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Hamster Book Club - Borrowed Time by Naomi Alderman (featuring Iain Martin) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:01
  Do you know what this is? No, of course you don't.
• 0:03
  Why would you? You just let anyone at all put
• 0:05
  any kind of temporal engineering device on your wrist, I suppose.
• 0:07
  Probably do it all the time. This is a time harvester device.
• 0:11
  It's a parasite, or it's a very small element of a parasitic
• 0:15
  Organism. Leave it on there much longer
• 0:17
  and it'll start sucking the time right out of you.
• 0:19
  And you really wouldn't want that to happen, believe me.
• 0:24
  It was pacing agitatedly, waving his hands in the air and rubbing
• 0:28
  his forehead. But Doctor, it's OK, Amy said.
• 0:32
  It hasn't taken any time away from me.
• 0:35
  In fact, it's sort of the other way around.
• 0:37
  It lets me borrow time, Doctor, as much as I want, but I've only
• 0:41
  borrowed about four days. The interest is only about 8
• 0:44
  hours. It's nothing.
• 0:46
  The Doctor stopped pacing. He turned towards her.
• 0:50
  Say that again, I've only borrowed 4 days.
• 0:55
  The other bit. His face was very grim.
• 0:59
  The interest is only about 8 hours.
• 1:04
  Did you say interest? Yes, she said, and her voice was
• 1:09
  very small. The Doctor rested his forehead
• 1:13
  on hers, just for a moment. He spoke very quietly.
• 1:18
  Oh, Amy, it's very bad. I don't know how to make it
• 1:21
  better. He pulled her wrist again,
• 1:25
  pressed a button or two on the watch.
• 1:27
  A display came up, projected out of the watch into the air in
• 1:30
  glowing orange letters. Borrowed time total four days,
• 1:36
  three hours. See, said Amy, wriggling her
• 1:40
  wrist to try to get out of his grasp.
• 1:43
  That's what I said. Four days, 5 minutes.
• 1:46
  Entrust on the hour, 8 hours in total.
• 1:48
  It's fine, I'll pay it back. Now if you'll just let me press
• 1:52
  the She reached for the button that Symington and Blankensop
• 1:55
  had shown her fee pay back the time you've borrowed button.
• 1:59
  They'd warned her it might make her feel a bit tired, all that
• 2:02
  time coming off her lifespan in one go, but better that than
• 2:06
  having the doctor fussing over her anymore.
• 2:08
  No, Shouted the doctor and wrenched her wrist around so she
• 2:12
  couldn't reach it. Ow, you're hurting me.
• 2:16
  Not as much as it'll hurt if you try and pay that time back.
• 2:19
  Look, just look at the interest. The display changed.
• 2:24
  Interest terms 5 minutes per hour per hour.
• 2:29
  That's what I said, said Amy. No, you said 5 minutes per hour.
• 2:35
  That's what it says. No.
• 2:39
  The Doctor wheeled around and grabbed a magic marker from the
• 2:41
  table. It says 5 minutes per hour per
• 2:45
  hour. Totally different thing.
• 2:47
  If you promise not to touch that watch, I'll explain.
• 2:49
  Do you promise not to touch it? Yes.
• 2:53
  Right. Look, he started to draw on the
• 2:56
  glass wall overlooking the atrium. 5 minutes per hour,
• 3:00
  right? So you've borrowed 99 hours.
• 3:03
  Call it 100. Make the sums easier. 5 * 100 is
• 3:07
  500, said Amy, somewhat sullenly.
• 3:11
  That means, you know, 500 minutes.
• 3:13
  Interest. Yes, yes.
• 3:16
  No, no, no, because it's not 5 minutes per hour, it's 5 minutes
• 3:22
  per hour every hour. Oh.
• 3:27
  Amy started to have a sinking feeling, the feeling that she'd
• 3:30
  done something really stupid. Doctor, do you mean that I've
• 3:35
  been adding five for every hour I've borrowed every hour since I
• 3:39
  borrowed it? Yes, but I know what you're
• 3:42
  thinking, Amy. You're thinking 5 minutes per
• 3:45
  hour every hour. That's 5 * 100 * 100.
• 3:50
  He wrote the sum up on the glass wall, which is 50,000.
• 3:56
  I owe 50,000 minutes. Oh, Amy, if only.
• 4:00
  If only you only owed 50,000 minutes, that'd only be 35 days.
• 4:04
  You could pay that back now and not really notice.
• 4:07
  Might feel a bit sleepy. Cup of coffee.
• 4:08
  You'd be fine, Amy. They charge interest on the
• 4:11
  interest. But it can't be that much more.
• 4:14
  Can a doctor? Can't be that much more, Can't
• 4:17
  be that much more. Don't they teach you anything in
• 4:19
  school? This is compound interest.
• 4:22
  Interest on the interest. He stared at her.
• 4:26
  She looked back blankly. Compound interest pond.
• 4:30
  This is the concept that built banks and empires.
• 4:32
  This is what means people don't pay off the credit cards.
• 4:35
  This is the concept that keeps poor people poor and rich people
• 4:38
  rich on your benighted, glorious planet.
• 4:41
  It's look. See this cake?
• 4:44
  He pointed at the enormous cake in the centre of the table.
• 4:47
  Yes, I see the cake. I understand cake, right?
• 4:52
  The Doctor cut a slice of cake. Look at the cake.
• 4:55
  Focused on the cake. The cake.
• 4:56
  This yellow part is the hour of time you've borrowed, and the
• 5:00
  icing is the interest. Get it?
• 5:02
  Yep. OK, so that's after one hour.
• 5:05
  Now let's borrow another hour. He cut another slice of cake.
• 5:09
  This is your new borrowing cake, plus the interest icing.
• 5:13
  Plus, you owe an extra slice of icing because you've got two
• 5:17
  slices of cake, right? Every hour you have to pay one
• 5:20
  slice of icing for every slice of cake you've borrowed. 2
• 5:24
  hours, 2 slices of icing. He made a gentle incision on top
• 5:28
  of the cake and cut off an extra triangular piece of soft
• 5:31
  chocolate icing, leaving the cake partly boiled.
• 5:35
  Doctor, you're ruining that cake.
• 5:37
  We'll get another 110. They're delicious.
• 5:39
  Anyway, look. He put the icing wobbling
• 5:42
  chocolatey on top of the second piece of cake.
• 5:46
  Now that's what you owe. Now let's borrow another hour.
• 5:50
  He cuts another slice of cake with the icing.
• 5:53
  Now the interest. He cut two more pieces of rich
• 5:57
  brown icing and piled them on top of the second piece of cake.
• 6:01
  Careful, Doctor, that cake's almost more icing than cake now.
• 6:04
  The Doctor grabbed Amy's shoulders and stared her hard in
• 6:07
  the eyes. That is precisely the point.
• 6:11
  Let's borrow another hour. He cut another piece and cut
• 6:15
  three more pieces of icing. He piled up all the extra icing
• 6:19
  together with the icing he'd already cut.
• 6:22
  There's a whole extra piece of cake just made of icing, said
• 6:25
  Amy. Yes, the Doctor cut another
• 6:29
  piece. There are five pieces of cake, 5
• 6:32
  slices of icing. But look at the slice entirely
• 6:35
  made out of icing. Oh, right.
• 6:38
  Well, if that counts as a piece of 6.
• 6:41
  So we have to cut an extra slice of icing looking.
• 6:44
  It's a big cake, but six slices of icing is practically a whole
• 6:50
  extra piece. That means now every time I
• 6:52
  borrow another slice, I end up getting a whole extra slice just
• 6:57
  made of icing. The doctor nodded slowly.
• 7:01
  The interest goes up much faster than your actual borrowings.
• 7:04
  Once an hour, a slice of icing for every hour you've borrowed.
• 7:07
  That's a lot of icing. That's how compound interest
• 7:11
  works. Eventually the icing you have to
• 7:13
  pay on. The icing is thousands of times
• 7:15
  more than the cake. So how much time do I owe with
• 7:20
  the compound interest? He worked it out for her.
• 7:24
  She must have made a mistake, Doctor.
• 7:27
  He shook his head. But I only borrowed 4 days,
• 7:31
  Doctor. She kept staring at the number
• 7:34
  written on the wall. She owed Symington and
• 7:37
  Blankensop 10 years. 10 years. Hamster Book Club, The Doctor
• 8:01
  Who Novel Review Podcast with Joe Ford and Ian Martin.
• 8:13
  Borrowed Time by Naomi Alderman. Welcome back to the hamster book
• 8:25
  club my I forgot what it was called then for a.
• 8:27
  Second, I could tell. I could tell.
• 8:29
  There's several arms for hamster now.
• 8:31
  My name is Joe Ford and I have been sitting here waiting for
• 8:37
  the delirious Ian Martin to appear on this podcast.
• 8:40
  I've been here ever since I started over a year now.
• 8:44
  Hello Ian, how are you today? Hello Joe, I'm really good.
• 8:48
  Thank you very much for having me on your book podcast.
• 8:52
  It's it's nice to do something different with your with your
• 8:54
  spare time, isn't it? I can't, I can't really forget
• 8:59
  the last time you and I got together where, you know, we
• 9:03
  talked less about the book in question and more about a
• 9:06
  particular passage of that book, if you recall.
• 9:09
  I do remember that passage fondly and intimately.
• 9:12
  Scaly rictus sax. Sax descending tubular shafts?
• 9:20
  No. That was in my Coldfield record.
• 9:23
  Yeah, no. I've got to tell you something
• 9:26
  as well, one of my book clubs said glamouring to do God Engine
• 9:30
  because two of three of them love it.
• 9:33
  I mean, I know, right? Well, the the what we find with
• 9:39
  the books is that they speak to different kinds of readers and
• 9:44
  some people are very much there for the continuity and the real
• 9:47
  world aspect of it. And of course, in the real
• 9:50
  world, Ice Warriors would definitely shag.
• 9:54
  Indeed. So I've got to really try not to
• 9:57
  just laugh. Every time you open your
• 9:58
  everything you say it makes me laugh.
• 10:00
  You know, I'm going to try and compose myself on this
• 10:02
  recording. OK.
• 10:05
  Ian, we're here today to talk about Oh no it isn't.
• 10:08
  Oh no, we're not. We were here to talk about Oh no
• 10:12
  it isn't. Yeah, yeah.
• 10:15
  And then, and then you, you, you said you've given it to someone
• 10:19
  else. Yeah, It's that Michael Mills,
• 10:21
  you know? Oh, him.
• 10:22
  Well, I'll, I'll, I'll be having him on on my show at some point.
• 10:25
  So I'll I'll take him to task. I shall listen to that episode.
• 10:31
  I'll take him firmly in hand, OK?
• 10:34
  Extreme interest. Have we got here already?
• 10:38
  Instead of that, we are doing Borrowed time.
• 10:41
  By Naomi Alderman The Renowned The renowned Is it the only
• 10:46
  doctor? Who writer that has got on to
• 10:49
  become an international bestseller?
• 10:53
  I, I think it probably is. I mean she, so I mean, my
• 11:00
  relationship with Naomi Alderman is that I started she, she wrote
• 11:05
  for an app about 20 years ago called Zombies Run.
• 11:08
  Have you heard of that? No, so it's like an audio drama
• 11:12
  designed for people that that go running and at certain points in
• 11:16
  the IT basically it's the the end of the world has happened
• 11:20
  and there are zombies everywhere and you're a lone survivor.
• 11:23
  So you've got this voice in your ear saying you have to go to the
• 11:28
  storage unit in the woods and get some food.
• 11:32
  As you set off, you hear the sound of and then every time you
• 11:37
  hear the sound of a zombie, you have to kind of speed up, which
• 11:41
  is a really good way of doing interval running if you're.
• 11:44
  But the problem is I used to do it indoors on a treadmill and a
• 11:48
  treadmill does not accelerate fast enough.
• 11:50
  So I was always getting killed by this like twat of a zombie
• 11:55
  about 3 minutes into my run. It was, it was, it was all
• 11:58
  awful. Does it know how fast you're
• 12:00
  running then so the zombie catches up with you?
• 12:02
  It does because it's linked to the and I forget the word, but
• 12:06
  the little movie thing in your phone that registers your
• 12:09
  movement it's. Such a clever idea to.
• 12:13
  Get it was it was great it's I think I assume it's still
• 12:16
  available I'd be very disappointed if it wasn't and
• 12:19
  it's very good for making people do you know speed up speed down
• 12:22
  interval running and just and breaking it up a bit when.
• 12:25
  Those, those Pokemons were everywhere.
• 12:28
  You know when everyone had the maps out on their phone and
• 12:30
  everyone was it's, oh, was that you?
• 12:32
  No, it wasn't me, no. Well, everybody I knew seemed to
• 12:35
  be out, you know, down the pier, down the beach, down, you know,
• 12:39
  the toilets in the park looking for.
• 12:42
  Is that what they said they were doing?
• 12:43
  Looking for Pokémon? But it was the same sort of
• 12:46
  thing, right? So getting people moving.
• 12:48
  Yeah, getting people moving. And it's at this point in our
• 12:51
  civilization, it's anything you can do to get people moving and
• 12:56
  and get some exercising because we're all so busy.
• 12:59
  We are increasingly an indoors kind of species now.
• 13:03
  It's, it's kind of a familiar and probably completely wrong
• 13:07
  trope, but I get the feeling that like my nephews growing up
• 13:11
  just didn't play outside very much.
• 13:13
  And they're just, they're indoor people.
• 13:15
  They're sort of pallid, like Gollum.
• 13:17
  They look like sort of half fish, half fish.
• 13:19
  My nephew, right, sits in his bedroom playing computer games
• 13:23
  with his friends who are in their bedrooms.
• 13:25
  Yeah. That's what.
• 13:26
  Always has. They're basically fucking
• 13:28
  Cybermen. Yeah, that's it.
• 13:30
  And and and that's why zombies run was a good thing to continue
• 13:35
  with Naomi all Yeah, please. The next time I was aware of her
• 13:39
  was in about 2016, when her novel The Power got onto Obama's
• 13:46
  list of his favorite books of the year, and it became a sort
• 13:50
  of global literary novel. Now, in the in the kind of
• 13:53
  median point between zombies Run and The Power becoming a global
• 13:56
  literary sensation, she wrote Borrowed Time, which presumably,
• 14:02
  I'm very much assuming was her first book.
• 14:06
  I'm not quite sure how she managed to write it because I
• 14:09
  don't recall exactly when they advertised for, you know,
• 14:14
  writers to come to this series, but, you know, whatever do.
• 14:18
  You know what this was? This was, you know, when they
• 14:21
  used to bring out the new series Adventures in batches of Free.
• 14:24
  And this was a trilogy of Naomi Alderman, Jonathan Morris is
• 14:29
  Touched by an Angel and Una Mccormack's The Way Through the
• 14:33
  Woods. And I think they may have peaked
• 14:35
  there, you know? I was, I was going to say, was
• 14:37
  that as good as it got? Pretty much, yeah.
• 14:41
  I've read some of the others. They held us great.
• 14:43
  If I want this, well, look before, before we get onto the
• 14:46
  book itself, can I ask you a question please that I'd like to
• 14:51
  ask everybody who comes on this for the first time?
• 14:53
  I'm not wearing any. Are you not?
• 14:55
  No, never am I. Oh, what is your Doctor Who book
• 15:02
  journey? I sort of have pieced together
• 15:04
  bits and pieces from where all stories in the end where you
• 15:08
  talk about sort of the new adventure, things like that.
• 15:10
  But like, what was your first Doctor Who book and then where
• 15:12
  did you go from there? What a lovely question.
• 15:16
  Well, settle down everyone. I'm going to be talking for some
• 15:19
  time. My first Doctor Who book was
• 15:24
  Eric Pringle's The Awakening, which my dad gave me the the
• 15:29
  paperback target of probably, you know, very soon after it was
• 15:35
  published, 838485, something like that.
• 15:40
  And I think it was the first time I'd been aware that Doctor
• 15:43
  Who stories had been turned into books.
• 15:46
  And I was the sort of kid who read quite a lot.
• 15:49
  So I was delighted to learn that there was Doctor Who available
• 15:52
  in book form, and over the next sort of year or three, that one
• 15:59
  target book turned into about 100 of them, and I would reread
• 16:04
  them over and over again. Money did you get?
• 16:07
  Well not a lot, I mean I but a lot of them were from a second
• 16:09
  hand shop on like on the Hill 40P ago and they were all you
• 16:13
  know, really brown paper, quite smelly.
• 16:16
  Did you say on the Hill then? Yes, I was going to, I was going
• 16:19
  to specify exactly which Hill, it's East Hill in Colchester,
• 16:23
  but I figured that's slightly too much information and it's
• 16:26
  minutiae that your listeners really don't need.
• 16:28
  You know that a Hovis advert where the kid runs up the hill?
• 16:31
  I could just see you right enough to get your.
• 16:34
  Yeah, I'd, I'd save my lunch mate.
• 16:37
  I didn't have any food. So I had enough money to buy a
• 16:40
  Doctor Who book instead. And yeah, I used to, I used to
• 16:43
  go there and buy all the targets.
• 16:45
  I'd read them. I sometimes I'd read them in
• 16:49
  like I'd read exactly 1 television episodes worth and
• 16:52
  I'd sort of hum the music to myself while I was, you know,
• 16:55
  putting the book away. Some, you know, I'd read the
• 16:57
  whole season over the summer. I'd read, you know, all of
• 17:00
  season 1 or all of season 24 or whatever.
• 17:03
  I used to love the Target books and then they finished the show
• 17:07
  finished in 1989 and on being, I suppose, let's say, fairly
• 17:14
  immature, I still had this big hole in my life that Doctor Who,
• 17:18
  you know, should be filling So. So then the new adventures
• 17:22
  happened in the summer of 91 and I'm.
• 17:25
  Not sure you should be casting stones, you know, at your
• 17:28
  younger self. You're still reading Doctor Who
• 17:31
  books right now, all. Right.
• 17:32
  I'm still intensely mature in in about 30 seconds, I'm going to
• 17:36
  use the word shaft and we're both going to giggle.
• 17:39
  That's how immature I am now. So, so I read the new adventures
• 17:44
  religiously all the way from kind of secondary school through
• 17:47
  sixth form through uni. And then they finished and I was
• 17:52
  spat out into the grown up world of work and suddenly money was
• 17:56
  slightly more. Hideous, isn't it?
• 17:59
  It's oh, it's terrible, it's terrible.
• 18:02
  And at that point the BBC book started.
• 18:05
  So I hadn't, I had much less money and they weren't as good
• 18:11
  in, in and everyone says this, everyone says it on my show,
• 18:13
  everyone probably says it on yours.
• 18:15
  That first 5 or 6 BBC books, oh, they were shite.
• 18:20
  So I kind of let it go and read intermittently those books from
• 18:24
  the library. And when the show came back in
• 18:29
  2005, I was quite happy to leave the books in the past because
• 18:32
  they'd done their job. They'd got me through.
• 18:35
  They'd kept the story going. But now the show was back on TV.
• 18:38
  So at that point I kind of stopped reading any of the the
• 18:42
  new fiction at all. Yeah.
• 18:51
  A lot of people on this podcast would say that that was a good
• 18:53
  move as well. Really, you know, sort of
• 18:55
  ducking out at that point because I don't even know.
• 18:57
  They're not really for ours. Are they?
• 18:59
  Like those books? They're not.
• 19:00
  They are tie in. Books for younger children,
• 19:04
  Yeah, Which is exactly what they should be.
• 19:06
  Yeah, it's exactly what they should be.
• 19:08
  And that's exactly the job they do.
• 19:11
  And you would question if you were, if you were.
• 19:15
  Let me think. They were BBC books, weren't
• 19:17
  they? So it's technically part of PRH,
• 19:20
  Penguin Random House, and any publisher worth their salt who
• 19:25
  wasn't publishing books aimed at children at that point would be,
• 19:29
  you know, quietly taken to the corner office and shot.
• 19:34
  Which is how in publishing we we change editors.
• 19:37
  What was so interesting, right, was I was working for Gardeners
• 19:40
  Books at the time, OK, so I could see the sales figures of
• 19:43
  and that's like the SEC that was the second biggest wholesaler of
• 19:46
  books. Now it's the first in Europe, I
• 19:48
  think since they bought out Bertrams and the 8th Doctor
• 19:55
  books of the past. Octopus may be sold, you know, a
• 19:58
  couple of 1000 if they were lucky, then the clockwise man
• 20:03
  and all that. The new series ones came out
• 20:04
  alongside the TV series. Hundreds of that that I mean the
• 20:09
  sales went through the roof. So, so they were a success in
• 20:13
  that terms, you know. Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:14
  And it's it's the same thing with Doctor Who magazine.
• 20:18
  At exactly the same time that magazine kind of jumped down to
• 20:22
  a younger readership and it was all about the TV show and it was
• 20:26
  much more kind of kid friendly. And again, it wasn't for me
• 20:30
  anymore. And I ducked out and I, I felt
• 20:32
  no bitterness about that. I didn't feel the need to
• 20:35
  complain about it on social media, Not that there were any
• 20:38
  social media at that point. But you know, I was just happy
• 20:42
  to let it go because it, it had got me through the, the 90s like
• 20:46
  the like the novels. And I was very grateful for
• 20:49
  that. But you know, believe it in the
• 20:51
  past. Here's something I'll have
• 20:53
  gleaned from We're All Stories in the End, and that is you
• 20:56
  quite enjoyed sort of diving into the mucky world of the New
• 20:59
  Adventures as they were coming out.
• 21:02
  You know, Poland, arts, semen in mouths, and TARDIS is turning
• 21:07
  into cities and the Doctor turning human and all of this
• 21:11
  stuff. And now the other thing I've
• 21:13
  sort of gleaned is coming back to.
• 21:16
  That books for we're. Stories.
• 21:18
  In the end you're going, oh, they are a peculiar sort of 90s
• 21:23
  phenomena now and that you know, and I know you Dicks ducked out
• 21:27
  sort of with the BBC ones, but you've quite enjoyed some of the
• 21:31
  BBC ones on On Rediscovery. Yeah, I'm finding 2 very
• 21:36
  different things, which is the the new adventures were very
• 21:41
  much, obviously they were very much of their time.
• 21:45
  So all the kind of references are extremely dated now, because
• 21:49
  I don't that's a lie. I do remember exactly which
• 21:53
  songs they're using as chapter titles and who, who they're
• 21:56
  talking about and what they're riffing on.
• 21:58
  But it's all very gun. It's all very science fiction
• 22:04
  serious. There's a lot of a lot of angst,
• 22:07
  There's a lot of torture. There's it was.
• 22:09
  Love that as a kid though, right?
• 22:11
  It was, well it was, it was in the kind of era of The X-Files
• 22:14
  and everything was very gritty and very real and it was like
• 22:17
  Doctor Who, but it was Doctor Who but 15 certificate, which is
• 22:20
  what I wanted when I was 15. And occasionally you'd get, you
• 22:24
  know, the odd bit of sex creeping in as well.
• 22:27
  And it was, it was perfect for me.
• 22:28
  Then turns out as a grown up, that's not so much what I want
• 22:32
  to read all the time and it's certainly not what I want from
• 22:35
  my Doctor Who. Whereas the 8th Doctor novels,
• 22:37
  which I didn't get on with so much at the time, it turns out a
• 22:43
  lot of them have got quite a lot more going on than I appreciated
• 22:47
  originally. And there's a lot more
• 22:49
  experimentation and frankly there's a lot more frock.
• 22:53
  And the older I get, I find myself drifting ever more
• 22:56
  frockwards from a sort of gun based youth.
• 22:59
  My favorite quote ever from you for I've just howled and I was
• 23:03
  at work. Unfortunately, some people
• 23:04
  wondered why I was laughing out loud in the middle of the shot,
• 23:06
  but was when you said, yeah, you know, I've I've become to like
• 23:10
  frock a bit more and you're talking about I think it was.
• 23:13
  Deaf and diplomacy which is like a ROM com right?
• 23:15
  You, you just went. Yes.
• 23:17
  As I get older, I find myself more.
• 23:19
  I find myself more and more. Attracted to romantic comedy
• 23:23
  that's like. Yeah, so do we all.
• 23:25
  At 15 we'd be like, I've never watched those things.
• 23:29
  Yeah, exactly. But but because you kind of when
• 23:34
  you're 15, you think, oh, I don't, I don't care about
• 23:36
  romance. I don't care about comedy.
• 23:37
  I want a snog. And I use the word snog to cover
• 23:40
  a lot of activities. But but, but again, the older
• 23:45
  you get and the the less actual meat you have, sorry, the less
• 23:49
  actual skin you have in that game Then you.
• 23:51
  You love watching a bit of romance because it's just
• 23:53
  something that happens to other people.
• 23:55
  Is that what you told them? All that we did just snog.
• 23:59
  Yeah, I, I, I did. I did, just euphemistically.
• 24:03
  Well done for rounding it out. Good.
• 24:05
  Well, well, OK, so I'm, I'm getting a good idea of where
• 24:10
  your head is when we dive into borrow time.
• 24:14
  This is, I think, an atypical. New.
• 24:18
  Series adventure in that I think it's a really good book like and
• 24:25
  I'm. Curious to see where you fall
• 24:27
  with this. I would.
• 24:28
  I would see that comment and raise it.
• 24:31
  I think this is a really good Doctor Who novel because it's
• 24:34
  really good. And yeah, I was completely
• 24:42
  expecting it to be like many of them, you know, six or seven out
• 24:46
  of 10. Perfectly serviceable.
• 24:48
  Yeah. Great.
• 24:49
  Does the job, tells you a story. Yeah, but my God.
• 24:55
  I did a Goodrees review after this, right?
• 24:57
  And I'll put them. I think this might be my
• 24:59
  favorite 11th Doctor story of all time.
• 25:01
  I was like that. That may sound like hyperbole,
• 25:04
  but I had a bit of an allergic reaction to this particular
• 25:08
  period of Doctor Who, which I think you're a bit kinder
• 25:10
  towards me. Massively so, massively so, and.
• 25:14
  Tell me, Tell me your love. Of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan.
• 25:19
  Well, and it's not so much Karen Gillan, but Matt Smith for me is
• 25:23
  the best doctor since Sylvester McCoy in terms of embodying the
• 25:28
  alien in a sort of inappropriately, really kind of
• 25:32
  human, dull, ordinary kind of body.
• 25:35
  He's he's got that that young old cliche that everybody says
• 25:39
  when they're trying to work out what it is about his doctor they
• 25:43
  like, but he's just awkward and knuckly and eccentric and weird
• 25:47
  and clearly an alien and. No wonder all the geeks fell for
• 25:51
  him. But that's just that is them.
• 25:53
  That is and that's and that's what's missing from a lot of
• 25:56
  other doctors in certainly in terms of knew who he's he's
• 26:01
  often or she portrayed more like a really cool bloke from down
• 26:07
  the pub than they are like an awkward, eccentric alien genius.
• 26:11
  But Matt Smith had that and the comedy was great in that era,
• 26:15
  and I was there for it because I'd grown up as a Moffat fan
• 26:19
  loving Coupling, so I knew what I was in for and that whole era
• 26:24
  just really worked for me. But I wasn't expecting it to
• 26:27
  necessarily translate to the page.
• 26:30
  I I hated coupling with a passion, but I just hate I hate
• 26:35
  American comedy, right? And that was that to me felt
• 26:38
  like Auk sitcom doing American comedy.
• 26:42
  It was it. Was very much sort of like,
• 26:45
  yeah, a British version of Friends, but again, a a kind of
• 26:48
  15 rated version. I didn't.
• 26:50
  David went Renwick sort of brilliantly structured episodes.
• 26:54
  It was very foot in the grave, wasn't it, How the episodes were
• 26:57
  all structured? It was it was really, really
• 27:00
  clever. And that made it very because,
• 27:04
  you know, it started, I want to say one year after or maybe two
• 27:09
  years after the very last Men Behaving Badly went out, which
• 27:13
  was a very different kind of sitcom.
• 27:16
  And, you know, stripping out the kind of unspeakable lavish,
• 27:20
  cancelable aspects of it. It was a it kind of, it had
• 27:25
  followed the same kind of sitcom template going back to like
• 27:29
  Hancock's half hour. You know, it was largely real
• 27:33
  time. It was relationship based.
• 27:35
  It was it was just chatting and nonsense with the occasional
• 27:39
  silly situation. And Kaplan came along and kind
• 27:42
  of blew all of that out of the water.
• 27:44
  And it played with time and it played with, you know, there's
• 27:49
  that episode where Jeff's trying to chat up the she Israeli and
• 27:54
  you get half the episode of him in English and her sitting there
• 27:57
  clearly not understanding a word he's saying.
• 27:59
  And then at the halfway point it flips and you hear the whole
• 28:01
  thing from her point of view. And there are so many examples
• 28:06
  of, of tricks like that throughout all four series that
• 28:10
  I thought it was the certainly the, the cleverest and most
• 28:13
  exciting thing to happen to the the moribund world of British
• 28:16
  sitcom. So yeah, I was totally on board
• 28:20
  when my foot took over and I, I totally loved it.
• 28:23
  And I appreciate that you and I will at some point in the future
• 28:26
  come to blows over this. But not today, because I think
• 28:32
  you're right. I think this not only it gets
• 28:36
  all three of the regulars absolutely perfect, they're so
• 28:39
  authentic on the page. I can see those actors saying
• 28:42
  every line in this book, but it added layers to their characters
• 28:45
  as well. I learned something about each
• 28:47
  of them in this book. Yeah, it did.
• 28:50
  There was. There's a lovely sequence with
• 28:53
  not to sort of leap in and stop explaining the plot, but at some
• 28:59
  point Amy gets the opportunity to kind of steal a bit of time
• 29:03
  and do her own thing. So what does she do?
• 29:07
  She goes shopping and then she goes off to Leadworth to see mum
• 29:10
  and dad for a night and have and cook dinner for them.
• 29:14
  And that's so lovely. And that is a side of her that
• 29:16
  you didn't get on the TV. She was, she was always quite a
• 29:21
  bit of a cow, If I can, you know.
• 29:25
  Raise it to a come, but yeah. I know.
• 29:26
  Well, I you know, she she was sounds adjacent on occasion, but
• 29:32
  some. Men love that though, you know.
• 29:33
  I know the people. That love, that in her.
• 29:35
  Yeah, no, I we've all, we've all known ladies like that, using
• 29:41
  these words carefully. But you know this, this fleshed
• 29:45
  out that family loving side of Amy.
• 29:52
  The Doctor got exactly the same kind of, you know, loaded
• 29:58
  dialogue that he would have got on the on the telly and Rory
• 30:02
  just radiated this kind of well meaning hopelessness, which
• 30:09
  which which is now kind of my my shtick.
• 30:12
  But you know, it was and it was so visual reading, you know,
• 30:19
  experiencing this book. It was so much like being back
• 30:22
  in front of like a a movie that they would have made between
• 30:26
  series 10 and 11. I mean 5 and 6.
• 30:29
  I don't know why I said 10:00 and 11:00.
• 30:31
  It would have been a budget Buster, but I think they could
• 30:33
  have made this because I think it's all the bank, isn't it?
• 30:36
  And then the second-half, they're doing it, they're sort
• 30:38
  of out on the streets and there's a million times the same
• 30:41
  person. And it would have cost a bit of
• 30:43
  money, but. There would have been they're I
• 30:45
  think now they could absolutely do this as like a sort of two
• 30:48
  hour TV movie. And they they absolutely bloody
• 30:51
  should. I mean, one of the notes I came
• 30:53
  away from this book with is why hasn't Naomi Alderman been asked
• 30:58
  to write ATV episode? Because she has such a a visual
• 31:02
  imagination that not just in terms of the descriptions are
• 31:06
  very adroitly expressed, but the kind of set pieces you you can
• 31:12
  see them playing out. You can imagine what everything
• 31:14
  looks like and yeah, there's a scene where they go to find
• 31:18
  someone who they think might be fiddling time and lo and behold,
• 31:23
  they go to his flat and he is there about 10 of him doing
• 31:26
  various jobs around the house that.
• 31:29
  Is the most muffy thing I could. Possibly.
• 31:31
  And, you know, you can imagine that they're all kind of
• 31:35
  translucent. It's not beyond the realms of
• 31:37
  television, but one of one of, you know, strikingly visual
• 31:42
  idea. So clearly she can she she can
• 31:46
  write the characters. She can write televisual or or
• 31:50
  certainly visual sequences and set pieces.
• 31:54
  And you know, without without coming to the end of the show
• 31:58
  too soon. But this is one of the most
• 32:00
  enjoyable Doctor Who books I've experienced, so surely she
• 32:05
  should be a showrunner right now.
• 32:08
  What is happening? Well, she's a best selling
• 32:10
  author. Well, she's too.
• 32:11
  She's too busy writing, you know, great friends with.
• 32:14
  Baraka Ballmer, Yeah. But I, I, I would imagine she'd
• 32:17
  she'd have got more money by producing Doctor Who than than
• 32:21
  by writing one you. Remember when Gareth Roberts
• 32:23
  wrote Only Human? I'm not sure, but, well, I'd say
• 32:26
  his name anymore, but I'm covering one of his books soon
• 32:28
  so I'd better get used to it. And then Rusty Davis read Only
• 32:33
  Human and went Jesus Christ. He should be writing for the
• 32:35
  series. And then the Shakespeare Code
• 32:37
  came two seasons later. Oh, is that how it happened?
• 32:40
  They should be exactly the same, right?
• 32:41
  Moffett should have read this and I don't even know if he had
• 32:44
  the time. He was juggling 22 fucking TV
• 32:46
  shows at the time, wasn't he? Well, you know what, there's
• 32:49
  this, there's this kind of sense that that the merchandise was
• 32:54
  like really strictly kind of controlled by Cardiff.
• 32:58
  So RTD would have, you know, he got sent a copy of all the
• 33:03
  action figures to check the faces were adequate or whatever.
• 33:07
  If, if they if, if RTD and Moffatt didn't read the books,
• 33:12
  there would probably have been someone whose job it was to read
• 33:15
  them and just let them know this happens and this happens.
• 33:19
  Is this going to impact anything you're planning to do in the
• 33:21
  show? Must have been somebody.
• 33:23
  So someone at some point could have said to Moffat, yeah, read
• 33:26
  this. One stage please read this it's.
• 33:28
  Fucking great. She's really good.
• 33:32
  You remember that slot in Series 6 you wanted to give to that
• 33:35
  prick Gareth Roberts? Well, Naomi Alderman's written a
• 33:38
  book here that would. Translate perfectly on the
• 33:40
  screen. See, the thing with Gareth
• 33:43
  Roberts is I've been, I'm not going to say I've been reading
• 33:49
  his book since the 90s. That makes me sound like I read
• 33:51
  them all constantly in a loop. I have been aware of the man for
• 33:55
  that long. I've read most of his Doctor Who
• 33:57
  fiction. I don't know what he's done
• 34:00
  wrong. I know he's a Tory, but I'm not
• 34:03
  aware of what it is that he's really done to make him so
• 34:07
  cancellable. I think I think the worst thing
• 34:10
  he's probably done in the eyes of a lot of people is very JK
• 34:17
  Rowling esque. Right.
• 34:19
  OK, well that seems a book. That sort of basically said that
• 34:26
  if gay people exist, then trans people can't exist and so sort
• 34:31
  of cancelled out and cancelled out the the the T from the.
• 34:35
  LGBTQ right now, Did you do that in a Doctor Who novel or was it
• 34:40
  no? Alas, he did it outside of
• 34:43
  Doctor Who. He wasn't being used by Doctor
• 34:44
  Who. Because.
• 34:46
  I was, I was going to say, that's a hell of a topic.
• 34:50
  A Doctor Who book to to wander into.
• 34:53
  I mean, I'm pleased you said it, frankly, because now I've just
• 34:55
  got that out of the way and next time I talk about Gareth Roberts
• 34:58
  I can just talk about the bloody book.
• 35:00
  Yeah, absolutely. But as you can imagine, there
• 35:02
  ain't a lot of people queuing up to do those.
• 35:04
  Books because that no one's willing to.
• 35:06
  Touch it with a barge pole. Going back to the regulars for a
• 35:10
  second. And I only want to do this
• 35:11
  because I've really come down hard on 11 Amy.
• 35:15
  I love Rory, I love her, but he's the underdog, right?
• 35:18
  And I always loved you. And he's treated appallingly in
• 35:21
  Series 5, where he's sort of tailing around after Amy and
• 35:24
  she's giving the Doctor moon eyes and shoving him on the bed
• 35:27
  and trying to suck his cock or whatever she's trying to do at
• 35:30
  the end of that episode. But there was a there was a
• 35:32
  description of Rory. And this as somehow he wasn't
• 35:35
  the shortest of the three of them, but somehow he was always
• 35:38
  tailing behind, which I wish. I could, yeah.
• 35:41
  That is. Do you remember the bit at the
• 35:43
  end where he finds out that she's borrowed all that time and
• 35:47
  she owes 10 years? And he goes, well, you're my
• 35:50
  wife. Your debts are my debts, so of
• 35:53
  course I will take them off you. And I was like, oh, that's just
• 35:55
  pure Rory. That's so Rory and that's so
• 35:59
  noble and kind of that's the kind of man or or person in a
• 36:06
  relationship that we should all aspire to be.
• 36:08
  I'd love to sit here now and say that if my wife came home and
• 36:12
  said, oh, I've lost 10 years to a dodgy time thing, I'd be like,
• 36:15
  don't worry darling. I have 10 of mine but I'm not
• 36:18
  sure I would. No, you go.
• 36:20
  You've lost 10. Years we still haven't.
• 36:22
  Been able to watch that bloody box set what you've been doing?
• 36:25
  Yeah. But also as well, you know, you
• 36:27
  said about Amy going home, I, I think Naomi Alderman looks at
• 36:32
  Pandora Robes and The Big Bang and went that was absolutely
• 36:35
  amazing. But really we've had 0
• 36:37
  explanation as to the two AMI timelines that are in existence
• 36:43
  because of that story. And so she just writes one
• 36:46
  paragraph in this, which if it had been on the TV I would have
• 36:48
  stopped whingeing completely. Where she goes, she sees her mum
• 36:52
  and dad there and she remembers them being there her whole life
• 36:56
  and having a really happy childhood.
• 36:58
  And she remembers them not being there and being a lonely little
• 37:02
  girl who was desperate for the raggedy doctors to come back.
• 37:05
  And I was like, that's all I needed.
• 37:08
  Well, this is what's so kind of impressive and graceful about
• 37:14
  about this book is that clearly one of two things happened.
• 37:18
  Either Naomi Alderman was a lifelong Doctor Who fan when she
• 37:22
  wrote this book, or, and I'm not saying this didn't happen
• 37:25
  because it might have done, or she watched all of Doctor Who
• 37:29
  and just dropped in enough continuity to say I know what
• 37:34
  I'm talking about. I know this show.
• 37:36
  I know inside out. I'm going to refer to this.
• 37:38
  I'm going to refer to that. I'm going to refer to an obscure
• 37:41
  reference to the 7th Doctor era, an obscure reference to the Tom
• 37:45
  Baker era. She just really lightly and
• 37:49
  delicately established her credentials and justified, you
• 37:52
  know, come on, boys, I'm allowed to write a Doctor Who book.
• 37:55
  I know what I'm talking about. I've seen the show without
• 37:59
  turning it into this kind of massive clunking.
• 38:03
  I'm going to reference every single story.
• 38:05
  Ever the new adventures under EDA.
• 38:07
  Which exactly, Exactly they'd have hammered it home.
• 38:11
  And Naomi just sort of lightly, lightly battered it and put it
• 38:15
  on a little plate and said voila.
• 38:17
  I mean, you haven't covered War of the Daleks yet, so that's why
• 38:20
  you you're keeping that shred of sanity still.
• 38:23
  But when you do, you'll learn that John Peel rewrites 4 entire
• 38:27
  TV stories just because he doesn't like the way that they
• 38:30
  go. You know, that's what the Edos
• 38:31
  were doing at the time. I can, I can remember I was, I
• 38:36
  think War of the Daleks. And I very unfairly say it was
• 38:41
  Castle's fault. I don't think it was, you know,
• 38:45
  how like, yeah, but that was, that was just one duffer too
• 38:50
  many. I feel like that's the dart
• 38:52
  board that everyone goes. For yeah, it's like, it's like
• 38:55
  in in Britain there was a very recent active kind of political
• 38:59
  referenda where a certain government were quietly got rid
• 39:04
  of. And it wasn't necessarily that
• 39:06
  people were sick of Rishi, but things have been building up for
• 39:10
  quite a while. And actually you can trace the
• 39:12
  moment that the Tories lost the election and it was it was
• 39:16
  Johnson a much the same way I think, War of the Daleks,
• 39:20
  although I carried on for a couple of books, War of the
• 39:23
  Daleks was the one that shat the bed.
• 39:27
  Understandably as well, yeah. Can I ask you a question?
• 39:32
  In your life, have you ever borrowed large sums of money?
• 39:39
  Borrowed large sums? Yes, I have.
• 39:42
  Well, I mean. I'm too sure then.
• 39:44
  I mean, I mean. Student loans, that kind of
• 39:48
  thing. Did you?
• 39:49
  Have to pay back interest on that money.
• 39:51
  I I did. Yeah, I did.
• 39:54
  Were you educated about it in a Doctor Who book?
• 39:58
  Well, not at the time. Could you have done with
• 40:02
  borrowed time in your teens? Would it, would it not have been
• 40:06
  absolutely amazing to get this lesson in how compound interest
• 40:10
  works? That's a point where, you know,
• 40:13
  I spent so, so coming out of university at the end of the
• 40:17
  90s, we were the first generation that had to go and
• 40:21
  buy a mobile phone. And thank God they were
• 40:24
  expensive. And I was always kind of at the
• 40:27
  bottom. Yeah.
• 40:28
  Basic huge Motorola Mother Mother fucker 103.
• 40:32
  I think it was cool. And you know, I would always be
• 40:36
  overdrawn at the end of the month.
• 40:38
  I'd have credit cards. And at the time it felt like I
• 40:41
  was, you know, I was maybe I think as much as one or maybe
• 40:46
  2000s in debt at any point now, as soon as I earned enough
• 40:52
  money, that stopped happening. And and you know, I'm, I'm, I'm
• 40:55
  quite sensible with money. I do know of people who are my
• 40:58
  age who are, you know, 10s of thousands in, in that kind of
• 41:02
  credit debt. If they'd had this book, the the
• 41:05
  way it explains how interest works.
• 41:10
  Oh God. So simply right.
• 41:12
  So it's a basically a cake and the Doctor starts cutting off
• 41:17
  layers of the cake to explain to Amy, because I suppose actually,
• 41:21
  sorry, we should really say it's not money that they're borrowing
• 41:24
  in this book. But the title sort of gives away
• 41:26
  what people are borrowing from the bank, and that is time.
• 41:30
  So they're borrowing time because they're busy, high
• 41:33
  flying bankers and they want to zoom around in all the meetings
• 41:36
  and get the promotions and be the best people they could
• 41:38
  possibly be. Amy Pons, you know, in a moment
• 41:41
  of spectacular drama, realizes she's got a call from the Doctor
• 41:45
  and a call from Rory, and she needs to be in two places at
• 41:48
  once. Fuck, how am I going to do that?
• 41:50
  And then these two chaps come along and go, hello, I just so
• 41:53
  happened to have this watch, which means you can borrow some
• 41:55
  time. Don't read the terms and
• 41:57
  conditions. You don't need to read those.
• 41:58
  Just just sign there and you can borrow back as much as you like.
• 42:02
  5 minutes you have to pay back for every hour.
• 42:05
  So she goes, that's not much, is it?
• 42:07
  You know, that's fine. And then she starts borrowing
• 42:11
  and borrowing and borrowing more things she thinks she needs
• 42:14
  doing. She's sort of doing her sums as
• 42:16
  she goes, thinking well you know, I borrowed 4 days so
• 42:19
  that's only a couple of hours I owe back.
• 42:21
  Great. And then, yeah, comes the
• 42:23
  horrific moment where the Doctor.
• 42:25
  Has to explain to her, no, this is how compound interest works
• 42:30
  and this is how much you owe. Do you remember how much that
• 42:32
  was? I, I, I borrowed 1020 years, 10
• 42:36
  years, 10 years, 5 minutes per hour per hour.
• 42:42
  And because it was the two guys and one of them says, oh, it's 5
• 42:45
  minutes per hour and the other one goes per hour.
• 42:49
  And it's so cleverly done as well.
• 42:51
  It's so cleverly done though. That's why they were such good
• 42:53
  villains. Did you like how they explained
• 42:56
  as well that every time you used the watch and you get given that
• 43:01
  time back again, it's, it's, it's a pleasurable feeling, like
• 43:05
  you've had all the sleep of that time put into you.
• 43:09
  And that's exactly the same feeling you get when you whip
• 43:12
  out your credit card and you buy something expensive.
• 43:15
  And I thought, she's so clever. That is exactly what it feels.
• 43:19
  Like when you spend money you haven't earned.
• 43:21
  It was a really sophisticated analogy, wasn't it?
• 43:24
  For again. Again, for a, for a, for a new
• 43:28
  series adventure book. My God, you know, we're getting
• 43:32
  great villains, We're getting a great premise.
• 43:34
  We're getting, you know, it's kind of like an episode of Red
• 43:36
  Dwarf, but we'll let that go. We're getting brilliant comedy
• 43:40
  and we're getting really entertaining books.
• 43:44
  So yeah, it's just yet another area in which this thing really
• 43:47
  excels. You know, when I was 20, Yeah, I
• 43:50
  I bought myself my first computer and I just saw it and
• 43:54
  it went by. Now pay two years later, I was
• 43:57
  like, oh, perfect, I'll just have it.
• 43:59
  Well, look, two years passed and that computer had broken by
• 44:02
  then. Yeah.
• 44:03
  And I no longer had it. I was on to my next one and it
• 44:06
  came to pay it back. I'll pay back that computer
• 44:08
  twice. I know.
• 44:10
  I wish I'd had this book back then, you know?
• 44:13
  Oh, you seem to be flicking right now.
• 44:14
  I'm I'm just getting, I'm just finding my notes.
• 44:17
  Oh, what was? What was the computer it?
• 44:19
  Was really shitty. I mean the porn would only come
• 44:22
  up the screen one line at a time.
• 44:26
  So yeah, it was, yeah. I love that I.
• 44:29
  Remember that. You know, those sort of times.
• 44:32
  That's what she said. But like as well as as well as
• 44:38
  that very a very sophisticated metaphor for spending money,
• 44:45
  which, you know, like in terms of educating kids, I think
• 44:47
  that's probably the most the the best use of education any Doctor
• 44:51
  Who has ever employed. There was like a wealth of like
• 44:56
  just throw away great ideas. For example.
• 44:59
  Oh, excuse me, I'm just getting a call.
• 45:00
  Hang on. Yes.
• 45:02
  Hello. Galactic enquiries.
• 45:04
  Hello. Yes, I'd like to.
• 45:07
  What's that? Yes, I'm looking to podcast for
• 45:09
  someone called Ian Martin. Yes, Ian Martin.
• 45:12
  That's right. Oh, 565.
• 45:16
  Ian Martins on the Earth, you say?
• 45:18
  Well, what about in this particular area?
• 45:20
  Oh, OK. 30, How many are human? Oh, only three.
• 45:24
  OK, how many are hot? 02?
• 45:27
  OK, how can we some this that is anyone got a load of new
• 45:31
  adventures behind him? Yes, that's the one.
• 45:33
  Put him on the call. I mean, that was a great idea,
• 45:36
  right? Galactic Enquiries.
• 45:38
  That was for me, that was kind of basically Douglas Adams level
• 45:43
  of throw away genius because that in itself, there's a
• 45:47
  there's a Doctor Who novel in that idea, but she's not worried
• 45:50
  about doing that. She doesn't, she doesn't need
• 45:52
  it. She's just throwing away
• 45:54
  brilliant ideas like that. It was so.
• 45:57
  Funny means to get from A to B, isn't it?
• 45:59
  As well, Yeah. Yeah, I've got another question
• 46:00
  for you though, Ian. How much sort of Doctor Who
• 46:03
  merchandise do you own? Well.
• 46:08
  Now that was an almost psychotic giggle.
• 46:11
  Then it was. Not as much as as you might
• 46:14
  think. I've I've still got all the Nas
• 46:16
  and all the Ed, almost all the EDA's.
• 46:20
  I've got about 30 targets left and two Blu rays and assorted
• 46:30
  DVDs. When I say 2 Blu rays, I mean
• 46:32
  two of the seasoned box sets and a bunch of individual DVDs.
• 46:37
  Not a lot. I used to own a hell of a lot
• 46:40
  more. Do you imagine, though, that
• 46:41
  your missus, you know, if you sort of packed it away in a
• 46:44
  storage area, that she might be quite happy to use that space
• 46:47
  for other things? Absolutely yes I do, but she
• 46:51
  would use it poorly. Oh, OK.
• 46:56
  I mean, I was just using it as a way really to get a sort of
• 46:59
  Millennium Dome storage centre. Which which is another of those
• 47:05
  brilliant ideas that she's had. So you have the Millennium Dome
• 47:10
  and then beneath it. I'm going to do that.
• 47:12
  So. So it works visually.
• 47:14
  You have a much larger inverted hollow dip, which is yeah for
• 47:21
  for off world travellers and people out of time.
• 47:24
  It's a special storage facility for for aliens.
• 47:29
  How amazing is this? It's like.
• 47:31
  You walk in, don't you? And you get shrunk down to a
• 47:33
  tiny size. That's how they can fit so much
• 47:35
  in there, because you're. Shrunk down.
• 47:37
  And then there's these. Is it cockroaches?
• 47:40
  Yes. But they're normal cockroaches
• 47:42
  because you've been shrunk. They're now sort of guard
• 47:44
  cockroaches, like bad things. They're going to come after you.
• 47:48
  And the whole place is governed by someone called Omelette
• 47:53
  something the omelette ram. Yeah, I the space names, yeah.
• 47:59
  Yeah, there was, there was, there was a bit of a space name,
• 48:01
  but. Even.
• 48:02
  Then right, they were just throwing open doors and she was
• 48:05
  throwing away ideas. Amy walks into one room and
• 48:07
  there's a load of mirrors and it's all these alternative
• 48:09
  versions of Amy in every mirror. And I was like, there's a book.
• 48:13
  And Rory opens a door and finds a room made of mucus.
• 48:18
  Well, of course, of course. And I laughed out loud and
• 48:23
  several people in the office looked at me like I was having a
• 48:26
  mental infarction. What's he reading?
• 48:28
  It must be so. Oh, Doctor Who.
• 48:31
  Well, they couldn't. So, and and I'll come to this
• 48:35
  now because why not? But I didn't read it.
• 48:37
  I did the audio which was read by Mira Sayal.
• 48:41
  Now I've done her a great disservice over the years
• 48:44
  because I've I've been not the biggest fan of her or Sanjeev
• 48:50
  Bhaskar, both from Goodness Gracious Me I believe in the 90s
• 48:54
  and I've found them both to be fairly limited performers, which
• 48:58
  is, on hearing this audio book, really not the case.
• 49:01
  She is absolutely brilliant. Her Amy impression is fantastic.
• 49:06
  Her ability to cope with all the space names and silly words is
• 49:11
  brilliant. The only mistake she makes is
• 49:14
  the same mistake John Pertwee once made where she says
• 49:17
  chittiness. Oh no.
• 49:19
  Are you aware of the anecdote about the the fan letter that
• 49:23
  John Pertwee got where someone said the reason I'm writing is
• 49:27
  how to say chitin and and the same thing happened and I
• 49:31
  thought. Well, do you know what the
• 49:32
  worst? Part of that is he asked Barry
• 49:34
  Letts, how do you say this? Is it chitonus or chitonus?
• 49:37
  And Barry Letts goes, I think it's chitonus.
• 49:40
  OK, well, we'll do that. I mean, I mean, it's fair
• 49:43
  enough. It's probably not a word in
• 49:45
  common usage of BBC towers in the early 70s.
• 49:48
  I never do the readings, you know, I always read the books,
• 49:51
  especially the NSA, because they're sort of brisk reads.
• 49:55
  Does it work as an audio? It absolutely works as an audio.
• 50:01
  And I think because it's so condensed, it was, it's six
• 50:03
  hours and you can measure that out in terms of, you know,
• 50:07
  that's, that's six commutes or it's, you know, 12 lunch breaks
• 50:13
  or or whatever. And it's each chapter's about 20
• 50:15
  minutes. And it really does work.
• 50:17
  Some books, let's for example, something like a Game of
• 50:21
  Thrones, there's no way you can actually listen to that without
• 50:24
  falling asleep at some point. And then you've lost your place
• 50:27
  in it and the whole thing's a disaster and you just go home
• 50:30
  crying because. But no, as a as a very it, it
• 50:35
  was like listening to some podcasts.
• 50:36
  It was that level of easiness of controlling the flow.
• 50:41
  What talking of the flow perfect segue because.
• 50:44
  Do you need the toilet? I'm all right, actually, I'll
• 50:48
  wait just for recap. I'll borrow some time if I need
• 50:50
  to go. All right, I'll leave you here
• 50:51
  with Mother Joe, OK? OK.
• 50:54
  Yeah. Oh, the things I've done with my
• 50:55
  borrowed time. I'll tell you what, There was 10
• 50:57
  of me in one place and there was no one else there.
• 51:00
  I'm telling you, what was I going to say again?
• 51:05
  I don't know is it? Is it something like a sort of
• 51:07
  Joe Ford based Human Centipede but with love?
• 51:12
  We have lots of love, yes, and lots of mouthful.
• 51:16
  What I was going to say was on the.
• 51:18
  Page. The prose flowed abusively.
• 51:22
  I'll read this in a day in a day and that is really fast for me.
• 51:26
  And just I just slipped across the pages like it was so fluid.
• 51:31
  But the way she paces a scene as well, because she has some very
• 51:35
  dialogue heavy scenes in this as she's explaining, you know, the
• 51:39
  people that are borrowed time and how you have to pay it back
• 51:41
  and all of that. And there's a ton of but it just
• 51:44
  sort of builds momentum and builds momentum.
• 51:46
  And then at the end of the chapter, it's like, how much do
• 51:48
  I owe 10 years? Boom, end of chapter.
• 51:51
  Like, it's like if this was her first book and then no wonder
• 51:55
  she went on to be an international bestseller.
• 51:58
  Well, that's or, or I would say the other way around.
• 52:01
  It's this good because she's that good of a writer.
• 52:04
  And there are there are other Doctor Who books I have read
• 52:08
  where the author is less. What's a nice way of saying it?
• 52:13
  The prose is is less kind of effortless and less subtly
• 52:18
  crafted, and you really have to work your way down the page
• 52:21
  because a lot of these paragraphs are quite hard work.
• 52:24
  And those are writers did not go on to be global literary authors
• 52:30
  in quite the same way. Barack Obama knows who Barry
• 52:32
  Letts is, you know. I That's probably true.
• 52:37
  I'm currently reading the Ghost event space, which is a typical
• 52:40
  example of what you're talking about there.
• 52:42
  Well, so I I do work in DC. So if I bump into Obama, do you
• 52:47
  want me to ask him if he's aware of who Barry let's.
• 52:49
  Read the ghost event. That's that's your question.
• 52:52
  It's the list. That's your question you'd ask
• 52:55
  to Barack Obama. If you had one question, it's
• 52:58
  Have you read The Ghost? Excuse me, do you know, like
• 53:01
  you're talking about politicians and Doctor Who spin off media?
• 53:03
  But I did in fact see a copy of Seal and the Devil Seat of
• 53:06
  Arador in Jeremy Corbyn's hands. Absolutely.
• 53:10
  So it's not without the realms of possibility.
• 53:14
  Which now that means and that that explains the problem with
• 53:18
  Corbyn. So he's clearly a a classic who
• 53:21
  fan so and classic Who fans. We were just weirdos.
• 53:25
  You know, it wasn't until the new series came along and
• 53:27
  everything got a bit cool and sexy and and kind of geekery
• 53:31
  became acceptable. Anyone from before times is just
• 53:37
  a weirdo. And that, I think, is probably
• 53:39
  what beset Corbyn. He should have borrowed some
• 53:41
  time and had another, you know, another go at.
• 53:44
  It the trouble is though, right? If this concept was real,
• 53:47
  everyone would be able to it, wouldn't they?
• 53:49
  Like, I think we all like to think we're a bit above this
• 53:51
  sort of thing, but oh Jesus Christ, I would be borrowing and
• 53:55
  borrowing and boring. But you know what?
• 53:56
  I'll just be reading Doctor Who books is the trouble.
• 53:59
  Well I mean serious point, but everyone, everyone kind of has a
• 54:05
  a vice in their life and it might be a perfectly innocent
• 54:08
  voice. Like I need to spend 3 hours in
• 54:10
  the gym every day. Orgasms.
• 54:13
  Is that a voice? Orgasms.
• 54:14
  People who spend all day fiddling with themselves if they
• 54:16
  could. Well, I didn't say that excuse.
• 54:18
  Me people who or, or, or other people, people who who just
• 54:23
  would spend the time smoking or drinking or whatever.
• 54:28
  And if if, if this thing was actually offered to everyone on
• 54:32
  the planet, everyone on the planet would take it up.
• 54:35
  And if they'd indulge their kind of weak human voices at the same
• 54:42
  time as sending the other version now into the office to
• 54:44
  do the job all day. So.
• 54:46
  If there was an adult version of this book, it would be that,
• 54:48
  wouldn't it? Absolutely.
• 54:49
  It would be the sort of get it wouldn't be able to be going
• 54:52
  home and taking Rory out for lunch and things like that.
• 54:55
  It would be yeah, it'd be blank of ways and yeah, people doing
• 55:00
  terrible or and you know what I'm going to slip in a we're all
• 55:03
  stories in the end gag here just to prove how much I'll listen
• 55:07
  that if it's could borrow some time, maybe you can finally have
• 55:10
  a fucking fag, right, yes. Finally, get me another one.
• 55:18
  Well, I remember, you know, reading, reading, reading some
• 55:22
  books with fits in, in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000s.
• 55:26
  Well, I did smoke and I'd be, I'd be sort of quite merrily
• 55:30
  puffing away and Fitz needs a cigarette.
• 55:34
  I've. I've got 11 in this packet.
• 55:39
  I was kidding of the world. You were offering them to the
• 55:41
  book, weren't you? Take it now.
• 55:45
  I've, I, I felt bad for him because every time he really
• 55:48
  needed one, it was like, oh, I know what that's like.
• 55:50
  It's in the middle of a lesson. Where were we, I.
• 55:55
  Have no idea. I was actually going to ask you
• 55:57
  about the climax of the book, if I may.
• 55:59
  Oh. Get to the climax.
• 56:00
  Well, no, just sort of like, because I read a couple of
• 56:03
  reviews online where everyone went.
• 56:04
  The first half of the book is just astonishingly good, you
• 56:08
  know? And you get that sort of sinking
• 56:10
  feeling in your gut as Amy is borrowing time, knowing even if
• 56:13
  she's doing nice things, horrible things are coming.
• 56:17
  And the way she shows how easy it is to spend time slash money.
• 56:27
  And we've all been there, right? Ah.
• 56:29
  Yeah, OK. Maybe just a bit more.
• 56:30
  Maybe just a bit more. Oh fuck.
• 56:34
  It's, it's the kind of human thought process of, oh God, I'm
• 56:38
  in trouble. I owe so much.
• 56:40
  So that being said, another another 1020 doesn't make a
• 56:44
  difference and that's the slippery slope everyone gets on.
• 56:48
  In the second-half of the book we joined forces with Andrew
• 56:51
  Brown and Samira Jenkins, who work at the bank, who basically
• 56:56
  started all this off borrowing time because they were rivals
• 56:59
  and they both were going for the same promotion.
• 57:02
  And the four of them are being pursued by relentless copies of
• 57:09
  I've Come Go Try and Say It. So it's Mr. Symington and Mr.
• 57:12
  Blankensop. Is that where you're going?
• 57:14
  Usefully done, yes, and I have seen loan sharks in inverted
• 57:18
  commas done on Buffy the. Van Buffy Yeah, in season 6,
• 57:22
  right? Just dreadful.
• 57:24
  Like the mask was awful. Whereas Naomi Alderman doesn't
• 57:27
  really describe big rubbery heads.
• 57:28
  She just goes for the teeth, didn't she?
• 57:31
  But did you think, was it? Did you bump on that moment?
• 57:34
  Did you think she's nicked that idea from Buffy?
• 57:36
  Or did it? I wrote it in my nose.
• 57:38
  Yeah, me too. But I thought she made it
• 57:41
  scarier because all shit, there was one bit where someone got
• 57:43
  eaten and it was described as they could just hear the
• 57:47
  crunching of bones or something. I was like, yes, yeah, lovely.
• 57:51
  Nice bit of nice bit of grim. Bone crunching.
• 57:54
  Yeah, that's what you want. So, yeah.
• 57:56
  So you were saying how the first half was really exciting and
• 58:01
  then and then a lot of critics online.
• 58:04
  Well, not not saying that, not saying it was terrible, just
• 58:07
  that it couldn't quite keep up that momentum of absolute
• 58:10
  brilliance. But I found the second-half
• 58:12
  really satisfying. Yeah, I would disagree with
• 58:14
  that. I think if and and what I did
• 58:16
  because I listened to this once and I wrote down a little prey
• 58:20
  see of each chapter. So it's amazing and a, so that
• 58:25
  I'd remember because I, I remember very little these days.
• 58:29
  In fact, someone's weed in my trousers.
• 58:31
  It wasn't me, but I, you know, I have all the stuff written down
• 58:36
  so I'm able to go back and look at it and see how she fills the
• 58:41
  time and tells the story. And each chapter, certainly in
• 58:45
  the first half, but to a degree throughout the book, is kind of,
• 58:48
  it works as a short story in that it's kind of one discreet
• 58:53
  event or or scene or or story being told.
• 58:58
  And then it moves on and it's quite effortless.
• 59:00
  And I think because of the way she structures it, it does kind
• 59:05
  of maintain the rhythm and the pace and a lot of a lot of other
• 59:10
  books where it just jumps back and forth, back and forth, back
• 59:14
  and forth, spinning out certain kind of subplots in a really
• 59:20
  wearisome kind of way there. There's so many books that are a
• 59:24
  lot worse than this and a lot harder.
• 59:27
  And obviously with any story, as it gets towards the ending,
• 59:31
  you're the the kind of focus crunches right down to the the
• 59:35
  kind of point that's being made and the characters who are
• 59:38
  making it. And that was really good in this
• 59:43
  book. And I've seen it done really
• 59:45
  badly in other books, but here it was really effortless.
• 59:48
  I just, I just thought the way she was so focused on the bank
• 59:51
  in the first Half Men, that this was like a filmable book.
• 59:56
  But then in the second-half we go off to the, what is it the
• 59:59
  galactic traders or something like that.
• 1:00:01
  Basically the doctor goes, look, everything they've borrowed, I
• 1:00:05
  will pay it back because I have a very long life.
• 1:00:08
  And she goes, well, if you're going to pay it all back, then
• 1:00:10
  you have to come with me and I'm going to sell you on the
• 1:00:12
  galactic trade market. Yeah.
• 1:00:15
  How much was he worth again? Hang on a.
• 1:00:17
  Minute I did write it down, it was it was made me laugh so
• 1:00:19
  much. He was worth.
• 1:00:22
  Hang on, here we go. 5 inhabited Galaxy and 15 sextillion lives
• 1:00:32
  to have them for the last of the time laws.
• 1:00:34
  Because we're still the last of the time laws at this point,
• 1:00:36
  aren't we? So he's very valuable.
• 1:00:38
  Oh, and imagine, imagine if it was a post season 9 doctor who'd
• 1:00:45
  been alive for those extra 2 billion years, thumping his way
• 1:00:49
  through a diamond. I've got no time left, I've used
• 1:00:53
  it all. It's like I own everything.
• 1:00:55
  I've got all the money. I've there aren't enough
• 1:00:57
  galaxies to buy me that. Is uncanny that impression?
• 1:01:02
  It's not one of my better doctors, but.
• 1:01:05
  Can you do Matt Smith? I'd love to.
• 1:01:07
  No, no, I can't. I saw his cock in the film
• 1:01:12
  Clone. You know I wouldn't mind too
• 1:01:14
  much as well. And I'm not speaking as an 11th
• 1:01:16
  Doctor fan. But I mean, I mean, I'm aware of
• 1:01:19
  the image because I have the Internet and I suspected he
• 1:01:24
  helped himself along just before that scene just to.
• 1:01:27
  Chapolis, when I'll do a quote of Matt Smith, I'll just use to
• 1:01:30
  say, oh wibbly wobbly. Tell Ibly why, you know, that's
• 1:01:33
  all. It's not bad.
• 1:01:34
  Thank you. As good as your Capaldi Jesus.
• 1:01:39
  You should see my Jodie. I don't.
• 1:01:43
  Please do it please. I I've never even tried and I'm
• 1:01:47
  I'm certainly not going to start now.
• 1:01:49
  You'll be cancelled when this goes out.
• 1:01:51
  I know. Well I will anyway, the things
• 1:01:53
  I've said. But he's he.
• 1:01:57
  I find him one of the less easily imitable doctors.
• 1:02:03
  But in print as well, because I read quite a few 11th Doctor
• 1:02:06
  books and they just overdo it. They make him like insane, like
• 1:02:10
  Willy Wonka, you know. And I know the TV series could
• 1:02:13
  go there, Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe every now and
• 1:02:15
  again. But for the most part that sort
• 1:02:18
  of humour was quite contained. It was all over the place.
• 1:02:22
  But he it, it wasn't madly over the top.
• 1:02:25
  And I think she got it perfect. In absolutely spot on.
• 1:02:28
  She you know this for me, this is up there with the kind of the
• 1:02:34
  the best Matt Smith episodes. I'm I'm going to point to a
• 1:02:38
  couple from season 5 Christmas Carol.
• 1:02:41
  There was a kind of very finite but very, very distinct period
• 1:02:45
  where it was absolutely amazing and and she's writing at that
• 1:02:49
  level. She's not point, isn't it?
• 1:02:51
  This is exactly after Christmas Carol, before the impossible
• 1:02:54
  astronaut. Then then it's probably
• 1:02:56
  conscious and it probably just means she's an even better
• 1:02:58
  writer than I thought she was. But yeah, she's, she's not just
• 1:03:03
  doing a good job imitating the characters, she's she's doing
• 1:03:08
  them at their absolute best and doing them better than any other
• 1:03:12
  writer I've I've come across. I feel like how she makes him
• 1:03:15
  quirky, but then the in the way that Matt Smith did at his best,
• 1:03:19
  he just drops all the comedy and he's deadly serious at the end
• 1:03:22
  of that chapter when he just looks at Amy when she comes up
• 1:03:24
  to him with a watch and he goes, I'll pond, what have you done?
• 1:03:27
  Have you done great? But I suppose, and then at the
• 1:03:33
  end, at the end, so they're selling the Doctor and we
• 1:03:38
  realise that, oh, there's a great twist as well, wasn't
• 1:03:42
  there, about who was? I won't give away the twist
• 1:03:44
  because maybe someone might want to learn something in the book,
• 1:03:46
  but who's actually behind all of this is a twist.
• 1:03:50
  It was a nice twist. Did you see it coming?
• 1:03:52
  Not at all. I was in I.
• 1:03:54
  Was in Starbucks with my brass. He's working and I went what the
• 1:03:58
  fuck? And he went, what?
• 1:04:00
  I went Oh my God, you wouldn't bullet because you are reading
• 1:04:03
  an NSA, right? I was like.
• 1:04:05
  It's really good. But anyway, she.
• 1:04:09
  We realized that she's obviously had to.
• 1:04:11
  This is how money works, right? You have, if you're going to
• 1:04:14
  lend money out, you have to borrow it from somewhere.
• 1:04:17
  And she's borrowed a shit ton of money.
• 1:04:19
  So you can then she can lend it out via the watches to all these
• 1:04:23
  other people. But because she's got the
• 1:04:25
  doctor's leverage now that she can actually borrow a whole lot
• 1:04:29
  more until the doctor throws a spanner in the works.
• 1:04:32
  And I think I don't know too much about the stock markets,
• 1:04:35
  Ian. You surprise me.
• 1:04:39
  Shut up. But once your sort of reputation
• 1:04:43
  is blown like hers is here, yeah, I'm assuming that
• 1:04:46
  everything just sinks. Yeah, like a stone.
• 1:04:49
  All your shapes, all your worth. The the way it the way it's done
• 1:04:54
  here is, I don't know if you're old enough to remember that
• 1:04:57
  rather marvellous period in EastEnders where Ian Beale went
• 1:05:00
  bankrupt. I do remember.
• 1:05:03
  And he's running around the square and he's on his knees and
• 1:05:05
  frying and begging him. And the snoss.
• 1:05:08
  That was lovely little runt. But yeah, it was like that.
• 1:05:11
  It just happens very quickly and it doesn't even take a concrete
• 1:05:15
  event or a specific loss. Once the momentum of failure is
• 1:05:21
  about you and the and the the smell of failure, then people
• 1:05:26
  call in their credit and you can't borrow anymore and you're
• 1:05:29
  finished. And it was described in about
• 1:05:33
  what, 2 paragraphs at the start of a chapter where the villains
• 1:05:37
  kind of reign of terror was over because just like that, the
• 1:05:40
  market decided bad investment, I'm off.
• 1:05:44
  And it was. So again, it was another another
• 1:05:50
  sequence where you actually learn stuff, you know, like the
• 1:05:55
  interest. This was this was aimed at kids
• 1:05:57
  to learn about money, but really it was me.
• 1:06:01
  Well, at the start she was told in you all about banking and how
• 1:06:03
  that works and she does like A2 page thing all about banking but
• 1:06:06
  in a really fun way. Then you learn all about sort of
• 1:06:09
  borrowing. Then you learn all about
• 1:06:11
  interest. Then you learn all about
• 1:06:14
  liquidity. And then you learn all about
• 1:06:18
  your business just failing in the market.
• 1:06:20
  So, you know, this is if if every kid had to read 1 Doctor
• 1:06:27
  Who book when they were like 9 or 10, make it this one.
• 1:06:31
  And what a what a country of, you know, fiscally prudent
• 1:06:35
  people would grow up to be Rachel Reeves wouldn't have to
• 1:06:38
  raise anything, you know, because we'd all be fine.
• 1:06:41
  There'd be no there'd be no debt.
• 1:06:43
  There'd be no they'd. Be like, what's going on?
• 1:06:46
  No one's. Borrowing any money anymore?
• 1:06:49
  It's just so happens to have coincided with.
• 1:06:52
  The reprint of Borrowed Time by Naomi Alder.
• 1:06:54
  Yeah. So it's like, well, this woman
• 1:06:57
  has destroyed banking, but she has captured Matt Smith really
• 1:07:02
  well, so. There's a load of sharks going
• 1:07:04
  around eating people. Yeah.
• 1:07:06
  So what are you going to do? What are you going to do?
• 1:07:08
  Did you like the idea of Torchwood and Unit both sniffing
• 1:07:11
  around the crime scene at the end?
• 1:07:13
  I did and again, how lovely was that little throwaway reference
• 1:07:16
  to because the the story is set in 2007, so that would be during
• 1:07:24
  season 3. So you had Torchwood and Unit
• 1:07:28
  capering round in the shadows of Mr. Saxon and it was, it was
• 1:07:32
  lovely to see. And and in sort of two lines,
• 1:07:35
  she gets a bit of comedy out of the relationship of these two
• 1:07:41
  sort of quasi government bodies, which again shows her knowledge
• 1:07:45
  of the show and its history. She says how she can make jokes
• 1:07:50
  about it. She says UNIT will spend 18
• 1:07:53
  fruitless months trying to reconstruct the pieces of the
• 1:07:55
  watch. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:58
  Poor Kate Stewart. She's getting very frustrated.
• 1:08:00
  Well, I, I imagine it's, it's Malcolm down there.
• 1:08:06
  Go. Oh really made it work?
• 1:08:08
  I'll have it done in a minute, Sir.
• 1:08:10
  OK. Oh.
• 1:08:12
  Fuck, I broke it again. Bless.
• 1:08:15
  Him. Oh, it's borrowed my leg.
• 1:08:18
  And can I just say as well, because I didn't see this coming
• 1:08:22
  and I should have seen this coming.
• 1:08:24
  I really loved Samira and Andrew snogging at the end and going,
• 1:08:28
  do you know what? This bank ain't worth it.
• 1:08:31
  Let's go. I'm going to I'm going to own a
• 1:08:32
  bakery. You go paint and.
• 1:08:34
  Let's have a happy life together.
• 1:08:36
  So I thought, actually it's quite a nice little.
• 1:08:38
  It's. Lovely because from page one
• 1:08:41
  and, and maybe I'll go back and talk about chapter one in a, in
• 1:08:44
  a second, but from, from page one, these two have been
• 1:08:47
  absolutely, absolutely set up as being perfect for each other
• 1:08:51
  because they are exactly as ruthless, yet fallible, yet
• 1:08:55
  corrupt, yet inadequate as each other.
• 1:08:59
  So of course they belong to each other totally.
• 1:09:02
  And as the book goes on and you realise maybe that's where we're
• 1:09:06
  heading, I'm sort of sitting again.
• 1:09:07
  Go, go and have a snog. Well, you'd be great for each
• 1:09:11
  other. They were sort of sneering at
• 1:09:14
  each other in those first couple of scenes.
• 1:09:16
  I didn't see it coming a mile off and then sort of.
• 1:09:18
  Halfway through the book when they started working together.
• 1:09:20
  I was like, well, of course they're made for each other,
• 1:09:22
  right? Yeah, yeah, everything they've,
• 1:09:25
  the reason they're both in so much debt is that from the from
• 1:09:29
  the word go, their story is that they're both vying for the same
• 1:09:33
  promotions. So they are absolutely at
• 1:09:35
  loggerheads and and getting themselves into more and more
• 1:09:38
  trouble to just seem better prepared and and better at their
• 1:09:43
  job than each other. So they're both, you know, awful
• 1:09:47
  people because I've never, you know, people, people, yeah,
• 1:09:52
  people that take their jobs that seriously.
• 1:09:54
  I've never really understood. And you know, that's you know.
• 1:09:59
  I thought there was an extra layer of education in this as
• 1:10:01
  well because the banks described towards the end as they don't
• 1:10:05
  care if you're borrowing time that you have to give back and
• 1:10:09
  that you will end up dead as a result.
• 1:10:11
  All they care about is the. Sheet at the end of the month
• 1:10:14
  and. I was like, yeah, say that to
• 1:10:16
  the kids. Don't end up in one of these
• 1:10:18
  dead end corporations that does not care.
• 1:10:21
  You know what the what they put you through and how how they
• 1:10:24
  basically kill you off. Yeah, HSBC would not give a shit
• 1:10:28
  if I were unable to make my repayments one month.
• 1:10:31
  They would not ask questions, they would not try to help.
• 1:10:34
  They would eat me up like a big metal machine.
• 1:10:37
  If they said to you though, OK, look, OK, clearly you can't pay
• 1:10:41
  this back. Like can we have a year of your
• 1:10:43
  life? Would you say yes?
• 1:10:49
  I might have done 30 years ago. Oh.
• 1:10:53
  Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I'm, I'm staring at the
• 1:10:55
  end of the tunnel now. Well, it's it's not so much
• 1:10:58
  that, but no one knows how long their personal tunnel is.
• 1:11:02
  Unless you'd like Adrian Mole, you've measured your personal
• 1:11:05
  tunnel. But yeah, I mean, it's one of
• 1:11:10
  those, it's one of those things you wouldn't necessarily do it
• 1:11:13
  in real, real life, but it is the sort of thing you do in a
• 1:11:17
  kind of fantasy world, I think. Well, I mean, I think, look,
• 1:11:24
  we've had a good go at the concepts, the characterization,
• 1:11:27
  the guest characters that pace, the pros.
• 1:11:30
  Have you got anything else on your nose that you would like to
• 1:11:32
  cover before we move on to the last segment of the episode?
• 1:11:35
  I there, there are two things I wanted to talk about.
• 1:11:38
  I wanted to talk about specifically chapter 1, because
• 1:11:41
  it's all about Andrew Brown and it's how you're introduced to
• 1:11:44
  the premise and he works at Lexington Bank.
• 1:11:48
  And Full disclosure, I listened to chapter 1 while I was on my
• 1:11:52
  way to work on Monday. So it was about at 6:30.
• 1:11:57
  It's still dark outside. I'm at the bus stop at the end
• 1:12:00
  of the road going to work in an office.
• 1:12:06
  And you've got this chapter that's telling you about Andrew
• 1:12:09
  Brown, who's getting up early and everything's going wrong.
• 1:12:12
  And he treads on his breakfast and he irons the carpet and the,
• 1:12:16
  you know, dog's sick on his shirt or something just so he
• 1:12:19
  can get into the office just because he's got a 9:00 AM
• 1:12:22
  presentation. And that goes wrong.
• 1:12:26
  And all the way through that chapter, everything is so leak
• 1:12:31
  and empty. And that's what adult life is
• 1:12:33
  like. And again, this would be a good
• 1:12:36
  book for for kids to read. It would also make a lot of them
• 1:12:39
  decide not to bother with growing up.
• 1:12:41
  But. What infant suicide through the
• 1:12:44
  roof while by the time by Naomi Alderman's just been rewritten.
• 1:12:49
  So, so yeah, OK, there's, there's good points and bad with
• 1:12:51
  the book, but what a brilliantly constructed and not, not
• 1:12:57
  sensationalist, nothing out of the ordinary happened.
• 1:12:59
  Those are, you know, he the, the, the train goes 3 minutes
• 1:13:04
  early before he can get on it. That's happened to all of us.
• 1:13:07
  We've all slept through the alarm.
• 1:13:08
  We've all had a unfortunate stain on our suit.
• 1:13:12
  You know, it's just this kind of succession.
• 1:13:14
  That was a plot point though, wasn't it?
• 1:13:17
  Because that's when they realized that there were two
• 1:13:19
  versions of him because one had the stain and one didn't.
• 1:13:22
  Yeah, but it was. But I, I just thought Chapter 1
• 1:13:25
  was such a skilful and brilliant and subtle evocation of the kind
• 1:13:31
  of awfulness of, of the life, You know, I've never worked in a
• 1:13:35
  bank. I don't assume it is actually
• 1:13:37
  that awful. If you're the sort of person who
• 1:13:39
  likes numbers, then you're probably quite happy working in
• 1:13:41
  a bank. Work in a bank?
• 1:13:42
  Get in touch with us, let us know.
• 1:13:44
  Yeah, let us know. Let us know are.
• 1:13:45
  You living a soulless existence. Yeah.
• 1:13:48
  Are you able to, are you able to move a decimal point in my
• 1:13:52
  account? So I've got some money that that
• 1:13:54
  would be good. Can you do three points in my
• 1:13:57
  direction please? But the other thing that I, I
• 1:14:00
  did bump on in Chapter 1 is that Andrew Brown is permanently in
• 1:14:06
  competition with Samira Jenkins. And I bumped on that because
• 1:14:11
  obviously she's coded as a, an Indian lady because she's called
• 1:14:15
  Samira. And until I got to the point in
• 1:14:19
  the book where I realised that she was also borrowing time, I
• 1:14:23
  just thought this was about that kind of kind of truism about
• 1:14:28
  Brown kids, that they are just pushed to be exceptional.
• 1:14:33
  And this is, and this is something I talked about with my
• 1:14:35
  wife, who is of Indian descent. And culturally, yes, those kids
• 1:14:40
  are pushed to work really hard throughout their childhood.
• 1:14:43
  They don't get to, they don't get to get AC for an essay.
• 1:14:47
  They get, you know, sent to their room without dinner if
• 1:14:50
  they don't get an A. That's why there are so many of
• 1:14:53
  them who become doctors when, you know, I, I fiddle about with
• 1:14:58
  a few spreadsheets for a couple of hours, you know, and I was, I
• 1:15:03
  was sort of momentarily wondering if we were going to
• 1:15:06
  get more detail about her or if she was just being kind of
• 1:15:10
  painted as well. She's Indian, so of course she's
• 1:15:13
  really good at her job. But no, we did get that fleshed
• 1:15:17
  out. So I was quite, I was very happy
• 1:15:20
  about that. Sort of the push away from that
• 1:15:22
  cliche is when she looks around and she goes, why the hell did I
• 1:15:27
  not notice that this bank is full of copies of people doing
• 1:15:31
  various things at the same time? Everyone in that bank's doing
• 1:15:34
  it. They're all borrowing time
• 1:15:35
  because they're all being pushed.
• 1:15:37
  Beyond the limits of human capacity.
• 1:15:41
  Now I've never been in a bank that's felt that kind of
• 1:15:43
  animated normally that everyone looks like they're half asleep.
• 1:15:46
  And you get some bloke comes out of his office in a suit and he
• 1:15:50
  yawns and he shuffles over to you and he's like, can I help or
• 1:15:54
  can I go back to sleep? I've got a Metro Bank.
• 1:15:57
  They. Offer out lollipops.
• 1:15:58
  Metro Bank. Do they?
• 1:16:00
  Yeah, I love going in there. Oh we had a Metro Bank in
• 1:16:03
  Colchester before I before I left the UK.
• 1:16:06
  And a pen. I was sold.
• 1:16:09
  I opened the account that day. That's, yeah, that's, that's,
• 1:16:11
  that's better than what I got when I, when I joined the
• 1:16:14
  Midland Bank when I was at university.
• 1:16:16
  What did you think then of the comedy sequence, though, where
• 1:16:20
  the Doctor and Amy are sitting in?
• 1:16:23
  On the presentation. And the guys from America are
• 1:16:26
  making absurd demands that nobody could ever.
• 1:16:29
  Oh, I would have thought you would have a report for this.
• 1:16:32
  And Andrew goes, oh, hang on a minute, walks out of the room
• 1:16:35
  and then walks back with that report that he's just spent the
• 1:16:37
  last, I know half a day doing. And it goes.
• 1:16:40
  It gets sort of. Crazier and more fast as it.
• 1:16:44
  Goes yeah, but. You can see it on the screen,
• 1:16:46
  right? Absolutely.
• 1:16:47
  That again is is that's Moffat, that's coupling.
• 1:16:51
  That's exactly where that's coming from.
• 1:16:52
  That's the kind of energy that Alderman's pulling from.
• 1:16:56
  And it would have been so good on TV.
• 1:17:00
  And it still could be. I've only really got one thing I
• 1:17:04
  want to quote which I think was. Sort of the moral of the story.
• 1:17:08
  But it it, it didn't come across as like, you know, looking at
• 1:17:11
  the screen and go, right, kids, pay attention.
• 1:17:13
  It was just a lovely line where the doctor says, that's the
• 1:17:17
  trouble. We're borrowing.
• 1:17:18
  It makes everything look good. No one wants to see what's going
• 1:17:22
  on underneath because the surface is just so shiny.
• 1:17:25
  There's no point making everything shiny.
• 1:17:28
  Your whole species is going to die out the moment they call in
• 1:17:30
  those deaths. And I was like, yeah, that's.
• 1:17:33
  True. Yeah, that is, that is very
• 1:17:35
  true. You know the only as a you know,
• 1:17:39
  in my in my 20's the only way to stop worrying about the amount
• 1:17:43
  of debt I had was to go and buy another DVD or another another 5
• 1:17:48
  pints of beer or whatever. I would totally.
• 1:17:51
  Rationalize it, right? And then at the end of the
• 1:17:54
  month, the bank statement would come in and I'll be like, how
• 1:17:57
  did I rationalize any of these decisions?
• 1:17:59
  What was like? Do you know what I mean?
• 1:18:01
  Seriously, I was in. By the time my marriage fell
• 1:18:03
  apart I was at about 25 grands worth of debt, which was a lot
• 1:18:08
  for me. Unfortunately we had a flat to
• 1:18:12
  sell that managed to pay off that debt.
• 1:18:15
  Otherwise I would have gone into single life a very unhappy man.
• 1:18:18
  Well, absolutely, this is, you know, the, the kind of unspoken
• 1:18:23
  point, I guess of, of the book is that, you know, a lot of
• 1:18:28
  people are in a very deep hole with, with credit cards.
• 1:18:34
  And it is because, well, I think a large part of it is that we're
• 1:18:39
  never really sat down and educated about this.
• 1:18:42
  It should be in the school curriculum.
• 1:18:43
  You know when you're doing your GCS ES, there should be a
• 1:18:47
  three-week module on how credit cards work and how mobile phone
• 1:18:51
  bills will destroy you. Just give them this book.
• 1:18:53
  Yeah, just do that. Just do that it it does so.
• 1:18:56
  We're going to make you even more famous.
• 1:18:58
  We're going to put you on the. The prospectus.
• 1:19:00
  You know you have to. Read this book.
• 1:19:02
  Yeah, there'll be a GCSE in Aldermania.
• 1:19:05
  Aldermania. Oh.
• 1:19:07
  I love it I. Mean, I said to you in a message
• 1:19:10
  and I read it back afterwards and thought, wow Joe, you really
• 1:19:12
  are capable of hyperbole when I said.
• 1:19:14
  That. This was potentially my favorite
• 1:19:18
  ever 11th Doctor story because in terms of a story with packed
• 1:19:24
  full of brilliant ideas, great comedy, scary moments, great
• 1:19:30
  twists, great dialogue, and just that furious pace, I was like I.
• 1:19:35
  Was trying to. Figure an 11th Doctor episode
• 1:19:37
  and there are some I really like.
• 1:19:38
  Don't get me wrong. Doctor's Wife I absolutely adore
• 1:19:41
  with the Gob complex, Vincent and the Doctor, you know there
• 1:19:44
  are some I absolutely love. This is up there though in terms
• 1:19:48
  of the pure enjoyment I got. And forgive me, I'm going to say
• 1:19:52
  this don't hit me. It may have had something to do
• 1:19:55
  with the fact that the book was divorced from the excesses of
• 1:19:59
  Stephen Murphy's dialogue and the performances of Matt Smith
• 1:20:03
  and Karen Guillard. That may have because I was sort
• 1:20:06
  of, you know, conjuring this in my head.
• 1:20:08
  But just purely in terms of what it's doing with those
• 1:20:11
  characters, Yeah. Just just absolutely brilliant.
• 1:20:16
  Well, for me, it's exactly the same response, but from exactly
• 1:20:19
  the opposite direction. So I'm comparing it to a lot of
• 1:20:25
  episodes from the first two years of Matt Smith and his era,
• 1:20:29
  which for me was as good as Doctor, whoever got.
• 1:20:33
  And I was visualizing their performances as I was hearing
• 1:20:37
  the audio book, and it matched perfectly.
• 1:20:40
  So for me, this is one of the better 11th Doctor stories
• 1:20:45
  because it feels very much like all the other best 11th Doctor
• 1:20:50
  stories. And I think it's deliberate and
• 1:20:52
  I think it's had an amazing work of, of art to to capture that.
• 1:20:58
  The fact that it pleased both of us and we come to this era from
• 1:21:03
  completely different directions, I mean, that's quite telling,
• 1:21:06
  isn't it? It really is.
• 1:21:08
  It's a great book. Yeah, really.
• 1:21:10
  Go and get this one, guys. I've been trying to convince
• 1:21:12
  people and they keep giving me a look like they've sort of
• 1:21:15
  swallowed a sour gummy game NSA. But actually, that's the last
• 1:21:19
  question I'm going to ask you before we go into the last
• 1:21:21
  little bit. It is, I read a review online
• 1:21:24
  and I sent it to you, and I really took exception with the
• 1:21:27
  last line of that review, which was something along the lines of
• 1:21:31
  they don't deserve something this good.
• 1:21:35
  And whether that was talking about the Nsas or whether that
• 1:21:38
  was talking about books for kids, I don't know.
• 1:21:43
  But I think that's a really shitty statement to make.
• 1:21:47
  It is, and I don't know either. There is a kind of assumption
• 1:21:55
  that the Nsas are just for kids. There is also an assumption that
• 1:21:59
  the Nsas are therefore a bit shit.
• 1:22:02
  If you're not a kid, If you're a kid and you get a book, then you
• 1:22:08
  deserve that book to be as amazing and transporting and
• 1:22:11
  evocative and inspiring as it possibly can be.
• 1:22:15
  Because kids need to read and. Possibly more so, right?
• 1:22:21
  More. Can be amazing.
• 1:22:22
  More than adults, these books need to be really good.
• 1:22:26
  Keep kids reading. Exactly.
• 1:22:28
  There's a, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that
• 1:22:32
  there's a problem with child literacy because everybody knows
• 1:22:35
  that people read less. And part of it is because we're
• 1:22:38
  just evolving away from the written word as a, as a, as, as
• 1:22:42
  a medium of narrative fiction, because everything's about TV
• 1:22:48
  now, prestige TV. But imagine if you as a kid had
• 1:22:53
  had a Doctor Who book this good. Now you know, Destiny of the
• 1:22:57
  Daleks is a fine novelization, but it's not this.
• 1:23:01
  But does the awakening still thrill you as much as it did
• 1:23:04
  when you were younger? Well, I mean, can you still feel
• 1:23:06
  the frisson? I can, I can, but that's because
• 1:23:09
  The Awakening happens to be probably my favorite Davison.
• 1:23:12
  So, you know, that's a coincidence.
• 1:23:15
  But yeah, this that review, I, I interpret it as saying that the
• 1:23:21
  Nsas didn't deserve a book this good, which is, which is no all
• 1:23:27
  NSA should aspire to be this good.
• 1:23:30
  It's not like saying it's a it's a range of ship books and that's
• 1:23:33
  the way we like it. And how dare they put a good one
• 1:23:36
  in amongst the pile. It should be criticizing all the
• 1:23:40
  other Nsas that aren't this one saying why aren't they this
• 1:23:44
  good? Obviously on We're All Stories
• 1:23:46
  in the end, you cover the New Adventures and the Avve Dr.
• 1:23:49
  books and you sort of said that you might be branching out into
• 1:23:51
  other areas if you ever cover a new or just you wait.
• 1:23:55
  Wait for the reaction you'll get from people if you suggest let's
• 1:23:59
  do one of these. Oh, you're.
• 1:24:02
  Just grabbing something off the shelf now.
• 1:24:05
  Oh, the Jody ones. The good doctors are great read.
• 1:24:09
  Oh, we've got also Sophie Aldridge 10.
• 1:24:13
  Dear, I thought you had a psychotic look about you.
• 1:24:15
  Engines of war, Yes. Fabulous.
• 1:24:18
  Any anymore there? Yeah, but I can't reach them.
• 1:24:24
  But yeah, we've I've got quite a lot and I'm really looking
• 1:24:27
  forward to. Sorry, I should I should turn
• 1:24:31
  around and talk into the microphone.
• 1:24:33
  I think I'd be surprised. When I'd want to be there are.
• 1:24:37
  Average books there, I won't say there aren't, but there are
• 1:24:40
  average new adventures and there are below average new adventures
• 1:24:44
  as well, you know? There are and I've I've just
• 1:24:47
  started re repurchasing all the Discworld novels because over
• 1:24:51
  here in America they're being reissued.
• 1:24:54
  And I was about to say that there's probably an average
• 1:24:57
  Pratchett novel, but I don't I don't think that's probably
• 1:25:00
  true. In fact, maybe Jingo.
• 1:25:03
  But yeah, every every author has, you know, off days in the
• 1:25:07
  office and not every book in any series is brilliant.
• 1:25:11
  Some of the bonds novels weren't very good.
• 1:25:14
  All of the bonds weren't very good.
• 1:25:18
  But you know, every, every series is capable of having kind
• 1:25:22
  of unexpected treasures in it. And this you know, if the Nsas
• 1:25:26
  can contain something this good, then what possible reason is
• 1:25:30
  there not to read all of them? And this is a range that did it
• 1:25:34
  managed to bring in Johnny Morris, a great writer, Lance
• 1:25:39
  Parkin, Paul Mars, you know, brilliant, brilliant writers
• 1:25:43
  writing for kids. All credits are.
• 1:25:45
  I mean, I said to you in a message, didn't I?
• 1:25:47
  This shit's all over a bulk of the New Adventures and EDA's
• 1:25:51
  that I've read simply because it's just so enjoyable.
• 1:25:55
  It's quite happy being like a Doctor Who story.
• 1:25:59
  It's not trying to be big or clever or dramatic or angsty or
• 1:26:03
  or adult. It's just having fun.
• 1:26:06
  And at the same time it's doing what TV, or certainly the BBC
• 1:26:11
  used to aspire to do, which was educate and inform as well as
• 1:26:14
  entertain. So it's, yeah, it's, it's just
• 1:26:20
  one of the best of two books I've ever read.
• 1:26:23
  Are you listening to this, Naomi?
• 1:26:24
  All right, OK. You better.
• 1:26:26
  We want to mention next time you're up against there with
• 1:26:29
  Barack Obama, all right? Yeah, when, when, when I meet
• 1:26:33
  you at the launch of the Power 2 Electric Boogaloo.
• 1:26:36
  I want I want to share your crude details.
• 1:26:40
  Well, OK, Ian, let's slip on into the last section.
• 1:26:45
  And it's probably the smallest section, but I am really
• 1:26:47
  intrigued to hear what your answer to this is.
• 1:26:50
  For some reason people love her ranking right?
• 1:26:52
  People love to rank. Yeah.
• 1:26:55
  What has been your favorite? And I'm not saying your favorite
• 1:26:58
  episode to record, but what's been your favorite books to
• 1:27:02
  discover on where all stories in the end your top 3IN whatever
• 1:27:07
  order you like? Well, I very much enjoyed
• 1:27:15
  talking about Warhead with Andrew Cartmel A because it's
• 1:27:22
  not everyday you get to interview someone who was
• 1:27:24
  responsible for for your era of Doctor Who, but but to get his
• 1:27:30
  perspective on it after all this time.
• 1:27:33
  And to finally get to the kind of peel the onion of how the
• 1:27:36
  Cat's Cradle trilogy of new adventures came to be and how
• 1:27:40
  they were completely unconnected books written by authors who
• 1:27:44
  weren't in touch with each other.
• 1:27:45
  And how it was kind of crowbar to being a.
• 1:27:47
  Really, I could never have told. I mean, I mean, we could all
• 1:27:50
  tell at the time there was like, really, this is this is supposed
• 1:27:53
  to be a trilogy. I I could do better than this
• 1:27:56
  and I'm an idiot. What did it say when it came
• 1:27:58
  out? It said Cat's Cradle and what
• 1:28:00
  the fuck? That, well, I think he knew it
• 1:28:02
  was going to happen because he'd had to sort of go back and
• 1:28:04
  rewrite one paragraph to include a silver cat.
• 1:28:07
  But yeah, he was, he was not, not angry about it.
• 1:28:11
  Still, it was 30 years ago. But he was, you know, he was
• 1:28:14
  being paid. I never, I never wrote a book
• 1:28:16
  called Cass Cradle Warhead. I wrote a book called Warhead.
• 1:28:20
  Thank you very much. So that was a really good book.
• 1:28:24
  Also, I have heard you say you know the which is why I'm
• 1:28:28
  desperate to get you back on this to cover one of these
• 1:28:31
  Andrew Carmel books because I think you and me will have
• 1:28:35
  different reactions, but that you said that is your peak.
• 1:28:38
  I think that's hard trilogy, specifically Warlock.
• 1:28:42
  But yeah, I, I, I that is a hill I will die on.
• 1:28:47
  So if you want to fight me on a hill, you may die on that.
• 1:28:51
  Hill. But well, bring it very dirty.
• 1:28:54
  Bring it, you tubby bitch. So wrestling, yeah.
• 1:29:02
  I another one would be End Game by Terence Dicks which.
• 1:29:08
  That was Dylan when it. That was now I thought at the
• 1:29:11
  time I read that book, firstly that it was it was kind of
• 1:29:15
  serviceable but underwhelming. Fast forward 20 years and
• 1:29:20
  talking about it with Dylan and obviously talking about anything
• 1:29:22
  with Dylan is one of life's joys because Dylan's great and.
• 1:29:27
  We try to be the best host of Doctor Who podcast, but we know
• 1:29:30
  we're already beat he's. Yeah, damn him to hell, but he
• 1:29:35
  just finds these layers of of kind of unintentional comedy and
• 1:29:41
  ineptness. And he because he knows the the
• 1:29:44
  back story. I didn't know that this was like
• 1:29:46
  a sort of barely complete first draft that Terrence Dick's
• 1:29:50
  handed in and then effed off on holiday, leaving Justin Richards
• 1:29:54
  to kind of write an extra 40,000 words and turn it into a very
• 1:29:58
  short book. It was revenge for when Robert
• 1:30:00
  Holmes did that with the Thai warriors Terence Dix.
• 1:30:03
  Yeah, sure it was. But it's fascinating to find out
• 1:30:06
  things like that. And, and, and so this is a good
• 1:30:08
  example of where you find out why a book has turned out the
• 1:30:14
  way it has. Like if if we knew what the
• 1:30:17
  story was behind Belle Tempest, I think that would be Oh yeah,
• 1:30:21
  that would be something a lot of people would like to know that
• 1:30:24
  in. Fact.
• 1:30:26
  Joyner Death cult. I don't know that he did, but
• 1:30:30
  you know, but it's assumption. So.
• 1:30:33
  So the Belle Tempest episode is the most popular episode of
• 1:30:37
  World Stories. In the end, it's had about twice
• 1:30:41
  as many downloads as any other episode, and I have no idea why.
• 1:30:45
  Maybe it's because my guest on that one's very popular, But
• 1:30:49
  yeah. And my third choice would be the
• 1:30:53
  Trevor Baxendale novel Cold Heart.
• 1:30:57
  That episode was hilarious, now hearing the two of you try and
• 1:31:00
  scramble around to find something positive to say about.
• 1:31:03
  That well, well, no. So so I really enjoyed the book
• 1:31:09
  and what made it a really good episode was that Harry,
• 1:31:13
  obviously it it didn't work for him.
• 1:31:18
  So we had we had very different perspectives about the book and
• 1:31:23
  that led to a really good conversation, really good
• 1:31:28
  episode, I thought, because I could listen to Harry talk all
• 1:31:31
  day. Blasted.
• 1:31:32
  It didn't they. I was.
• 1:31:33
  He was not in. The well-being room at work,
• 1:31:36
  howling with laughter. Someone ducked their head in the
• 1:31:38
  door and said, you're right. I went, Oh yeah, Doctor Who
• 1:31:41
  books, you know? Yeah, but, but, you know, as a
• 1:31:46
  as a Doctor Who fan, I would have assumed that everyone would
• 1:31:50
  respond to that book the same way that I did, which is this
• 1:31:53
  feels like a six part John Pertwee story.
• 1:31:58
  We we know this, it's very familiar.
• 1:32:00
  There's a baddie, there's his sort of duplicitous son or
• 1:32:03
  whatever. There's a crap civilisation of
• 1:32:06
  poorly realised aliens. They're a ridiculous
• 1:32:09
  underground. I thought everyone would love
• 1:32:10
  this. So it was fascinating there.
• 1:32:14
  There was a huge gaping orifice on the cover.
• 1:32:17
  More He likes a a big hole. Trevor Baxon Dale, isn't he?
• 1:32:23
  I think that's libelous, Joe. No, there's a hole on the front
• 1:32:26
  of Eaters of Wasps as well. That's a mouth.
• 1:32:29
  Oh. You're still a big.
• 1:32:30
  If you're going to, if you're going to say he holds a goal,
• 1:32:32
  I'm, I'm going, I'm not, I'm not being party to filth like that.
• 1:32:37
  He likes, yeah, he likes an unexpected aperture.
• 1:32:41
  If you shut your eyes it could be any sex, OK?
• 1:32:45
  Yes, it could. It could be any, any any lady
• 1:32:47
  with a prickly beard. Those are three great episodes
• 1:32:51
  as well. I've been, I mean, I chose 3 as
• 1:32:54
  well. I loved doing the Remembrance of
• 1:32:58
  the Daleks because another book that made me realise.
• 1:33:03
  Man, oh man, sometimes when we're catering for kids, you get
• 1:33:06
  the best Doctor Who fiction you've ever had and.
• 1:33:10
  That sort of. That's the first new adventure,
• 1:33:12
  which is what it feels like. Absolutely.
• 1:33:14
  It's probably the best new adventure of all, which kind of
• 1:33:17
  leaves the range in the dust after that.
• 1:33:19
  Well, fortunately, you know, yes, it's got the Daleks in it.
• 1:33:22
  So of course it's going to be the best.
• 1:33:24
  But I, I, and I was listening to your episode on Remembrance and
• 1:33:27
  I and I can't remember what it what I wanted to point out a
• 1:33:31
  couple of things that they got wrong.
• 1:33:34
  I think it came out in, I think it was April 1990, Yeah.
• 1:33:40
  And there seemed, there seemed to be a lot of people who
• 1:33:42
  weren't sure when it came out. I'm.
• 1:33:43
  Supposed to edit that bit out. Everyone's just going through
• 1:33:45
  books going, oh, I'm not sure when.
• 1:33:47
  It happened. So I remember going into Ace
• 1:33:50
  Comics like every single Friday, because that was the day that
• 1:33:53
  they put that month's new Target on the shelf after school for a
• 1:33:57
  month. Because it was, it was delayed.
• 1:34:00
  Imagine that. A delayed book by Ben Ronovich.
• 1:34:03
  Good Lord. I remember all right.
• 1:34:08
  I remember exactly when it came out and yeah, it, you know,
• 1:34:12
  there were maybe what, 3 or 4 books left after that and it
• 1:34:16
  absolutely blew me away. So it was great to hear your
• 1:34:21
  episode. Yeah, I I couldn't.
• 1:34:23
  Sing in its praises. Of course there are better new
• 1:34:26
  adventures, but not many, you know, I think that did start
• 1:34:29
  things high. My second one is what I've not
• 1:34:32
  long recorded, actually, which was Doctor Who in Wonderland by
• 1:34:35
  Paul Mars, because I fucking hate Alice in Wonderland with a
• 1:34:38
  passion. My other half's obsessed with it
• 1:34:41
  and I have to watch all these different versions.
• 1:34:43
  Have you seen the Alan Moore version of?
• 1:34:47
  No. Novel Alice getting cunnilingus.
• 1:34:50
  I mean, it's absolutely terrifying.
• 1:34:52
  I know, right? Yeah, I mean, now I will.
• 1:34:55
  It's called Lost Girls or something like that.
• 1:34:57
  Yeah, it's a big, big old tome full of pony images and
• 1:35:01
  pictures. Down lost girls.
• 1:35:04
  He's on Amazon as we speak. You, you keep talking, don't
• 1:35:09
  mind. What I'm doing?
• 1:35:10
  Did you say your your missus was away?
• 1:35:12
  Don't worry, they do 24 hour delivery all right.
• 1:35:16
  Anyway, I so I went in with low expectations, but high
• 1:35:19
  expectations because I love poor Mars so.
• 1:35:22
  And finally, I'm in on the party because he manages to fuse the
• 1:35:25
  two together so beautifully, so whistly.
• 1:35:31
  It was just an absolute joy. And everyone else there was a
• 1:35:33
  huge Paul Miles fan and a huge Alice in Wonderland fan.
• 1:35:36
  So it was just a big love in with me just shitting on Alice
• 1:35:38
  in Wonderland a bit. But you know, like you do.
• 1:35:40
  And then my number one is still The Eight Doctors, because I
• 1:35:45
  went into that expecting to really hate that book.
• 1:35:49
  I just found it an absolute tree.
• 1:35:51
  Like it was all the best and all the worst of Terence Dicks, all
• 1:35:55
  in one book. All the indulgence, all the
• 1:35:59
  ambition, you know, all the humor.
• 1:36:01
  The pit where the trashing ate the man.
• 1:36:03
  Maybe howl for about 3 weeks. Yeah, and just put it apart.
• 1:36:08
  That absurd tone, how it is to be is baffling, right?
• 1:36:13
  It is. And again, speaking, speaking
• 1:36:17
  not just as a man, but as a, a publisher now anyone signed off
• 1:36:22
  on that as a commercial enterprise?
• 1:36:25
  It's like we've done a, we've done ATV movie.
• 1:36:28
  We're probably not going to go to series, but there is a, you
• 1:36:32
  know, we got 9 million viewers. There's a lot of interest.
• 1:36:35
  Let's start publishing some books that will sell to these
• 1:36:38
  new viewers who may not be intricate, delicately familiar
• 1:36:42
  with State of Decay and The Trial of the Time Lord.
• 1:36:47
  And how they ever signed off on on that book being put, I will
• 1:36:51
  never know. And I I won't get to cover that
• 1:36:54
  on my show for a number of years, and I may well be dead
• 1:36:58
  before those before that time. You'll have the best time, I
• 1:37:01
  promise you. No, I, I just, I don't know if I
• 1:37:05
  can. I think that might be the
• 1:37:06
  episode that breaks me. What you've got to do is it's
• 1:37:10
  literally, they should have asked Terence, like Terence, who
• 1:37:13
  is this book for once he'd finished it and handed it in and
• 1:37:15
  he just would have gone everyone.
• 1:37:17
  Because it's literally, it's the people that have never heard of
• 1:37:20
  Doctor Who. It's the people that know Doctor
• 1:37:22
  Who intimately. It's the people that like huge
• 1:37:25
  sprawling narratives. It's the people that like short
• 1:37:28
  stories because they're all kind of short stories.
• 1:37:31
  I mean, it is just eclectic, let's say that.
• 1:37:35
  So the way I look at it is, is I like what you've said, I like
• 1:37:40
  what you've done there, but I would add to it.
• 1:37:41
  So it's for simultaneously. It's a book for everyone and no
• 1:37:46
  one. It should be for no one.
• 1:37:49
  Yes, I was saying about suicide rates going up.
• 1:37:53
  What? I don't know what the numbers
• 1:37:54
  were like in. They were quite heavy in May 97
• 1:37:58
  through the roof, a lot of sort of 20 something sad virgins were
• 1:38:02
  ending their lives. Oh my God, Ian, why do I always
• 1:38:06
  have the best time when I'll talk with you on a Zoom call?
• 1:38:09
  Jesus. Christ, I, I have no idea.
• 1:38:11
  I think, I imagine it's because you can see my cat and it's very
• 1:38:14
  therapeutic. I mean, it's like a, it's like
• 1:38:16
  the cat's cradle cat. It's a sort of silver cat in.
• 1:38:18
  The back, yeah, he's, he's, he's, he's Grey.
• 1:38:21
  When we when we rescued him, he was called Grey Wolf, but we
• 1:38:26
  changed his name to Harvey Cohen because he looked more like a
• 1:38:29
  lawyer. And he look, his tail is just
• 1:38:32
  sort of gently caressing what looks like a load of past doctor
• 1:38:36
  adventures. I think he's his tail is on.
• 1:38:40
  What's he choosing out for? Yeah, it's a white one.
• 1:38:42
  He's he's picking out, he's pointing at Father Time, which
• 1:38:45
  is which at the time of recording is my most recent
• 1:38:48
  episode, Boys and girls. A cat of huge distinction.
• 1:38:53
  He's on brand, He's on brand. Although I'm scared now that
• 1:38:58
  Cat's here we might be. This episode may be the 4th
• 1:39:00
  instalment of the Cat's Cradle trilogy.
• 1:39:03
  What would we be called? Well, I would be, so I'd have
• 1:39:10
  one of those very long Gallifreon names like
• 1:39:12
  Violvariansti, Chevarel and Suit.
• 1:39:16
  You. You'd be like Joe the fucker and
• 1:39:19
  you'd get one line of dialogue which would be a foul mouthed
• 1:39:23
  rant about something and then you'd be eaten by a horse or a
• 1:39:27
  Centaur. Joe the fucker.
• 1:39:29
  I feel like that's a good. Good way to end this episode.
• 1:39:32
  Ian, can I ask you please to tell people, because I have a
• 1:39:36
  feeling they're going to want to after listening to this madness
• 1:39:40
  where people can find you elsewhere, not here.
• 1:39:44
  Not here. So I exist.
• 1:39:47
  You do. Much much like the man dragger.
• 1:39:50
  I've been spending the last two hours talking to myself
• 1:39:53
  otherwise. I am on numerous podcasts.
• 1:39:59
  We started out doing all of Time and Space which you can listen
• 1:40:03
  to, which is me and my very dear friend Mark Cockrum working our
• 1:40:07
  way through all of Doctor Who televisually.
• 1:40:11
  Can I say something? About all time and space.
• 1:40:13
  Yeah, please do. Please do I.
• 1:40:15
  Think there are sort of tears of Doctor Who podcasts.
• 1:40:18
  Not to sort of denigrate anybody, but I would say in
• 1:40:21
  terms of the production and the quality of guests and the
• 1:40:25
  critique, there's two I'll put on the top tier and that is
• 1:40:30
  flight for entirety and all the time and space because you can
• 1:40:34
  see how much love goes into those two.
• 1:40:37
  Well, I mean, I'm, I'm flattered on Mark's behalf.
• 1:40:40
  He he produces that. So all of that quality is down
• 1:40:43
  to him. And to be to be mentioned in the
• 1:40:46
  same breath as flight for entirety is just I the stuff of
• 1:40:50
  a giddy fool's dream. So I thank you humbly.
• 1:40:54
  I'm also so. So that's my upmarket show.
• 1:40:57
  I also do rural Stories in the end, which as we've mentioned is
• 1:41:01
  me talking with a bunch of people about the New Adventures,
• 1:41:05
  the 8 Doctor books and who knows where we're going to go next
• 1:41:08
  year. Then I do a comedy podcast
• 1:41:13
  called The Electric Sod Cast and like a great many people, I am a
• 1:41:17
  stranger in space. So you can listen to me very
• 1:41:20
  infrequently these days because I'm spread ever so thin.
• 1:41:23
  And I'm toasting to strangers in space, you know?
• 1:41:26
  Well, I wouldn't play with anyone else.
• 1:41:28
  I said. I'll do it on my own or nothing.
• 1:41:31
  He went all right. Well, you've kind of
• 1:41:34
  revolutionized things. And I think J Rs desperately
• 1:41:38
  glad that someone's got a bit of drive and a bit of initiative
• 1:41:41
  because the rest of us are like cats and he has to spend all of
• 1:41:44
  his time corralling us to read this.
• 1:41:47
  Watch that. Now I'm on those group.
• 1:41:49
  Chats, I'll say just how much work he actually does.
• 1:41:52
  It's amazing on those goals. It's amazing, you know, but then
• 1:41:56
  again, it's because he puts out three episodes a week and that's
• 1:41:58
  a lot of content. And, and obviously we, we talk
• 1:42:02
  about films and books and, and TV shows and we've, we've kind
• 1:42:07
  of ran out of Doctor Who stuff donkeys years ago, but it's a
• 1:42:11
  really good pop culture show. Dip in and out of it.
• 1:42:13
  There's going to be an episode that will appeal to you.
• 1:42:16
  There's going to be 5 on the trot that maybe don't, but it's,
• 1:42:18
  you know, it's, it's like a like a.
• 1:42:21
  Person to your subject. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:42:23
  So yeah, I'm I'm. I want to say one thing about
• 1:42:26
  your book podcast now as well. Sorry, I'm so sorry about this,
• 1:42:29
  but I'm doing a bit of marketing for you here, OK, Because I
• 1:42:32
  mean, I will say that too hot for TV where that drops in my
• 1:42:35
  podcast catcher. It does make me sort of cream my
• 1:42:38
  knickers more than where were stories in the end, but that's
• 1:42:41
  only because it's more frequent. Otherwise you'd be on a path for
• 1:42:44
  excitement in my pants. But thinking what I'm trying to
• 1:42:49
  say badly is that the the MVP Doctor Who Book podcast is we're
• 1:42:56
  all stories in the end. And do you know why that is?
• 1:42:59
  Not clear. Because you're on it.
• 1:43:02
  And you are? So fucking funny.
• 1:43:05
  I see they're howling. You know, there's almost like a.
• 1:43:09
  Yeah, I've committed to this task.
• 1:43:11
  Of reading all these fucking books.
• 1:43:14
  And now I'm, I'm wading my way through the dirt, you know, And
• 1:43:19
  every now and again there's a glimmer of light.
• 1:43:22
  You know, yeah. And this and this started off as
• 1:43:24
  a labour of love, but after about 3 episodes I was like
• 1:43:28
  fucking hell with hundreds of these can.
• 1:43:31
  I ask a favour. Yes, please.
• 1:43:34
  Please. Don't stop because it's just
• 1:43:35
  delightful. I love it.
• 1:43:38
  You're very kind, you're very generous, and just for you, I
• 1:43:41
  will keep soldiering on. Yeah, just.
• 1:43:44
  Just for you. I've seen the, I've seen the,
• 1:43:46
  I've seen the figures. It literally is just for you.
• 1:43:50
  Before we go, Ian, I've just I've just acquired this watch
• 1:43:54
  that I would like to hand to you now.
• 1:43:56
  OK? Should you wish to get the last
• 1:43:58
  two hours of your life back, then just turn the Don't read
• 1:44:01
  the terms and conditions, turn the dial.
• 1:44:03
  All right, just see where you go from there.
• 1:44:06
  Is there any interest or? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 5 minutes per
• 1:44:10
  hour per hour. Oh, sorry, I'm sorry.
• 1:44:13
  I've got a cough. No, I'm quite happy to take that
• 1:44:15
  at face value and not think about the fact that you said
• 1:44:17
  that bit twice. That's fine, that's fine.
• 1:44:20
  Give me the watch. I'm off.
• 1:44:21
  I'm going to go and have a wee two hours ago.
• 1:44:24
  So I'm going to cut it right there.