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Hamster Book Club - Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:05
  Welcome to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:08
  I'm here today with the creme de la creme of the podcast world,
• 0:13
  Mr. Nathan Bottomley, Mr. Fraser Gregory and Mr. Simon Hart.
• 0:19
  Say hello chaps. Hello, chaps.
• 0:21
  Hello, very formal. We're in the club now, that's
• 0:29
  why we are. We're in the club.
• 0:32
  Gentlemen's club, isn't it? And so essentially the idea here
• 0:38
  is that we're all coming together and I have forced all
• 0:41
  of you to read a Doctor Who book.
• 0:44
  There was not much force and coercion required.
• 0:47
  For this. Well, not from you, but to bring
• 0:51
  together 3 separate voices. With three different opinions.
• 0:55
  So, and I'm fairly certain that you guys are going to have big
• 0:58
  opinions about this book. Possibly.
• 1:05
  Just to break the ice and to see sort of how you came to Doctor
• 1:09
  Who books, I want to ask each of you what was the 1st Doctor Who
• 1:14
  book that you read? And I'm going to go across to
• 1:16
  Nathan first, who is now thinking about that question.
• 1:21
  It's actually a little bit difficult to tell, but when I
• 1:25
  was 10, so you're being born around that time, I guess I I
• 1:36
  used to go to the local department store with my with,
• 1:40
  you know, there's a big mall near where I live.
• 1:43
  We would go to the local department store and I would
• 1:45
  buy, I would put books on lay by do do people know what that is?
• 1:50
  So. So yeah, so, so yeah, I would
• 1:55
  get five books that would be about $2.00 each or something,
• 1:59
  and I would get the lady at the shop to put them away.
• 2:02
  I would pay a bit of money towards it each time that we
• 2:06
  came to the shop each week, and then by the time I paid for it
• 2:10
  all, they would give me the books and go away.
• 2:12
  So I had a small collection, not a massive collection, and there
• 2:15
  were massive gaps in it even at the very end.
• 2:17
  I never ended up buying all the target novels, but it was the.
• 2:21
  Target novels, and it tended to be the ones that had Tom Baker
• 2:23
  or John Pertween. It's stories that were repeated
• 2:26
  over and over again when I was a kid.
• 2:28
  They were my doctors when I was in primary school and so I guess
• 2:32
  it's those. And yeah, yeah, so just a bunch
• 2:36
  of Terence Deaks normalizations, essentially.
• 2:39
  What about you, Fraser? So a little bit similar in terms
• 2:44
  of age. I probably would have been a 10
• 2:46
  or 11 year old and it was a 10 sticks book and it was the
• 2:49
  novelization of the Dalek Invasion of Earth and.
• 2:54
  I'd want to start with. Yes, well, that was the only
• 2:57
  one, in fairness, because I borrowed that from the library,
• 3:02
  found, you know, stumbled across that in the library thought, oh,
• 3:04
  I like Doctor him. That's book on Doctor Herman.
• 3:06
  Oh look, it's, it's. It's the story of one of the old
• 3:09
  ones and let's read this and you know read that and loved it and
• 3:11
  then took it back to the library and looked for another one and
• 3:14
  there wasn't any others. So stop.
• 3:18
  You know as there's a 10 or 11 year old the the idea that I
• 3:20
  could go to the the library counter and say please get me
• 3:23
  more Doctor Who books please from other you know outside of
• 3:27
  your library order them in for me please was.
• 3:30
  Completely unknown to me, so. Oh my goodness.
• 3:33
  Well, I was doing that from about age 7.
• 3:38
  Yeah, so that was that was kind of like a bit of a abortive
• 3:43
  start on the targets for me, because not long after that I
• 3:45
  started collecting VHS rather than printed words, so I was
• 3:51
  able to get the actual stories on a VHS.
• 3:55
  What's in the first line in the Dalek Invasion of Earth novel
• 3:58
  Come and Saw you all know. This through the ruins of the
• 4:00
  cities. Spoke.
• 4:01
  The ruins. Of the man.
• 4:04
  That's a great way to get you in.
• 4:06
  It's He does great first lines doesn't.
• 4:09
  He he really does the best. He said ancient.
• 4:12
  Evil. Death to the dog.
• 4:14
  Yeah, that's. He's a dead man running.
• 4:18
  Yeah. He's Terry Walsh running, isn't
• 4:20
  he, like it was? It was a stuntman running.
• 4:26
  And. Then.
• 4:27
  I know you've got an. I have a full on Tale of Youth.
• 4:34
  My my cousin Adrian was and is still a Doctor Who fan.
• 4:39
  He's. Nine years older than me, so he
• 4:43
  was a massive hoof and he'd been a fan since the excitement of
• 4:47
  Curse of Paladin and Day of the Daleks.
• 4:49
  He'd seen and he's told me about all these stories that I hadn't
• 4:52
  seen and one day. So I think this must have been
• 4:55
  around 1980, probably. I was visiting and he he said
• 4:59
  right he he brought me up to his room and he laid out lots of
• 5:04
  Target books on the floor because he had a whole set,
• 5:08
  which was just amazing. And just said you can borrow one
• 5:11
  of these and get your mom to read it to you.
• 5:15
  And so the one I picked was Destiny of the Daleks.
• 5:19
  So that was my first TV and my first book.
• 5:22
  And then that sort of set a pattern for the next few years
• 5:25
  of my mom would read me a chapter of the book before bed
• 5:29
  each night and we went from there.
• 5:32
  Then we started in the library and the next one we read was The
• 5:35
  Dalek Invasion of Earth. And Mum would be there and say,
• 5:40
  well I remember this one on TV. Look at this.
• 5:42
  The Yetis were so frightening in the underground and I'd get
• 5:45
  these little. Phrases of the stories that
• 5:47
  she'd. Seen.
• 5:48
  And so, yeah, a fan was born very, very quickly.
• 5:51
  I want you to take a good look around the room that you're in
• 5:54
  right now and see what? Yes.
• 5:58
  Because I know how in that room. There, yeah.
• 6:03
  There's the full targets there. You should consider working the
• 6:08
  book side probably be a good you should consider working with
• 6:11
  books. It'll probably.
• 6:11
  Be a good but yeah, maybe. It'd be a good fit.
• 6:14
  It could work. And so, well, thank you very
• 6:18
  much gentlemen. The book that we are going to
• 6:21
  talk about today on Sorry. What was your first talk to Who
• 6:25
  book? Yeah, come on.
• 6:27
  Yeah. You can talk about.
• 6:28
  Their answers for these questions, I was just going to
• 6:31
  thank you. I mean, I can't really talk
• 6:34
  about the Targets. I've already been on track One
• 6:35
  and Tell Miserable Tales the entire Target book collection,
• 6:41
  put them in a black bin bag as I was moving house and threw them
• 6:45
  away. But I have since had somebody on
• 6:47
  another podcast that did exactly the same thing.
• 6:49
  So I know I. I do.
• 6:50
  It doesn't make it right. I did the same thing.
• 6:54
  My, my I kept the new adventures like I had a collection of the
• 6:58
  new adventures. I got rid of the targets.
• 7:01
  It's a choice that any complete fucking idiot could have made,
• 7:06
  and. And find 2 on the same podcast
• 7:09
  though it's. Crazy and and.
• 7:15
  Yeah, so and I don't want to collect physical objects
• 7:19
  anymore. I'm like, I'm like swarm.
• 7:22
  I'm dedicated to the destruction of all spatial objects and and
• 7:28
  so I I have got a lot of them back on Audible now, like a like
• 7:34
  a whole bunch of them. But yeah, like I kept the I kept
• 7:36
  the new adventures, normalizations and my husband
• 7:39
  just hoards crap like every crawl space, every attic.
• 7:44
  You know, every square inch of the attic is is just full of
• 7:47
  stuff, so I will only ever see the new adventures again when he
• 7:53
  dies, we'll get all the stuff out for his wake and set fire or
• 8:00
  something. But but I do have the one
• 8:03
  remaining novel, which is the talents of Wing Chang, which is
• 8:07
  signed by Tom Baker who came to Australia in 1980 I think.
• 8:13
  And so he signed that for me. The disheartening thing for me
• 8:16
  is I'm a bit of a completist, so I've been recollecting those
• 8:19
  target novels at some expense ever since.
• 8:22
  So how are? You doing?
• 8:23
  My mom? This is where my mom was
• 8:25
  brilliant, where she just encouraged me to keep everything
• 8:28
  because she said if you don't keep it, you'll regret.
• 8:30
  If you get rid of it, you'll regret it.
• 8:32
  And so she encouraged me and she was absolutely right.
• 8:36
  I would have bought them all again.
• 8:38
  But I can definitely remember my first book.
• 8:40
  It was Doctor Who and the Cybermen.
• 8:42
  By Harry Davis And because I was absolutely baffled when I
• 8:46
  finally saw Ben in a Could you remember that?
• 8:50
  There's a drawing that was back when they had drawings in the
• 8:54
  and there's one of Polly Ben and the Doctor in the console room.
• 8:59
  And Ben's wearing like this dress or something, and it
• 9:02
  doesn't look anything like Michael Craig.
• 9:03
  I was convinced for a long time that that's what he looked like.
• 9:06
  But I was absolutely gripped by the book.
• 9:08
  It was like proper, you know, sort of adventure stuff I was
• 9:10
  about. Seven years old and they used to
• 9:13
  sell them for about sort of 25 P down the market.
• 9:16
  I used to beg my nan to buy them for me all the time.
• 9:20
  That would have been my second Target novel.
• 9:22
  I remember buying that in a car boot sale in Kelso in Scotland.
• 9:26
  I can't remember how old I was, but I would have been sort of
• 9:28
  mid teens and then going through that on holiday, open the
• 9:32
  Borders and, you know, getting a certain way in before twigging
• 9:37
  what the story actually was. It was the mood base.
• 9:41
  Because I had the the the Cybermen, the earlier is VHS or
• 9:45
  but. There wasn't part one.
• 9:47
  There wasn't part one, so we kind of getting in probably got
• 9:50
  you know, part of the way through Part 2 and the.
• 9:52
  Moon piece. So that was the only Trout one
• 9:57
  that I had. In fact, it was the only pretty
• 9:58
  perfectly one that I had was the Sideman 1.
• 10:01
  So it's target, target, target and target and we're doing a BBC
• 10:05
  book today. Yeah.
• 10:08
  Do you? I mean, sorry, I know you've
• 10:11
  collected all the BBC books. Why?
• 10:14
  It's over with some of them. Nathan and Fraser, did you guys
• 10:18
  read these at the time? Have you read them at all?
• 10:22
  No, no, I don't think I may. I may have read one.
• 10:27
  I can't remember the so like the new adventures, like they were
• 10:32
  all sort of coming out as I was becoming a fan and.
• 10:38
  You know, so there was a time where Kate Orman was, you know,
• 10:45
  Co running the Doctor Who fan club here and we would do stuff
• 10:49
  together on the newsletter and things.
• 10:51
  And so the big, the big adventures we're calling them
• 10:54
  now, that's what they were always called the big
• 10:56
  adventures. Not many people know that the
• 10:57
  new adventures became a big deal because Kate was writing for
• 11:02
  them and getting published and stuff.
• 11:04
  And we met Paul Cornell as a result of that.
• 11:09
  But the BBC books, By the time the BBC books started to come
• 11:13
  out, we'd kind of, I think all of us at some point have a new
• 11:17
  adventure that we were just defeated by.
• 11:21
  And mine was false. The shadow.
• 11:23
  It's like I don't have the patience for this kid any
• 11:27
  longer. Oh, you were.
• 11:28
  You were out quite early, remember being.
• 11:34
  Absolutely baffled by or what was it?
• 11:37
  Lucifer rising Okay. Yeah, but I think it was just
• 11:41
  too heavy scifi for me and. Yeah, yeah.
• 11:44
  Wasn't Doctor Who? I just remember in transit there
• 11:47
  was a sequence where a woman like she's got the taste of
• 11:51
  semen in her mouth, and that's a part of that's that's described.
• 11:55
  And I was like. Fraser's face is amazing.
• 11:57
  This is very unpleasant, I know. She was a sex worker, wasn't
• 12:01
  she? Like it was a sex worker who was
• 12:03
  eating some colonos to get rid of the.
• 12:05
  I mean I I made it through transit and I thought transit
• 12:08
  was worth doing, you know? But yeah, there are some new
• 12:13
  adventuresisms which are actually present in this book.
• 12:16
  Even though I quite enjoyed this book, there are some new
• 12:18
  adventures things in it that. That shit me and continue to
• 12:23
  shit me and I will mention them as they come up.
• 12:26
  But yeah, so, so I never made it.
• 12:29
  I never made it to the to the BBC books at all, even though
• 12:33
  Kate was still writing for them. The book we are talking about
• 12:47
  today is Jonathan Morris's Festival of Death.
• 12:51
  Published in September 2000 by BBC Books and Fraser, Because
• 12:57
  you've got the sexiest accent of all of us, is going to grace us
• 13:00
  with a very small blurb. Off you go, Fraser.
• 13:05
  Which is from the 2013 reprint, which they did for the 50th
• 13:11
  anniversary. So it's going to be a little bit
• 13:14
  different from the original one, but Festival of death?
• 13:19
  The Beautiful Death is the ultimate theme park ride, a
• 13:22
  sightseeing tour of the afterlife.
• 13:24
  But something has gone wrong, and when the 4th Doctor arrives
• 13:28
  in the aftermath of the disaster, he is congratulated
• 13:30
  for saving the population from destruction, something he hasn't
• 13:34
  actually done yet. He has no choice but to travel
• 13:37
  back in time and discover how he became a hero, and then he finds
• 13:42
  out he did it by sacrificing his life.
• 13:53
  So it's Jonathan Morris's first thing, isn't it?
• 13:56
  It's the first he wrote. He wrote three books in total,
• 13:59
  Festival of Death, Anacrophobia and The Tomorrow Windows, and I
• 14:06
  think if I think this is probably his most popular of the
• 14:10
  three. And as as far as I'm aware as
• 14:13
  well, it's sort of the only BBC book You remember how Gareth
• 14:16
  Roberts came in with those fantastic Season 17 books.
• 14:20
  Romance Help me outside Romance of the Crime.
• 14:25
  Romance of crime, the English way of death and the well
• 14:28
  mannered wall. And this was sort of the only
• 14:30
  book in the BBC books that sort of touched on this era as
• 14:35
  effectively I was. The only one that actually
• 14:38
  touched on this era, and there was no other.
• 14:43
  Season 18 There were no books ever set In Season 18.
• 14:47
  No one ever dared. Well, you know, and Jonathan
• 14:52
  Morris also decided in the same sort of thing to write a plot
• 14:56
  backwards. He set himself quite a task
• 15:00
  here. Nathan, I know you and Sy are
• 15:03
  both massive fans of this era of Doctor Who, Fraser.
• 15:09
  Oh yeah, Season 17. Yeah, that's great.
• 15:12
  It's great. It's.
• 15:14
  How? How do you guys think Jonathan
• 15:16
  Morris captured this period of Doctor Who?
• 15:18
  Then let's go to Sai first. I think he captured it really,
• 15:22
  really well. It's it's quite a difficult
• 15:26
  season to catch properly in tow because tonally it's it's quite
• 15:31
  different to every other era and so you've got to be witty and
• 15:37
  clever and have a clever plot. And a good central idea.
• 15:41
  And so he's got that. So that's really good and he
• 15:44
  captures the regulars incredibly well and it's nicely self aware
• 15:50
  in the way that the show was at the time it was on.
• 15:54
  So the line that always stood out to me, right?
• 15:57
  Back in 2000, and again this time that made me laugh, was
• 16:00
  when the doctor turned around and said, Oh yes, people are
• 16:03
  always threatening me with death, he said.
• 16:05
  Usually about 24 minutes into the until I've arrived somewhere
• 16:09
  and just think, you can just hear Tom delighting and saying
• 16:13
  that you could just hear him sort of being that aware and
• 16:17
  yeah, and playing that. So I think, yeah, it's captured
• 16:19
  really, really nicely. What do you think, Nathan?
• 16:23
  Well, it also sort of shares that season's interesting sort
• 16:26
  of weird spaces. And so it's very much like
• 16:30
  Nightmare of Eden as far as the premise is concerned.
• 16:33
  Like the G lock is a bit like the two interlocked spaceships.
• 16:38
  There's a sort of running gag all the way through, like the
• 16:41
  sort of Doctor's chess playing and stuff like that.
• 16:44
  Here it's that the Doctor never passed his time travel
• 16:47
  proficiency exam and that goes all the way through.
• 16:51
  There's another thing which I was expecting to pay off, which
• 16:53
  also struck me as really realistic, is that the Doctor
• 16:56
  keeps referring to the second Law of time in Romana, keeps
• 16:59
  having to correct him each time and like all.
• 17:02
  That stuff. Yeah, first Law.
• 17:04
  And it's exactly how it would work I think.
• 17:08
  And and you know when, when Romana is eventually persuaded
• 17:12
  to just bleak the switch and kill Tom because he's being such
• 17:17
  a prat about, you know, final words and and stuff like that
• 17:21
  and she just goes off for God sake and put, you know try just
• 17:23
  kills him to put us up to it. Like all of that stuff read
• 17:27
  really, really well, I thought. And it really did capture the
• 17:31
  era and of course the other thing the era does is
• 17:33
  relentless. Actually plunder the ideas of
• 17:35
  Douglas Adams. And he got that right too, I
• 17:38
  think. What do you think, Fraser?
• 17:41
  Yeah, I totally agree. I think Nathan took the nail on
• 17:43
  the head that this is nightmare of Eden land, You know, it's
• 17:46
  hyperspace, it's corridors on a ship, you know, it's just
• 17:52
  really, yeah and sort of decor style of, you know, corridor.
• 17:59
  So it really kind of evokes that it's the sort of.
• 18:03
  The dialogue between the Doctor and Romano as well, you know you
• 18:06
  can it's it fizzes with chemistry and it's, it's so Tom
• 18:12
  and Lala at that time when they are, you know, courting and
• 18:16
  getting together before they have the sort of the arguments
• 18:21
  of season 18 recorded, you know, and before, before they stop
• 18:27
  looking at each other, it has really got that spark.
• 18:29
  I think he's really captured their chemistry in the dialogue.
• 18:33
  Yeah, that's what kind of stuck out was mean.
• 18:37
  And and like we said, obviously Douglas Adams names come up.
• 18:42
  Jonathan Morris in the introduction to my version, you
• 18:44
  know quite clearly states you know it's not so much wearing
• 18:50
  Douglas Adams influence on these sleeves.
• 18:52
  He's wearing Douglas Adams' sleeves at times and that
• 18:57
  really, really comes through not just in things like.
• 19:02
  Derek the computer and Whoopi the the lizard.
• 19:06
  Those little nods, both the the idea of the piece, you know, I
• 19:11
  think Douglas Adams. Everyone says season 18 is when
• 19:17
  Chris bit Mead comes in and bring puts the science back in
• 19:20
  the Doctor Who, which is a little bit inaccurate if you ask
• 19:24
  me, because season 17 is full of signs.
• 19:26
  It's full of good scientific principles, good ideas for.
• 19:31
  You know, good science fiction ideas.
• 19:33
  It's just that the story isn't about them.
• 19:35
  The story is built around the idea.
• 19:38
  So it's things like, you know, Nightmare of Eden, it's the, you
• 19:41
  know, the zoo taking chunks of planets out, put them in
• 19:44
  crystals, you know, That's a really sound idea.
• 19:48
  Hyperspace 2 ships coming out, hyperspace and merging into each
• 19:50
  other. You know, fantastic ideas.
• 19:52
  But that's not what the story's about.
• 19:54
  It's about this, you know, who done it?
• 19:56
  Running around Mandrel, you know?
• 20:00
  Drug run and escapade. And that's, I think what, you
• 20:03
  know, Jonathan Morris is done. They hasn't read, necessarily
• 20:06
  built his story around this idea of and the beautiful death and
• 20:10
  what Dr. Paddocks is trying to do with it.
• 20:13
  That comes very late on. It's all around sort of the
• 20:17
  predestination element, the unpicking of, you know, working
• 20:21
  the plot backwards and unpicking what they should be doing and
• 20:23
  what they shouldn't be doing and that sort of stuff.
• 20:26
  Well, how did you feel that was handled then?
• 20:29
  Was it overly complicated or did you think it was quite a smooth
• 20:32
  read? Yes, it was overly complicated.
• 20:34
  And I think you guys are going to have an advantage on me on
• 20:38
  this. And you're going to like this
• 20:40
  book a lot more than I do because you've read it more than
• 20:43
  once. Yeah, I haven't.
• 20:47
  I've only read it once and. And I just let all that stuff
• 20:53
  wash over me. It's just like, this is Doctor
• 20:54
  Who book. I'm not really gonna work that
• 20:56
  hard to read this, so I'll just, you know, So I didn't end up
• 21:01
  disentangling, you know, where we were in the time stream or
• 21:04
  anything like that, I think. It's the the, the Douglas Adams
• 21:10
  thing is the puzzle box plot. It's a thing that Stephen
• 21:13
  Moffett inherits from him, because Stephen Moffett is
• 21:16
  obviously hugely inspired by Douglas Adams in a way that's
• 21:19
  not often recognized. I think.
• 21:22
  And it's, you know, the idea that there's various mysteries
• 21:26
  and stuff that finally come together at the very end.
• 21:30
  And if you think about, say, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
• 21:33
  Agency where the you know, the. Remain the sort of secondary
• 21:37
  character the, you know, Professor Chronodis nips out and
• 21:41
  travels back in time in the middle of a paragraph and sets
• 21:46
  up something, do you know what I mean?
• 21:48
  Like it's and that becomes an important sort of issue in the
• 21:52
  plot. So that stuff, I think the time
• 21:54
  stuff works, works really quite well and it is a new thing that
• 22:01
  he brings to. It this was, yeah, this was the
• 22:04
  1st. Why me?
• 22:06
  To coin a phrase, Story really. That something quite like this,
• 22:12
  where the Doctor is involved in something in his own death, but
• 22:16
  well, that idea is going to come back, isn't it?
• 22:19
  The. Idea of him landing at the
• 22:21
  beginning and being told you've saved the day and he just seems
• 22:24
  and goes, how wonderful did I? That's that's such a clever
• 22:28
  idea. Well, what about user inside?
• 22:30
  Did you sort of look at the intricacies of the plot a bit
• 22:33
  more to see if everything? Yeah, I think I did.
• 22:35
  I mean to give phrase, I have read it twice, but that's I last
• 22:42
  read it 23 years ago, so it's not like it was yesterday, so.
• 22:46
  In your mind then. Yeah, things.
• 22:49
  Bits of the You remember what? They were doing 23 years ago.
• 22:52
  You've got a good memory. I don't I mean just to kind of,
• 22:56
  you know clarify what I'm saying there is I don't necessarily
• 22:58
  think the the complex is a plot is a bad thing.
• 23:02
  What I think is, you know this is a book that not so much lends
• 23:06
  itself to being reread is to demands to be reread.
• 23:09
  You know I held it up. With me bookmarking at the start
• 23:13
  of the recording, you guys, and said, Oh yeah, I've read this
• 23:15
  much and that's my second reader now because I want to go back
• 23:18
  over it now. I've read it through the first
• 23:20
  time, you know, and seen this kind of plot unravel and now I
• 23:24
  want to go back through again the second time and understand
• 23:28
  it a bit better. Understanding all the bullet
• 23:30
  points, but seeing if everything is.
• 23:32
  Yeah, because, I mean, ultimately I haven't, I haven't
• 23:35
  read this book all in one go. It's not like something like.
• 23:39
  The Big Bang where, you know, I sit and I watch 45 minutes plays
• 23:43
  out. You know, I've had to follow
• 23:45
  this over a couple of weeks now, you know, reading a chapter or
• 23:49
  night or so or maybe he's having a couple of nights off and then
• 23:52
  you know reading a few more chapters.
• 23:53
  So I'm. And you've got to try and keep
• 23:56
  all those, yeah? Exactly, and it's kind.
• 23:58
  Of complex. At the something like that in
• 24:01
  bits and pieces. You think that's a little harms
• 24:03
  the smoothness of the rate? I think it does because like I
• 24:06
  say, you know I'll. I remember going through a
• 24:09
  splurge in the middle and you know, being really, you know,
• 24:12
  page turning and getting into it.
• 24:13
  And then after a couple of days coming back and having a kind of
• 24:16
  work mentally to kind of pick up where I was and go back.
• 24:21
  And I think, you know, it's it's it's a clever idea.
• 24:25
  It's a really clever idea to tell the story backwards.
• 24:28
  But I think, you know, again, going back to something the The
• 24:32
  Big Bang, you have one or two jumps.
• 24:37
  Where was in this three or four or five maybes?
• 24:39
  And I think that was harder to keep on top of as well.
• 24:43
  So the first time through it was definitely, you know, a case of
• 24:49
  trying to keep up and trying to remember who was who.
• 24:52
  Like I say, I'm about four chapters back into the second
• 24:55
  read now and it's coming alive a lot more because we've got
• 24:58
  things like the prologue with the young paddocks, which you
• 25:02
  now understand you've got the. The scenes with what's it
• 25:06
  called, Glura, is it the, yeah, the last of the aubertins being
• 25:11
  born. And these are now making a lot
• 25:12
  more sense and the dialogue in there is making a lot more
• 25:15
  sense. Whereas when you read the first
• 25:16
  thing, you say what's this plant egg thing?
• 25:20
  When you turn the last page, that first line of for the rest
• 25:24
  of his life, he would remember this as the day he died
• 25:27
  suddenly. Makes sense, doesn't it?
• 25:28
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But.
• 25:31
  When you read it the first time, that's the first line.
• 25:32
  And it's it's just instantly disposable because it's like,
• 25:35
  oh, OK, whatever. It wasn't.
• 25:36
  You know, I remember getting towards the end of the book and
• 25:40
  having this memory of, well, what's hang on, what's the kids
• 25:44
  going to be him, isn't it? Because that's the only thing he
• 25:47
  can be in the end. So I kind of pieced that
• 25:50
  together before the end of the book, that who it was, but the
• 25:53
  actual, you know, the reason why he was doing what he was doing
• 25:58
  to prevent that accident. Kind of came a little bit later
• 26:02
  and then, but like you said, it's not until you go back, you
• 26:05
  know, in a Paddocksy sort of way, as it were, and really live
• 26:09
  the adventure again that it kind of gels a lot more.
• 26:12
  So yeah, it's not a bad thing that I need to read this book
• 26:17
  again. It's actually.
• 26:19
  Consider that a success of that it got.
• 26:21
  You. Yeah.
• 26:24
  Yeah. And it's not that.
• 26:26
  It's not that I didn't enjoy the book.
• 26:28
  The first time around it was more that that see the plot
• 26:31
  escaped me a little bit and when on the on the first read through
• 26:36
  I think the second one is just going to be is going to you know
• 26:40
  bring a lot more color to it. I think it's like the secret
• 26:43
  that the bulk of sort of the BBC books do not warrant a second
• 26:48
  reading to see they are as satisfying.
• 26:53
  No money. No, not not on this sort of
• 26:55
  level, no. I always remember in the in the
• 27:01
  review in DWM, and I think it was either Dave Owen at the time
• 27:05
  or Matt Michael maybe of the ham fan, who said what this book is
• 27:11
  that the one thing that Johnny didn't do in this book was if
• 27:14
  they've done this on TV, each time the Doctor is in a
• 27:18
  different timeline, he'd have worn one of his different coats.
• 27:22
  And you would know which timeline you were in and which
• 27:25
  doctor you were seeing by which coat he was wearing.
• 27:29
  It wouldn't quite have worked, would it?
• 27:31
  Because I think there's one point where he's mistaken, Like
• 27:34
  maybe Romana gets it wrong, which one he is or something.
• 27:39
  That opening chapter does what The New Adventures annoys me
• 27:45
  with. I think that sentence worked.
• 27:48
  The. Like, you know, there'll be like
• 27:50
  a whole paragraph in, it'll be prologue, it'll all be in
• 27:53
  fucking italics and you'll read this thing and it bears no
• 27:57
  relation to anything that happens later.
• 28:00
  And then page 250, it all gets sold for you.
• 28:04
  It's just like, it's like, just chill out.
• 28:06
  You're a Doctor Who novel. I'm not going to, you know, like
• 28:08
  I just, I'm not going to be trying to piece that together.
• 28:12
  But it strikes me that that thing with with Coel at the
• 28:16
  beginning. Is exactly the same scene
• 28:20
  functionally as the scene with Scar off on the spaceship.
• 28:25
  So there's this scene, which seems to be unrelated to
• 28:28
  anything that then follows, and it's the inciting incident.
• 28:34
  The thing that motivates Scar off to do what he's doing is set
• 28:36
  up there, but the difference is that you don't have to read 250
• 28:41
  pages before that becomes clear where it where it appears in the
• 28:45
  plot, and I think it's a 90. Mighty thing.
• 28:48
  It's a new adventures thing where you'll do something at the
• 28:52
  beginning and then and like I remember sighing when I knew
• 28:57
  that Coel would. That's what this was.
• 28:59
  It was going to be all right and we're just not going to talk
• 29:02
  about this again for ages and ages.
• 29:03
  And I didn't fit it together too because I think partly you're
• 29:07
  encouraged to empathize with Coel.
• 29:10
  I think it's a well written scene.
• 29:13
  I was horrified by them letting the dog go.
• 29:14
  What the fuck's that They just open.
• 29:16
  The door and let the. Let the dog wander off anyway,
• 29:19
  the and so it it irritated me in a way that the new adventures
• 29:25
  would irritate me I think. And the same with Galura.
• 29:29
  And what's the name? Nyan Nyan?
• 29:32
  Ya the name honor Nyanna Nyanna. Anyway, Yeah yeah like that
• 29:41
  again. It didn't seem to be something
• 29:43
  that we needed. To do, but it is something that
• 29:47
  that those books tended to do quite a long.
• 29:50
  Yeah, I do think it's very much a book thing because suddenly
• 29:55
  they've got to write a full length novel.
• 29:58
  Based around Doctor Who, whereas a target book you could do in
• 30:01
  120 pages tops really and do a four part story, but suddenly
• 30:07
  you've got 280 pages of small type that you've got to fill and
• 30:11
  so you've got to pad it out somehow and you we've got.
• 30:15
  Prologues and epilogues. And yeah, exactly.
• 30:17
  And. It was a particular problem
• 30:19
  about those BBC books. You know, with the new
• 30:20
  adventures, they would let the page count go as long as it
• 30:24
  needed to go. We needed to go 300 pages.
• 30:26
  Plus they just do it. With the BBC books, it had to be
• 30:29
  less 280 pages or less. And when you get to something
• 30:33
  like the adventurous of Henry Edge St. the I'm just tiny.
• 30:36
  So small. That's why I can't.
• 30:39
  See. Yeah, going back to something
• 30:49
  that Nathan said earlier. Like, we've all said that this
• 30:52
  is authentically season 17 and it is quite funny and it's full
• 30:57
  of witty lies, but it's also quite dark as well in places.
• 31:01
  I think, yeah, seeing your yeah, going and seeing yourself die is
• 31:07
  is a very dark central idea. But also it feels in keeping
• 31:12
  with with Douglas Adams, Doctor Who.
• 31:14
  It's the big idea. And yeah, of course people would
• 31:18
  be intrigued by that. You've also got, you got like
• 31:21
  zombies tearing about the place. You've got, you know, robotic
• 31:24
  spiders going around eating people.
• 31:27
  You've got that scene with the Doctor in the TARDIS where you
• 31:30
  know, he sort of made light of the fact that he's going to die
• 31:33
  and he just orders Ramada and Canine out of the console.
• 31:35
  It just says go away and leave me like like did that strike you
• 31:38
  as, as something that would happen?
• 31:41
  I think that's Johnny Morris trying to be clever and and
• 31:45
  trying to bring the Season 8 and.
• 31:48
  Work out why the Doctor is so doomy and miserable in season 18
• 31:53
  and it's because he's seen his own death and so this is sort of
• 31:56
  the start of the season 18 more miserable.
• 32:00
  A slightly more serious Doctor because of this which is a very
• 32:04
  fan thing to do because you try and.
• 32:08
  Get adults in the books. Yeah, exactly.
• 32:10
  And it's it's all that's how I felt that was and but it's also.
• 32:16
  Quite early, that's something early.
• 32:18
  Tom Baker. Yeah, or some people.
• 32:20
  Have done see Olympian Detachment.
• 32:22
  I don't want you to see me being like this.
• 32:26
  Not with people that he really cares about.
• 32:28
  And as he calls the both canine and Romana in this book, his
• 32:32
  best friends, he yeah, he doesn't want either of them to
• 32:37
  see him miserable. Maybe.
• 32:40
  That was a funny line, sort of. Romana's also my best friend, K
• 32:44
  and A, but not in a way you would understand.
• 32:46
  Whoa. Would you think like?
• 32:51
  Sorry, you can see anything. Of light and dark, right?
• 32:55
  Like, did you think this was overly funny?
• 32:59
  Overly Nathan. I think you've got a bit of an
• 33:00
  issue, don't you really? So I want to say mature in
• 33:03
  inverted commas, these books. So, like, it's another 90s
• 33:09
  obsession as well, isn't it? We finally got Doctor Who and
• 33:12
  we're kind of watching, you know, The X-Files and things and
• 33:16
  things that are a little bit darker than Doctor Who is on
• 33:19
  television. And so, like the season 17,
• 33:22
  Doctor can't be affected emotionally by anything that
• 33:26
  goes on around him. He's never, he's not sort of
• 33:30
  scared and stressed in the way that he can be.
• 33:33
  During the Hinchcliffe here, I remember like.
• 33:35
  The hinge Cliff here has the doctor in pain quite a lot and
• 33:38
  he's you know grinding his teeth and stuff and and we see that
• 33:41
  quite a lot and that goes away for season 1716 and 17 by and
• 33:46
  large. And so having him emotionally
• 33:50
  affected by a thing I think probably doesn't work but it's
• 33:54
  a. Book.
• 33:56
  And so you need to give the character some interiority, I
• 34:00
  think. And like that's the thing that
• 34:02
  that's lacking in the book a little bit too, is that there
• 34:06
  are no real proper memorable characters.
• 34:10
  I think like Avatni is the closest to the sort of companion
• 34:15
  surrogate who tales along with the Doctor Romana, and even she
• 34:18
  has no real proper interiority. I don't know.
• 34:22
  I don't know. I think.
• 34:23
  I think the grim dark thing fights against Doctor Who.
• 34:26
  It's not at all what Doctor Who has ever been.
• 34:28
  And so you're having the, the big spider things, you know, we
• 34:34
  see them eating corpses and stuff.
• 34:36
  Hearing about that, like hearing that the G lock has been emptied
• 34:39
  out of its population by escaped monsters, that's perfectly
• 34:43
  Doctor Whoish. That's great.
• 34:44
  But seeing it, I mean, even the fact that they refer to food as
• 34:48
  eats and stuff is very. Doctor Who ish as well, but the
• 34:53
  actual kind of dismembering corpses and aiding each other
• 34:56
  and stuff is not something we could ever have seen.
• 34:59
  They could never have afforded it, but it wouldn't have
• 35:01
  happened either. Did sign Fraser?
• 35:04
  Did I? If you think there were any
• 35:05
  memorable sort of secondary characters in here?
• 35:08
  And just to kind of, you know, recap on the sort of like in the
• 35:13
  dark thing, I think for me, you know, it is called Festival of
• 35:17
  Death. You know, it's not going to be a
• 35:19
  laughter. You know, I think the darker
• 35:23
  elements, yeah, I mean it's it's, you know, there's there's
• 35:27
  a lot of of humor in there because I've had that line.
• 35:31
  You know, there's the, there's, you know, things about K9 where
• 35:35
  you know, the K9 usually gets laughed at.
• 35:37
  Not people aren't usually scared of them.
• 35:38
  They usually laugh at them. I think, I think Jonathan Moss
• 35:44
  is obviously a fan of Stuart Lee.
• 35:46
  There was a. The lane in there, which I
• 35:49
  picked up from this morning, for which I'm not Judy, which is you
• 35:53
  can't. You can prove anything with
• 35:54
  facts, which is a still a routine which I incorporate into
• 36:00
  my daily life every as much as possible.
• 36:03
  So there's a lot of humor in there.
• 36:06
  I think for me, what I would have liked was the the darkness
• 36:10
  of the the Doctor's death to be a bit more.
• 36:17
  In hand, you know, a bit more focus on that because when I,
• 36:20
  you know, I've read that blurb out here and I read that.
• 36:22
  So I was expecting this to be very much that was going to be
• 36:25
  the story. You know, it's going to be the
• 36:27
  predestination stuff, is going to be the doctor trying to avoid
• 36:30
  his death, and that was going to be the focus.
• 36:32
  But it's kind of introduced in the middle of a chapter, whereas
• 36:35
  you'd expect that to be like a chapter end a bit of a
• 36:37
  cliffhanger. Oh yes, you saved the G lock by
• 36:40
  sacrificing your life. You know so you know I thought
• 36:49
  that was going to be more of a central theme than actually was
• 36:51
  it was it was kind of roundabout that way.
• 36:53
  If you know if you think like 2 season 18.
• 36:56
  Yes. When he is more dark and and
• 36:58
  brood and then you know that funeral atmosphere Logopolis
• 37:02
  would fit well with this story to kind of lead it towards you
• 37:06
  know you know he's not going to die because it's it's it's you
• 37:09
  know there's going to be a some sort of.
• 37:12
  Kind of clever way out. The monsters, the arachnipods,
• 37:16
  the zombies, and that. That's all the sort of stuff
• 37:18
  that you would get in season seven.
• 37:21
  You know the Hinchcliffe area, It's just obviously.
• 37:22
  Just kept seeing them as they would be realized in the season
• 37:25
  17, yeah. Like the old guys on.
• 37:32
  On the think tank in sharder, Yeah, yeah.
• 37:36
  You know, you you wouldn't be able to make the story today
• 37:38
  because the effects would be too good for it and it would be
• 37:42
  terrifying. But you know, back in 1979 you
• 37:46
  could probably get away with with that sort of thing.
• 37:48
  I think, you know, it's probably had worse in the Hinchcliffe
• 37:52
  era, you know, all said and told in terms of the characters,
• 37:57
  though, I think the big problem with the story.
• 38:01
  Characters is the plot device of going backwards because you
• 38:07
  introduce the characters and the Doctor Romana spend a certain
• 38:12
  amount of time with them in one period and so they move back and
• 38:15
  then spend another bit of time with them.
• 38:16
  But when you go back a third time, then you can't spend time
• 38:19
  with that character. So you have sort of like I think
• 38:24
  it's like 3 distinct blocks on the J lock, you know where the
• 38:29
  Doctor Romana are and. Each character only appears in
• 38:32
  two, so you have Hoopy who is in the second, the 1st and the 2nd
• 38:37
  of the the find Hoopy injured. And then you you have the middle
• 38:41
  block where he's injured. He's not in the first block.
• 38:43
  And then you have like Paddocks who's not really in the last
• 38:46
  block because he's dead by that point, but he's in the 1st and
• 38:48
  the. So each character only has a
• 38:51
  little bit of time. So when you get to the end it is
• 38:53
  just basically the doctor Ramona running around because everyone
• 38:55
  else is either, you know, died at this point or has been.
• 39:00
  Temporarily locked, as it were, because you can't interact with
• 39:02
  that character. So it's it's a bit of a, it's
• 39:05
  not a shortcoming, it's a bit of a disadvantage.
• 39:09
  With. That. 70 pages in, you know
• 39:13
  where all of those secondary characters are going to end up.
• 39:16
  So from that point on, you know there's no danger of losing any
• 39:20
  of them because you know where they're going to.
• 39:22
  Be. The problem, because it's not a
• 39:25
  linear story, you don't have the introductory scenes with them
• 39:29
  either till much later on, so that makes it a bit more
• 39:33
  difficult. So they've got to be fairly
• 39:36
  stereotypical archetype characters.
• 39:38
  So you've got Harken back who is the documentary maker who's
• 39:42
  flamboyant and a bit camp and like a bit like J&T really, you
• 39:48
  know and so and the Batney who's.
• 39:52
  Brave and she's good and yeah, she's like Della in nightmare of
• 39:56
  Eden and. I liked Met.
• 39:59
  I was just like, how snively and terrible can this man possibly
• 40:04
  get? And every time I thought we'd
• 40:05
  sunk to a new low, it did something even worse.
• 40:10
  I was getting sort of Costa and Fisk Vibes from some of those
• 40:14
  characters as well. What about Hoopy and his
• 40:18
  dialogue? And I?
• 40:19
  You know what? Back in the day when I read
• 40:20
  this? I know, You know, I was young.
• 40:23
  I thought it was so cool, That dialogue this time I was reading
• 40:26
  all of that sort of groovy. It's a bit tragic.
• 40:28
  I was like. It's it's Safford Beeble Box.
• 40:32
  It is. It is in a nutshell.
• 40:38
  Well, hence why it's called Hoopie.
• 40:39
  Because exactly one of Safford's lines, isn't it?
• 40:43
  It's it's one of his visas. A really together guy is what
• 40:48
  Hoopie means, isn't it? That's right.
• 40:51
  Yeah, there's Triganic in reference to currency, which I
• 40:55
  thought was a pretty deep dive. Triganic pews.
• 40:58
  Yes, yeah, yeah. And there was another one as
• 41:01
  well there. But there were these sort of
• 41:03
  little references to hitchhikers all the way through.
• 41:06
  Do you know, we actually do get the doctor confronting his own
• 41:09
  death eventually, and that's in series 6.
• 41:12
  And it's similar he we see him die, we're assured that he's
• 41:16
  dead. And then in, you know, 13
• 41:19
  episodes later, he gets out of it by cleverly substituting the
• 41:23
  Tess elector. But we also get, you know, the
• 41:25
  stuff in closing time about him being kind of maudlin as his
• 41:29
  death approaches and getting rid of everyone so they can force.
• 41:33
  Me to this day that because some of the book writers did transfer
• 41:38
  to the TV series and write scripts, that Stephen Moffett
• 41:40
  never gave Jonathan Morris a Ryan gig because he's playing
• 41:44
  with all the same tools. In a lot of his books and in a
• 41:47
  lot of his audios, he does these sort of nonlinear, very clever,
• 41:51
  densely plotted stories. He did, he did a lot.
• 41:54
  He did all of the DWM comic strips whilst Stephen Moffett
• 41:59
  was showrunner because they were, yeah, absolutely in
• 42:03
  simpatico. But it did baffle me that he
• 42:05
  never, he never gave them a gig. Because Moffett never does the
• 42:08
  time thing quite as thorough goingly as this.
• 42:11
  And I think it's Russell who lays down the rules for how, you
• 42:15
  know, nonlinear storytelling works.
• 42:17
  It's permitted only in extreme circumstances and for cheap
• 42:21
  tricks, which is what the Doctor says in Smith and Jones.
• 42:25
  And so it's something like this where it's sort of central to
• 42:27
  it, like it's an innovation. It is something the Doctor Who
• 42:31
  could always have done, but no one really thought to do it.
• 42:34
  Absolutely, and I think it's far more successful here than in
• 42:37
  something like big finishes creatures of beauty, which is
• 42:41
  just ridiculously messed up because they can, rather than
• 42:48
  for any good reason. It's a really dull story told in
• 42:51
  a. Tricksy way to make it seem
• 42:53
  cleverer than it actually is. It's Nick Briggs throwing the
• 42:57
  plot from a great high. It's shattering into pieces.
• 42:59
  And then him just picking them up, assembling in a ministry.
• 43:03
  Yeah, but with Johnny he's he does flip flop, which has sort
• 43:09
  of sort of similar elements to this in the storytelling where
• 43:16
  the story. Can be told from different
• 43:19
  perspectives and different. I have to explain it with my
• 43:21
  hands because I can't explain it the other way.
• 43:25
  It does tails beautifully despite it being sort of complex
• 43:29
  and told from different perspectives and at different
• 43:32
  time points. Flip flops are literally the
• 43:35
  same story told in two directions, isn't it?
• 43:38
  You can. It's too dear you can.
• 43:40
  Listen to it either way. Either way.
• 43:42
  Brilliant. Although it's.
• 43:45
  A white disk and a black disk and you can listen to either 1st
• 43:48
  and still come up with the same same thing despite it being
• 43:52
  slightly different. He goes to some desperate plot
• 43:55
  measures to make that work, though, in that I thought this
• 43:57
  was just quite cleverly plotted. Yeah, Or it says in his
• 44:01
  introduction to the 2013 edition.
• 44:04
  That this was the one that he had to do.
• 44:06
  He had a wall of post it notes or something just to get the
• 44:10
  plot so that he knew exactly who was where at what time and what
• 44:13
  was going on, so that he could keep it absolutely in his head
• 44:17
  the whole time or on his wall at the whole time.
• 44:20
  I'm imagining the the Always Sunny meme, you know, with the
• 44:24
  with the red thread, you know, on the paranoia board.
• 44:30
  That's what I saw, Yeah, just lots of.
• 44:32
  Yeah, I don't want to frochet the other Doctor Who writes, but
• 44:34
  I don't think all of them were going to those lengths to write
• 44:37
  these books. A lot of them weren't just
• 44:39
  sitting down at a keyboard and bashing them out.
• 44:42
  What did you think of the ending then?
• 44:44
  Were you satisfied? Oh, so I didn't throw.
• 44:48
  That Yes, yeah, let me So. So we go back and we do the
• 44:53
  epilogue and he does a clever thing, I think, where in the
• 44:58
  prologue there's a moment where Cole looks across and sees his
• 45:02
  own reflection in the wall, if he's going up an escalator or
• 45:05
  something like that. And so there's two coils for a
• 45:08
  second, and he describes the experience of seeing himself
• 45:10
  from outside. And then then at the in the
• 45:15
  later version of that, that's made real because Paddocks is
• 45:18
  inside him experiencing what it's like being him from a sort
• 45:23
  of exterior position. He's not able to affect
• 45:25
  anything. So there's two Coels in that
• 45:28
  first scene and then when he redoes it at the end.
• 45:31
  And of course I think Fraser touched on this as well, but
• 45:36
  that if we start at the beginning and then at the end,
• 45:38
  you know like that we're having the same experience of panics is
• 45:42
  having. So we're going back to the
• 45:43
  beginning of the book and starting again.
• 45:46
  And so that makes it clear what he's condemned to.
• 45:51
  I think he has to do some sort of Fiji we genus to get the the
• 45:57
  arboretums to work and to get his.
• 46:00
  You know, like the arboretums can go back and re experience
• 46:06
  their lives and make small changes.
• 46:10
  They're like Bill Murray, only plants and so they get to so and
• 46:17
  that's just a feature of aliens because aliens can be anything
• 46:20
  and whatever. So that's fine.
• 46:22
  But I think that's a good thing to condemn paddocks too.
• 46:26
  I think so I think that works. Sorry.
• 46:30
  Yeah, I thought it it was a satisfying ending.
• 46:34
  The paradox basically worked fine and wasn't wasn't too was
• 46:41
  solved quite cleverly. I I have always liked when K9 is
• 46:47
  possessed by by something. So that was a nice moment as
• 46:50
  well where you can just hear John Leeson or David Breeley or
• 46:55
  as I suspect he probably did. He had K9 possessed so that his
• 46:59
  voice could change back afterwards.
• 47:01
  Pretty for season 18 recording in my head.
• 47:06
  But yeah, a nice moment for K9 as well.
• 47:09
  And all of that and the doctor being clever and sort of working
• 47:12
  out what the repulsion possession was all about and
• 47:17
  having it possess himself and all of this.
• 47:19
  So yeah, I was quite satisfied at the end.
• 47:24
  Are you phrase that? Yeah.
• 47:27
  It was okay I think you know let's have another run through
• 47:32
  and get to that end point because you know when I got to
• 47:35
  the end it seemed as if things were kind of done very quickly.
• 47:41
  It was you know we're we're looking for the the doctor to
• 47:47
  not die essentially. You know we know it's been
• 47:52
  though it hasn't been as. Central to the story as I
• 47:57
  thought it would be. You know I'm go back through in
• 47:59
  our park with that expectation and reread it.
• 48:02
  I think you know we're looking for that trick what's going to
• 48:04
  be the slighter hand what's going to be the you know the
• 48:07
  test selective moment you know and it's it's basically that
• 48:09
  event need just he wasn't dead when she seen him in the coffin
• 48:13
  sort of thing which is a bit yeah B plus could do better and
• 48:21
  I think you know the. What I was expecting was more of
• 48:24
  the Arboretum thing to come into it.
• 48:26
  You know, it's like the Doctor has died, but because he's
• 48:30
  linked to an Arboretum, he has the the chance to go back over
• 48:35
  his, you know, a spell of his life.
• 48:38
  And then he will actually come out and he will, you know, have
• 48:41
  that knowledge to be able to suddenly adjust what he's going
• 48:46
  to do. And it's it's touched on because
• 48:48
  you obviously you have that bit where.
• 48:51
  Is born again and no, no, no, no, asks him, you know, did the,
• 48:57
  you know, did the Doctor survive this time?
• 48:59
  And he's like, yes, this time he did.
• 49:02
  So you know that. I mean it's just like a one line
• 49:05
  that I think that that element, if that had been boosted a
• 49:10
  little bit more, I think that would have been a lot, a lot
• 49:13
  more satisfying for me. The thing with Paddocks,
• 49:17
  obviously we want Paddocks to get a come up and you just get
• 49:20
  come up and sees he's like you say he's Bill Murray in, but
• 49:25
  without being able to change anything.
• 49:26
  Because I think, again, you know that the idea that Paddocks has
• 49:29
  wiped out the arboretums, but what basically is a right at
• 49:33
  Alton Towers isn't again, you know, central enough.
• 49:40
  It isn't. You know, telegraphed enough.
• 49:42
  It's not not enough of me, It's made of that to say actually
• 49:45
  this is your guy, this is this is the big bastard.
• 49:47
  Because one of the key things, if you look back over season 17
• 49:51
  is and you look at those stories, you've got Davros,
• 49:56
  you've got Skaroth, you've got Skagra, you've got St.
• 50:03
  Yes, yes, you've got big, big, memorable villain.
• 50:10
  And that's what's missing from yeah.
• 50:11
  You've got met Carl. You know who is kind of setting
• 50:14
  up. But Paddocks is the real bastard
• 50:17
  of the piece. But it's just not bastard
• 50:20
  enough. I mean he's a but he's just not.
• 50:22
  It's just not. He's not put.
• 50:25
  We don't. See it?
• 50:26
  Yeah. We're told that he's, he's
• 50:28
  killed all the arboretums and they have to say that again.
• 50:31
  I think it's a bit of an overreaction to your parents
• 50:33
  dying. I mean, you know, like that
• 50:35
  happens. We don't all go and.
• 50:38
  Commit genocide as a result, basically happens to everyone
• 50:42
  eventually. We we need like the big scene
• 50:44
  between the Doctor and Paddocks, where this is all kind of yeah,
• 50:48
  you know. And the big scene happens
• 50:50
  between the doctor and the repulsion and repulsion, doesn't
• 50:53
  it? Rather than the paddocks.
• 50:55
  So yeah, yeah, so the. Repulsion's a bit of a thing.
• 51:00
  What is that? What even is that?
• 51:04
  No, I didn't either. It's there, yeah, yeah.
• 51:10
  Base plot convenience. It's yeah again I could have
• 51:14
  been some of there's quite a few elements when you kind of when
• 51:18
  you stop and unpick this and you kind of think well you've got
• 51:20
  the Arachnopods who are nasty pieces of work and you know I
• 51:25
  think the doctors way of dealing with them was really clever and
• 51:28
  that was that was good. But again it's just kind of
• 51:30
  like. Sort of side character which
• 51:33
  isn't given enough time, I think.
• 51:35
  You know, take take the pods out, focus more on the repulsion
• 51:40
  or focus more on paddocks and you put meat on their bones and
• 51:44
  making it a bit more satisfying when they are defeated, do you
• 51:50
  think? I think you want monsters.
• 51:52
  Don't you want monsters? I think you want monsters.
• 51:55
  But do you think this is sort of first novel syndrome, that this
• 51:57
  is a big plot and it's first Doctor Who thing?
• 52:01
  Yeah, absolutely. And I do wonder whether it's
• 52:05
  just throw everything in the melting pot because I might
• 52:08
  never get a chance to do this ever again.
• 52:10
  And off we go. And as we know, Johnny has gone
• 52:13
  on to do a lot of Doctor Who ever since so and has got better
• 52:18
  maybe or refined what he does a bit better.
• 52:21
  I I wondered how this. Book would have come out if he'd
• 52:25
  wrote it six or seven years later, because it felt to me
• 52:32
  very much sticking to that four part structure.
• 52:37
  You know of. You know, you kind of explain,
• 52:40
  you know you you've got a chunk and then you have a cliffhanger
• 52:42
  bit and you have a I think the bit where that really struck me
• 52:46
  was where K9 gets chucked into the.
• 52:48
  Stargate. That was a yeah, that was a
• 52:50
  cliffhanger. That's part of cliffhanger
• 52:52
  that's that's you know and I wonder if you know the short
• 52:58
  come back and Johnny had had that experience of what you can
• 53:02
  do with a 45 minute story rather than 425 and maybes you might
• 53:08
  have structured it a little bit differently and.
• 53:11
  Down the line, he wrote a book called Touched by an Angel,
• 53:15
  which was during Moffett's time. It's fantastic.
• 53:18
  It's as this is as complicated as this, but it's told.
• 53:23
  It tells the story of two people in a relationship and the Angels
• 53:27
  basically, you know send them all through time in different
• 53:29
  places. So we see their relationships at
• 53:31
  different points in time and and how they almost didn't meet.
• 53:35
  But there's like an emotional threat running through and two
• 53:38
  central characters and that's what the new series brought to
• 53:41
  him. It was like okay, you can tell a
• 53:42
  story this way now you know with real heart.
• 53:46
  That's a. Which is possibly what this is.
• 53:48
  Missing a bit, it's it's very sort of calculated, isn't it?
• 53:53
  There is something clever though about maintaining a four episode
• 53:55
  structure in the story that you're telling backwards.
• 53:57
  So yeah, you know, I think that is pretty clever, you know,
• 54:02
  because, I mean, the peril is always kind of not real anyway.
• 54:06
  Do you know what I mean? We know the Doctor's going to
• 54:08
  survive the cliffhanger and stuff, and that's even more the
• 54:11
  case we need because we know that the Doctor's yet to go back
• 54:13
  and experiencing. But I think that's cleverly
• 54:15
  done. Oh no, it's it's the plot and is
• 54:19
  is really clever, the structure of the story is is is very
• 54:22
  clever. I just wonder maybe if you know
• 54:24
  if you were writing this is say A2 parter for the new series
• 54:28
  weather things, certain things might be a bit more streamlined.
• 54:32
  Or if you'd done it as a as A2 parter Big Finish adventure for
• 54:37
  Tom Baker and Lola Ward for one of their seasons.
• 54:40
  She wrote a lot for them anyway. And then, yeah, maybe it just
• 54:43
  been a bit more focused and a bit more forensic drilled in
• 54:48
  perhaps and thought of the core ideas and not thrown everything
• 54:52
  in the pot. Is that, you know, get this at
• 54:55
  the impression talk from you guys who have read all these
• 54:57
  books that were under the 90s and in the turn of the century
• 55:00
  and whatnot. That you know, it was a very
• 55:02
  much a time of, you know, Doctor Who write as cutting loose and
• 55:08
  going well. Now I'm not having to stick to a
• 55:11
  watershed or. Stick to a budget or whatever I
• 55:15
  can, you know, go to town. That could go to an extreme.
• 55:20
  You can. Yes, I can give dodo syphilis.
• 55:26
  And someone had to do it. I can actually have the Doctor
• 55:31
  know. Book like Damaged Goods, which
• 55:33
  is Russell's first Doctor Who story and it's a fantastic book.
• 55:38
  Like it's brilliantly written. I question whether it's a Doctor
• 55:41
  Who book, though it's so adult. So it's funny, he has the end
• 55:46
  form and this thing has the G lock.
• 55:50
  There's, you know, there's a monster that's name is just an
• 55:53
  abstract noun and there's a lot of gore and stuff.
• 55:58
  Like the really striking thing about Russell's book is that
• 56:01
  it's. So brutal and so.
• 56:03
  Horrifically gory. And that's kind of what we're
• 56:08
  doing in that era. Do you know, it strikes me
• 56:10
  actually that he's not the first person to do the Doctor and
• 56:13
  people meeting out of order. And that has to be paid in
• 56:16
  lefthanded Hummingbird where Christian, the main character,
• 56:20
  she meets him like the Doctor meets him before, you know, like
• 56:26
  it when he's older and then goes back and meets him as a younger
• 56:28
  man. Like that's a thing that
• 56:30
  happens. It also has a.
• 56:32
  Kind of circular storytelling too where the blue again another
• 56:37
  abstract now it's also actually actually now I want to both you
• 56:44
  know has has they the attack and then we come back and we see the
• 56:48
  attack and it it's reinterpreted in another way.
• 56:50
  So you know it's something that has happened before and it does
• 56:54
  seem to be you know one of the things one of the tricks of the
• 56:58
  new adventures sort of develops. I was wondering if Stephen
• 57:02
  Moffett, you know, obsessed over the Time Traveller's Wife.
• 57:04
  Maybe you just read The left-handed Hummingbird and
• 57:07
  this. He was.
• 57:09
  Always doing these greats, Wasn't he?
• 57:12
  To round off Festival of Death? Then I'm going to ask you all,
• 57:17
  would you recommend this book to another Doctor Who fan and why?
• 57:24
  Sigh. Yes, because I think.
• 57:27
  If you like Season 17, you're going to, you're just going to,
• 57:30
  I think you're going to get just enjoy having another adventure
• 57:35
  with the Doctor and Lola, wards, Romana and K9 because why
• 57:39
  wouldn't you? You know it from the point of
• 57:42
  it, as we said right at the start, the from the point of
• 57:44
  view of that team, this is beautifully written for them.
• 57:49
  They are so in character and you just want to spend time with
• 57:52
  them and. Having a few hours reading this
• 57:56
  book with them, it was like comfort reading for me.
• 57:58
  It's comfort Doctor Who, So yeah, and it's clever and it
• 58:02
  stands up well, sort of. After 23 years, it stood up a
• 58:05
  lot better than I expected it to.
• 58:06
  So that's a positive point, I think.
• 58:10
  Why is that? Yes, absolutely, 100%,
• 58:14
  definitely. I think you know the few things
• 58:17
  we haven't touched on in this, I think you know.
• 58:22
  This is a Doctor Who fan. If you love season 17, if that
• 58:25
  is, you know, does everything for you, then this is got season
• 58:28
  17 throughout its DNA. You know it like I say, it's
• 58:32
  got, it's got corridors, it's got hyperspace, it's got canine,
• 58:36
  it's got Ramona, it's got, you know, witty plot dialogue.
• 58:40
  If you don't like season 17 for whatever reason, if you think
• 58:43
  season 17 is too funny, then guess what kids?
• 58:46
  It's got zombies and it's got spiders and it's got death and
• 58:49
  it's got the afterlife and. Really.
• 58:52
  Zombies and everything. If you think, Oh no, I'm a lot
• 58:56
  more like a Stephen Moffett type of person that you know, yeah,
• 58:59
  it's tiny. Why, you mean you know,
• 59:01
  Moffett's cribed off this, hasn't he?
• 59:04
  A lot of times. So, you know, even if you're
• 59:06
  like, Oh well, you know, I'm, I'm too.
• 59:09
  Yeah. There's there's a lot of you
• 59:11
  enjoying here. Things like this way.
• 59:16
  I'm talking about this. I love the the quotes that went
• 59:19
  through it all. The Doctor was is constantly
• 59:22
  quoting about death, so there's like quotes from like the rhyme
• 59:25
  of the injured mariner. The Blossomious blossom pops up
• 59:28
  here, you know a good thirteen years before Jodie Whittaker
• 59:36
  gets that line. So it is just such a
• 59:41
  multilayered book and I think the best thing about it, like I
• 59:45
  said before, is it absolutely is 1 you're going to read again.
• 59:48
  It's not just one you're going to buy.
• 59:50
  Or download or whatever. And it's going to sit on your
• 59:52
  Kindle or it's going to sit on your shelf.
• 59:53
  It's one that you're going to be like, you're going to get the
• 59:55
  end and you're going to be like, I'm the big bastard.
• 59:59
  I want to read this again and you want to go and relive it.
• 1:00:01
  And you'll probably do that two or three times to be honest, to
• 1:00:05
  really appreciate and. Fully.
• 1:00:06
  I wish there was a talking book version read by Lana, because
• 1:00:11
  that would have been magnificent.
• 1:00:13
  I did go looking for it. What?
• 1:00:17
  About United. So I I would recommend it
• 1:00:23
  because I do think it captures Series 17, season 17 very well,
• 1:00:26
  but I think, I don't know, I might This is why am I on this
• 1:00:34
  episode. I actually don't think the
• 1:00:36
  Doctor Who works all that well as in book form.
• 1:00:41
  And I think because part of the way that I enjoy Doctor Who is
• 1:00:44
  that it's television, which is collaborative.
• 1:00:48
  It has act as performances. It has Duff bits that are
• 1:00:51
  hilarious that we can make fun of and it's something that we
• 1:00:55
  can enjoy together. And and so for me, like I
• 1:01:01
  beautifully read. I read the Target books because
• 1:01:04
  they were, I was a kid. There was no VHS or anything
• 1:01:07
  like that. That was the only way you could
• 1:01:09
  experience certain Doctor Who stories, even though they were
• 1:01:12
  repeated at nausea. I'm on Australian television.
• 1:01:17
  But I miss, I really miss. You know, I've, I've read lots
• 1:01:23
  and lots of the books. They were sort of super
• 1:01:25
  important, but eventually it was no longer the shared experience.
• 1:01:28
  That is what I really enjoy about stuff like this.
• 1:01:33
  And so there's echoes of Tom and echoes of Lala, but it's season
• 1:01:37
  17 essentially without actual Tom and actual Lala and that's
• 1:01:42
  never going to be quite as good I think.
• 1:01:47
  That's a good note. So I actually want to throw that
• 1:01:50
  back a sigh, because I know you're somebody who absolutely
• 1:01:54
  loved documents in novel form growing up.
• 1:02:00
  So maybe give us the other side of that argument.
• 1:02:05
  It's really difficult to do now because I think maybe I wasted a
• 1:02:10
  lot of time reading, a lot of trust in that time.
• 1:02:18
  And I sometimes I look up at the shelf and I think I read the
• 1:02:21
  majority of these books and yet I couldn't tell you what was
• 1:02:26
  going on in the majority of them.
• 1:02:28
  There were not many that really stood out, and this was always
• 1:02:33
  one that did stand out for me because it was almost a cut
• 1:02:39
  above what else was coming out. I mean, particularly with the
• 1:02:43
  8th Doctor BBC novels, there were a lot of them.
• 1:02:49
  Well, yeah, but there were a lot of them.
• 1:02:51
  But there were a lot of very forgettable ones where I can
• 1:02:56
  remember reading the Book of the Still.
• 1:02:59
  And getting to the end of it and thinking I have no memory of
• 1:03:02
  what I've just read, everything in this book has actually been
• 1:03:06
  filtered out of my brain Before I've even got to the end of this
• 1:03:09
  book, I couldn't tell you the. Silence.
• 1:03:15
  You know, so yeah, and this was a period where you get 2 novels
• 1:03:21
  a month. It's a lot of Doctor Who and not
• 1:03:24
  all of it is going to be the quality stuff and.
• 1:03:28
  Remarkable, Doctor Who. Some did push the boundaries, I
• 1:03:31
  think Virgin the Virgin books pushed harder, but they were
• 1:03:38
  doing everything first so they they could and they set what
• 1:03:43
  what came afterwards. And I think, and certainly
• 1:03:46
  towards the end, I think there was more a feeling of writing.
• 1:03:51
  Doctor Who, like Doctor Who, was on the telly.
• 1:03:54
  And people started to remember that actually Doctor Who was
• 1:03:57
  fun, and it wasn't. And Doctor Who isn't dark.
• 1:04:01
  And I think it was as someone who likes fun and funny Doctor
• 1:04:05
  Who constant dark stories where horrible things happen to
• 1:04:11
  horrible people in horrible ways, just really grown me down
• 1:04:16
  after a while and when it's people, when it's happening to.
• 1:04:21
  Doctors and companions who normally had a really nice time
• 1:04:25
  being in Doctor Who, that was also a bit of a problem, so.
• 1:04:31
  Back-to-back in the new adventures, Parasite and Falls,
• 1:04:34
  the Shadow and it was 600 Relentless Torture.
• 1:04:39
  Paul, Bernie Summerfield. I should just go through hell,
• 1:04:43
  Fraser. I just want to really quickly
• 1:04:44
  throw that at you as well, because you're somebody that's
• 1:04:47
  done quite a lot on Jason Miller's.
• 1:04:50
  Podcast recently, so I feel as if you're discovering the books
• 1:04:53
  now. Yeah.
• 1:04:56
  What was the question again? Are they worth reading?
• 1:05:07
  I mean that that is that is a really tricky one because like
• 1:05:12
  Nathan says, there's there's an element of Doctor Who which is,
• 1:05:17
  you know, visual it's. It's the sound.
• 1:05:22
  I'm I've got Warriors Gate on my shelf, which I need to read
• 1:05:27
  because I'm going to be covering on track one, the Warriors Gate
• 1:05:30
  novelization. So, you know, that's waiting for
• 1:05:33
  us. You know, how is Warriors Gate
• 1:05:35
  going to translate to a book? Because, you know, so much of
• 1:05:39
  the success of Warriors Gate lies with Paul Joyce's direction
• 1:05:42
  and the soundtrack to that. You know, how is Stephen
• 1:05:47
  Gallagher going to capture that? On on the page.
• 1:05:56
  So I think it depends on what you're looking for.
• 1:05:58
  You know, because again, you know a lot of the books, the
• 1:06:02
  target books are just, you know, script to page rewrites of what
• 1:06:09
  was on screen. So if that's what you're looking
• 1:06:11
  for, awesome, you've got a target book.
• 1:06:13
  If you want to make a little bit more expand, some of the targets
• 1:06:16
  are. You know, some of the other
• 1:06:17
  authors have come in and fleshed it out and you know change bits
• 1:06:21
  and tweet bits. So you're actually getting a bit
• 1:06:23
  more depth there. So if you like, if you wanted as
• 1:06:27
  sort of like Doctor Who plus the extended experience, then you've
• 1:06:31
  got those books there as well. And with regards to sort of like
• 1:06:34
  the BBC books and and so and so forth, I'm, you know complete
• 1:06:37
  novice on those. So you know, I can only really,
• 1:06:43
  you know, go off what I've already said about this one
• 1:06:45
  really which is. You know, it feels this is like
• 1:06:49
  a love letter to a particular time of Doctor Who, and it's a
• 1:06:55
  successful one and obviously, you know, so I'll be able to
• 1:06:58
  point you out the ones which aren't, you know?
• 1:07:03
  You. Know.
• 1:07:05
  So I think you know my question back to you guys would be sort
• 1:07:08
  of what is it about this book that makes it a success?
• 1:07:12
  Is it capturing an era? And capturing the style of
• 1:07:17
  Doctor Who that makes it a homage, a love like that, rather
• 1:07:21
  than a prestige or a knockoff. That is a good question.
• 1:07:29
  I think there's enough sort of complexity there and enough
• 1:07:32
  originality and you know, everything's a remix.
• 1:07:36
  Like everything is inspired by other things.
• 1:07:40
  But I. Think that, you know, it's not a
• 1:07:44
  pastiche. He captures the voices of the
• 1:07:46
  characters. He captures the the, the, the
• 1:07:49
  obsessions of the era, the concerns that the era has and
• 1:07:54
  it's worthwhile on its own. I think, you know, like I think
• 1:07:58
  this is a a good thing. And I think, I think there's
• 1:08:01
  absolutely it's no surprise that he's gone on to write Doctor
• 1:08:05
  Who. You know, for sort of.
• 1:08:09
  Broader audiences and and stuff like that with some success
• 1:08:12
  because there's clearly something really good here.
• 1:08:16
  And I also think that choosing like an Adam scripted era as
• 1:08:20
  your inspiration shows that you have just good taste.
• 1:08:23
  Absolutely. Like, he knows he he knows that
• 1:08:27
  this is good stuff, that there's there's something here, yeah,
• 1:08:31
  that's worth worth capturing. There was still very much a
• 1:08:35
  feeling. At the time that this was an era
• 1:08:38
  that was just worth writing off in its entirety, apart from City
• 1:08:42
  of Death, that was obviously brilliant, but everything else
• 1:08:45
  was a bit disposable and a bit cheap and shoddy, and it hadn't
• 1:08:50
  quite gone through the revival, because I get Still in 2000,
• 1:08:56
  most of those stories from season 17 hadn't been released
• 1:08:59
  on video, but they were still. We hadn't had Creature from the
• 1:09:04
  Pit, Nightmare of Eden. I think we'd have not maybe
• 1:09:07
  Nightmare of Eden, but we hadn't had ones of 9/1, which was one
• 1:09:11
  of the last BHS's of all because obviously, because everyone
• 1:09:16
  hates it. So you know.
• 1:09:19
  To push against fan opinion and do such an affectionate book.
• 1:09:24
  And as I said, it's very telling that no other offer other than
• 1:09:28
  Gareth Roberts in The Missing Adventures.
• 1:09:32
  Touched this era at all. So two whole years of Doctor
• 1:09:36
  Who, when they're scrabbling to fill the gaps between every
• 1:09:40
  single story were were basically ignored, which I think tells you
• 1:09:45
  everything about fandom. But also I think it's hard to
• 1:09:50
  do. I think it's hard to do.
• 1:09:52
  You have to be smart. You have to be clever like
• 1:09:54
  Douglas Adams to to do that, you know.
• 1:09:58
  And that's the thing you know that that Morris brings to.
• 1:10:03
  Doctor Who that Moffett brings to Doctor Who is that you have
• 1:10:07
  to be clever to write clever people, and Romana and the
• 1:10:10
  Doctor are clever and witty and stuff, and not everyone can do
• 1:10:15
  that. You said, Nathan, that you know
• 1:10:18
  you enjoy TV because it's a collaborative process and you
• 1:10:21
  weren't getting sort of the actors saying these lines.
• 1:10:24
  But actually the reason I found it so successful is I could see
• 1:10:28
  I could hear Tom Baker and Lala was and it was in the moment.
• 1:10:32
  It was in the sort of the sort of charming that you said about
• 1:10:35
  that gag about the first and second law of time and the pay
• 1:10:40
  off to that where he finally gets it right and she still goes
• 1:10:44
  to correct him and. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:46
  Yeah, right. And sort of beams at him.
• 1:10:48
  We're so proud. I was like, I can see Lala War
• 1:10:51
  doing that. Absolutely.
• 1:10:54
  The point I would make is obviously I'm holding up the
• 1:10:57
  copy I've got, which is the one that was reprinted for the 50th
• 1:11:01
  anniversary. So you know of all these books,
• 1:11:03
  you know of all, you know the the Tom Baker books, you know at
• 1:11:09
  the time, written at the time. Like you say when when fandom is
• 1:11:15
  taking a big shit on this era and the one that's actually
• 1:11:19
  being picked to represent Tom Baker's era.
• 1:11:23
  For the 50th anniversary is the one from season 17, so show us
• 1:11:27
  what you know, fans of 2000. I don't think they'd be picking
• 1:11:31
  a Gareth Roberts book for. No, not anymore.
• 1:11:35
  They would have done 10 years ago.
• 1:11:37
  Yes. The and Touched by Touched by an
• 1:11:42
  Angel is Witch Doctor. Because I mean that's in that's
• 1:11:44
  very printed for the 50th too. Is it Amy and Rory?
• 1:11:50
  Right, well. Definitely worth a read.
• 1:11:51
  It's a really, really great book.
• 1:12:01
  Well look guys, thank you so much.
• 1:12:03
  You unpicked that in some detail there.
• 1:12:06
  I am now going to ask each of you.
• 1:12:09
  To and you know, given, we basically just decided that
• 1:12:12
  reading Doctor Who books is a waste of time to a Doctor Who,
• 1:12:19
  to the people listening. And I think we will start with
• 1:12:23
  the one person who hasn't prepared a book to be
• 1:12:27
  recommended. And I sigh.
• 1:12:31
  I'm. He doesn't have many to choose
• 1:12:36
  from. He just reaches off camera and
• 1:12:39
  just pulls something out I am. Taking you.
• 1:12:41
  At random. To the Doctor Who Annual 1980,
• 1:12:46
  which is the most? Which was the book that expanded
• 1:12:51
  my mind in ways that I never expected.
• 1:12:54
  So this is one of the very first Doctor Who books I ever owned.
• 1:12:58
  Bought second hand at a school fair and it has ridiculous and
• 1:13:02
  terrible pieces of artwork in it.
• 1:13:05
  I. What's that?
• 1:13:07
  No one? I'm not just holding up some
• 1:13:09
  impenetrable artwork there, but. This is great podcasting.
• 1:13:14
  This has it is. So enjoy everyone, but this has.
• 1:13:18
  There's a PDF insert. You'll love it, yeah.
• 1:13:20
  Really strange, odd stories that were not quite like Doctor Who,
• 1:13:26
  but were enough like Doctor Who for them to entertain me when I
• 1:13:30
  was young. And there's a brilliant comic
• 1:13:33
  strip called The Weapon, which is.
• 1:13:36
  About 7:00 or 8 pages. That's a real really great
• 1:13:39
  morality play about a laser that has been dropped in medieval
• 1:13:43
  England and it can wipe out a rival faction in a war.
• 1:13:49
  And it's about the Doctor's reaction to that and it's it's a
• 1:13:53
  really nice story and really and the artwork is actually
• 1:13:56
  beautiful on that one as well. But I.
• 1:14:01
  I can't objectively say that this is the best Doctor Who book
• 1:14:04
  ever written, but it's one that I love.
• 1:14:06
  And every so often I just go back to the shelf, pull it out,
• 1:14:10
  pull it out of the out from between 1979 and 1981, have a
• 1:14:16
  look at it, and it just takes me back to being five years old and
• 1:14:21
  and just trying to. Work out from the pictures
• 1:14:25
  because I couldn't read particularly well at that point.
• 1:14:27
  Obviously what these stories were about and it's just mind
• 1:14:31
  expanding and joy so. That is the most you
• 1:14:35
  recommendation. Absolutely.
• 1:14:39
  Fraser, well, I'll, I'll try and do the most me recommendation I
• 1:14:43
  can because my choice is going to be the first Doctor Who book
• 1:14:48
  that I actually bought, not the one that I read because that was
• 1:14:51
  someone that I'd be. The first one I actually bought,
• 1:14:55
  which is the 6th Doctor Andrew, which I.
• 1:15:01
  Those books have got a lot to answer for, right?
• 1:15:04
  Yeah. Absolutely.
• 1:15:05
  I received plan wisdom. Yeah.
• 1:15:08
  And this is a house Dammers walk a book.
• 1:15:10
  And I stumbled across this and a WH Smith's in York of all
• 1:15:14
  places, on a sort of day trip out with me.
• 1:15:16
  Mom and dad, you know left us kind of wander around and do
• 1:15:20
  some shopping. So I.
• 1:15:22
  Stumbled across this and just, you know, flicked through it and
• 1:15:26
  you know what? It's the 6th Doctor.
• 1:15:30
  It's it's just so compact and in depth of everything.
• 1:15:36
  You know, there's explanations of the stories.
• 1:15:40
  There's sort of interviews. There's, you know, quotes Colin
• 1:15:44
  Baker in his own words. There's, you know, a dive into
• 1:15:47
  the character of the Doctor. All the fiction side, the sort
• 1:15:51
  of. Continuity around it.
• 1:15:54
  You've got like a script screen of Revelation of the Daleks.
• 1:15:56
  It's all production stuff. It's just, it's just
• 1:16:00
  fascinating. And that was me.
• 1:16:02
  Took this away and, you know, read through the bits that I was
• 1:16:05
  interested in and and make note the other bits.
• 1:16:08
  And yeah, so it's got obviously, you know, how stammers walk as
• 1:16:13
  views on things, which are, you know, the Bible.
• 1:16:17
  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
• 1:16:21
  You know, but it's and you know this is the 90s so there's no,
• 1:16:25
  well probably up and coming but you know you've got no way of
• 1:16:29
  kind of anyone else telling you what another opinion and so you
• 1:16:33
  know God bless yeah recommend this just to kind of you know
• 1:16:39
  have a you know this was just. Mind blowing and manner from
• 1:16:44
  heaven for a young fan who just wants to learn about, you know,
• 1:16:50
  what they found themselves getting into and what they found
• 1:16:53
  themselves falling in love with and just to have all this
• 1:16:56
  information at hand. And obviously, yeah, there is
• 1:17:01
  those opinions. So the recommendation because if
• 1:17:03
  you go out and buy this now, you've got so much stuff to
• 1:17:05
  disagree with and what the fans like doing the most disagreeing
• 1:17:10
  with each other. Those books are as fascinating
• 1:17:13
  as you are, Fraser. So that is absolutely you're in
• 1:17:18
  a book form there. What about you, Nathan?
• 1:17:21
  So I'm gonna make a fairly basic choice.
• 1:17:26
  My friend Peter, who is a regular on FTE and has appeared
• 1:17:30
  on Maximum Power and on Hamster. He's a massive fan of the John
• 1:17:35
  Pertley era. It's one of his, I don't know
• 1:17:38
  whether it's a secret vice or not, but it is something that he
• 1:17:41
  really loves and you know, it's a thing that you rewatch when
• 1:17:45
  you're ironing and and stuff like that.
• 1:17:47
  It's a, it's perfect comfort food TV.
• 1:17:50
  And he pointed out to me, to my surprise, actually so much said
• 1:17:54
  that I actually quoted it back to him.
• 1:17:55
  I said, oh, someone that I met said this about these Pertley
• 1:17:58
  stories. He said, yeah, that was me.
• 1:18:01
  He thinks that Malcolm Hulk's TV stories are boring and it kind
• 1:18:06
  of, when you think about it, it's actually a little bit hard
• 1:18:09
  to disagree with. And but his novelizations are
• 1:18:15
  amazingly good and they're the best, I think, of the target
• 1:18:19
  range. And so I'm going to choose
• 1:18:24
  Doctor Who and the dinosaur invasion as my pick.
• 1:18:29
  Because that's an incredibly ropey looking story, and it does
• 1:18:37
  benefit enormously from taking place entirely in your
• 1:18:39
  imagination. But it fleshes the whole thing
• 1:18:43
  out so well. It's so good.
• 1:18:46
  And so, like, I was given opportunity to write about it in
• 1:18:49
  you on Target. I think it's the longest essay
• 1:18:53
  in that book. And every, single, every single
• 1:18:58
  Target novelization gets an essay.
• 1:18:59
  But I got to write about the dinosaur invasion because I
• 1:19:02
  discovered as I was writing that it was the very first audio book
• 1:19:05
  that I bought on Audible read by Martin Java beautifully.
• 1:19:10
  Read by. So well, but I remember reading
• 1:19:14
  it in like 1970. 95 or something like no, can't have been as
• 1:19:19
  early as that. 1979 I have a strong memory that I can place
• 1:19:23
  in 1979 of reading the book and it is so good, it's so well done
• 1:19:29
  and all of his books are I think superior to the episodes that
• 1:19:35
  inspired them. So you I would really recommend
• 1:19:39
  that. It's too.
• 1:19:41
  Is. So much better than colony in
• 1:19:43
  space, in fact. One of the Hamster Book Clubs is
• 1:19:47
  the doomsday weapon that's going to be.
• 1:19:49
  A It's really great. Yeah, that's a proper.
• 1:19:52
  Book, yeah. And the depiction of the bit
• 1:19:55
  where you talk about the IMC staff and and what earth is
• 1:20:00
  like, where you live and what your life is like on Earth is
• 1:20:04
  just. Yeah, credibly bleak and
• 1:20:07
  horrible. There's a beautiful bit where
• 1:20:10
  Pertweet trains, tells Ash. How to conduct the Leeson's
• 1:20:15
  funeral do you remember that it's so beautifully done and
• 1:20:19
  it's so absolutely unlike Perth who's a bit of a Pratt, you know
• 1:20:24
  it's really humane and sort of lovely and they're given just
• 1:20:27
  they're given just a few seconds screen time aren't they At the
• 1:20:29
  beginning of episode one they're barely in it but that that's an
• 1:20:34
  important thing that we don't see their funeral I don't think
• 1:20:37
  in the in the story but it's it's just.
• 1:20:40
  Terrifically well done. Because, you know, death has
• 1:20:43
  been taken away from because they live in this sort of very
• 1:20:45
  industrialized or sort of, you know, mechanized society.
• 1:20:49
  It's all sanitized and stuff. He's never really properly
• 1:20:51
  experienced it. Now we are on this planet and
• 1:20:54
  you've got to dig holes in the ground to put people in.
• 1:20:57
  And it's new to him and it's. It's very like all of those are
• 1:21:02
  great. Even the space war, like I think
• 1:21:06
  Frontier in Space gets extra points for having Delgado in it.
• 1:21:10
  And so it's kind of fun like Delgado's in it all the way
• 1:21:13
  through as opposed to just at the end of Colony and Space.
• 1:21:17
  And so you missed that, I think in the novel version.
• 1:21:19
  But again, I think the novel's better than the.
• 1:21:21
  You remember the end of the space war as the Master, the
• 1:21:25
  scene we were denied with the master coming.
• 1:21:27
  In. Papers and going.
• 1:21:29
  Oh well, there's always another plan tomorrow.
• 1:21:33
  Absolutely perfect. And do you remember that
• 1:21:36
  sequence in The Doomsday Weapon, where I think it's from Bernard
• 1:21:39
  Kay's character's point of view, the depiction of the Earth?
• 1:21:45
  It is one of the bleakest, Yeah, it's.
• 1:21:47
  Horrible, yeah. One living in boxes and by these
• 1:21:51
  terrifying rules. And getting a wife, like a
• 1:21:54
  company wife or something. Who gets that?
• 1:21:56
  Yeah, yeah. And does Jane Leeson, remember
• 1:22:00
  going up various escalators and being able to sit in the sun for
• 1:22:03
  now, you know, that you had to schedule time to get sunlight?
• 1:22:07
  And then she goes back into the sort of giant conurbation that
• 1:22:10
  she lives in, I think. You know, and Hulk's politics is
• 1:22:15
  really, really visible in the books in a way that doesn't
• 1:22:18
  always come through in the. Yeah, and the fact that they
• 1:22:21
  give him the Green death to novelize, which he didn't write
• 1:22:24
  want to be because it fits his wheelhouse.
• 1:22:28
  Absolutely. Yeah, and it's a great version,
• 1:22:31
  isn't it? It's really good.
• 1:22:32
  Really, really good. Well, somewhat controversially,
• 1:22:35
  I'm I'm going to look at Cy's face when I say this.
• 1:22:38
  I want to recommend warmonger. I skipped warmonger.
• 1:22:47
  The 5th Doctor in Perry. The 5th Doctor is the warmonger
• 1:22:51
  bringing together the Cybermen, the Daleks and I think the
• 1:22:55
  Santorins to take on Morbius. It is the wankiest BBC book you
• 1:23:02
  are ever going to find. It's terrible on every single
• 1:23:05
  level. It's written by Terence Dix and
• 1:23:08
  somehow that man. Manages to make though that
• 1:23:12
  premise work, and it is a really fun, bouncy read.
• 1:23:18
  But I just on every level that the nuts and bolts of the story
• 1:23:21
  are terrible and it is considered one of the worst
• 1:23:24
  novels of all. But you've all read terroristic
• 1:23:26
  books. You know the man can write
• 1:23:28
  prose, he can get you from one chapter to the next.
• 1:23:31
  It's it's a truly, truly abysmal story, but it's a really fun
• 1:23:37
  read. Elle Sandifer has an incredible
• 1:23:41
  essay in Tartus Eruditorum about warmonger.
• 1:23:45
  Really kind of positive reading of it.
• 1:23:47
  It's really, it's pretty it's pretty great because she's kind
• 1:23:52
  of pointing to all of the problems in the era in a way
• 1:23:55
  that it's a sort of an assault on the sensibilities of the
• 1:23:58
  Colin Baker era, but done with. And so Perry is sort of
• 1:24:03
  important in it. And it's it's pretty
• 1:24:06
  interesting. It's worth a RAID.
• 1:24:08
  But he's even like like it's terror that's trying to do the.
• 1:24:12
  I'm saying inverted comments again, adults BBC books.
• 1:24:15
  So it's got characters going around saying, oh I'm just going
• 1:24:17
  to casually rape that person. It's just deeply uncomfortable
• 1:24:21
  and to show sort of how on the floor these books are being
• 1:24:24
  written, it was pitched for Colin Baker's doctor because
• 1:24:29
  he's he's. Portrayed has been quite violent
• 1:24:31
  and you know, and I'm going to sort out the universe just as
• 1:24:34
  column, you know, morally upright.
• 1:24:36
  And they went, Oh no, we haven't had a 5th Doctor book for a
• 1:24:38
  while. So Terrence is like, oh, all
• 1:24:40
  right, well, I'll write for the 5th Doctor, but it doesn't
• 1:24:42
  change a thing. It's still characterization.
• 1:24:46
  And you know what? I went in, I knew the reputation
• 1:24:49
  of the book and I went in and go, how are we ever going to
• 1:24:52
  pull this off? Like this is the worst extremes
• 1:24:55
  of Virgin and BBC books And it was just really, really fun.
• 1:25:00
  I think Terence Dix is a magician.
• 1:25:04
  Oh, no one's disagreeing. That's good.
• 1:25:06
  No, that's fair. That is fair.
• 1:25:08
  Yeah. Well, that just leads me to say
• 1:25:11
  thank you very much to all of you.
• 1:25:13
  Great recommendations that go and find those books.
• 1:25:15
  People you are my most favorite is people in the whole world and
• 1:25:20
  it has been a delight to bring you all together.
• 1:25:23
  I apologize for making you read a Doctor Who book.
• 1:25:26
  Yeah. That's what it If that's what it
• 1:25:28
  takes, then that's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:32
  But in case through some insanity, people don't know who
• 1:25:38
  you are or where you can be found elsewhere.
• 1:25:41
  I want to start with Nathan, then side, then Fraser, can you
• 1:25:44
  please just say where else you could be found in podcast land?
• 1:25:50
  Well, I have. A problem and it is creating
• 1:25:55
  more and more podcasts So I can be found on Flight Through
• 1:26:00
  Entirety, which is at Flight through entirety.com and we are
• 1:26:05
  at the time of recording. In between our coverage of
• 1:26:09
  Series 8 and series nine of the new series, we've gone from the
• 1:26:13
  beginning. I can also be heard on Untitled
• 1:26:16
  Star Trek project Yeah, with Joe and We.
• 1:26:21
  Yeah, it's pretty great. I really like that podcast and
• 1:26:24
  we do random Star Trek episodes from every single series and we
• 1:26:31
  have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot and Enterprise as
• 1:26:35
  well. And and then there's a few
• 1:26:38
  things coming this year. We'll be doing a flash cast on
• 1:26:41
  the new stuff towards the end of the year, and we'll be
• 1:26:44
  announcing another project at the end of the year as well.
• 1:26:46
  But for now, flight through entirety.com or untitled Star
• 1:26:49
  Trek project.com. Fraser.
• 1:26:55
  Well, when you when I'm not, you know, trapped in hyperspace
• 1:27:01
  taking all the drugs I can get my little lizard hands on.
• 1:27:04
  You can find me on Twitter is at Felix Fraser.
• 1:27:07
  Or one word in Fraser spoke with his head like Mr. Hines
• 1:27:10
  podcasting wise. I'm on a little known podcast
• 1:27:14
  that most of you won't have known about, which is called a
• 1:27:17
  Hamster with a blood pen knife. As.
• 1:27:20
  Well, you'll also find me popping up on Trap One every now
• 1:27:27
  and again and talk to who literature with Jason Miller and
• 1:27:32
  what else have I done. I've done to kettle with some
• 1:27:34
  string with Dave Rennie in the past, I've done Who Cornered the
• 1:27:39
  Corner and I have recently popped up on Happy Times and
• 1:27:43
  Places with Toby Haydock. But you're going to have to sign
• 1:27:45
  who's paid being. Just no.
• 1:27:49
  But yeah, basically anywhere that anyone is ever going to
• 1:27:52
  just ask us to come and talk about Doctor Who.
• 1:27:54
  His happy time and places was make loss, in case you're
• 1:27:57
  wondering. Oh, wonderful.
• 1:27:59
  That's awesome. By using speed to tie.
• 1:28:06
  Now look, this is going to be a long list.
• 1:28:08
  Saha is everywhere. Well, yeah, you're not.
• 1:28:12
  People keep asking me, and I never say no.
• 1:28:14
  If people want me to go on their podcast, I'm very happy to.
• 1:28:17
  And I think obviously the main one for me is handsome with a
• 1:28:22
  blunt pen knife, which I've still done more episodes of than
• 1:28:25
  anyone else, so I'm very proud of that.
• 1:28:30
  Just very quickly that Nathan is in the process of building a
• 1:28:35
  hamster with a blunt pen knife website and your guest page is
• 1:28:38
  going to be so long we may have to.
• 1:28:40
  Be very long. All the episodes in.
• 1:28:46
  But my main project I suppose is maximum power, the Blake 7
• 1:28:52
  podcasts, which I've done with Nathan and Colin and Pete and.
• 1:28:58
  Peter and Simon and James and Brendan, Well, I feel we're all
• 1:29:03
  part of the Brendan Multiverse really, that he is the glue that
• 1:29:07
  has brought us all. Together.
• 1:29:09
  In one way or another really, but that we're currently
• 1:29:13
  recorded Series C at the moment, so and really enjoying that.
• 1:29:19
  I'm 84, yeah. Yes.
• 1:29:23
  Every The show notes of every FTA episode right now promises
• 1:29:28
  that Seriously will be out late this year, so we'll see.
• 1:29:33
  Don't specify which unit and in your.
• 1:29:38
  It's nearly done, isn't it so? It is, yeah.
• 1:29:40
  Yeah. We're we're 3/4 of the way
• 1:29:42
  through recording, so that's. Good recording or nearly done as
• 1:29:46
  in? Oh no, no recording.
• 1:29:51
  And then I'm one of the main hosts on track one, which is
• 1:29:55
  always a joy, and as Mark gave me my very first chance to be on
• 1:29:59
  a podcast, I will always be grateful to him for doing this.
• 1:30:02
  So I whenever he wants me, I will be there.
• 1:30:05
  But I've also done the extra most experiments, which was
• 1:30:09
  really good fun talking about The Tomorrow People and being
• 1:30:11
  filthy and thoroughly enjoyed that.
• 1:30:16
  I have been where I've just recently done an episode of
• 1:30:20
  Robots in Your Eyes talking about Battle of the Planets,
• 1:30:24
  which is out very shortly. I've been on the lovely mic
• 1:30:31
  Honors who fucks which name I've probably got completely.
• 1:30:37
  Who gives a flux? You got it right.
• 1:30:40
  Yeah, which was absolutely brilliant, fun to do, talking
• 1:30:43
  about the new series Studs and Duds.
• 1:30:46
  And I'm coming back on that shortly to talk about BEEP, the
• 1:30:50
  Meep and the Star Beast with him, because he knows nothing
• 1:30:53
  about BEEP. And so I'm going to give him the
• 1:30:56
  beginner's guide to to to where Beep comes from and.
• 1:31:01
  I I gave Mike on a A Christmas Carol as my Dad of the Matt's
• 1:31:06
  Meat. He had to stop the recording.
• 1:31:08
  He was choking so much on his drink.
• 1:31:10
  I mean, that's a fantastic podcast because everybody's
• 1:31:15
  experience of the new series is so different.
• 1:31:17
  Yeah and it's it's something still that we're we're only just
• 1:31:21
  touching on I think as well that we've had all these years of
• 1:31:26
  knowing exactly what's what with classic who and you know you you
• 1:31:30
  just say yeah I know instantly what what my favorites what I'm
• 1:31:33
  not and I haven't stopped to think.
• 1:31:36
  So hard about the new series and what are my favorites of each
• 1:31:39
  era and which ones don't fly for me.
• 1:31:42
  So that was really interesting. And actually with Matt Smith, I
• 1:31:46
  was doing it on the fly because I've got two favorites and I
• 1:31:49
  couldn't decide between them. And it was literally he asked
• 1:31:51
  the question and I said it's not the 11th, it's A Christmas
• 1:31:55
  Carol. So it was just, yeah, it was
• 1:31:57
  just all of those faults, sort of.
• 1:32:00
  So that was really good, but yeah.
• 1:32:03
  And you can find me on Twitter at Syheart, where I will tell
• 1:32:05
  you which podcast I'm on as they come.
• 1:32:11
  On Amazing. Listen, you guys, you are my
• 1:32:13
  favorite human beings alive. Thank you so much for your time
• 1:32:16
  today. It's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:32:19
  Oh, it has. It's been fantastic.
• 1:32:20
  Thank you for inviting us. Yeah, thank you.
• 1:32:22
  It's been fun.