  Like it felt like she was like kind of at a festival or
• 50:48
  something at the start. And I've been, I've been to
• 50:50
  those those like like people revelling and doing all this
• 50:53
  stuff. I love this moment where it's
• 50:55
  just her and the doctor chilling on the, I don't know, the wall.
• 51:00
  He's reading his, he's reading his that book and it's just a
• 51:10
  really nice kind of sweet moment and she remains this kind of
• 51:16
  level headed and kind of interesting throughout.
• 51:18
  So I wasn't expecting her to be, well, bearable and interesting
• 51:23
  at the same time with the 8th Doctor.
• 51:27
  I I love him. He just did.
• 51:28
  Did he just end the purge by using the magic book to call up
• 51:31
  some kind of Griffin? Hydra, yes.
• 51:38
  Like the Purge is happening. If you guys have seen that
• 51:40
  movie. Like, this is The Purge 20 years
• 51:43
  or more before The Purge even comes out.
• 51:45
  I was like, all right, this is getting a bit more bloody than I
• 51:47
  expected. That's the deputy going to sort
• 51:49
  this. Out Luke.
• 51:49
  Can we have a moment for that? The idea that these people that
• 51:52
  live in peace and harmony, they literally take them to extremes
• 51:56
  of emotions. So just for is it a day they
• 51:59
  could all get all their anger and frustration and just murder
• 52:02
  each other horribly and then they could be all peaceful again
• 52:04
  for the next year. I mean, I feel like this could
• 52:06
  work in society, you know? Sorry, sorry.
• 52:10
  Please continue. But yeah, I must use this book
• 52:15
  to get out of this situation. That seems reasonable.
• 52:17
  Yeah, a three headed hydra or something just pretty much
• 52:19
  decimates the whole whole town and things like that.
• 52:22
  So yeah, I feel like he is revelling in the magic of where
• 52:30
  he is, which I feel like brings me in on it as well since I'm
• 52:35
  not a fantasy guy, I'm like, well, the Doctor's throwing self
• 52:38
  into this magical world is even. Yes, we all know he's pretty
• 52:43
  much a wizard, but you know he's being a little wizard in this
• 52:46
  book and I just had AI had a great time with him.
• 52:49
  We should get to see this side a little more.
• 52:52
  He has a line, you know, he says.
• 52:53
  Once Upon a time I thought rationality was everything.
• 52:57
  Some kind of sorceries appear to work here, and they conform to a
• 53:01
  system of belief and science to which we know very little.
• 53:04
  Even to me they seem magical. So he accepts that there is
• 53:09
  magic in inverted commas going on here, but he understands it
• 53:13
  as a level of science that he just doesn't comprehend.
• 53:16
  I think that's a great get out applause, but to just be able to
• 53:20
  do whatever he wants. Which is interesting what the
• 53:22
  series seems to be doing. Yes, yeah.
• 53:25
  Very, very good timing on that, that pic Andrew, I have to say.
• 53:30
  Oh everybody, Paul. Now Mark the Doctor and Sam,
• 53:35
  your second book for the Doctor and Sam.
• 53:38
  Yeah, I mean, I I don't get all the Sam, hey, this is, she's
• 53:41
  great. And you know a a chance to
• 53:45
  experience another story with the 8th Doctor.
• 53:47
  Who's going to turn that down? It's a great one for him.
• 53:51
  It it is a great one for him. It's a very funny bit.
• 53:54
  Did you? The bit where I don't know if
• 53:56
  it's in the frackers. I think that's what it's called,
• 53:58
  isn't it? Where all those people fight and
• 54:00
  it's all from Sam's point of view.
• 54:02
  And Iris goes, goes in with her Venusian karate guy, it sounds
• 54:07
  like, oh God no. And then the doctor jumps in as
• 54:10
  well. She's like, Oh no, like so more.
• 54:14
  She's like, she's like the facilitator of a broken
• 54:18
  marriage, isn't she? Between.
• 54:19
  The two of. Them goes from one to the other.
• 54:22
  I love how the doctors take away from the whole thing.
• 54:24
  Is that the restaurant that they were at before it all kicked off
• 54:28
  hasn't charged them yet, so they might actually get away with
• 54:31
  having had a free meal. I like the bit where she goes
• 54:36
  corn. Just nick the book, all right.
• 54:38
  There's no one around to give them any money, so that just
• 54:41
  shows you it's not quite the Lily white Sam that we had
• 54:43
  before. No.
• 54:45
  Ask the Doctor I I think this might be the strongest book for
• 54:50
  the 8th Doctor in that initial run, right right up until
• 54:55
  Ancestor Sale. It's it's just everything I love
• 54:59
  about that. He's funny, he's he's energetic.
• 55:02
  He thinks of brilliant solutions to things.
• 55:06
  He's a little bit dark as well in his interactions with Iris.
• 55:10
  Yeah, he just surprised me on every single page.
• 55:13
  Yeah, I wish Paul Mars had written a few more of these, you
• 55:16
  know? But nevermind.
• 55:18
  We are Gary Russell coming up next week.
• 55:20
  No, no, I'm joking. All right, well, I'm going to
• 55:23
  kick him to Hall himself again with the last quote I've got
• 55:29
  from him, which is, it was never as simple as deciding to write
• 55:34
  write a fantasy adventure that was all about magic as opposed
• 55:37
  to a science fiction story about science.
• 55:40
  I can see why the book can seem like that at first sight.
• 55:43
  It was more about seeing what other genres and traditions I
• 55:45
  could draw upon. I was thinking about whimsy,
• 55:48
  surrealism, folk tales, as much as anything else.
• 55:51
  Above all, more than science fiction.
• 55:53
  Doctor Who seemed to me to be a compendium of fairy tales that
• 55:57
  just happened to have been told to us so far through the medium
• 56:00
  of late 20th century. Science fiction.
• 56:03
  In another time and place, it would have, and was in fact
• 56:06
  quite different. God, man, he's so profound,
• 56:09
  isn't he? OK, listen and go on.
• 56:12
  My question to you is this is how much fantasy can you handle
• 56:16
  in Doctor Who. I want a a good answer from you,
• 56:19
  Luke, because you always say you don't like it.
• 56:20
  And like of all the sort of fantasy elements of this book,
• 56:24
  what was your favorite, like what really struck you as as as
• 56:28
  being quite fantastic And you're pondering Andrew, but I am
• 56:33
  coming to you first. Now I'm going to have to think
• 56:35
  as I speak. So yeah, in terms of how much
• 56:40
  fantasy in Doctor Who, well, I guess we're going to find out in
• 56:43
  the in the next seasons. It looks like the series is
• 56:46
  leaning into that genre more than it has before.
• 56:50
  I think it's kind of, it's one of the flavours isn't it?
• 56:53
  It's like I think if I wouldn't want Doctor Who to be kind of
• 56:59
  100% fantasy. I think it's interesting when it
• 57:03
  comes in because it's something different to the to the usual
• 57:06
  wear. The rules are pretty much, even
• 57:09
  if it's made-up science, there's some sort of science to it.
• 57:12
  And it feels like with where the series is going now with the
• 57:17
  Shooty Gatwa series, although it's leaning into fantasy
• 57:21
  elements, there's kind of been a justification for it in the
• 57:24
  world blue Yonder story. So it's still kind of sitting
• 57:27
  within the Doctor Who framework. So yeah, I mean, I mean,
• 57:33
  although I love the fantasy elements of this book, I think
• 57:35
  like Luke, I'd say I'm not a fantasy person.
• 57:37
  Like I love kids fantasy and mainly things where it's the
• 57:41
  everyday clashing with something weird and more than the kind of
• 57:47
  high fantasy Lord of the Rings type stuff where it's just off
• 57:50
  in another world and you're in that other world.
• 57:52
  So I think for me it's that kind of interplay between the normal
• 57:56
  and the weird, which is where fantasy works for me.
• 58:02
  Where does this fall for you then?
• 58:03
  Is this a good example of the clash of the two or do you think
• 58:07
  this is balls to the walls? Well I think I don't really want
• 58:13
  to say like there's a degree to it for me because I think this
• 58:16
  is a really good book and I mean that's that's what it is for me.
• 58:19
  It's is the story good as it's saying something interesting
• 58:22
  rather than no, I don't want fantasy in my Doctor Who.
• 58:25
  It's if you're going to put fantasy into Doctor Who and kind
• 58:27
  of break the rules do do it in an interesting way and talk
• 58:30
  about something interesting. And that's what this book does,
• 58:34
  and that's how it uses the fantasy elements to say
• 58:37
  something about storytelling and genre and the way that Doctor
• 58:41
  Who kind of cherry picks from all these different things and
• 58:44
  uses it into something kind of weird and unique.
• 58:47
  So yeah, I don't feel like there is like a kind of scale of this
• 58:51
  is too much and this is this is not enough.
• 58:54
  It's kind of a yeah. What are you doing with it
• 58:56
  rather than using it or not? It does say explicitly, doesn't
• 59:00
  it? Those bits I said earlier where
• 59:01
  Sam's going, oh, it's a bit like Wizard of Oz.
• 59:03
  It's a bit like this, you know, she's literally pointing at.
• 59:05
  It's a bit like Muffet at the end of the last Christmas where
• 59:09
  she wakes up with that list of movies that has just informed
• 59:13
  the entire episode that we've just watched.
• 59:14
  You know, they're a bit cheeky, these writers.
• 59:17
  And also, what was your what was your favorite set piece or
• 59:20
  character? What was your favorite moment in
• 59:22
  this? Oh, I mean, there's so many
• 59:24
  like. Go on and list your top five.
• 59:27
  And my top five, I think, like I said, there's just so many
• 59:31
  strong images in the book. Like it's a really visual book.
• 59:34
  So I think this is my third time reading it.
• 59:38
  And and I couldn't necessarily remember how all of those images
• 59:42
  fit together, but it was nice to kind of revisit it and see all
• 59:47
  that stuff, reading it, rereading it this time, the bit
• 59:51
  that I really liked was the the the Duchess and the spider.
• 59:56
  So the Duchess is this kind of Android character and we talked
• 1:00:02
  about the spider earlier. So it's this giant spider who
• 1:00:05
  who guards a gate and then the two of them kind of have this
• 1:00:07
  romance and then they fuse together into this spider
• 1:00:10
  Duchess. And yeah, it was just like a
• 1:00:14
  really strange but kind of lovely moment of this weird
• 1:00:19
  relationship between the two characters and it's all kind of
• 1:00:21
  happens within about 30 pages and then you move on to
• 1:00:24
  something else. But yeah, I think that was a
• 1:00:27
  moment which kind of stood out for me this time, that kind of
• 1:00:30
  magical fusing those two characters.
• 1:00:33
  I could believe it was like the opposite of what we just said,
• 1:00:35
  wasn't it? Of the two, the two doctors
• 1:00:37
  coming apart with yeah, how about you there, Luke?
• 1:00:41
  We know you don't. You're not keen on fantasy, but
• 1:00:44
  how did it work here? I'm not.
• 1:00:46
  I will admit though, Matt Smith being that Dragon show, I've
• 1:00:49
  been watching it, so put a Doctor Who in it.
• 1:00:54
  Not. Completely.
• 1:00:59
  But you hear it everywhere in Doctor Who, and I think every
• 1:01:06
  fan thinks that that and it's this idea of Doctor Who can be
• 1:01:11
  anything. And I feel like.
• 1:01:13
  I feel like most fans like that. Yeah, And it except.
• 1:01:17
  Until they do anything, and then they.
• 1:01:19
  Hate until until they get challenged in some way like I or
• 1:01:22
  not challenged in some way or something.
• 1:01:24
  Just jars with them that I don't like it.
• 1:01:27
  But I like. I like that I like it.
• 1:01:29
  There's some Doctor Who I'll never like just because it's not
• 1:01:31
  my thing. But I like that they tried it
• 1:01:34
  and I I feel. I feel like this is one of those
• 1:01:37
  books I'm like like I remember listening to.
• 1:01:40
  I've listened to your Crooked World Book Club and they're
• 1:01:43
  they're they're like, oh, I wish there was more explanation for
• 1:01:46
  this, more explanation for that. I wish they had been a little
• 1:01:50
  bit less. They're in a cartoon.
• 1:01:51
  While the the TARDIS could go anywhere and go anything.
• 1:01:55
  It's in a cartoon. Done.
• 1:01:57
  I don't like that with this book.
• 1:01:59
  Paul's not going to be like a new Adventures, right?
• 1:02:04
  And and in the last 30 minutes ago, oh, by the way, we're in
• 1:02:07
  some sort of West Weld being with holodecks and it's.
• 1:02:12
  Terraforming. They'd always do something with
• 1:02:13
  terraforming. That's right, it's terraforming
• 1:02:16
  and nanites or something like that.
• 1:02:19
  He said in that interview he hates PO face science fiction,
• 1:02:23
  so you know you can tell he's heard a few Nick Briggs pen big
• 1:02:26
  finishes, can't you? Sorry, no, gone, gone.
• 1:02:28
  But this is being cheeky. And so this is one of the things
• 1:02:32
  that works like, I'm I'm not 100% sure Ruby Church worked for
• 1:02:37
  me. It was like a little bit too
• 1:02:40
  childish fantasy. It's fine, like it's a Christmas
• 1:02:42
  thing. It's not good for me but I was.
• 1:02:44
  I still finished it going like well I like shooty and I like I
• 1:02:49
  want to see what happens with Ruby and that's all really
• 1:02:51
  needed to do so I kind of like the clash of genres sometimes
• 1:02:55
  with Doctor Who and this book. If you look at what comes before
• 1:02:58
  and after this is a clash. I think every couple books
• 1:03:02
  before and after are done by good writers.
• 1:03:05
  There's nothing wrong with them but they have that PO faced
• 1:03:08
  sci-fi ishness that this book does doesn't.
• 1:03:11
  So this book shines if you don't know anything about anything
• 1:03:15
  around it. And this book shines if if you
• 1:03:19
  do, it's just like one of these kind of beacons.
• 1:03:23
  It's it's not going to be for everyone.
• 1:03:24
  I think. Like there's going to be some
• 1:03:26
  people listening to this going, I don't know if this sounds like
• 1:03:29
  it's for me, but there's someone who doesn't like magic all that
• 1:03:31
  much, I think. It is so Sway.
• 1:03:34
  I think this is as subversive as alien bodies.
• 1:03:37
  Alien bodies opened out like this huge, like arc plot and all
• 1:03:41
  of these details. But in tone, this is something
• 1:03:45
  totally new. And you're right, it's going to
• 1:03:47
  go one or two ways. And I think Paul said in that
• 1:03:49
  blog post that there was a bit of a reaction against this.
• 1:03:53
  But what you just said there about Church of Ruby Rd. yeah,
• 1:03:55
  it was quite childish. This has still got a bit of an
• 1:03:57
  edge to it, hasn't it there? There's a lot of violence in
• 1:04:00
  this. People are getting swollen,
• 1:04:01
  people are getting turned to glass.
• 1:04:02
  It's. Flamethrowers.
• 1:04:04
  Yeah, it's that sort of, you know, The Walking Dead.
• 1:04:07
  There's there's there's some darkness to it as well which
• 1:04:11
  keeps it fresh. Mark.
• 1:04:14
  Now, yeah, I'm you're a fan of Steven Moffett and I know you
• 1:04:17
  probably quite like Season Series 5 quite a lot, which has
• 1:04:20
  a strong family of thought, if that's been to it.
• 1:04:23
  I'm a I'm a child of the Graham Williams era, so I'm all about
• 1:04:26
  fantasy. Yes.
• 1:04:28
  You know, this is the time of the retelling of the Greek myths
• 1:04:31
  and you have adventures on Tara with princesses who robot
• 1:04:37
  duplicates and sword fights and stuff.
• 1:04:40
  This is, you know, this is my bread and butter.
• 1:04:43
  But as Andrew was saying, I don't think you would want that
• 1:04:46
  every story, because that would get a bit tiresome after a
• 1:04:49
  while. But that's why we like the
• 1:04:51
  variety. It's not always going to hit,
• 1:04:54
  you know, 100% for you every time, but it's always going to,
• 1:04:59
  you know, every story is always going to be someone's favorite.
• 1:05:03
  And that's why I like that variety.
• 1:05:05
  When it's written by somebody as skillful as this, I think it
• 1:05:10
  needs to be somebody who is as good a writer as this, who's
• 1:05:13
  already written a ton of novels before he's honed his craft, so
• 1:05:17
  he's come in stocks who fully formed.
• 1:05:18
  I don't know how many books you've read by first time
• 1:05:20
  authors in the Doctor Who range, but those are not always but
• 1:05:24
  generally the ones you should avoid.
• 1:05:27
  Andrew. Can I just put something out
• 1:05:30
  there? Go on.
• 1:05:32
  We've been we've briefly touched on Shooty's first story.
• 1:05:36
  There's been all this speculation about who misses
• 1:05:39
  Flood might be Oh, is it the Ronnie Is it this?
• 1:05:42
  Is it that? You don't.
• 1:05:43
  Think could it be? Iris.
• 1:05:46
  Wild time, that would. That would be pretty wild.
• 1:05:51
  Didn't someone say Auntie Iris in one of those specials?
• 1:05:54
  Yeah, Donna said it, didn't she? Wild Blue Yonder.
• 1:05:57
  And Paul Miles was like, yes, Iris, Wild Time is Donna's
• 1:06:01
  Donna's auntie. I've got to admit, I don't
• 1:06:04
  really like out and out of fantasy.
• 1:06:06
  I can't bear Lord of the Rings, these sort of quest stories.
• 1:06:10
  You don't have fun, Joe. I love fun.
• 1:06:13
  I love the Graham Williams here as well, and I did love The
• 1:06:16
  Church of Ruby Rd. too, but this really worked for me because
• 1:06:21
  it's very often channelled through Cat.
• 1:06:23
  I love Cat. I love good characterization and
• 1:06:25
  it's channelled through characters I really liked and I
• 1:06:29
  think the best part of this book, and I don't want to be
• 1:06:31
  rude to the rest of the book. It's the first chapter which.
• 1:06:35
  Sucks the scene so well, doesn't it?
• 1:06:37
  The magic of Doctor Who of it's like that very tiny bit at the
• 1:06:42
  beginning of turn left when they're down in the markets of
• 1:06:46
  the Doctor and the Companion having the best time.
• 1:06:49
  And it isn't cynical. And he he just feels it full of
• 1:06:54
  sounds and sense, and you really feel like you're there.
• 1:06:58
  I've just thought of something, Joe.
• 1:07:00
  I don't know if you might remember this on the BBC.
• 1:07:02
  There used to be this youth segment in the 90s on BBC Two
• 1:07:08
  called Def Two, and they'd have all these, you know, edgy
• 1:07:10
  programs. And one of them was one, a
• 1:07:13
  program called Rough Guides and it was a travel show and it was,
• 1:07:19
  it was a woman called Magenta Divine and she was very posh and
• 1:07:22
  had this other guy as well. And it would be, you know,
• 1:07:26
  they'd be exploring all these really exciting cities across
• 1:07:29
  Europe and, you know, further afield.
• 1:07:32
  And it felt very much like that, you know, they're setting the
• 1:07:35
  scene, they're going into the into the the streets and
• 1:07:40
  enjoying the the nightlife. And it just, yeah, that really,
• 1:07:45
  I just suddenly thought of that now.
• 1:07:46
  I thought, yeah, that really kind of marries in with that.
• 1:07:49
  I thought, I thought, sort of. All the book club I've done so
• 1:07:51
  far, there's not been a single chapter of any of the books
• 1:07:55
  where I'm there. I'm literally there and I can
• 1:07:58
  see what's going on around me and I want to and I want to be
• 1:08:01
  there as well. Yeah, it takes some skill.
• 1:08:05
  I think that's what makes it a really good summer holiday,
• 1:08:07
  readers. You're kind of exploring these
• 1:08:10
  exotic sunny places and it, but it also has that variety to it.
• 1:08:14
  So it's the kind of, yeah, you can just lose yourself in it for
• 1:08:17
  a for an afternoon and you've been kind of transported through
• 1:08:20
  this whole different place. You know, it's like a modern day
• 1:08:23
  keys and Mariners, isn't it? Because we go to a forest, we go
• 1:08:26
  somewhere snowy, we go to a desert.
• 1:08:28
  I love the Keys. Yeah, yeah, I love the.
• 1:08:30
  Keys and Mariners. Too.
• 1:08:31
  Oh my God, we're full. For more.
• 1:08:34
  Well, look first we've we've you know with the help of Paul Miles
• 1:08:39
  we've we've covered a lot of angles here.
• 1:08:42
  Is there anything we haven't covered that you would like to
• 1:08:45
  talk about? Any characters, any moments, any
• 1:08:48
  themes, anything. Say your piece now before we
• 1:08:53
  move on, and Andrew's frantically looking at his
• 1:08:56
  notes, so I'm going to throw it to Luke.
• 1:09:01
  Oh, nice. Hey.
• 1:09:04
  All right. So they're just kind of just
• 1:09:08
  little things I like. I like little nerdy things.
• 1:09:10
  Like Iris mentions to the Doctor that you just couldn't help
• 1:09:15
  bragging about how instrumental you were at the Battle of
• 1:09:18
  Trafalgar and the Doctor's. Like.
• 1:09:20
  What? So he hasn't done that yet, So I
• 1:09:24
  don't know if he ended up ever doing that.
• 1:09:26
  Hey, Paul Mars, Eccleston's doing audios now.
• 1:09:33
  Hey, why? Why not?
• 1:09:34
  I feel. I feel like we're pretty
• 1:09:35
  covered. It's it's a mismatch of it's
• 1:09:39
  like it's like the ugliest quilt you've ever seen.
• 1:09:42
  But it's awesome because it's got so much different kind of
• 1:09:46
  shit on it. Like it's busy.
• 1:09:47
  It shouldn't work, but it does. It's Colin Baker's code.
• 1:09:53
  Yes, this book is Colin Baker's code, but but good.
• 1:09:59
  OK. You look ready for me now,
• 1:10:01
  Andrew. Off you go.
• 1:10:04
  Yeah, I was just going to talk about Iris a bit more.
• 1:10:07
  And the regeneration, which is a really cool again highly visual
• 1:10:13
  scene which does she regenerates in zero gravity in her TARDIS
• 1:10:19
  and sends a video of it to to the Doctor and Sam and it's it's
• 1:10:26
  a Barbarella rip off so and she then regenerates into Barbarella
• 1:10:31
  she regenerates into into Jane Fonda and then the kind kind of
• 1:10:37
  the next book the Jane Bonder one was the one you didn't
• 1:10:39
  mention earlier Joe. He's the Iris of the Blue Angel
• 1:10:44
  which. Is.
• 1:10:44
  Oh, yes. Yeah.
• 1:10:45
  Yeah. Which is kind of it's it's
• 1:10:49
  similar in a way to this, but it's it pushes everything much
• 1:10:52
  further and there's it's a more kind of fractured story.
• 1:10:57
  There's lots of stuff that happens.
• 1:10:59
  It kind of interlinks on kind of A at a thematic level, but not
• 1:11:04
  necessary in a story way, and the ending can be quite
• 1:11:07
  frustrating. But.
• 1:11:09
  It's. Yeah, it's it's a really
• 1:11:12
  interesting kind of companion piece to this one in that it
• 1:11:17
  kind of takes these ideas and then pushes them further.
• 1:11:21
  And yeah, I just wanted to flag as well that that all these kind
• 1:11:25
  of incarnations of of Iris there, there are all these camp
• 1:11:28
  icons. So you've got Barbarella, you've
• 1:11:32
  got Shirley Bassey, Katie Manning, and you've got Sally
• 1:11:37
  Bowles from Cabaret. So there's this like she's just
• 1:11:40
  a massively kind of queer figure who comes in and disrupts these
• 1:11:44
  figures and she's she steals her bodies from camp icons.
• 1:11:48
  So yeah, I don't, I I don't really know where I was going
• 1:11:52
  with that. I just wanted to talk about her
• 1:11:54
  more and that kind of side of of her.
• 1:11:56
  Paul Miles is straight, right wife and.
• 1:12:00
  Kids. I do.
• 1:12:02
  You know what? Like he might he might write
• 1:12:06
  fantastic stories but the best thing he writes is those women
• 1:12:10
  like are force to be reckoned with.
• 1:12:14
  You know you said about the regeneration that did you get
• 1:12:16
  echoes of case of Androsani where the doctor had to go off
• 1:12:19
  to find that Acacia honey or whatever it was to save her
• 1:12:23
  life. Yeah, I I don't think I clocked
• 1:12:26
  that the 1st times I read it. But then this time I was like oh
• 1:12:28
  OK, that's another kind of echo back into Doctor Who and he's
• 1:12:33
  got this another quest at the end of the book to get this
• 1:12:36
  honey to help with her regeneration.
• 1:12:38
  Kind of like the bat milk and. It was a bit like, what's it
• 1:12:41
  called in from the sisterhood of Khan?
• 1:12:43
  What's that stuff that they take from that mountain elixir stuff?
• 1:12:46
  Here we go. Thank you.
• 1:12:47
  I used to. Get dry ice.
• 1:12:54
  Andrew looks incandescent when you say that, you know.
• 1:12:59
  The lemonade. What about you?
• 1:13:03
  Anything we haven't covered? I just think there's so many
• 1:13:06
  great scenes. And you mentioned earlier about
• 1:13:10
  the the, the fight between the Griffin and the, what was it?
• 1:13:15
  The Hydra? Hydra.
• 1:13:17
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was great.
• 1:13:21
  The pirate ship, that whole thing, and that was pretty cool.
• 1:13:25
  And the the creepy Heron, I mean that.
• 1:13:28
  Really. Yeah, that stuck with me.
• 1:13:31
  And then the whole thing where he gets his head lopped off,
• 1:13:33
  that's that was very cool. So yeah, just lots of really
• 1:13:37
  nice little set pieces. And as Andrew was saying, the
• 1:13:39
  whole the bizarre but somehow kind of quite moving love story
• 1:13:44
  between a giant spider and a a Cyborg with 10 eyes is just kind
• 1:13:50
  of cool. And the ultimate unrequired love
• 1:13:52
  story between Iris, Wild Time and the Doctor, which is a
• 1:13:57
  wonderful bit in the degree where the Doctor and Iris are
• 1:14:01
  falling for a time vortex or someone else.
• 1:14:03
  The 3rd Doctor, and she's taken it as a chance to keep to grope
• 1:14:08
  him as they're flailing. About.
• 1:14:10
  And he just goes on hand. Me, Madam, I've only got one
• 1:14:16
  thing I want to add, and that's just because it's going to annoy
• 1:14:18
  all those people that love the new adventures.
• 1:14:20
  But I'd like to to quote Iris Wildtime talking about the 7th
• 1:14:25
  Doctor, because I've got a feeling Paul Miles was not
• 1:14:28
  impressed. She says.
• 1:14:30
  You sound a might like that last incarnation of yours, a
• 1:14:34
  portentous little fella swaggering around thinking he's
• 1:14:37
  got the world's darkest secrets under his hat.
• 1:14:40
  Times champion, my ass. You are a pretentious old thing
• 1:14:44
  then, Doctor, and you've got on my nerves.
• 1:14:46
  Oh, Iris, I've never agreed with you more.
• 1:14:50
  I was reading it, going. Yes, someone speaking my
• 1:14:53
  language at last. Well, hello, fellas.
• 1:14:58
  Thank you very much for that. And thank you Andrew because
• 1:15:01
  that was a fantastic. Yeah, great choice.
• 1:15:04
  Well, thank you for for letting us read it again, shot.
• 1:15:08
  Through In a heartbeat, we're going to come on next to our
• 1:15:18
  recommends after I've completely forgotten what we chose for one
• 1:15:23
  and two. But yeah, same.
• 1:15:25
  Go and listen to him, fellas, if you want to hear.
• 1:15:27
  Yeah, yeah. Let's shake this up completely
• 1:15:32
  and we'll start with Mark. OK, I was slightly at a loss as
• 1:15:36
  to what to recommend, but then inspiration hit me as we were
• 1:15:40
  chatting as we record this about two or three weeks ago.
• 1:15:47
  It's slightly left field. There's a a fanzine called Warp
• 1:15:52
  Warp which you may be aware of. It's such a beautifully put
• 1:15:56
  together, I mean to call it a fanzine is possibly, you know,
• 1:16:01
  not really paying it the full services deserves.
• 1:16:05
  It's a beautiful, really nicely put together magazine.
• 1:16:11
  It's got articles, it's got really nicely illustrated comic
• 1:16:15
  strips, It even comes with a little DVD, which I haven't
• 1:16:18
  explored yet, which has got some animations on it.
• 1:16:21
  And it's just it's not the cheapest thing you're gonna buy,
• 1:16:25
  but it's worth every penny. Just, you know, when it arrived
• 1:16:28
  through the door I just just flicked through the pages and
• 1:16:31
  it's just really nicely put together.
• 1:16:34
  If. If Doctor Who Magazine is like
• 1:16:39
  the Twin Dilemma, it's for war. For war, The case of Andrasani.
• 1:16:44
  You could argue that, yeah. It's just really, it's just
• 1:16:48
  yeah, I was super impressed. I wasn't quite sure what to
• 1:16:50
  expect because I've not had one before.
• 1:16:52
  But yeah, that really blew me away.
• 1:16:55
  Check it out, Luke. What have you got for us all?
• 1:16:59
  Right, so I've been kind of paranoid, like, did I recommend
• 1:17:03
  this in the first two that we've done?
• 1:17:05
  I don't know. You definitely recommended The
• 1:17:07
  Crooked World once I remember that.
• 1:17:09
  Oh. It's it's it's definitely not
• 1:17:11
  that I'm Going for The Time Travellers by Simon Guria.
• 1:17:16
  It's one of the later PDAs, so I had to bide my time and be
• 1:17:23
  patient and manage to find one for 20 bucks.
• 1:17:26
  So it was pretty nice, if you like his Hartnell audios for Big
• 1:17:32
  Finish, I mean like the companion chronically Chronicle
• 1:17:35
  ones, which I do this is this is like that, but it's got, it's
• 1:17:40
  got, it's Susan E and Barbara. It's a time travel twist story
• 1:17:45
  that set in 2006. I think it's set the start of
• 1:17:49
  season two or something like that.
• 1:17:51
  And it's just, if you, if you like, listening for an hour to
• 1:17:56
  Simon Guria's world building of that Hartnell era.
• 1:18:00
  I do. He's 280 pages of it.
• 1:18:03
  And it's absolutely wonderful. Yeah, it's his only past Doctor
• 1:18:09
  adventure and. Got in just at the end, didn't
• 1:18:11
  he was? It the last.
• 1:18:12
  One, I think it was the last one.
• 1:18:14
  I think it's Atom Bomb Blues. I think Carmel got in last.
• 1:18:17
  Oh yeah, we don't talk about that.
• 1:18:19
  No, I'd. I'd never forget the Can you
• 1:18:23
  just open that book, please, and tell me, because I haven't read
• 1:18:25
  that for however many years. 20 years is the last line of that.
• 1:18:30
  This is Ian Chesterton, Mum, and he's brought me home.
• 1:18:36
  Oh, the suspense. Mum, said Barbara.
• 1:18:39
  This is Ian. He's brought me home.
• 1:18:42
  Damn, that really stuck with me. Wow, I'll take it.
• 1:18:49
  That's a great book anyway. Go out and read that, doesn't he
• 1:18:51
  Rewrite The War Machines and Remembrance of the Daleks in
• 1:18:54
  that book? I swear he's having a bit of fun
• 1:18:56
  with continuity. And and a bit of the 10th planet
• 1:18:58
  as well. Yeah, Andrew.
• 1:19:03
  So I've gone non fiction this time and I've chosen this book
• 1:19:08
  called Time Slides, which is a collection of Colin Howard's
• 1:19:15
  Doctor Who artwork. So it's all of his VHS covers
• 1:19:21
  from the 90s which just bring back such a kind of nostalgia
• 1:19:25
  rush for me. A lot of the classic comics
• 1:19:28
  covers and some stuff for Virgin Books as well.
• 1:19:33
  So you kind of get really lovely reproductions of the art and
• 1:19:38
  then with a kind of commentary from Colin and sketches of kind
• 1:19:44
  of, which sometimes show slightly different layouts for
• 1:19:47
  them. So if you were a kind of doctor
• 1:19:49
  Doctor Who kid of the 90s who grew up obsessed with the VHS
• 1:19:53
  tapes like I was, this is, it's such a beautiful, beautiful book
• 1:19:58
  and his commentary also kind of tells you more about his life
• 1:20:01
  and his influences and and yeah, it's just it's just a really
• 1:20:06
  lovely thing And as the kind of, as someone who runs a Doctor Who
• 1:20:09
  cover art Twitter account, this, this is an absolute gold mine of
• 1:20:16
  just really fascinating stuff. And yeah, I I've been planning
• 1:20:21
  to buy this for a while, but the web, the publishers website just
• 1:20:25
  never really liked me and wouldn't work.
• 1:20:27
  But I think there are some copies of this available on
• 1:20:30
  Amazon now. Not that we want to encourage
• 1:20:32
  people. No.
• 1:20:34
  But yeah, that worked for me and that he actually took my order
• 1:20:38
  and delivered it to me. So yeah, highly recommended.
• 1:20:41
  It's. Almost like photorealistic how
• 1:20:44
  he does people, isn't it? It's so.
• 1:20:46
  So do you have a favorite? A favorite A favorite of his are
• 1:20:52
  probably Snake Dance, which let me see if I can.
• 1:20:57
  Find it. Is it this like the crystal?
• 1:20:59
  It's sort of so you've got kind of got the crystal, you've got
• 1:21:03
  the snake and those kind of lovely sort of desert colours
• 1:21:07
  and blue sky. We're having a collective fag as
• 1:21:12
  of right. Now.
• 1:21:15
  Yeah, it's just so lovely to see all the artwork, kind of text
• 1:21:17
  free and uncropped, and it's got all the key to time ones from
• 1:21:23
  when they released the whole season over that for those
• 1:21:26
  series of months. So yeah, 90s fans, it's a It's a
• 1:21:31
  must buy. Sorry, I was looking around me
• 1:21:34
  then because some of those videos are near me, somewhere of
• 1:21:37
  his covers, but I can't see any. So he's bloody moved stuff
• 1:21:40
  around Again. Andrew, that's a great choice.
• 1:21:44
  Is it me? Is everyone?
• 1:21:46
  Yeah. Sorry I was so romanced by that
• 1:21:49
  artwork. I'm going to suggest non fiction
• 1:21:52
  as well because I've done a lot of fiction lately.
• 1:21:55
  They're completely useless. Encyclopedia, which is exactly
• 1:22:00
  as it says on the scene, utterly useless, but fucking funny.
• 1:22:05
  This is so funny. So it's by Steve Lyons and Chris
• 1:22:09
  Howarth. Steve Lyons, Luke again, man.
• 1:22:13
  He's everywhere and it's basically him going A-Z, just
• 1:22:19
  choosing random things from Doctor Who and telling a series
• 1:22:23
  of bloody funny jokes around them.
• 1:22:26
  Now, I have prepared a small excerpt and I know no one's
• 1:22:29
  going to laugh at all. It's going to be appalling, but
• 1:22:32
  let's find out. So under S we have Stavros.
• 1:22:38
  Yes, matey peeps. It's true.
• 1:22:40
  One newspaper did actually get the name of the Dialects creator
• 1:22:43
  embarrassingly wrong, twice confusing it with that of Harry
• 1:22:46
  Enfield's Kebab Stan proprietor or even Kojak's portly underling
• 1:22:51
  because it was such a nice feature about the series.
• 1:22:53
  Otherwise, we were considering letting the paper remain
• 1:22:55
  anonymous and thus sparing blushes.
• 1:22:58
  However, they went on to discuss some of the Doctors, other
• 1:23:01
  adversaries such as the Horrible Snowmen, and the reporter's
• 1:23:05
  personal favorite, The Ant Monsters of Zombie.
• 1:23:09
  Their belief that the first episode was entitled An Earthly
• 1:23:12
  Child just swayed it. Sorry guys at the Glasgow Herald
• 1:23:16
  Weekend Extra Diamond Show and it's just it's a reverend, it's
• 1:23:23
  it's not really proper opinions but have any of you guys read
• 1:23:26
  this? No.
• 1:23:28
  I haven't read it for years, but I haven't somewhere.
• 1:23:31
  It's got Steve Lyon's name on it.
• 1:23:32
  So yeah, I'm trying to. Have it somewhere it it is a
• 1:23:35
  genuinely witty book that has absolutely no right to exist,
• 1:23:40
  but it's very funny so so go and check it out.
• 1:23:45
  It's on eBay for about £500 so good luck with that.
• 1:23:51
  OK, well, that's how it recommends.
• 1:23:54
  Now, I did put out to you fellows and I can't believe I'm
• 1:23:58
  going to do this on episode about doing another one again
• 1:24:01
  and no one came back to me. So I'm just going to assume
• 1:24:03
  we're going to read another book.
• 1:24:04
  All right. And you can tell me otherwise
• 1:24:07
  off Mike. But Luke, we've done Day of the
• 1:24:10
  Doctor, which was Mark Cochran Bent.
• 1:24:14
  We've done the Skull Empress, which is Andrew Bent.
• 1:24:18
  Sorry, I can't believe you're all Ben.
• 1:24:19
  What book is a wish? Fulfillment there, Joe.
• 1:24:25
  It is What book is Luke, Ben. What are we going to read next?
• 1:24:30
  All right, so I need Sam to go to sleep and picture sounds
• 1:24:35
  great. So old Doctor Who's perfect.
• 1:24:37
  I've been watching a lot of season 13 as I go to sleep
• 1:24:41
  loving it. I love me some season 13 and I
• 1:24:45
  went for a book that I don't hear anyone talk about and he
• 1:24:49
  only wrote the one I remember loving it.
• 1:24:53
  Oh my God, I think this is one of the two missing adventures
• 1:24:56
  has already been chosen, but go on.
• 1:24:59
  It is. Oh no, he's someone's already
• 1:25:04
  chosen that one. That person has good taste.
• 1:25:08
  So you did say you had a backup though, right?
• 1:25:10
  I did. Now come.
• 1:25:13
  On How embarrassing. I have the other one.
• 1:25:18
  I here's here's the other one I prepared earlier So I have been
• 1:25:21
  watching a lot of season 13 as as you know I've just I've just
• 1:25:26
  told you and so how about the stands of time.
• 1:25:32
  No one's mentioned that at all. And in fact, that was more
• 1:25:35
  readily available as well because didn't that come out as
• 1:25:37
  part of the? Yeah, there's a 50th anniversary
• 1:25:41
  version of it with one of the mummies faces on it as well, and
• 1:25:45
  I'm pretty sure there was it. It became one of the free PDF
• 1:25:50
  versions on the BBC website back in the day, with new artwork and
• 1:25:53
  some additions and things like that.
• 1:25:56
  So yeah. If I don't have to pay £5000 for
• 1:25:59
  it on eBay, that always helps you.
• 1:26:02
  May have to read it off your phone though, it's the only.
• 1:26:04
  Trouble. Yeah, But yeah, that's fine.
• 1:26:05
  As far as I'll get, Siri. To read it to me.
• 1:26:07
  I'll remember that book being Absolutely Fabulous, but we'll
• 1:26:12
  see. I wanted.
• 1:26:14
  I wanted something season 13 ish.
• 1:26:16
  All right, fine, it's it's not. But it's kind of is.
• 1:26:19
  No, that's a great pick, fellas. You up for this task?
• 1:26:23
  Definitely. Absolutely.
• 1:26:25
  Well, before we go, thank you very much for your time.
• 1:26:28
  Thank you for reading all these books and coming on and letting
• 1:26:31
  everybody know what you think about them.
• 1:26:33
  Can you please let everybody know where they can find you?
• 1:26:36
  I know we've done this, but let's pretend it's the first
• 1:26:39
  time they've heard you, Mark. Yes, I am on All of Time and
• 1:26:45
  Space, which is a podcast where myself and my friend Ian Martin
• 1:26:49
  are watching all of Doctor Who in broadcast order.
• 1:26:51
  I know originally we have a fantastic rotating door of
• 1:26:58
  incredible guests who come on. Joe will be coming on at some
• 1:27:01
  point and you know, I know maybe we'll extend an invite to Luke
• 1:27:05
  and Andrew to to come along as well.
• 1:27:10
  Just warning I I am an absolute weirdo for planning years ahead,
• 1:27:15
  so probably won't be for you know.
• 1:27:17
  It's two recordings of you already, right?
• 1:27:19
  You haven't got to tell them you're a.
• 1:27:20
  Weirdo. I know, I know.
• 1:27:22
  All right, all right. So, yes, as we record this,
• 1:27:25
  we've done a couple of episodes for season six.
• 1:27:30
  So yeah, hopefully we'll have those coming out relatively
• 1:27:33
  soon. And where are you on Twitter?
• 1:27:36
  Yeah, it's Time and Space Pod. And of course, you can find us
• 1:27:39
  and all those great podcasting apps all of time and space.
• 1:27:44
  Andrew. So you can find me on Twitter,
• 1:27:48
  I'm at DW Cover Story, which is an account where I share artwork
• 1:27:55
  from and inspired by Doctor Who from across the ages.
• 1:28:01
  It's a great account. It's a fabulous account, you
• 1:28:04
  know. It really is, yeah.
• 1:28:06
  Well, it just takes me back to the past every time I look at
• 1:28:09
  these pictures, you know, it just makes me think, oh, where I
• 1:28:12
  was when I watched that video, when I read that book.
• 1:28:14
  Oh, amazing. Can you be more frequent,
• 1:28:17
  please? All right, I need more hints or
• 1:28:19
  nostalgia, Luke. Yes, I'm on the tweeting.
• 1:28:26
  There'll be just intermittently random Doctor Who things that
• 1:28:30
  I'll just tweet out. I've almost finished the Capelli
• 1:28:34
  era thanks to our Day of the Doctor episode.
• 1:28:38
  So I'm up to the Ice Warrior story in Paladies last season.
• 1:28:42
  So I haven't got that much to get left to go.
• 1:28:45
  So yes, there Grumpy Two EB is my, you know, electric boogaloo
• 1:28:50
  it stands for, I guess. But yeah, I'm.
• 1:28:52
  I'm there. Random Doctor Who posts in
• 1:28:54
  Japanese wrestling for some reason.
• 1:28:56
  There you go. What's not to like?
• 1:28:58
  Toxication mix. Anyone would think I'm the Matt
• 1:29:00
  Smith man. I've got him behind me there.
• 1:29:02
  But actually, Mark, you do have the Pandorica behind you there,
• 1:29:05
  don't you? I do.
• 1:29:07
  I do. Is that what that is?
• 1:29:09
  No, it's. It might.
• 1:29:12
  The Diamond logo might. It might be an attempt at the
• 1:29:14
  Diamond logo. Well done.
• 1:29:17
  Well, fellas, again, thank you very much.
• 1:29:19
  And we'll see you next time for our sequel to Pyramids and Mars.