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Hamster Book Club - The Gunfighters by Donald Cotton (featuring Michael Mills & James Lark) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  My name is Buntline. Ned Buntline.
• 0:05
  I made a certain amount of coin in my time biographies in the
• 0:09
  same notorious characters for the edification of the reading
• 0:12
  fraternity. Right now.
• 0:15
  I was on the track of one of the last colorful survivors of a
• 0:18
  vanishing era. This is truth must at all times
• 0:21
  be served. As another saying is.
• 0:24
  I eventually took advantage of a brief pause and all this
• 0:27
  justifiable pesticide and wrapped smartly on the
• 0:30
  splintered panels. Come in shooting man, if you're
• 0:34
  a comin golfed a raucous but well modulated voice from
• 0:38
  within. I ain't armed replied.
• 0:41
  So if you're a can oblige, then I stepped into the now tranquil
• 0:46
  room to find myself looking down the open for business end of a
• 0:49
  large caliber Colt. Brenda Wyatts.
• 0:53
  I announced, hastily called to pay my last respects.
• 0:58
  Hurry now. Well, in that case you'll have a
• 1:02
  drink with me. Acknowledged Doc Holiday,
• 1:05
  gracefully sliding the shooter blackly into a bunch of funeral
• 1:08
  real lilies of Bat Masterson. It's in them.
• 1:12
  In view of my recent association with Wyatt Earp, you may think
• 1:15
  it's strange that Doc and I had not previously locked horns.
• 1:18
  Doc had never even heard of me, so he was at a loss to account
• 1:22
  for my well meant visitation and after a glass or two, said so.
• 1:27
  Well, I told him, notebook at the ready.
• 1:30
  It's about the OK Corral. What about it?
• 1:34
  Asked Doc, reaching for his six gun once more.
• 1:37
  You ain't no friend of the Clanton's by any chance?
• 1:41
  I quickly denied any such ill advised relationship.
• 1:45
  No, it's Joseph. There's one or two things about
• 1:48
  that little frack of yours and Wyatt's There's always puzzled
• 1:51
  me some. I mean why for instance, does
• 1:54
  everyone say you used a shotgun you never had before and I
• 1:58
  didn't then? Said Holiday, grinning like a
• 2:01
  friendly hyena into the neck of his bottle.
• 2:04
  Never utilize that class of instrument.
• 2:06
  No how? No Sir.
• 2:08
  Why use a bone saw when you can use a chisel as I used to say
• 2:11
  when I was a dentist? No, that particular rumor is a
• 2:15
  dad blasted lie. Then why does everyone say I
• 2:19
  mean a 12/4 ain't quite according to the code of combat,
• 2:23
  is it? Calling me a liar?
• 2:26
  No, not for a moment, I assured him.
• 2:28
  But in that case, how'd the story get about Sway?
• 2:32
  Stories have used Holiday. Ain't it always the same?
• 2:37
  Do a friend a favor and in no time you're known as a hooch
• 2:40
  craze killer with no kind of social conscience.
• 2:44
  That's one of the things Wyatt wouldn't talk about, I told him.
• 2:47
  Odd that you'd think he'd have been glad to put the record
• 2:50
  straight, seeing as how he's such a friend of yours.
• 2:54
  Well, there's some things you just can't really talk about.
• 2:57
  Not if you don't truly understand them.
• 3:00
  Never talked about it myself, come to that.
• 3:02
  But now, well, I guess it makes no, never mind.
• 3:05
  Not this late in the game. You see, Like I've been several.
• 3:09
  Enough to tell you, though I never carried such a weapon
• 3:12
  myself. There was another doctor at the
• 3:14
  OK Corral. And he did, Oh my God, didn't he
• 3:18
  just. And that, without any particular
• 3:20
  conception of accuracy is our call.
• 3:22
  Blasted the thing off every which way like it was Gatling
• 3:26
  gun mounted on a roulette wheel. And I tell you, Mr. Buntline,
• 3:29
  that I, the great dark holiday, have never been so scared
• 3:33
  gutless in all my born days. And take it, Mr. Buntline, that
• 3:37
  you're a tender age. You may not have heard of time
• 3:39
  travel. Well, I could say it ain't that
• 3:42
  easy to understand. But the TARDIS, if you'll kind
• 3:45
  of believe me, was and is for all I know, a kind of four
• 3:49
  wheeled buggy designed for riding every sort of direction
• 3:51
  through eternity. And this other Doctor feller I
• 3:54
  was telling you about, he drives it back and forth through the
• 3:57
  star spangled centuries like it was a rodeo bull got loose in
• 4:00
  Jackson's hardware store. Never seems to know quite where
• 4:04
  he'll end up next. Back in 1881, by golly, it was
• 4:07
  Tombstone, Arizona where the poor old Buzzard got himself
• 4:11
  taken from me. I went on listening to his crazy
• 4:15
  sound of the story for the rest of that afternoon while the
• 4:19
  whiskey sang lower in the bottle until, you know, I finally
• 4:23
  believed him. Yes, Sir, I did.
• 4:25
  And I make so bold as to hope that you will too, because it
• 4:29
  explains a deal of stuff that had just never seemed to add up.
• 4:32
  And the other accounts I'd heard from so-called eyewitnesses,
• 4:36
  they'd probably never been nearer to the OK Corral than the
• 4:38
  railhead at Abilene. And so, friends, here follows a
• 4:43
  true and full account of the gunfight at the OK Corral.
• 5:24
  The good evening ladies and gentlemen.
• 5:26
  I dare say you're expecting to hear a mad from Mr. Joseph
• 5:30
  Ladykiller Ford right about now, The man known to every podcast
• 5:35
  between here and the Rio Grande. Well, Mr. Ford is going to be my
• 5:40
  guest this evening courtesy of this Burnt Lion special.
• 5:44
  I have trained on him. And also with us is Mr. James
• 5:47
  Regret Lark, who'll be keeping U.S. company just as long as he
• 5:51
  can keep those dainty fingers on those pearly wackies.
• 5:55
  And As for me, my name is Michael, John Paul and George
• 5:58
  Mills, the man of 1000 voices, none of them particularly from
• 6:03
  anywhere. Now Mr. Ford, if you please, why
• 6:06
  not tell the lady and gentleman listening?
• 6:08
  Wow, we are gathered here this evening.
• 6:11
  Can you please do that accent for the entire episode please?
• 6:16
  Not for the sake of Anglo American relations.
• 6:19
  We are here today. We are gathered to talk about
• 6:22
  Donald Cotton's masterpiece, voted very highly in James
• 6:28
  Lark's Top 10 Doctor Who books of all time, I believe.
• 6:33
  Before we do that, may I sing you a little song?
• 6:36
  I've been sent a Ballad of the Last Chance Hamster from
• 6:41
  somebody here called Andrew Store alias Este Oh Double RI.
• 6:46
  Have no idea what any of that means but a 3A2A1.
• 6:52
  So Polish your glasses and dust off the book, the reviews right
• 6:57
  behind you and you won't give up.
• 7:00
  Look, so come you vloggers and howl at the moon till there's
• 7:05
  penknives on the carpet from the Hamster Saloon.
• 7:10
  It. Sort of works.
• 7:14
  Pen knives on the carpet. Into silence on the carpet.
• 7:18
  Now look here, right? He took his time to write that
• 7:20
  for us. OK, Let's be appreciative.
• 7:25
  Hello, James. Sorry, I've not you haven't
• 7:27
  actually spoken yet. No.
• 7:28
  Well, I feel like you both came with these beautifully prepared
• 7:33
  openings and I've come with nothing.
• 7:35
  Nothing at all. Why would you come at me with
• 7:38
  beautifully prepared openings? Well, that won't be the last
• 7:46
  filth we hear in this body. No, I was absolutely a cock with
• 7:50
  the tawdry filth in this book. Before we start, can I ask you
• 7:56
  fine gentlemen please before we go into the book itself, I've
• 8:01
  got 2 questions for you. My number one question is do you
• 8:05
  like a Western? And my number two question for
• 8:09
  you is, do you like the televised Doctor Who, the
• 8:13
  gunfighters, James? Oh, I the answer to #1 is I
• 8:18
  don't really know. I I wasn't brought up watching
• 8:23
  westerns and I feel shamefully ignorant to some of the standard
• 8:27
  texts cinematically. I mean, in terms of actual
• 8:31
  texts. I did a little bit of research
• 8:33
  for this podcast, but I've never read a a pulpy western novel,
• 8:41
  Not that I can remember anyway, so.
• 8:42
  You have now. Completely, I'm not sure I have
• 8:45
  actually, and one of the things that we'll talk about is
• 8:47
  actually what is this pastiching.
• 8:49
  I'm not sure it is the literary version in terms of cinema.
• 8:52
  I know I've not seen the good, the Bad and the ugly or any of
• 8:57
  the obvious ones that like that. Shane the searches.
• 9:02
  No, none of them. I've seen bits of High Noon
• 9:04
  because I, I teach lessons on film music and it's important
• 9:09
  stuff, you know, those early Western movies.
• 9:13
  But I, I can't say I ever sat down and watched a whole one.
• 9:17
  Probably the closest I've got to is to a Western is Once Upon a
• 9:21
  Time in the West, and that is clearly an art house movie, just
• 9:26
  kind of wearing the clothing all western or Back to the Future
• 9:29
  three That's the future 3 is probably the most authentic
• 9:33
  western I've seen, so I got. One more suggestion for you, you
• 9:37
  know, and please bear in mind that this our friendship rests
• 9:40
  on whether you say yes or no as to see in this film all right,
• 9:44
  because one of my favourites, Calamity Jane, I've.
• 9:49
  Ever seen? I'll rectify.
• 9:54
  That does. Does Annie get your gun count?
• 9:56
  Kind of. It's the inferior version,
• 9:58
  though. Doris Day, come on.
• 10:01
  As to the gunfighters, I think it's bloody marvelous and.
• 10:05
  Why's that? I think it's a really well made
• 10:09
  bit of Doctor Who. I think the humor is perhaps an
• 10:15
  acquired taste. I can totally understand why a
• 10:18
  fandom wanting to take itself seriously in the late 70s, early
• 10:22
  80s didn't get it and thought it was a kind of Nadia.
• 10:26
  And what it's not clearly is a historical There's no there's no
• 10:32
  pretense of being educational. But I love The Doctor has given
• 10:39
  us a story narrated by a ballad and a story that treads this
• 10:46
  weird, really weird tightrope between comedy and jeopardy and
• 10:52
  ultimately a really well filmed gunfight.
• 10:55
  I mean, that's the other thing that people don't really credit
• 10:58
  it for, is that the gunfight that it builds up to is really,
• 11:02
  really good. I think it's possibly the best
• 11:05
  piece of action shooting in Doctor Who up up to that point.
• 11:08
  It is super and actually the direction for outreach
• 11:11
  direction. Really well correct, Looks
• 11:13
  gorgeous. Not all of the performances
• 11:16
  match the material. Oh.
• 11:17
  No the. Access, but the regulars do.
• 11:20
  You've got some really strong leads in there.
• 11:23
  It's it's the best outing for Dodo without question.
• 11:27
  By a mile. And Peter Purves has got proper
• 11:31
  comedy chops and William Hartnell, absolutely.
• 11:33
  It's it's a last outing for his his really nuanced, carefully
• 11:40
  calculated comedy. He's really funny in it.
• 11:43
  So there's so much for enjoying the Gunfighters.
• 11:45
  I didn't think they could possibly top Hartnell's comic
• 11:48
  timing when he puts his hand on that body in the Gunfighters and
• 11:53
  realizes it's a dead body. But then in the book they play
• 11:56
  out the same scene with dialogue and it's even funnier in the
• 11:59
  hook. Michael Westerns and the
• 12:02
  Gunfires. But yes, I'm, I'm a bit I'm a
• 12:05
  big fan of of Westerns. I they, they were very much
• 12:08
  around when I was when I was young left possibly including.
• 12:11
  Straight you. Know I like guns and horses and
• 12:17
  women in big dresses yeah. What's?
• 12:21
  This new Western, was it you that told me about it?
• 12:22
  This new Western that came out fairly recently?
• 12:25
  Very, very slick modern day TV show Massively.
• 12:29
  I swear. You talked about it with me.
• 12:32
  No. Am I making that up?
• 12:34
  They're still making westerns all the time.
• 12:36
  Westworld or. Maybe that's what I'm thinking
• 12:38
  of. Are we allowed Westworld?
• 12:40
  The film? The original film.
• 12:43
  You could have, well, you're like.
• 12:44
  I mean, we'll, we isn't it? I mean, we'll definitely get on
• 12:47
  to this. But the thing about Westerns is
• 12:49
  that it's a genre that is, that is constantly in conversation
• 12:55
  with its past selves and iterating on itself to the point
• 12:57
  where the relationship between a modern Western and any
• 13:02
  historical accuracy is is layers deep in terms of referring back
• 13:06
  to itself in all different forms.
• 13:07
  It can take, you know, through as, as James said, art house
• 13:11
  almost spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 70s through the sort
• 13:15
  of comic pulp revival of the early 90s where you've got
• 13:19
  things like Back to the Future Part 2 and the Quick and the
• 13:21
  Dead and on on TV things like Briscoe County Junior and all
• 13:25
  those sorts of things through to the last 1020 years where
• 13:29
  westerns continue. But as sort of independent
• 13:33
  metaphors for America and any time they try to make an actual
• 13:37
  big one like The Lone Ranger, they tried to do for westerns
• 13:41
  with The Lone Ranger what Pirates of the Caribbean did for
• 13:43
  pirate films, which was to take a dead old fashioned genre and
• 13:45
  bring it back and it flopped. But I'm I'm.
• 13:49
  About that coming out. Well no exactly.
• 13:51
  It's probably better part of 10 years ago.
• 13:53
  Now it doesn't get repeated because the leads are Johnny
• 13:57
  Depp and Army Hammer. But on that note, no big fan.
• 14:03
  Big fan of posters all the way through all of them and the
• 14:07
  gunfighters, yes, I love as well.
• 14:09
  I I agree with James that I think there was a sort of very
• 14:14
  fandom in his adolescence years. Probably thought this is this
• 14:17
  isn't proper sci-fi. This is making our show look
• 14:20
  silly. Christopher H Bid Mead would not
• 14:22
  approve. But I, Donald Cotter was brought
• 14:26
  in because they want at a time when they wanted to try and
• 14:28
  expand what Doctor Who could do and could be in all the
• 14:31
  different formats. And you know, I think I think
• 14:33
  it's glorious. I think it's joyous.
• 14:34
  I. Think it's sad that he didn't do
• 14:37
  more, that he was just two stories now.
• 14:41
  Yeah, well, the story is that of course my brain fails me, but
• 14:45
  they've been, you know, changes with the producers and what have
• 14:47
  you. Very much didn't want to do what
• 14:48
  he wanted. And Gunfighters was kind of only
• 14:51
  made it through because it was already, you know, halfway down
• 14:54
  the track. And that was the point, Michael,
• 14:56
  where they said, you know, the kids don't like the historicals.
• 14:59
  They just looked at that and went, no, we'll stop making
• 15:00
  those. Had a few more in the can.
• 15:02
  But after that, yeah, it was it was quits for the historicals.
• 15:07
  Sometimes children are wrong. Frequently.
• 15:11
  No, but it looked but the sets as well.
• 15:13
  That's the other thing I think we should we should touch on.
• 15:15
  It's got absolutely you watch that and I don't think you doubt
• 15:19
  unless you engage your brain. They've not gone and filmed that
• 15:22
  on an actual western set or something.
• 15:24
  Wasn't it? There's a there's a famous
• 15:25
  legend that it's the the 1st western made for British TV
• 15:29
  which I'm not sure. It feels like some research
• 15:32
  would be needed but certainly pretty impressive.
• 15:34
  Or something that wasn't that common coming out of the UK.
• 15:38
  Although of course I imagine audiences at the time would be
• 15:40
  very familiar with TV westerns. Mounting a Western in a studio,
• 15:46
  it was unusual. Like entirely in a studio.
• 15:50
  Because it's one of the big things about Westerns, isn't it?
• 15:52
  It's the vistas. It's the locations.
• 15:54
  Where was it shot? Because they literally can't
• 15:57
  have shot it in Lime Grove. I think a lot of it was Ealing.
• 16:00
  Yeah, yeah. The the stuff on film, the
• 16:03
  gunfight itself is is all Ealing don't know about the I don't
• 16:07
  know about the stuff I. Think the rest is just the
• 16:09
  normal studios but just. But they moved by then.
• 16:12
  I'm I'm pretty sure they they weren't aside.
• 16:16
  Possibly bad fans. Bad fans.
• 16:19
  There are definitely people listening who know the answer to
• 16:23
  the. Toby Hey, don't say he's
• 16:25
  incandescent at the moment. Oh, because they because the
• 16:28
  lights went off at 9, didn't they?
• 16:30
  And. It was a way we can we can annoy
• 16:32
  him more as if we were Googling the also now you know on the
• 16:36
  call. Sorry, I've just sort of another
• 16:37
  western that I I've watched that I love, which is Blazing
• 16:40
  Saddles. What's that?
• 16:44
  I've never heard of it. Mel Brooks film.
• 16:47
  Oh, is it a comedy One it. Is a comedy.
• 16:49
  I mean, it's a well. It's Mel Brooks.
• 16:50
  Yeah, no, it's not a it's a brilliant film though.
• 16:54
  It's got a scene. It's got one of the scenes in
• 16:56
  cinema that will just have me howl like on the floor,
• 17:00
  paralytic with laughter. And it's joking.
• 17:06
  You're not going to. It's not going to make any sense
• 17:08
  to you at all. There's a dance sequence.
• 17:10
  It's and it's men in top hats and tails, and they're on a big
• 17:14
  stack. You'd love it.
• 17:15
  And they're on a big staircase doing this rivaled dance
• 17:18
  sequence with a song that goes stick out your touch.
• 17:21
  Do do do do and it's. Sounds great.
• 17:24
  Oddly calm and it's being erected by the campus man ever
• 17:28
  put on film And then a cowboy comes in and punches him in the
• 17:32
  stomach. It's it's loses something in the
• 17:34
  telling, but it's very, very funny.
• 17:36
  No, but that's going in my box. I'll tell you what, I'm going to
• 17:39
  watch that movie. I'll tell you another Western
• 17:42
  that any Doctor Who fan listening, if there are any,
• 17:45
  should be watching is Gunslinger's Revenge, originally
• 17:48
  Ilmia W, because that features Michelle Gomez as the deadly
• 17:54
  cowgirl sidekick of David Bowie's Gunslinger.
• 17:59
  I mean, it's not very good that. It's Lion Michelle Gomez in a
• 18:02
  western. Oh please.
• 18:06
  I've got to say, for my part, I really hate westerns.
• 18:08
  Like when was that? Oh, that's that's a good
• 18:12
  question, man. You're gonna Google it on the
• 18:14
  call, right? It's 1998.
• 18:18
  OK, so quite an old David Bowie. And quite a young Michelle
• 18:22
  Gomez, yeah. It's still enticing, right?
• 18:25
  They are the best they're they're.
• 18:27
  It's worth watching it for those two.
• 18:29
  I was force fed westerns by my grandmother every Sunday for
• 18:33
  what felt like 10 years. Yeah, she, she just always
• 18:37
  chewed, baked a cake, and we watched the Western.
• 18:39
  And so I got so bored of them when I was younger.
• 18:41
  Then I did a dreaded media studies course.
• 18:44
  And of course, the first genre that we looked at was Westerns
• 18:48
  and I was force fed 10 separate westerns across several weeks
• 18:52
  and I was forced to write essays about them.
• 18:54
  So I feel as if I know about westerns inside out, back to
• 18:56
  front and I lost any interest in there on I've never I don't
• 19:01
  watch them at all. I really don't like them.
• 19:02
  My favorite westerns are a Fistful of Datas from Star Trek
• 19:06
  the Next Generation, Gunmen of the Apocalypse from Red Dwarf,
• 19:10
  and well, Star Trek D Space 9. It's just a western in space.
• 19:15
  But the actual western films, God they are tedious.
• 19:18
  As for the gunfighters, I mean, is it the best Johnny Ringo
• 19:22
  we've ever had? I think Lawrence Payne is
• 19:24
  absolutely sublime in that role. He's super menacing.
• 19:29
  I was disagreeing with me. Oh yeah, I think he's brilliant.
• 19:32
  I was just thinking of other westerns in space, but surely
• 19:34
  Joss Whedon's series. Firefly.
• 19:36
  Yeah, I think I was so well with that one.
• 19:39
  I'd ask for Anthony Jacobs as Doc Holiday in the gunfires.
• 19:45
  It's a great turn, isn't it? And what was great about this is
• 19:48
  I could hear his voice as I was reading the book because a lot
• 19:52
  of it is from his PFA. Well, look, let's, let's get on
• 19:56
  to the book itself. Where would you find gentlemen
• 19:59
  like to start? Hang on, I'll crack open a
• 20:00
  whiskey for each of us. Here we go.
• 20:02
  Cigarette. Lovely cigarette.
• 20:04
  Sorry. You'll be a cigar, wouldn't it?
• 20:07
  Michael, where would you like to start?
• 20:09
  Well, I think it'd be appropriate to start in 1887
• 20:13
  with a dying Doc holiday being visited by cronlocker of the Old
• 20:19
  West, Ned Buntline. And just to start off here, one
• 20:23
  of the things that it's worth establishing about the gun
• 20:26
  fighters before we go any further is that with the
• 20:30
  exception of Charlie the Barman and Seth Harper, every
• 20:35
  supporting character in this story is a historical figure, at
• 20:40
  least at least, or at least they're they're based on them.
• 20:44
  Kate, you know, she's she's real.
• 20:46
  Obviously all the people who were involved in it doesn't mean
• 20:48
  they actually bear much of A resemblance to the real people.
• 20:51
  We'll get onto that. But even here, Ned Buntline.
• 20:54
  So the the framing, the framing device for this novelization is,
• 21:01
  is Doc Holiday relating these events on his deathbed to Ned
• 21:04
  Buntline. And Ned Buntline is also a real
• 21:07
  historical figure. He was a novelist who produced
• 21:13
  dime novels in the in the 1880s and did a huge amount really to
• 21:19
  do that sort of first draft of history, the romanticization of
• 21:21
  the West, and to to make legends of real people and to begin to
• 21:29
  put that idea of what the American West was into the
• 21:31
  popular imagination. As mentioned here, probably most
• 21:33
  famously, he kick started the entertainment career of Buffalo
• 21:37
  Bill Cody himself. Great story that he'd gone out
• 21:41
  West looking for. What's his name?
• 21:45
  While Bill Hickok he of the 8th Doctor's costume only while Bill
• 21:50
  Hickok told him to go away or he'd shoot him.
• 21:53
  And so he bumped into Buffalo Bill and said well I'll write a
• 21:56
  book about you instead. And all that carried on.
• 22:00
  So here we have just as in the myth Makers novelization, Donald
• 22:06
  Cotton gave us the legend of the Trojan War as told by Homer.
• 22:10
  Here we have the legend of the Old West, told by the original
• 22:14
  chronicle of it himself. I had no idea that he was a
• 22:19
  robot and how unusual for a Doctor Who story to feature a
• 22:23
  genuine historical character and not point out that that is a
• 22:27
  genuine historical character. I suppose it's because he never
• 22:30
  meets the Doctor and the Companions.
• 22:33
  No, and indeed in fact was in real life dead by this point.
• 22:37
  So. OK, I do believe there's one or
• 22:39
  two factual inaccuracies in this book.
• 22:42
  One or two. I've seen a few podcasts where
• 22:44
  they detail every single one. Nothing.
• 22:46
  Just enjoy the jokes, all right? Get a life.
• 22:49
  But it's the point. Because I was, I was going to
• 22:52
  say I was going to start a little bit earlier than Michael.
• 22:55
  I was going to go back to the 13th century BC because Don
• 23:02
  Cotton's first novelisation is of the myth makers.
• 23:06
  And I think they have a similar approach to history, which is
• 23:10
  they're not that concerned with. I mean, obviously the Trojan War
• 23:14
  is much more steeped in myth anyway.
• 23:17
  And and what's actually historical factors is far more
• 23:20
  kind of open to debate and clouded by fictionalized
• 23:25
  accounts. But to some extent, you could
• 23:27
  say that about the Wild West and this gunfight, which has
• 23:30
  featured in so many films and been treated as a pivotal event,
• 23:35
  but but not necessarily with any particular devotion to
• 23:40
  historical accuracy. And I was constantly on
• 23:42
  Wikipedia kind of looking up kind of who these people were.
• 23:44
  Because you're absolutely right, these are real people.
• 23:48
  But sometimes real people who died in real life died several
• 23:53
  months after these events. And it's just been expediently
• 23:58
  minds to create better drama or some of the people in this story
• 24:01
  were not actually there at Tombstone on that particular
• 24:04
  day. It just makes better dramatic
• 24:05
  sense to have them all together. You know, it's a massive
• 24:08
  simplification of the actual circumstances by which we
• 24:12
  happened upon this gunfight. However, like the like the myth
• 24:16
  makers, it's like Don Cotton sees this, this sequence of
• 24:23
  events and and this location and these characters as a kind of
• 24:28
  playpen that he can just kind of grab and assemble as, as he
• 24:31
  needs to to make great drama. And so both books, although they
• 24:38
  have no pretense at being factual accounts or informative
• 24:43
  accounts, they, they're steeped in a kind of authenticity.
• 24:47
  And I read both books really wondering to what extent Donald
• 24:51
  Cotton was either an enthusiast or had he, just for the sake of
• 24:56
  writing these scripts or coming back to them to novelize them?
• 25:00
  Because there's a hell of a lot more detail in the novelizations
• 25:02
  than there is in the original scripts.
• 25:03
  Did he just have a lot of time in his hands and and immerse
• 25:06
  himself in it to the point where he could just throw in
• 25:09
  references to the Bird Cage Theatre in Eddie Foy and Annie
• 25:13
  Oakley and and and all of the above?
• 25:16
  He really presents that town in a lot more detail, doesn't he?
• 25:19
  Than we ever saw on screen. It really feels like a thriving
• 25:24
  Western. Town and a populated town as
• 25:26
  well because there's lots of other locals involved.
• 25:28
  Yes, Mark I, What's it? Margo Lightly's House of Sin.
• 25:33
  Oh Lightly's House of sin. Yeah, I wouldn't want to visit
• 25:36
  myself, you know. You know, I found that quite
• 25:39
  amusing actually. I'm sort of skipping head.
• 25:40
  I will go backwards, but the Par Clanton's sort of motive,
• 25:44
  because he doesn't really get a motive in in the actual story.
• 25:48
  It's just because that's what happened in history.
• 25:50
  In the book he says that he wants to be the mayor and he
• 25:53
  wants a constant three day pass to Margo Lightly's House of Sin,
• 25:58
  which sounds like a fair motive to me.
• 26:00
  And I think there was an application to be a mayor is, is
• 26:04
  that right? Certainly one of the Clanton's
• 26:07
  tried to get appointed into a position of more officialdom
• 26:14
  because of all the run insurance with the they.
• 26:16
  But basically we're trying to basically constantly running in
• 26:21
  with the actual officials, therefore trying to kind of put
• 26:24
  themselves into some some kind of position of actual authority.
• 26:27
  I think with with this book though, like he's like you say,
• 26:31
  he's not going for factual, factual accuracy.
• 26:34
  He's trying to conjure the genre right.
• 26:36
  And so he's using the facts. They're all in his playpen.
• 26:40
  But more than the genre, he is actually trying to come to the
• 26:43
  place that, as you say, Tombstone feels like a a genuine
• 26:46
  place because it's it's absolutely populated with real
• 26:50
  things and real people and real locations and real.
• 26:53
  Order were his books written in Was it the myth makers, the
• 26:57
  Romans? The.
• 26:58
  Gunfighters. Gunfighters.
• 26:59
  Romans. Ah, Gunfighters was the second
• 27:01
  one because I've read all three in quick succession and
• 27:04
  obviously they all have in unusual framing devices or
• 27:09
  narrators and I think this is the most successful of the free.
• 27:12
  I think the the letters in the Romans is genius, but he has to
• 27:16
  find sometimes reasons that stretch credulity for people to
• 27:21
  write those letters in order for them to happen and in the myth
• 27:24
  make focus. No, no, it is the fun.
• 27:27
  It is the fun, yeah, but at some point I was going, really.
• 27:30
  Would. You be writing that down.
• 27:31
  I think that's funny. I think anyone who says how
• 27:33
  would Ian Chesterton have really written a letter to his
• 27:35
  headmaster is really missing the point of that book.
• 27:38
  But I I think the gunfighters and the Mythmakers feel more
• 27:41
  like companion pieces. Well, but in the Mythmakers,
• 27:43
  he's also got one narrator, but that one the rater.
• 27:46
  And again, this is the joke of the book.
• 27:48
  Or one of the jokes of the book is that he can somehow get in
• 27:51
  and out of the two counts throughout the entire book, and
• 27:55
  that's how he's telling both sides of the stories.
• 27:57
  But here he's finally struck upon that formula where it's an
• 28:00
  omnipresent narrator who is being told a story.
• 28:04
  And so he could absolutely be everywhere in the story,
• 28:07
  justifiably. And I think that really works
• 28:10
  well. Yeah, and it's it's a massive
• 28:12
  statement of intent in making it the man who chronicled the Old
• 28:16
  West. So you, so you have this bit
• 28:17
  where it's, it's already couched.
• 28:19
  So it's, it's Ned bundler saying, Oh, here's the stories.
• 28:21
  It was told to me by Doc Holiday, which was a lot of what
• 28:23
  he did with people like Buffalo Bill Cody.
• 28:26
  And really he would just treat these people as fictional
• 28:30
  characters. So, you know, even before you
• 28:32
  get into it, if you want to enumerate the historical
• 28:36
  inaccuracies, what have you, which, you know, I, I, I, I'm
• 28:39
  sure we will do and have great fun doing so.
• 28:40
  He's sort of saying, yeah, but I don't care because that's not
• 28:43
  what I'm doing. This is a story about Doctor Who
• 28:46
  landing in, in the myth, in the legend of the Old West.
• 28:49
  And it's, it's it's one of the things that's worth reiterating
• 28:52
  is that you know, you, you say, you know, James, you've not seen
• 28:55
  many of them. Joe, you, you try to avoid them
• 28:58
  and it's easily, they're easily avoided these days.
• 29:00
  But at the time, they would have been inescapable.
• 29:04
  There's a fact that there's a fact that I think it's like in
• 29:07
  1953, a third of all films made in Hollywood were Westerns.
• 29:11
  And that was because they were popular and they were cheap.
• 29:13
  And in the 1960s, there were so many of them.
• 29:15
  Just let me put this out. I think so just to take as a as,
• 29:18
  as an example, John Alderson, who appears as Wyatt Earp in the
• 29:22
  TV version. He had also appeared in in the
• 29:25
  1950s and the 1960s, among other things.
• 29:29
  Gunsmoke Yancey derringer black saddle lawman Border Patrol Colt
• 29:34
  45 have gun will travel bamberick, tales of Wells Fargo,
• 29:38
  Bronco, Gunsmoke again, combat the Rogues, Bonanza, Doctor Who,
• 29:43
  the gunfighters, Death Valley Days.
• 29:44
  I mean, I could go on. This was everywhere.
• 29:48
  The audience would know exactly Oh, Doctor Who has landed in
• 29:51
  this genre. So immediately all of the
• 29:53
  signifies everything would have been there.
• 29:55
  And it takes that as read as it just throws you through all of
• 29:59
  the trappings, romantic imagery. And yet here in the
• 30:01
  novelization, especially, as James has said, manages to make
• 30:07
  an entire and believable and living place out there that is
• 30:10
  constantly in conversation with the popular understanding of the
• 30:13
  Old West, which is entirely drawn from popular culture and
• 30:16
  not, you know, long books about the Lois and Clark expedition or
• 30:22
  the cattle industry in 19th century America.
• 30:26
  What was great about the book was they couldn't really do it
• 30:29
  on TV is he could make it a bit dirtier, a bit grimier, you
• 30:34
  know, the liquors flying, people's brains are splatting on
• 30:37
  people's shoes. You know, there's whore houses.
• 30:40
  Someone says bastard at one point, you know, it's a, it
• 30:44
  really feels like a Western town, you know?
• 30:46
  There's a bit where he says Charlie mopped up Seth sly me to
• 30:49
  Trisus with the panel. I like all all the gags around
• 30:54
  people dying just killed me. And the the books, the book as
• 31:00
  as with so many of these Westerns, which are, you know,
• 31:03
  they're wholesome American family adventures right about a
• 31:05
  dirty horrible time. And the book as the genres
• 31:10
  relationship with sex is really interesting because there is sex
• 31:14
  throughout this as there is sex throughout like the first time.
• 31:17
  Usual, isn't it? The first time you watch a
• 31:19
  Western, first time you watch a Western.
• 31:21
  And you say, was there really a big enough economy to in the
• 31:24
  entertainment industry to support so many women as
• 31:27
  showgirls in those days? You're oh, it was a euphemism,
• 31:30
  wasn't it? And.
• 31:31
  It's a few extra rooms upstairs. Well, just as you know, in in
• 31:35
  this in in this book, especially the character of Kate.
• 31:38
  So Kate thinks Dodo is sleeping with Doc Holiday and almost
• 31:42
  explicitly says that. No, she calls her jailbait at
• 31:45
  one point. Oh God, I've forgotten that.
• 31:50
  I was reading it this morning, I shouted out to Mark Dodo's just
• 31:53
  been called jailbait in this book.
• 31:55
  Oh, just brilliant. And Oh yeah, I indeed.
• 32:00
  And doesn't Doc say to someone at some point of Kate?
• 32:03
  You probably know her. Most people do gloomily.
• 32:08
  And there's another bit where where he goes upstairs, anxious
• 32:12
  to claim Kate's very special brand of congratulations.
• 32:15
  Oh, I wrote that. And what about this one then?
• 32:17
  Hang on, I have a point of fact. The wrong man was even now
• 32:20
  trying to talk himself out of a misunderstanding at Margo
• 32:23
  Lightly's place, where he had in cautiously inquired if this is
• 32:27
  where his young friends were waiting.
• 32:29
  Well, they certainly were, but not the kind he wanted and more
• 32:33
  unused to complaints had taken a certain amount of umbrage.
• 32:37
  I mean, the doctor stumbled into our.
• 32:38
  The whole house wonderful I. Wonder what the school librarian
• 32:43
  would have thought. I think if those librarians have
• 32:47
  read quite a few of these, Doctor, you know, arc in space,
• 32:49
  things like that, that would have been appalled of what was
• 32:51
  inside. Except that it's would.
• 32:56
  It's not explicit. Innocence, school librarian, or
• 32:59
  indeed an innocent school child have got these references that
• 33:04
  they're subtle enough, aren't they?
• 33:07
  It's all plausibly deniable, yes, and, and it's how Westerns
• 33:10
  deal, deal with these things. You know, there's always, you
• 33:12
  know the the girls stood along the landing in their in their
• 33:16
  fine silk hose. That's in the song, isn't it?
• 33:20
  Yeah, well, maybe not a bit, but the big on the landing.
• 33:23
  But you know the image, right? Because that was the, I mean, I
• 33:27
  forget the actual stats. There's a fantastic book.
• 33:29
  If anyone wants to know the actual relationships between
• 33:32
  myth and legends of all this, there's a fantastic book called
• 33:34
  The Last Gunfight. I forget the name of the author.
• 33:37
  It's a history of the, of the gunfighter, the OK Corral.
• 33:40
  And it's actual and it's it's legacy and it's legend as well.
• 33:43
  And there's all sorts of stats in there about just how
• 33:44
  overwhelmingly male, not just this genre, but this time in
• 33:48
  history was and, and, and, and the role of women inevitably
• 33:52
  within that. And it's just interesting how
• 33:54
  that all gets sublimated into this, in into these, these,
• 33:58
  these signifies and these archetypes and these, these,
• 34:00
  these tropes which appear here and which Donald Cotton is
• 34:02
  playing with. And then actually pokes you just
• 34:05
  a little bit for the attentive viewers to go, you know, you
• 34:08
  know what's actually going on here, right in the Co, in the
• 34:10
  cosy Western. I think the kind of the piesta
• 34:15
  resistance is when he has Johnny Ringo literally shot in the
• 34:17
  balls, but rather than saying that he he just says shot in in
• 34:23
  the place it would do most damage.
• 34:26
  No need to classify. That is open to interpretation.
• 34:29
  And then when he dies, it says, And thereupon he quietly died,
• 34:33
  not perhaps quite like a gentleman.
• 34:39
  This is such a funny book, isn't it?
• 34:42
  Isn't it funny? Question to to to you who have
• 34:46
  studied the Western more. Where does this prose style come
• 34:49
  from? Because it's written in a kind
• 34:51
  of very conversational, slightly coy way with with and and very
• 35:00
  idiosyncratic, lots of kind of expressions.
• 35:03
  The use of the word sure, in a way that I don't think is quite
• 35:06
  the same as Western poppy Western novels do.
• 35:12
  It's sillier than that. And I just wonder where the
• 35:14
  voice comes from. Well, I think it's I think it's
• 35:17
  interesting because you're right, from what little I've
• 35:19
  read in these pop, the poppy Westerns tend to be quite
• 35:21
  they're very plain written and they're quite, you know, they
• 35:24
  were written quickly, printed quickly and read quickly.
• 35:28
  But this style is I I couldn't name.
• 35:31
  I've read a few things like, I mean, the first person narration
• 35:33
  is much more, I would say a modern style.
• 35:37
  That thing of my story of the West.
• 35:39
  We know that it's a place that exists in the past.
• 35:42
  It's not current, which Ned Buntline would have made it at
• 35:44
  the time. And here's my memory of it
• 35:46
  actually is having mentioned the gunslingers revenge earlier, the
• 35:51
  original title that is Ilmia West my West, and it's and and
• 35:56
  and this about a boy's remembrance of what it was like
• 36:00
  to be there at the time. So that idea is very, very key
• 36:03
  to I think there's all these terms that I'm sure Joe picked
• 36:06
  up on his media studies course about for first generation,
• 36:08
  western, second generation, western third generation and
• 36:12
  postmodernism has since at least the 50 sixties around the time
• 36:16
  you got the spaghetti westerns and others.
• 36:18
  The point at which the genre in its sort of classic form of, you
• 36:22
  know, John Ford and Gunsmoke and all the rest of it had kind of
• 36:25
  reached saturation point. And people began to want to
• 36:29
  return to something closer to reality or the perceived reality
• 36:34
  of it. And you would get this
• 36:35
  postmortem take on it, this, this, this attempt to reconcile
• 36:38
  reality with the legend and the myth and that that sort of been
• 36:43
  more or less the continuous form of it in one form or another
• 36:45
  ever since Back to the Future part three turns up.
• 36:48
  I'm Clint Eastwood, you know, and starts running around like
• 36:51
  that. But that's it exactly.
• 36:53
  But that's what I think. The same joke that that they
• 36:55
  play here, that he dresses up as he thinks people in westerns
• 36:58
  dress. Which is exactly what?
• 37:01
  Yeah, it's ABS it's absolutely perfect.
• 37:02
  And it it it speaks to the genre, which is, which is, you
• 37:05
  know, so in conversation all the time with his previous selves
• 37:08
  and other forms of it. So even the ways in which he
• 37:11
  gets revised people. The first thing I'm sure, Joe,
• 37:13
  they would have told you in your media studies lesson is, oh, you
• 37:16
  know, the magnificent 7 is actually based on Akira curse
• 37:18
  hours, 7 Samurai and everyone like and that's you know, that's
• 37:21
  that's baby's first film theory, right.
• 37:26
  But what they don't then go on to mention is, Oh yeah, but
• 37:28
  Akira Kurosawa made 7 Sambrai because he wanted to make John
• 37:31
  Ford Westerns, but he was making them in Japan.
• 37:34
  So this weird way in which things get sort of exported and
• 37:37
  reinterpolated. But it's your question, James.
• 37:39
  So that that postmodernism is very much part of it is a
• 37:42
  postmodern genre, whether people realize it or not.
• 37:45
  The actual tone of it is fascinating because it's I mean,
• 37:49
  I'm, you know, I've read a bit, but you know, there will be
• 37:52
  people who know more than me, But I can't think of certainly
• 37:56
  anything that came before this that I can think of that did
• 37:58
  exactly that voice, or at least not enough to establish it.
• 38:01
  But what it is the sort of voice people think people talk about
• 38:04
  in the way in Westerns, right. So you're oh, I could like like,
• 38:08
  like one of the more annoying of the trio did at the very start
• 38:11
  of this podcast. You know, you put on a silly
• 38:13
  accent and you start affecting things and that's all what's
• 38:16
  going on here. And in fact, that becomes part
• 38:18
  of it. He comments on the expectation
• 38:20
  of the action as we go into the gunfight near the end.
• 38:23
  Earlier than Matt Microwave, he's at the bit of the bar.
• 38:26
  He goes, this is the Western, so you're obviously expecting some
• 38:29
  action. Yeah, and it is.
• 38:32
  It is because of all that cultural saturation, because of
• 38:34
  all of those films and all of those TV series that we've all
• 38:37
  seen, even James. I'm sure if we sat here for
• 38:39
  longer we could extract more things that have been referring
• 38:42
  to Westerns you've seen. Oh yeah, refers to them
• 38:46
  definitely. 4th episode. Well, it's Doctor Who's ventured
• 38:51
  more than more than once since the gunfights as well.
• 38:54
  Yeah, and and you know, but even if you think about something
• 38:58
  like A Fistful of Dollars is made by Italians shot in Spain
• 39:01
  with about one or two Americans in the cast, all these ways in
• 39:06
  which it's it's A1 removed. But it's a genre that knows it's
• 39:10
  a it's a genre that knows itself but also knows that you know it.
• 39:14
  And the voice here is exactly that of saying, look, this is he
• 39:19
  might as well say, kids, Doctor Who's doing a Western at the
• 39:23
  start, and you go, yay. We don't like that they
• 39:27
  literally come out in fancy dress.
• 39:28
  They literally. Say we're doing a Western.
• 39:32
  I mean, we should also admit, yeah, then that self
• 39:34
  referentiality is, is is is glorious.
• 39:37
  And at the heart of this whole thing.
• 39:38
  It is, it is an exploration in that.
• 39:40
  And I think we can lose sight of the fact that Doctor Who lands
• 39:43
  in Tombstone and gets mistaken for Doc Holiday.
• 39:46
  Inspired. It's just a brilliant premise.
• 39:49
  I think when they were putting together the leakly Bible in the
• 39:51
  90s and as part of the pitch document it listed potential
• 39:56
  episodes they could do and most of them were based on.
• 40:02
  Existing old Doctor Who episodes they could do, and one of them
• 40:04
  I'm pretty sure was the Gunfighters, because they went,
• 40:07
  you know what, you can still do that now and it's great.
• 40:10
  I mean that labour joke at the end of the Celestial Toy Maker
• 40:13
  where he goes his tooth. The best joke of always.
• 40:16
  You know he needs a dentist and look where he rocks up.
• 40:19
  Jesus Christ was being threatened with no anaesthetic
• 40:23
  Rack to the cranium. Two of them in the in the bloody
• 40:27
  chair in the next room. Canoodling.
• 40:30
  I mean, it's just hilarious. Can we?
• 40:32
  Talk about kind of on that because clearly it's the most
• 40:37
  ludicrous excuse for getting him to the Wild West.
• 40:39
  If you needed a dentist, the last place you'd go.
• 40:42
  And actually the first chapter lays into that and and capital
• 40:45
  light. It makes comic gold out of the
• 40:47
  absurdity because it's got the him complaining about how
• 40:52
  difficult it is to find a decent dentist anywhere in an emergency
• 40:55
  in the waiting lists. And it turns what's a silly
• 41:02
  expedience into a whole page of jokes which ends with the doctor
• 41:05
  saying, my dear boy, amongst my suppliers I have everything we
• 41:08
  could possibly answer at the effects of all the death rays
• 41:11
  from Alpha to Omega devices for the instantaneous resetting of
• 41:15
  broken bones, and specifics to counteract cellular mutation.
• 41:19
  But for some reason I neglected to pack any aspirin.
• 41:23
  The bit that made me die was where they're trying to figure
• 41:26
  out where the hell are we? Would there be a dentist?
• 41:28
  And he just goes, look, there's a wheel.
• 41:30
  At least they've discovered that.
• 41:32
  Oh, bless him. So funny.
• 41:37
  Do you think the humor translated well to the page?
• 41:41
  The humor that was there on the street?
• 41:42
  Because they're the same jokes are there, but they're sort of
• 41:45
  told in a different way. The bit that really stood out to
• 41:48
  me was the sequence in the bar where everyone gets their guns
• 41:52
  out. And it's written like proper
• 41:55
  fast, isn't it? They've got their guns out,
• 41:57
  they've got their guns out. They've got their guns out.
• 41:58
  Someone's shot. He's confused because he knows
• 42:01
  he didn't do it. He's confused because he thought
• 42:03
  he didn't do it. It's just, and it's like a
• 42:05
  series of repetitions, but just done it now.
• 42:10
  It's like a comic masterpiece on the page.
• 42:12
  I was laughing my head off. Yeah, I I actually think in some
• 42:17
  ways it works better on the page.
• 42:21
  Without the performance. Part of the reason is because
• 42:26
  without the performance, because I think in some cases in the
• 42:29
  Gunfighters, you've got actors who are going, well, we're in a
• 42:33
  Western, so I'm going to do a an American accent and that some of
• 42:36
  them are struggling with that already.
• 42:38
  And then maybe not really thinking very hard about comic
• 42:41
  timing or characterization. I think the characters in the
• 42:45
  novel are really well drawn. And so, for example, you've got
• 42:49
  the three Clanton brothers and they each have, it's a classic
• 42:54
  status exchange where the the oldest brother, Ike, is the the
• 42:58
  most powerful and Phineas, the youngest one is, is the
• 43:01
  stupidest. They're all stupid, but there
• 43:02
  are different levels of stupidity.
• 43:04
  And there's a running gag where Phineas is the one who comes up
• 43:07
  with a Bon Moe for every occasion.
• 43:08
  And there's a part of the novel where he gets obsessed with
• 43:11
  frogs and he has one successful frog, Bon Moe.
• 43:14
  And then he continues to try to recapture the success by
• 43:18
  dropping frogs into everything. And this this gag kind of runs
• 43:21
  through the book where every now and then you've got Phineas and
• 43:23
  just a mention of a frog and. Doesn't he drop one when he
• 43:26
  dies? He goes out on one passing but.
• 43:29
  No, doesn't he? The thing that Don Cotton has
• 43:32
  done is he sometimes he's written lines that are not
• 43:36
  funny, but they are knowingly not funny.
• 43:38
  They are a character trying to be funny and delivering a a a
• 43:42
  bad joke, which in the gunfight I think can sometimes come
• 43:46
  across just as an actor delivering a bad joke, not
• 43:49
  terribly well. Whereas when Don Cotton is able
• 43:51
  to characterize very clearly and specifically and have lines such
• 43:56
  as well, who is it? Nobody said you were scared,
• 43:59
  boy. Not that I recall Brother Ruben.
• 44:01
  Now he wasn't scared any, but that didn't stop holiday filling
• 44:04
  him, fill his holes as a he sought for a picturesque simile.
• 44:08
  He failed as a lawyer's argument.
• 44:11
  He ended lamely. So clarifying that lawyer's
• 44:13
  argument is not meant to be funny.
• 44:15
  It's a shit joke because it's delivered by an idiot.
• 44:19
  The joke that probably made me laugh the most, and I would have
• 44:23
  loved to have heard Hartnell say this line out loud.
• 44:27
  The line itself isn't funny. The situation is funny.
• 44:30
  Where the doctor doesn't realize he's been set.
• 44:32
  He's been completely set up for being a murderer by Doc Holiday,
• 44:37
  and he's there at the bar and they mentioned that the
• 44:39
  brother's dead. And he's like, oh, what can I
• 44:40
  say? At a time like this, it's
• 44:42
  difficult to find the words. And Oh my God, it is just so
• 44:47
  funny. So funny.
• 44:50
  I also think that he's had time to rethink certain like you say,
• 44:55
  that that bar scene with the with where they're all getting
• 44:58
  their guns out, he just positions it slightly.
• 45:01
  And, you know, these things were, were were filmed at speed
• 45:05
  and compromised by the availability of camera angles
• 45:08
  and what was able to be blocked in the rehearsal time.
• 45:12
  Some of the some of the the slapstick doesn't quite full
• 45:21
  right. And, and again, that's the, I
• 45:25
  mean, that's sort of an inevitable with any television
• 45:27
  production, even even broad comedy.
• 45:30
  And I just feel like Don Cotton is so good at writing comedy
• 45:33
  that he manages to take jokes that fell flat on television and
• 45:37
  make them work, sometimes by rewriting them or reconceiving
• 45:40
  them completely. Did you read it or did you
• 45:42
  listen to the audio? Read it, Michael.
• 45:46
  I listened to the audio. And how was it in Shane Rimmer's
• 45:50
  grizzled voice? It was fantastic because this
• 45:55
  was, this was 2012. So he was quite an old man by
• 45:57
  this point. And he, he sounds like someone
• 46:01
  who was there. You know, this, the whole thing,
• 46:03
  this being a story from so far back and it's probably gone
• 46:07
  through several tellers by the time it's it's got to your ears.
• 46:10
  And he's, he's that. Voice Michael is on its last
• 46:14
  legs, isn't it? That's a voice that smokes a lot
• 46:17
  of fags. And drunk.
• 46:18
  A lot of liquor. Shane Rimmer is playing as the
• 46:22
  narrator Doc Holiday on his deathbed.
• 46:25
  And it is it's it's a wonderful listen.
• 46:27
  It really is. And the sound design is it's
• 46:29
  just fantastic and really plays into get gets the tone.
• 46:33
  So all the set of XR and as they should be.
• 46:40
  Well, Michael, did you want to discuss some of the like factual
• 46:45
  elements of the story, the factual inaccuracies or
• 46:48
  accuracies? Well, I mean, I'm, I'm, we, we,
• 46:52
  we, we, we could enumerate them, but it would sort of indicated
• 46:56
  be slightly to miss the point because we go from that point
• 46:59
  of, you know, Doc Holiday telling Ned he's going to tell
• 47:02
  him the story. And then the next chapter is set
• 47:04
  in the TARDIS where neither of them were, you know.
• 47:06
  So that's that's quite, quite deliberate.
• 47:08
  But I just think one thing that really, and there's lots of
• 47:11
  other things you can do. So here, I mean, taking the
• 47:14
  gunfight at the OK Corral as your as as your as your as your
• 47:19
  premise is, you're already in myth making territory because
• 47:22
  that story is myths from the title down.
• 47:25
  It didn't actually happen at the OK Corral.
• 47:27
  It happens at an empty lot down the street.
• 47:29
  You know everything is lies, including.
• 47:31
  The sound choir is exciting. No, you know.
• 47:33
  The gunfight near the OK corral within sight of the OK.
• 47:37
  In the back alley. The gunfights among people who
• 47:40
  knew where the OK Corral was. But there's a lot of this and
• 47:47
  the fact that the way in which history is sort of chopped and
• 47:52
  changed and rearranged and things are subbed in or replaced
• 47:55
  to make it to make a better story.
• 47:59
  As as as James mentioned earlier on, the the specifics of what
• 48:05
  led to the fight are are not the specifics that led to here.
• 48:08
  It was about a long running feud between the clansons and and and
• 48:13
  the herbs as law enforcement. And I think the actual cause of
• 48:17
  the fight was that they weren't allowed to bring their guns into
• 48:19
  town. And so the herbs in ordinance,
• 48:21
  there was an ordinance that said you weren't allowed to have guns
• 48:23
  in city limits. And so the herbs had to take the
• 48:27
  guns off them and that led to the gunfight, which is really
• 48:29
  interesting given that, you know, what you think about,
• 48:32
  shall we say, some Americans in the modern day who might lionize
• 48:36
  Wyatt Earp and the law marshals of the Old West.
• 48:38
  He was trying to disarm men who wanted to open carry weapons.
• 48:42
  You know, it's just interesting, isn't it?
• 48:45
  But one thing, that's really one thing, that one little detail
• 48:47
  that jumped out at me is a sort of, I don't know, Snechterkey
• 48:51
  part that stands in for the whole of all of this is there's
• 48:53
  a reference to Herb having a bunt line special gun A.
• 48:58
  Couple of times. Yeah, and a bunt line special.
• 49:03
  If you don't recognise the name, you probably know the type of
• 49:06
  gun it's talking about because it turns up a lot in westerns.
• 49:08
  It's a revolver with a with a unusually long barrel, and they
• 49:14
  turn up a lot in in Westerns these days or on the covers of
• 49:17
  books because they're just so striking and and, and a bit
• 49:20
  unusual. I.
• 49:22
  Hate to do this sort of thing, but if anyone does want to see
• 49:24
  what he's talking about, go look at an image of Doctor Who
• 49:29
  Peacemaker. There's one on the cover of that
• 49:31
  book. Is that not, is that not a, is
• 49:34
  that not a cult peacemaker? Oh, you're so straight, Michael
• 49:38
  Mills for God's sights. All I do is come on here and
• 49:42
  talk about girls and guns. So.
• 49:46
  God, I've drowned in testosterone here.
• 49:49
  But the reason, the reason I bring up the special, the reason
• 49:52
  it's interesting, is because the idea that Wyatt Earp carried
• 49:56
  that gun is a bit of a myth of the Old West.
• 49:57
  But it wasn't put forwards until there was a biography of him
• 50:01
  after he died called Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshall, which was the
• 50:05
  one that sort of set the myth of of Wyatt Earp as being this
• 50:08
  Western Superman who, you know, pretty much settled the West one
• 50:12
  hand single handedly. And in that book it was claimed
• 50:17
  that the pistol was a gift from Earp to Ned Buntline to thank
• 50:22
  him for all the Frontier stories that he'd given him.
• 50:24
  So it became known as as a Buntline Special.
• 50:26
  Only a few problems with that story 1 is that there's no
• 50:30
  evidence that's Buntline and words of Ethernet.
• 50:33
  He certainly never mentioned mentions them in any of his
• 50:35
  books. There's no evidence that
• 50:39
  Buntline ever ordered any guns that looked like this.
• 50:43
  And people have gone through the records at Colt.
• 50:45
  I think you made them. And there's pressures that led
• 50:48
  us that words have ever had a gun that looked like that at
• 50:51
  all. But such was that was the
• 50:53
  strength of that legend and of the image that it's it's really
• 50:56
  become a bit of the it's thrown in here quite casually as a sort
• 50:58
  of accepted fact that Oh yeah, Wyatt Earp with his Buntline
• 51:01
  special. And it just appeared in
• 51:02
  everything, pretty much every depiction of him.
• 51:05
  So TV series like the life and legend of Wyatt Earp, the movie
• 51:09
  Tombstone with with Val Kilmer and all the rest of them.
• 51:12
  He's got one of them in that. And in fact, cult themselves
• 51:16
  then actually started to produce a Bundt line special off the
• 51:19
  back of this between about 1957 and 1999.
• 51:22
  So you could go and buy this fictional weapon named after a
• 51:25
  man who never saw one, or made one given to someone who.
• 51:27
  Lived in fictional. Well, not just like, but it's
• 51:31
  the way in which, you know, reality gets reshaped into myth
• 51:34
  and myth then itself reshapes reality that way in which the
• 51:37
  teller becomes part of the tale. And that's sort of how Doctor
• 51:42
  Who treats history a heck of the lot of the time.
• 51:45
  The the gun fighters is doing it incredibly, you know,
• 51:50
  deliberately and openly here. But it's also but it's there in
• 51:54
  things that would have you think that they were much more
• 51:56
  straight. This takes.
• 51:57
  So the gun fights, the OK Corral took place in 1881.
• 52:01
  There's another Doctor Who story that takes place in 1881 also
• 52:05
  begins with the G ghost light. Those two, they take place in
• 52:08
  the same year, but they present such not just different places,
• 52:13
  but such different interactions with history and yet.
• 52:16
  A. Different smile between the two.
• 52:19
  And yet there we have, we have, you know, the popular
• 52:23
  understanding of an era wrapped back into its actual execution
• 52:26
  in the form of evolution being being part of the historical
• 52:30
  plot. I just think.
• 52:32
  I never if I never would have guessed in a million years till
• 52:36
  you said that, that those two stories would have been set in
• 52:38
  the same year. No, no, not at all.
• 52:41
  And, and and yet just that one little reference.
• 52:44
  Just unpick something that I think people who would claim to
• 52:48
  have a problem with the gunfighters miss about what
• 52:52
  Doctor Who actually does. And this is before we even get
• 52:55
  on to talents of Wing Chiang. Well, not just Doctor Who,
• 52:58
  though. I mean, it's, it's, it's
• 53:00
  embedded in any kind of historical drama to some extent,
• 53:03
  isn't it? But as you say, the gum, the the
• 53:05
  thing that I think the gum fighters does so virtuosically
• 53:08
  is it is completely open about it.
• 53:12
  Yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 53:12
  No, absolutely no, no, I think, I think you're, you're
• 53:15
  absolutely right there. And there have been many
• 53:17
  Westerns that have claimed to be oh, no, no, no, no.
• 53:19
  This is actually how it did happen.
• 53:21
  And it's still bollocks. It's just a new, different type
• 53:22
  of bollocks. So is the whole thing being
• 53:26
  written with a knowing I then? Yeah, we know.
• 53:29
  You know, I'm going to give it to you all.
• 53:31
  Isn't it OK? It's also knowingly an
• 53:35
  unreliable narrator, ironically, given that he's chosen to kind
• 53:38
  of narrate it in the the Wild West equivalent of Homer, an
• 53:43
  actual person. And yet the the unreliable
• 53:46
  narrator is actually Doc Holiday, isn't it because he's
• 53:48
  he's he's relating an account of an old drunk man.
• 53:53
  So we're we're not even asked necessarily to take it.
• 53:57
  He's specifically mentioned at one point, James, I thought I
• 54:00
  didn't actually write down what he's talking about, but there is
• 54:03
  a bit in brackets where he goes look who, and he's talking to
• 54:05
  us. Now look who's telling this
• 54:07
  story, you or me. Don't give me no argument,
• 54:10
  right? I know this is ridiculous, just
• 54:13
  go with it. Well, and it's.
• 54:16
  One of the first things it tells us to believe is that the Doctor
• 54:22
  was a gunslinger. It it it talks about the Doctor
• 54:24
  before he's even been introduced into the story as someone firing
• 54:27
  a gun, which particularly when this book came out anyway, it
• 54:29
  would be like the Doctor never fires a gun unless it's the
• 54:33
  Ogrons and Jon Pertley in that one scene.
• 54:35
  But actually, it what what's so funny is that it it by the end
• 54:40
  of the story, it is the Doctor firing a guy.
• 54:42
  It's just he's doing out of sheer incompetence.
• 54:44
  It's so nice that he has such a a much bigger part in the
• 54:48
  climaxes like in the original. I mean, they don't need to be
• 54:51
  there. He could have left before the
• 54:52
  end, couldn't they? No, they're all much more
• 54:55
  integrated and and the fact that the the gunfight is actually set
• 54:59
  off by the doctor letting his guns go.
• 55:04
  He's very funny. Yeah, Donald, Donald Cotton, I
• 55:07
  think, you know, we all, we all love Terence Dicks and I am, you
• 55:10
  know, I'm not here to besmirch him, but there is that type of
• 55:13
  Doctor Who novelisation that is the screen to the to the printed
• 55:16
  page. That maybe I used to think
• 55:18
  Michael most. Maybe because people, more
• 55:21
  people had home video recorders by the time the gun fighters
• 55:24
  came out. But Donald Cotton, I get the
• 55:26
  impression he's, I'd like to imagine, I get the sense he's
• 55:29
  having a lot of fun writing this as well.
• 55:31
  He feels really the sense of an author who's engaged, who wants
• 55:35
  to make their point even better than they did 20 years
• 55:38
  previously and work out all the kinks and spot all the things
• 55:42
  that were missing in the 1st. Place.
• 55:44
  I just think he's got a very generous grasp of vocabulary as
• 55:48
  well, and he likes putting more sophisticated words on the page
• 55:53
  than you would get in your average target novel.
• 55:57
  It's it's a, it's a, it's an absolute joy of language.
• 56:01
  But the other thing that it always impresses me and it's
• 56:04
  it's the reason I think the Romans is an absolute Tour de
• 56:07
  force and not to be underestimated.
• 56:10
  We may have to revisit that, James.
• 56:12
  Yeah, well. You know, I, I, I think the
• 56:14
  Romans is Don Cotton going OK, this is what I can do.
• 56:20
  What? He's really good at his voice
• 56:23
  and he is effortlessly able in in this in the gunfighters to
• 56:28
  adopt the the a voice that feels like an authentic Western voice,
• 56:32
  even though, as we said, it's it's it's not really passaging
• 56:36
  anything except for what we think a Western sounds like in
• 56:41
  the myth makers. It's a more poetical type of
• 56:43
  writing. But again, it's he's definitely
• 56:45
  kind of found a voice for Homer in the Romans.
• 56:48
  He's going well, I'm going to do lots of voices.
• 56:50
  I'm going to do the doctor's diary in chest and writing
• 56:53
  letters. Nero's scrapbook, A letter from
• 56:57
  a centurion. What's it?
• 56:59
  It begins. Salve.
• 57:00
  Mater. The the assassin is writing home
• 57:04
  to his mother. Mother, why don't you answer me
• 57:07
  back? Come on now.
• 57:08
  It's Papaya the poisoner. And and it the and I mean, this
• 57:13
  is the the highest praise. It reminds me most of all of
• 57:17
  Michael Frayn, who's a writer who who can write in all kinds
• 57:21
  of styles and in some books does exactly that trick where he
• 57:24
  writes from different viewpoints and and adopts a very clear
• 57:28
  voice for each one. Travel.
• 57:29
  With the Romans and I feel like I'm coming down hard on it.
• 57:32
  Trust me, I was the one person that adored that book in that
• 57:35
  episode out of the four of us is he does that, that very verb,
• 57:41
  all that alliteration, all that very verbose, that Henry Gordon
• 57:45
  Jago style that he adopts. There's about four characters
• 57:48
  that have it in the Romans and they all sound a bit similar.
• 57:53
  That would be my one criticism of those different voices.
• 57:56
  There's one or two that are very different, and the rest let's.
• 58:00
  Go back to it because my my recollection is that I was
• 58:02
  impressed that even within those we'll.
• 58:05
  Do it. We'll cover it, Yeah.
• 58:08
  The the audio the audio book of the Romans is is is a a joy
• 58:14
  unbeknownst to any other any other Doctor Who audio book the
• 58:18
  assassin. Like Tintra Laws Welsh assassin.
• 58:22
  I loved that he this this innocent Welsh boy who's just
• 58:25
  got just sat in a Bush writing letters homes with mother.
• 58:29
  And like, so I'm sorry, we're talking about the bloody Romans
• 58:31
  now. Incredible though that that book
• 58:33
  even exists that there was a Doctor Who novelization where 1
• 58:36
  chapter is a love poem, Barbara and this.
• 58:41
  So coming back to the Gunfighters, one of the things I
• 58:44
  thought was well, clearly JNT has checked out.
• 58:46
  He's not even bothering to read these, but.
• 58:49
  Why would he get the saucy jokes?
• 58:51
  I don't think he'd even get them if I'm honest.
• 58:54
  I don't know, he directed Bantamimes.
• 58:56
  Maybe Maybe this? Yeah, but those are a bit more
• 58:59
  obvious, right? What I was thinking was if you
• 59:02
  were reared on I I think how Terrance 6 more or less stops
• 59:07
  novelising them by this is sort of 1987, is it he?
• 59:10
  Was he was still going but he'd cut back.
• 59:12
  I think his last one was Planet of Giants and that was early 90s
• 59:16
  but he wasn't going at the same clip anymore.
• 59:18
  If you were a child picking your latest target, look up.
• 59:22
  Yeah. You opened it up and the first
• 59:24
  thing you read is Sanatorium at Glenwood Springs, Co was never a
• 59:28
  place you'd visit for your health, but at least the
• 59:30
  management would usually arrange for you to die there in some
• 59:33
  sort of comfort. Which is better.
• 59:34
  To my way of thinking. The meeting your maker in some
• 59:37
  gun loud back alley and a bit of booms.
• 59:40
  That's the first paragraph and it's all one sentence.
• 59:42
  It's a beautifully constructed sentence, but my God, what if
• 59:47
  you were a child whose whose only exposure to to literature
• 59:51
  was tearing sticks? It's not that.
• 59:53
  Yeah, he was a ruin of a man walking through the ruin of a
• 59:56
  city. Is it?
• 59:58
  And I I I. Just say very quickly, both of
• 1:00:01
  you make very sexy Cowboys, you know?
• 1:00:04
  I can't see what Ken Ken Moss gives us.
• 1:00:10
  We didn't we did mention Brokeback Mountain, did we in
• 1:00:12
  our in our list of few times I do you throw me off there.
• 1:00:21
  I I do think I did. One of the reasons I love the
• 1:00:26
  gunfighters on TV and I love it here is especially as you know,
• 1:00:30
  the years roll by and the big finish download folder gets ever
• 1:00:35
  longer. I think any long running
• 1:00:38
  franchise of any form has that. Talking of self referentiality
• 1:00:43
  has that issue of endlessly referring back to previous
• 1:00:47
  versions of itself. You know, it's the next month
• 1:00:51
  Death to the Daleks again, but this time it's the 4th Doctor
• 1:00:54
  and Leela. And so I think, well, with
• 1:00:57
  Doctor Who in general, but spin off media especially,
• 1:01:00
  idiosyncrasy goes a long way for me.
• 1:01:02
  And Donald Cotton was brought in to do something different
• 1:01:05
  because he would bring something different to Doctor Who.
• 1:01:07
  And oh, it was love. It's lovely reading something
• 1:01:10
  that's doing something, do you know?
• 1:01:11
  What I said to those book lovers, Michael, I said you guys
• 1:01:14
  need to chill out and enjoy the experiment because there's so
• 1:01:17
  few targets like this. The fact that these exist at all
• 1:01:21
  is a miracle, frankly, and I think it's only because Nigel
• 1:01:24
  Robinson came in towards the end, wasn't it?
• 1:01:26
  And he was, you know, willing to test the wars with other styles.
• 1:01:31
  I'm really pleased you did. It's an astonishing effort.
• 1:01:35
  It's this wouldn't have been no, no one writes like this easily.
• 1:01:39
  This is a a really crafted piece of writing.
• 1:01:42
  It's a very eccentric piece of writing.
• 1:01:44
  And again, I wondered how that any child would necessarily have
• 1:01:47
  followed the story or if they would have done I.
• 1:01:49
  Don't think it was very popular. Was it this one?
• 1:01:52
  No, I it's it's not giving you at all what you'd expect from a
• 1:01:59
  from a target novelization. But by golly, that's because
• 1:02:01
  he's that's because he has gone above and beyond and and then
• 1:02:05
  some. And I love that he is
• 1:02:07
  simultaneously writing something that is such a love letter to
• 1:02:12
  language and an exploration of what how far you can push
• 1:02:16
  sentence structure and idiosyncrasy.
• 1:02:19
  And yet it's still a bit of a piss take.
• 1:02:22
  And he's not so highfalutin that he he can't still have a hell of
• 1:02:27
  a lot of fun with it and occasionally just lapse into
• 1:02:30
  utter silliness. Well, this is that rarest of
• 1:02:33
  things, then. A target novel that isn't really
• 1:02:36
  going to appeal to you as a kid, but it will grow on you in time
• 1:02:41
  because of its sophistication. Maybe not I, I think I would
• 1:02:44
  have enjoyed this as a kid, but I suppose it depends what, what
• 1:02:47
  you're going into. But I agree with everything
• 1:02:49
  James said. And I think on top of all of
• 1:02:51
  that, it's that he, it's not just that he's doing this for
• 1:02:52
  himself. He's so generous to the reader
• 1:02:55
  and he's so in terms of his estimation of you and your
• 1:02:59
  ability to follow this and get all the jokes.
• 1:03:00
  So there's just there's just a line from Park Lantern which
• 1:03:03
  says boys stand not upon the order if you're going, but.
• 1:03:06
  Get the hell out of here. It's just a little Hamlet joke
• 1:03:08
  for you there. What about this one, then?
• 1:03:12
  If you don't let us get out of here at once, I should have no
• 1:03:14
  alternative but to apply for the writs of Happiest Corpus.
• 1:03:18
  See how you like that? Well, this is the writs of many
• 1:03:21
  a happy course, right? Enough.
• 1:03:22
  I mean, come on, he knows that's cheesy as hell, right?
• 1:03:26
  Come so thick and fast though you.
• 1:03:28
  I felt like I was missing 2 for everyone that I picked up on
• 1:03:33
  because that is so densely populated just.
• 1:03:35
  He tosses out things like in memory of his wife.
• 1:03:38
  God rest her tongue and and and it's so.
• 1:03:44
  Effortlessly witty even the chapter titles Chapter 7 open
• 1:03:48
  mouth surgery. That made me laugh.
• 1:03:51
  You know what I felt with the chapter titles?
• 1:03:52
  I felt, you know, with Fraser used to have those headings for
• 1:03:55
  scenes and every now and then you'd get one of the references.
• 1:03:58
  I'd feel a bit clever and most of the time miss them.
• 1:04:02
  They're not as funny though, James, as the ones for the myth
• 1:04:04
  makers. Those.
• 1:04:05
  Chapter Titles. I just felt reading down the the
• 1:04:10
  the chapter titles in the Gunfighters that I maybe just
• 1:04:13
  wasn't clever enough to understand where he was coming
• 1:04:15
  from because. They agreed.
• 1:04:16
  If you're not, I'm definitely not Jesus Christ.
• 1:04:20
  Oh, and talking of clever, though, the probably the when
• 1:04:22
  the character gets the biggest reinvention here is of course,
• 1:04:25
  Johnny Ringo, who but it's who is here a a student of the
• 1:04:31
  classics who carries out his move so that you can afford
• 1:04:33
  particularly fine editions of the collected works.
• 1:04:36
  And it's it's I mean it it it's wonderful on so many levels.
• 1:04:40
  A it's it's just funny. B in a in a real sort of
• 1:04:44
  historical comic context somehow makes seems it's an old thing
• 1:04:47
  that Johnny Bingo character because you got Seth Harper
• 1:04:49
  there for so much of it, who then gets killed.
• 1:04:52
  You then got to bring in sort of the replacement.
• 1:04:53
  We have to make him feel like a bigger threat somehow.
• 1:04:56
  And on screen that's sort of achieved through the
• 1:04:57
  performance. But on on Paige, by making him
• 1:05:01
  this, this, this intelligent character, there's also that
• 1:05:04
  element of him being an intellectual threat, perhaps.
• 1:05:06
  Oh, everyone in this story so far has been a blithering idiot.
• 1:05:09
  Here's someone who might actually who might actually be a
• 1:05:12
  borderline competent. But also you've got you've also
• 1:05:15
  had characters who are just all horrible anyway and are all
• 1:05:18
  doing horrible things for horrible reasons.
• 1:05:20
  And yet the fact that he wants to do it just so he can afford
• 1:05:22
  some books, the fact that he's an estate somehow makes him the
• 1:05:25
  coldest of cold killers. It's brilliant and zero
• 1:05:31
  relationship to historical reality, of course.
• 1:05:34
  Hooked it up after. What was he into Classics?
• 1:05:39
  It's just an excuse for a series of jokes.
• 1:05:44
  There's also a there's a word play thing and I was, I was
• 1:05:46
  reading bits of it thinking was, did did this come just after the
• 1:05:51
  second series of Blackadder? Because you know, there's a Ben
• 1:05:54
  Elton thing where he's like, you're as something, something
• 1:05:57
  as a something in a something. And I actually know this, this,
• 1:06:00
  this is a little bit before Blackadder.
• 1:06:01
  And, and you've, you've got plenty of things there that both
• 1:06:06
  the kind of the word play, the anachronisms or replacing known
• 1:06:10
  sayings with, you know, where he says to kill Buzzard, to kill 2
• 1:06:13
  buzzards with one rock rather than two birds with one stone.
• 1:06:18
  But then he's got things like exuding menace like Attila, the
• 1:06:21
  hunt of the pole booth, murmuring like bees at a BBQ or
• 1:06:27
  possums that a bakery has finished.
• 1:06:28
  My I'm I'm stuck for music as a porcupine and a pianola you
• 1:06:36
  could absolutely see coming out of Roy Atkinson's mouth.
• 1:06:39
  I want to hear you read this book.
• 1:06:42
  There were so many, there were so many lines in this where I
• 1:06:45
  was just the entire thinking. I must remember to use this
• 1:06:47
  conversation. Oh gosh almighty.
• 1:06:54
  But what about because we haven't really talked about
• 1:06:57
  them? What about our regulars Stephen
• 1:07:00
  Regret, Dodo DuPont and Doctor Caligari James?
• 1:07:10
  Oh well, who should I take? I I've written to help.
• 1:07:17
  Maybe this is unfair. I've written.
• 1:07:20
  Dodo is distinctly virginal and her TV counterpart.
• 1:07:25
  They do mention that quite a lot, don't they?
• 1:07:28
  He's very she's so pretty and the and the humor they get that
• 1:07:32
  he gets out of Dodo being basically most spending most of
• 1:07:35
  the story with Kate, who is the most sexual person in the story,
• 1:07:40
  and Doc Holiday, who's not much better.
• 1:07:43
  And it's convinced, isn't she? She's convinced something's
• 1:07:46
  going on there. Absolutely.
• 1:07:47
  But she doesn't quite understand what.
• 1:07:49
  And it is that's funny because that's Dodo.
• 1:07:52
  We recognize that Dodo from all of the other stories where she
• 1:07:56
  blunders into things going, oh, isn't this fun?
• 1:07:58
  Oh, I don't quite understand what's going on here.
• 1:08:01
  Another game that might kill us. And and here it's just like, oh,
• 1:08:04
  there's something going on between these two, But whatever
• 1:08:06
  it is I'm at, I don't think it's very nice.
• 1:08:08
  So there's a paragraph that says, As for Dodo, she was for
• 1:08:12
  once uncertain as to what to say.
• 1:08:14
  If this was the widely advertised love, she thought she
• 1:08:17
  would be quite content to lead the older generation for the
• 1:08:20
  foreseeable. So it's like it's Oh yeah.
• 1:08:24
  And and being a sensible girl, she changed the subject before
• 1:08:27
  it became exhausted. So she's she's profoundly
• 1:08:32
  irritating as a character pretty much as on television.
• 1:08:36
  But it is turned into a very funny joke throughout and the
• 1:08:40
  but the the balance of Kate and Doc Holiday and they're
• 1:08:44
  constantly trying to double cross and some some somehow
• 1:08:47
  being outwitted the whole time by Dodo simply because she just
• 1:08:51
  doesn't fit into this world is really delicious.
• 1:08:54
  I think on on screenwrote her best scene in her entire run is
• 1:08:57
  when she holds the gun up. To the holiday.
• 1:09:00
  It's so funny, isn't it? And then she's.
• 1:09:02
  Pretty nice. Well, and she and she finds her
• 1:09:05
  way into the end. She finds herself, in a way,
• 1:09:09
  into the gunfight, in a way that's almost useful at the end,
• 1:09:12
  too. So, you know, I just start
• 1:09:14
  thinking, you know, because she sort of starts a story going,
• 1:09:17
  oh, we're in the Wild West, whoopee, you know?
• 1:09:19
  And she's like, I started thinking, oh God, imagine Tegan
• 1:09:21
  was in this story. She'd be so down on it.
• 1:09:24
  Or wouldn't she? Maybe sometimes the dodo
• 1:09:26
  approach is the right approach. The the description of her
• 1:09:30
  clothes as well she a little number made-up of scarlet fur
• 1:09:34
  blows and flounces trimmed with black lace, the whole set off
• 1:09:37
  with a picture hat of such dimensions that an enterprising
• 1:09:41
  florist could well have opened a branch department on its third
• 1:09:43
  corner of its brim. She's so stupid, right?
• 1:09:47
  She looks out at the pyre that they're building to Burns
• 1:09:50
  leaving. On it goes.
• 1:09:51
  Oh look, they're lighting a bonfire on the street.
• 1:09:54
  Isn't that pretty Daf? Cow.
• 1:09:59
  But but it's so clever. Is that because structurally as
• 1:10:02
  well in terms of what he's doing, because it's the
• 1:10:04
  gunfights at the OK Corral. And we know that from the start.
• 1:10:07
  We know where the ending of this story is going to be.
• 1:10:09
  So you think, oh, so it's a sort of historical tragedy that no
• 1:10:11
  matter what anybody does, we're not going to be able to avoid
• 1:10:14
  this, this fight, you know, the Fires of Pompeii, massacre of
• 1:10:18
  Saint Bartholomew's Eve version of it.
• 1:10:20
  But he completely inverts that and turns it into a farce where
• 1:10:24
  none of the regulars, the ones who should know what's going to
• 1:10:27
  happen. But you know, because of course
• 1:10:28
  he Dodo and Steve Evans case, how much do you actually know
• 1:10:30
  about the historical world? W you just know yippee, I get to
• 1:10:33
  dress as a cowboy and the doctor, it works brilliantly
• 1:10:37
  because he's an alien. There's no especially with the
• 1:10:39
  first doctor, there's no reason he should know what's going on.
• 1:10:42
  He's he's sort of this innocent in all of it because he's he
• 1:10:44
  doesn't have any preconceptions of where they are.
• 1:10:47
  And rather than it being a story which they try to avert what's
• 1:10:49
  happening or to extricate themselves from it, they bumble
• 1:10:52
  through it in a sort of fast whereby.
• 1:10:54
  Arms. Always the word Michael.
• 1:10:56
  They sort of asked backwards cause the gunfights sort of come
• 1:10:59
  together in all of the ways it should and all the characters to
• 1:11:02
  be pushed in the ways, in the ways they're going to go.
• 1:11:04
  So Doc Holiday doesn't get killed.
• 1:11:06
  He ends up over there and they have a showdown and Seth
• 1:11:08
  Harper's dead. So they've got to bring in
• 1:11:10
  Johnny Ringo and all. It's just it's, it's probably
• 1:11:15
  not as tightly plotted or as clever as you might think it is,
• 1:11:17
  but there's a but it does have that beautiful sort of ballet of
• 1:11:21
  a farce of just all of these people spiralling together.
• 1:11:24
  Because until you end up it's until the jigsaw falls together
• 1:11:27
  and you go and, and as it says, and now, ladies and gentlemen,
• 1:11:30
  the gunfights at the. OK, correct.
• 1:11:32
  It introduces it at the end and it.
• 1:11:34
  Introduces. Everybody doesn't.
• 1:11:36
  It is is beautifully written and it does like a like stage
• 1:11:40
  directions place all of the characters in their particular
• 1:11:43
  bit for that final scene. What is he goes so he literally
• 1:11:48
  ends that bit by saying so got that have you because all these
• 1:11:52
  strangely compounded Oh God, I can't say the word com
• 1:11:56
  concomitants are the stuff of legend.
• 1:12:00
  The stage is set. Gentlemen fire.
• 1:12:05
  Because he's got these references to Eddie Foy and, and
• 1:12:08
  the Bird Cage Theatre was the theatre and Tombstone and, and
• 1:12:10
  that's, I think that's about the right time, Eddie.
• 1:12:13
  Marco Lightly's James. Michael like these?
• 1:12:16
  I'm not sure. Was was Michael a real person?
• 1:12:19
  Oh, I wish I could confidently give you the answer.
• 1:12:21
  But there certainly would have been the sort of things it was
• 1:12:23
  too. So one of the reasons the
• 1:12:25
  tombstone was so successful was that it was a mining town.
• 1:12:28
  And there is a sort of confluence here of the cattle
• 1:12:33
  towns, so like Dodge City and things like that, and the mining
• 1:12:35
  towns. But they would be the epicenter
• 1:12:37
  for the people who would be out there, you know, prospecting all
• 1:12:40
  around the hills. So when you'd come into town, it
• 1:12:42
  would be for entertainment. So it was a degree to which in a
• 1:12:44
  slight character that you can see here, the whole city was a
• 1:12:47
  bit of a a bit of a red light district because most people
• 1:12:51
  lived and worked outside of it in some form or another.
• 1:12:54
  But also a a stage. And yeah, the reason it works,
• 1:12:58
  the reason the set works so well on television is that there is
• 1:13:01
  something stage like about the build certainly of a the Wild
• 1:13:07
  West bar with its its balcony and its swinging doors.
• 1:13:11
  But also the the outdoor bit surrounded as it is by buildings
• 1:13:16
  with an arch, a proscenium arch as you come into it has the look
• 1:13:20
  of a station. And going back to the tradition
• 1:13:23
  of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, there is that tradition
• 1:13:26
  of these things being played out in the outdoors as a kind of
• 1:13:29
  arena entertainment. And so he I think he knowingly
• 1:13:33
  delivers it in that theatrical way because he rating as a as a
• 1:13:39
  theatrical event. And I I love the he doesn't feel
• 1:13:43
  the need to to rationalise every production shortcoming in this.
• 1:13:47
  But for all the tombstone is more populated.
• 1:13:50
  I loved his little bit about why we don't see more people for
• 1:13:53
  such a bustling metropolis, which is that everyone knows
• 1:13:55
  there's trouble. So they was at the theatre and
• 1:13:58
  had its best week ever because everyone was just trying to go
• 1:14:00
  wherever. Constantly just heading into
• 1:14:04
  Marco lightly stood to get out of.
• 1:14:06
  The world the. Crowd that were there for the
• 1:14:08
  lynching were there for his signature, didn't he?
• 1:14:12
  He's not afraid to hang a Lantern on the narrative
• 1:14:16
  coincidences as well. He literally writes at one
• 1:14:19
  point. But one of those coincidences
• 1:14:21
  without which the best fiction would be unreadable, and even a
• 1:14:25
  true story such as this? Unconvincing.
• 1:14:29
  And there we go. Bloody nerve.
• 1:14:30
  Donald Cotton, do You know? But there again, he's he's
• 1:14:33
  literally just stating what he's doing with reality here, which
• 1:14:35
  is that he's turning it into a better story.
• 1:14:38
  The the actual gunfight at the OK Corral.
• 1:14:40
  It wasn't a beginning of anything.
• 1:14:42
  It wasn't an ending of anything. It was just the most tense point
• 1:14:45
  in in this ongoing, this ongoing vendetta, which led to like I
• 1:14:49
  think weeks, if not months of sort of recriminations
• 1:14:51
  afterwards. Morgan Earp, the brother who
• 1:14:53
  gets killed in the lead up here and it sort of becomes an
• 1:14:56
  instigating factor actually didn't guy at the gunfire.
• 1:14:59
  I'm not sure he's even there. He got he got shot a couple of
• 1:15:02
  weeks later. A.
• 1:15:04
  Couple of months later I think. But how unsatisfying would it be
• 1:15:09
  to rock up in this town and then not do the the gunfire, the OK
• 1:15:13
  corral at the end, you know? He's sort of saying to anyone
• 1:15:16
  who doesn't like this, who says this is silly, it's stupid, it's
• 1:15:19
  a comedy, He's going well, What do you want, the true story?
• 1:15:22
  Yeah, how boring. Well, I suppose at least
• 1:15:28
  Stephen, doesn't it? He doesn't do too much in this
• 1:15:30
  really, does he? No, but we learned where he
• 1:15:35
  picked up the skill of playing the piano.
• 1:15:37
  Oh, go on. This I thought was so in the the
• 1:15:42
  the novel doesn't. It does pop in a couple of
• 1:15:44
  verses of the ballad, but it doesn't try and replicate that,
• 1:15:48
  which I think is. Did you?
• 1:15:49
  Did you sing it in your head though?
• 1:15:51
  When you was wrong? Of course.
• 1:15:53
  Good stuff. It's slightly ruined for me
• 1:15:55
  actually by that Escape Room Blu-ray special feature.
• 1:16:00
  Well, here in more in O'Brien and Lisa Bahman singing it,
• 1:16:04
  yeah. Anyway, instead he has Stephen
• 1:16:09
  playing America the Brave again and again and again.
• 1:16:13
  It's so. It's another of the things
• 1:16:15
  that's so improbable that Steve and of all companions would have
• 1:16:19
  a clue how to play the piano. So he pops in this the extra.
• 1:16:23
  The ex astronauts had in fact learned this as an essential
• 1:16:26
  part of his advanced course at Cape Canaveral or someplace, and
• 1:16:31
  was rather proud of it. Are you talking about two guns,
• 1:16:35
  Stephen? Regret.
• 1:16:36
  Terror of the space waves there, the very same.
• 1:16:41
  You know, it's really interesting that Peter Purvis,
• 1:16:43
  for many, many years after making the gunfires, was hugely
• 1:16:48
  embarrassed by the whole thing and would never go back to it at
• 1:16:51
  all. He just remember singing that
• 1:16:53
  song and making a tear out of himself.
• 1:16:55
  And then he was sat down one day at a convention and he watched
• 1:16:59
  it and it was like a revelation to him.
• 1:17:02
  And now, you know, he sees all the sophistication in it.
• 1:17:04
  But I think, I think maybe fan theory hit him at some point.
• 1:17:08
  I. Bet it did, yeah.
• 1:17:11
  Yeah, and it because it is, it is a story that ironically has
• 1:17:14
  built up a legend and a myth. You know, people will tell you
• 1:17:17
  it was the lowest rated Doctor Who.
• 1:17:20
  Story shit. Michael Mills.
• 1:17:22
  It wasn't, you know, people the. Savages was worse than this.
• 1:17:28
  But it's not. The book is not terribly highly
• 1:17:30
  rated on Goodreads. Some people have given it five
• 1:17:33
  stars, but I did click on some of the one star reviews just to
• 1:17:36
  see. What?
• 1:17:37
  What were they saying, James? Well one of them just said worst
• 1:17:40
  Doctor Who story ever. So it the the myth persists.
• 1:17:45
  But do you think that's just them reiterating restating the
• 1:17:48
  myth rather than actually reading this and making a
• 1:17:50
  decision? Yeah, from the review that the
• 1:17:52
  book had necessarily even been read.
• 1:17:55
  I mean, it goes about saying the best reviews on Goodreads come
• 1:17:58
  from 1. Mr. James Lark discussing the
• 1:18:01
  new adventures. Those are dissertations in
• 1:18:04
  length, but very witty. Yeah.
• 1:18:08
  I've, I've not done any of the targets.
• 1:18:10
  I should probably diversify, but that's what we're doing here,
• 1:18:15
  so. That's what we're doing here.
• 1:18:17
  Well, any anything else? Any other characters you really
• 1:18:20
  want to focus on? Do you want to move on to the
• 1:18:22
  plot? What have you got notes about?
• 1:18:26
  Come on that you got this. Well, we should talk about the
• 1:18:30
  plot because I think Michael is absolutely right when he says
• 1:18:34
  that it's maybe not as clever as it feels.
• 1:18:37
  It is just people dashing from one location to another and and
• 1:18:41
  in in many cases, an excuse for a set piece.
• 1:18:46
  And the set pieces are so good and they earn the way that the
• 1:18:51
  characters have been moved into them so well that I don't think
• 1:18:54
  you really questioned the story. There is something interesting
• 1:18:56
  about this which is different from the myth makers, which is
• 1:19:00
  the unlike the myth, because he doesn't do that kind of gradual
• 1:19:03
  transition into something more serious, which is such a a
• 1:19:07
  successful aspect, I think of the myth makers on television.
• 1:19:10
  And as a novelization. He very elegantly takes you to a
• 1:19:16
  place where you go, oh, this isn't funny anymore, and these
• 1:19:20
  are characters that I've grown to like and something really
• 1:19:22
  horrible is about to happen. Oh, James, I couldn't believe
• 1:19:25
  the nerve. You know, obviously homie has
• 1:19:27
  already had one eye popped out and just before you know the
• 1:19:30
  massacre occurs, the other eyes popped out.
• 1:19:33
  So the person is telling us the story, unfortunately can't see
• 1:19:35
  any of the graphic violence. They can only hear it.
• 1:19:39
  Yeah, although the although that bit is actually more or less
• 1:19:42
  played for laughs, the actual violence itself that follows is
• 1:19:44
  not in the Gunfighters. It he doesn't do that, that
• 1:19:48
  gradual transition which I think to some extent maybe having some
• 1:19:52
  television. I certainly think the gunfight
• 1:19:55
  as filmed is taken very seriously.
• 1:20:00
  Whereas in the novel, because of not least because of the the the
• 1:20:04
  presence of the doctor sort of as the ACT, the accidental
• 1:20:08
  instigate of of the conflict and and then Stephen and Dodo.
• 1:20:13
  Come into it as well. It just bumbles into it, doesn't
• 1:20:16
  it it? Becomes more of a comic set
• 1:20:18
  piece and, and almost kind of pathetic in the end because it's
• 1:20:22
  there's it, it, it ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
• 1:20:25
  And, and he and he sees the characters picked off 1 by 1.
• 1:20:29
  And then it ends well, it ends with the actor Eddie Foy being
• 1:20:36
  arrested for causing an obstruction.
• 1:20:38
  He's deliberately kind of undercutting the whole thing,
• 1:20:40
  and then he ends the whole scene with and that was about it,
• 1:20:44
  really. That's Shallot, although I did
• 1:20:49
  like the theatrical flourish of Wyatt and Warren indulging in a
• 1:20:53
  certain amount of overkill simultaneously shooting Billy.
• 1:20:57
  It is rotten heart honestly. The murders in this are so well
• 1:21:01
  described. Great, but but he doesn't even
• 1:21:03
  give us the scene where Morgan Earp is is discovered dead,
• 1:21:06
  which is quite a moving moment in the on television.
• 1:21:09
  He he skips right over that. And so even that plot point
• 1:21:13
  where the Earps are given more motivation for what happens is
• 1:21:17
  isn't really dwells upon. It's interesting, you know, like
• 1:21:20
  the myth makers and the gunfighters.
• 1:21:22
  I, I was sort of checking the page count and I was going
• 1:21:25
  along. Episode 1 gets a huge amount of
• 1:21:28
  pages. Episode 4.
• 1:21:31
  It's quite brief in the book. Running out of time, do you
• 1:21:34
  think? Well, no, because I don't think
• 1:21:36
  much happens in episode 4 until the gunfire.
• 1:21:38
  They they just sit around waiting for the gunfire, so you
• 1:21:41
  just skip straight to it. It's it's having re watched
• 1:21:46
  recently a good chunk of season 5 for a different strand for
• 1:21:50
  this very podcast. It is a common issue of Doctor
• 1:21:54
  Who in the 1960s of, you know, a first episode that sets things
• 1:21:58
  up brilliantly and then characters just wander around in
• 1:22:01
  that world for X extra episodes. But, but I think you're right,
• 1:22:06
  James, the the use of the word pathetic is right because I
• 1:22:09
  think his, his view of these characters, one of the, you can
• 1:22:12
  actually think again, you think about the historical nature of
• 1:22:15
  the Wild West. It was not a place anyone
• 1:22:16
  actually wanted to be who, who could avoid being there.
• 1:22:19
  You know, these were mining towns, These were cattle towns.
• 1:22:22
  They were, they were quite industrial and quite remote and
• 1:22:25
  quite, quite grimy. And, you know, people would move
• 1:22:30
  away in and out of them a lot, quite a lot by Tinuan
• 1:22:32
  travellers. And here the loop all the way
• 1:22:35
  back to the start. A little detail, he adds that's
• 1:22:37
  obviously not on screen is that when they arrive in Tombstone,
• 1:22:41
  it's raining. So it's from the start.
• 1:22:43
  It's just a grim place to be. And I think he does view all
• 1:22:48
  these, portrays all of this as being a little bit pathetic, but
• 1:22:52
  also pathetic a lot of the time. This is not a nice place to be.
• 1:22:55
  These are people who are scrapping and being horrible
• 1:22:57
  over nothing. You know, the fact, the fact
• 1:23:00
  that he gives Par Clanson that thing of wanting to be the mayor
• 1:23:04
  and you think the mayor of this. Why there we get we get a
• 1:23:08
  description of the Clanton ranch and it is utter.
• 1:23:11
  It is utterly horrible and miserable.
• 1:23:13
  And he's going out to his his wife's grave.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah, exactly. This is none of this is not.
• 1:23:19
  It's none of these, but there is.
• 1:23:21
  And perhaps. They're alive as well, which is.
• 1:23:24
  Yeah, and also, but there's that thing that, you know, one of the
• 1:23:28
  things about the, about the Westerners, they have become a
• 1:23:31
  sort of in the American context, almost a sort of foundational
• 1:23:34
  myth. You know, this, this is this is
• 1:23:37
  who we are. This is how we took law and
• 1:23:39
  order to, to, to the West in some people's minds.
• 1:23:42
  Not, not everyone, of course. And, and a lot of Westerns often
• 1:23:45
  come with with quite a lot of metaphor that we're some they're
• 1:23:48
  somehow saying something about, about America and who we are.
• 1:23:52
  But of course, this is a Western written on TV, shot and acted,
• 1:23:58
  but here certainly written by a Brit.
• 1:24:00
  So we're alien to this. And so of course it's a piss
• 1:24:03
  take. The whole thing is a is a
• 1:24:05
  massive piss take of American mythology in the same way that
• 1:24:08
  it did. I think ultimately his view of
• 1:24:10
  this is all of these people are gangsters, you know, none of
• 1:24:14
  these people. Would say the one person who's
• 1:24:17
  romanticized a little bit is Doc Holiday.
• 1:24:21
  Because he's a rogue. He's.
• 1:24:22
  Not a nice guy, but because. He's not the one character you
• 1:24:27
  have we have not sympathy for, but he wants us to like is the
• 1:24:31
  is the rogue is the chance the guy who's is the guy who's got
• 1:24:34
  to. Like him?
• 1:24:35
  We do like him, but it's it's it's interesting, isn't it, that
• 1:24:39
  you get a British right to doing this and it's not wire up, you
• 1:24:42
  know, it's not the Marshall of the West, the man who didn't get
• 1:24:44
  shot. It's it's the.
• 1:24:46
  Dentist. It's the guy who Doctor Who gets
• 1:24:49
  confused, gets confused for right, who runs off, who runs
• 1:24:52
  off with the girl having wheedled his way of danger and
• 1:24:55
  setting foot up against themselves.
• 1:24:56
  It's just so telling. I'm makes you proud to be
• 1:24:59
  British. I mean, you shouldn't like him,
• 1:25:01
  right? He literally sends the doctor
• 1:25:03
  off to die. We should really hate him.
• 1:25:06
  Do you know I've remembered little fact.
• 1:25:07
  Do you know who was on the list to potentially play Doc Holiday?
• 1:25:12
  They can they considered for the role 1 Patrick Troughton.
• 1:25:15
  Oh, I did know that. Yeah.
• 1:25:17
  That would have been intriguing, wouldn't it, Commander Maxill?
• 1:25:21
  I, yeah, I, I, I think that's absolutely right.
• 1:25:26
  That. And there's a point where the
• 1:25:27
  Clantons all the way through the Clantons are out for revenge for
• 1:25:30
  their brother. And there's a point very near
• 1:25:33
  the end where the Clantons go to power.
• 1:25:36
  Clanton's place seen not not seen on television and and they
• 1:25:41
  suddenly remember that they never liked their brother much
• 1:25:44
  at all and it's I think it's just saying they're not doing it
• 1:25:48
  out of revenge. They're doing it because they
• 1:25:50
  need to shoot some people. That's.
• 1:25:52
  Because they're in a Western. Exactly that.
• 1:25:58
  Well, what have we covered then? Come on, look at your notes.
• 1:26:02
  Tell me what we haven't covered. Well, for for those missing the
• 1:26:06
  myth makers and those of a classical bent, there is a
• 1:26:08
  little reference to Crimson Fingered Dawn.
• 1:26:11
  Oh, I thought that was. Gorgeous.
• 1:26:14
  It's a recurrent phrase from the If you ever actually read the
• 1:26:16
  Odyssey, you will get bloody bored.
• 1:26:18
  Which? Of course you have Michael
• 1:26:19
  Mills, haven't you? Yes, I have, but you'll get very
• 1:26:23
  bored of Rosy Finger Dawn and how often she turns up.
• 1:26:28
  James, anything we haven't covered?
• 1:26:30
  Well, I thought interesting comparison here is just the the
• 1:26:35
  way he chooses in in in different approaches to language
• 1:26:41
  to to describe the TARDIS, which of course is a completely alien
• 1:26:45
  object in either either in the context of the Wild West or the
• 1:26:51
  the Trojan War in the myth makers.
• 1:26:53
  He he describes it thus. I swear there came a noise
• 1:26:57
  reminiscent of a camel in the last stages of dementia,
• 1:27:00
  Preycox, and nowhere there appeared on the plains beside us
• 1:27:03
  a small dark blue building of indeterminate architecture.
• 1:27:07
  Whereas in the Gunfighters he gives us, the doctor was already
• 1:27:11
  clutching at an apparently haphazard selection of levers
• 1:27:13
  with the air and a demented xylophonist who finds he's
• 1:27:17
  brought along the wine list instead of the score.
• 1:27:21
  You know what I want? You to read this out, it sounds
• 1:27:23
  a bit like neurotic literature. Doesn't it?
• 1:27:27
  OK, well, I'll tell you what, right.
• 1:27:28
  Are you fired to such greatness? Will you boys do me a favour?
• 1:27:31
  Right, Look down at your nose because I know you would have
• 1:27:32
  written down a lot of jokes. A lot of gags.
• 1:27:35
  Yeah. Let's do a quick fire round of
• 1:27:38
  our favorite gags from the gunfires.
• 1:27:40
  I'll go first. Yeah.
• 1:27:42
  You have to sign the hotel book just in case I need to get into
• 1:27:45
  contact with your next of kin, Michael.
• 1:27:50
  Not a gag but I liked when it comes to the world W everyone is
• 1:27:54
  a boy at heart. James.
• 1:28:01
  The doctor presently noticed that the crowd carried Stephen.
• 1:28:04
  Trust like a rupture amongst them, just like trust like a
• 1:28:08
  rupture. Oh man, I think I may have said
• 1:28:12
  all my best jokes. Oh, I did like this.
• 1:28:14
  It's not a joke, but I just like because I just wish every
• 1:28:17
  character would say this to her. Meanwhile, you Miss Dodo would
• 1:28:20
  help considerably if you would kindly button your flapping lip.
• 1:28:29
  So being a girl who had always known which side her bed was
• 1:28:32
  bartered, she said. Oh, sorry, I didn't hear you
• 1:28:36
  then. Can you say that again?
• 1:28:38
  So being a girl who had always known which side her bed was
• 1:28:42
  bartered. Confound the man, objected the
• 1:28:45
  doctor. Here's the cause of this whole
• 1:28:47
  intolerable imbroglio. I'm going to give you the whole
• 1:28:55
  of this paragraph because I because I love it.
• 1:28:57
  I have quoted from it already, but it's the one about Paul,
• 1:29:03
  Paul Clanton's wife. You can still see her temporary
• 1:29:12
  grave near the blocked overflow from the hog # if you weren't
• 1:29:15
  careful. And along about now of an
• 1:29:19
  evening. It was the old man's habit to
• 1:29:20
  wander gladly down there and getting some spitting practice.
• 1:29:24
  A thing hadn't hardly got enough of when she was alive.
• 1:29:29
  I like the description of Doc Holiday's a second selection of
• 1:29:34
  curious implements, gleaming, it seemed to him with anticipation.
• 1:29:41
  Oh, and I'm sorry, the bit before that still on Park
• 1:29:44
  Lantern, his wife. Park Lantern claimed he had kept
• 1:29:48
  it that way in memory of his wife, God Rest her Tongue, whose
• 1:29:51
  early death had followed hard upon her premature burial back
• 1:29:53
  in 75. Oh, that is with the flickering
• 1:29:57
  Hellfire eye of a misogynist Methodist preacher.
• 1:30:01
  Oh, and Dodo looked like the proprietors of a broken down cat
• 1:30:05
  house in one of the less select quarters of New Orleans.
• 1:30:09
  I mean, it's just one banger after another, isn't it?
• 1:30:13
  It's, it's, it's overly generous in some ways, isn't it, When you
• 1:30:17
  think about what's up? Well, they've got some of the
• 1:30:19
  60s writers back to write up their old scripts, what some of
• 1:30:21
  them got a check for, and then you've got this, are you?
• 1:30:25
  Talking about Jerry Davis there, Michael.
• 1:30:28
  I'm not naming names. Is him whose idea of updating
• 1:30:33
  your script was to have Ben watch a more recent James Bond
• 1:30:36
  movie. Oh, I'm trying to see if I've
• 1:30:41
  got any more. The doctor was as jubilant as if
• 1:30:44
  he'd just discovered El Dorado, the shining city of legend.
• 1:30:48
  There you are. What did I tell you?
• 1:30:50
  Civilization at last. I've just got one quote after
• 1:30:54
  another. James anymore.
• 1:30:56
  Carnation blazes he's not. I know you would.
• 1:30:58
  His first choice of exclamation out of deference to the all
• 1:31:01
  female company. Ma'am, it would.
• 1:31:03
  I'll behold me to accuse a well brought up little lady like your
• 1:31:06
  sweet self of concealing wildies in her mentionables.
• 1:31:10
  But then don't, said Dodo. Put up or shut up.
• 1:31:13
  Want some more, lady? I got no more you just clean me
• 1:31:16
  out. The doctor stormed off to keep
• 1:31:21
  his appointment. With history and to redecorate
• 1:31:23
  the annals of the Golden West while he was about it.
• 1:31:26
  Oh listen to this dodo. I've always wanted to be a gym
• 1:31:29
  palace. Tootsie, you stay where you are,
• 1:31:33
  Doc Holiday said his beloved Kate snapping like an angry
• 1:31:36
  Garter. Oh, I couldn't believe this.
• 1:31:40
  I could not believe. I'm sorry, doc, but I've got to
• 1:31:42
  take you in. I'm not taken in for one moment.
• 1:31:49
  This deserves to be reissued, doesn't it?
• 1:31:51
  Why is this not still available you?
• 1:31:53
  Could do a Don Cotton trilogy, couldn't they?
• 1:31:56
  They could put. Michael, can I ask you a
• 1:31:59
  question? Yeah.
• 1:32:01
  Because we were never down to do the gunfires.
• 1:32:04
  What on earth possessed you to listen to the audio of it?
• 1:32:08
  Well, it was when I listened to your your terribly good episode
• 1:32:10
  on time in the Rani and towards the end you said we should do
• 1:32:14
  gun fighters next time. I I saw, I saw an in No, I
• 1:32:18
  thought, I thought, you know, I haven't.
• 1:32:20
  I've never read the gun fighters and the audio book is on
• 1:32:24
  Spotify, so I've listened to that.
• 1:32:25
  So I'm prepared for it. And I just ended up with so many
• 1:32:28
  notes written down. But I was just texting you the
• 1:32:31
  whole time and presumably without checking with James
• 1:32:33
  first. You invited me on.
• 1:32:35
  So thank you. Thank.
• 1:32:36
  You. I did.
• 1:32:37
  Check with James. How dare you, James?
• 1:32:41
  Did I ask you? I think you said I'm going to do
• 1:32:43
  it with Michael whether or not you want to be on it so.
• 1:32:46
  You. Bitch.
• 1:32:50
  Well, OK, let's bring this. To you one last thing, because.
• 1:32:54
  Yes, please. Possibly the.
• 1:32:55
  First book club I ever did with you.
• 1:32:56
  I brought up Malcolm Hulk could put in an unwise and not
• 1:33:00
  terribly successful Doctor Who Who joke.
• 1:33:04
  I think the Time Lords say something like so who is he?
• 1:33:07
  And one of them says exactly. And the target novelizations are
• 1:33:12
  littered with such attempts to make mileage out of the title of
• 1:33:17
  the show. And I feel like Don Cotton has
• 1:33:19
  maybe been observing this because when he's introduced to
• 1:33:24
  Bat masts and Bat enquires Doctor Who and the Doctor says
• 1:33:30
  precisely. And he looked at the others for
• 1:33:32
  approval. He was disappointed, of course,
• 1:33:35
  but he was used to that by now. Yes, very knowing well.
• 1:33:43
  Last minute thoughts sent on the gunfires as a whole.
• 1:33:46
  I mean, you loved it, right? We all loved it.
• 1:33:48
  We all had a great time with it, James.
• 1:33:51
  I think, I think I agree with your assessment that this is
• 1:33:57
  Cotton's most successful novelization.
• 1:34:01
  I think it takes the formula of the Myth Makers and builds on
• 1:34:05
  it. I think it's, I think joke for
• 1:34:08
  joke, it's funnier than the Myth Makers novelization.
• 1:34:11
  I think it's less of a Doctor Who story at the end of the day
• 1:34:16
  and I still feel like the Myth Makers is better.
• 1:34:19
  I do too. This is a more successful
• 1:34:23
  attempt at the same way of telling a story.
• 1:34:25
  I feel like the Myth Makers has got a bit more heart,
• 1:34:28
  particularly because of the way that it drags you into the final
• 1:34:31
  act. What?
• 1:34:32
  Do you think the myth makers has got over the gunfighters?
• 1:34:34
  We've all said that, that then you know, the idea of the doctor
• 1:34:36
  rolling up into town and being mistaken for Doc Holiday?
• 1:34:39
  Well, the myth makers, the doctors mistaken for God, You
• 1:34:42
  can't get better than that. Well, I wouldn't want to lose
• 1:34:45
  the gunfighters in the form that we have it, and I wouldn't want
• 1:34:48
  to lose the Romans in the form that we have it.
• 1:34:50
  And I'm so glad that he did the Romans in in that way.
• 1:34:53
  I think The Romans is a thrilling read, and I'm glad
• 1:34:57
  that we've got all three Don Cotton novelizations.
• 1:35:00
  I think we're so lucky to have them.
• 1:35:02
  And I think all three of them stand out as as three of the
• 1:35:06
  pinnacles of the target range. Doing all three of them in such
• 1:35:10
  quick succession, I then just started thinking about other
• 1:35:13
  books in the target range that could have been written with
• 1:35:16
  this sort of flair and, and, and just sort of shaking it up a bit
• 1:35:20
  and, and not just doing that script page.
• 1:35:25
  It made me feel like there was a bit of a lost opportunity in
• 1:35:28
  that range. Michael the gunfires.
• 1:35:31
  Yeah, absolutely. It's wonderful.
• 1:35:33
  And thank you for, for prompting me to, to, to, to actually
• 1:35:38
  listen to it or read it. I think not only did I really
• 1:35:41
  enjoy it as a as a book itself and it it is incredibly funny,
• 1:35:45
  but I think it's it's everything I want to target to be at heart,
• 1:35:49
  which is the opportunity to go back to the the treating the
• 1:35:54
  original TV version as being imperfect that any any TV story
• 1:35:58
  will be. And give it a chance to look
• 1:35:59
  again at and say, what was I trying to do with that story?
• 1:36:03
  What was what was the thing that set that story apart from all of
• 1:36:06
  the others? And how can I do that even more?
• 1:36:08
  How can I draw that out in in book form?
• 1:36:11
  And I think that's what the best targets, the most rewarding
• 1:36:13
  targets really to he doesn't feel confined in any way.
• 1:36:17
  It feels like he's gone great, brilliant.
• 1:36:19
  I can do this again and do this even better.
• 1:36:21
  And he both into his, you know, plot mechanics, the ways we
• 1:36:25
  should talk about bringing the Doctor and the others into the
• 1:36:27
  climax more. But also just in terms of the
• 1:36:29
  things that sets it apart. All of the things that maybe
• 1:36:32
  people didn't get that the gun fighters was trying to do.
• 1:36:34
  As James said, partly through delivery and partly just
• 1:36:36
  through, you know, everything in terms of production and
• 1:36:39
  realization really comes out here.
• 1:36:42
  And it has such a rich flavour to it.
• 1:36:46
  And it stands a part, you know, Doctor Who's been going for,
• 1:36:48
  for, you know, how many years and 60 plus years and to have a
• 1:36:52
  story that feels different and it feels truly itself.
• 1:36:56
  If that's not a rubbish way of putting it, that is articulating
• 1:37:00
  something unique within Doctor Who in terms of its founder
• 1:37:05
  thing that no other Doctor Who story has done.
• 1:37:06
  And I'm going to approach it in this way and, and really run
• 1:37:11
  with it. And this does it really well,
• 1:37:12
  which I, I love so much more than than obviously some
• 1:37:16
  targets, especially in the 70s. They're just direct
• 1:37:18
  translations. They're almost a different
• 1:37:20
  thing, but some others are almost trying to bring in things
• 1:37:24
  that are different, that aren't, are not the same, or just trying
• 1:37:26
  to make things more adult. This is I think all three of
• 1:37:30
  Donald Cotton's novelizations are better than the TV stories
• 1:37:32
  they're based on. And I think this is the one that
• 1:37:37
  is the most conspicuous glow up because it makes me not only do
• 1:37:41
  I like this more than the TV version, it makes me like the TV
• 1:37:43
  version more than I did before I read it.
• 1:37:48
  I mean, it's a goddamn miracle for me because it made me like a
• 1:37:50
  Western and I hate westerns. And from the second you set foot
• 1:37:57
  in that town, you just feel like you're there, don't you?
• 1:37:59
  You're immersed in that scuzzy lowlife town.
• 1:38:03
  It's a wonderful place, to be honest.
• 1:38:05
  I keep saying this, it's just so funny.
• 1:38:09
  But it's not all obvious gags. It's very sophisticated humour
• 1:38:14
  delivered just with such weight on the page.
• 1:38:18
  No cow has written three Doctor Who books for us and it's an
• 1:38:22
  absolute delight. How?
• 1:38:25
  Would your grandmother have made of the gunfighters?
• 1:38:27
  Oh, she would have hated it. It had the words Doctor Who.
• 1:38:31
  Ralph, she go. If I have to listen to that
• 1:38:32
  bloody theme tune one more time, no, she wouldn't have had any of
• 1:38:36
  it. There's presumably all sorts of
• 1:38:39
  Western TV fans who are going well.
• 1:38:41
  It's not proper TV Western because it's not taking it
• 1:38:44
  seriously. But is that the problem?
• 1:38:46
  Like, because people that like Westerns are like, well, this is
• 1:38:48
  a comedy Doctor Who Westerns and people are like Doctor Who.
• 1:38:51
  It's like Doctor Who as a comedy Western.
• 1:38:53
  Who is this appealing to? But that's the thing though,
• 1:38:55
  this is the reason you can do this with the gun fighters.
• 1:38:57
  You couldn't like, say he'd written a story about Asian
• 1:39:00
  core, right? You couldn't have done this
• 1:39:02
  exact same approach because everybody knows about Westerns.
• 1:39:05
  Westerns, I'm going to say, are one of the five main genres.
• 1:39:08
  It's Westerns, pirates, murders, space and Wizards, right?
• 1:39:12
  So everybody who, even if they don't like them, they know
• 1:39:15
  what's involved with those genres.
• 1:39:18
  So you can do a book where you just go, hey everybody, we've
• 1:39:21
  got the Statsons on this week. What baffles me though, is that
• 1:39:23
  fan reaction to the gunfires on TV and a book really didn't have
• 1:39:27
  much of a chance because it's reputation was in the gutter
• 1:39:30
  because of what they put on the telly.
• 1:39:32
  It's just so well executed. It's for the most part,
• 1:39:35
  especially the regulars, it's so well performed, you know, and
• 1:39:40
  it's so I just don't understand. I don't understand what those
• 1:39:43
  people were seeing. It's a delight and the book is
• 1:39:46
  even more of a delight. So fandoms just shit, isn't it?
• 1:39:53
  Let's be honest. Well, fellas, I mean, what a
• 1:39:56
  delightful time we've had here. Well, I'm going to ask you the
• 1:39:58
  question, where are we heading next?
• 1:40:01
  Now, I believe, I believe the book we're covering next was on
• 1:40:06
  both of your top ten lists, which is why we're coming
• 1:40:12
  together to talk about it. Michael, take it away.
• 1:40:16
  We are diving even further back into myth and legends, into the
• 1:40:20
  very dark ages. We will cross dimensions and the
• 1:40:24
  Doctor's own time stream. Long before Steven Moffat had
• 1:40:28
  given up teaching, we had timey wimey Doctor Who.
• 1:40:32
  For the Highlander generation, we are doing Doctor Who
• 1:40:36
  Battlefield. Oh.
• 1:40:38
  Shame. Oh, it's going to be wonderful.
• 1:40:41
  Now I've got a confession. I've never read it.
• 1:40:44
  This will be. This will be.
• 1:40:46
  My first read. Of Battlefield and of course
• 1:40:49
  I've heard good things from about 5 separate people now on
• 1:40:53
  their top ten lists for ATV story that's maybe not held in
• 1:40:58
  higher. Is this?
• 1:40:59
  Is this the all time blow up from TV to book?
• 1:41:03
  Certainly another conspicuous blow up.
• 1:41:06
  Yeah, and another one where you get the impression, although
• 1:41:08
  it's not the author of the original version, someone who is
• 1:41:11
  really, again, really grabbing what that flawed TV version
• 1:41:15
  wanted to be and going. All right, now I've got.
• 1:41:18
  Now I've got the budget and the time.
• 1:41:20
  Well, what if you do a bit of investigation, please, before we
• 1:41:23
  talk about this, to find out precisely why?
• 1:41:27
  Because he novelized Remembrance of the Daleks.
• 1:41:29
  Ben Eronovich chose not to do this, I think.
• 1:41:31
  You can guess, can't we? Was a bit embarrassed by what
• 1:41:34
  hit the screen. Eronovich was had found the
• 1:41:38
  whole experience of battlefield soul destroying and and when you
• 1:41:42
  hear him talk about it to this day, he's quite down on it and
• 1:41:45
  he's down. Go listen to the commentary,
• 1:41:47
  James. He's he, he gets told off,
• 1:41:49
  doesn't he? And.
• 1:41:50
  By Angela Bruce tells Andrew Cartmel This is one of the best
• 1:41:55
  jobs I ever had. Will you 2 please leave?
• 1:41:58
  I think he, I think it just in, in the way that Remembrance of
• 1:42:02
  the Daleks did all of his ideas always better than he was
• 1:42:06
  expecting because he wasn't expecting them to land a
• 1:42:07
  spaceship in the playground. Battlefield was all of his ideas
• 1:42:11
  falling short and they didn't get what he wanted.
• 1:42:13
  And the, The funny thing for me is that I came to Battlefield
• 1:42:18
  the other way around. I read the novelization first
• 1:42:20
  and then I saw it on TV. So what I saw on TV was informed
• 1:42:23
  by the richness of the of the novel.
• 1:42:25
  So although are you disappointed?
• 1:42:27
  No, because I can, I can see that it's not as good and some
• 1:42:30
  of the scenes are not as as well crafted as they are in the book,
• 1:42:33
  because the book goes back to the script and the intention.
• 1:42:37
  I, I, I know what he intended because I'd read the book and,
• 1:42:40
  and it's got Knights and swords and lots of explosions and a
• 1:42:45
  nuclear missile in a lake. What's more do you want?
• 1:42:48
  I've been seduced by Marva half, who as is his favorite Sylvester
• 1:42:52
  McCoy story, Battlefield. And you know, I came into this
• 1:42:55
  relationship loathing it and now I've seen it so many times, done
• 1:42:58
  the commentary with him. I rather love it now so.
• 1:43:02
  What's not to love? 1 So isn't it?
• 1:43:04
  Yeah, yeah. It was some of those fabulous
• 1:43:06
  side characters that don't need to be there at all, but they're
• 1:43:09
  a lot of. Anyway, we're doing the episode
• 1:43:11
  now. Good grief.
• 1:43:14
  What's 11? We've made it on time.
• 1:43:16
  We've made it on time. Thank you very much, gentlemen.
• 1:43:20
  I believe this is the first time the three of us, just the three
• 1:43:23
  of us, have been together. We did it strictly, didn't we?
• 1:43:27
  We had a fault there as well. Until we reconvene again and
• 1:43:31
  discuss Merlin, Arthurian legend and spaceships under the sea.
• 1:43:37
  Boom, Michael. What's a What's a cowboy say
• 1:43:44
  when they leave? The.
• 1:44:49
  Yeah.