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Hamster Book Club - Steven B ranks his top and bottom ten Doctor Who Books! · 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 what a thrill it is for me today to
• 0:09
  introduce to the book club not a stranger to hamster listeners
• 0:13
  after his, you know, 8 episode meteoric commentary on the
• 0:16
  invasion, his barely audible commentary on Castro Valva.
• 0:23
  Yes, so sorry for that. Mr. Stephen B Hello, Stephen.
• 0:29
  Hello Joe, thank you so much for inviting me on.
• 0:31
  I have been listening to the Hams Book Club tentatively and
• 0:35
  with great pleasure for a number of weeks and months now and what
• 0:39
  a joy to be asked on. Thank you very much.
• 0:41
  Have there been any episodes that you've listened to and
• 0:43
  you've just heard the opinions and gone?
• 0:45
  What are they talking about? I wouldn't say entire episodes,
• 0:50
  but I would definitely say there would be some surprises, which
• 0:52
  is great. It sort of speaks to the fact
• 0:55
  that every each one of us have our subjective opinions around
• 0:58
  what makes good Doctor Who or even what makes enjoyable Doctor
• 1:02
  Who, even though we know, perhaps objectively that it's
• 1:05
  trash. And that's that's kind of the
• 1:06
  fun. That's that's really fantastic
• 1:09
  to hear people's, you know, whether it's guilty pleasures
• 1:11
  or, you know, recognizable trash, but love to trash being
• 1:15
  in top 10s. I think it's great.
• 1:17
  Do you think the books are, you know, you in LA, you know,
• 1:21
  you've had your own podcast. I've got my own podcast.
• 1:23
  We've guested on other podcasts talking about Doctor Who on the
• 1:26
  television. You know, that's a well
• 1:28
  thoroughed field. Do you think the books are less
• 1:32
  well represented in terms of critique?
• 1:36
  I think so. And obviously there's this sort
• 1:38
  of barrier to entry in terms of television being a communal, but
• 1:42
  also a much easier genre or text form or text type to to read.
• 1:47
  And it's also something that sort of exists outside fandom,
• 1:52
  right? People recognize Doctor Who
• 1:54
  because it's on the telly and it's a mass, you know, mass
• 1:57
  media product and consumed as such.
• 1:58
  Whereas we're talking perhaps about a particular wilderness
• 2:02
  year's books. And that's very much the topic
• 2:05
  for our top and bottom 10 this time around.
• 2:08
  You know, perhaps, I don't know, 20,000 people may have read a
• 2:12
  particular book, sometimes less than that.
• 2:14
  And we're talking about the minority of the minority of the
• 2:18
  population. So there's less of a maybe
• 2:21
  cultural cache or, you know, recognizable audience out there
• 2:25
  for, for these kinds of criticisms and these kinds of,
• 2:28
  you know, critiques. I don't think that means that
• 2:31
  it's invalid to do so. I think there's some great stuff
• 2:34
  that was, you know, developed during the ordinance years.
• 2:36
  It's an absolute trash as well, and it's great to be able to
• 2:39
  pull that apart in the same way that we pull apart the horns of
• 2:42
  Naiman or, you know, spearhead from space.
• 2:44
  I think the joy of doing this is discovering some of this stuff.
• 2:50
  Like I've read all of these books, but in fact, by by sort
• 2:53
  of pulling them apart a bit you you're discovering some of the
• 2:57
  best and some of the worst Doctor Who there has ever.
• 3:01
  Been absolutely yes. Definitely some of the worst,
• 3:03
  but absolutely. Some of the best.
• 3:05
  As well. Well, look, before we go into
• 3:07
  any sort of a list, can I ask you then what your book journey
• 3:12
  is with Doctor Who? I know kind of how it starts,
• 3:15
  but please for everybody else. I mean, if if people have
• 3:19
  listened to my appearance and sigh hearts impossible, a
• 3:23
  library of impossible things, they'll, they'll have heard me
• 3:26
  talk about this for probably longer than is decent.
• 3:30
  But I came to Doctor Who through the books.
• 3:32
  It was the target books that were my gateway to the mythos.
• 3:35
  And then from that, the television show was something
• 3:37
  that I sort of watched afterwards.
• 3:40
  And that very much continued, I guess, you know, through the
• 3:42
  bulletinous years when the books were the primary source of, of
• 3:45
  Doctor Who, particularly new Doctor Who.
• 3:49
  And so for me, I guess Doctor Who is primarily a written text.
• 3:53
  And that sounds really strange, but you know, the, the
• 3:56
  television shows and the television episodes that some of
• 3:59
  them I, I saw decades after I first read the target
• 4:02
  novelization. And so my impression of those
• 4:06
  stories are framed through the written word.
• 4:09
  What was the most shocking realization on the screen?
• 4:14
  After. Reading a target novel.
• 4:17
  I I keep going back to the three doctors.
• 4:22
  It's. Such a triumph as told by
• 4:24
  Terrence Dixon, you know, 126 pages or whatever it is.
• 4:27
  But you know, we all know the stories now, and you know, I'm
• 4:30
  familiar with it enough now to understand that, you know, the
• 4:33
  the sets were ready, you know, 5 minutes before they shot, you
• 4:37
  know, started to shoot. And you know, the tops of the
• 4:41
  the background sort of pieces that were used for Omega's lair
• 4:45
  were, you know, kind of like dulled on right at the last
• 4:47
  moment. And you know, we all know that
• 4:49
  the Flame of Singularity is just this miserable little puff in
• 4:53
  the studio, whereas in. The in the book it's sort of.
• 4:55
  Great flame. It lights up, doesn't it?
• 4:58
  In this enormous cavern? Isn't there an illustration of
• 5:01
  it? Is there an illustration of it
• 5:03
  in the book? I, I don't know because I don't
• 5:05
  think I've ever had the copy of the original 3 Doctors.
• 5:09
  And I wonder whether actually at that point there was still those
• 5:12
  beautiful evocative line drawings in the text.
• 5:15
  So I don't know actually, I'll have to check that out.
• 5:18
  I always imagine the directors reading the books and go and
• 5:21
  look at those pictures and go, well that's not fair.
• 5:25
  Although sometimes with those illustrations, and don't get me
• 5:27
  wrong, I think they would like to remember the moon based ones
• 5:29
  where you had the Cybermen floating off into space and then
• 5:33
  you know, towards the start of the book you've got some old man
• 5:36
  playing Ben Jackson for some reason.
• 5:39
  I don't know that one, but it asked my uncle Price.
• 5:43
  So OK, so, so the targets. What about the original Doctor
• 5:48
  Who books then? Yeah.
• 5:50
  So I mean, the way that I've done this is I've kind of got a
• 5:53
  top 10 for the targets that probably will whisk through very
• 5:55
  quickly because I, I think, I think they're very separate from
• 5:59
  the Wilderness Years books. And I think there's two reasons
• 6:01
  for that. Obviously they're two different
• 6:04
  types of books. One's a novelization and the
• 6:06
  other's original novels. But the other thing is that the
• 6:09
  novelizations are after the fact, whereas the, the
• 6:13
  Wilderness Years novels are very much, you know, fashioning
• 6:18
  Doctor Who from the war ingredients and materials that
• 6:20
  exist in the zeitgeist at the time.
• 6:21
  And so they're, they're so inseparable from the context
• 6:24
  that they were created that they sort of start telling these new
• 6:27
  stories and new ways of being able to tell Doctor Who.
• 6:30
  That's just so impossible when you're trying to adapt a, a, a
• 6:34
  target novelization. Although having said that, the
• 6:37
  new target ranges, there's some wonderful examples of where that
• 6:40
  actually occurs. So.
• 6:42
  So maybe there was scope at the time of course.
• 6:44
  Towards the end in those McCoy ones.
• 6:47
  Yes, absolutely. They're suggesting a much wider
• 6:49
  universe than the stories on TV taking place in.
• 6:53
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and, and the way that I sort
• 6:56
  of came to the, the sort of wilderness use fiction was I
• 6:59
  guess I just sort of got to the point where I was towards the,
• 7:02
  the end of my, you know, completionist run of the
• 7:05
  targets. And they, they were the stories
• 7:07
  that were coming out at the time.
• 7:09
  And I gravitated particularly towards the missing adventures.
• 7:11
  And I sometimes wondered why because there's probably only
• 7:13
  about half a dozen that were actually any good in that range
• 7:17
  and then sort of graduated towards the EDA's and sort of
• 7:21
  stuck with that through to about the ancestor sale on a monthly
• 7:24
  basis before I just sort of thought, OK, I'm out at this
• 7:27
  point. That was a nice job.
• 7:28
  Interesting. Andrew Batty put that in his top
• 7:30
  10. Okay, yeah, right.
• 7:34
  I don't think the story itself sort of turned me off, but I
• 7:36
  just sort of used this as a signpost to say, okay, well, I
• 7:39
  think we're kind of done here. And that, in hindsight maybe was
• 7:41
  a little bit early. We've spoken off Mike about some
• 7:44
  wonderful Edas that came later on in the run.
• 7:47
  My favorite period from the burning to.
• 7:49
  You've mentioned this. Yeah.
• 7:51
  Chronicles, yeah. Yeah.
• 7:52
  And so, you know, one of the great joys later on in life now
• 7:55
  is that I get to go back and read those, you know, bit by bit
• 7:59
  and, you know, page by page sometimes as I read on the
• 8:02
  Kindle before falling asleep each night.
• 8:05
  But you're the indication of the quality of the book there
• 8:07
  rather. Than no.
• 8:09
  Right. No, exactly right.
• 8:11
  And, you know, the adventurous of Henrietta St. and Mad Dogs
• 8:14
  and Englishmen are wonderful, wonderful stories.
• 8:17
  So I probably missed out on those, but I'm sort of picking
• 8:23
  them back up and trying to fill in the holes as much as possible
• 8:25
  in the meantime. So I think maybe my experience,
• 8:31
  I guess, with those Wilderness Years novels has extended, you
• 8:34
  know, through to the present day, unintentionally so.
• 8:37
  But you know, I'm still finding new things.
• 8:39
  I'm looking forward to reading. A macrophobia.
• 8:43
  Is that what it's called? Stephen, I'm recording
• 8:46
  Anachrophobia this week. I'm going to have to read it
• 8:49
  before. Then I think that.
• 8:52
  Oh boy. Well, it's it's very based under
• 8:54
  siege, but it's creepy as hell. So I've heard, yeah.
• 8:58
  So I'm, yeah, just looking forward to sort of discovering
• 9:00
  more of those Ultimus Years books as particularly the late
• 9:03
  PDA ones and maybe some PDA as well.
• 9:05
  So as we approach your sort of lists after the targets, there
• 9:10
  are some gaps, yeah. I would definitely say so,
• 9:14
  definitely, but there was no shortage of contenders And you
• 9:18
  know, there's a number of runners up that I could easily
• 9:20
  have sort of, sort of fell just outside the top ten that I could
• 9:23
  have included as well, which probably talks about or speaks
• 9:27
  to the huge, you know, strength in depth that we had over those
• 9:31
  10 or 15 years, I guess. Well.
• 9:34
  I. Cannot wait.
• 9:35
  And I'll focus on every single episode.
• 9:38
  These are my favorite ones to record because for once, I have
• 9:42
  no clue what's coming. And you do.
• 9:45
  But let's let's do your 10 targets first.
• 9:49
  So you're, you're sort of your huge passion with Doctor Who,
• 9:53
  the targets so far away. OK, and and I won't take too
• 9:58
  long because I think this is just a case of sort of name
• 10:00
  checking these, these top 10s and they're probably some usual
• 10:03
  suspects, but perhaps some surprises here as well.
• 10:06
  I have numbered these because I actually did this on a nine hour
• 10:08
  flight from Singapore to Sydney. And I was so bored that I just
• 10:12
  basically wanted to to make sure that I got everything ready for
• 10:17
  us for our conversation tonight. So #10 I could have put in The
• 10:22
  Curse of Fenrick, but I put in Remembrance of the Dialect by
• 10:24
  Ben Eronovich. Obviously both are beautifully
• 10:27
  written, but also kind of what you said before, it's a
• 10:30
  different way of telling Doctor Who stories, particularly in the
• 10:33
  in the target novelization form. And I think so much of what we
• 10:37
  saw, particularly in Virgin New Adventures is actually formed in
• 10:41
  these two novelizations. But obviously Remembrance is
• 10:43
  kind of a text for that. And so when people sort of say
• 10:47
  Genesis time when Genesis was the first NA, I'm not so sure.
• 10:51
  I actually think Remembrance might well be just in terms of
• 10:54
  the writing style and scope of the too deep, too broad for the
• 10:58
  small screen kind of approach I guess that that novelization
• 11:01
  takes. So that's.
• 11:02
  Not the two, I promise you. I'm not doing this on purpose,
• 11:05
  but I'm recording. Remembrance of.
• 11:06
  The next week. Got it.
• 11:09
  Wonderful. I've just read it and you know
• 11:12
  what one of my notes was? This is the first new adventure.
• 11:15
  So much, so great technology. You know, the the master
• 11:19
  manipulator, all of that stuff that the new adventures took and
• 11:23
  took to an extreme. It's all there in that book.
• 11:27
  It is a fantastic book. So yeah, definitely that one's
• 11:31
  on the list #9 probably have the opposite end of the spectrum in
• 11:34
  terms of chronology and and style as well.
• 11:37
  It's the Loch Ness Monster, It's novelized by Terrance, and it
• 11:42
  probably serves as a placeholder for all of those.
• 11:44
  Season 12 to 14, Tom Baker, early novelizations by Terrance.
• 11:48
  There's an effortless style about this very much sort of
• 11:51
  book. Boys own adventures.
• 11:54
  They were amongst the first targets that I've read.
• 11:56
  And so we're very much responsible for me becoming a
• 11:59
  reader and then going on from that, studying literature and
• 12:01
  teaching literature and doing postgraduate literature and all
• 12:04
  the rest of it. So I think there's a lot to be
• 12:06
  said and I owe a huge debt deterrence.
• 12:08
  You know, I think I've mentioned many times how he never got a
• 12:11
  knighthood for services to childhood literacy.
• 12:13
  I'll never know. I don't know if I've ever read
• 12:18
  that one. You know, we may have we may
• 12:20
  have that one to our list. Is it a straight script to page
• 12:24
  or is he? Is he Because I know Terence can
• 12:27
  go one or two ways, can't he? He'll sort of knock out a
• 12:30
  brilliantly written, but it is essentially exactly what you saw
• 12:33
  on the screen. And then other times he will nip
• 12:36
  and tuck and go. Bob didn't tie up that loose
• 12:39
  end. So I'm, you know, and things
• 12:41
  like that. I mean, it's a pretty tight
• 12:43
  script to start with Terror of the Zygon.
• 12:45
  So there's little for him to do. But I think we're sort of in
• 12:48
  that halfway house between him, you know, really sort of
• 12:51
  painting these evocative worlds. Like, for instance, in the
• 12:54
  Autumn invasion as compared to a few years later to something
• 12:57
  like the Robots of Death, which is, you know, rather scant in
• 13:00
  terms of details and definitely word count as well isn't.
• 13:05
  It that one. Yeah.
• 13:06
  One thing's rife for you. Know if only.
• 13:10
  Adding more to, but then I think of something like Horns of
• 13:14
  Naimon where he adds that enormous, it's not enormous.
• 13:17
  A couple of pages about the Horizon four of the Scone on
• 13:20
  Empire. Fabulous.
• 13:23
  OK, so what's #8? It's modern undead and this is
• 13:29
  by Peter Grimwade, so it's novelised by the writer.
• 13:32
  I think what you get whenever this happens, and I'll talk
• 13:34
  about this later on, is a filling in of the gaps in the
• 13:39
  silences that perhaps exist in the script.
• 13:42
  And if you're paying attention on television, maybe sort of
• 13:44
  picking up on some of those. But there's a great deal of
• 13:48
  pathos, I guess, to Grimmode's writing and characterization, in
• 13:51
  particular of the Brigadier in this and that whole kind of
• 13:55
  concept of, you know, what happens to to old soldiers.
• 13:58
  You know, they don't die. They just sort of fade away.
• 14:00
  And here he is fading away in a, in a British, you know, school
• 14:04
  for, for, for boys. And that's really quite lovely
• 14:09
  and wonderful. And he's he's a great prose
• 14:13
  writer. I think Green Wade, I guested on
• 14:18
  Jason Miller's Doctor Who literature to do order and
• 14:20
  undead. So I've got a lot more to say
• 14:21
  about that there. But yeah, I'm really impressed
• 14:24
  with Green Wade's writing. But of course, it's Davison.
• 14:27
  And this is one of those stories that I didn't know existed
• 14:31
  until, you know, a few years into my into my fandom.
• 14:36
  And so, you know, finding this in the sort of, you know, Target
• 14:40
  or Kmart or whatever it was bargain bin for a dollar was one
• 14:45
  of those sort of great choices, you know, like primary school, I
• 14:49
  guess. And again, just that sort of, I
• 14:52
  think you and cycle it, that sort of archaeology of Doctor
• 14:55
  Who sort of finding things in your own way.
• 14:57
  There's great memories attached to that very sort of critical
• 15:01
  point in my life and my fandom, I think.
• 15:04
  Just putting it all together slowly and realizing how it all
• 15:06
  connects. You know, when the picture comes
• 15:09
  together, it's like finishing a jigsaw puzzle, putting in that
• 15:11
  last piece. Very satisfying.
• 15:13
  Although that is a dreadful cover for Mordred.
• 15:15
  Undead it. Is yes, it's.
• 15:19
  Davison looking a bit stirred And that's disappointed in.
• 15:22
  You perfectly captures the story, you know, what's your 7
• 15:27
  then what's your #7? It's earmarks The Invasion,
• 15:32
  which I think is, you know, typically Ian Marta, he has this
• 15:35
  wonderful sort of visceral style in terms of novelizing stories,
• 15:40
  and The Invasion is right for that.
• 15:41
  It's a great sort of action adventure.
• 15:43
  I've sort of characterized this as in the past as four parts
• 15:46
  sci-fi and four parts sci-fi, and I think he does a great job
• 15:50
  in sort of bringing that to life.
• 15:51
  But you know, I think there's probably other second doctorate
• 15:55
  stories that I could have slotted in at this point.
• 15:57
  I remember reading The Abominable Snowman by Terrence
• 16:00
  Dicks and The War Games by Malcolm Hulk.
• 16:02
  Both incredibly amazing, you know, adaptations and probably
• 16:07
  in some ways superior to to the originals, which is what Target
• 16:11
  does best when it's at his best. But no Ian Martin's invasion.
• 16:17
  I remember reading this probably when I was 13 or 14.
• 16:21
  I'd never seen the invasion. Obviously it was never televised
• 16:23
  from Australian television. There were missing episodes and
• 16:26
  I don't think I ever saw a black and white Doctor Who on
• 16:28
  Australian television. So this was again, part of that
• 16:31
  archaeology. And then just to sort of
• 16:32
  discover how incredible this era was, you know, Patrick Trout and
• 16:38
  2nd Doctor era and the companions and, you know, the
• 16:41
  introduction of the UNIT in, you know, in a serious way in the
• 16:45
  Brigadier, etcetera. Although we'd seen it before in
• 16:49
  the Web of Fear. You know, this was kind of like
• 16:51
  the the prototypical or the prototype of UNIT as we would
• 16:58
  see in the perk we use, which I was very familiar with at that
• 17:01
  point. I, I, I would put any Ian Marter
• 17:06
  novelization on my top ten list because I just think, I think he
• 17:10
  writes with all the senses a lot of the time.
• 17:13
  He's, he's the one writer that really puts me in a scene.
• 17:16
  You know, I'm there living the life of those characters.
• 17:21
  Great, right? This is a great marriage for
• 17:22
  you, isn't it? It's a marriage of a story you
• 17:24
  love on TV and a writer you enjoy as well.
• 17:27
  Yeah, it really is absolutely it.
• 17:30
  Doesn't always work that way with the with the targets, but
• 17:33
  you know, they're called gold, yeah #6.
• 17:38
  The edge of. Destruction.
• 17:40
  And I think this is sort of indicative of a lot of those
• 17:42
  sort of mid to late 80s First Doctor novelizations.
• 17:44
  The the stories that perhaps weren't as sexy and as immediate
• 17:47
  as as and as in need of novelizing as perhaps, you know,
• 17:52
  the Dalek invasion of Earth or perhaps even the Daleks.
• 17:56
  But critical because we're getting to a point in the run
• 17:57
  where these stories are, have been novelized and need to be
• 18:01
  and also targets running out of stories to novelize as well.
• 18:04
  But there's this sort of wonderful delving, I guess, into
• 18:08
  the 1st Doctor era that I sort of go through in this sort of
• 18:12
  mid to or early to mid 90s. And I read every target
• 18:17
  novelization that I haven't so far read or perhaps seen on
• 18:21
  television or video in order. And The Edge of Destruction just
• 18:25
  blew my mind because I couldn't believe that this was Doctor Who
• 18:28
  in 196364 whenever it was 64 or early 64.
• 18:32
  But of course it wasn't. It wasn't.
• 18:34
  This is This is a. Wonderful adaptation.
• 18:39
  Of Tardis in that. Absolutely.
• 18:43
  Only that was what that involved.
• 18:44
  Was like. Yeah.
• 18:47
  Definitely. And I think you know.
• 18:48
  There's a number. Of these First Doctor stories
• 18:50
  that do the same, the masoch is another example, I think, where,
• 18:54
  you know, Luke already comes back and and does something
• 18:56
  very, very different with the script, which I found engaging
• 18:59
  from a sort of, you know, nerdy adolescent who very much enjoyed
• 19:05
  history. And I was probably at the right
• 19:07
  age to enjoy that as well. But yeah, the edge of
• 19:10
  Destruction actually is one of those novelizations that sort of
• 19:13
  made me think what you could do with the story in terms of
• 19:16
  reimagining it. And, you know, when I think
• 19:18
  about, you know, one of the impetuses or inspirations for,
• 19:22
  you know, my my absolutely foolish blog reimagining Doctor
• 19:25
  Who, this was one of them, right?
• 19:27
  It's like, what could you do with the bare bones of the story
• 19:30
  and reassemble it in a way that is just so powerful and, you
• 19:33
  know, epic in a way that perhaps appeals to, to, to modern
• 19:36
  audiences. So Edge of Edge of Destruction
• 19:39
  has to be there by Nigel Robinson.
• 19:40
  Somehow The Edge of Destruction, which is 2 episodes on the TV,
• 19:44
  is a longer book than The War Games, which is 10.
• 19:48
  The targets can be surprising. I always have this idea in my
• 19:51
  head of like a Terence Dix has called forth Philip Hinchcliffe,
• 19:56
  Ian Marta and Nigel Robinson says right, come on, we've got
• 19:59
  to do season 1. Everyone put your name in that
• 20:02
  hat, right? And we'll pull them out at the
• 20:04
  same time. I've got Reign of Terror, Philip
• 20:09
  Hensley goes. I've got Keys of Marinus, Dodge
• 20:13
  Robinson, Oh fuck, I've got Edge of Destruction.
• 20:16
  Oh well, I'll try and do something with it.
• 20:18
  I'm to be clear to him, like I had a few issues with his
• 20:23
  novelisation of The Underwater Menace, especially some of the
• 20:28
  sexism in that. It's very there isn't even there
• 20:31
  really in the script. But yeah, Edge of Destruction is
• 20:34
  a great choice. Well then, keep us going.
• 20:37
  OK, OK #5 I could have put very easily the Tomb and Cyberman,
• 20:42
  which is a great classic and and favorite of mine.
• 20:45
  But the one that I read before I read the Tomb was the Cyberman
• 20:48
  by Jerry David Popular. And again, yeah, very much like
• 20:53
  the invasion, sort of evocative of an era that I didn't know had
• 20:57
  no real sort of visual cues or, you know, notes to sort of to to
• 21:03
  take from other than those beautiful evocative line
• 21:06
  drawings. And you mentioned one earlier,
• 21:09
  but I think you know those images of the of the siren
• 21:12
  floating away in space and that sort of stark light of the moon.
• 21:17
  And. You know, the, the Dome
• 21:19
  underneath it, all of the, that sort of imagery, not just
• 21:23
  obviously from the from the drawings, but from the prose by
• 21:27
  Jerry Davis, which I've described in the past as
• 21:30
  beautifully austere. He has this great way of boiling
• 21:34
  down almost in a sort of economical fashion like Dick's,
• 21:38
  you know, the, the, the, the story that he's trying to tell.
• 21:41
  But at the same time, there's this sort of momentary poetic
• 21:44
  flourishes and we see that, you know, I think it both of these
• 21:48
  in the Cyberman and to Cyberman. But this is sort of one of those
• 21:52
  totemic examples, I guess, of, of mythic Doctor Who that
• 21:57
  existed in my mind for a long time.
• 21:59
  And I don't think you know, when I eventually saw the Tomb of the
• 22:02
  Sidemen after it was returned, many years after it's returned,
• 22:05
  I was disappointed because I just again held so strongly to
• 22:08
  those memories of those first 2 Jerry Davis novelizations.
• 22:14
  My very first target was the Cybermen.
• 22:17
  And we had we. Had a market stall in the Old
• 22:20
  Town of Crawley and my man bought me that just shut me out
• 22:24
  that day and I just consumed it. I remember reading the creation
• 22:27
  of the Cybermen bit, you know, that bit, It's wonderful.
• 22:30
  Like, my God, this is amazing, you know, and that that picture
• 22:34
  of the man with the helmet on his head and the sort of blank
• 22:37
  white eyes, you know, they've been taken over by the Cybermen.
• 22:40
  And I've used to beg my nanny Steptoe every time we went to
• 22:43
  the market. Now please, please can I have
• 22:44
  another doctor? Google, please.
• 22:47
  Oh, wonderful choice. OK, so what's that 4th?
• 22:50
  Are we 4th now? We are up to #4 you mentioned
• 22:53
  two parties that are, when novelized into target form,
• 22:58
  longer than the novelizations of something like the War Games
• 23:01
  were. Black Orchid by Terence Dudley
• 23:03
  is on this list. Now this is a.
• 23:05
  Surprise. Come on.
• 23:08
  I never thought Terence Dudley would be in the top 10.
• 23:10
  Come on. No, neither did I, but it would
• 23:13
  have been the coming into the winter of 2015 in Australia.
• 23:17
  And I've got to say I wasn't in a particularly happier place,
• 23:21
  but I had discovered the target audio books just just by total
• 23:25
  chance. And the euphoria that came from
• 23:27
  that particularly sort of Castro was the first one, but Black
• 23:31
  Orchid I think was the second or the third one.
• 23:33
  And listening to that was wonderful.
• 23:36
  It was pure escapism and in a way that was entirely decadently
• 23:40
  indulgent because you're right, it is just a two-part and
• 23:44
  nothing much very happens. You know, nothing much happens
• 23:47
  in it very much. But it is so charming,
• 23:51
  particularly that first episode. And that really comes through in
• 23:55
  that sort of very sedately paced writing style of of Terence
• 23:59
  Dudley. I will not pretend that it isn't
• 24:02
  Florida and overly written or overwritten, rather, it
• 24:05
  absolutely is. But I think it was just one of
• 24:07
  those things that I needed at that point in my life that
• 24:10
  really, you know, lifted me out of a place, but also in a very
• 24:15
  gentle way. And so Black Orchid by Terence
• 24:19
  Dudley is number 4 on that list. Who reads that?
• 24:23
  Michael Cochran. Oh, I.
• 24:27
  Know just it, really. Is it really is just wonderful.
• 24:33
  But yes, another one that I've done on Jason Miller's Doctor
• 24:37
  Who Literature podcast and sort of picked that two pieces, but
• 24:41
  really, really just a favorite. And I know it's flawed, but I
• 24:44
  don't care. For me, it's just a subjective
• 24:47
  personal favorite on that list. OK.
• 24:51
  What's #3. Terror of the Autons, and this
• 24:55
  stands in for so many 3rd Dr. UNIT stories, again by Terrence
• 24:58
  Dicks also have an alcohol as well.
• 25:01
  But Terror of the Autons, I think the novelized form is a
• 25:04
  masterpiece. I think it's a great way of
• 25:06
  establishing the UNIT family. I think the way in which the
• 25:09
  master sort of threatens to, as Nathan says, sort of to steal
• 25:13
  the the limelight from the doctor in his own show is very
• 25:17
  much, you know, comes to before in the novelization as well.
• 25:20
  You can't help but rooting for him and you know, there's just
• 25:25
  an incredibly sort of sinister aspect of the story when it's
• 25:28
  relayed again in a way that is not beholden to budget or
• 25:34
  inflationary crises or whatever the case may be.
• 25:36
  On 7 News, Doctor Who, The imagination ran wild in my, you
• 25:42
  know, very young, sort of 910 year old mind reading this.
• 25:45
  And you know, to this day I'm I just can't help but be
• 25:48
  disappointed that the nesting consciousness isn't as it
• 25:51
  appears on the cover of that that reprint.
• 25:54
  Fabulous octopus, do you mean? Absolutely, when I saw.
• 25:57
  Those white lines on the screen? I went, well, what's that?
• 26:01
  Oh, that's the octopus, is it? Yeah.
• 26:05
  I could imagine my disappointment, definitely.
• 26:08
  But there is like it's like you said as a stand in for those
• 26:11
  sort of 6 classics, like there's so many you could fall under.
• 26:16
  Like you said, the Abominable snowmen, the Dalek invasion, of
• 26:20
  all of those biggies that people remember that we all devoured
• 26:24
  when we were younger. Yeah, definitely.
• 26:27
  And the only person who could do is even perhaps blasphemous to
• 26:33
  say this slightly better job than Terence's Mack Hulk.
• 26:35
  And my number 2 is the dinosaur invasion.
• 26:37
  And again, this could be any Mack Hulk 3rd Doctor story,
• 26:40
  could be the doomsday weapon. It could be the Sea Devils.
• 26:44
  Mack Hulk is perhaps technically the greatest Doctor Who
• 26:48
  novelization writer. I think there there was.
• 26:51
  I think he's absolutely nailed every story that he's done.
• 26:54
  But the dinosaur invasion, I think as wonderful as the 6th
• 26:58
  part is the six part or is, and it is, I think it is wonderful.
• 27:02
  I think those people who don't think it is are watching
• 27:04
  something else entirely. They're probably watching Doctor
• 27:06
  Who for spectacle as opposed to story.
• 27:10
  And I know that both of those things together should, you
• 27:12
  know, should ideally make a great Doctor Who.
• 27:14
  But we're talking about 70s archival television, for
• 27:16
  goodness sake, really need to be looking at the story itself
• 27:19
  primarily. At least the dinosaur invasion
• 27:22
  sort of takes that to a whole another level.
• 27:24
  The characterization of Butler. He gives him the scar.
• 27:28
  And you know, the way that the sort of access is not just a
• 27:30
  plot point, but a characterization device as well.
• 27:35
  You know, the great kind of interplay between the unit
• 27:38
  family this time with with Sarah Jane perhaps for well, not the
• 27:42
  last hurrah, but the second last horizon is really if I could
• 27:45
  have been beautiful. And he does a great job in in
• 27:48
  novelizing, novelizing that bit around, excuse me, novelizing
• 27:52
  that bit around Benton, you know, offering himself to be
• 27:56
  offering, you know, the doctor to knock him out.
• 27:58
  I think that's really wonderful as well.
• 28:01
  But yeah, Mac Hulk's dinosaur invasion and some great memories
• 28:05
  sort of reading that as a 10 year old in the back garden on a
• 28:08
  summary. Well, spring, sunny spring day,
• 28:12
  just around about the time of my birthday, actually.
• 28:14
  Some wonderful memories of that just holding those pages.
• 28:16
  And you know the evocative smell of a Target book, too.
• 28:20
  What's the name of the character in chapter one who reaches his
• 28:24
  terrible ends? It's.
• 28:25
  Shuey McPherson, I guess. The Glaswegian.
• 28:29
  This is something a bit different, you know.
• 28:33
  Yeah. Little did he know when he
• 28:36
  turned that corner, a Tyrannosaurus Rex was going to
• 28:38
  step on him. Bless him.
• 28:41
  Well, there can only be #1. And it really there can only be
• 28:46
  one, can't there? Well, I'm going to say a quote
• 28:49
  to you. I'll know so little about
• 28:51
  Telebar Genesis and you tell me if I'm right or not.
• 28:55
  You're absolutely, yeah. Because we did this, didn't we,
• 28:59
  You know. Through a very.
• 29:00
  Crackly line I apologise to this day for the audio on my side but
• 29:05
  we did this nothing. To do with you, I'll assure you.
• 29:09
  But we did this, didn't we? As a as a hamster commentary
• 29:13
  where we actually didn't just commentate on the, the
• 29:17
  television, but actually brought into play the, the novelization
• 29:21
  as well. And we found, well, I thought, I
• 29:23
  think we found it, you know, really beautifully written and
• 29:26
  smartly, cleverly written novelization by Big Beat as
• 29:30
  well. And may I say because it's Peace
• 29:33
  Davison doing the reading of that, his take on Anthony Aindy
• 29:38
  is so accurate. As Nathan says, he must have
• 29:42
  been taking the piss out of him behind the scenes.
• 29:46
  It's uncanny. But no, just the exploration of
• 29:49
  the ideas though, how they have a real chance to breathe in
• 29:53
  prose and how he can take something like the index on
• 29:55
  recursion and things like that. I'm doing over sort of a couple
• 29:58
  of pages rather than a few lines of dialogue in the TV show,
• 30:02
  because of course we've got to skip on to the next set piece or
• 30:04
  whatever. Yeah, definitely one of my
• 30:07
  favorite bits is where the doctors are sending the cliffs
• 30:09
  of of Castrovalva and there's just this beautiful, it's not
• 30:13
  even a sentence, half a sentence sort of parallel with, you know,
• 30:16
  the 5th Doctor ascending flash, you know, the flashback against
• 30:20
  the 4th Doctor, you know, falling from a great height at
• 30:23
  the end of the Gopolas. And that sort of flourishes
• 30:25
  those those literary thematic flourishes that you wouldn't
• 30:29
  necessarily sort of think of or expect.
• 30:32
  And yeah, particularly like watching it.
• 30:34
  You know, the last thing that perhaps you're thinking about,
• 30:36
  you know, as you Peter Davidson sort of clambering up those
• 30:39
  rocks is, you know, the the scene that we have right at the
• 30:43
  end of Lacopoulos. But there it is in the pros.
• 30:45
  And it's a beautiful sort of point of resonance, I guess,
• 30:49
  between those two stories, that one is a story of, you know,
• 30:52
  death and decay, and the other is on the other side of that
• 30:55
  rebirth and, and, and new beginnings.
• 30:58
  The thing you have to do with Christopher H Midmead, I find,
• 31:01
  is just divorce his personality as a person from all of his
• 31:05
  work. And then all I can see is
• 31:08
  someone who is incredibly skilled at writing, you know?
• 31:12
  But unfortunately, the second you add him in a commentary or
• 31:15
  something like that, I'm like, oh, get over yourself.
• 31:17
  But he is my my favorite innovation of that one was the
• 31:24
  they didn't he didn't give the cliffhanger end to recursive
• 31:27
  occlusion. Someone's he gives the
• 31:29
  cliffhanger end to the doctor saying if there ever was a real
• 31:33
  history. So I was discovering that Castro
• 31:36
  Falva is potentially a fiction that's a much stronger Cliff.
• 31:40
  It's like a conceptual cliffhanger.
• 31:42
  I love that chapter ending. Yeah.
• 31:44
  Oh, that was a joy to do that with you, that book.
• 31:47
  Yeah, thank you. It really was.
• 31:49
  I enjoyed that great deal. Thank you.
• 31:51
  OK, so that's your 10 targets and brilliant choices, although
• 31:55
  I'm fairly certain you could have chosen another sort of 20,
• 31:58
  you know? I think so.
• 32:01
  Let's skip across then to original Doctor Who fiction.
• 32:06
  So this is I'm assuming this is assembled from New and Missing
• 32:10
  Adventures, EDA and Past Doctor Adventures.
• 32:13
  Is that right? It is yes.
• 32:14
  So NSA's are in scope here largely because I don't really
• 32:18
  have a history with them, but also because I really wanted to
• 32:21
  sort of focus in on like I say, a particularly rich vein of of
• 32:26
  original non target wilderness years books and the the context
• 32:33
  that I guess that that that those books sort of reflect for
• 32:36
  good and for I'll are. There any tell us in there or is
• 32:39
  that out as well? Oh, you know, I I've only read
• 32:42
  one or two time and relative I thought was beautiful and I
• 32:47
  really enjoyed the book club discussion on that.
• 32:51
  I actually was listening to you and was Michael, wasn't it?
• 32:54
  As I was strolling around Hong Kong of a long weekend just on
• 32:57
  the holiday. And that was a, that was a, a
• 33:00
  wonderful sort of soundtrack to, to just, you know, walking
• 33:03
  around a new city particularly love that.
• 33:06
  But no, I've, I've, I've very much concentrated on those four
• 33:09
  ranges then. So the Virgin new and missing
• 33:11
  adventures and the 8th doctor and Past doctor adventures.
• 33:15
  So let's let's go from best to worst.
• 33:19
  OK 10109988 what order did you want to do here?
• 33:22
  Best or worst? Oh no, I'm going to.
• 33:25
  I'm going to leave that to you. Too.
• 33:26
  All right, let's start with best.
• 33:27
  Let's start on a high. OK.
• 33:30
  OK, so in my original list #10 was time when Revelation, but I
• 33:35
  heard John Arnold, wonderful and lovely John Arnold talk so
• 33:38
  beautifully about this that I don't think I've got anything
• 33:40
  more to add to that. So I'm going to go to a reserve
• 33:44
  of around about 5 or six that I've got here that I might just
• 33:47
  sort of swap out in the event of, of this sort of happening
• 33:50
  further on down the list. And it does happen once or twice
• 33:52
  again, and I know he's mentioned this one before, but I will
• 33:57
  include Managra by Stephen Marley.
• 34:00
  Oh. Do you know I'm recording that
• 34:02
  next? Time and you.
• 34:04
  Genuinely are right. Oh yeah, yeah.
• 34:08
  Hit me because I I really enjoyed this.
• 34:10
  I'm glad that you did and I don't want to sort of, you know,
• 34:13
  steal any Thunder for the the episode that I'm also came
• 34:17
  looking out for. But, you know, this was a a A
• 34:23
  and a missing adventure that I guess I didn't didn't think I
• 34:28
  would enjoy as much as I did when I picked it up.
• 34:31
  And having reread it in recent years, I think it was during the
• 34:34
  COVID period, I was even more surprised by how how fantastic
• 34:37
  it is. Just in the way that it acts as
• 34:39
  a kind of literary mash up, you know, genre concoction that
• 34:44
  brings all these sort of characters and historical
• 34:47
  figures to to life in a, in a sort of theme park Europa that
• 34:51
  couldn't possibly exist. And sort of wondering how does
• 34:54
  this place exist? And then you sort of find out
• 34:56
  that it is actually, am I, am I spoiling this?
• 34:58
  Should I say this? Never mind most people, off you
• 35:02
  go. That it is genuinely a theme
• 35:05
  park. It's just that it's gone
• 35:06
  absolutely wrong and haywire and out of control because it's sort
• 35:09
  of being left to like many theme parks, sort of gather, you know,
• 35:15
  gather dust and grow weeds, I guess.
• 35:18
  But there's just this kind of league of extraordinary
• 35:21
  gentlemen style, as I say, mash up of characters that as a
• 35:25
  literature student and, you know, even back when I was a
• 35:28
  teenager, just sort of, you know, very much in love with,
• 35:31
  you know, different literary genres and books, you know,
• 35:33
  could recognize and really appreciate it.
• 35:36
  And, you know, dropping the dropping Doctor Who into that
• 35:39
  was was wonderful. You know, Tom Baker and Sarah
• 35:42
  Jane Smith was a, you know, they still are.
• 35:44
  But you know, back then, particularly a great favorite of
• 35:46
  mine as as a duo. But it kind of illustrated, I
• 35:51
  guess, thing that Doctor Who does particularly well in the
• 35:54
  90s when it's done well like this, which is to sort of play
• 35:57
  up on on it as a postmodern text.
• 36:01
  That is, you know, thinks, I forget who mentioned this or who
• 36:04
  has said, you know, said this in the past, but it's a genre
• 36:07
  machine. It's something that can take you
• 36:09
  not just forwards and backwards in time and space, but into
• 36:12
  different stories and different types of stories.
• 36:14
  And that's very much what Nagra does.
• 36:17
  It's a wonderful blend, I guess, of what happens when you drop
• 36:22
  Doctor Who into, in this case, sort of literary fiction in a
• 36:27
  way that is clever and smart and intriguing and also bizarrely
• 36:34
  sinister in a way that I guess, you know, appeals to those of us
• 36:39
  who like Doctor Who a little bit dark.
• 36:42
  I realized about sort of 50 pages in, this is a book I
• 36:47
  needed to be patient with because it was throwing a ton of
• 36:50
  characters at me. Lots of situations with 0
• 36:54
  explanation as to what was actually happening.
• 36:57
  And then somewhere around sort of page 125, Sarah and the
• 37:00
  Doctor have a chat with Byron and he basically explains the
• 37:03
  whole of Europa and what's going on.
• 37:05
  So you do have to be patient with it.
• 37:08
  And if you are, boy, there is some brilliant world building
• 37:12
  going on in that. I mean, he's all I was sort of
• 37:15
  saying, right? Is he going to cross every T and
• 37:18
  thought every I? And he does.
• 37:19
  By the end of the book, he absolutely does.
• 37:22
  But you. Know what?
• 37:23
  It's so funny as well. This book is hilarious.
• 37:25
  That Miles dashing character who his family hated him, everyone
• 37:30
  hated, they even died so they didn't have to spend any more
• 37:33
  time with him. He met the love of his life,
• 37:35
  Beatrice, and then she went off and joined whorehouse because
• 37:39
  she couldn't bear him. Oh my God, it was so funny, this
• 37:42
  book. I had a few issues with Sarah,
• 37:46
  the fact that she was sort of written out halfway through and
• 37:48
  then we didn't see much of her in the second-half.
• 37:52
  And he does seem to think she's some bossy harridan as well.
• 37:54
  The. Places she's.
• 37:55
  Captain. Byron can't stand her.
• 38:00
  But there was. I said to you, didn't I?
• 38:01
  I cracked a cigarette afterwards.
• 38:03
  There was a lot to this, a lot to this.
• 38:06
  So much so shall I say it? I read a Christopher Beulis
• 38:09
  afterwards. Just as a palate cleanser, you
• 38:12
  know. I'm in sorbet after the main
• 38:14
  course. Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 38:16
  I mean, was it van der Dyken's children?
• 38:18
  That's probably my go to Beulis. Palace of the Red Sun Nothing.
• 38:22
  Happens in it at all. What a stunning first choice.
• 38:26
  And John Arnold and Luke Sims Jenkins right now are dancing
• 38:30
  around their living rooms. Well then, let's let's move
• 38:34
  across to a a a left positive endorsement for your first wow,
• 38:40
  your first of your bottom 10 doctor books.
• 38:43
  Yeah. And, and maybe I should preface
• 38:45
  this by saying something that I think I shared with you earlier,
• 38:47
  Joe, I was really quite apprehensive, I guess, about
• 38:52
  drawing up this bottom 10 list because I, I think I know what's
• 38:55
  on this list, you know, off the top of my head, didn't take all
• 38:57
  that much effort. But there's a part of me that
• 39:00
  sort of winces at going full throttle for these in the same
• 39:03
  way that I would for time Lash or, you know, the dominators.
• 39:06
  Sorry, Fraser, because, you know, as as examples of classic
• 39:12
  or even Yahoo stories, we're very much, you know, critiquing
• 39:15
  the text. There's nothing personal about,
• 39:18
  you know, of the authors themselves or the writers, But
• 39:24
  there's always been the part of that sort of thinks, well,
• 39:26
  actually, I know that these people are on Twitter or ex or
• 39:28
  whatever the case may be. And I'd hate to sort of, you
• 39:31
  know, put something out there and then, you know, feel as
• 39:34
  though I've sort of trodden on someone's, you know, beautiful
• 39:38
  work, even though I don't think it's particularly beautiful.
• 39:41
  But I think I think there's also a point where you sort of say,
• 39:45
  you know what, it's been 2025 years.
• 39:47
  I'm sure that they've matured as people and as writers and these
• 39:50
  texts are 2025 years old and also deserve the kind of kind of
• 39:54
  criticism fair and perhaps the unfair as we would reserve for
• 39:59
  the horns. And I'm on in whichever way you
• 40:02
  think, whether that's a classic or not.
• 40:04
  And I I love it. But I think what I'm trying to
• 40:09
  say is here the the top ten or the bottom 10 here are.
• 40:14
  You know, books that I have not, I have not engaged with in any
• 40:18
  way that have not inspired me, that have sort of left me
• 40:21
  frustrated or just quite even angry that I've paid money to to
• 40:25
  have to sort of read, but I don't want in general.
• 40:29
  Yeah. And I think.
• 40:30
  That's, that's a valid thing to be able to say, even though
• 40:34
  perhaps, you know, some of these writers are, you know, they're
• 40:38
  not necessarily friends of mine, but that, you know, through
• 40:41
  degrees of separation, they might well be sort of closer to
• 40:43
  me than I than I may think. So I'll preface it that way.
• 40:46
  I think I can summarize your points succinctly.
• 40:49
  You ready? Go for it.
• 40:50
  Yeah. It's nothing personal, but you
• 40:52
  wrote a terrible book. Yeah.
• 40:56
  Yeah. That's exactly right.
• 40:58
  So very unusual for me to be succinct, but there we go.
• 41:04
  It's not unusual for me. Beaver bows.
• 41:06
  OK, so at #10 The Space Age by Steve Lyons, it's an eighth
• 41:11
  Docker adventure that I think is so uninspired and lacking of the
• 41:18
  kinds of ideas that we would expect from a Steve Lyons book.
• 41:22
  I think, you know, Conundrum and head games in particular.
• 41:25
  I didn't enjoy them at the time, but you know, it's a killing
• 41:28
  ground. And what was the other one that
• 41:31
  he wrote the. Time of your life if you said
• 41:35
  that. Yes, that's right.
• 41:37
  Yes, killing ground and time you for life well.
• 41:38
  Yeah, but then even in BBC, The Witch Hunters.
• 41:42
  Witch hunters world like crooked world.
• 41:44
  My word, yes, absolutely. This is not one of them.
• 41:48
  I I like I say that it. Really is a little bit empty.
• 41:51
  It kind of feels like you know your favorite band.
• 41:55
  They're given like A5 record deal contract and they've got up
• 41:59
  to the fourth record and they just have run out of ideas and
• 42:02
  they maybe hate one another and this secure and they don't want
• 42:04
  to do it, but it's a contractual obligation in order to get the.
• 42:08
  The paycheck, I guess, Maybe. This was one of those examples
• 42:12
  where it was just, you know, he had to he had to sort of submit
• 42:15
  something. But it's kind of like I say that
• 42:17
  sort of crushingly disappointing 4th album of your favorite bands
• 42:21
  of Doctor Who. EDA's for me.
• 42:24
  And the worst thing about it is, I think rather than just the
• 42:27
  sort of general setting and, and, and pretext or pretense of
• 42:31
  the, the story, I can remember so little about this, whereas
• 42:36
  there's so many other Steve Lyons books that I can remember
• 42:38
  quite pivotally. And that's, that's a shame.
• 42:41
  That's a, It's such. A striking aberration, isn't it?
• 42:44
  Because I I don't think there's another Steve Lyons as weak as
• 42:48
  that where where there is so little substance to it.
• 42:52
  And I think I quite like the taint by Michael Corley.
• 42:57
  I stroke Steve Cole. Oh, OK.
• 42:59
  Yeah. And that does the 60s really
• 43:01
  well. That's where Fitz comes in and
• 43:03
  we sort of do. So why are we doing it again?
• 43:05
  But in the future, you know. Yeah.
• 43:07
  Odd, odd, odd, odd. OK, good choice.
• 43:10
  And I think that marks them on someone else's list as well.
• 43:12
  Maybe it was OK. Oh, it was mine.
• 43:14
  That was a. Mine against.
• 43:19
  Yeah, well, let's see how many others we score together.
• 43:22
  Well, let's go. Let's go back to your #9 then of
• 43:25
  your top ten list. OK, this might be.
• 43:30
  Controversial just by virtue of the fact that it's written by
• 43:33
  someone who's turned out to be a thoroughly unpleasant person.
• 43:36
  In a way that is disappointing, similar to the way that
• 43:40
  Morrissey and his politics has turned out to be so
• 43:43
  disappointing. And, you know, Morrissey was
• 43:45
  kind of like along with the other, you know, three members
• 43:48
  of The Smiths, my Beatles when I was a was when I was an
• 43:51
  adolescent and also around about the time that I was reading this
• 43:54
  book. But it's the English Way of
• 43:55
  Death by Gareth Roberts, which I think is so perfectly evocative
• 44:00
  of Season 17, as are, you know, the other two.
• 44:03
  And in particular, the World Man at War, which could have fired
• 44:06
  for the English Way of Deaths place here at #9 on my list.
• 44:11
  I often wonder, would Season 17 actually be better if we sort of
• 44:15
  took out some weaker stories and replaced it with this script?
• 44:18
  Because it's just so wonderful. All the three of us missing.
• 44:24
  Yeah. He.
• 44:25
  Really does a great job and you can see the love that he has for
• 44:29
  this period of the show and this combination of, you know, the
• 44:31
  Doctor Romano 2 and canine. It's a joy.
• 44:35
  It's an absolute joy. And I think with the English way
• 44:37
  of death, there's almost a sort of paralleling with, you know,
• 44:41
  that kind of early to mid 20th century Canon, I guess, of
• 44:47
  English writers. And in particular, I was sort of
• 44:50
  reminded of no see, Woodhouse in particular, PG Woodhouse, that
• 44:57
  sort of English comedy of manners, aspects of the, you
• 45:01
  know, that sort of underpins the story.
• 45:03
  And that perhaps is also there in season 17 as well.
• 45:08
  And maybe also a little bit of The Avengers too.
• 45:10
  I'd like the the dynamic between the Doctor and Romana too is
• 45:13
  very sort of reminiscent of Steed and and Peele and Misses
• 45:15
  Peele. So, so much wit isn't there.
• 45:19
  Oh. It just jumps off the page and
• 45:21
  it's an absolute joy. And, you know, in comparison to
• 45:25
  so many other virgin racing adventures, which are kind of
• 45:28
  tired, old, cliched, hackneyed tropes being regurgitated and
• 45:32
  recycled, I'm not going to name any names.
• 45:35
  But. But this sort of stood out
• 45:37
  amongst that because it was, it was fresh and lovely and
• 45:41
  energizing, but in a way that was so, so faithful.
• 45:46
  To it's still nostalgic, isn't it?
• 45:48
  Right? But utterly authentic of the era
• 45:52
  and yet doing its own thing, unique in its own way.
• 45:55
  It it brings up something that's really interesting about when a
• 45:59
  writer writes for a couple of ranges.
• 46:02
  So Gareth Roberts wrote for both Missing Adventures, where I
• 46:05
  think he was so at home, so comfortable and delivered all of
• 46:08
  his great work. I love the plotters as well.
• 46:11
  I think that's a. Brilliant.
• 46:12
  Yes, Yes. And then he wrote a couple of
• 46:15
  new adventures and boy, oh boy, Zampa did.
• 46:18
  Did something happen in that book?
• 46:19
  I can't remember at all. The highest is OK, but he's so
• 46:25
  much more comfortable writing classic Doctor Who than he is.
• 46:29
  And there are other writers as well that you can sort of point
• 46:32
  out and say, yes, they're more suited to this than this.
• 46:35
  I'd say Cornell was more suited to the New Adventures than in
• 46:38
  Missing Adventures because God has got a very bizarre chapter
• 46:41
  with glitz and the mini scope and.
• 46:43
  All that's right, which is? Very strange.
• 46:45
  Yeah, brilliant choice. OK, back to the worst then.
• 46:50
  These are my favourites. Well, I think this list this
• 46:56
  this one has paid on many lists and probably will appear on many
• 46:59
  other lists after me. It's the ghost event space by
• 47:02
  Dee Barrett. Let's and this just feels like
• 47:05
  original fiction is grave robbing.
• 47:07
  This is perhaps to sort of use the Star Wars analogy, and I'm
• 47:11
  not a huge Star Wars fan, but even I can recognize this is a
• 47:14
  bit of the Attack of the clones of Doctor Who.
• 47:16
  And I don't even know anything about Star Wars and saying that.
• 47:19
  But in the sense that it just feels like a hollow decades late
• 47:24
  resuscitation of a dead corpse that should have just been left
• 47:29
  alone. And I think about in particular
• 47:31
  his novelization of the demons, which is incredible.
• 47:34
  Like it is a it probably should have been on that top ten target
• 47:37
  list earlier. And I can only think that or
• 47:42
  Robert Sloman would have done a lot of heavy lifting on that
• 47:45
  script and some of the others as well as weak as something like
• 47:47
  the Thai monster is. Because if this is Barry let's,
• 47:51
  you know, running free, I think someone needs to stop him.
• 47:55
  This really is an appallingly conceived treading on on, you
• 48:01
  know, metaphysics and and the afterlife aspects that Doctor
• 48:05
  Who probably ought and but if it were to should have a much
• 48:10
  stronger idea and grasp or notion than it does here, which
• 48:14
  is rather sort of weakened a bit off putting, I think as well.
• 48:19
  I I know, you know, barrel. It's obviously has a strong, you
• 48:21
  know, Buddhist religiosity and spirituality about him, and
• 48:26
  that's wonderful. But you know, this is now 20 odd
• 48:30
  years. It's strange to think, isn't it?
• 48:32
  20 years after the 3rd Doctor era, you may as well have been
• 48:35
  50 or 100. Because, you know, when we think
• 48:37
  about 20 years ago, it kind of feels like what, you know,
• 48:40
  Christopher Eccleston was was 20 years ago.
• 48:43
  But the divide between what Doctor Who was and what he had
• 48:48
  become at that point was so vast that I don't think, I don't
• 48:54
  think Barry let's doesn't, you know, he's he's able to trust
• 48:57
  that gap. And even Terence sort of
• 48:58
  struggles at certain points during those courtesous years as
• 49:01
  well. He's so out of touch though,
• 49:03
  isn't it? I think Terence can hit and
• 49:05
  miss. I think Barry let's only missed
• 49:09
  in any of his original books. Do you think Ireland of Death
• 49:12
  from the past Doctor Range Deadly Reunion.
• 49:16
  You know these are terrible, terrible books, but worse than
• 49:20
  the story. The pros prose is is garbled and
• 49:25
  incomprehensible. The dialogue he gives characters
• 49:28
  that he wrote for, it's like. They would.
• 49:31
  Never say those things unless we not forget he gave us Jeremy
• 49:35
  Fitz Oliver as well. No, this is this.
• 49:42
  Is one of those things that, you know, it sounded like a great
• 49:44
  idea. What was it, 1990?
• 49:46
  I want to say 6, but it's probably a little bit earlier
• 49:48
  than that, you know, bringing back John Perry and Nick
• 49:52
  Courtney and and Liz Sladen and and even Peter Miles, right?
• 49:56
  And and getting them to to get on the radio to record a new
• 50:01
  story written by the producer. I mean, surely that can't fail.
• 50:04
  But wow, did it, did it massively, just missed the mark
• 50:08
  entirely. But.
• 50:09
  Do you think then it's a bit like OK, lightning in a bottle,
• 50:14
  but it was five years worth back in the perk we era.
• 50:17
  But then there comes a point where you just okay that you did
• 50:20
  it and it was amazing, but don't do anymore.
• 50:22
  Now that's your Doctor Who. And it's almost sad to see once
• 50:29
  revered writers churning out these tie in books which are
• 50:33
  just not very good. I think it happened to Dicks on
• 50:36
  and off. I think it happened to Chris
• 50:38
  Boucher as well. Oh, completely.
• 50:40
  You know, whereas if they hadn't have done that, their record
• 50:43
  would be unstained. Definitely.
• 50:47
  I think you're right though, like Barry Litz is much like the
• 50:50
  Perry era, such a product of that ensemble.
• 50:54
  You know, we talked about the unit family.
• 50:56
  I think there's that sort of extends behind the cameras as
• 50:58
  well with with let's and Dicks and so many sort of directors
• 51:03
  and and whatever else that sort of make up that very stable,
• 51:06
  stable of of, you know, production team people that
• 51:10
  made, you know, one of the most consistent periods of Doctor
• 51:13
  Who. Maybe taking any one of those
• 51:15
  elements out and relying on them to recreate that without the
• 51:19
  help of the others. And that sort of relational
• 51:22
  ecosystem that they had maybe was bound to fail.
• 51:26
  And like we say, even Terence, even, you know, Sir Terence
• 51:29
  Dicks just there were definitely misses, probably more misses
• 51:33
  than hits, I would say when when we sort of had him back in the
• 51:37
  90s and the 2000s. The idea of something like
• 51:40
  Deadly Reunion, right? Which is Dicks and Lex working
• 51:43
  together again on a piece of Doctor Who.
• 51:46
  It should have been gold. It should have been recapturing
• 51:49
  all the glories of those old days.
• 51:51
  And instead let's write an autobiography for 100 pages and
• 51:56
  then Dicks rewrites to demons. It's like.
• 52:02
  That'll do, That'll do. OK, well then let's let's swing
• 52:05
  back around to the positives. So I think there's a number of
• 52:11
  highlights, not many, but there's a number of really high
• 52:14
  highlights in the Virgin Missing Adventures range, which is the
• 52:17
  one that I was reading at the time that they were coming out.
• 52:20
  And it wasn't until many years later that I sort of dipped into
• 52:23
  the the Virgin New Adventures. So this was kind of like, sounds
• 52:28
  strange to say this mine knew who during the wilderness years,
• 52:31
  even though really we're talking about old who.
• 52:34
  But it's the Sands of Time by Justin Richards, which, as a
• 52:38
  Peter Davidson 5th Doctor fan was every page was a joy.
• 52:44
  It was again, just a great adventure story, but allowed
• 52:50
  through the page again and again through a different medium of,
• 52:53
  of the written word, the kind of characterization that maybe
• 52:59
  maybe I inferred by thinking too long and hard about my favorite
• 53:03
  era as a as an adolescent, sort of bring it to life in my own
• 53:10
  head. But to sort of see that
• 53:12
  reflected and explicated and, you know, developed even further
• 53:16
  through particularly the relationship that that's, you
• 53:21
  know, Tegan and the 5th Doctor have in this is it's it's
• 53:24
  superb. The incidental characters or the
• 53:26
  secondary characters are also very well conceived and really
• 53:30
  rather memorable. You know, you have the Butler
• 53:33
  figure, you've got the, you know, the the Egyptian priest.
• 53:38
  And of course, you know, how that sort of all pays out, plays
• 53:41
  out rather in that third act. It's just really wonderful.
• 53:44
  But the time you, I mean is of it as well, if I can sort of,
• 53:47
  you know, use that ten years perhaps before it was actually
• 53:50
  used. Moffy Read.
• 53:51
  This book you. Know, I think he must have
• 53:54
  because it actually is like one of the great high points, I
• 53:56
  think of 90s wilderness who, even though it's not
• 53:59
  necessarily, you know, the RE or the sort of kind of, I'm not
• 54:05
  trying to say the the bleeding edge, I guess the doctor at the
• 54:08
  time. What it does is to sort of show
• 54:10
  what you can do with a franchise that, you know, perhaps by that
• 54:15
  at that stage was considered to be dead or dying and, and
• 54:18
  reinvigorated and bring it back to life in a way that should
• 54:21
  sort of prove that. It could be like if this was a
• 54:24
  television show, you know, made by Fox or, you know, even BBC
• 54:29
  with the external production company in the 90s, I, you know,
• 54:32
  there would be millions of people watching that who have
• 54:34
  watched it. It's just a great, great story.
• 54:38
  I think Justin Richards is a hugely undervalued Doctor Who
• 54:42
  writer. I think he's always competent,
• 54:46
  he's mostly good and he's occasionally fantastic, and this
• 54:51
  is one of his fantastic books. I really love when I reread this
• 54:55
  for the book club. I really love the fact that he
• 54:57
  managed to do a sequel to Pyramids of Mars without doing
• 55:02
  Pyramids of Mars. He didn't do all the obvious
• 55:04
  things and he actually took us on that exposition.
• 55:06
  He shows how long it takes to get across the world and travel
• 55:10
  the desert and get into the tombs and all of that stuff that
• 55:13
  they couldn't afford to do back in the 70s.
• 55:16
  But in the same breath, he still had, you know, mummies walking
• 55:19
  out of flames in the British Museum and all of this.
• 55:22
  God, it was a wonderful read. Yeah, that's one I would love to
• 55:26
  see as a movie. Absolutely.
• 55:30
  Yes, please. OK, come on, You've been far too
• 55:33
  positive. Now time to.
• 55:38
  OK, this is going to be controversial, and I think
• 55:42
  controversial for the sake of it, but bear with me.
• 55:45
  I'll prepare it myself, OK? This is.
• 55:49
  Nightshade by Mark Gaddis and I can see the shock on your face.
• 55:54
  I think this is entirely adroit, even beautiful, but the way that
• 55:59
  it does damage to the direction that the virgin new adventure I
• 56:02
  think eventually take by again traversing I think what was
• 56:06
  already a well born and perhaps even resolved path for the 7th
• 56:10
  Doctor and Aces relationship he's a bit of.
• 56:13
  A prick in this, isn't he? Very much so.
• 56:16
  But like, wasn't that resolved by the end of, you know, season
• 56:19
  26? And certainly sort of.
• 56:20
  I'm thinking of cursor Fenrick and and and Ghost Light.
• 56:23
  But. To to then sort of rehash that
• 56:26
  as effectively the template for not just the character dynamics,
• 56:29
  but also the stories that you tell around those characters
• 56:32
  four years afterwards. To the point where we sort of
• 56:35
  take her away and then bring her back and make her a hardened
• 56:37
  space bitch and like continue to tell those stories that are
• 56:42
  nothing less than traumatic. I think it's, it's kind of the
• 56:46
  signalling of a point in what should have been a new,
• 56:52
  exciting, again, bleeding edge storytelling of Doctor Who.
• 56:56
  But instead, it's sort of looking backwards and rehashing
• 56:59
  a dynamic that like we're talking already here about, you
• 57:02
  know, it being maybe 3-4, five years old at this point.
• 57:05
  And that continues for another 3-4, five years until eventually
• 57:08
  set piece by Kate Allman, right? But I feel like the Doctor Ace
• 57:12
  arc was resolved at the end of 26 with the Curse of Fenrick.
• 57:16
  And, you know, we have, I guess, Ghost Light as well.
• 57:19
  And you know, by survival that that's worked out.
• 57:23
  You know, there's that wonderful genuine one between the two of
• 57:26
  them that that you can tell this is it.
• 57:30
  OK, They've resolved all of that angst between them now.
• 57:33
  And that's well learned and ultimately sort of reprising
• 57:36
  that I think in Paul Cornell's Love and War works because it's
• 57:40
  the way that you write out the character.
• 57:43
  And so, as I was slow to say, you know, we've come to this
• 57:46
  resolution, but actually it was never going to last.
• 57:48
  And the dynamic between the two of them ultimately is toxic.
• 57:51
  And we need to to split them and go on our way and bring in
• 57:54
  someone as charming and breezy as Paul Cornell in A Week in
• 57:58
  Bernie Summerfield, which I think is a.
• 58:01
  The way forward, right? Absolutely right.
• 58:03
  Ace out, bring Benny in, and then we're going off onto a
• 58:06
  brand new dynamic that we've never seen before.
• 58:09
  It should have been the way it should have been.
• 58:12
  Another way. Yeah, exactly.
• 58:14
  And so in that regard, this is the Earth shock of Vnas in some
• 58:17
  regard where we just have the a really good story that does
• 58:23
  something that actually takes us backwards going forwards.
• 58:28
  Can you believe I found Nightshare online last week?
• 58:30
  Because I don't have a physical copy of that.
• 58:32
  A pound. A pound.
• 58:35
  I snapped it up up a day later. Yeah, I think it's a great book.
• 58:39
  I don't disagree with what you're saying.
• 58:42
  And that sort of toxic ace that ran for those sort of 20 books
• 58:47
  actively made good books less enjoyable.
• 58:52
  And that's. Madness, isn't it?
• 58:54
  What conclusion do they draw in that series of books After she
• 58:58
  goes to space, you know, Space Academy and comes back with
• 59:01
  bazookas and all sorts, they come to the same conclusion that
• 59:04
  they didn't survival that in set piece.
• 59:06
  She's a mature woman and she's ready to go off and do her own
• 59:09
  thing. That's right.
• 59:11
  So why have we gone through that journey again, just with worse
• 59:13
  stories? Well, it's a really good
• 59:16
  question and I think it probably speaks to maybe the 90s being a
• 59:21
  period that you know, it's the past is a different country.
• 59:24
  I think, you know, that kind of grittiness and griminess and,
• 59:29
  you know, adult nursing inverted commas was just something that
• 59:31
  they were looking for. And maybe this was the only way,
• 59:34
  or one of the only ways that they thought they could do it
• 59:36
  with these characters. Isn't there a sequence in the at
• 59:40
  the beginning of Nightshade where Ace is walking the TARDIS
• 59:42
  and the Doctor's screaming go away at her?
• 59:45
  So what are? You why it's just not necessary.
• 59:49
  I'll go and redo This Way of Death again.
• 59:51
  They're having a lot of fun. Yeah, exactly.
• 59:55
  Doctor should be fine. That was your first big
• 59:57
  surprise. I was not prepared for that one.
• 1:00:00
  OK. I I wanted to get a
• 1:00:01
  controversial one in but be be able to defend it in a way that
• 1:00:04
  seems reasonable. The day someone puts time where
• 1:00:07
  Revelation on their ten list. Actually, that might be me.
• 1:00:15
  So back to your top ten list. OK, so we're up to number 7 and
• 1:00:21
  it's the most beautiful of Virgin Missing adventures.
• 1:00:26
  It's The Empire of Glass by Andy Lane.
• 1:00:30
  I've never read that, so now you can educate me.
• 1:00:33
  OK, well maybe this is something that we do for a book club
• 1:00:36
  ourselves, and in that regard I won't spoil it.
• 1:00:38
  But if you could imagine the genre of Hartnell historicals
• 1:00:43
  told in a way that would capture the imaginations of a 90s
• 1:00:48
  viewing public, I think that's ultimately what we have here.
• 1:00:51
  It's a pseudo historical, what an outright historical.
• 1:00:54
  But you have the Doctor arriving in Venice, where there seems to
• 1:00:58
  be some kind of alien invasion or intervention going on, The
• 1:01:05
  Doctor meeting a historical figure in Galileo.
• 1:01:09
  The Doctor and his companions being embroiled in all sorts of,
• 1:01:13
  you know, spy plots and machinations involving the the
• 1:01:16
  Catholic Church and the English crown and the, you know, the
• 1:01:22
  popping up of a historical literary figure.
• 1:01:25
  And I won't spoil that because that is one of the sort of
• 1:01:28
  reveals in the story. It.
• 1:01:31
  Really is. And this is this is Hartnell in
• 1:01:36
  his Season 3 giddiness and joy. I think it's meant to be Season
• 1:01:40
  3 at least. I'll have to double check that.
• 1:01:42
  It's Stephen and Vicky, isn't it that?
• 1:01:44
  One, it is Stephen and Vicky, right?
• 1:01:45
  Yes. And so I think, you know, we
• 1:01:49
  have the cuddly version of Hotmail, you know, that sort of,
• 1:01:52
  you know, the bright spark in his eye and the mischievous
• 1:01:54
  giggle and and mischief that he wants to that he's always sort
• 1:01:57
  of getting up to at that point in his characterization, which I
• 1:02:02
  just think is is Peacock Hartnell in many ways and peak
• 1:02:05
  first doctor in many ways. But yeah, this is this is a
• 1:02:09
  story that is also particularly beautifully written in terms of
• 1:02:11
  its prose. And I have mentioned this on
• 1:02:15
  Side Hearts Library of Impossible Things podcast, but
• 1:02:21
  it's heavily influenced by what I believe is the most beautiful
• 1:02:25
  book written since the Second World War.
• 1:02:28
  That is to say, during the the era of postmodernity.
• 1:02:31
  And that is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is a
• 1:02:35
  series of vignettes of no more than one 2-3 pages each.
• 1:02:39
  In which the traveler Marco Polo, who is from Venice,
• 1:02:43
  recounts to Kublai Khan in his court of Xanadu all of the
• 1:02:46
  cities and places that he's been to on his travels, except with
• 1:02:51
  one difference. These are cities and places that
• 1:02:53
  could never have existed. And it is an incredible,
• 1:03:00
  playful, clever and contemplative series of
• 1:03:06
  reflections about memory and desire and death and life.
• 1:03:10
  And I think a lot of that seeps through into Angie Lane's
• 1:03:13
  beautiful empire of Glass. I mean, it's no secret that you
• 1:03:19
  and I are going to be reading this.
• 1:03:20
  I'll bet you in the episode I look now, I absolutely can't
• 1:03:24
  wait. And I think Andy Lane is just a
• 1:03:27
  consistently very good writer of prose.
• 1:03:31
  I think it's all consuming. Fire is a great.
• 1:03:34
  Read. Original scene.
• 1:03:35
  I had a few issues with it but I it was such a smooth read for
• 1:03:39
  for one of the longer books. I love the Banquo legacy that he
• 1:03:43
  wrote with Justin Richard. Yeah, I think he's a great
• 1:03:47
  writer. He went on to do a load of Jago
• 1:03:49
  and Light for audios as well. And he's a great writer of
• 1:03:53
  dialogue, too. And.
• 1:03:55
  Oh, that sounds enticing. Well, I can't wait.
• 1:04:02
  Come. Back from the Sublime from.
• 1:04:04
  The well, actually I just want to say as well, it is bizarre
• 1:04:08
  because you've got this is a missing adventures heavy list so
• 1:04:12
  far. So far.
• 1:04:13
  Indeed, it's kind of crazy, isn't it?
• 1:04:15
  That you can have really ambitious books like Managra and
• 1:04:20
  the Empire of Glass rubbing shoulders with the ghosts of End
• 1:04:24
  Space and Twilight of the Gods, isn't it?
• 1:04:27
  Like, it's almost absurd. But that is Doctor Who, right?
• 1:04:31
  Like in terms. Of consistency.
• 1:04:33
  Of quality in terms of like, you know, wrenching from one genre
• 1:04:38
  to another. It's it's just like Doctor Who
• 1:04:41
  on the TV in that respect. That's so beautifully generous
• 1:04:45
  of you to say. I think because I think what it
• 1:04:47
  really says to me, at least in hindsight, is that instead of
• 1:04:51
  having 12 monthly PDAs and 12 or 12 monthly MAS and 12 monthly
• 1:05:00
  MAS every month year, they needed to actually alternate.
• 1:05:03
  So I have 6 MAS and six MAS and alternate ones.
• 1:05:07
  And then they would have had a bit of quality control around
• 1:05:09
  that, I think. Although we'll be would we be
• 1:05:12
  able to sell the good ones for the bad ones if there was no bad
• 1:05:15
  ones in there? I think you would have.
• 1:05:19
  But obviously that's. What they could possibly get?
• 1:05:22
  But then, you know, the reality probably would have been that
• 1:05:25
  we're talking about such as, you know, minority of a minority
• 1:05:28
  population, reading population and audience for this that I I
• 1:05:31
  think they probably wouldn't have, you know, folded up the
• 1:05:33
  the range because it would have been just, you know, financially
• 1:05:36
  and economically unviable to continue if they didn't.
• 1:05:39
  And so, you know, maybe if the price of that, you know,
• 1:05:42
  continuing of that range for, you know, best part of 15 years
• 1:05:46
  across 2 ranges is some dross, then maybe that's just the price
• 1:05:49
  we had to pay. At one point, you know, the the
• 1:05:53
  readership, there was less people reading it than they were
• 1:05:56
  warming their hands up in that furnace out in that as they were
• 1:06:00
  shuffling in copies of the Turing Test.
• 1:06:03
  I prayed to my heart, I love that book.
• 1:06:07
  All right, well, let's let's get back to the dross.
• 1:06:10
  OK, we spoke about him earlier. It's Christopher Buellis, who
• 1:06:13
  seems like a lovely chap, all things considered.
• 1:06:16
  How many times? Does he appear on your list?
• 1:06:19
  Oh, I've tried to ration it out. So it's just the once this time
• 1:06:23
  and I've had to choose because there's quite a number of them,
• 1:06:26
  I think that aren't much cop. But then, you know, again, if we
• 1:06:28
  were talking about palate cleanses earlier, I my one of my
• 1:06:31
  go to is, is van der Deakin's children, which I think is,
• 1:06:34
  yeah, a joyful little space adventure rock from the EDA
• 1:06:37
  range. But I think.
• 1:06:38
  Yeah, Well's end is pretty good as well.
• 1:06:40
  That's. Oh, I.
• 1:06:41
  Haven't read that. Yeah.
• 1:06:43
  OK. Oh, you know he also did.
• 1:06:46
  This is entirely off topic, but he also did I think Sorceress
• 1:06:51
  Apprentice. Is that what's cool?
• 1:06:52
  Wonderful rate, yeah. I enjoyed that, definitely.
• 1:06:55
  But. But the ultimate treasure, I
• 1:06:57
  absolutely did not enjoy it. I, I, I think this has come up
• 1:07:01
  on a list before and I, I don't want to sort of repeat those
• 1:07:04
  points, but it's. True.
• 1:07:06
  It seems to be written for an entirely different demographic
• 1:07:08
  than perhaps even the VMAs. Were.
• 1:07:12
  I think it's hokey and insipid and plays with a perceived gap
• 1:07:15
  between adventures that should never, ever be allowed to be
• 1:07:17
  filled. You know, it's kind of this idea
• 1:07:21
  that the thing that makes case of Andrasani so wonderful in
• 1:07:24
  terms of the characterization between doctrine and companion
• 1:07:26
  is that he's he gives up his life as someone he's just met.
• 1:07:30
  And that's the 5th Doctor. That's him right there in in a
• 1:07:33
  moment, you know, sort of, you know, pure distillation of
• 1:07:36
  action and intent. But to sort of pad that out with
• 1:07:42
  garbage like this, that sort of does violence against the Canon
• 1:07:46
  and amusing Canon inverted quotes, I think is just a
• 1:07:49
  mistake, a royal mistake. I think they do.
• 1:07:52
  If you're going to do this, yeah, you need a bloody good
• 1:07:55
  reason to do it and not this tribe.
• 1:07:58
  Yes, there's that, but even there, I just don't think you
• 1:08:01
  should be allowed. It's like, you know, cover
• 1:08:03
  versions of of new orders, Blue Monday or Joy Divisions, love or
• 1:08:06
  terror supplies. There should be laws and
• 1:08:08
  legislation to prevent these kinds of travesties from ever,
• 1:08:11
  ever occurring because the original is intact and perfect
• 1:08:13
  as it is. I think they do something
• 1:08:15
  similar, don't they, with Big Finish.
• 1:08:17
  Is it? Is it dawn Is what is the one
• 1:08:20
  that I'm thinking? They do the whole Perry and
• 1:08:22
  Aramin. Adventures.
• 1:08:24
  I haven't got that. So basically there's a new
• 1:08:27
  companion brought in and they have a series of 15 stories
• 1:08:30
  between Planet of Fire and Case of Andresoli.
• 1:08:34
  And I get it because like, I mean, I don't know much about
• 1:08:37
  that character, and I know she's like an ancient Egyptian
• 1:08:39
  Princess or something like that, or queen, and that's cool.
• 1:08:43
  But I just sort of feel like there's that gap between those
• 1:08:46
  two stories that just shouldn't be touched.
• 1:08:48
  It's sacrosanct. And that's just my scenario.
• 1:08:52
  When I talked about 10 little aliens for the podcast, because
• 1:08:56
  that's the first Doctor Ben and Polly story that canonically
• 1:08:58
  cannot happen because there isn't a space between
• 1:09:02
  adventures. And I did like them in that book
• 1:09:05
  and I liked the book. So I was like, yeah, Marv Raft
• 1:09:09
  goes crazy for Canon. And Ed, you know, if there's a
• 1:09:12
  big that contradicts another big finished story, he won't enjoy
• 1:09:16
  it just for that fact, whereas I don't really give a shit.
• 1:09:19
  But. But I do agree with you on this
• 1:09:23
  book. Like, yeah, if you're going to
• 1:09:25
  do it, then you need a better reason than this.
• 1:09:29
  And you're right. It's that period of the BBC
• 1:09:32
  books in the early days when there was nobody steering the
• 1:09:35
  ship. I don't think there's any kind
• 1:09:37
  of quality control. There's no consistency of tone.
• 1:09:41
  That's right. To go from that last third of
• 1:09:43
  sort of new adventures where they kind of knew what they were
• 1:09:46
  doing at that point and they they were very assured.
• 1:09:49
  I still think it's inconsistent in terms of quality, but that's
• 1:09:53
  from writer to writer. But they were maturing and they,
• 1:09:58
  they kind of, they, they got their thing to go from that to,
• 1:10:02
  you know, the 8 doctors to vampire science to the body
• 1:10:06
  Snatchers to like, what the hell.
• 1:10:07
  It's like total whiplash, isn't it?
• 1:10:11
  Yes. Yeah.
• 1:10:14
  Definitely falls into the into that period.
• 1:10:17
  Yeah, I think so too. So that's number seven on my
• 1:10:21
  bottom 10. List so back to your top team.
• 1:10:26
  Okay, so I'm looking at this again and I'm realizing that
• 1:10:29
  this is a book that's been spoken about before, It's Alien
• 1:10:32
  Bodies by Lawrence Miles. I could have chosen Henry
• 1:10:35
  straight. It is bound to happen.
• 1:10:37
  So I'm probably going to have to now swap it out for another book
• 1:10:40
  that was just outside my top ten.
• 1:10:42
  Just for varieties sake. I don't want to bore the
• 1:10:44
  listener, but Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones, have you read
• 1:10:48
  this? I have This is a new adventure I
• 1:10:51
  read when I was younger because I read the review in DWM and it
• 1:10:55
  said there was like a gay character in it and there was so
• 1:10:58
  little gay characters in Doctor Who.
• 1:11:00
  I was. Desperate, Yeah.
• 1:11:01
  I found it very touching this book.
• 1:11:04
  Yeah, I can say that definitely it's it's it's a beautifully
• 1:11:09
  sort of character LED story, but also does something really,
• 1:11:12
  really sort of perfectly Doctor Who, which is to sort of step
• 1:11:15
  into that post war period that sort of maybe was the fertile
• 1:11:21
  ground from which Doctor Who eventually sprung on our
• 1:11:24
  television screens in 1963. And, you know, it's a it's a
• 1:11:29
  great period, you know, fascinating period for me, that
• 1:11:32
  period from effectively the end of the Second World War through
• 1:11:37
  to in 1989, nineteen 91, the the fall of the communism and the
• 1:11:41
  Berlin Wall, particularly in the UK and sort of the cultural
• 1:11:45
  changes that occur. You know, you go from from
• 1:11:48
  effectively the end of empire through, you know, the American
• 1:11:52
  influx that leads through to The Beatles and the white heater
• 1:11:55
  technology and all of that sort of stuff is coming together
• 1:11:58
  here. And there's just that sort of
• 1:12:02
  wonderful almost Mark Gator style nostalgia for that period
• 1:12:07
  in something like, for instance, oh gosh, it's one out of my mind
• 1:12:12
  idiots Lantern, which does, you know, a very similar thing in
• 1:12:15
  terms of playing with that with that time.
• 1:12:17
  And and yeah, I think you know that it is it is beautiful and
• 1:12:22
  redolent of that era whilst at the same time doing something
• 1:12:26
  that, as you say, probably was it ever done in Doctor Who in
• 1:12:30
  any way before? I can't think of an example of
• 1:12:33
  that. But you know, sort of
• 1:12:34
  foregrounding, you know, gay relationships in a way that just
• 1:12:40
  it perhaps was taboo even perhaps in the 90s, I'm not
• 1:12:42
  sure. And you know, in a way bringing
• 1:12:49
  in fan wank, but in. A.
• 1:12:51
  Really. Really, what's the right word?
• 1:12:55
  Deserved and rewarding by baby. And maybe should I spoil this?
• 1:13:01
  Yeah, I mean, Perry, It's it's Perry's stories and what happens
• 1:13:04
  to her. And I think one of the great
• 1:13:06
  tragedies and travesties of classic who is is Perry's
• 1:13:11
  character Rock, which I've mentioned in the past, is sort
• 1:13:13
  of replaced by effectively a rape narrative.
• 1:13:17
  And at the end of Mindwalk, you know, after, you know, series
• 1:13:20
  upon series, story upon story of of, you know, gross old aliens
• 1:13:24
  lusting after a body, you know, that's exactly what they get.
• 1:13:28
  And it's a metaphorical rape. But it's clearly also like the
• 1:13:32
  pay off to what is clearly, you know, rapacious intent by a
• 1:13:37
  number of characters from very many different stories leading
• 1:13:39
  up to that point as well. And that was never a great
• 1:13:43
  resolution for me. And I don't know what's worse,
• 1:13:46
  you know, having her body taken over by a gross old alien or
• 1:13:50
  marrying Brian Blessed. And this sort of gives us a a
• 1:13:55
  conclusion that's probably nicer than both of those.
• 1:13:58
  And that's not a high bar to clear.
• 1:14:01
  But I felt that that was a lovely piece that maybe
• 1:14:05
  redresses through fan bank, admittedly A and act in Doctor
• 1:14:11
  Who's televisual classic cannon that still bugs me enormously.
• 1:14:18
  I think it's it's the worst creative decision that any
• 1:14:24
  certainly classic, perhaps even all type Doctor Who production
• 1:14:27
  team to make in terms of what they do to that character.
• 1:14:29
  And how dare they give Nicola Bryant those scripts?
• 1:14:35
  I remember, I do remember. The gay character is Jack, isn't
• 1:14:38
  it? That's his name.
• 1:14:39
  And he has a wonderful relationship with the 7th Doctor
• 1:14:44
  Who's just desperately sweet in this book.
• 1:14:47
  And I wouldn't often say that about Mccoy's Doctor in the New
• 1:14:50
  Avengers. They often make him a bit of a
• 1:14:52
  monster. And there's a wonderful bit.
• 1:14:54
  He's in Jack's bedroom and the landlady's coming up the stairs.
• 1:14:59
  He's like, get under the bed quick.
• 1:15:01
  And Mccoy's like, hide it under the gay man's bed.
• 1:15:06
  It's. Just glorious.
• 1:15:09
  My, my, my. One issue with that boot was I
• 1:15:13
  didn't like what happened to Ross in the latter New
• 1:15:16
  Adventures. I didn't understand why the
• 1:15:18
  books were coming to an end and no one was allowed to be happy.
• 1:15:21
  So Bernice got married, and then she got.
• 1:15:23
  Divorced. Divorced.
• 1:15:25
  Ross joined the TARDIS, and she was becoming a better person.
• 1:15:28
  And then she got killed. Yeah.
• 1:15:30
  Chris was suffering from losing it.
• 1:15:32
  I'm like, why can't anyone be happy in these books?
• 1:15:34
  Like, for God's sakes, it's the 90s.
• 1:15:37
  Yeah, it's true. It's true.
• 1:15:40
  And, you know, Sam Jones was just round the corner.
• 1:15:42
  Oh, wait, she turned out to be a druggie from a bedsit, didn't
• 1:15:45
  she? Oh.
• 1:15:47
  I've got things to say about Sam.
• 1:15:48
  Jones Oh, great. Well, let's let's.
• 1:15:51
  Skip some of you. Bottom 10.
• 1:15:53
  List OK, All right, so again, this is perhaps an author that's
• 1:16:01
  on Twitter and he may even be a listener.
• 1:16:03
  And I apologize in advance, but I'm I am and I don't know this
• 1:16:07
  person at all. But I think the the story is and
• 1:16:11
  the book is incredibly dull. And I had enormous difficulty
• 1:16:13
  reading it the first time around.
• 1:16:15
  And again, when I tried to pick it up a few years later during
• 1:16:17
  the COVID period because I thought I just was missing
• 1:16:19
  something and time had elapsed and I could perhaps sort of
• 1:16:23
  review it a bit more objectively and with more adult eyes.
• 1:16:25
  But it's the James Conjunction by Trevor Baxendale.
• 1:16:29
  Oh, OK, I I just. Find this deathly dull.
• 1:16:33
  I think one of the things that the wilderness use books does
• 1:16:38
  wrong on more than one occasion is that they mistake exploring
• 1:16:41
  The Who hint land in this case of an IMC controlled future
• 1:16:45
  earth without necessarily fleshing out not just the
• 1:16:50
  background or the context or the, you know, the world
• 1:16:53
  building. But how do you do that through
• 1:16:55
  engaging characters and settings and dialogue or plot.
• 1:16:59
  And all of those things need to come together to sort of take
• 1:17:02
  that piece of classic who iconography or setting or
• 1:17:07
  whatever the case may be into a direction that's worthy of, you
• 1:17:12
  know, revisiting and exploring and taking further and
• 1:17:14
  reinterpreted, interpolating and interpreting.
• 1:17:18
  And I don't think any of that sort of happens here.
• 1:17:21
  I think it there's, you know, we're talking about characters.
• 1:17:23
  I can't remember any one of the sort of goodies, space hardened
• 1:17:27
  characters that populate the book outside of Doctor and Sam
• 1:17:30
  Jones. The setting itself also is kind
• 1:17:34
  of like those definitely depressing.
• 1:17:37
  Perhaps Colony in Space inspired horrible planets and you know,
• 1:17:44
  installations on those planets. Everyone talks.
• 1:17:47
  Pitch black because I remember you just kept describing they're
• 1:17:50
  on the surface it's. That's right.
• 1:17:52
  Yeah, and it's sort of glows, doesn't it?
• 1:17:54
  A sort of bluey color. And there's spiders about the
• 1:17:57
  place. And it.
• 1:17:58
  I just kept thinking about that 90s movies pitch black.
• 1:18:01
  OK, Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Definitely.
• 1:18:03
  Maybe that goes, that's one of the inspirations that goes into
• 1:18:05
  it. You know, no one's particularly
• 1:18:07
  charming or says anything particularly witty or
• 1:18:09
  interesting. And the plot itself just takes
• 1:18:11
  forever to unfold. And I actually can't recall all
• 1:18:15
  of the details, even though I read it a couple of years ago
• 1:18:17
  now. And the way that it sort of
• 1:18:19
  comes together. And so again, just in terms of
• 1:18:23
  the, the text and the story that's presented, I just think
• 1:18:26
  it's one of those things where during the wilderness years,
• 1:18:30
  there's stories that try to bring back something of the
• 1:18:34
  past, but don't do it in a way that doesn't do it in a way that
• 1:18:38
  is particularly engaging or innovative or even frankly
• 1:18:41
  interesting, I'm afraid. And so for that reason, I, I
• 1:18:46
  kind of, you know, when you were talking before about the books
• 1:18:49
  that are sort of burned in the, in the Romanian orphanage, like
• 1:18:53
  this would have been one of them.
• 1:18:54
  And I'm warned for the trees that died for this book to be
• 1:18:57
  published, only for that to just be burned in that in that
• 1:18:59
  Romanian orphanage. It's.
• 1:19:02
  Really disappointing, I think. And I, I often wonder, had I
• 1:19:06
  been old enough to sort of, you know, sit down and write a
• 1:19:09
  Doctor Who book for, you know, if I was so lucky, the Edas or
• 1:19:13
  the PDAs or VMA's or VMA's or whatever the case is, this would
• 1:19:17
  have been so, so far from what I come up with, you know what I
• 1:19:21
  mean? Like there's just, there's an
• 1:19:22
  opportunity there. And I just feel like this is a
• 1:19:25
  wasted one. Weird thing about boxing though
• 1:19:27
  is I think he can't do it. I think Eaters of Wasps is a
• 1:19:31
  brilliant target novel double the length about a massive a man
• 1:19:36
  turned into a massive mutant wasp that's attacking an English
• 1:19:39
  village. He writes Dead Stone Memorial
• 1:19:42
  towards the end which is a great ghost story all centred on like
• 1:19:46
  one. It's like what if Doctor Who
• 1:19:47
  just saves one family in one house and he does that really
• 1:19:51
  really well. He writes Prisoner of the Daleks
• 1:19:53
  for the new series Adventures, and that's one of the most
• 1:19:57
  lauded new series adventures. But yeah, I think you're right.
• 1:20:00
  I think this, this, it's so unambitious, this book.
• 1:20:04
  I feel like he's just trying to write an action movie.
• 1:20:07
  Yeah, and I and I don't, I don't think that works in the EDA.
• 1:20:10
  It's like Bell Tempest by Jim Mortimer tried to do something
• 1:20:13
  similar. And again it just, I'm sorry it
• 1:20:17
  misses the mark and how. Many planets do you have to
• 1:20:19
  roast before I stop caring. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:20:24
  Yeah. So that is another big problem,
• 1:20:26
  though, with the the wilderness years books is like they really
• 1:20:30
  feel like if they murder just whole planet's worth of people
• 1:20:33
  when it happens so often that that that was going to make an
• 1:20:37
  impact. But the basically the the more
• 1:20:39
  epic you make it, the more the less I care.
• 1:20:41
  I. Think, I think that's it
• 1:20:43
  exactly. You sort of lose touch with,
• 1:20:46
  again, all of those things that I said really make up good
• 1:20:48
  storytelling, which is the characterization and the
• 1:20:50
  interplay between those characters through a satisfying
• 1:20:53
  plot that's dramatically resonant, has charming dialogue,
• 1:20:56
  or at least interesting dialogue that propels the story forward.
• 1:20:59
  None of those things are there, I'm afraid, Do.
• 1:21:01
  You remember that that that miserable book Eternity weeps
• 1:21:04
  where Jason Kane? Oh my Lord.
• 1:21:06
  Accidentally wiped out, you know, 9/10 of the Earth's
• 1:21:09
  population. There's the feel about that.
• 1:21:13
  Yeah, yeah. It's a baffling choice.
• 1:21:16
  And it happens again and again. You're right.
• 1:21:17
  In the wilderness years, it's almost as though scale is the
• 1:21:20
  substitute for, you know, adequate drama.
• 1:21:23
  It doesn't need to be. The thing you said there as well
• 1:21:25
  about taking something from the classic series and implanting it
• 1:21:29
  into their books but not adding anything to it and actually
• 1:21:34
  slightly detracting from its original use in the classic
• 1:21:38
  series, that was another big problem at times.
• 1:21:41
  That's a great call. I think that's absolutely.
• 1:21:44
  From those writers that assembled their plots entirely
• 1:21:47
  from Doctor Who Conservancy rather than anything original.
• 1:21:52
  That's so true. Absolutely.
• 1:21:54
  We're getting sort of nap of the problems here.
• 1:21:56
  Well, I'm just trying to do, but let's go back to the strengths
• 1:21:59
  and back to your top ten list. Well, you know, you mentioned
• 1:22:03
  just then about how there's a trap for Doctor Who writers,
• 1:22:08
  even of of television stories as well, who sort of look to
• 1:22:12
  reinterpret the Doctor Who mythos alone and don't look too
• 1:22:16
  much beyond that or outside that.
• 1:22:18
  Here's a story where they actually do do that, and it's
• 1:22:22
  wonderful. In fact, they probably overdo
• 1:22:24
  it. And I'm not complaining.
• 1:22:28
  Ben Eronovich is the also people, which is such an
• 1:22:32
  incredible accomplishment, but one that is absolutely a a
• 1:22:40
  shining Polish, perfectly formed story that probably was nicked
• 1:22:45
  from Ian M Banks. But it doesn't matter because
• 1:22:49
  the way that it sort of again brings together Doctor Who and
• 1:22:53
  another genre, in this case science fiction, high science
• 1:22:56
  fiction written by, you know, the great Ian M Banks, is, is
• 1:22:59
  maybe the crowning achievement of the entire Virgin New
• 1:23:04
  Adventure range. With the exception of one more
• 1:23:08
  that I've actually got later on in this list.
• 1:23:11
  I wonder if after the remembrance of the Daleks
• 1:23:14
  novelization, we all saw transit in the schedules and when.
• 1:23:19
  Oh, this is going to be amazing. And we read transit and
• 1:23:24
  unfortunately we read transit. Then we saw the also people in
• 1:23:29
  the schedules and when. Oh dear, that's something.
• 1:23:32
  The fellow who wrote Transit, Boy, oh boy, you know what?
• 1:23:36
  It's so relaxed, isn't it? It's such a, it's such a light
• 1:23:39
  read. I always say the New adventures
• 1:23:42
  are far more gum than they are frock.
• 1:23:44
  For the most part. That's the previous terms that
• 1:23:47
  people use back in the 90s. And I very often find the EDA's
• 1:23:52
  can be quite gum, but would sort of juggle gun and frock at a
• 1:23:57
  regular basis, especially when I was like Paul Miles came in and
• 1:24:00
  people like that. This boy, oh boy, just the the
• 1:24:05
  regulars are all shelled out. The worst thing that happens is
• 1:24:09
  a robot dies. And that's the murder mystery in
• 1:24:11
  the book. That huge Dyson sphere like Weld
• 1:24:16
  that he creates. It's just that it's a stunningly
• 1:24:19
  good bit of fantasy in its own right, I think.
• 1:24:22
  Yeah, I think so. And it's one of those examples
• 1:24:25
  perhaps where particularly from the wilderness years, if you
• 1:24:28
  were to pass it to one of the knotweed people who who read,
• 1:24:32
  perhaps also other science fictional, just people who read,
• 1:24:36
  you know, books on a holiday and want to be transported to a
• 1:24:39
  wonderful world and have a great adventure and maybe something
• 1:24:41
  escapist and fun. But at the same time Stillwell
• 1:24:44
  written and carrying you along and having a great element of
• 1:24:49
  surprise and suspense as well as characterization and all the
• 1:24:52
  rest of it. All those things this book does
• 1:24:53
  superbly well. There isn't a single floor, I
• 1:24:56
  don't think you know. And again, maybe this is what
• 1:25:00
  the New Adventures, well, I say, should have been, but you can't
• 1:25:04
  have this every month. I understand that.
• 1:25:05
  But this is kind of the Platonic ideal of what the New Adventures
• 1:25:09
  probably should have been aiming for.
• 1:25:12
  It's also one of the very rare examples of a New Adventure
• 1:25:17
  trope of having alien characters with utterly unpronounceable
• 1:25:22
  names actually being quite fun. Yeah.
• 1:25:27
  I think it it gives you the sort of way that you say it with your
• 1:25:30
  tongues and your clicks and things like that, you know?
• 1:25:32
  Yeah. And I think again, sort of
• 1:25:35
  another sort of influence I guess on Benderonovich is sort
• 1:25:40
  of I think it's Swahili, the the native African, South African
• 1:25:45
  dialect or language rather, which uses those sounds which
• 1:25:49
  are sort of incorporated into the character names.
• 1:25:51
  And again, sort of gives it that sort of worldly and, you know,
• 1:25:56
  greater than just a Doctor Who story kind of feel to it that,
• 1:25:59
  you know, we're kind of at a period in time where South
• 1:26:02
  Africa moves out of apartheid and Nelson Mandela is, you know,
• 1:26:06
  becomes the, I believe the, I would say, president of the
• 1:26:10
  Republic of South Africa. And, you know, South Africa in
• 1:26:14
  that region I guess is topical and obviously that's where
• 1:26:18
  Swahili comes from of that region at least.
• 1:26:21
  So perhaps that's an influence on it as well.
• 1:26:23
  And again, just in one of which looking sort of beyond Doctor
• 1:26:26
  Who, looking to sort of bring in different influences and sort of
• 1:26:29
  mash them together in that sort of genre machine that we were
• 1:26:31
  talking about before. But yeah, in an effortlessly,
• 1:26:36
  and I'm sure it was an effortless, effortlessly breezy
• 1:26:39
  and enjoyable and fun and really clever way that nonetheless, you
• 1:26:45
  know, it does explore beautiful considered themes around, you
• 1:26:51
  know, what is life and is intelligence solely the preserve
• 1:26:53
  of, you know, the, the biological just, you know, the
• 1:26:57
  artificial and machine also count as, as, as intelligence.
• 1:27:01
  And in this instance it does. And you know, there's that
• 1:27:03
  playfulness also around God as a, as a supercomputer who knows
• 1:27:07
  everything in the Dyson sphere. And, you know, also a bit of fan
• 1:27:11
  wankery as well with the with the, the, the people rather than
• 1:27:15
  the culture here having a non aggression pact with the Time
• 1:27:18
  Lords. That's how how advanced and
• 1:27:20
  powerful they are. You know, all of that just sort
• 1:27:22
  of makes it beautifully Who, beautifully Who, but in a way
• 1:27:27
  that is very much influenced by some some really fantastic ideas
• 1:27:30
  that sit outside or perhaps adjacent to Doctor Who.
• 1:27:34
  I I wonder if that hard drive crash that meant Savala scene
• 1:27:40
  came out, you know, after the new adventures Rangers finished
• 1:27:44
  was in fact, now I know for a fact because I know a few people
• 1:27:48
  that know the writers and Ben Eronovich basically had a bit of
• 1:27:51
  a meltdown and did not want to finish that book.
• 1:27:54
  God bless Kate Ormond for stepping in and doing that.
• 1:27:57
  I'm wondering if he knew he was never going to write anything
• 1:27:59
  quite as good as also people again.
• 1:28:02
  It's just right place, right time.
• 1:28:04
  It's a wonderful read. Certainly not in the Canon of
• 1:28:09
  Doctor. I hate that word.
• 1:28:10
  I shouldn't be using it. Certainly not in in the sort of
• 1:28:13
  in Doctor Who. But I think about the incredible
• 1:28:16
  novels, the original novels that it's written in terms of the
• 1:28:18
  rivers of London. And you know what?
• 1:28:21
  I've only read the first one of those and I was so impressed and
• 1:28:23
  so enjoyed it. I don't know why to be
• 1:28:25
  continuous. It's probably something else you
• 1:28:26
  need to put on the list. But he is without doubt like an
• 1:28:30
  incredibly accomplished author with mainstream success now and
• 1:28:34
  and well deserved too. Well, the thing I'm learning is
• 1:28:37
  I'm exploring the books is and it's a bit of an unfair category
• 1:28:41
  to put people in, but you can sort of divide the Doctor Who
• 1:28:45
  original novel arise into two categories.
• 1:28:48
  And that is those that absolutely have the potential to
• 1:28:51
  have a writing career away from Doctor Who and and are going to
• 1:28:55
  do it whether they do it or not. And those that know people in
• 1:28:58
  the know and happen to have the opportunity to write a Doctor
• 1:29:02
  Who book in those, you know, and I think the second category is
• 1:29:07
  the larger one with but I do think there are a few choice
• 1:29:12
  Cornell, I think Laura's Miles has non Doctor Who books in him.
• 1:29:16
  Kate Orman, you know, there there are some there are some
• 1:29:20
  examples, definitely Lance Parkin.
• 1:29:23
  But yeah, but unfortunately I think the the first category is
• 1:29:27
  a bit smaller than the second. Yeah.
• 1:29:31
  And that's, you know, that's just the nature of things, I
• 1:29:33
  guess, but. Well, let's explore the second
• 1:29:35
  category a little more than and go back to your bottom 10 list.
• 1:29:40
  Oh dear. OK, well.
• 1:29:42
  You sound so apologetic every time you do this.
• 1:29:45
  I I have great fun reading out my bottom 10 list.
• 1:29:51
  I don't get on with this author at all.
• 1:29:53
  I don't think I've read a single book that I've enjoyed.
• 1:29:56
  And that's on me. I know that because I definitely
• 1:29:59
  believe that he would have a number of, you know, people
• 1:30:02
  championing him and he's written some books that I think have
• 1:30:06
  been praised and lauded amongst Doctor Who fans.
• 1:30:11
  But it's Dave Stone and in particular Burning Heart, which
• 1:30:14
  is one of the latter Virgin missing adventures with the 6th
• 1:30:17
  Doctor and Perry. What is it about Stone that you
• 1:30:20
  don't get on with? Not the person, the books.
• 1:30:25
  Oh, look. I think I haven't read all of
• 1:30:29
  this stuff. I have to admit I've I've read
• 1:30:30
  quite a number. But like, there's a theme that
• 1:30:34
  sort of emerges through this other work where there's kind of
• 1:30:37
  like this perhaps belligerently obscure and edgy style that he's
• 1:30:44
  always aiming for, which is which is maybe again, just a
• 1:30:47
  product of the 1990s. And, you know, that sort of grim
• 1:30:51
  dark theme that ran through science fiction post William
• 1:30:57
  Gibson in the 1980s with cyberpunk, which casts a long
• 1:31:00
  shadow, I think into onto Doctor Who in the 90s.
• 1:31:05
  But it's already cliched in many ways.
• 1:31:08
  And I think I think that sort of suffers or his writing suffers
• 1:31:12
  as the result of that. Because, you know, even at the
• 1:31:15
  time I sort of felt that. And I think of Red Burning Heart
• 1:31:18
  9697, sometime around that, basically, you know, six months
• 1:31:22
  after it came out, it really felt as though it was maybe
• 1:31:29
  trying a little too hard to sort of be on that avant-garde of
• 1:31:32
  cyberpunk and Britishness and darkness.
• 1:31:34
  And, you know, all of that kind of stuff that we've sort of
• 1:31:37
  talked about before, which sort of is kind of attraction from a
• 1:31:41
  lot of the the best of the Virgin New Adventures.
• 1:31:45
  And in that regard, like I say, perhaps it's just inherently
• 1:31:49
  1990s. But again, maybe it's just the
• 1:31:51
  fact that we sort of go back to that abusive, horrible
• 1:31:55
  relationship between the 6th Doctor and Perry and the
• 1:31:57
  characterization of Perry in that.
• 1:32:01
  I won't spoil it too much, but she sort of falls in with this
• 1:32:03
  sort of charismatic rebel leader on this very dystopian sort of
• 1:32:07
  Judge Dredd inspired out of colony world where basically
• 1:32:11
  people are left to to to rot. And I just sort of think,
• 1:32:14
  where's the charm in this? Like I, I don't see any joy in
• 1:32:20
  in any of the the dynamics that have sort of been harnessed here
• 1:32:25
  to tell this story in a way that, yeah, it just sort of
• 1:32:29
  wraps me up the wrong way for, for all those reasons, I guess.
• 1:32:34
  But again, maybe it's just the the 1990s of it all.
• 1:32:37
  It's kind of like maybe the undercut hairstyle of Doctor Who
• 1:32:40
  authors, Dave Stone just being so emblematic of that period
• 1:32:44
  that I think has a number of great advantages, but also just
• 1:32:49
  a number of drawbacks that sort of put me off.
• 1:32:54
  Always describe Dave Stone as Tutu.
• 1:32:58
  He's always trying to be too wacky, too funny, too ambitious
• 1:33:03
  too. It's like everything's taken to
• 1:33:05
  such an extreme, like he's trying really hard to get your
• 1:33:08
  attention. And.
• 1:33:09
  And weirdly enough, as time went on and he stopped writing
• 1:33:14
  original Doctor Who books and he was just writing for the Bernie
• 1:33:18
  Summerfield range in Big Finish. Yeah.
• 1:33:21
  Galed it all back. Yeah.
• 1:33:23
  And what transport. What came out of that was a
• 1:33:26
  genuinely engaging writer. And he had a chance to rewrite
• 1:33:31
  Deaf and Diplomacy because he was writing out Jason Kane in
• 1:33:35
  the Bernese range. So he was writing writing him
• 1:33:38
  out. But he also had flashbacks to
• 1:33:40
  death and diplomacy, the difference in his prose between
• 1:33:44
  what he was writing then and what he wrote back in.
• 1:33:46
  That's interesting. And he even says at the start,
• 1:33:49
  he goes, I look back at some of those old books and I just
• 1:33:52
  cringe at how much effort I was putting in.
• 1:33:57
  And what I realized was just to take my foot off the pedal and
• 1:34:01
  just write, you know? Yeah, he's very, very Marmite,
• 1:34:05
  isn't he? Dave Stone.
• 1:34:07
  Yeah, and and and look, 22 is probably the great, the greatest
• 1:34:11
  and most succinct summation of I guess his style and and maybe
• 1:34:15
  white puts me off him so much. But yeah, I if he is Marmite
• 1:34:19
  again, I definitely know there are people who champion his work
• 1:34:22
  and that's great. I definitely don't know the chap
• 1:34:24
  and I'm sure he's, yeah, he'd be someone who'd be great to have a
• 1:34:26
  conversation with over a couple of pints in the pub.
• 1:34:28
  I'm sure of that. Because it's just so sharp,
• 1:34:30
  because you can see the ideas jumping from 1:00 to the other
• 1:34:33
  and that conversation would be incredible in person.
• 1:34:35
  But when when written down, truly trying to tell the story
• 1:34:39
  and telling it in a way that it's again just a cliche 1990s,
• 1:34:43
  it just doesn't work for me, I'm afraid.
• 1:34:45
  Just even the, the words that he uses as well, he cannot possibly
• 1:34:50
  talk the way he writes. You know, I figure he's just got
• 1:34:53
  a fierce horse in front of him the whole time.
• 1:34:55
  You know, he's like, what's the longest word I can find to
• 1:34:58
  describe that thing? You know, by the time you get
• 1:35:01
  something like the Slow Empire. God, Bennett, Yeah.
• 1:35:05
  It just wasn't working. Oh well, be positive and #4 in
• 1:35:11
  your top ten list. OK this this is.
• 1:35:14
  An absolute highlight of the 8th Doctor adventures for me, it's
• 1:35:18
  Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman writing, I think their greatest
• 1:35:23
  story. And look, it could have been
• 1:35:25
  vampire science and could so easily have been the year of
• 1:35:27
  intelligent tigers, but it's unnatural history for me, which
• 1:35:31
  I think is such a fantastic milestone in sort of the mythos
• 1:35:37
  of the 8th Doctor range. But also is it's gorgeous to
• 1:35:41
  read, you know, for all those reasons that we talked about
• 1:35:43
  before in terms of the also people or sands of Time or
• 1:35:47
  Empire of Glass. It's got it all.
• 1:35:48
  Their plot and character, the sort of fantastic way in which
• 1:35:53
  the exposition unfolds, the imminence and sort of always
• 1:35:59
  their threat of the crack and awakening and coming out of the
• 1:36:03
  San Francisco Bay in the race against time.
• 1:36:05
  The incredible. His take of, you know, those
• 1:36:09
  sort of narrow minded Doctor Who fans who always want something
• 1:36:12
  pinned down through the character of Griffin the
• 1:36:17
  Collector, I think is superb. And of course, you have a cameo
• 1:36:22
  by none other than, gosh, you might have to edit this.
• 1:36:30
  Let me try this again. Go on.
• 1:36:32
  OK. And you have a cameo by none of
• 1:36:35
  them, Sean Connery playing Doctor Who's dad.
• 1:36:37
  It's, as you will see, it's Joyce.
• 1:36:39
  It's fantastic. And you know, the best thing
• 1:36:42
  about this, I think, is the Sam Jones character is one that's
• 1:36:46
  horribly maligned. And I've got an entire thesis
• 1:36:49
  about Sam Jones as being effectively one of the first of
• 1:36:53
  the millennials written by effectively the last of the Gen.
• 1:36:57
  XS. And that culture or generational
• 1:37:01
  divide between those two is is really apparent.
• 1:37:04
  I think, you know, it keeps I keep reading interviews, you
• 1:37:07
  know, at the time and you know, going back to it as well about
• 1:37:11
  the authors just saying, oh, we didn't know what to do with her.
• 1:37:14
  And I think that's large. It isn't because, you know,
• 1:37:16
  Terence writes A1 page that's terribly vague.
• 1:37:19
  I think, you know, I've we would have had the same for any number
• 1:37:22
  of classic who companions And I I don't think that's the reason.
• 1:37:27
  I think ultimately we had a, a character who sort of embodied
• 1:37:35
  a, a different generation, you know, the ethos and concerns, I
• 1:37:41
  guess, of millennials that maybe just wasn't understood by Gen.
• 1:37:44
  XS. But here there's a great kind of
• 1:37:48
  again, pathos, I guess, and, and, and real sort of sympathy
• 1:37:52
  with with Sam, both in her sort of blonde form, but in her dark
• 1:37:56
  form as well, which I think is super, super interesting.
• 1:38:00
  And I wonder had they sort of sat down at the beginning of it
• 1:38:05
  all, Lawrence Miles and Jon Blum and Kate Orman and Lance and all
• 1:38:11
  the rest of them, and sort of plotted out this character,
• 1:38:13
  whether we would have actually had a sort of coherent act for
• 1:38:16
  Sam. And she wouldn't have been as as
• 1:38:18
  horrible a character or a companion as many people think.
• 1:38:23
  I don't think there's anything wrong inherently with the
• 1:38:25
  construction you can, you know, concept of Sam Jones.
• 1:38:28
  I think it's the the botched development or lack of
• 1:38:35
  development that we have from her as a result of kind of
• 1:38:39
  different authors doing different things in different
• 1:38:41
  directions that that really undermined her.
• 1:38:43
  And again, that's probably generational.
• 1:38:47
  My thesis is generational, that they just couldn't understand
• 1:38:49
  what these new, you know, millennial kids were like.
• 1:38:53
  If you read Vampire Science, Alien Bodies, Seeing Eye, The
• 1:39:00
  Scarlet Empress and interference back-to-back, you swear you have
• 1:39:06
  the best novel companion on your hands because the best writers.
• 1:39:11
  Paul Mars just comes in in that first chapter of the Scarlet
• 1:39:13
  Empress and has her walking around that fabulous city and
• 1:39:18
  she's funny and engaging. She's easy from the comics, you
• 1:39:22
  know that's. Oh my God.
• 1:39:24
  Fun to be around. I'm going to talk about this
• 1:39:26
  exactly later on when I bring up Paul Mars, but that is spot on.
• 1:39:29
  Who she is. She is easy from the comics.
• 1:39:32
  That's effectively who the character should have been.
• 1:39:34
  And you're right, she's so charming in that in in all the
• 1:39:37
  way through Scarlet Empress. But again, the way that that
• 1:39:39
  character is introduced by Paul Mars in that first chapter is
• 1:39:41
  incredible to the point where my sister, her doctor is Paul
• 1:39:45
  Mcgahn. That's just, you know, that's
• 1:39:48
  she was 910 when the movie came out.
• 1:39:52
  And Sam Jones is a companion because she started reading the
• 1:39:55
  EDA's to the point where we named the dog after Sam.
• 1:39:58
  Like that's that's how much we loved her.
• 1:40:00
  That's wonderful. And it's down to a Natural
• 1:40:04
  History and Paul Mars's Scarlet Empress.
• 1:40:08
  I always wonder as well. We get over Stephen Moffat
• 1:40:11
  didn't read Unnatural History as well.
• 1:40:13
  All of that fractured pain when when he read, when he wrote the
• 1:40:18
  Name of the Doctor in serious. Scenes.
• 1:40:20
  Oh, completely. Yes, absolutely, yes.
• 1:40:22
  But to be. Fair.
• 1:40:23
  Borrow from the best. There's nothing wrong with that.
• 1:40:26
  What's the deterrent said? Strange enough, you know,
• 1:40:29
  Unnatural History is the only one of almond and blums that I
• 1:40:32
  didn't get on with. You know, it's like.
• 1:40:34
  Oh, please tell me why. I right now I can't because I
• 1:40:39
  haven't read it in like 10 years.
• 1:40:40
  I just remember that when I was writing my reviews of the that I
• 1:40:43
  gave like a four out of 10. I can't, I can't remember why,
• 1:40:47
  but I'm rediscovering these and everyone's a revelation,
• 1:40:50
  frankly, as I'm reading it. So that one, maybe we'll add
• 1:40:53
  that to our list. Well, if that's not a bad.
• 1:40:56
  Idea. I'd love to do that with you.
• 1:40:57
  That would be wonderful. But yeah, great choice.
• 1:41:00
  And how fabulous to talk about Sam Jones as well.
• 1:41:05
  No unrepresented. Well, oddly enough, your Sam
• 1:41:09
  Jones book is not in your bottom 10, but we're heading there now.
• 1:41:14
  What's your number four? Number four, yeah #4.
• 1:41:17
  There is a #4 and I will neither confirm nor deny whether Sam
• 1:41:22
  Jones appears on the bottom 10 list.
• 1:41:24
  Again, we'll find. We'll have to find out, but #4
• 1:41:28
  look, this might be a repeat of the James conjunction in many
• 1:41:32
  regards, but Simon Messingham's Zeta Major.
• 1:41:36
  This is This is. Hard taking, you know, one of my
• 1:41:42
  favorite doctors at the time and putting him in an impenetrably
• 1:41:45
  boring sequel to what is an impenetrable boring story, and
• 1:41:48
  then running that to 300 odd pages.
• 1:41:51
  I, I just could not, you know, I got to the end of it and you
• 1:41:56
  know, like you said, needed a, a cigarette or something like
• 1:41:59
  that. I don't even smoke.
• 1:42:01
  This is the planet of Richard Evil of the, the Virgin, the,
• 1:42:04
  the PDAs. Rather, this again, sort of
• 1:42:07
  takes the trappings and iconography and ideas of of
• 1:42:11
  classic Doctor Who and just sort of it does try to do something
• 1:42:16
  different with them. But it's so baroque and bizarre
• 1:42:19
  And ultimately it's really nice that it just again, there's no
• 1:42:25
  joy in it. And maybe it's influenced by
• 1:42:28
  this idea that if you take the 5th Doctor and put him into a
• 1:42:31
  case of Anderson said what would happen.
• 1:42:34
  But that only really works, I would say, completely in case of
• 1:42:38
  Anderson, you know, when we get him in stories like Resurrection
• 1:42:41
  of the Dialects, which is a mess and a car crash of a story to
• 1:42:44
  start with, you know, he just sort of comes across as
• 1:42:46
  ineffectual and bumbling. And all of the criticisms that
• 1:42:49
  people have of Davidson's Doctor, which ultimately isn't
• 1:42:52
  the right thing to do. Like you don't put a character
• 1:42:54
  like that or a doctor like that in those stories, or at least
• 1:42:58
  not without some sort of redemption or pay off, whether
• 1:43:01
  that is not actually just, you know, regeneration at the end of
• 1:43:03
  the in terms of case of Androsani.
• 1:43:05
  But you're right, the nastiness around this, I think is kind of
• 1:43:08
  an exercise of what happens if we take the most ineffectual Dr.
• 1:43:11
  and put him in this nasty situation and always awful.
• 1:43:14
  How much of you know how terrible a doctor he is because
• 1:43:17
  he's unable to actually do anything, you know, about the
• 1:43:21
  terrible things that are happening around him.
• 1:43:23
  Whereas if perhaps it was another doctor, then it would
• 1:43:25
  have been different. I think that's a banal reading
• 1:43:29
  of the 5th Doctor. And I'm very much a 5th Doctor
• 1:43:31
  advocate and defender. But I also just think it's a
• 1:43:34
  thorough waste of everybody's time.
• 1:43:36
  And I just need to have some kind of, not necessarily season
• 1:43:42
  17 joy and finding every piece of Doctor Who, but I need for
• 1:43:45
  there to be a valid purpose in the telling of the story.
• 1:43:48
  And I just couldn't find it here.
• 1:43:51
  And what on earth do these writers have against Nyssa?
• 1:43:54
  Because she goes through hell in this book.
• 1:43:57
  Mind you, Nyssa frequently does one of your top 10 picks, The
• 1:44:01
  Sounds of Time. Sounds of time.
• 1:44:02
  A great time in that book. Oh.
• 1:44:04
  Wait. Was that Anne Cranley I saw in
• 1:44:06
  episode 1? Oh, sorry, no, it's and this
• 1:44:12
  this is a this is a common fault with these original books is to
• 1:44:17
  make them as and I'm going to use air quotes adult as possible
• 1:44:22
  and adult equates to torturing the characters horribly.
• 1:44:25
  There's a bizarre run of new adventures around Parasite Falls
• 1:44:29
  the Shadow, and it's just unrelenting misery where you
• 1:44:34
  think to yourself, Bernie Summerfield, why are you
• 1:44:37
  continuing to go on these adventures when you're murdered
• 1:44:40
  every other week? You know.
• 1:44:42
  Yeah, awful. Well, we won't add that to the
• 1:44:45
  list. Then take us back to the top 10.
• 1:44:50
  OK. Well, I think at this point
• 1:44:52
  we're in the top three, aren't we?
• 1:44:54
  So this is a bit of a. The best of the best.
• 1:44:57
  Yeah. And I have to sort of start this
• 1:44:59
  sort of triptych or trio by saying that I think these are
• 1:45:03
  largely interchangeable. And on any given day, they they
• 1:45:06
  might well sort of jumble order and you know #3 might become
• 1:45:09
  number one and vice versa. But we're really sort of talking
• 1:45:13
  about the highlights here of, of, of the wilderness use.
• 1:45:18
  And I guess we probably started this run, you know, as far back
• 1:45:21
  as #5 with the also people where we're really sort of grading at
• 1:45:25
  the top of the curve here. This is, this is a plus
• 1:45:27
  territory. And this is maybe getting into a
• 1:45:29
  plus plus territory. Lance Parkins The Dying Days is
• 1:45:34
  the greatest 8th Doctor novel there ever was.
• 1:45:38
  It is it is everything that an Eighth Doctor story should be.
• 1:45:44
  We have Paul Mcgann's Doctor leaping up the page beneath
• 1:45:48
  Summerfield. There is the companion to sort
• 1:45:50
  of guide us through that transition from many, many years
• 1:45:54
  of McCoy into perhaps the first real and meaningful story told
• 1:45:59
  post the TV movie. And that's probably true until
• 1:46:03
  the alien bodies in fact, in terms of the EDA range.
• 1:46:06
  So, so you know, quite some time afterwards the Brigadier is
• 1:46:11
  brought back. We have a sort of maybe a sort
• 1:46:14
  of a a retread or, you know, yeah, perhaps retread is the
• 1:46:20
  right word of, you know, that sort of unit earring.
• 1:46:22
  Particularly the ambassadors of Death, which is a great favorite
• 1:46:24
  of mine. The Ice Warriors are wonderfully
• 1:46:28
  realized and returned. They're not.
• 1:46:30
  In fact, this is probably the best Ice Warriors story of the
• 1:46:32
  world as well. I would say ever, ever, ever,
• 1:46:36
  ever. Yeah.
• 1:46:36
  I really do believe that the characterization of the villains
• 1:46:40
  is wonderful and nuance. You know, the idea that that the
• 1:46:43
  Martians would have beef with the United Kingdom and not the
• 1:46:46
  rest of the world is a great sort of pretense to the invasion
• 1:46:49
  and sort of bit of A twist on it as well.
• 1:46:51
  So much of it is stolen for the climax of the Christmas Invasion
• 1:46:58
  by RTD, which is another introductory story for a new
• 1:47:02
  Doctor Who's, you know, charming and light and breezy and fun and
• 1:47:08
  gosh, I could just go on and on, couldn't I?
• 1:47:10
  But there's a particular end to a chapter and a particular end
• 1:47:14
  to a section of the book where the fake out is that the doctors
• 1:47:17
  died and he's been killed off in effectively the last virgin
• 1:47:20
  novel. And it's kind of, you know,
• 1:47:22
  foreshadowed to sort of say, hey, we might well do this.
• 1:47:24
  It's the last story, after all. Yeah, that BBC book.
• 1:47:28
  Yeah. Exactly a bit of a sort of
• 1:47:30
  spiteful volley back at them. But of course you can't possibly
• 1:47:35
  do that. And Lance Parker is too generous
• 1:47:37
  and wonderful and kind of person and writer to sort of leave it
• 1:47:39
  at that. And instead what we have is one
• 1:47:42
  of the most punch the air Doctor Who moments of all time,
• 1:47:45
  although, albeit sort of just on paper, not that's terrible to
• 1:47:48
  say just on paper, But you know, it should it should be one of
• 1:47:52
  those moments that's far more, you know, recognizable in the
• 1:47:54
  mythos of Doctor Who. It's history.
• 1:47:56
  And that is, I mean, getting chills trying just thinking
• 1:48:00
  about it now, the Doctor returning at the Tower of
• 1:48:05
  London, It's superb. I don't know if I've been so, so
• 1:48:15
  rarely at least moved by a moment in, in, in written
• 1:48:20
  original Doctor Who as that as that moment.
• 1:48:23
  And the punctuation to it all is again, Lance Park and just being
• 1:48:28
  superbly brilliant. You know, it's sort of, it comes
• 1:48:32
  together with and you can almost hear like the, you know, the,
• 1:48:36
  the I am the Doctor's sort of music in the background, you
• 1:48:39
  know, the doctors saying I am the doctor.
• 1:48:43
  And then the punctuation point at the end of the chapter is
• 1:48:46
  from Bernice's perspective. And it was Oh my God.
• 1:48:52
  Gorgeous. It is stunning.
• 1:48:56
  I love the bit where he's gets thrown out of the ship and he's
• 1:48:58
  got, he's got the bomb, he's got no Michael Mills.
• 1:49:04
  We went on a bit of a journey when we did this one together.
• 1:49:07
  Because I loved that episode. I was reading it and going,
• 1:49:09
  well, this seems very familiar, frankly.
• 1:49:12
  And he goes, yes, it seems very familiar because the new series
• 1:49:15
  stolen all of this for its best alien invasions.
• 1:49:18
  And he introduced me to that idea of rad before trad.
• 1:49:21
  This was radical for the New Adventures because they'd never
• 1:49:24
  done an alien invasion story in their entire 60 book run.
• 1:49:28
  It's become so commonplace because of, you know, the new
• 1:49:31
  series does it every, every single season.
• 1:49:34
  Yeah. And it's got my single favorite
• 1:49:36
  ever continuity reference in any original Doctor Who book.
• 1:49:43
  And that is when Grey Haven sends the signal to bomb Mars.
• 1:49:49
  And what's the pay off? It's 5 minutes to get a radio
• 1:49:52
  signal between Earth and. Mars.
• 1:49:56
  Only a deep dive Doctor Who fans going to get that, but oh, it's
• 1:50:00
  just brilliant. What a superb book.
• 1:50:03
  I mean, frankly, you could pull any last parking book out on
• 1:50:06
  your top ten list and I'd say absolutely, yes, even.
• 1:50:10
  Well, they're disregarded ones. Trading futures?
• 1:50:12
  Maybe, but even that's fabulous. It's good fun.
• 1:50:15
  Definitely. Boy, oh boy.
• 1:50:17
  Wonderful choice. Well, from the best of the best
• 1:50:20
  to the worst of the worst. And and we are now entering an
• 1:50:25
  interchangeable bottom 3 for me and we've.
• 1:50:27
  Already had Barry Letters and Christopher Beulis, so who could
• 1:50:31
  possibly be left? I mean, there is one more name
• 1:50:35
  and I and it's, it's so obvious isn't it?
• 1:50:38
  It's Neil Penswick's The Pit. I hope this the poor bastard.
• 1:50:42
  This has been kicked to death by so many before me, and so I
• 1:50:46
  won't labour the point other than to say that it feels like
• 1:50:49
  the work of a competition winner, and it's not the worst
• 1:50:53
  on the list merely by virtue of it.
• 1:50:56
  Giving us the name is Sagarov, or, I don't know if that's how
• 1:50:59
  you pronounce it, but it's the name of the crime, Great
• 1:51:01
  Vampire, which is a stonkingly superb, sibilant, even satanic
• 1:51:06
  evocation of that essence of pure evil.
• 1:51:08
  And Lawrence Miles is every so right.
• 1:51:10
  We pointed this out, but other than that, this is your least
• 1:51:16
  favorite ever reality show contestant of a Doctor Who
• 1:51:19
  story. I don't know.
• 1:51:23
  And again, I'm sorry, Neil, if you're listening or, you know,
• 1:51:26
  you're probably a thoroughly wonderful chap, but I don't know
• 1:51:29
  how this gets to the point where it's published.
• 1:51:33
  There has to be a serious lapse in editorship and in judgement
• 1:51:37
  in the same way that, you know, there are certain classical
• 1:51:42
  episodes like the Dominators. Sorry, Fraser, that you just
• 1:51:44
  sort of wonder how, how was this made?
• 1:51:46
  Why was this made? Who is this made for?
• 1:51:50
  And I think, you know, to sort of to boil it down, really it's,
• 1:51:55
  it's, it's not written by someone who's a competent
• 1:51:58
  writer. And that's probably, it's worth
• 1:51:59
  seeing. There are too many ideas.
• 1:52:01
  And that's obviously one of the, the failings, I guess the first
• 1:52:04
  time writers and writers who perhaps don't have any sort of
• 1:52:07
  mastery over their art. But beyond that, it's just a
• 1:52:10
  turgid slog, sentence after sentence, page after page.
• 1:52:15
  There isn't anything to look forward to other than getting to
• 1:52:17
  the end of the book. And then when you do, you sort
• 1:52:19
  of wonder, why did I do that? That was a terrible waste of my
• 1:52:23
  time. And maybe it's one of those
• 1:52:25
  things that it's just a rite of passage for every Doctor Who
• 1:52:28
  nerds like you and I just sort of sit through and come to the
• 1:52:31
  other end of and say, I there, I've read it.
• 1:52:35
  But you know, that's not a particularly valid reason to
• 1:52:39
  read it in the same way that maybe reading Finnegan's Wake by
• 1:52:41
  James Joyce's. This is something to be endured.
• 1:52:48
  And I I don't know if I can say much more than that without or
• 1:52:52
  into libel. I'm going to say something
• 1:52:55
  controversial about the New Adventures now.
• 1:52:58
  I don't think they figured out what they were doing until
• 1:53:02
  Sanctuary and Human Nature. I think that's the point where
• 1:53:05
  they were like, OK, we've kind of hit our peak here, this is
• 1:53:09
  what we do. And I think that sort of last
• 1:53:13
  third is a really great run of books.
• 1:53:16
  But I think the first half, the New Adventures are staggeringly
• 1:53:20
  inconsistent. You get, OK, we're going to do
• 1:53:23
  link series of adventures, you know, Time Worm, which turns out
• 1:53:28
  to be not linked particularly well.
• 1:53:30
  And then we're going to do another link series of
• 1:53:31
  adventures. But we're actually going to do
• 1:53:33
  books that have already been written and somehow just slap
• 1:53:36
  Cat's Cradle on them. And hopefully people will buy
• 1:53:38
  all three. Then we're going to do, you
• 1:53:41
  know, we're going to write Ace out and we're going to bring
• 1:53:44
  Benny in and we're going to do a series of an alternative history
• 1:53:48
  cycle and all. And there's just no, there's no
• 1:53:50
  clear path of what they're doing at all.
• 1:53:53
  And in between the cracks, you get these one off writers that
• 1:53:57
  are coming in. And The Pit is a really great
• 1:54:00
  example of that where it's just like, how were you ever given a
• 1:54:04
  Commission to write a book? What did you present to these
• 1:54:07
  people that made them think that you could actually write a book?
• 1:54:13
  And it is painful, isn't it? It's really painful.
• 1:54:17
  There's, there are a few sort of one and out books, writers like
• 1:54:20
  Stephen Marley who came in and going, I'm going to impress you,
• 1:54:23
  you know, and there are others that I don't know.
• 1:54:28
  Was this written? Was this excreted?
• 1:54:30
  I'm not sure. But it is painful to ensure.
• 1:54:34
  Yeah. And it is just during that
• 1:54:36
  period of where they're trying to figure it out and they
• 1:54:38
  haven't figured it out yet. Who is this supposed to appeal
• 1:54:42
  to? I.
• 1:54:44
  Don't know. No, I don't think so, because
• 1:54:46
  it's not a particularly great sort of incarnation of William
• 1:54:52
  Blake. I don't think in any real way,
• 1:54:54
  like if you're a Blake fan or scholar, you you're going to see
• 1:54:57
  through this pretty quickly. So I don't think, I don't think
• 1:55:01
  that's and, and what, you know, it's such a weird insertion.
• 1:55:05
  It's it's such a sort of like a fanboy thing to do.
• 1:55:07
  It's like, who's my favorite writer, You know?
• 1:55:10
  For me, it'd be like sort of taking TS Eliot or Virgil or
• 1:55:12
  Dante and putting him into a Doctor Who story.
• 1:55:14
  It's like, there's a real need for this.
• 1:55:16
  Unless you've got, again, a stonking great idea.
• 1:55:20
  But what is the, the point of, of Blake being in that story?
• 1:55:24
  I, I don't really know, other than just to have William Blake
• 1:55:27
  in a Doctor Who story. Isn't that a cool thing?
• 1:55:30
  Not unless you do something with it.
• 1:55:31
  He's my. Favorite author Terrence Dicks.
• 1:55:33
  What would it be like if he was in a Doctor Who book?
• 1:55:36
  Pretty good actually. Well that that's just
• 1:55:39
  metafiction straight away. That's give that to poor Mars.
• 1:55:43
  This climax doesn't make any sense.
• 1:55:44
  And then Terror Sticks would pipe up and say, don't worry,
• 1:55:47
  I'll cover it with a line. OK, well, come on, you're top
• 1:55:53
  two. I mean, I know they're
• 1:55:55
  interchangeable, but as we head towards one, I'm getting more
• 1:55:57
  excited. Yeah.
• 1:55:59
  And, and, and you know what? This this is interchangeable in
• 1:56:01
  terms of the other imprints of the author.
• 1:56:05
  And I'm looking at the list now and I was like, why did I pick
• 1:56:08
  that one? I really should have picked that
• 1:56:09
  one. I have got here the Blue Angel
• 1:56:13
  by Paul Mars but. Interesting choice I.
• 1:56:17
  But maybe I needed to have Scarlet Empress of Magics and
• 1:56:20
  Englishmen. But I chose The Blue Angel
• 1:56:22
  specifically because I think this is the writer and in
• 1:56:26
  particular this is the one book out of the EDA that's most in
• 1:56:30
  tune with. Bear with me as I get
• 1:56:32
  pretentiously academic with you and start betraying my my
• 1:56:36
  postgraduate silly interest. But this is one of the most
• 1:56:42
  actually the most in tune with the socio cultural slash the
• 1:56:46
  zeitgeist of that era that emerges very much at the cutting
• 1:56:51
  edge of a very 1990s post modernism.
• 1:56:54
  There's that sort of postgraduate tertiary
• 1:56:57
  intellectual academic discourse that Mars comes from, but he
• 1:57:02
  also very much sort of plays with and recreates in the form
• 1:57:06
  of thoroughly entertaining and highly amusing and easy to
• 1:57:11
  engage with and read Doctor Who stories.
• 1:57:13
  And I think that is, if I look back at that period, that's
• 1:57:19
  actually the true backdrop, I guess, of what's happening in
• 1:57:22
  that era of that of that production context of the McGann
• 1:57:26
  era of Doctor Who, which actually we never really got to
• 1:57:29
  see because it was off, off the air at the time.
• 1:57:33
  But crucially does come through and perhaps even aptly through
• 1:57:37
  the written word in novel form. That's maybe the only place that
• 1:57:41
  it can sort of do this kind of justice here.
• 1:57:44
  And it's also perhaps just to sort of go down a slight
• 1:57:47
  tangent, why I think the BBCEDAS and not the Big Finish audios
• 1:57:53
  are actually the true line of McGann adventures, even though
• 1:57:56
  Mcgann's in the BB, the Big Finish audios.
• 1:57:59
  Because if we're talking about Doctor Who and his eras, his
• 1:58:04
  eras are always bound up with, again, that what I mentioned
• 1:58:06
  before about the production context, what is the time and
• 1:58:09
  the space and the location of the zeitgeist and the ideas that
• 1:58:13
  are floating around at that time.
• 1:58:15
  They're the things that come through in the Green Death,
• 1:58:18
  They're the things that come through in the Awakening, which
• 1:58:22
  we need to do, by the way, as a hamster, because there's an
• 1:58:25
  incredible sort of thatcherous vein that sort of comes through
• 1:58:29
  in that. And you see the Falklands is
• 1:58:31
  part of it as well. But as a result of that, to get
• 1:58:35
  back to Paul Mars, I think we have like Doctor Who in its most
• 1:58:42
  sophisticated form during the Wilderness years.
• 1:58:48
  And it's sophisticated not just for the depth of its incredible
• 1:58:51
  intellectual reach, but the mastery with which he's able to
• 1:58:57
  convey that through narrative in a way that's so easily consumed
• 1:59:01
  and enjoyed. I think Paul Mars is the writer
• 1:59:05
  of the Wilderness Years. The the number one, the.
• 1:59:11
  As a writer, yes. Now there's still one more book
• 1:59:13
  that I've I've sort of ragged ahead of this.
• 1:59:15
  But like I say, those three are very much interchangeable.
• 1:59:17
  But as a writer, Paul Mars is I think the greatest wilderness
• 1:59:20
  years writer. Yeah, for all of those reasons.
• 1:59:23
  When he first stepped into the EDA's with the Scarlet Empress,
• 1:59:27
  I felt as if, you know, they say, well, that old cliche, you
• 1:59:31
  know, a gust of wind came in and blew all the cobwebs away.
• 1:59:35
  I feel as I feel the Scarlet Empress is every bit as
• 1:59:38
  revolutionary as Revelation was for the New Adventures.
• 1:59:42
  Agreed. Agreed.
• 1:59:42
  Yeah. And showed the potential of
• 1:59:45
  writing Doctor Who is in a completely different way.
• 1:59:49
  I love the fact they just tackled that sort of that
• 1:59:53
  fantasy science fiction and then had the nerve to go with the
• 1:59:57
  doctor goes at 1.0, he goes, no, there is science behind all of
• 2:00:00
  this. It's just beyond our
• 2:00:02
  comprehension. That's all.
• 2:00:03
  And that means he can get away with whatever he wants.
• 2:00:06
  You know, yeah, absolutely. And.
• 2:00:07
  In the Blue Angel, when he wrote those, what was it?
• 2:00:10
  20 questions. You've got a bloody nerve.
• 2:00:15
  So so this is just another classic and wonderful example of
• 2:00:19
  metafiction as a sort of Ave., I guess, of that sort of post
• 2:00:24
  modern play of of narrative disruption of storytelling
• 2:00:29
  through, you know, means and ways that are that play with the
• 2:00:33
  with the very concept of storytelling.
• 2:00:36
  That's metafiction. And it's just so wonderful that
• 2:00:39
  that's to me, I think that's it was hilarious and I was laughing
• 2:00:42
  because, you know, again, this is what I was doing for
• 2:00:44
  undergrad and postgrad. I just got it.
• 2:00:46
  And maybe that's that's conceded of me, but I just feel like this
• 2:00:52
  was the writer that I always wanted to to read and look
• 2:00:56
  forward to, I guess in terms of the the bourtiness years books.
• 2:00:59
  I just never forget the doctor's anger, Iris coming low at the
• 2:01:02
  end and taking him out of the climax.
• 2:01:05
  He's completely denied what happens at the end of the book.
• 2:01:08
  And then when I when I did the interview with Paul Mars, he
• 2:01:11
  said it was less about, oh, make up the ending yourself and more
• 2:01:14
  about, no, the story goes on. That's right.
• 2:01:17
  Let's not bring it to an end, you know?
• 2:01:19
  Let's tell me what. And and that's again, sort of
• 2:01:23
  playing of, of, of generic conventions and particularly
• 2:01:27
  narrative and storytelling through post.
• 2:01:29
  You know, postmodernist postmodernism is huge.
• 2:01:32
  Think about, for instance, Pulp Fiction.
• 2:01:34
  That's a classic pop example of the playing of narrative through
• 2:01:38
  postmodern means and, you know, identifiable conventions in
• 2:01:42
  themselves. And part of that is that the
• 2:01:45
  story does go on that if there is never a close, there's never
• 2:01:49
  a beginning or an end in life, why should that apply to
• 2:01:52
  narrative? We can also break down those
• 2:01:54
  structures in those walls in that way.
• 2:01:56
  So the 20 questions again, is sort of breaks down those
• 2:02:00
  dichotomies of effectively, you know, either or and starts
• 2:02:06
  building out these, these conceptions of not just neither,
• 2:02:09
  both, but this idea of and and and, and and and there's that
• 2:02:14
  infinite chain of what's called signifies or stories that we
• 2:02:17
  tell through Doctor Who. Again, it's all very academic,
• 2:02:21
  but it's all very, very beautifully told and concretely
• 2:02:24
  told, I think, through the stories.
• 2:02:26
  And like you said earlier, and I'm not doing myself a
• 2:02:29
  disservice when I say this, I think you are an intellectual
• 2:02:33
  and I like populist entertainment.
• 2:02:35
  I'm not intellectual. You absolutely are but but all
• 2:02:39
  Mars bridges that gap between those two people because
• 2:02:43
  provides like mad dogs. An Englishman is is a very
• 2:02:46
  funny, fast, engaging, imaginative book that anyone
• 2:02:53
  could read and simply told, you know, not told.
• 2:02:55
  And yeah, it's got references to the high heavens if you wanna go
• 2:02:59
  digging, you know, parodies of things on homages of things.
• 2:03:03
  Ray Harry houses in there. George Lucas is in there.
• 2:03:07
  Jr. Tolkien is in there, you know,
• 2:03:09
  and. All the in jokes.
• 2:03:11
  No coward. Come with those people.
• 2:03:12
  No, coward. I mean, he's just a bloody
• 2:03:14
  genius that bridges the gap between sort of intellectualism
• 2:03:18
  and populist entertainment. I think that's a really hard
• 2:03:21
  thing to do. Yeah.
• 2:03:22
  He's a. Genius, isn't he?
• 2:03:24
  No, he is absolutely a genius. And again, that's also a
• 2:03:27
  postmodern thing, that disruption of those dichotomies
• 2:03:30
  between high and pop culture, that in fact those two things
• 2:03:34
  can merge and blend in and come up with wonderful concoctions as
• 2:03:38
  a result. Well, like, like I read Mallagra
• 2:03:41
  recently, which again, I think it's somebody that very clever
• 2:03:44
  has written that book. But at the end I was a little
• 2:03:47
  bit exhausted because there was so much thrown at me that I was
• 2:03:52
  always juggling a lot and I was always trying to keep a lot in
• 2:03:55
  my head and I I was working to read it.
• 2:03:58
  I don't get that with a Paul Mars book.
• 2:04:00
  I've just flown through it laughing my head off and at the
• 2:04:03
  end I go, my God, that was so clever and very funny.
• 2:04:06
  You know he. Would have been wonderful as a
• 2:04:10
  writer for The Avengers, I think, because The Avengers does
• 2:04:13
  exactly the same thing. Yeah, actually he did though,
• 2:04:17
  didn't he? In the in short trips he had a
• 2:04:19
  a, you know, Doctor and Mrs. Jones kind of esteem and Mrs.
• 2:04:23
  Peel parody as well and. How much a good way even when
• 2:04:28
  you know when they were doing the Nsas, Paul Mars stuffed his
• 2:04:31
  cap at the kids and wrote sick building, which is just
• 2:04:35
  absolutely brilliant. Are we in your number ones both
• 2:04:39
  sides now? No, there's a number two in the
• 2:04:42
  bottom. Oh, go on then.
• 2:04:45
  OK, And again, every time I've heard him talk and heard others
• 2:04:52
  talk about him, he just seems like such a lovely chap.
• 2:04:55
  But Steve Cole masquerading as Michael Collier for The Longest
• 2:04:58
  Day, a superbly apartment titled This is the dullest EDA I've yet
• 2:05:04
  read, such that I often wonder how could possibly run to such
• 2:05:08
  length. It's kind of the post child, I
• 2:05:11
  guess that aborted promise of that range, especially
• 2:05:13
  concerning the non development of the character of San Jones.
• 2:05:16
  I think, and it probably tends to prove Cardinals practice of
• 2:05:20
  not having script editors right for the series.
• 2:05:22
  But that might be a liable thing to say.
• 2:05:24
  So feel free to edit that out. I don't think that there is a
• 2:05:31
  dramatically feasible idea in this entire book.
• 2:05:34
  I think there's a mishmash of sci-fi concepts that could have
• 2:05:38
  been interesting if developed, this idea of a of a planet with
• 2:05:43
  different time zones, for instance.
• 2:05:45
  But I think I read the first 50 pages when I first read it, when
• 2:05:49
  I first got the book. And I, I just, I wanted to know
• 2:05:52
  when does this start? Because I'm 50 pages in and
• 2:05:55
  genuinely nothing has happened here.
• 2:05:58
  Much like the change conjunction, it's that sort of
• 2:06:00
  drabness of the setting and again, the plot, the sort of
• 2:06:04
  sedate, not even sedate. It's just stonkingly slow, slow,
• 2:06:11
  slow unfolding of the narrative that really brings this down.
• 2:06:16
  But also I don't I don't think he's this is strange because he
• 2:06:19
  was the editor of the of the range.
• 2:06:21
  I don't think he's got a handle of the characters.
• 2:06:23
  I I certainly don't think he can write for Sam Jones, as I
• 2:06:25
  mentioned, But also the doctor comes across as really
• 2:06:29
  sidelined, perhaps and and ineffective and so decentered
• 2:06:33
  from from the story that I I, I just don't know what I'm reading
• 2:06:36
  sometimes. Like is this a, is this a sci-fi
• 2:06:38
  novel? That has to be that has to have
• 2:06:41
  the doctor in a because it's Doctor Who and this is the only
• 2:06:45
  way it gets published. Or is this, I don't know, a
• 2:06:50
  Doctor Who story that just doesn't have any of the
• 2:06:55
  constituent elements required to have, you know, have it sort of
• 2:07:00
  take the reader on a journey and an enjoyable 1.
• 2:07:03
  You know, you think about all the great stories that we talked
• 2:07:04
  about so far, I don't think it had it comes close to sort of
• 2:07:08
  emulating any of those and then let alone actually sort of
• 2:07:11
  enacting those. So I, I think this is a real
• 2:07:15
  real one of those examples where I I feel terrible because I'm
• 2:07:18
  sure it just sounds like a lovely chat, but I remember
• 2:07:22
  saving up my meagre pocket money to buy what was effectively.
• 2:07:25
  A royal. Headache of an EDA for this and
• 2:07:28
  I felt so disappointed I can't tell you.
• 2:07:32
  He's a weird 1, Carl. When we talked about him
• 2:07:34
  recently, we were like, we couldn't really get a handle on
• 2:07:37
  what he does because he tips his hands to all sorts and he's very
• 2:07:40
  often stuck writing the ARC books.
• 2:07:42
  Right, The ancestors tell. Yeah.
• 2:07:48
  So that's got that weighing him down, definitely.
• 2:07:50
  I think that's probably him sort of trying to do a thankless job,
• 2:07:53
  but. Like I I get what he's trying to
• 2:07:56
  achieve with this runner. Books.
• 2:07:59
  Yeah, Longest day. He wants Sam Jones to do
• 2:08:02
  something so she runs away from the doctor.
• 2:08:04
  I don't buy it. I don't buy the fact that she's
• 2:08:06
  not in. CPR.
• 2:08:07
  And I don't buy the fact that that turns into a kiss, because
• 2:08:10
  who the fuck does that? When you're trying to.
• 2:08:13
  Revive somebody, Steven, you're so pretty if.
• 2:08:15
  I was. If I was pulling CPR on you, I
• 2:08:18
  wouldn't stick my tongue in your mouth.
• 2:08:21
  I just want to try and get your breathing again.
• 2:08:24
  I certainly wouldn't run away from you.
• 2:08:26
  But anyway, what they're trying to do is grow her up, right?
• 2:08:29
  So they're trying to push them apart.
• 2:08:31
  So then she has an adventure on her own and he has an adventure
• 2:08:34
  on his own. And then there's three years
• 2:08:36
  that pass in Seeing Eye and they come back together again and
• 2:08:40
  she's grown up a bit like New Ways.
• 2:08:41
  They're trying to repair the character.
• 2:08:44
  You've got him right in the first one, Paul Leonard right in
• 2:08:47
  the second one, John Peel right in the third one.
• 2:08:50
  And thank Christ, Kate Orman and John Blum come along at the end
• 2:08:54
  and it's just fucking gold at the end.
• 2:08:57
  And it's very rare that the conclusion of a Doctor Who arc
• 2:09:00
  is the best thing about it, but there we are.
• 2:09:03
  I do get it. I get what they're trying to do,
• 2:09:06
  like the new adventures. I just don't think they're there
• 2:09:08
  yet. No, and I think it's it didn't
• 2:09:11
  work in the Nas where they took Ace away for that period and
• 2:09:15
  sort of brought her back, funnily enough, three years old
• 2:09:18
  yet again. Like it's kind of going back to
• 2:09:21
  a world that's already very, very dry and proved not to be
• 2:09:24
  fruitful in the 1st place. I'm mixing my metaphors, I
• 2:09:25
  understand, but the point being that it was a bad idea in the
• 2:09:30
  first instance to do this. What they really needed to do
• 2:09:32
  was just get the character right as quickly as possible and right
• 2:09:35
  for that seeing I, I, I think it's the least successful of the
• 2:09:41
  Orman Blum novels. And I'll say that because it
• 2:09:44
  tries to do something that it doesn't need to have.
• 2:09:47
  They got the rest of it right, Not Orman and Blum, but the
• 2:09:49
  rest, the rest of the authors intended characterization of Sam
• 2:09:52
  Jones. It tries to, you know, resurrect
• 2:09:54
  and retrieve a project that's pretty much at this stage, like
• 2:09:57
  everyone's giving up on Sam Jones.
• 2:09:59
  And probably because we've had bought a dozen plus and they
• 2:10:02
  still haven't got it right. Like it's just time to give up
• 2:10:04
  entirely. And so in that regard, it's sort
• 2:10:08
  of, it sort of reminds you a bit of set piece where there's a
• 2:10:11
  great deal of characterization and wonderful writing.
• 2:10:13
  But again, I'm sort of reading it thinking why was this
• 2:10:16
  necessary in the 1st place? Like if we had the right kind of
• 2:10:20
  development throughout the range, whether that's down to
• 2:10:22
  the editor or effectively trying to sort of develop through a
• 2:10:25
  secret writers room, whether it's like, you know, gosh, I
• 2:10:29
  don't even know what would have been available in the 90s.
• 2:10:31
  But I guess e-mail like an emailing group just sort of
• 2:10:33
  bouncing idea. I don't clearly that hasn't
• 2:10:35
  happened. Or if it has sort of not matured
• 2:10:38
  in a way where everyone's on the same page.
• 2:10:40
  And again, you know, I go back to that point about the sort of
• 2:10:44
  aborted premise of the range and particularly of Sam Jones.
• 2:10:47
  This is probably like Exhibit A when it comes to, I think what
• 2:10:53
  could have been a character that, you know, spoke to me.
• 2:10:58
  I guess, again, I'm a millennial.
• 2:10:59
  She was a millennial. But perhaps there wasn't that
• 2:11:01
  kind of understanding from a series of Gen.
• 2:11:03
  X writers. And that's a generational thing.
• 2:11:05
  I understand no one's to blame but.
• 2:11:07
  Gosh, that could mean right. And these books don't understand
• 2:11:09
  is is we don't all go around going, Oh well, you know, pro go
• 2:11:13
  Greenpeace. Yeah.
• 2:11:16
  Good grief. I mean, I feel as if she was
• 2:11:18
  aged before she even started, you know?
• 2:11:22
  And also, you've got, like we've already said, the Scarlet
• 2:11:25
  Empress just around the corner, right?
• 2:11:27
  Which? Shows you how easily.
• 2:11:29
  Easily. How right?
• 2:11:30
  You can do that and all gone. Oh dear.
• 2:11:32
  Oh, we could have just done that instead of going through all
• 2:11:35
  these hoops over here. Exactly.
• 2:11:39
  OK, so I'm. Afraid.
• 2:11:42
  What's on the throne at #1? OK.
• 2:11:47
  Your favorite original Doctor Who novel?
• 2:11:51
  So I. Mean again, these three
• 2:11:54
  interchangeable, but this one sits at the apex of this list.
• 2:11:57
  And the reason behind this was that if you were to scrub every
• 2:12:01
  last wilderness years novel away and you could only save one one
• 2:12:06
  that sort of highlighted, I guess what the era was about in
• 2:12:12
  terms of looking backwards but also looking forwards.
• 2:12:15
  What was it about in terms of being able to perhaps straddle
• 2:12:19
  the divide between red and tread, what that era sort of
• 2:12:23
  presented in terms of emerging talent and how that talent sort
• 2:12:28
  of synthesized new Doctor Who for a new audience and a new
• 2:12:31
  time and a new era at a time also when it was definitely
• 2:12:34
  basically dead? What is that one example that
• 2:12:38
  you could pluck out from the ashes in a way that you know if
• 2:12:40
  the the Library of Alexandria was burning, you could save one
• 2:12:45
  one text by Aristotle. I can think of 20.
• 2:12:48
  OK. I can think of two, and it's one
• 2:12:51
  from the New Adventures and one from the 8th Doctor adventures.
• 2:12:55
  Interesting. OK, All right, So I don't think
• 2:12:57
  we're going to agree. This is the Infinity Doctors by
• 2:12:59
  Lance Parking. Oh, mine was a.
• 2:13:01
  Parking. OK, I I think this is the
• 2:13:06
  blueprint for how to reboot Doctor Who for a 90s American
• 2:13:11
  audience. If Lance Parkin was given the
• 2:13:13
  job of writing the script and he presented this TV movie, I think
• 2:13:18
  we may well have had something go to a series.
• 2:13:21
  And that's hard to say because it was up against Roseanne.
• 2:13:24
  But the quality of this script is so incredible in what it
• 2:13:26
  tries to do, which is to take an entire crystallizing summation
• 2:13:33
  of a 35 year old mythos at that point and do two things and
• 2:13:40
  reinterpret it and bring it into a rebooted form to atone a new
• 2:13:43
  audience while still bringing 35 years of legacy.
• 2:13:48
  And hopefully with many fans across to the new to this new
• 2:13:52
  world and the conception of this Doctor Who never left Gallifrey,
• 2:13:58
  clearly, I think played by Paul McGann.
• 2:14:03
  And the adventure beginning only after these sort of cataclysmic
• 2:14:06
  events, which basically retell, but in a much better way.
• 2:14:11
  Again, a reimagining of the three doctors, the Omega sort of
• 2:14:14
  incident whilst, you know, throwing at us all the lore and
• 2:14:18
  the iconography and the sort of futility of, you know,
• 2:14:21
  cloistered life on Gallifrey and these ancient dusty senators
• 2:14:25
  who, you know, only perceive but never intervene.
• 2:14:28
  And then you bring a character like that into, you know, the
• 2:14:33
  center of the show and send him out on his way in Iraq of the
• 2:14:37
  old tires. I think it is superb.
• 2:14:41
  And, you know, again, Lance Parkin is someone like in the
• 2:14:45
  dying days who writes so beautifully and with such joy.
• 2:14:49
  And there's an incredible amount of fun to be had on each page.
• 2:14:56
  It's it's, I don't know. I just think it's, it's that
• 2:15:00
  that one text that I think you could sort of retrieve from an
• 2:15:04
  era that is largely subsumed perhaps by the sands of time, if
• 2:15:10
  you want to call it that, where it's so invisible to a greater
• 2:15:15
  audience. And this would have been a
• 2:15:18
  perfect way to reboot Doctor Who in a way that we didn't get with
• 2:15:21
  Russell and and Chris Eccleston and sort of a continuation of
• 2:15:25
  that. But that wasn't in the air in
• 2:15:27
  the 90s, I don't think. I think you had it gone to the
• 2:15:29
  US, it would have been kind of like a page one rewrite would
• 2:15:33
  have got, you know, apparently, you know, genesis of the
• 2:15:36
  dialects and talents and two of the sidemen all over again,
• 2:15:40
  which would have been interesting in some regards.
• 2:15:42
  But if there was a story to kick off effectively that kind of
• 2:15:47
  reimagining of Doctor Who for an American mainstream 90s cable
• 2:15:51
  audience, this would have been it.
• 2:15:55
  I think it's one of the very few Doctor Who books that does
• 2:16:03
  science fiction so adebly. There's a sequence where you've
• 2:16:08
  got the suntarans and the proofs right, and this shouldn't work
• 2:16:13
  in prose because we're not seeing.
• 2:16:15
  Special effects or? Anything like that And he
• 2:16:17
  describes the scale of it and the destructive capacity of what
• 2:16:23
  could happen if these two two armies start far.
• 2:16:26
  And I just remember reading it going this shouldn't be working
• 2:16:30
  and yet it does. And why the fuck have we never
• 2:16:32
  seen the Suntaras and the Ruins together anyway?
• 2:16:37
  It is an amazing. I've not read that in over a
• 2:16:39
  decade at the Infinity Doctors. I should get back to that one.
• 2:16:42
  And he? Just.
• 2:16:43
  Writes so crisply but packs in so much substance, doesn't he?
• 2:16:49
  And he is the ultimate Michael Mills is he's brilliant at
• 2:16:54
  sifting out all the Easter eggs, right?
• 2:16:57
  But even he acknowledges for everyone he finds, there's five
• 2:17:00
  he's not seeing. And by the time you get
• 2:17:03
  somewhere like the Gallifrey Chronicles, where every page is
• 2:17:05
  an Easter egg of some kind or another.
• 2:17:09
  God, he's such a brilliant writer, isn't he?
• 2:17:11
  We we were very lucky to have him and everybody given we've
• 2:17:16
  been doing a bit of plug in. Go find my 5 hour interview with
• 2:17:19
  Lance Park. It's so good.
• 2:17:21
  Well, I still haven't brought out the last part yet, but
• 2:17:23
  that's my long running joke that that'll be the last thing I'll
• 2:17:25
  ever bring out as hamster. I think that's the episode where
• 2:17:30
  he talks about the Infinity Doctors as well, you know?
• 2:17:33
  Gosh. What a wonderful, wonderful last
• 2:17:37
  choice. In fact, your top three were
• 2:17:38
  sublime. 2 Parkins in there. Yeah, Yeah.
• 2:17:41
  I don't think that's accidental. I think, you know, Parkin is, is
• 2:17:46
  one of my great favorite authors of that era and I I can't
• 2:17:50
  believe he has never written for, you know, televised Doctor
• 2:17:53
  Who since it's really. You know when he wrote for
• 2:17:56
  episode, for God's sake? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:17:59
  Yeah. Yeah, no, I I just sort of think
• 2:18:02
  he, he's superb. And have you heard, have you
• 2:18:07
  heard his Big Finish audio, Davros?
• 2:18:10
  I have actually it's one of the few that I have heard it is
• 2:18:12
  brilliant it. Is yeah, you know, you think
• 2:18:15
  doing a character study on Davros is just bound to fail,
• 2:18:19
  but goddess, just gripping that. Incredible.
• 2:18:21
  Just the opening of that alone had me hooked from the superb
• 2:18:26
  Yeah. I thought I thought you was.
• 2:18:29
  You know your preamble before you mentioned what the title of
• 2:18:32
  the book was. I thought you was either talking
• 2:18:34
  about human nature or Father Time.
• 2:18:37
  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which are two.
• 2:18:39
  Books I think you could pull out of their respective ranges and
• 2:18:42
  just publish on the road because they're just great books.
• 2:18:46
  So, as you and Jack Coyer would know, I have not as yet read
• 2:18:51
  Human Nature, and I don't know why.
• 2:18:53
  Maybe I'm saving it for, you know, a particularly rainy day
• 2:18:56
  or something. But Paul Cornell is an
• 2:18:59
  incredible writer, one of my favourites.
• 2:19:03
  I I have never got round to reading it.
• 2:19:05
  And you know, if I had, I dare say it would have been somewhere
• 2:19:07
  very, very high indeed on this list, considering how much I
• 2:19:11
  love the the televised version, which I know is very different.
• 2:19:14
  But yeah. I.
• 2:19:16
  Can I can believe that? After reaching that meteoric
• 2:19:19
  high, it almost feels a bit sad to go to the the all time
• 2:19:25
  biggest Doctor Who book, Clanger, but here we are.
• 2:19:30
  So I don't know if we're going to agree or disagree on this
• 2:19:32
  because I know that you quite like one book by this author
• 2:19:36
  that left me really cold. And I think you may have
• 2:19:39
  mentioned it maybe 10 or 15 minutes ago, in fact.
• 2:19:43
  But kind of like Dave Stone, Paul Leonard is not my favorite.
• 2:19:49
  I thought it would come up today.
• 2:19:50
  You. Know.
• 2:19:54
  And you and I have spoken before about it's Dreamstone Moon,
• 2:19:58
  isn't it? It's not.
• 2:19:59
  That's not the one that I've got as my least favorite, though You
• 2:20:02
  could very well be Paul Leonard's just sort of ideas
• 2:20:07
  around storytelling and Doctor Who.
• 2:20:11
  And it just sort of leaves me cold.
• 2:20:14
  It's not for me. And that's OK.
• 2:20:15
  I know that, you know, he's a perfectly adept Droid, good
• 2:20:18
  writer. It's just not for me.
• 2:20:19
  And that's OK. But the speed of flight?
• 2:20:23
  Is one book that I just cannot get my head around.
• 2:20:26
  This is the third Doctor, Joe Grant and Mike eggs.
• 2:20:31
  It is utterly bizarre in a way that makes little sense in terms
• 2:20:37
  of sci-fi as an allegory or sci-fi as some kind of comment
• 2:20:41
  on the world or having some kind of, you know, analogous quality
• 2:20:46
  or quantity to to the real world.
• 2:20:49
  And in that regard, sort of reminds me of, you know, at the
• 2:20:52
  beginning, talking of Christmas Invasion earlier of Christmas
• 2:20:57
  Invasion where Rose and Mickey go shopping just ahead of
• 2:21:00
  Christmas. And Mickey's taking the piss out
• 2:21:04
  of Rose because of, you know, all of these great adventures.
• 2:21:06
  And he starts talking about Doctor Who, you know, you know,
• 2:21:11
  the Doctor taking her to a in a big yellow garden full of
• 2:21:14
  balloons. And that's kind of what this
• 2:21:17
  story is. It's utterly bizarre as a, as a
• 2:21:19
  sort of setting in a location and as a pretense and sort of
• 2:21:23
  this strange evolutionary sort of story of, of what happens on
• 2:21:28
  this planet. But it's so out there that I
• 2:21:32
  just kind of feel like it loses touch with maybe what sci-fi
• 2:21:35
  should do its best, which is to have some kind of comment about
• 2:21:38
  the real world. And so this is kind of like
• 2:21:40
  Doctor Who in the big yellow garden of the entire worldiness
• 2:21:43
  years for me, that it's so definitely imaginative, but in a
• 2:21:48
  way that I can't, there's no hope there for me there.
• 2:21:51
  There isn't a any kind of aspect of reality or, or the mundane or
• 2:22:02
  whatever you want to call it that allows me to in any way
• 2:22:05
  care for the setting or the characters of the world or even
• 2:22:10
  you know, the Doctor and Joe and Mike Yates in this.
• 2:22:15
  So the back of the book, this is the TARDIS, lands on Numa, a
• 2:22:18
  world in the middle of an industrial revolution.
• 2:22:20
  But the Third Doctor, Joe and Mark Yates quickly discovered
• 2:22:22
  there is no limit to the upheaval.
• 2:22:23
  The sky is alive and it war with the ground.
• 2:22:25
  The continents are on the move competing for replacement of the
• 2:22:28
  sun and somewhere there is a Starship.
• 2:22:30
  Mike finds himself committed to a fight where his only option is
• 2:22:32
  to kill or be killed. Joe is caught in a worker's
• 2:22:34
  revolt and the Doctor must find out what is really happening to
• 2:22:37
  Numa before the struggle for survival kills the world and
• 2:22:39
  everyone in it. Does that ring a bell?
• 2:22:42
  No, not at all. I don't think I've read it, but
• 2:22:44
  it does sound like it's sort of about 15 classic Doctor Who
• 2:22:48
  stories bolted together. Yeah.
• 2:22:50
  And maybe sort of in that regard, likes either major or
• 2:22:54
  James conjunction kind of commits that sin of
• 2:22:57
  reinterpreting or representing something without really going
• 2:23:01
  into depth or, you know, bringing it into, into a, into,
• 2:23:05
  into some kind of meaning or relief against the, the real
• 2:23:08
  world. I think that's my great sort of
• 2:23:10
  gripe with with Paul Lennon's books that I've struggled with,
• 2:23:13
  with pretty much all of his books, actually.
• 2:23:16
  There's, there's just a strangeness to it that doesn't
• 2:23:19
  work for me. But this is sort of dialed up to
• 2:23:20
  11 in a way that I can't possibly care for the characters
• 2:23:25
  or the, or the conflict or any of the nuance.
• 2:23:30
  I guess that may. I'm sure he's there but I just I
• 2:23:33
  which I I struggle to pick up on.
• 2:23:35
  The the thing I like about Paul Leonard is he's willing to try
• 2:23:43
  new things. Now, whether he's successful or
• 2:23:46
  not, that's entirely down to the person reading.
• 2:23:48
  But like, I really hate genocide because it just does miserable
• 2:23:52
  things with Joe. It's it's the ultimate example
• 2:23:55
  of that. Just make the classic
• 2:23:57
  companions. Absolutely.
• 2:23:58
  Miserable. You know I've.
• 2:24:00
  Just read Downtime and poor Victoria and Walford.
• 2:24:02
  They were obsessed with doing this and.
• 2:24:04
  They really were from. Things like this.
• 2:24:06
  But then like revolution man came along and I like that he
• 2:24:12
  dared to have the dog to pick up that gun at the end and shoot
• 2:24:14
  somebody. I know a lot of people didn't,
• 2:24:17
  but I like that he dared to do it.
• 2:24:19
  Then he wrote The Turing Test and that's, that's a superb book
• 2:24:24
  that he writes from the point of view of Turing and Hella and,
• 2:24:28
  and, and it is, it's a really, really strong piece of work.
• 2:24:33
  Then he does The last Resort and it's at that point where all the
• 2:24:38
  multiverses are shattered and he dares to have a book where from
• 2:24:42
  1 scene to the next, you're in a different universe but with the
• 2:24:46
  same characters. And you have to try and keep up
• 2:24:49
  with what version of the characters you're seeing from 1
• 2:24:53
  scene to the next. And it is confusing and full of
• 2:24:56
  mass murder. He's totally in love with Jim
• 2:24:58
  Mortimer Star by this point. It's like I said, whether it
• 2:25:03
  whether it works or not, that's subjective.
• 2:25:06
  But I do like the fact that he tries.
• 2:25:09
  No, I understand that of those books he just recounted, Turing
• 2:25:11
  Test, one that I haven't read is probably the one that most
• 2:25:14
  appeals from what you've just said.
• 2:25:16
  But yeah, that's sort of. The sort of.
• 2:25:21
  The abjectness, I guess of, you know, the mass murder and the
• 2:25:24
  incoherence and the wilful kind of objects to sort of make much
• 2:25:28
  sense really puts me off. I'm sorry.
• 2:25:31
  And I can, I can get that. You know, experimentation is a
• 2:25:34
  really important aspect of Doctor Who, but I think
• 2:25:36
  experimentation sort of needs to have, well, one, an element of
• 2:25:41
  success to it, but an element of design almost.
• 2:25:43
  What is it that you're trying to prove or disprove?
• 2:25:45
  There's a hypothesis and I didn't.
• 2:25:47
  I just don't see particularly in speed of flight.
• 2:25:49
  Where is this going? What are we trying to say here?
• 2:25:51
  Where is the where is the commentary?
• 2:25:55
  Again, Doctor Who in the big yellow garden is just how it
• 2:25:57
  comes across to me. There's one thing that has
• 2:26:01
  struck me. Well, there's many things that
• 2:26:03
  struck me about your list, but one thing, one thing that's
• 2:26:06
  really stood out to me is, and you said it at the start, but
• 2:26:10
  then you proved it with loads of examples that The Missing
• 2:26:13
  Adventures truly is there's absolute gold in there and also
• 2:26:19
  the US and the deer as well. I.
• 2:26:21
  Think. So.
• 2:26:24
  Which does actually lead me on to our sort of our last little
• 2:26:28
  section, and that is to ask you to rank the ranges.
• 2:26:33
  And I'm desperate to know where the missing adventures falls.
• 2:26:36
  In this. List OK so.
• 2:26:39
  To be clear, the targets, the new adventures, the missing
• 2:26:42
  adventures, the ape Dr. adventures and the past Doctor
• 2:26:45
  adventures. OK, so I'm excluding the new
• 2:26:50
  series adventures from this because obviously it wasn't just
• 2:26:53
  something that I could speak to, but also the remit for me was
• 2:26:56
  very much the wilderness years and new series adventures sort
• 2:26:59
  of fall outside that. So, you know, if we, if we do go
• 2:27:03
  on to read some books, you know, do some episodes, I might
• 2:27:06
  suggest one newer series adventure.
• 2:27:08
  Oh OK to read together. Oh, that sounds.
• 2:27:11
  Interesting. Maybe the park in one?
• 2:27:13
  Is that the eyeless? That's the only NSA I've read.
• 2:27:19
  Fine, I'll be the Nicholas Briggs one then instead.
• 2:27:23
  Well, I'm actually interested about the sick building, about
• 2:27:26
  the Paul Mars one that's on the To Do List.
• 2:27:28
  But okay, so if we were to rank those five, I think the one that
• 2:27:32
  I have least exposure and least fondness to as a result is the
• 2:27:36
  past Doctor adventures. I know that the Infinity Doctors
• 2:27:41
  technically sits in that range, but to me always sort of kind of
• 2:27:44
  set as nature to the 8th Doctor adventure.
• 2:27:46
  So it's immune from from my general sort of dissolution, I
• 2:27:50
  guess, and non, non, what's the word engagement and involvement
• 2:27:57
  with the PDAs, which I think maybe had proved at that point
• 2:28:00
  that there was very little left in the exercise of going back
• 2:28:08
  and trying to tell something new from something old.
• 2:28:11
  And that was always something that even the virgin missing
• 2:28:14
  adventures struggled with. But I, I just haven't read
• 2:28:19
  enough, I guess. But also the ones that I have
• 2:28:21
  read of the PDAs just show that there isn't anything like the
• 2:28:25
  crazy highs of like, for instance, Sands of Time, but
• 2:28:31
  even things like Scales of Injustice, which are kind of
• 2:28:33
  like really interesting detours from, from that particular
• 2:28:38
  period or, or, or genre or style.
• 2:28:42
  And I just didn't find that with the PDA.
• 2:28:43
  So that's, it's unfortunate. Yet the in the fifth spot and
• 2:28:46
  last spot #4 and this might surprise you given some of the
• 2:28:51
  chat that we've had, you know, backwards and forwards via text
• 2:28:54
  in the last couple of weeks. It's actually the Virgin You
• 2:28:57
  adventures. I think that kind of actually
• 2:29:00
  what you said is right. There's there's an unholy mess,
• 2:29:03
  particularly in the first half, if not a little bit longer, as
• 2:29:06
  you say, where they're trying to find out what are we, what are
• 2:29:09
  we doing here? Where is this going?
• 2:29:11
  It kind of feels like an interminable series of, you
• 2:29:13
  know, even Doctor bastard and horrible space bitch ace, you
• 2:29:18
  know, sniping and griping at one another and being terrible in
• 2:29:21
  cyber, you know, degrade cyberpunks sci-fi novels for a
• 2:29:26
  very sort of niche audience, which should have sort of goes
• 2:29:29
  round and round in circles. And we we don't ever really try,
• 2:29:33
  you know, escape from until I think you're quite right until
• 2:29:35
  later on in the series. But you know that there are some
• 2:29:40
  great highs in there. And you know, the greatest thing
• 2:29:42
  to come out of the virgin new adventure, So I think is Benny
• 2:29:44
  Summerfield, who is a joy of a companion and again points to
• 2:29:49
  what Wilderness year's written Doctor Who should have been,
• 2:29:53
  which is, you know, sarcastic and funny and light and charming
• 2:29:57
  and beautiful and all of those things that Bernice is.
• 2:30:03
  But we don't always get that month to month, I think.
• 2:30:05
  So she's. Not a culture in her she's so.
• 2:30:08
  For a start. Yeah, exactly.
• 2:30:11
  So as a result, Virgin New Adventure sits in in number.
• 2:30:14
  Four. That does surprise me, but OK,
• 2:30:17
  what's next? Well.
• 2:30:19
  This was a real toss up and even now, as I say this before I say
• 2:30:23
  this, I wonder whether I need to reverse these.
• 2:30:25
  But I'm going to go with the 9 hours of consideration time that
• 2:30:28
  I had on that flight from Singapore to Sydney and the
• 2:30:31
  original rankings that I've got here.
• 2:30:33
  Number three are the EDAS and I've put that I think third
• 2:30:36
  solely because I wasn't engaged enough to sort of carry on after
• 2:30:39
  the ancestor sell and that might be my fault and I understand
• 2:30:44
  that for you. The brains definitely got better
• 2:30:46
  afterwards and there's some highlights there and I've read
• 2:30:49
  some of them. You know, I'd saved for a long
• 2:30:51
  time Mad Dogs and Englishmen only because I didn't want for
• 2:30:55
  there to be no 8th Doctor Paul Miles books left for me to read.
• 2:30:58
  That was a joy. The adventurous of Henrietta St.
• 2:31:01
  was, I wouldn't say it was a chore, but I'm really glad I
• 2:31:06
  stuck with it because it actually is a great perfectly
• 2:31:10
  written novel. It's still not as good as Alien
• 2:31:12
  Bodies, however. And then there's others that
• 2:31:14
  I've really enjoyed later on in the range, like is it trading
• 2:31:18
  futures, the Lance Park and James Bond pastiche?
• 2:31:20
  Yeah, as a, as a sort of not quite casual, perhaps a bit more
• 2:31:25
  serious than that James Bond fan.
• 2:31:26
  I really enjoyed that. And I'm sure there will be
• 2:31:29
  others that I, you know, come across in terms of the, the
• 2:31:32
  Lloyd Rose ones. Highly recommended to me.
• 2:31:35
  Have you read over those two? Not as yet.
• 2:31:37
  It's on the list, I'm afraid. There's a lot that lot to go on
• 2:31:40
  that list. And of course, anachrophobia is,
• 2:31:42
  am I getting that right? Anachrophobia.
• 2:31:44
  Yeah, Johnny Morris. By Johnny Morris Yeah, So I know
• 2:31:48
  that there's highlights there in the latter part of the series.
• 2:31:51
  Brilliant. Douglas Adams book in the
• 2:31:53
  Tomorrow Windows right near the end of the evening Games.
• 2:31:57
  OK, a whirlwind tour of the universe.
• 2:32:00
  And maybe we'll have to cover that because that is it's just
• 2:32:04
  amazingly creative, that book. OK, well that might be one that
• 2:32:09
  I read next then because that sounds absolutely great.
• 2:32:12
  So yeah, I mean, it's sits in 3rd because I guess there wasn't
• 2:32:17
  enough support for me to sort of stick with it and even get in
• 2:32:19
  going back. I'm having to pick the eyes out.
• 2:32:21
  There's not a great run that I would say month to month that
• 2:32:25
  sort of stand out. It's very much a case of OK,
• 2:32:27
  there's this one and then perhaps 6 releases later.
• 2:32:30
  There's that one, you know, adventure adventure rest is
• 2:32:33
  followed up by mad dogs. So of course, those who are
• 2:32:36
  great. But you know, that's that's just
• 2:32:38
  the way that I think they sort of realized they needed to
• 2:32:40
  release Miles books, you know, by followed up by Paul Miles
• 2:32:44
  that. Happens twice.
• 2:32:45
  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a great way to do it.
• 2:32:49
  But other than that, I don't think there's a sort of
• 2:32:51
  sustained period of excellence throughout.
• 2:32:54
  And you know what, that's true of all the ranges, but I kind
• 2:32:57
  of, you know, jumped ship halfway through #2 therefore
• 2:33:01
  must be Virgin Missing Adventures.
• 2:33:02
  And I, I, I ranked that as #2 more so because, you know, that
• 2:33:07
  was kind of me and my prime fandom of adolescence, you know,
• 2:33:12
  reading the Hartnell novelizations, target
• 2:33:15
  novelizations, while at the same time buying month on month
• 2:33:18
  through my pocket money. The, the, the Virgin Missing
• 2:33:21
  Adventures and sometimes being horribly bored and disappointed
• 2:33:24
  and other times being absolutely thrilled and in a way that maybe
• 2:33:27
  I haven't been by other stories and other ranges, but that's
• 2:33:31
  because, hey, I was 14 at the time and a massive nerd.
• 2:33:36
  And so when things like, you know, we've mentioned Sands of
• 2:33:42
  Time and Empire Glass come out or English way of death or Man
• 2:33:45
  of War, what else is on the cold fusion is really, really
• 2:33:50
  fantastic. That probably should have been
• 2:33:51
  on that list. Shout out again to Scales of
• 2:33:55
  Injustice, which I just thought did great things with that Third
• 2:33:58
  Doctor era and his kind of cousin who killed Kennedy, which
• 2:34:02
  I found just enjoyable from a fan wank perspective.
• 2:34:05
  That era, that time, that range, I guess sort of sits at #2 but
• 2:34:09
  if we're talking about mountain ranges, these would be sort of
• 2:34:12
  coastal plains in comparison to the Himalayas that are the
• 2:34:15
  target, which sit so far above all of these.
• 2:34:19
  The target books for everything that they represent, but also
• 2:34:22
  the purity of the storytelling and the, again, just that sort
• 2:34:27
  of general intergenerational way that they got kids to bloody
• 2:34:34
  read. I mean, I wasn't, I've read
• 2:34:36
  tinting books before Doctor Who Target books, right?
• 2:34:38
  That's as far as it got. And then when I was 8-9 years
• 2:34:41
  old, I picked up Planet of the Dialects and Death to the
• 2:34:44
  Dialects, and that was it. Like I was a confirmed lifelong
• 2:34:46
  reader after that. So for those reasons, and
• 2:34:51
  obviously because of those stories and what they mean to
• 2:34:53
  all of us in terms of classic Who, that is by far and away the
• 2:34:57
  best Doctor Who book range of all time.
• 2:35:00
  What shocked me during the ranking of the ranges is how few
• 2:35:05
  people I've spoken to so far have rated the targets, so
• 2:35:09
  they've they've come second to last or last on every single
• 2:35:13
  list so far. And it got me to thinking it's
• 2:35:16
  entirely where you came in. And those people I spoke to,
• 2:35:20
  they came in either with new adventures or a Doctor
• 2:35:23
  adventures and they went straight to the top.
• 2:35:25
  You know, they, they, they were there into Doctor Who fiction.
• 2:35:28
  And for you, obviously, it's the targets in a couple of weeks I'm
• 2:35:31
  talking to sigh heart. And I'm almost willing to bet
• 2:35:34
  the targets. Will be on the top of his.
• 2:35:35
  List as well, so it does. Seem to be.
• 2:35:37
  It does seem to be sort of the foot in the door range is what
• 2:35:41
  comes, and of course it would, because that's got the nostalgia
• 2:35:45
  factor right. Spot on.
• 2:35:47
  But I also think it's worth noting the the breadth, the
• 2:35:53
  diversity in the target range because people think they are
• 2:35:56
  just, you know, script page. Go and read Donald Cotton's The
• 2:36:02
  Myth Makers. Go and read Ian Briggs's The
• 2:36:04
  Curse of Fenrick. Go and read Chris Rage, Bid me's
• 2:36:07
  Castro Valva, You know, go and read The Gunfighters edge of
• 2:36:12
  destruction. Like you said, you know, some of
• 2:36:14
  these are just complete reinterpretations of what we saw
• 2:36:18
  on TV. So true.
• 2:36:21
  And I can't believe I threw them all away in a bin bag.
• 2:36:29
  Can you believe that something's got to go?
• 2:36:31
  He said when we moved house. He's got to go.
• 2:36:36
  No, I've got to go. Put me in the bin.
• 2:36:43
  Oh Stephen, what a glorious, glorious list that was.
• 2:36:46
  And I just knew you were going to have spectacular reasons for
• 2:36:49
  each one. By by far been the longest top
• 2:36:53
  and bottom 10. Yes.
• 2:36:54
  I do apologize, definitely. Well, no, I, I thank you for
• 2:36:58
  indulging me. I, I know that, you know, this
• 2:37:01
  has been quite a, a long episode and I'm thankful to every
• 2:37:05
  listener who sort of made it to the end, You know, kudos to you.
• 2:37:08
  You deserve some sort of prize, I'm sure.
• 2:37:11
  But I kind of, I mean, this is like I say, Doctor Who primarily
• 2:37:15
  is a written text for me. And I've had that sustained
• 2:37:18
  engagement with Doctor Who in the written form for decades
• 2:37:22
  now. And each of these ranges, you
• 2:37:25
  know, to some degree greater than others have such an
• 2:37:28
  important part to play in my, in my fandom.
• 2:37:30
  It's been so integral, I guess to to my experience and you know
• 2:37:35
  initially in imbibing as well as interpretation of Doctor Who.
• 2:37:40
  What surprised me is not only how many people are really
• 2:37:47
  excited to have the chance to reread these and talk about
• 2:37:50
  these on the podcast, but also I did when I started this, I
• 2:37:54
  thought, is anyone going to listen to these like these books
• 2:37:57
  from 20 years ago? And what surprised me is this is
• 2:38:01
  now after my strictly come hamsters.
• 2:38:03
  This is like my most listened to episodes.
• 2:38:05
  It's the book club ones. So there's clearly still a lot
• 2:38:08
  of passion and a lot of interest for it.
• 2:38:10
  So please don't apologize people wishing you could go on for
• 2:38:14
  another couple of hours. But you and I are going to
• 2:38:18
  continue to talk about books, aren't we?
• 2:38:20
  And we're I. Think we should?
• 2:38:22
  What are we going to read? Well, I'd like to.
• 2:38:25
  Sort of put out a bit of an invitation across the ether to
• 2:38:30
  perhaps Jack Koya and maybe even Si Hart, with whom I've talked
• 2:38:34
  about this particular book. It's The Empire of Glass by Andy
• 2:38:38
  Lane. And as I said, I've never read
• 2:38:41
  that one either. And I'll get in touch with that
• 2:38:44
  pair and see if they're both willing to read this book and
• 2:38:47
  and talk about it. I'm sure they are.
• 2:38:49
  Assemble them. Oh.
• 2:38:50
  Boy, I can feel another book club group assembling my very
• 2:38:54
  eyes. Steven, thank you for putting so
• 2:38:59
  much time and effort into assembling the list.
• 2:39:01
  And yeah, nice. Thank you very much for your
• 2:39:03
  time. It has been an absolute
• 2:39:04
  pleasure. No, you've indulged me yet
• 2:39:06
  again, Joe Ford. I cannot tell you how much I
• 2:39:09
  appreciate everything you do for me, but also all hamster fan
• 2:39:13
  listeners, it's just a joy. Thank you again.