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Hamster Book Club - Top Tens! (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:03
  My name is Joe Ford and I am here today in person with an
• 0:10
  esteemed Hamster Book Club member who looks quite scared
• 0:15
  right now, Mr. Michael Mills. Hello, Michael.
• 0:18
  How did you know I'd be here? How did you find me?
• 0:21
  I've been hunting you down across the time and space and
• 0:24
  here we are. What the hell are we doing here
• 0:26
  sitting down in this park? We're here to talk about Doctor
• 0:29
  Who books. We don't do that very often, do
• 0:31
  we? No, we thought we'd thought it
• 0:34
  lacking something from not being in the same civic public space.
• 0:39
  As usual, I've given you very little, so I know I've given you
• 0:42
  a couple of days, haven't I? Gave me a few hours notice at
• 0:46
  least. At least, that's when I
• 0:47
  remembered that you'd asked me to do this.
• 0:48
  Enough time to write all this down in your little book here.
• 0:51
  Yes, I didn't do it panically on the train.
• 0:54
  Oh, I did. No.
• 0:57
  So what we're going to do today is we're going to forgo all the
• 0:59
  usual nonsense of actually reading a Doctor Who book, and
• 1:02
  we are going to list our top ten least favorite and least
• 1:10
  favorite. Favorite, most favorite.
• 1:13
  Shut up. Doctor Who books, Of course.
• 1:17
  Well, where the hell do you want to start?
• 1:21
  I reckon what we'll do is we'll go back and forth.
• 1:24
  You start. I'll go next.
• 1:26
  Do you want to start with? I can't believe you've written
• 1:28
  top and bottom in your pad. What?
• 1:34
  How would I? Remember filthy Kit?
• 1:37
  I put top and hang on worst and I'm the gay man.
• 1:44
  We see this thing. I don't work within that frame
• 1:46
  of reference. Oh, yeah.
• 1:47
  All right, totally innocent. Let's go for it.
• 1:49
  All right, we'll come in do do one of your tops first of all,
• 1:53
  and explain why. Well, I'm going to get it
• 1:56
  straight out of the way for anyone who's been listening to a
• 1:59
  number of our episodes in the past.
• 2:00
  My first. Top Top No Lance Parkin.
• 2:03
  Oh well, sorry for the Time. For the Time is my first top
• 2:07
  dodgy book, because it is. It's a wonderful story that
• 2:11
  genuinely does something different, both in terms of its
• 2:14
  subject matter and in terms of the way it tells that story of
• 2:17
  what if Doctor Who became a dad but telling it from the
• 2:21
  perspective of his daughter. It's a wonderful, magical story
• 2:24
  that has that you can you can read easily and breeze through a
• 2:28
  decade's worth of story without really trying.
• 2:31
  But if you start to dig into it further, if you're paying
• 2:34
  attention, which Joe wasn't, then you also discover their
• 2:36
  entire world hidden within this story.
• 2:38
  And it's actually quite moving. It's quite emotional.
• 2:40
  It feels like it. It gives this character who had
• 2:42
  been around for 40 years at this point, something, something new
• 2:45
  to do and find something new to say about him genuinely.
• 2:48
  And not just, oh, we've said, what if he was a bastard this
• 2:51
  time, which is what Doctor Who tends to do when it tries to
• 2:54
  interrogate him and. Where precisely can people find
• 2:58
  an in depth discussion about this book between one very smart
• 3:03
  man and the stooge that he hangs out with?
• 3:06
  Oh, well, they did it on Doctor Who Talked.
• 3:08
  No, you can find it. Yeah.
• 3:10
  It wasn't as good. No, you can find it on.
• 3:14
  Yeah, Yeah. And that inspired us to do it
• 3:16
  properly. You can find it on You can find
• 3:20
  it on Hamster with a blunt pen knife from last October,
• 3:24
  November. Yeah, yeah.
• 3:26
  Well, last year, if you just keep scrolling, just keep
• 3:28
  scrolling. NTDC Father Time and we did well
• 3:31
  hour and a half on this. At least and then we did five
• 3:34
  hours with Lars parking himself. But. 2/3 of which you.
• 3:38
  Can hear? Oh yeah.
• 3:39
  Anyone. Anyone playing the Has Joe
• 3:41
  uploaded the third part of the last parking drinking game?
• 3:44
  Please take another shot. There is one member of the
• 3:47
  hamster community just weeping every night and it's you.
• 3:52
  OK, Well, my first choice for my top ten Doctor Who books is
• 3:57
  Father Time, and I'm going to give different reasons.
• 4:04
  One, because I think it's just beautifully written.
• 4:07
  We sort of talked a lot about the prose at the start of the
• 4:10
  book and how he sets the scene in the snowy hills and creates
• 4:14
  that sort of fairy tale quality. But actually this shifts tones
• 4:18
  throughout the book and he adopts the prose perfectly to
• 4:21
  that. I think it is probably the best
• 4:26
  depiction of Paul McGann, 8th Doctor in print until Gallifrey
• 4:30
  Chronicles, which is when Last Parking comes back to to finish
• 4:33
  the range. And oh, we talked about it a lot
• 4:37
  in that episode. I actually would like to say
• 4:40
  that I think the last third of this book is sorely underrated,
• 4:45
  and now I've had the many pertinent plot points for five
• 4:48
  times explain to me. I'm sure the next read will be
• 4:53
  even more gripping. Yes, absolutely.
• 4:56
  A lot of people say, oh, great book, shame about the last
• 4:58
  third. People say that.
• 4:59
  People who just didn't get the last third, I think.
• 5:02
  Literally writing out how to steal a space shuttle on a
• 5:06
  napkin. Yeah.
• 5:07
  Debbie Castle thinks, no, that's not going to happen.
• 5:10
  And then they do it. Yeah.
• 5:12
  And one of Doctor Who's most lynching scenes when he walks
• 5:17
  into the time engine and you get, yes, you get a next time
• 5:20
  trailer for the next two years of Doctor Who books.
• 5:23
  Which does show you how they were planning these forward.
• 5:25
  Yeah, anyone, Anyone who says the BBC books were entirely done
• 5:28
  on the fly. Well, here's one example of
• 5:30
  where it didn't happen. Do you remember how far it goes?
• 5:32
  I know you see mistletoe from an anacrophobia.
• 5:36
  And you see, you see the older version of the astronaut who
• 5:41
  turns up again as president in trading futures.
• 5:43
  So it's at least over a year. Well, I know because it goes all
• 5:46
  the way up to he also sees a Dalek because I think it was
• 5:48
  meant to run all the way up to the end of the Sabbath arc, back
• 5:51
  when they still planned for the resolution of the Sabbath arc to
• 5:53
  be that he's working for the Daleks.
• 5:56
  They kept referencing the the sun in the sky and the some
• 6:00
  something chronicle looking down at them.
• 6:02
  Yeah, yes. And the Doctor sees in that
• 6:04
  sequence something that he doesn't identify as, but the
• 6:07
  reader will recognise as being a Dalek.
• 6:09
  So I think, I think that was meant to finish around, I think
• 6:14
  that was meant to finish sometime around what ended up
• 6:17
  being timeless. So that was summer 2003.
• 6:20
  So at the time he thought he was trailing the next two and a bit
• 6:24
  years. Pretty impressive.
• 6:26
  Yeah, pretty impressive. Didn't turn out that way, but
• 6:29
  you know. I'm wondering if you know what
• 6:30
  actually did turn out to be the culmination of all of those
• 6:33
  books? Sometime Never by Justin
• 6:34
  Richards, if that is going to turn up on your list.
• 6:37
  But as we head towards your second choice, let's find out.
• 6:41
  Second best or second or first worst?
• 6:45
  Whatever you want. To do let's let's, let's, let's
• 6:46
  keep it going. Let's go for a what?
• 6:48
  My first bad book. Oh, great.
• 6:50
  Yeah, I'm going to say Revelation of the Daleks by Eric
• 6:54
  Sabers. Oh, you've already done this
• 6:55
  one. Yes, but it bears repeating
• 6:57
  because it's truly terrible. Contains the line.
• 7:00
  It's a shame about Dad. He was a wonderful father and
• 7:04
  one of the best agronomists in the Galaxy.
• 7:06
  You're never going to let that go.
• 7:07
  Why? If they if Eric Saywood had
• 7:12
  wrote it down and worse, BBC Books had the temerity to
• 7:14
  publish it and to charge people money and I got a lie and asked
• 7:18
  Terry Malloy to read it for the audio book.
• 7:21
  I mean it is it is true. People say this is a people say
• 7:25
  this a lot bad. This is bad books.
• 7:26
  How did this get published? It's genuinely a terribly
• 7:29
  written book. Not quite the worst thing that
• 7:32
  Terry Malloy has been asked to read, though, is it?
• 7:34
  Spoilers. I mean, it might be I don't, I
• 7:38
  don't have to cut a few episodes, but.
• 7:40
  Is there anything redeemable about this book at all?
• 7:44
  Did you finish it? I did, I did finish it, but
• 7:46
  that's because I have the toxic trait that I find it hard to
• 7:49
  give up on books when I'm even when I'm not enjoying them.
• 7:52
  Is there anything redeemable at all?
• 7:54
  I thought the the front cover of the target version was quite
• 7:57
  nice actually. That was quite good.
• 8:01
  It prompted me to go back and watch the TV version again.
• 8:03
  I quite like the TV version. There isn't.
• 8:05
  Lovely direction. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 8:08
  No, there isn't much good to say about this.
• 8:10
  Please do not. Please genuinely, genuinely do
• 8:13
  not waste your money on this book.
• 8:14
  A book so bad. Two separate book clubbers have
• 8:19
  have not recommended it when I've asked for them to to find a
• 8:23
  book that they really really hated.
• 8:25
  OK well then I'll I'll do one that I didn't enjoy as well.
• 8:28
  I would like to recommend for the Bin Kersal by Peter
• 8:33
  Angelidis. It's how you say his name.
• 8:38
  Yeah, I don't. Know, and the only reason I
• 8:42
  really want to be this is because this book stopped me
• 8:45
  reading Doctor Who books for about two years.
• 8:49
  It was so boring. I don't know how you could take
• 8:52
  a werewolf tale and make it quite this dull.
• 8:55
  Do you remember anything about this?
• 8:57
  I have never actually read cursal, but isn't it?
• 8:59
  But it sounds like it should be exciting.
• 9:01
  Werewolves in a theme park in space.
• 9:03
  Oh, is that not a great book? I I don't really find Angelica's
• 9:08
  prose particularly engaging. It's during that period of the
• 9:12
  8th Doctor and Sam where they're both highly generic characters
• 9:15
  unless a very good writer is writing for them.
• 9:19
  It was just really, really boring and none of it's retained
• 9:22
  in my head. It's a werewolf story where I
• 9:24
  can't remember the werewolves now.
• 9:26
  I remember a lot about Wolfsbane, which Jacqueline
• 9:28
  Rayner wrote most. Most importantly that Harry
• 9:31
  Sullivan died. Oh, spoilers, so did he?
• 9:35
  Well, no he didn't. They opened the doors in
• 9:37
  sometime. Never.
• 9:38
  And all the characters sprung back to life.
• 9:40
  Oh, sorry, spoilers, these are old books.
• 9:43
  Let's move back to you then. You want it's OK a my second
• 9:47
  good book. Oh, go on.
• 9:49
  My second good book is going to be The Day of the Doctor by
• 9:51
  Stephen Moffitt. Oh, covered Not by you.
• 9:54
  No, by by lesser people, but nonetheless, I'm sure they have.
• 9:58
  I'm sure they had insightful things to say about it.
• 10:00
  Who? Who did that on the book club?
• 10:02
  That was Mark Cockrum. OK.
• 10:05
  Luke and Andrew now Luke and Andrew got on but Mark Cochran
• 10:09
  realised he was never going to write read a book as good as
• 10:11
  that, so stopped at that. Point.
• 10:13
  Well, that's fair enough. No, he did the Scarlet Empress
• 10:15
  after that and then he stopped after.
• 10:16
  That there you go, 2 for two. So no, it's a wonderful book.
• 10:19
  It it takes one of Doctor, whose biggest stories and somehow
• 10:22
  makes it even bigger. I think it is Moffitt showing
• 10:26
  that he can, showing that he can do prose that he is not.
• 10:29
  He is not exhausted afterwards. It was the first thing he did.
• 10:31
  He finished Doctor Who, he did twice upon a time and he said
• 10:35
  the 1st post Doctor Who job he had was writing The Day of the
• 10:39
  Doctor and I think it was because Russell D Davis had
• 10:41
  agreed to do Rose. So he went well, if Russell's
• 10:43
  doing one, I'll, I'll do one. It is, it is, it is surprising.
• 10:47
  It is as intricate as you would expect from from Stephen
• 10:50
  Moffitt. It interrogates the story itself
• 10:53
  and reapproaches it in different ways.
• 10:55
  It's the best thing of you know, we all, we all love a
• 10:57
  straightforward Terrance Dix novelisation, right.
• 11:00
  But. This is not that.
• 11:01
  This is almost the opposite. This is I am going to cover the
• 11:05
  same story that was on TV, but I'm not going to do it in any
• 11:09
  way that is recognizable from what was done on TV.
• 11:12
  He he he finds new new themes in the story, new things to bring
• 11:16
  out this tragedy of the Doctor returning to the the cell in in
• 11:20
  the tower three times across his life is that is brilliant.
• 11:23
  In the. Book is clever, it's fantastic.
• 11:26
  And he does. He does the sort of clever
• 11:27
  things that annoy people who who he's brilliantly trying.
• 11:31
  He's annoying exactly as all people who get who to get
• 11:33
  annoyed by these things. So there is an.
• 11:34
  Andrew was very annoying about the lemonade.
• 11:38
  Which is what? Explain that, please.
• 11:41
  So there is a narrator narrating all this, and the identity of
• 11:45
  the person narrating the book is a spoiler that I'm not gonna
• 11:47
  touch on here, but. Staying spoiler.
• 11:51
  It's relatively spoiler free as far as possible given these are
• 11:53
  just brief ones, but there is the suggestion that the
• 11:57
  concoction that the 8th Doctor drinks that turns him into the
• 12:00
  War Doctor is just lemon is just lemonade and some dry and some
• 12:03
  dry eyes. And I think a lot of people get
• 12:04
  very annoyed about this. They forget.
• 12:06
  There's also a bit where the 8th Doctor remembers that he was
• 12:09
  colour blind for the 1st 2 regenerations.
• 12:12
  That annoyed me that bit. What people get annoyed by this
• 12:15
  fell through eyes is that it's a joke.
• 12:18
  I think the. What about the Peter cushion
• 12:20
  bit? That's brilliant.
• 12:21
  That's brilliant. They, they, they.
• 12:23
  Steven Moffett wasn't allowed to use the Peter Cushing posters in
• 12:26
  the TV version, so in the novelisation he has them watch
• 12:30
  both films on VHS. Wonderful.
• 12:33
  It's. About the innovation Zone, like
• 12:35
  the climax of the book has all of the doctors doing wonderfully
• 12:41
  heroic things, the sort of things if you had CGI had a lot
• 12:43
  of money that you would he would have done it, wouldn't he?
• 12:46
  He did what he could with those tallnesses, but.
• 12:49
  Yeah, so instead of having all the sizes whizzing around, he
• 12:52
  has the Doctors turning up and rescuing it.
• 12:54
  This moving a planet across space and time and dimensions is
• 12:57
  going to create all sorts of havoc.
• 12:58
  So he has the Doctors save everyone individually on
• 13:01
  Gallifrey. It's a fantastic.
• 13:03
  Season. I'm not going to spoil this
• 13:05
  surprise, unusually for me, but there is a surprise appearance
• 13:10
  of somebody at the end of the book which genuinely made my
• 13:14
  heart melt. Yes, it was.
• 13:16
  It was a brilliant target. And in amongst it all as well,
• 13:19
  he he gives a happy ending to one of the saddest scenes he
• 13:22
  ever wrote. But I will.
• 13:24
  What's that? Well, it'd be pretty when All
• 13:28
  right, when we. Look so sheepish right now.
• 13:32
  That Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, OH.
• 13:34
  Yeah, I've just remembered. Did not.
• 13:36
  Spoilers. Read the book.
• 13:38
  It's it's a beautiful bit. Oh, some of the weight off of
• 13:43
  me. Thank you.
• 13:44
  I've been holding that phone for ages.
• 13:46
  Thank you very much, Michael. OK, my second choice then is,
• 13:50
  oh, this might be an unusual choice, Lucifer Rising by Andy
• 13:55
  Lane and Jim Mortimer as a new adventure.
• 13:59
  And I haven't read it for years so I'll probably do it for the
• 14:01
  book club and it'll be absolutely terrible.
• 14:05
  But I just remembered it takes the IMC Corporation, yes from
• 14:09
  Colony and Space, A bold starting point for any writers
• 14:14
  and takes them into the future and presents it in such a
• 14:17
  brilliant way. It brings Ace back to the new
• 14:20
  adventures. It's new Ace, the hardened space
• 14:23
  pitch in the hands of actual capable writers that can make
• 14:26
  her into a person. It's got.
• 14:28
  I remember having the 7th Doctor and Benny at the height of their
• 14:31
  powers and it just told a really sophisticated science fiction
• 14:37
  story with interesting morality in it too, in a way that I feel
• 14:42
  the New Adventures did at their best when they did their, their
• 14:45
  future history, or whatever you want to call it, their, their
• 14:47
  sort of near future storytelling.
• 14:51
  Sometimes it was absolutely ghastly, like Shadow Mind, and
• 14:55
  other times it was really sophisticated, like Lucifer
• 14:58
  Rising. You've not read it, have you?
• 15:00
  I have not. Can we do that one please?
• 15:01
  Yes, it's it's a really fantastic book.
• 15:03
  I think you'll be. And Jim Mortimer at his best and
• 15:06
  Andy Lane at his best. They're too.
• 15:08
  Have you done all Consuming fire?
• 15:09
  Have you read that one? Yes, I have.
• 15:11
  Yeah. He's a great writer.
• 15:13
  So All right, coming to a book club near you, Loose for rising.
• 15:16
  New Ace AKA PVC Ace, Yeah. That's the one, Yeah.
• 15:20
  Kinky ace. Right.
• 15:22
  Well, for my second bad Doctor Who book, I'm going to do The
• 15:27
  Dalek Generation by Nicholas. Briggs Oh, OK.
• 15:30
  Go on, explain yourself, Sir. Nicholas Briggs got to write a
• 15:34
  new series adventure and there's a lot of Nicholas Briggs hate
• 15:38
  out there. And I don't necessarily want to
• 15:39
  join a pylon, but there's. Literally are joining.
• 15:41
  That but and yes, I find myself doing so despite my best efforts
• 15:46
  asked to you know, come up with 10 books that I thought were
• 15:49
  pretty bad I had to include this one there I've.
• 15:52
  Never read this, what's so bad about it?
• 15:54
  What's so bad about it is they got the Daleks for the new
• 15:57
  series adventures. They gave them to the voice of
• 15:58
  the Daleks. You may remember the previous
• 16:00
  Dalek new series adventure was Prisoner of the Daleks, which is
• 16:03
  very good. This one is not very good.
• 16:08
  It is all of Nicholas Briggs's worst behaviours.
• 16:14
  I would say Patterns of Behaviour in book form, which is
• 16:17
  that it's a not terribly inspiring, slightly over
• 16:21
  complicated Dalek story that also turns out to be an origin
• 16:25
  story for the Dalek time strategist.
• 16:27
  Spoiler alert. Who's?
• 16:29
  That the Dalek Time Strategist was a character that Nicholas
• 16:34
  Briggs created for I think it was Patient Zero originally.
• 16:37
  It was a Dalek time controller turns up in the audio Patient
• 16:40
  Zero, and then kept turning up time and time again.
• 16:44
  And they killed it off and they thought thank Christ for that.
• 16:47
  And they replaced it with the Dalek Time Strategist, who is
• 16:49
  just exactly the same character. Are you telling me that this
• 16:52
  book is an excuse to give an origin story for a Dalek
• 16:56
  character created by Nicholas Briggs on audio and played by
• 16:59
  Nicholas? I mean, this man's vanity
• 17:01
  projects. They know know.
• 17:03
  I mean, what the hell? I as we record this, we are yet
• 17:07
  to learn the details of Joe Martin's first box set for Big
• 17:11
  Finish, but I swear to God. The Dalek Time Strategist.
• 17:16
  If it contains they did it with the War Doctor.
• 17:19
  I swear if that character appears I am.
• 17:22
  I'm never buying anything from them ever again.
• 17:24
  The question I'm really intrigued and what are the pros?
• 17:28
  It was his first book. No, no, that's be honest.
• 17:32
  That's you being quiet. Not very good.
• 17:36
  In what way? Clunky and mechanical as far as
• 17:42
  I remember it some years ago, but I remember just being, oh
• 17:45
  you know, pretty turgid and boring to be honest.
• 17:49
  Not coming to a book club near you?
• 17:51
  Please don't make me. OK, well then Next up I would
• 17:55
  like to not recommend Return of the Living Dad by Kay Orman.
• 18:02
  Have you read this one? I haven't but I think they said
• 18:04
  it was really good on Too Hot for TV.
• 18:06
  They did. I don't know what they were
• 18:08
  smoking that day. Dylan Reece.
• 18:09
  Jesus Christ. It is the wankiest book The New
• 18:13
  Adventures ever put out. It's Bernice's dad coming to
• 18:17
  this little village. It turns out to be a massive
• 18:20
  fucking soap opera. Everybody from this range turns
• 18:23
  up in it. It's packed full of in jokes.
• 18:26
  All the names of the characters are people that the writer
• 18:29
  knows. It's just horrible, horrible
• 18:32
  wank. There's not a great plot to it
• 18:35
  at all. The jokes are bad.
• 18:36
  Kate Allman is a good writer. This was self indulgence on a
• 18:40
  level I have never ever. I took a look at my review OK
• 18:45
  this one out of 10, but I did detail every single in joke that
• 18:48
  was in there. It's one of the longest reviews
• 18:50
  I've ever read. Isn't there an auton auton
• 18:52
  spoon? Here is an awesome spoo.
• 18:55
  It's just appalling. Can we move on from this please?
• 18:57
  I just wanted to include this because Dylan Reese said it was
• 19:00
  great. Well then I will bring things
• 19:04
  back with a good book I would like to recommend Storm Harvest
• 19:09
  by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. What?
• 19:12
  Madness is this. This was the 1st Doctor Who book
• 19:15
  I ever read and I loved it. I I read it again a few years
• 19:18
  later and I still loved it. 10 of my favourites.
• 19:21
  This is the entirely. Oh, I'm sorry, that didn't bring
• 19:24
  the metrics of goodness to this. Give me give me the top ten
• 19:28
  books you enjoyed the most. What do you mean you went for
• 19:30
  the ones you enjoyed? OK, well then explain why.
• 19:35
  Why did you enjoy this so much? Because in I think I really
• 19:38
  lucked out in terms of choosing this as the first Doctor Who
• 19:40
  book because this was about 2001, so right in the midst of
• 19:44
  the wilderness years. And I could have picked up a lot
• 19:45
  of books from that surprisingly amply stocked Doctor Who shelf
• 19:48
  in WH Smiths in Shrewsbury. And yeah, there were tons of
• 19:53
  these things for a show that hadn't been on air properly for
• 19:56
  12 years. Insane number.
• 19:58
  I could have picked up Independence Day.
• 20:00
  I could have picked up Asylum. And yes, I think they would all
• 20:03
  have been. You didn't.
• 20:04
  Well, yes, they would have been a much poorer start.
• 20:06
  Whereas what I instead got was Sylvester McCoy, here a Doctor
• 20:09
  Who but for on a broad screen with no budget.
• 20:13
  Or no limited budget, I should say.
• 20:15
  And a brand new monster on the front.
• 20:16
  And it was incredibly exciting. It was action sci-fi movie
• 20:19
  stuff. A new exciting, thrilling
• 20:22
  monster. It felt epic in scope.
• 20:23
  There was huge, huge visual imagery with storms and monsters
• 20:28
  tearing things apart. Oh, it was so exciting the.
• 20:31
  Krill. The krill, the very same.
• 20:34
  Yeah, one of one of the few original monsters around that
• 20:38
  ear of the BBC books for which Mike Tucker created maquettes or
• 20:42
  masks that were then used on the covers You.
• 20:44
  Didn't even turn the little aliens as well.
• 20:45
  Didn't you know this was the grey faced aliens?
• 20:47
  The Skir. The skir or the Shur or yes and
• 20:50
  the the flesh Smiths in prime time.
• 20:52
  Oh. What was that?
• 20:54
  Oh, it had a an eye in the middle of his head, did it?
• 20:58
  Yes, that sort of Dalek eye, but his face was all sort of gibbly,
• 21:01
  I'd say. The krill were probably the most
• 21:03
  successful of. Yes, which is probably why they
• 21:06
  also turned up on the front cover of Dust breeding for Big
• 21:10
  Finish as well a year or two later.
• 21:12
  But yes, no. And and as I found out as the
• 21:14
  young fan, that was exactly the sort of thing that I was getting
• 21:17
  delivered, that it's not a surprise that Mike Tucker in
• 21:19
  particular has come back to the new series adventures so often
• 21:23
  because I think he he was still writing and Robert Perry still
• 21:27
  writing Doctor Who books that were recognized.
• 21:29
  They were trads, but I think there was a space for trad and
• 21:32
  that was very good trad at that time.
• 21:34
  Do you think that the follow-ups matrix loving the alien?
• 21:39
  What was the other one? Well storm harvest was the 3rd
• 21:43
  in their runs. They they did a sort of like
• 21:45
  mini season over the years of the PDA.
• 21:47
  So it starts with the legal alien, then it's Matrix, then
• 21:50
  it's storm harvest, then prime time, then loving the alien did.
• 21:53
  They do, the hollow men. No.
• 21:55
  No, that was very good though. Well, that's an intriguing
• 22:01
  choice. Not one I expected you to make,
• 22:03
  although I should have done because you did say well when I
• 22:05
  asked you the question, what was the 1st Doctor Who book you
• 22:07
  read? That was it, wasn't it?
• 22:09
  Yes, it was. OK, well then I am going to
• 22:12
  recommend. I'm going to go back to what
• 22:14
  I've done, an episode on Mad Dogs, An Englishman by Paul
• 22:17
  Mars. And I was really, I'm in an RN
• 22:20
  about which Paul Mars to choose because I could easily have
• 22:23
  chosen Verdigris. I could easily have chosen the
• 22:25
  Blue Angel, the Scarlet Empress, any of them.
• 22:29
  But I really love this one because it's a life doctor fits
• 22:32
  an Angie book. And I just love those
• 22:34
  characters. They're scattered through time.
• 22:36
  They're given lots to do. You've read this one, right?
• 22:39
  Sorry, I'm distracted because really to the park and there's a
• 22:40
  horse going past. It sounds like a plot twist in
• 22:44
  Mad Dogs and Englishman. It's a brilliant Iris story as
• 22:47
  well. Or it's the Brenda Subi Iris,
• 22:50
  isn't it? Friend of Soubi, the Shirley
• 22:52
  Bassy incarnation. One that sings on the stage and
• 22:54
  looks like she's strangling an Anaconda as she's singing with
• 22:58
  her fever boa. The very same.
• 23:01
  No, it's it's a very easy to read, very funny, very complex
• 23:08
  actually in how it's plotted story that happens to have pink
• 23:12
  poodles on the front cover and even dares to have the
• 23:17
  suggestion that a human being is having a sexual relationship
• 23:21
  with a pink poodle in it. No, no, no, it is.
• 23:24
  It's a great time and I don't think I need any more excuses
• 23:28
  than that. Every time I read it, I've got a
• 23:30
  smile on my face. Marvellous.
• 23:31
  And I should say I'm going to disrupt this and say one of my
• 23:34
  top 10s was also Mad Dogs in English.
• 23:36
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would.
• 23:39
  Why is that My many of the same reasons that you said I think it
• 23:43
  is? I love the fact that you're
• 23:44
  taking these off as you go. I'm doing them out of order.
• 23:48
  OK? I would say many of the same
• 23:52
  reasons. It is incredibly brawl in scope.
• 23:55
  It is a unique story. There aren't really any other
• 23:58
  dog two books like this. You certainly wouldn't be able
• 24:00
  to republish it today, no matter how nice the cover you choose to
• 24:03
  put on it. The.
• 24:03
  Dog stations are covered in dog shit everywhere.
• 24:07
  Yeah, there's a bit where the doctor in Fitz and Angie get all
• 24:11
  their clothes taken off and they have dog collars put on them.
• 24:13
  She's trying very hard not to look down, isn't she?
• 24:16
  And failed. And fails.
• 24:19
  Yeah, and it is at the same time also manages to parody Ray
• 24:23
  Harryhausen and Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings all in my
• 24:28
  somehow in the same page count as Storm Harvest.
• 24:32
  Weird enough when I interviewed Paul Mars, he seemed to have
• 24:34
  forgotten all of that. But it's clearly there, right?
• 24:38
  All of all of what you just said.
• 24:40
  Oh yeah, I mean, the character the the George Lucas character
• 24:42
  is called George is called John Fucus or something.
• 24:44
  So it's not exactly, are you? Sure, it's Fucus.
• 24:47
  It might be Fucus. No, it's a great book.
• 24:51
  It is a great one. Is he back to me again?
• 24:54
  I've I've I've somewhat I've somewhat messed it up because we
• 24:56
  both chose mad dogs and Englishmen.
• 24:57
  OK, so choose. Another you've got.
• 24:59
  Choose another good one. Oh shit, OK.
• 25:03
  I would like to choose Just War by Lance Parkin and we were
• 25:07
  talking about this just earlier today.
• 25:09
  Very rare for a author to come in and write a debut novel as
• 25:14
  accomplished as this. It pert or beneath Summerfield
• 25:18
  through hell, but weirdly enough, when that happens, it
• 25:22
  usually does yield great dramatic results and on audio as
• 25:26
  well, funnily enough. No, no, it's it is a an
• 25:29
  intriguing depiction of it's the tail end, isn't it, of the
• 25:33
  Second World War in Guernsey? Yes, I I think so certain,
• 25:38
  certainly in the months prior to D-Day.
• 25:41
  And compromises that people had to make during that time.
• 25:45
  It's got a intriguing, I don't know what the name of the year
• 25:49
  Richardson character isn't this, but he's basically the head
• 25:51
  Nazi. And he has passages and passages
• 25:55
  where he gets to justify his position.
• 25:57
  Lars refuses to make him. He's a villain, but he refuses
• 26:01
  to make it like not let him have his say.
• 26:04
  And those pages are absolutely riveting.
• 26:06
  The doctor's kind of out of the book for a lot of it, but he
• 26:09
  plays a pivotal role in the climax.
• 26:12
  It is. Yeah.
• 26:12
  It's it's probably the best historical Doctor Who book there
• 26:17
  is. Yeah, and definitely one of the
• 26:21
  most thoughtful and considered approaches to the depiction of
• 26:26
  Nazism in Doctor Who, which is something Doctor has done a few
• 26:29
  times in books and other areas, but does tend to be a little bit
• 26:32
  Hollywood. Are you?
• 26:33
  Suggesting that Time War exodus is a little bit Hollywood.
• 26:39
  Another one I haven't read. Oh.
• 26:40
  OK, Yeah, plug some of these gaps back to you.
• 26:44
  So a bad one now, and I'm going to go for potentially
• 26:48
  controversially, Cat's Cradle Times Crucible.
• 26:51
  That is not controversial at all.
• 26:53
  Oh, isn't it? It's.
• 26:53
  An appalling book, but please tell us why.
• 26:56
  Well, you see, because for long time people, you know, hold this
• 26:58
  up as being Oh yeah, it's brilliant.
• 27:00
  Oh yeah, it's so sophisticated. No, it's it's a, it's one of the
• 27:04
  probably the worst example of just the virgin books getting
• 27:08
  overly interested in Time Lord mythology, which always struck
• 27:11
  me as the sort of thing that was born out of people thinking that
• 27:15
  Doctor Who didn't have enough law like proper sci-fi does,
• 27:19
  like Babylon Five, Star Trek, The Next Generation.
• 27:22
  And instead, no, it's just it's very confusing.
• 27:25
  It's very dull. It's full of big ideas that are
• 27:27
  not made particularly interesting or exciting, but it
• 27:31
  does just lay down a lot of a lot of text that Lance Barking
• 27:35
  can put into a history of the universe at a later point.
• 27:38
  Isn't this the same Mark Platt that wrote Lung Barrow?
• 27:41
  Which is great. Which is great.
• 27:43
  Slide. Yeah, which are both great
• 27:45
  because they actually have plots that involve the characters.
• 27:47
  They're not just extended mythology dumps.
• 27:51
  Yeah, the only thing I remember about Cat's Cradle is isn't it
• 27:54
  all set in a TARDIS? Isn't that big city a TARDIS?
• 27:56
  It's. Something very confusing like
• 27:59
  that. Yeah.
• 27:59
  They did a lot of this in the early 90s of, oh, it's really a
• 28:03
  TARDIS. It was really the Time Lords
• 28:04
  all. It was the Time Lords all along.
• 28:07
  Well, isn't it all couched in sort of weird?
• 28:09
  And they're going to Dreamscapes and it's all very sort of, you
• 28:12
  know, find your own readings on what the hell was going on at
• 28:15
  the end of that book. Yes, no.
• 28:17
  I'd like you to give me at least one reading on this, please, Mr.
• 28:19
  Rothman. I couldn't do it, I'm afraid.
• 28:23
  I haven't read this book for years.
• 28:24
  I remember giving this a one out of 10 when I read the book
• 28:29
  because I didn't understand a fucking word of it.
• 28:31
  But I do think that there is a point to be made there.
• 28:34
  These books have to be penetrable, right?
• 28:37
  Yeah, yeah. It's compared and contrasted to
• 28:38
  what we're saying about Father Time of where, you know, there
• 28:40
  can be depths beyond what is there on the surface.
• 28:42
  But you, you at least have to be able to engage with it in some
• 28:45
  way and not just feel, I think it was, you know, too broad and
• 28:48
  too deep, as they used to say. They wanted these to be proper
• 28:50
  science fiction novels, but this is the sort of trying to be one
• 28:53
  of those really boring science fiction novels that makes you
• 28:56
  tiresome when you talk about them.
• 28:58
  Well, then my oh, hang on, would you like me to relieve the
• 29:00
  burden for a second? My my next not recommend book is
• 29:06
  Byzantium by Keith Topping, which basically exists because
• 29:12
  the Romans was a four part Doctor Who story told in the
• 29:16
  1960s and they couldn't fill it full of sex and violence.
• 29:20
  So Keith Topping goes, well, I'm going to tell the same story
• 29:23
  again, but I'm going to fill it full of sex and violence.
• 29:27
  And the end result is it's not funny, it's not enjoyable, it's
• 29:30
  incredibly crude, It's sloppily written.
• 29:35
  Have you read this one? It is, I think, maybe the only
• 29:38
  Doctor Who book I've ever given up on.
• 29:40
  Oh, is it really? What?
• 29:42
  For the same reasons. Yeah, well, it was very early on
• 29:45
  in my Doctor Who reading, so I think I'd pretty much just read
• 29:47
  Storm Harvest and Prime Time at this point.
• 29:50
  And then I picked up that one and I just found it so dull and
• 29:53
  it was just not what I wanted from Doctor Who books.
• 29:55
  I cannot remember much about it other than being very bored by.
• 29:58
  It there really wasn't much of A plot at all.
• 30:01
  It is orgies and gladiatorial fighting, which is described in
• 30:06
  horrible detail and lots of swearing and I don't know the
• 30:10
  the whole of it. I love the Romans.
• 30:12
  I think the Romans is a very clever way of going to that time
• 30:15
  period and telling a a farcical story.
• 30:18
  This is not that. Oh dear, dear, dear.
• 30:23
  But let's talk about something good.
• 30:24
  Let's talk about something good like Sky Pirates by Dave Stone.
• 30:28
  You are mad. What is wrong with you?
• 30:31
  I am mad and so is Dave Stone and that is why I love this
• 30:34
  book. It is a Oh my God, it is a.
• 30:39
  You shock me at least. The Virgin New Adventures could
• 30:44
  be a bit PO face. They could be a bit gun, as Joe
• 30:47
  has said at times, but they this is a kaleidoscopic, maximalist
• 30:54
  absurdity of of a story. It is it's in its own little
• 30:58
  clockwork universe with planets that look like snowmen.
• 31:04
  It is a it is a story about which the villains are
• 31:09
  caricatured capitalists who are monsters collecting everything
• 31:12
  they can possibly find. It is.
• 31:17
  It is absurd, mad fun, and I think if one of the best
• 31:21
  examples of the new adventures fulfilling their promise of
• 31:24
  telling stories too broad and too deep for the small screen.
• 31:28
  Because Lord knows how you could even fit some of this into your
• 31:30
  own head, let alone onto a TV screen.
• 31:35
  I seem to remember right in my review of this book.
• 31:37
  It's too, too, it's trying too hard to be too funny, too wacky,
• 31:43
  too weird to I was like, I read it and I was just like, that was
• 31:46
  just an intense experience of somebody that the editor did not
• 31:50
  say to calm down love, all right, And just do you really
• 31:54
  love it that much? I thought it was great fun and
• 31:56
  also includes a wonderful piss take of all of the sort of
• 32:01
  infatuation with Time Lord mythology that we touched on
• 32:04
  when discussing Cat's Cradle. Yeah, yeah.
• 32:07
  It's also just got some great funny lines as well, like a line
• 32:09
  about it's a bit about Bernie's having been commissioned to
• 32:12
  write a comic book series because she happened to walk
• 32:14
  through an American publishing house with a British accent in
• 32:16
  the early 90s. Dave Stone's prose, Yeah, as he
• 32:22
  got off your source to hand whilst he's writing his book, do
• 32:25
  you think? Because he loves long words,
• 32:26
  doesn't he? Yeah, but that's.
• 32:29
  The Michael Moorcock of the Virgin.
• 32:32
  I mean, he's, I think he's actually better known for
• 32:34
  writing Judge Dredd stuff, you know, more broadly.
• 32:37
  And he's Judge Dredd stuff has exactly that same that same tone
• 32:41
  of of of of of huge, you know, complex words and very being
• 32:46
  very erudite on the one hand, and yet having such a almost
• 32:50
  pantomime sensibility about storytelling at others.
• 32:53
  I don't have the brain the size of a planet like you, so I'm
• 32:56
  reading those sentences and I'm grabbing my dictionary and
• 32:58
  going, well, what the hell does it mean?
• 33:00
  Yeah, if you don't like sky pirates, it's because you're too
• 33:02
  stupid. That's the third time today he's
• 33:05
  called me stupid. What have I got to do next?
• 33:07
  I've lost track. Am I doing bottom or top?
• 33:11
  123 you're doing a. Top one, right?
• 33:14
  I would like to recommend Fear Itself by Nick Wallace, which I
• 33:20
  genuinely so that's like the Lucifer Rising of the 8th Doctor
• 33:24
  books. Although it's technically a past
• 33:26
  Doctor book, it's actually an Eighth Doctor book and it's in
• 33:30
  the style of a virgin new adventure, so it's sort of
• 33:33
  ticking all the boxes. It came after the Gallifrey
• 33:37
  Chronicles and beautifully ties in a lot because there was a lot
• 33:42
  of things left unsaid at the end of the 100 years amnesia arc
• 33:47
  that the range just seemed to forget about until the Gallifrey
• 33:50
  Chronicles. So Nick Wallace goes, do you
• 33:52
  know what? I'm going to plug some of those
• 33:54
  gaps. So he tells his story where fits
• 33:57
  fine. He says to the doctor, please
• 33:59
  can we talk about what happens when you destroy Gallifrey?
• 34:03
  He plugs in a ton of back story for Angie Kapoor that we never
• 34:08
  really got in what is that dreadful book at the end of the
• 34:10
  Earth arc? Escape velocity.
• 34:12
  Yeah, awful. We didn't really find out much
• 34:14
  about her. She had a boyfriend that was in
• 34:15
  Star Wars and he died. That was it.
• 34:18
  It was sad, apparently, and but in the same time it tells a
• 34:24
  brilliant science fiction story in three different time zones.
• 34:28
  He very cleverly jumps between all three and maintains a
• 34:32
  momentum through the first half of the book, where things
• 34:35
  established in the first two are paid off brilliantly in the last
• 34:39
  setting. It is a an astonishingly
• 34:43
  accomplished book by Nick Wallace.
• 34:44
  I'm surprised he he was never asked to do anything more if I
• 34:48
  for BBC books. It's such a clever book, so fear
• 34:51
  itself. Excellent.
• 34:53
  I think that comes back to me then for a bad book, and I would
• 34:55
  like to say a book that I have also previously had to go out on
• 34:58
  this podcast with The Price of Paradise, which is for me just
• 35:03
  an example. Remembered anything about?
• 35:05
  It Nope still not AI think I think they mentioned.
• 35:08
  There's a column break as well, isn't.
• 35:09
  It yeah, not doing. Too well today.
• 35:11
  I think there's a reference to Trisilicate in it maybe.
• 35:15
  Yeah, there we go. There's that.
• 35:19
  Yes. As I mentioned previous episode,
• 35:22
  the prize paradise for me is just an example of those new
• 35:24
  series adventures that were just there, You know, they got put
• 35:28
  out on shelves and they sold thousands and thousands of
• 35:30
  copies and there wasn't much to them at all.
• 35:33
  They're the opposite of a of a of a father time or of a mad
• 35:36
  dogs and Englishmen in the sense having no purpose, just feeling
• 35:39
  like generic filler. Doctor Who, you know, a cliche,
• 35:43
  but chachi PT style stuff of this is what Doctor Who stories
• 35:46
  involve. And it went in and I read it.
• 35:50
  I remember reading it. I've got a copy of it.
• 35:52
  Cannot tell you a single thing that occurs.
• 35:55
  Did you finish it? Oh yeah, yeah, I read the whole
• 35:57
  thing but. I was to tell you now that AI
• 36:00
  software had created the price of paradise, would you be
• 36:02
  surprised? Only in, you know, historical
• 36:06
  terms, but. It was biological AI.
• 36:09
  It was called Colin Brake. Yeah, I'm sorry it's not the
• 36:12
  only new series adventure that fell into this trap, but I would
• 36:16
  say it's the one that springs to mind when I just think of of
• 36:20
  filler. Absolute filler.
• 36:21
  Having recently read The Pirate Loop by Simon Gurio, a point you
• 36:26
  made on our 6th building episode that actually the norm for the
• 36:30
  new series adventures was that they were better than we had any
• 36:34
  right for them to to be. It just highlights these ones
• 36:38
  even more where they are this generic.
• 36:41
  Yeah, it's it's just very safe. Nothing to worry the lawyers,
• 36:44
  nothing to worry the parents, nothing to excite the kids.
• 36:48
  Then I would like to not recommend The Domino Effects by
• 36:53
  David Bishop for a couple of reasons.
• 36:56
  One is this poor man does not know what subtlety means.
• 36:59
  This is another alternative Earth story where featuring this
• 37:06
  sort of Nazi esque crazy regime doing terrible things to people.
• 37:10
  It's takes place after Time 0 which takes the 8th Doctor books
• 37:15
  to a brilliant sort of end of one series and start of another.
• 37:21
  So the universes are all shattered and the TARDIS from
• 37:24
  storage story is going from one universe to another and it was a
• 37:27
  brilliant cliffhanging end in the Time 0.
• 37:29
  Then you got the Infinity Race by Simon Messingham which was
• 37:32
  Dulles dishwater and that was followed up with the domino
• 37:36
  effect are genuinely are. As a lover of the 8th Doctor
• 37:39
  books I genuinely thought what has happened to this series?
• 37:43
  Is this what we can come to expect from now on?
• 37:46
  Yeah. Unsubtle characterization.
• 37:49
  Really dreadful words put into great characters like these
• 37:54
  regulars that I love. The 5th Doctor, the 5th Doctor,
• 37:56
  the 8th Doctor, Fitz and Angie. Just terrible all round.
• 38:01
  Yeah. Disappointing.
• 38:05
  Well, let's talk about something good then, and I would like to
• 38:09
  take us into the realms of non fiction for the the third Lance
• 38:13
  Park in book. Not that we're fanboys to be
• 38:15
  mentioned with a history formerly a history of the
• 38:18
  universe. I didn't.
• 38:19
  Realize we were able to do nonfiction.
• 38:22
  We can do anything. You said that.
• 38:23
  You said the rules, you said we couldn't.
• 38:25
  It is a Doctor Who book. Yes, a history, formerly a
• 38:29
  history of the universe, long running series now now on it's
• 38:33
  third edition. 4th edition, 5th, 5th.
• 38:36
  Some were many editions now in which Lance parking and latterly
• 38:40
  with the help of Last Pierce and takes on the Herculean task of
• 38:44
  trying to work out the history of the Doctor Who universe
• 38:48
  chronologically from Big Bang to the end of the universe.
• 38:51
  Try and fit all of the TV stories, all of the novels, all
• 38:54
  of the audios, all of the comic, all of the spin off into some
• 38:58
  kind of and of course you can't. That's the point.
• 39:00
  You know, this is this is they're not designed to do this.
• 39:02
  So it's one massive parlour game.
• 39:04
  And yet it is a heck of a lot of fun to read to.
• 39:06
  Do you read it through? No, no, it's not a book that you
• 39:09
  read. I mean, I think maybe the, the
• 39:12
  you know, the first virgin edition, you could read that
• 39:14
  through. It was one volume and fairly
• 39:15
  light, you know, at the beginning to end.
• 39:17
  But these days, no, of course you can't, but you'd be a fool
• 39:19
  to do so. But it's a bit perfect for
• 39:21
  dipping in and out of of just, you know, of seeing or where
• 39:24
  does that story fit or what happens to that story?
• 39:26
  Where does that story take place following their reasoning or
• 39:29
  because they extensive footnotes where they explain, you know,
• 39:32
  how they've worked out this particular dating for this
• 39:35
  story, that story. It's a lot of fun and a very
• 39:38
  different perspective on Doctor Who, and a absurd but joyous
• 39:43
  effort to try and make some sort of sense out of all of this.
• 39:47
  You know what I find fun with that?
• 39:48
  It's just picking a page. Yeah.
• 39:50
  Picking a particular entry and going Right.
• 39:52
  What other stories took place alongside this?
• 39:55
  And then, you know, you usually get ATV story with a couple of
• 39:57
  books next to it and a big finish.
• 39:59
  You're like, wow, I never. Actually.
• 40:02
  You don't really think that way when you are enjoying an
• 40:05
  individual story, how it all fits into the large picture.
• 40:08
  Well, some people do. Gallifrey Bass generally has
• 40:10
  friends with people going yeah, but who cares?
• 40:12
  I don't care how good it is, where does it fit?
• 40:16
  But that's quite a fun game to play.
• 40:17
  I mean, it's a mad endeavour, right.
• 40:19
  Like. Who would even think to try and
• 40:21
  do this? I think so.
• 40:22
  It's been going for, you know, about 30 years now, this just
• 40:26
  slowly being built up and built up and built up.
• 40:28
  And I think that's the only way you could do it.
• 40:29
  I don't think you could sit down now and say I'm going to do this
• 40:32
  from the start. Yeah, he's got, he's got his
• 40:35
  template, the last edition, right?
• 40:37
  Where can I add it? Well, wonderful choice.
• 40:40
  I am going to recommend Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles.
• 40:45
  I'm assuming that's on your list as well.
• 40:48
  Actually not an oversight, but I'm glad you've mentioned it.
• 40:50
  Outrageous. Probably obvious.
• 40:54
  You and I have covered two books from the early 8th Doctor range
• 40:58
  already, one which we thought was utterly self indulgent but
• 41:02
  enjoyable, and another which we thought was a fine character
• 41:07
  piece but a little lacking in incident.
• 41:10
  This has neither of those problems.
• 41:12
  It is a brilliant character piece.
• 41:14
  It is has got a brilliant plot. It's packed to the gills with
• 41:19
  ideas in a way that I think people wondered if the Age
• 41:22
  Octopus would be doing any more post the New Adventures.
• 41:27
  It kick starts an arc that doesn't end officially until the
• 41:32
  Gallifrey Chronicles. Officially and is still ongoing.
• 41:36
  Unofficially, well. Yeah.
• 41:38
  I don't think we'll ever go back to it though, do you?
• 41:39
  Well, no, I mean, there are. There are endless faction
• 41:42
  paradox stories still being produced in the darkest recesses
• 41:45
  of the Internet. To stick those out beautifully
• 41:49
  structured the way everyone's been invited to this auction.
• 41:54
  And throughout the book you get little passages which are called
• 41:59
  whichever character's name it is story which goes into well, you
• 42:03
  get basically a set piece which helps to build the picture, this
• 42:08
  picture of the the future that Laura's Miles is telling, the
• 42:13
  hints of a war to calm between the Time Lords and somebody just
• 42:18
  I mean, there are too many nice things you can say about this.
• 42:21
  And but it is doing huge things, massive ideas, big science
• 42:26
  fiction. But it's very funny as well.
• 42:28
  It's very readable book. And I think there's a reason why
• 42:32
  this hits most people's top ten list.
• 42:34
  Yes. Lawrence Miles doesn't get
• 42:35
  enough credit. How funny he is as a writer as
• 42:37
  well. I think I absolutely agree.
• 42:39
  So I'm going to say something bad.
• 42:43
  Is that right? I have no idea.
• 42:46
  Yeah, let's do something bad. I'm going to say parallel 59.
• 42:51
  Who wrote that? The one with the blood down?
• 42:54
  Paul McGann. 'S yeah.
• 42:56
  Who wrote it now? I think it's Stephen Cohen,
• 42:58
  Natalie, somebody. The one who didn't write for the
• 43:01
  range again. Yeah.
• 43:03
  And when we, when we mentioned Lance Bachman a few times when
• 43:06
  we spoke to him, he, we asked, we spoke to him about, you know,
• 43:11
  BBC books versus version books. He thought that the BBC books,
• 43:14
  the Ed as their highs were every bit as high as the, as the
• 43:17
  virgin, the adventures highs and the, the lows are every bit as
• 43:20
  low. He felt the problem with the
• 43:21
  range wasn't that it was that there were more bad ones.
• 43:26
  It's just that there were lots of them that were just there,
• 43:29
  lots of them that were fine. And I, I would agree.
• 43:31
  And I think on the podcast we characterized these as Earth
• 43:34
  colony books where all is not as it seems.
• 43:36
  Is this an Earth colony book? Where not everything as it
• 43:39
  seems, it is exactly that it. Is a little bit Matrixy, a
• 43:43
  little bit Neuromancer Y. There's warring nations on the
• 43:48
  same planet. I think there's a whole weird
• 43:51
  subplot about. Fitz falling in love with some
• 43:53
  woman who ebox and then he loses her and he's agonising over her
• 43:57
  for the second-half of the book, which, you know, we've done
• 44:00
  quite a few times by this point. Yeah.
• 44:01
  And we've also done the whole. People living inside digital
• 44:06
  realities. We've done that many times by
• 44:08
  this point across the verge in the BBC books.
• 44:10
  It's just a, it's a lot of the same.
• 44:12
  It's very dull, but it's critically.
• 44:14
  There's no one thing that you could point out and say this is
• 44:16
  the book that does this, or this is the book where that happens,
• 44:20
  and there's too many Edas like that, and this is very much one
• 44:24
  of them. It's one.
• 44:26
  Of those times when saying something is competent is an
• 44:28
  insult. Exactly that.
• 44:31
  Yeah, it's absolutely and terribly fine.
• 44:37
  OK, well then I'm going to. Oh, I'm.
• 44:40
  Going to do one from the same period.
• 44:41
  This is not a great period of the 8th Doctor books, but
• 44:45
  unfortunately I cannot remember a single thing about this book.
• 44:50
  It's The Space Age by Steve Lyons, and I'm a little limp
• 44:54
  because Steve Lyons is such a reliable pair of hands.
• 44:58
  This is the man who brought us the Crooked World, the Steelers
• 45:01
  of Dreams, the Fires of Vulcan from Big Finish.
• 45:05
  You know, this is a bloody good writer, and I honestly cannot
• 45:10
  remember. Have you read this one years
• 45:12
  ago? Mods and rockers in space I
• 45:15
  didn't even. Remember that I'm just going for
• 45:17
  the list. There was nothing in my head at
• 45:20
  all. And I remember being, I think
• 45:22
  it's one of those ones that I just sort of skipped through,
• 45:24
  you know? You know when you're kind of
• 45:25
  half engaging with the book, but you're just taking in the
• 45:28
  pertinent plot points and want to get to the end?
• 45:31
  We're going to add it to the list.
• 45:33
  Because I'd like to revisit this one because I remember not much
• 45:36
  about it, but I remember enjoying it.
• 45:38
  And it's very much a product of that 90s nostalgia for the 60s.
• 45:41
  So it's. Yeah, I think my memory is that
• 45:43
  it's about a gang of mods and a gang of rockers.
• 45:45
  You get transported to an alien world where they keep on
• 45:48
  fighting out the popular imagining of of, you know, on
• 45:50
  Brighton Beach, but with aliens in a space age city.
• 45:54
  I think it might be a fun one to revisit.
• 45:56
  Challenge accepted. All I know is this is Ken Moss
• 45:59
  who does the readings for the book club who is now doing
• 46:01
  readings for Kenny Smith's split up book.
• 46:05
  Episode. Betrayal messaged me and said oh
• 46:10
  God, I've been asked to do these passages from the space age, how
• 46:14
  am I going to make this shit sound exciting?
• 46:16
  So yeah, challenge accepted. We can ask him to do some
• 46:19
  different. Passages from For this podcast,
• 46:23
  I'm going to go for a graphic novel.
• 46:26
  This time for a good graphic novel, I'm going to say
• 46:29
  Oblivion, which is the culmination of the Izzy
• 46:34
  storyline in the 8th Doctor adventure.
• 46:36
  I mean, really, though, the 8th Doctor comic strips do that
• 46:39
  remain the high. You could choose any.
• 46:42
  Of them and it would be. Perfect.
• 46:43
  But this one memorable for many reasons.
• 46:45
  The resolution of the of the long running Izzy storyline,
• 46:48
  which was so beautifully done, which was the story of a of a
• 46:52
  sort of quote, UN quote teenage terror, but basically someone
• 46:54
  who was just very unhappy in their life at a particular time.
• 46:57
  It's a story about adoption, about finding your own identity
• 47:00
  and finding your family and understanding who you are.
• 47:04
  It what features I believe the first gay kiss in Doctor Who
• 47:07
  comic strips. Russell T Davis was paying.
• 47:10
  Attention Russell T Davis wrote a letter.
• 47:13
  To DWM was published a couple of issues after the final part of
• 47:16
  Oblivion praising them because this I mean it was also so, so
• 47:21
  well done the handling of Izzy sexuality because it had not
• 47:24
  been a big tortured storyline. She was a character who just for
• 47:27
  various reasons was not happy with herself and understanding
• 47:30
  her own identity and where she sat in the world.
• 47:32
  There were hints that maybe she was gay and at certain points,
• 47:35
  but only slight hints. And it neither did it suggest
• 47:38
  that her sexuality was was the cause of any of this, that it
• 47:41
  was much deeper, much broader about where she sat in the
• 47:43
  world. But her I'm embracing of her
• 47:47
  sexuality and the fact that she was gay was reflective of her
• 47:50
  coming stones with herself more broadly as well.
• 47:52
  It was beautifully done. Oblivion itself and the stories
• 47:56
  leading up to it are cracking stories.
• 47:58
  Is this the? Is this the graphic novel?
• 48:01
  That's got the one set in the snow where destries.
• 48:07
  Oh bad, Blanco turns. Around and.
• 48:10
  Beats her at the end. It's so visceral that saying
• 48:14
  yeah, it's either in Oblivion. Or the following or the
• 48:17
  following collection. But yeah, that is it's such a
• 48:20
  strong era that had such its characters were so well
• 48:22
  developed. It had the freedom and the space
• 48:24
  to say many things about them and to say things about families
• 48:27
  and people. Yeah, Jadafra, who was a a
• 48:29
  villain in the the latter part. See, this is where he's
• 48:32
  introduced in Oblivion as well. He's introduced as being really.
• 48:35
  Charming. And then just turns on a dime.
• 48:38
  He's, Yeah, he's, he's meant to be a sort of dark.
• 48:40
  Counterpoint to the Doctor, but different to the Master.
• 48:44
  He's meant to be all of the things about the 8th Doctor that
• 48:47
  people find attractive, but showing how they could be deeply
• 48:50
  problematic and unattractive. This charismatic, handsome
• 48:53
  adventure in time and space, who was also egotistical and doesn't
• 48:56
  care about those around him. He never really got a proper
• 48:59
  ending. He was sort of one of the that
• 49:00
  was one of the casualties of the show coming back was they
• 49:02
  couldn't really fill that arc out.
• 49:05
  But it it is brilliant. And if you're going to be
• 49:08
  reading any comic strips or you want to get in stock 2 comic
• 49:10
  strips, you don't notice there's so many of them.
• 49:12
  Now do the 8th Doctor comic strips end game onwards.
• 49:16
  You'll have a great time. We know there's so many of them
• 49:18
  because we went into. Forbidden Planet today and there
• 49:20
  was about 14 bookshelves full of the bloody things.
• 49:23
  The sapling volume one what? Even is this, I think oblivion.
• 49:27
  You know, is the one that starts off with the Frobisher tail in
• 49:31
  the bar, that fabulous one off, you know, where he's talking to
• 49:34
  the fellow in the bar. And then when the doctor leaves
• 49:37
  at the end, it's Frobisher. That's the that is.
• 49:40
  Where nobody knows your name. It's the 1st.
• 49:42
  It's the first story after Oblivion, so it might still be
• 49:44
  in this collection, but it. Is right, but again, it's.
• 49:48
  All part of that emotional arc of the characters not getting,
• 49:51
  not caring so much about the mythology and the cosmology and
• 49:54
  trying to create, you know, complex storylines about what
• 49:57
  the Church of the Silence were actually up to all the time.
• 50:00
  It's a story about those characters.
• 50:02
  Do you know what? I really.
• 50:03
  Yeah, I, I said to you. Earlier, when I first approach
• 50:06
  graphic novels for Doctor Who, I was so skeptical.
• 50:09
  How could pictures steal pictures on a page, engage me?
• 50:14
  And the two things that really struck me was one, my emotional
• 50:17
  involvement with the characters, and two, was just the beauty of
• 50:22
  the art and the the spectacle that they could put in the
• 50:25
  graphic novels. I I I'm not sure there's a
• 50:29
  better run of Doctor Who than those 8th Doctor comic strips.
• 50:34
  No, it's, it's massively it's. Incredibly consistent and
• 50:37
  consistently good. You know, because I haven't been
• 50:39
  ticking off as I've. Gone along, I've already we're
• 50:42
  50 minutes in. I've forgotten ones I've done.
• 50:45
  Have I done camera obscura yet? And then I'd like to recommend
• 50:49
  Camera Obscura by Lloyd Rose, which is one of the best 8th
• 50:54
  Doctor ARC books that there was. It's certainly the best Sabbath
• 50:59
  book ever written. Sabbath is for anyone not in the
• 51:03
  know. He's introduced in the
• 51:05
  adventures on Henriette St. and he's technically is he like
• 51:09
  that's sort of like a dark version of the Doctor.
• 51:11
  He's a fantastic idea as a. Character which is that so
• 51:15
  they'd blown up Gallifrey got rid of the Time Lords imagine
• 51:18
  that in the books. And so the next question they
• 51:21
  set up and they posed was well, the Doctor's lost his memory.
• 51:25
  He doesn't know how to be the Doctor.
• 51:26
  There are no more Time Lords. What if someone else decided
• 51:29
  they were going to step in and be the Doctor and be Times
• 51:33
  champion and be the person who travels through time and space
• 51:35
  setting it all right? And what if their motivations
• 51:38
  for doing so were not the same as the Doctors?
• 51:42
  It's a fantastic idea and I would say agree with you.
• 51:48
  This is the one book that delivers on that idea.
• 51:50
  The imagery around them as well. He.
• 51:52
  Basically got a big ship called the Jonah, which is a steampunk,
• 51:55
  nightmarish ship which is helmed by these disgusting slathering
• 52:00
  apes. Yeah, really, really brilliant.
• 52:03
  But this, this takes all so the Doctor, Fitz, Angie and Sabbath
• 52:07
  to Victorian England. It's set in and around Crystal
• 52:11
  Palace. There's a wonderful chapter
• 52:14
  which is just them visiting Crystal Palace and Laura Rose
• 52:17
  has done her research and it is like you are walking around.
• 52:20
  The prose is so immersive. It's like you're walking around.
• 52:23
  But really, I think the biggest strength of this book are the
• 52:26
  very witty, very surprising passages as the 8th Doctor and
• 52:31
  Sabbath have to work together in this book.
• 52:34
  And this is the book where the Doctor realizes that Sabbath has
• 52:38
  stolen his heart and put it inside of his body because the
• 52:42
  Doctor is murdered in this book. And the only reason and he's
• 52:46
  still alive is because that heart is beating inside
• 52:49
  Sabbath's chest, which is a great twist.
• 52:51
  Oh my God, I thought that was a burg coming towards me.
• 52:54
  Then you've got Fitz and Angie on the sidelines of this book.
• 52:59
  But because the Doctor's in a weakened state throughout, it's
• 53:02
  one of those books where you really see how much they care
• 53:04
  about him. It's got all those wonderful
• 53:07
  carnival freak characters in it that help the Doctor out.
• 53:11
  You're looking confused. No, just just remembering.
• 53:13
  It also has a. Cameo by Spike from Buffy.
• 53:16
  It also has a cameo by Sylvester.
• 53:19
  McCoy as a 7th Doctor as we go into the Doctor's mind in a very
• 53:23
  new adventure style way and he's getting close to those whatever
• 53:27
  all those blossoms are. There's thousands and thousands
• 53:30
  of them in his head. It turns out in the Gallafro
• 53:32
  Chronicles, it's all those Time Lord memories from the Matrix as
• 53:37
  Lars Park picks it up later and the the 7th flock just goes,
• 53:41
  he's standing there in front of the fence, isn't he going go
• 53:44
  away, get out of here. Which is very New Adventures
• 53:47
  because Lloyd Lloyd Rose was a huge New Adventures fan and you
• 53:50
  can tell in the writing of this book that she's a big New
• 53:53
  Adventures fan. The dream 7th Doctor is a.
• 53:56
  Minor character who who appears occasionally throughout the 8th
• 53:59
  Doctor books. It doesn't get picked up enough.
• 54:01
  This idea of the 7th Doctor master manipulator still exists
• 54:05
  in a little bit of the 8th Doctor's brain just squirrelling
• 54:09
  away, doing plots in the background because he appears
• 54:11
  first in the dying days. He appears to beneath when she
• 54:14
  thinks the Doctor's dead to, to sort of basically reassure her
• 54:17
  and say how how absurd it all stands.
• 54:18
  Then he reappears here and then again finally in the Gallifrey
• 54:20
  Chronicles. And that was a little thread
• 54:22
  that I have not picked up on until we started revisiting some
• 54:25
  of these books. And it's delightful we're
• 54:27
  putting the threads together. As we go and the last thing I'd
• 54:31
  like to say about this book is the the chapter of the Doctor
• 54:35
  running across the moorland away from this hideous monster that's
• 54:39
  coming after him. And it is just a chase across
• 54:42
  this moorland. It's so vividly told you really
• 54:45
  feel like he is in terrible danger as is unknowing I think
• 54:49
  the the creature's described as having like he's got a cactus
• 54:52
  for an arm. He's scraping his arm along the
• 54:55
  floor after him. The winds lashing.
• 54:58
  The doctors tried desperately to remember that lion from the
• 55:00
  Hound of the Baskerville. So it was the what was it?
• 55:03
  It was the footprint of a giant hound or something like that.
• 55:07
  Just a brilliant, brilliant book.
• 55:09
  This comes just before time zero.
• 55:11
  It's like, my God, the age of Doctor Revengers are on an
• 55:14
  absolute high. Unfortunately.
• 55:16
  Then, as I said earlier, you get the Infinity raise of the domino
• 55:18
  effect, showing just how inconsistent these books can
• 55:21
  actually be. Yes.
• 55:23
  And just to follow up on that, my next.
• 55:24
  Bad book is the Infinity race. Go on.
• 55:29
  Yeah, which is? A it's, it's, it's a really
• 55:32
  exciting idea of a, a rounder planet yacht race.
• 55:35
  That is the, the bizarre Selenart, which is, it's just,
• 55:41
  again, it's one that you just can't remember much about.
• 55:43
  It's quite dull. There's a very strange idea to
• 55:46
  tell it all from first person perspective, including Fitz and
• 55:48
  Angie. And I don't know that that
• 55:50
  really works. The, the, the yacht race element
• 55:55
  doesn't really come across in the pros.
• 55:57
  There are some very confused ideas around around warlocks and
• 56:01
  time and it's and Sabbath turns up in.
• 56:05
  It in one of the. Races in his Jonah, which is
• 56:08
  then also a yacht, and I remember being disappointed with
• 56:13
  his depiction in it coming off the back of camera obscure
• 56:16
  because it's just a sign of how inconsistently he was.
• 56:20
  He was depicted in throughout that series, which is he's
• 56:24
  basically the master in this, which doesn't really work at all
• 56:28
  and it's probably showing you the weakness of the 8th Doctor
• 56:31
  ventures actually, which is that often their reach, the
• 56:36
  outstretch, their grasp or whatever the phrase is because
• 56:38
  their ambition was huge their. Ambition was huge, their
• 56:41
  ability. Was less huge.
• 56:43
  Yeah, because to have that character.
• 56:45
  Reappearing that often without any clear reference central
• 56:49
  reference for the character was perhaps more than they could
• 56:52
  actually pull off I I don't think they salvage.
• 56:55
  Him until the last resort, that's when he's next written
• 56:59
  with some kind of some degree of competence.
• 57:01
  And then I think in some time never.
• 57:03
  He's great. Yeah, but this is sort.
• 57:05
  Of a a good example of where the character just doesn't work.
• 57:11
  Yeah, it lets me record for an hour.
• 57:14
  Well, since you. Chose a Dave.
• 57:16
  Stone Book to recommend? I would like to for for almost
• 57:22
  entirely the same reasons you recommended him.
• 57:25
  I'm honest, it's impenetrable, bloody prose.
• 57:28
  The Slow Empire during a period I was really enjoying the 8th
• 57:35
  Doctor books. Year of intelligent Tigers,
• 57:37
  Earth World Dark, fortunately less slow.
• 57:41
  I don't remember anything about that, but The Slow Empire, it's
• 57:46
  told from the point of view of some weird eccentric in big bold
• 57:51
  font, and I couldn't understand a fucking word he was going on
• 57:56
  about. He's basically like a Henry
• 57:59
  Gordon Jago style character, very flamboyant, especially with
• 58:04
  his language. And it's a tour of this little
• 58:09
  corner of the universe. We go from planet to planet.
• 58:13
  It's it covers a lot of ground. I, I just remember not being
• 58:17
  able to read the thing because it was Dave Stone's prose.
• 58:22
  And to both of you, I pretty much every time I've read a
• 58:24
  Stone book, I've had that more cocky and problem of not
• 58:29
  understanding a word that he's talking about.
• 58:30
  Do you remember this book? I don't remember this book.
• 58:34
  I can't even tell you if I've read it or not, actually.
• 58:36
  But it was his last one, wasn't it?
• 58:38
  I don't think he wrote any more after that.
• 58:40
  He. Skipped.
• 58:42
  Across the big. Finish.
• 58:43
  Oh, there you go. And did he do?
• 58:45
  Judge Dredd stuff. There he did.
• 58:47
  There we go. He's probably happier.
• 58:48
  He was a lot happier although. I've done some of those recently
• 58:51
  and they are not the best of that range.
• 58:53
  Sorry Dave. I quite like deaf and diplomacy.
• 58:58
  I am a lot dude. Do you know what he did?
• 59:00
  This is not going to be on either list, but he did Burning
• 59:03
  Heart for the Virgin Missing Adventures which was meant to be
• 59:06
  a Doctor Who judged Dredd crossover book because Virgin
• 59:09
  did Judge Dredd books at the time.
• 59:11
  So it was meant to be a crossover between the two
• 59:12
  Rangers and then wasn't. But it's very thinly veiled
• 59:15
  Judge Dredd crossover. I think the Slow Empire is.
• 59:19
  The book where everybody's learnt to hate Andrew Kapoor as
• 59:22
  well because he writes her as as Tegan Times 100.
• 59:28
  She just whinges and moans her way through the entire book.
• 59:31
  There's some kind of a plot about the physics of this
• 59:36
  universe being slower than ours. I didn't get my head around any
• 59:41
  of that. The Doctor barely features in
• 59:43
  the book, and this is the Doctor sort of stepping into space for
• 59:47
  the first time in 100 years. I don't understand why we're
• 59:50
  doing that. A generally unpleasant
• 59:52
  experience? Well, let's talk about much more
• 59:55
  pleasant. Experience from the early
• 59:57
  noughties and go with the Cabinet of Light by Daniel Omani
• 1:00:02
  from the Doctor Who tell us novella range the idea of which
• 1:00:06
  was discussed on the podcast previously was to tell different
• 1:00:09
  experimental different Doctor Who stories in a in a more
• 1:00:12
  limited space and it's more a print run and this is a sort of
• 1:00:17
  post war noir magical realist dark fantasy story about a.
• 1:00:24
  A detective investigating strange goings on in the bombed
• 1:00:28
  out London involving a number of mysterious figures, including
• 1:00:33
  one called the Doctor. And it is a the Doctor is a very
• 1:00:39
  minor character in it, but it's a very interesting approach.
• 1:00:43
  To the to a Doctor Who story. From a very different literary
• 1:00:48
  point of view, it is I think you see there's a character like
• 1:00:53
  Graham, authors like Graham Greene, Arthur Mackin, in terms
• 1:00:56
  of how it's addressing the same ideas, but from a very different
• 1:01:00
  angle and a very different, very different set of references.
• 1:01:04
  It led on to the time hunter spin off range of novellas,
• 1:01:07
  which is not always brilliant, but always interesting.
• 1:01:12
  A features a Doctor Who we don't recognize from anywhere else as
• 1:01:15
  well. Could potentially be the richly
• 1:01:17
  Grant doctor sat, you know, descriptions a bit like him, but
• 1:01:20
  might not be. It's really good.
• 1:01:23
  I recommend it. It is still available because it
• 1:01:26
  was republished as a Time Hunter book with just a few little
• 1:01:29
  changes to to the text, but actually not that many given
• 1:01:32
  that the doc's not a huge character and it's really
• 1:01:34
  interesting. It's really different.
• 1:01:36
  One of the few of the telos. Ones that everyone sort of raved
• 1:01:39
  about at the time alongside time and relative.
• 1:01:42
  Is that it? Oh, there must.
• 1:01:46
  Be others, surely? Come on, the one you want me to
• 1:01:49
  read, The Dalek? Factor.
• 1:01:50
  That's good, but I've not heard anyone.
• 1:01:52
  Really talk about that. At all and.
• 1:01:58
  You won't hear me talk about it here.
• 1:01:59
  I'm saving my Kim Padded. Right?
• 1:02:02
  Okay, well then. I would like to recommend Eye of
• 1:02:06
  Heaven by Jim Mortimer from the past doctor adventures.
• 1:02:12
  Yeah. Have you read that one?
• 1:02:13
  No, this is the book I think Jim Mortimer wanted to write during
• 1:02:22
  his virgin days, but they said no, no, no, You can't tell any
• 1:02:27
  scenes from the doctor's point of view.
• 1:02:29
  That has been relaxed. And so we have many, many
• 1:02:33
  sequences from both the Doctor and Leland's point of view.
• 1:02:37
  And it's the best, I think the two of them have been written by
• 1:02:41
  anybody. Layla's sequences, that sort of
• 1:02:45
  savage point of view. Chris Boucher couldn't have done
• 1:02:47
  it as well as he does it in this.
• 1:02:49
  I thought you were taking a note then to read it.
• 1:02:53
  I've heaven you've not got that there, have you?
• 1:02:55
  OK. I've lost my train of fault.
• 1:03:04
  Yeah, I think it's a really great run that those early pass
• 1:03:08
  Dr. adventures you had the witch hunters coming out there, the
• 1:03:10
  Holloman this I think those those were in order actually,
• 1:03:14
  the round heads was great and and Eye of Heaven just showed
• 1:03:21
  illegal alien. That's a good one.
• 1:03:25
  It shows you that the BBC, they were willing to relax some of
• 1:03:31
  those rules and experiment a bit more.
• 1:03:34
  And this is a very experimental book that went down a storm when
• 1:03:38
  it came out and I love it. So I want it to go through.
• 1:03:41
  Good. I said I want it to go through.
• 1:03:43
  Like I'm doing. Strictly, I don't know what
• 1:03:46
  we're doing anymore. I'm not Rod.
• 1:03:48
  I'm Michael. I.
• 1:03:51
  Couldn't possibly make a comparison, so I'm going to
• 1:03:54
  suggest a bad. 4th Doctor past documentary and that is Last Man
• 1:03:58
  running by Chris Boucher, Boucher Butcher.
• 1:04:03
  Yeah. And it is just it's one of those
• 1:04:07
  things where you got right. He did some great stuff.
• 1:04:09
  So Corpse Marker is a great is a great 4th October adventure, but
• 1:04:14
  proper sequel to Yeah. But last man running is just.
• 1:04:18
  Very generic Chris Boucher stuff and I can't remember anything
• 1:04:20
  about it. And I came, I almost gave up on
• 1:04:23
  it. I had to come back to it just to
• 1:04:24
  complete it. It's it's almost like reading
• 1:04:28
  it. It's almost written like it's
• 1:04:30
  done on a a dodgy set that's trying to look like an alien
• 1:04:34
  jungle world. It could be a very boring Blake
• 1:04:39
  Seven episode. Imagine that, a boring episode
• 1:04:41
  of Blake 7. Unthinkable.
• 1:04:44
  But it's one of those things where.
• 1:04:45
  When you you get a writer who writes a lot and has written
• 1:04:48
  some very good things, but then also just writes a lot.
• 1:04:50
  That's very say me and I think at the time in the BBC books,
• 1:04:53
  we're willing to do different things.
• 1:04:55
  We're willing to relax some of them.
• 1:04:56
  It's just a book that if it were, if it come out as a new
• 1:04:59
  series of events, you'd think like The Price of Paradise, this
• 1:05:02
  is just a bit of filler. But what, what purpose would
• 1:05:05
  there be to filler when Doctor Who isn't on TV?
• 1:05:07
  It's a strangely absent book. I wonder if his name was.
• 1:05:12
  Supposed to be enough because he hadn't written a book before.
• 1:05:15
  A Doctor Who book? Oh really?
• 1:05:17
  Was that his first word? Oh, is that?
• 1:05:18
  This came before corpse marker. Oh, I mean, oh, well, that makes
• 1:05:22
  sense. Yeah.
• 1:05:23
  Very much getting his eye in. I think I I remember reading the
• 1:05:25
  reviews at the time and. Everyone was going, my God,
• 1:05:27
  Chris. Chris Patcher.
• 1:05:28
  How amazing. Oh God, yeah, I think that maybe
• 1:05:32
  we've solved the. Rhythm.
• 1:05:33
  Enormous reputation, Yeah. And actually to.
• 1:05:36
  Be honest. What else did he do?
• 1:05:38
  Course marker, science fiction and Match of the Day.
• 1:05:42
  His prose is not great, No, I mean.
• 1:05:46
  It's it's it's it's it's very like corpse marker is is
• 1:05:49
  wonderful. So clearly he could do it.
• 1:05:52
  But no, this this is just filler at a time when you couldn't.
• 1:05:56
  Believe there was. Filler and name recognition for
• 1:05:59
  the sake of it perhaps? No, I seriously can't remember a
• 1:06:01
  thing. About that book, what at all?
• 1:06:03
  And I have read it. Then I would like to oh, hello
• 1:06:07
  children. I would like to would you like
• 1:06:10
  to read Parasite by Jim Mortimer?
• 1:06:12
  It's full of lovely torture scenes, you know.
• 1:06:15
  No, no. And that is 1X not to recommend.
• 1:06:19
  And you're in an unfortunate position where you have Parasite
• 1:06:22
  and Force the Shadow back-to-back and they're both
• 1:06:26
  over 300 pages. It's 600 pages of torture porn.
• 1:06:31
  Terrible, terrible things happen to the characters in those two.
• 1:06:35
  But why are you looking around yourself like that?
• 1:06:38
  Who's who's listening? What do they think we're
• 1:06:41
  talking? About we're talking about
• 1:06:43
  Doctor. Paul and Doctor Who.
• 1:06:44
  No, no. And it is Jim Mortimer writing a
• 1:06:46
  book where? Yeah, it's something we couldn't
• 1:06:48
  do on TV. Too broad and too deep for the
• 1:06:50
  small screen, blah, blah, blah. It is very weird.
• 1:06:54
  It is very violent. I didn't like a second of it.
• 1:06:57
  It's an actively unpleasant read given we discussed this.
• 1:07:02
  As well given one of the reasons that virgin was sorry to lose
• 1:07:06
  the Doctor Who license was because the books were if not
• 1:07:09
  amazing sellers, they were very regular sellers.
• 1:07:10
  So you know, a lot of people who bought one book would buy all of
• 1:07:13
  the other books as well. And when you mentioned those two
• 1:07:16
  next to each other and then also at the 8th Doctor Adventure
• 1:07:18
  range, having the Infinity race and the domino effect
• 1:07:23
  back-to-back, I do wonder if they if I wonder if they lost
• 1:07:26
  readers because, oh, they absolutely did off the.
• 1:07:29
  Back of those off the back of. You know, having two bad books
• 1:07:32
  in a row, you know, you might just think there's plenty of
• 1:07:35
  else to plenty of us to read. We don't know about numbers, but
• 1:07:37
  I know. Time Worm.
• 1:07:39
  That Time Worm series did pique a lot of interest because that
• 1:07:42
  was new Doctor Who. By the time you got to the
• 1:07:45
  middle of the New Adventures, they were doing those polls, and
• 1:07:49
  over 50% of all of those polls for the New Adventures books
• 1:07:52
  was. I don't read them.
• 1:07:54
  I don't know. Yeah.
• 1:07:55
  And we forget it now, but there. Was a time in the early North in
• 1:07:58
  the early noughties. I remember when I was first
• 1:08:00
  getting to fandom and the Virgin adventures were not particularly
• 1:08:03
  well thought of. I mean, people thought some of
• 1:08:04
  the individual books were very good.
• 1:08:05
  You know, no one was pretending that human nature wasn't
• 1:08:08
  excellent, but there was as as a whole as a range.
• 1:08:11
  A lot of people were like, no, I think if you look at some of the
• 1:08:13
  contemporary views towards the end of the run as well, a lot of
• 1:08:16
  those books very well regarded. Now at the time, people are
• 1:08:18
  like, it's losing it, man. And I thought I wonder if the
• 1:08:22
  new series. Salvage the reputation of the
• 1:08:25
  new adventures a bit because so many of those writers came
• 1:08:28
  across. I think there's definitely a lot
• 1:08:29
  of that. I think not.
• 1:08:30
  To say some of those books aren't wonderful, but, you know,
• 1:08:32
  are you telling me that books like Parasite, like Falls the
• 1:08:35
  Shadow, like Saint Anthony's Fire, you know, a range that can
• 1:08:38
  produce those was not was not hit after hit after hit.
• 1:08:42
  And the flip side is also why the, you know, the BBC books are
• 1:08:44
  somewhat underconsidered because the people who were more
• 1:08:46
  involved then didn't go on to have such a role in in the new
• 1:08:49
  series. So there's a lot of look at
• 1:08:51
  who's writing the history. Yeah, I looked.
• 1:08:53
  At a list of when I was putting this list together of the Virgin
• 1:08:57
  New Adventures and I've come to recognise that I was a bit
• 1:09:01
  biased and actually they're better than I remember them
• 1:09:04
  being. But then when I looked down the
• 1:09:06
  list and I was going, oh, crikey, like, there isn't.
• 1:09:09
  There's never a run of like five books.
• 1:09:12
  There's always a couple in every five books.
• 1:09:15
  You know, Iceberg, we said the Cats Cradle series 2 of the time
• 1:09:21
  Worm books were terrible, like transit, you know, and that's
• 1:09:24
  all in the start of the range. Yeah.
• 1:09:27
  Yeah. And you know this is not.
• 1:09:28
  Isn't as you said, this is not a counter counter reading that
• 1:09:31
  they were all terrible, but they're much less consistent
• 1:09:33
  than I think the popular myth has it.
• 1:09:36
  I think 11 myth I've busted. Though is I think the last third
• 1:09:40
  are very good, with a few exceptions.
• 1:09:44
  I really think they got their act together, sort of human
• 1:09:48
  nature onwards, yes, but I'll give you one that from.
• 1:09:51
  That from my next from that last that isn't.
• 1:09:54
  Any good and that? Is, and it pains me, God Engine
• 1:09:57
  and I've put God Engine here by Craig Hinson because I don't
• 1:10:00
  think I've been so disappointed by a book.
• 1:10:04
  It's promises huge. I love Craig Hinson and stuff
• 1:10:06
  and I think this was his you do. I do like a lot of his stuff.
• 1:10:09
  I I really. Like Quantum Archangel, I think
• 1:10:11
  it's I think it's Doctor Who is mad.
• 1:10:13
  It's mad, but it's Doctor Who done as a big DC Marvel summer
• 1:10:17
  crossover comic book series, and it's a heck of a lot of fun.
• 1:10:19
  And I really like Synthespians. I think that's a lot of campy
• 1:10:22
  fun as well. I was, but God, engine looks on
• 1:10:29
  the cover is so exciting. You know, it's the Ice Warriors
• 1:10:32
  on Mars. Oh no, I'm picking them legacy.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah, no, it's the one that has the.
• 1:10:37
  The two Ice Lords on Mars dueling in front of a dueling in
• 1:10:41
  front of a pyramid. And it is.
• 1:10:44
  It is Craiginton, I think popularly credited with
• 1:10:48
  inventing the term fan wank and he always claimed that it was
• 1:10:55
  him who created it in review for Celestial Toy Room.
• 1:10:59
  Possibly, I'm not sure. And he, it's the book in which
• 1:11:03
  he is going to pull together all the continuity on Mars and
• 1:11:05
  actually give you a depiction of Mars within the Doctor Who
• 1:11:09
  universe based on everything we know about it.
• 1:11:11
  So how did the, what was happening with the Ice Warriors
• 1:11:14
  when the dialects had invaded Mars?
• 1:11:15
  Well, how did the how did the siren influence actually spread
• 1:11:18
  into Martian culture? It sounds exciting.
• 1:11:21
  And we're going to go on a great big epic travel through the
• 1:11:23
  city, underground cities. I've got a question for you
• 1:11:25
  there. What went wrong?
• 1:11:27
  It just wrote it as a very dull. Book in which characters spent a
• 1:11:31
  lot of time walking through a lot of underground tunnels.
• 1:11:34
  It is a but he, he's very clever in the sense that it is set the
• 1:11:38
  Daleks are an off screen presence throughout throughout
• 1:11:41
  because obviously they can, they decided, I think it was the
• 1:11:43
  decision was financial one with the they weren't going to give
• 1:11:46
  the money to the nation of state that they'd need to in order to
• 1:11:48
  feature the Daleks. So, you know, commercial
• 1:11:50
  decision, but they couldn't feature them.
• 1:11:52
  But that therefore means that a lot of the most interesting
• 1:11:54
  stuff is off screen. It's very slow.
• 1:11:58
  There's a lot of walking between places and ultimately it's
• 1:12:05
  threats and its ideas are very, very big and yet they just
• 1:12:09
  don't. You just don't feel it.
• 1:12:10
  You don't feel the epic, the epic scale of of the threats
• 1:12:14
  that are being levelled. And yeah, a bit of a
• 1:12:17
  disappointment. Some of the mythology, some of
• 1:12:19
  his ideas around the history of Mars and how these things fit
• 1:12:21
  together. They're fun, they're
• 1:12:22
  interesting, but oh, there's a lot of walking between them.
• 1:12:25
  Do you think The Epitar and Doctor Who Magazine?
• 1:12:28
  Is accurate. What's that?
• 1:12:31
  God engine. God awful.
• 1:12:33
  More like, yeah, that's more succinct than what I just said.
• 1:12:37
  I do also think as well that. Craigkinton suffered from the
• 1:12:42
  same thing I accused David Bishop of earlier.
• 1:12:44
  There's no real subtlety in any of the rising.
• 1:12:48
  So I spend a lot of the time, even the quantum Archangel sort
• 1:12:51
  of cringing at the over the top dial I bet everyone's got and
• 1:12:55
  the the overly descriptive prose.
• 1:12:59
  Unfair. Yeah, I mean it might explain
• 1:13:01
  why I think these. Days if I had, you know, if I
• 1:13:03
  had to eyeball it, I'd say his best regard best remembered
• 1:13:06
  because is his last one sin thespians.
• 1:13:08
  And perhaps that's because that is a tribute to big bowls camp
• 1:13:12
  1980s American soap opera, and that tone fits.
• 1:13:15
  Realise where his strengths are. What have I got to do next?
• 1:13:19
  Give us. Give us something.
• 1:13:20
  Good, something good. OK, I would like to recommend.
• 1:13:23
  The also People by Beech. Now I'd like to give this a
• 1:13:28
  Really. Smart reading like I know you
• 1:13:30
  will when you and I cover this on the book club, because we
• 1:13:32
  this is one we've talked about, isn't it?
• 1:13:34
  Yes, I'm, I'm going to be quite. Tiresome again and I'm slowly
• 1:13:37
  working my my way through E&M, Banks's culture novels and I
• 1:13:41
  want to read the also people at the point in publication order
• 1:13:45
  where it came out what to see where all the influences have
• 1:13:48
  come. From Yeah.
• 1:13:49
  Oh, you're such a geek. I love it, but mostly I do what
• 1:13:53
  the reason why I love this at the time and why I love this
• 1:13:57
  now, My God, people are going to kill each other on bicycles is
• 1:14:00
  because it's a new adventure that fucking chills out for a
• 1:14:04
  whole book. There's relatively little peril
• 1:14:08
  in this book. One robot gets murdered on this
• 1:14:11
  sphere and it's a murder mystery about who killed that robot
• 1:14:15
  because nobody ever gets harmed on this big.
• 1:14:18
  It's like a big Dyson spheres I think.
• 1:14:20
  Sounds quite Isaac Asimov as well as.
• 1:14:22
  Ian M Banks a little bit, yes. It's got Ross and Chris.
• 1:14:28
  What is going on? He's got Ross and Chris and the
• 1:14:31
  7th Doctor. They're absolute high as well.
• 1:14:34
  I think that both of those characters can be badly written
• 1:14:39
  when you just lean into the cliches about him.
• 1:14:41
  She's the grizzled cop, and he's the sort of teddy bear,
• 1:14:45
  literally a teddy bear in his first.
• 1:14:46
  Appearance hideous. But no, no.
• 1:14:49
  And Ross actually gets a romance in this with one of the
• 1:14:52
  characters on the what it's called.
• 1:14:54
  Is it the sphere, something like that, The world sphere.
• 1:14:57
  Oh, how do you? Know that I know.
• 1:14:58
  Things. No.
• 1:15:02
  No, after Transit, which I think is Aronovich right into extremes
• 1:15:07
  in a lot of ways, he comes back and he brings all the brilliant
• 1:15:11
  world building he did in transit, but just writes a very
• 1:15:15
  relaxed book on a in a setting that I'd love to be in because
• 1:15:19
  it's one of these worlds where everything is delivered to you
• 1:15:22
  with characters that I loved hanging around with.
• 1:15:24
  And much like Andrea Tatara, the small stakes of the story are
• 1:15:29
  what make it. It's a real it's an easy book to
• 1:15:32
  relax into. I look forward to covering it
• 1:15:34
  just so I can. Do my best Patrick Stewart
• 1:15:36
  impression when I say could this be a Dyson sphere back to you?
• 1:15:45
  That's fine. Something that's good.
• 1:15:47
  As well another 7th Doctor book that is good I'm going to go for
• 1:15:51
  the novelization of Battlefields by Mark Platt.
• 1:15:54
  Wouldn't be the first choice. Because you know.
• 1:16:00
  Season 26 is a good run of Doctor Who stories, but the run
• 1:16:03
  of novelizations is God's tear. And these novelizations at their
• 1:16:07
  best, they are aimed, they're another pass at the story, freed
• 1:16:12
  of the limitations of TV and more able to go further and do
• 1:16:15
  things it could not. And Battlefield on TV is a is a
• 1:16:18
  frustrating story because I like a lot of its ideas and what it
• 1:16:21
  wants to do, but it's it's let down by its production.
• 1:16:23
  I don't think that's a controversial take.
• 1:16:25
  This doesn't have those problems.
• 1:16:26
  It is moving more towards the Platonic ideal of that story.
• 1:16:29
  It is Doctor Who as big beefy 80s fantasy macho fantasy.
• 1:16:35
  It's Doctor Who doing Highlander.
• 1:16:37
  It is Doctor Who doing Legends and Excalibur and all and all
• 1:16:41
  the rest of them. And it does it deviate from the
• 1:16:43
  plot then is it has. It got like set pieces that we
• 1:16:45
  never saw on TV a little bit. It follows.
• 1:16:48
  The main story well, but in the style of these things bit like
• 1:16:51
  remembrance of the Daleks, you know, it builds out around that
• 1:16:53
  a bit. So you do get glimpses of of
• 1:16:55
  Arthur's world and oh, you get a wonderful prologue which feeds
• 1:17:00
  into the whole sort of circular storytelling that's hinted out
• 1:17:02
  on screen, which is of the future doctor bearing Arthur to
• 1:17:06
  his final rest. It it it it's, it's fantastic.
• 1:17:10
  It's wonderful. It it it brings out some of the
• 1:17:14
  things that are implied in the story and just I just perhaps
• 1:17:17
  brings the seasoning up a bit more.
• 1:17:19
  So you get it. But it's a wonderful moment
• 1:17:20
  where they realize that Excalibur can interface with the
• 1:17:23
  TARDIS because they're the same technology, which just hints at
• 1:17:26
  a bit more of this, this idea that there is this whole other
• 1:17:28
  world, this whole of the set of adventures lying in the Doctor's
• 1:17:30
  future with with Merlin and all the rest of them, which is quite
• 1:17:33
  ahead of its time and quite Steve Mofitier made me think a
• 1:17:35
  lot of things like actually Silence in the Library, maybe
• 1:17:39
  think of as there being this ideal future Doctor, Who's the
• 1:17:42
  real Doctor, the Doctors he could be who is actually setting
• 1:17:45
  up everything that's going on here and leaving the 7th dock to
• 1:17:48
  the arch manipulator actually is the one who's being a bit guided
• 1:17:51
  through things a bit, which is a really nice and clever inversion
• 1:17:53
  reversal. Yeah, so.
• 1:17:55
  It's a really good book. Not.
• 1:17:56
  Discover I think we've said we're probably going to
• 1:17:58
  hopefully got a very long list, but hopefully another one we're
• 1:18:00
  hoping to get into a bit further in the future.
• 1:18:03
  What shocks me in that is that Ace.
• 1:18:04
  Goes piss off. At one point I remember reading
• 1:18:07
  that as a kid going what? I mean, that's so much less
• 1:18:10
  painful. Than get lost, brought bags or
• 1:18:13
  something. To be fair, yes.
• 1:18:15
  Have I got to go? To a terrible book.
• 1:18:16
  Now then, I'd like to talk about The Ghosts of En Space by Barry
• 1:18:23
  Letts, A controversial choice. Often lingering at the very.
• 1:18:26
  Bottom of the poles, just above interference.
• 1:18:30
  Do you know what? I don't think Barry Letts
• 1:18:31
  remembers any of the characters that he created in the 70s or
• 1:18:36
  the Axis performance because they bear little resemblance to
• 1:18:39
  the ones that appeared on TVI mean it had been 20 years.
• 1:18:44
  I know, but he's not been. He didn't push away from fandom
• 1:18:46
  at all, did he? No, it's very odd.
• 1:18:48
  The Brigadier goes off to Italy and it's a story about his
• 1:18:53
  uncle, Uncle Mario we were doing.
• 1:18:55
  That all the time in the. 70s, weren't we?
• 1:18:58
  Sarah Jane Smith is doing her work for Metropolitan magazine
• 1:19:02
  and just happens to be there at the same time with her own
• 1:19:05
  assistant, Jeremy Fitz Oliver. Oh, Sarah.
• 1:19:08
  Hello. Or Jeremy.
• 1:19:10
  And where's he? Where's he?
• 1:19:11
  Come from up on the. Woodhouse because it's very odd,
• 1:19:14
  and then the 3rd Doctor himself, who is a.
• 1:19:17
  Well I know John Poe was an arrogant prick, let's be honest,
• 1:19:19
  but it's taken to monumental levels.
• 1:19:22
  It's a very stupid book, this isn't it.
• 1:19:25
  The thing about the paradise of death and the.
• 1:19:27
  Ghost of in space that I've always thought is it doesn't and
• 1:19:29
  I sought respective for this. It may be one of the reasons
• 1:19:32
  they don't feel like the characters as they've been on
• 1:19:34
  screen is because Barry Letts as one of the sort of authors of
• 1:19:36
  those characters, maybe feels less.
• 1:19:38
  I mean, he feels more ownership of them and he feels less of a
• 1:19:41
  need to explicitly ape what was done on screen and say, you
• 1:19:44
  know, this is how I'm writing my characters now.
• 1:19:46
  This is this is how I see them. What I thought about those two
• 1:19:48
  books as well is for that reason, it doesn't feel like a
• 1:19:51
  return to the 70s. It feels like this is no, no,
• 1:19:53
  this is the third Doctor, Brigadier and Sarah Jane in in
• 1:19:55
  the early 90s and the, you know, maybe, you know, with timeless
• 1:19:58
  Doctors and by regeneration and all the rest of it, you know,
• 1:20:00
  maybe you could do it in that way.
• 1:20:02
  Fair enough. I buy.
• 1:20:04
  That argument, but please explain to me how terribly the
• 1:20:10
  written this is, how appalling the pros is.
• 1:20:13
  And every time paradise of death go some in space, deadly
• 1:20:17
  reunion, Island of death. God, how did that not make it on
• 1:20:22
  my list? He just can't write pros.
• 1:20:25
  Or maybe you'd enjoy it more if you just thought of.
• 1:20:27
  It as you know, if if they've got the gang back together for a
• 1:20:30
  for another series in 1993 or whenever, it was 1995.
• 1:20:34
  And this is the Bergerac style Christmas special.
• 1:20:37
  And what do you do on a Christmas special?
• 1:20:38
  You go abroad? Yeah.
• 1:20:41
  No, it's terrible. Don't read it, although I have
• 1:20:44
  just had my arm twisted today to go and read it for a future book
• 1:20:47
  club episode. Dodge the bullet there.
• 1:20:50
  I'm going to give a mention a bad Doctor Who book, and it's
• 1:20:54
  one an author I did not expect to include on this list.
• 1:20:58
  I'm going to say Doctor Who and the Cricket Men by Douglas Adams
• 1:21:02
  and James Goss. Wow, my God, two of the.
• 1:21:05
  Best writers Doctor Who has ever had, Yes, and I think in
• 1:21:08
  fairness. The reason this book is here is
• 1:21:10
  not reflective of either of them as authors.
• 1:21:12
  It's reflective of the the attempt that it recognizes,
• 1:21:18
  which is to try and make a novel out of very loose material,
• 1:21:24
  which was a a pitch that Douglas Adams had pulled together for a
• 1:21:27
  potential Doctor Who film, as I understand.
• 1:21:29
  I'm not even clear it was ever meant to be ever actually
• 1:21:32
  seriously meant to be produced. I think it was.
• 1:21:35
  I think when he was pitching to be script editor, they asked him
• 1:21:37
  to come up with ideas for a script and ideas for a film
• 1:21:39
  treatment. So Doctor in the cricket member.
• 1:21:41
  So it's never got fully developed in that way.
• 1:21:43
  The material is varies, I suspect from have you read Life,
• 1:21:50
  the Universe and everything? The yes I have it's that so he.
• 1:21:53
  Basically. Douglas Adams had already reused
• 1:21:56
  these ideas for the third Hitchhiker's book for the
• 1:21:59
  Cricket men, The Cricket Key, you know, the war and the
• 1:22:01
  universe and all the rest of it. So a lot of it had all the best
• 1:22:04
  bits had already been taken and and done again elsewhere.
• 1:22:08
  And what stitches it together is a lot of very fannish stuff.
• 1:22:11
  There's a return of Professor Cronotis for no particular
• 1:22:14
  reason. There's lots of Time Lord
• 1:22:16
  mythology around. Battle Tardis is a lot of our
• 1:22:20
  choices today. Yeah, and the whole thing just
• 1:22:22
  becomes. An absolute an absolute slog.
• 1:22:25
  Douglas Adams was not the always the tightest of plotters.
• 1:22:30
  I mean, that's the markup of our City of Death is how is how well
• 1:22:33
  the plot for City of Death works given that it's a Douglas Adams
• 1:22:36
  script. Graham Williams is in there as
• 1:22:38
  well though. That's possibly.
• 1:22:39
  That's possibly not. Coincidental and James Goss,
• 1:22:42
  magnificent author as he is really I just think can't make
• 1:22:45
  can't make a coherent and satisfying book out of this
• 1:22:48
  these huge but very loose ideas and you know, just just go and
• 1:22:53
  read life, the universe and everything fair.
• 1:22:56
  I've not read The Cricket Man and actually.
• 1:22:58
  Weird enough, it's the only one of those James Goss, Douglas
• 1:23:01
  Adams ones that I've just not gone anywhere near.
• 1:23:03
  It's the only one that people don't talk about because the
• 1:23:04
  others are. Great.
• 1:23:06
  The City of Death novelisation good.
• 1:23:07
  It was almost on my list of good of of top ones.
• 1:23:09
  Big Pirate Planet's great as well.
• 1:23:11
  Oh, the other. One's scratch, man.
• 1:23:13
  I've not gone near that either. Yeah.
• 1:23:15
  I mean, I think that was a similar premise.
• 1:23:16
  And they they get away with it a bit more.
• 1:23:18
  Basically, it's it's, it's, it's mad, glorious fun.
• 1:23:20
  I think it helps that the ideas aren't as huge.
• 1:23:22
  Whereas Dr. Doctor and the Cricket Men is a story about
• 1:23:26
  aliens threatening the entire universe.
• 1:23:28
  So, well, what have I got there? Something I like now.
• 1:23:31
  Yes, I'm. Glad you know what you're doing.
• 1:23:34
  We're almost there, listeners, don't worry.
• 1:23:36
  I was. Going to say Christmas on a
• 1:23:40
  Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles which has the the most
• 1:23:44
  glorious ending of the TARDIS just because she loves the
• 1:23:49
  Doctor saving the day. It's a very clever but
• 1:23:52
  unfortunately I don't remember anything else about it so I've
• 1:23:54
  got nothing else to say. So what instead, I can't believe
• 1:23:57
  I didn't put it on my list, is Festival of Death by Jonathan
• 1:24:00
  Morris, which is pulls off the very difficult feat as you have
• 1:24:06
  just proven to convincingly ape a Douglas Adams script that's
• 1:24:12
  come from season 17. And having the wonderful premise
• 1:24:15
  of the Doctor, Romana starting the story having already saved
• 1:24:20
  the day and the Doctor having already been killed, and then
• 1:24:23
  throughout the rest of the book having to constantly go
• 1:24:26
  backwards in order for the plot to make sense.
• 1:24:30
  It's really, really clever, this book.
• 1:24:33
  It's full of witty dialogue. It gives the Doctor some
• 1:24:36
  surprisingly dark moments, actually, for a book that's this
• 1:24:39
  funny, It's sort of trying to work through someone's vomiting,
• 1:24:45
  trying to work through. We're in the middle of London,
• 1:24:49
  folks. All right.
• 1:24:49
  We're nowhere dodgy. Buckingham Palace is just over
• 1:24:53
  there. No, it's, it's a really funny,
• 1:24:57
  it's a really clever book. It has a very satisfying ending
• 1:25:02
  for a book that starts with this ending with lots of surprising
• 1:25:06
  twists. It catapulted Jonathan Morris as
• 1:25:09
  the writer to watch at that point because nobody else apart
• 1:25:12
  from Gareth Roberts had touched that season seven teacher.
• 1:25:15
  Because I think it's like, it's really hard to get Riot.
• 1:25:17
  Yeah. Very clear, but very funny.
• 1:25:19
  Yeah. Brilliant.
• 1:25:20
  Excellent. And I'm going.
• 1:25:22
  To now for my final. You'll be glad to hear good book
• 1:25:25
  recommendation. I'm going to go nonfiction again
• 1:25:28
  and to make up for some of the cruel jokes we've made, I would
• 1:25:32
  like to recommend Downtime The Lost Years of Doctor Who by
• 1:25:35
  Dylan Reese. Oh, sorry, I.
• 1:25:38
  Thought you meant Downtime by Mark Platt.
• 1:25:42
  Are you mad? Oh yeah, sorry, that's actually
• 1:25:43
  what I've got written. Down here you recommended Dylan
• 1:25:45
  Reese's book. Yes, that's what I just did
• 1:25:47
  here. Oh, it's wonderful.
• 1:25:48
  Isn't it? It's fantastic.
• 1:25:50
  It's gossipy. It's scurrilous.
• 1:25:52
  It's disciple about one of them, one of those.
• 1:25:55
  You see, if you think there weren't any new topics to talk
• 1:25:57
  about in Doctor Who. And yet, and yet 111 man, one
• 1:26:02
  man who was a boy with a dream, has written an entire book about
• 1:26:08
  when Doctor Who, when Doctor Who wasn't on telly about about BBV,
• 1:26:12
  about real time magic bullet, the whole lot of them, when
• 1:26:15
  Doctor Who was. Copyright violations everywhere.
• 1:26:19
  BBC lawyers didn't give a damn. And so we got we got TV series
• 1:26:24
  like The Stranger, about a mysterious traveller in time and
• 1:26:28
  space and his companion, played by Nicola Bryant, checked out
• 1:26:31
  Return of the Sontaras featuring.
• 1:26:33
  Sophie Aldridge at her absolute best, may I say, as what was her
• 1:26:38
  character's name in that? Did you expect me to remember
• 1:26:40
  that? Oh God, I can't.
• 1:26:43
  Remember she screams brilliantly and Caroline Ford as the mad
• 1:26:47
  drunk vamp. As well as audio series.
• 1:26:51
  Like the True history of Faction Paradox and Caldor City, which
• 1:26:54
  is brilliant as well. Oh yeah, it's gossipy.
• 1:26:56
  It's full of it's full of scandal and rumor and lots of
• 1:26:59
  excellent interviewees. It's actually one of those books
• 1:27:01
  where you think. A lot of work has gone into this
• 1:27:04
  and you've endured a lot of pain in order to bring this for us to
• 1:27:08
  read, so we must respect. The sacrifices that were made.
• 1:27:12
  Can I ask you a question? Do you?
• 1:27:14
  Think this is where the rumor of Dylan and his bullshit rumor
• 1:27:18
  meals come from because he spread so much gossip in this
• 1:27:21
  book yes I I, I think he. I I think that's probably the
• 1:27:26
  the origin point. He has no one to blame but
• 1:27:27
  himself. If you're going to go out of
• 1:27:28
  your way to write a book like this for presuming not much
• 1:27:30
  financial reward, you will you will endure these rumours about
• 1:27:35
  yourself. I do believe you know he endured
• 1:27:37
  a. Two or three hour interview with
• 1:27:39
  Ian Levine in order to get quotes for this book and the
• 1:27:42
  next one. I want to reread it now.
• 1:27:45
  I know the. Pain this man went through Go.
• 1:27:47
  And buy this bloody book, all right, We salute you.
• 1:27:50
  Oh, God, what have I got to do now?
• 1:27:51
  Your hopefully final bad Doctor Who book.
• 1:27:55
  No, you're. Yeah, yes, Yes, it is.
• 1:27:59
  Listeners tell us text quickly and it's two books.
• 1:28:04
  That so funny. Randomly you've both mentioned
• 1:28:08
  earlier of saying if you were in WH Smiths you could have picked
• 1:28:14
  up these two books instead of Storm Harvest.
• 1:28:17
  Isn't that narratively satisfying listeners?
• 1:28:19
  This. Is where we started.
• 1:28:21
  Independence Day and asylum by Peter Darville Evans.
• 1:28:27
  Now, Michael, why don't you tell everybody who Peter Darville
• 1:28:29
  Evans is? Peter Darville Evans is one of
• 1:28:32
  those. People who turns up, if you're a
• 1:28:33
  geek, a British geek, he turns up in a surprisingly large
• 1:28:35
  number of places. I think one of the earliest
• 1:28:37
  things I've heard about him, he's involved.
• 1:28:38
  He was involved in the early days of Games Workshop.
• 1:28:42
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great book called Dice
• 1:28:45
  Men about the early days of Games Workshop, written by Ian
• 1:28:49
  Livingston, who was involved. He was one of the guys who set
• 1:28:52
  it up. And Peter Darwell Evans turns up
• 1:28:54
  there. He also wrote then I think took
• 1:28:55
  over writing some of the Fighting Fantasy books that
• 1:28:58
  geeks of a certain age might remember and through that got
• 1:29:02
  into publishing where he became the range editor on the Doctor
• 1:29:07
  Who Virgin books. And then when they ended, he
• 1:29:11
  went into account tax, which was for HMRCI think wow, right?
• 1:29:18
  And those Virgin New adventures, it got him prepared for all of
• 1:29:20
  that. Of course, you had all that
• 1:29:22
  information about him when I just wanted you to say he was
• 1:29:27
  the editor of the Virgin New Avengers.
• 1:29:28
  Always adding value believe. You know he's also.
• 1:29:31
  Written 140 erotic novels under the pen name of Porsche de
• 1:29:36
  Costa. If any lawyers listening, that
• 1:29:38
  is. Yet.
• 1:29:39
  That is absolutely potentially not true.
• 1:29:42
  If anyone knows who Porsche the. Costa is please come forward.
• 1:29:45
  We need to know what was I saying?
• 1:29:48
  Oh yes, Asylum and Independence Day, the book that everybody was
• 1:29:54
  asking for. Nyssa after she left the 5th
• 1:29:57
  doctor meets Tom Baker's doctor. Yes, before they meet the first
• 1:30:02
  time. Really wobbly time.
• 1:30:03
  You want me the past at? Some point.
• 1:30:07
  That's all I can remember about it.
• 1:30:09
  Anyone can remember Independence Day?
• 1:30:11
  Not a thing. Not a single thing about that
• 1:30:15
  book. It's the 7th Doctor and Ace.
• 1:30:17
  I have read it as a soldier on the front with glowing eyes.
• 1:30:21
  That's all I've got for you, Peter.
• 1:30:23
  Doctor Evans. I think he was a a very good
• 1:30:26
  range editor. Have you read Deceit?
• 1:30:31
  20 years. Ago.
• 1:30:32
  He's not a good novelist. And honestly, why they brought
• 1:30:36
  him back to see out the past Doctor adventures with atom bomb
• 1:30:39
  Blues that was Andrew Carmel. Fuck that was terrible as well.
• 1:30:46
  No, no, no. Just highly, highly unmemorable.
• 1:30:52
  But I do remember them being a bit painful whilst I was reading
• 1:30:55
  them as well. Just badly written books Yeah,
• 1:30:59
  sorry, I don't have anything else Well, and for my.
• 1:31:02
  For for our final book, My Last bad choice, I am going to say A
• 1:31:07
  Big Hand for the Doctor by John Colfer.
• 1:31:11
  Apologies if I got his parents, doesn't mean correctly.
• 1:31:13
  So it's one of the little Puffin E shorts they did for the 50th
• 1:31:16
  anniversary where they got a big name YA author to write a short
• 1:31:21
  story for each of the doctors. Mallory Backman did one for the
• 1:31:25
  7th Doctor that was quite good. Jacqueline Rayner did imaginary.
• 1:31:28
  Friends, is it that serious? No, no, no, no.
• 1:31:30
  This is this is. This is much.
• 1:31:31
  This is 2013. I'm trying to think who else who
• 1:31:34
  else did 10 your man who did class wrote one for the 5th
• 1:31:37
  doctor tip of the tongue and Joan Colfer Bethany of the
• 1:31:40
  Artemis Fowl books wrote one for the first doctor called the big
• 1:31:43
  hand for the Doctor. And it's, it's, it's a lovely
• 1:31:45
  idea for a range. And most of the stories were,
• 1:31:47
  you know, and, and good, good to entertaining.
• 1:31:52
  This one, however, I think because the problem is if you
• 1:31:54
  bring in people who aren't that familiar with Doctor Who is
• 1:31:56
  sometimes you get stories that don't seem very Doctor Whoy.
• 1:31:59
  I think he said he wants to write something that reminded
• 1:32:01
  him of the sort of mad, crazy annual stories he remembered
• 1:32:03
  when he was a kid, which is fair enough, but it's just not how
• 1:32:06
  the Doctor really behaves. And it's certainly not how the
• 1:32:08
  1st Doctor behaves. It's it's sort of paying tribute
• 1:32:12
  to things like Peter Pan, But I just don't think you recognize
• 1:32:16
  anything of the Doctor or a, or a Doctor Who story in
• 1:32:18
  particular. It's a real shame because I
• 1:32:22
  think when you get, you know, right about accomplished, I
• 1:32:25
  think you, you know, you're really hopeful, but I think it
• 1:32:27
  just misses the mark. And I think if if it if it
• 1:32:30
  weren't him writing it, it would matter.
• 1:32:34
  I don't think it would matter. No.
• 1:32:36
  Wow, Michael. I do have to apologize to you.
• 1:32:40
  I probably should have sent five top on bottom each and then you
• 1:32:43
  wouldn't have had to have been doing this for the last two
• 1:32:46
  hours. I did point out to Joe off off.
• 1:32:48
  Mike that if he asks for my top ten, my bottom 10, his top ten,
• 1:32:51
  no, that's forty books. That's a lot of books, but we
• 1:32:54
  have gone through it. To sort of round this off Bug
• 1:33:01
  what is on our potential list of books we could be covering in a
• 1:33:06
  bit. I know there's a bit of a
• 1:33:07
  spoilers Yep, it's a strange sort of an episode.
• 1:33:11
  Yep, I as far as I know, Yep, we have got the beast of Fang rock,
• 1:33:16
  which will by Andy Frank and Allen, which.
• 1:33:19
  We are reading slash listening to at the moment.
• 1:33:22
  Enduring, I'd say, but. OK, fair enough.
• 1:33:25
  That's what I can remember you. You bought the other one today.
• 1:33:29
  Joe Liberation of the Daleks. Oh yes, the 14th Doctor graphic
• 1:33:33
  novel bridging the gap between Power of the Doctor and
• 1:33:37
  Destination Scaro. We're very much looking forward
• 1:33:39
  to that. 10 Anacrophobia by Jonathan.
• 1:33:42
  Morris, we've talked about. I'm sure we'll do that at some
• 1:33:44
  point. Yeah, that's all I've got.
• 1:33:46
  The also people when I get there, we're just making this
• 1:33:51
  shut up now. Do you know what?
• 1:33:55
  I'll bring this to it because Michael has a pained look on his
• 1:33:57
  face. My foot has gone to sleep.
• 1:33:59
  Yeah, mine too. I.
• 1:33:59
  Really anyway. Michael, thank you very much.
• 1:34:03
  Thank you, Joe, coming to this park.
• 1:34:05
  And talking about. Your favorite and least favorite
• 1:34:07
  Doctor Who books Last question have you wasted too much of your
• 1:34:11
  life reading Doctor Who books Yes, but that's not going to
• 1:34:15
  mean. I'm not going to waste more.