Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Downtime

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - Downtime · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  Victoria, where are you? The voice again it filled her
• 0:08
  with relief and fear. Yet this time it was distant,
• 0:12
  not close by her ear, and she was still wide awake.
• 0:16
  By listening, Victoria, I know you can hear me.
• 0:21
  It was real. It was calling from somewhere in
• 0:24
  the very depths of the monastery.
• 0:27
  She slid off the bed and opened the door slowly.
• 0:30
  She moved silently out and darted through the shadows.
• 0:33
  The flagstones were cold on her bare feet.
• 0:36
  Why do you neglect me when you are so near?
• 0:41
  His voice was raging on, and it occurred to Victoria, not for
• 0:45
  the first time, that he must be much changed from the kind and
• 0:48
  gentle father she had known and loved so much as a child.
• 0:53
  Finally, at the end of the passage, she saw the great doors
• 0:56
  that she knew led to the inner sanctum.
• 0:59
  She yanked the bolt free and started to push the doors
• 1:02
  inwards. Inside the chamber was exactly
• 1:07
  as she had seen it, with an overturned chair, a torn veil,
• 1:12
  and moonlight that cut through the broken ceiling like a blade.
• 1:16
  Now what do I do? I am here in the darkness.
• 1:20
  Find me. A gentle voice at her shoulder
• 1:24
  startled her. Turn back now, Vic.
• 1:29
  The Abbot Tomney had been waiting in the shadows inside
• 1:32
  the door. He carried an ornately carved
• 1:35
  ceremonial staff. Victoria echoed the voice.
• 1:41
  I have to find out, she protested.
• 1:44
  My father died far away on another world.
• 1:48
  I can hear his voice in my thoughts.
• 1:50
  He called me and I travelled all this way.
• 1:53
  No, insisted the Abbot. Demons and hungry ghosts steal
• 1:58
  many shapes. Please turn away.
• 2:00
  Victoria, Why do you delay? Release me.
• 2:05
  Her father's voice seemed to be coming from somewhere below.
• 2:09
  She noticed a shadowed alcove sat into the side wall of the
• 2:12
  sanctum. I know he's here.
• 2:15
  She started to move towards the alcove, but the Abbott staff
• 2:18
  swung up to block her way a second time.
• 2:22
  I ask, what do you seek? What have you done to him?
• 2:27
  She pushed back against the staff, but he held her firmly,
• 2:31
  forcing her back. Do not disturb it.
• 2:35
  It is not your father. It is delusion.
• 2:40
  Victoria, let me through. I cannot.
• 2:45
  For the third time I ask, what do you seek?
• 2:49
  I want the. Truth.
• 2:51
  She cried in despair. At last the Abbott Tomney turned
• 2:56
  wearily away from her. You were expected.
• 3:00
  My task is ended. I cannot prevent your journey
• 3:04
  into the dark. He ceremonially raised his
• 3:07
  ornate staff towards her. Perhaps truth may light your
• 3:11
  way. Take it.
• 3:14
  Bewildered, she took the staff from his outstretched hands and
• 3:18
  watched as he started to grope his way out of the open sanctum
• 3:21
  door. There was a low moan from the
• 3:24
  depths. Are you there?
• 3:28
  She called and approached the alcove.
• 3:32
  Cold air was welling up from below, carrying a dank reek of
• 3:35
  decay. The walls glittered with a
• 3:38
  putrid green. She went down step by step,
• 3:42
  clinging to the damp wall. She reached the foot of the
• 3:46
  stairs and the glimmering light revealed some sort of private
• 3:49
  Chapel. Victoria, are you there?
• 3:54
  She could just make out an archway with something strung
• 3:57
  across its portal like a cobweb. Release.
• 4:01
  Me. She went closer and saw that the
• 4:04
  web was composed of colored threads, all into mesh and
• 4:08
  stretched across the opening. She tried to see through the
• 4:11
  mesh but could make out only a dark, hunched figure in the
• 4:14
  gloom. She raised the Abbott ceremonial
• 4:17
  staff and thrust it into the web.
• 4:22
  A roar of green flame. Victoria stumbled back,
• 4:26
  shielding her face. A figure was shuffling against
• 4:30
  the light, emerging from the archway.
• 4:34
  Victoria fell to the floor, staring up in disbelief.
• 4:38
  This wasn't her father at all. It was delusion.
• 4:42
  It's ancient features were wasted and slag, it's white hair
• 4:46
  and beard matted, it's eyes sunken and blind.
• 4:50
  Yet she knew the face. It was an uninvited memory,
• 4:53
  resurrected, lost in time like her.
• 4:58
  You. She whispered.
• 5:00
  The figure faltered. It's voice, the voice that had
• 5:04
  been in her head for so long, was fierce and tortured.
• 5:09
  Find with a locust. Hamster Book Club, the Doctor
• 5:20
  Who Novel Review Podcast with Joe Ford and Matt Barber.
• 5:31
  Downtime by Mark Platt. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 5:52
  Club. My name is Joe Ford and it is a
• 5:55
  true delight for me today to have a virgin hamsterer, a
• 6:00
  virgin book clubber, but he's not a virgin stranger.
• 6:04
  And that is Mr. Matt Barber. Hello, Matt.
• 6:07
  It's yes, you're very honoured and welcome.
• 6:11
  You did not, like, realize you was a virgin twice over on this
• 6:14
  call, did you? I'm I'm fine with that, you
• 6:17
  know, You know, I'm ready. I'm prepared.
• 6:21
  Well, I've got I've got a few questions about books for you
• 6:24
  because I kind of want to learn about your Doctor Who book
• 6:26
  journey. But before we get there, why
• 6:29
  don't you tell everybody what? And this was your pick.
• 6:32
  Remember what you decided the two of us should read for this
• 6:35
  episode? So I decided I I hope we both
• 6:38
  read it. I decided we should read
• 6:40
  Downtime, which is the adaptation of the Christopher
• 6:47
  Barry Mark Platts like fan created the video extravaganza.
• 6:54
  And I think, I think I chose it kind of to wind Dylan Reese up
• 6:58
  because he's he's a massive fan of all of these.
• 7:01
  Like not really Doctor Who, but almost Doctor Who.
• 7:05
  And I kind of grew up not being able to afford these sort of
• 7:10
  these kind of proto Big Finish kind of videos.
• 7:14
  So I can't, I must have seen downtime at some point, but I
• 7:19
  can't remember it. So I felt it was a really good
• 7:22
  opportunity to kind of to kind of get back into that.
• 7:25
  And it also gives you something to talk about beyond just the
• 7:28
  book, because it's an adaptation, and it's Mark Platt
• 7:31
  and Mark Platt, you know? And it's good actually that you
• 7:35
  that you can't remember the downtime video because you're
• 7:38
  sort of going into the book. I mean, I'm sure you had sort of
• 7:41
  sketchy details about the plot and things like that and some of
• 7:44
  the character bees, but actually then you're coming to it fresh.
• 7:47
  Yeah, yeah, I couldn't. I can remember who who was in it
• 7:50
  and I've got, well, I can't. It's at that stage where I don't
• 7:53
  know if I've seen bits of it or I've seen the whole of it.
• 7:58
  And I don't think it entirely matters from what I understand
• 8:01
  about it. I've also seen the Ian Levine
• 8:05
  added bits, which is, which is interesting where where he
• 8:10
  basically like locks Sylvester McCoy in a room and forces him
• 8:15
  into a costume at gunpoint at gunpoint.
• 8:17
  So it's it's like that sort of Mark Gatiss, David Walliams
• 8:21
  sketch with Peter Davison, but obviously with Ian Levine.
• 8:25
  What? Was that mask that Padma Samlova
• 8:27
  mask? It looked like an over on,
• 8:29
  didn't it? It was very strange.
• 8:31
  It's very odd. I mean, it kind of didn't look
• 8:34
  all that bad. And you know, McCoy is very good
• 8:38
  at kind of hiding his fear of of Ian Levine.
• 8:43
  So it kind of sort of was all right.
• 8:45
  But it was, I think it's an interesting thing in the context
• 8:49
  of this book and in the context of the original, because
• 8:53
  obviously, obviously they're all sort of introductions to the
• 8:58
  original. And it's a different direction
• 9:01
  to introduce the original. And the book takes a very
• 9:03
  particular, particular direction to sort of frame quite a thin
• 9:09
  story. Not something you've got. 100
• 9:12
  things to talk about there that you just said.
• 9:15
  But before we do, can I ask you please, what was the 1st Doctor
• 9:19
  Who book you ever read? And from that point on, what's
• 9:23
  sort of been your book journey? Like do you have them all?
• 9:24
  Did you read them all? Have you just read Selected
• 9:27
  Ranges? I didn't have them all.
• 9:29
  So I'm of the generation that that grew up with Target books.
• 9:34
  I'm not of the generation like Jr.
• 9:37
  Southall who bought all the Target books as they were being
• 9:42
  released. So I grew up in the 1980s.
• 9:45
  So I started to read sort of mid 80s.
• 9:47
  So by that point there were a lot of Target books out there
• 9:51
  from the 70s. So there's a whole sort of, you
• 9:53
  know, goldmine somewhere in libraries and to collect them
• 9:58
  seemed a little bit extravagant. So I was sort of cherry picking
• 10:01
  them. God was the first one, but it
• 10:04
  might have been the Web of Fear. So I had the Web of Fear for
• 10:07
  ages or Talons. So it was one of those ones, but
• 10:11
  I reread the ones I had quite a lot.
• 10:18
  So so it's it's kind of faded into the mists of time, which
• 10:21
  one was the first. But I'm also of that generation
• 10:25
  that quite quickly got videos. So videos started coming out
• 10:30
  when I was 11/12, which was sort of when I was starting to grow
• 10:35
  out of the target books. So I sort of stopped mostly with
• 10:40
  target books and started focusing on the videos.
• 10:44
  So I kind of, I kind of don't have that sort of romance
• 10:49
  towards the target books that some of my some of my other
• 10:52
  podcasters and friends do. I, I sort of moved on to like
• 10:57
  Christie's or Hardy Boys or whatever.
• 11:02
  But then obviously when I got to a particular age, which is like
• 11:06
  1314, yeah, 1314, then suddenly you get like the remembrance,
• 11:14
  the Daleks adaptation. You get ghostly adaptation,
• 11:17
  which I thought would. I thought that was like, you
• 11:20
  know, War and Peace for me. I thought that was the most.
• 11:22
  How can you do this with literature?
• 11:25
  I think. It's like war and peace.
• 11:26
  I mean, it's about. I mean, it's, it's extremely
• 11:29
  compared to like Terence Dick's Destiny of the Daleks.
• 11:33
  It's some, you know, it's incredibly intricately written
• 11:37
  and it gives extra depth to the TV series.
• 11:40
  So when I was creating I'm. Actually, reading Remembrance of
• 11:42
  the Daleks right now, for a book club like I'm halfway through
• 11:45
  it, yeah, it's astonishingly good.
• 11:48
  It is really good. I mean, it is Ben Ronovich wants
• 11:51
  to be a novelist. He does.
• 11:52
  And he's taking his full opportunity to like expand what
• 11:56
  he did for the screen. So he's not doing this.
• 11:58
  I mean, I love Uncle Terry. Terrence Dicks is great and he
• 12:01
  gets kids into reading. It's he's like the best sort of,
• 12:06
  you know, funnel for literacy, but he was churning them out.
• 12:10
  I mean, Destiny of Vedalics is the one that I always remember.
• 12:13
  Destiny of Vedalics I actually read in about an hour. 90 pages.
• 12:17
  It's. Nice.
• 12:18
  So thin. So he was doing it, if not for
• 12:21
  the money, then the money and the kind of, you know, the
• 12:24
  education purposes. Whereas those, those 1989
• 12:29
  adaptations, they're doing it because they love the stories
• 12:34
  they've, they've written and they're, they want to expand on
• 12:37
  them and they're proud of them and they want to kind of build a
• 12:41
  universe around them. And that, and that's the funnel
• 12:45
  into new adventures, missing adventures.
• 12:48
  And they come just as I became of age.
• 12:51
  In fact, I found them really difficult, really difficult to
• 12:54
  read to start with because they're actually quite they're
• 12:59
  different from the Target books. There's a big jump from the TV
• 13:02
  series and the Target books to the new invention.
• 13:04
  It'd be pretty dense as well, can't they?
• 13:06
  Things like Transit and Cat's Cradle, The Mark Platt, One
• 13:10
  Time's Crucible. Yeah, well, they're, they're in
• 13:13
  that period where everybody's into cyberspace and, and like
• 13:20
  Generation X kind of, you know, Lawnmower Man sort of characters
• 13:25
  dropping into computers and stuff.
• 13:27
  And to be honest, I find that really dull.
• 13:30
  And if that happens in a book, I kind of start to lose the will
• 13:34
  to to live. But there were things like
• 13:38
  Nightshade, which felt like it was close to the TV series,
• 13:42
  which Mark I remember quite well.
• 13:44
  Do you? Like Conundrum.
• 13:46
  That was a goodie. I really loved, I loved
• 13:48
  Conundrum. I was obsessed with the village
• 13:51
  setting. I loved.
• 13:52
  I tried reading it recently and couldn't get through it.
• 13:57
  So one thing I'm interested in is rereading, one reason why I
• 14:02
  was really keen to get on your podcast, just other than being a
• 14:07
  podcast hall is I really wanted to be forced to read some.
• 14:12
  I've got all these books, a lot of them I sort of half read or
• 14:17
  just struggles through or I haven't read at all.
• 14:20
  And I really want the excuse to kind of force me to to reread
• 14:24
  the books just to as literature as kind of, you know, now I'm
• 14:28
  now I'm 40 something I should be able to read, read these books
• 14:34
  from cover to cover, follow what's happening.
• 14:36
  And if I can't, then actually they are badly written.
• 14:39
  And I don't think things like the pit I probably wouldn't go
• 14:41
  back to. But when you.
• 14:44
  Struggle. It's so different though, you
• 14:45
  know, It's so different reading them when you're younger.
• 14:48
  And then obviously you, you're a literate man.
• 14:50
  So I'm sure you've read a ton of stuff between reading them to
• 14:54
  where we are now. So your experience of reading
• 14:56
  books is completely different. And then you read them.
• 14:58
  Sort of, Yeah. And your fault is like I'm doing
• 15:01
  and stuff I hated back then, now I really love and vice versa.
• 15:05
  But yeah, it is interesting how your opinion revises.
• 15:10
  Yeah, I mean, transit I thought was really good.
• 15:14
  I did read transit a couple a few years ago and I thought, I
• 15:18
  thought actually, actually it's better and I don't know what.
• 15:21
  So I I haven't listened to a lot of apologies.
• 15:25
  I haven't listened to a lot of your podcast which is very rude
• 15:27
  you. Can't.
• 15:28
  It would have to be your entire life.
• 15:29
  I know. Oh, yeah.
• 15:30
  Because you're on everything. I mean, this is like, you know,
• 15:33
  you're recording this, but at the same time you're recording a
• 15:36
  podcast behind you. And every so often you just turn
• 15:39
  around and you do another question for a devil you may.
• 15:42
  See one of my clones bringing in a drink later.
• 15:44
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but I don't know what
• 15:47
  you're, I know roughly what your tastes are and I know, you know,
• 15:53
  I know where where you're completely wrong about things.
• 15:56
  So I've already, I've already got the sense that you're,
• 15:58
  you're like. Completely.
• 15:59
  Oh, wonderful. Completely misguided.
• 16:02
  Jr. You're a Steven Moffett fan.
• 16:05
  I am. I'm Nicole.
• 16:07
  Now. Now I'm joking.
• 16:09
  I am AI am a Steven Moffett apologist.
• 16:13
  You don't have to be an apologist.
• 16:14
  It increases as I watch non Stephen Moff, Doctor Who and I,
• 16:21
  but I appreciate anybody who writes Doctor Who.
• 16:25
  I think they they've they've really made an effort to put
• 16:29
  something on screen apart from Pip and Jane Baker, who
• 16:33
  monstrosities and and dead now. So that's fine.
• 16:36
  So I can say that. They're two of my favourites, of
• 16:38
  course they are. Really.
• 16:40
  You're you're a big person. Honestly, I've, I've discussed
• 16:42
  that in, well, all, all kinds of places.
• 16:45
  We just put out the Series 23 strictly, and yeah, Verve voice
• 16:50
  went down. Very, I mean verve voice is the,
• 16:53
  I mean, I, yeah. So don't read the novel, though,
• 16:56
  Matt. Don't read the novel.
• 16:57
  Their prose is something else. I've read the novel that did
• 17:01
  they're pros. They are pros or yeah, actually
• 17:05
  Mark and Ronnie I'm I'm unfair with Pip and Jay Baker.
• 17:07
  Mark and Ronnie's fine ver voids is OK time and Ronnie was even
• 17:12
  actually better when I re watched it recently.
• 17:14
  So it's just I don't like them as people, I think.
• 17:19
  It'll be you're used to talking to Jr.
• 17:21
  S for you're used to these long words coming at you, you know?
• 17:24
  Yeah. And tedious lectures.
• 17:26
  Absolutely. Yeah.
• 17:28
  Yeah. So.
• 17:29
  You read? You read the new adventures?
• 17:31
  Or did you read all the new? Did you collect them all?
• 17:33
  I, I started, I think, I think I sort of tailed off when I
• 17:37
  realized I wasn't reading a lot of them.
• 17:41
  So I've got quite a number of them and I sort of dipped in and
• 17:44
  out. I got Lung Barrow.
• 17:47
  I had the good sense to buy Lung.
• 17:49
  Pension there. Yeah, yeah.
• 17:51
  So that's, I mean, it's battered, so it's probably not
• 17:53
  worth very much. So I bought the interesting
• 17:55
  ones. I bought the ones that felt like
• 17:57
  they were going to be a bit like the TV series or the front
• 18:02
  covers appealed to me. I think the science.
• 18:05
  So that's mainly so my taste in Doctor Who.
• 18:08
  I really like the historical stories, the one set, the ones
• 18:12
  to clarify, the ones set in the past just in case historical
• 18:15
  stories and clear enough, but not the pure historicals.
• 18:18
  I like, you know, the visitation and.
• 18:21
  Pseudo historical. Pseudo historical pyramids of
• 18:24
  Mars, columns of Wang Chai. Unfortunately it's racist.
• 18:27
  So I'm I'm less keen on it now, but pyramids of Mars is
• 18:30
  absolutely fine with no problems at all.
• 18:33
  So I really like those and that's and actually history is,
• 18:38
  is something I'm really into So so buying the the ones set in
• 18:42
  the past was very attractive to me.
• 18:46
  Buying the kind of the futuristic kind of sci-fi ones.
• 18:50
  Hard sci-fi didn't do that much for me when I was a kid.
• 18:54
  So I, that didn't appeal to me. The horror ones did appeal to
• 18:58
  me. So I, I bought the ones that
• 19:00
  looked like they were a bit horrory.
• 19:02
  But the sci-fi ones, I just thought they'll get, they're
• 19:04
  going to end up in a computer like and, and it's going to be
• 19:09
  blocked paragraphs of like dense text with exclamation Marks and
• 19:14
  caps locks and whatever. It's just going to be, it's just
• 19:17
  going to be rubbish. So I think I probably avoided
• 19:19
  those. That's about half the new
• 19:21
  adventures you're talking about there, you know.
• 19:23
  Oh yeah, I've got a fair number. Going into a dreamscape, Well,
• 19:26
  yeah, it's all done with metaphors and you have to try
• 19:28
  and figure out the plot for imagery.
• 19:30
  So Even Burst Right, which I've read recently and I talked about
• 19:33
  on a rival podcast, Even Burst Right ends up with that kind of
• 19:38
  like computery sci-fi thing because it's split between
• 19:42
  Victorian and England and an alien planet.
• 19:45
  Actually this time around I didn't mind the alien planet
• 19:47
  stuff as much when I read it the first time I was devouring the
• 19:51
  Victorian stuff and kind of skipping over the Asian stuff
• 19:54
  and then devouring the Victorian stuff.
• 19:56
  So I had no idea what was going on, but I was getting that
• 19:58
  atmosphere, that Victorian atmosphere.
• 20:01
  So it's I was sort of like that, which meant I got nothing out of
• 20:05
  lots of the books because. I mean, what's the what's the
• 20:09
  Sherlock Holmes one? Is it all consumed fire?
• 20:12
  Yeah, exactly the same. So the Sherlock Holmes stuff
• 20:15
  absolutely love. Brilliant.
• 20:17
  They go to an alien planet. Oh, they've, you know, there's
• 20:21
  insects like aliens with clicky names.
• 20:24
  I don't, I'm not getting on with this.
• 20:27
  Oh, they're back in Victorian times.
• 20:29
  So it's that I think. What about when the license was
• 20:32
  taken away from Virgin in and it skipped over to the BBC?
• 20:35
  Did you get any of those? So the 8th Doctor adventures
• 20:39
  yes. So I carried on again
• 20:42
  sporadically. So I was never a big collector
• 20:45
  of them, but I would get them as as they came.
• 20:48
  And some of those were really I found really exciting.
• 20:51
  Some of those are fantastic. Some the first one is absolutely
• 20:55
  dog shit. I mean the 8 the 8 doctors even
• 21:00
  even when I read it. So I would have been in my 20s
• 21:03
  then when I when I was reading those I think and back then, I
• 21:10
  mean you can just tell that Terrence Dicks is just gone off
• 21:14
  the boil with the 8 doctors. Which do sequels to all of his
• 21:17
  own TV stories. It's not, it's not even sequels.
• 21:20
  It's just vignettes that kind of round off some of his TV stories
• 21:25
  and kind of connect together. But but it's, it's not even
• 21:29
  short stories, not even writing short stories.
• 21:31
  He's just writing fan fiction scenes.
• 21:34
  It's the worst sort of fan fiction.
• 21:37
  So I read that. But even despite reading that, I
• 21:40
  also, I then kind of carried on buying some.
• 21:43
  And you know, Lawrence Miles, I think he's really interesting.
• 21:48
  Lance Parkin I think is great, a great author and a really clever
• 21:54
  person. And you know, his books have
• 21:56
  really, again, there are some, you can just tell that they're
• 22:00
  passion projects that they put a lot of thought into and a lot of
• 22:04
  time into. They're not just sort of
• 22:06
  churning things, churning things out.
• 22:09
  So I appreciate that. So I think, I think I I did
• 22:13
  quite like quite like the 8th doctored ones.
• 22:17
  And then and, and then what about when the new series came
• 22:21
  out? Did you touch any of those when
• 22:22
  it went a bit family friendly or?
• 22:25
  So was that. He was out.
• 22:28
  So I review. So now we're into were into
• 22:31
  reading professionally. I reviewed a couple for
• 22:34
  something like Den of Geek or something purely because I got
• 22:38
  free copies. So I think they're an autumn
• 22:41
  one. But no, no, because they're
• 22:44
  they're for kids really. I probably wouldn't reread that
• 22:48
  many targets now unless I had the flu.
• 22:53
  It wouldn't take you long. You're here for about 5 in a
• 22:56
  day. Yeah, yeah, it wouldn't take
• 22:58
  long. And the impression I got with
• 23:00
  the and it's always a bit sad that that they stopped, they
• 23:04
  stopped making kind of stories too broad and deep for the TV
• 23:09
  and started making kind of shorter, shorter ones.
• 23:12
  Oh, I tell you what I did read they had a series where they got
• 23:17
  quite reputable sci-fi authors to write them to Alastair
• 23:21
  Reynolds, like one called the The Wheel of Ice or something
• 23:25
  like that. There was one with the master
• 23:28
  with multiple masters in it. I can't really remember what it
• 23:31
  was called or who was in it. So I read some of those and they
• 23:36
  seemed geared actually geared towards a completely different
• 23:39
  audience. So it's not New Adventures
• 23:41
  territory. New Adventures were a great kind
• 23:43
  of incubator for for writers, for new writers, for interesting
• 23:50
  sort of, you know, fan fan writers.
• 23:52
  Then the new series books are kind of bringing in, bringing in
• 23:57
  some of them to write. Kind of not dumbed down, but old
• 24:01
  friendly. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:02
  Which is understandable because it's the way the the magazine
• 24:05
  went as well, because suddenly in 2005 you're getting 8 year
• 24:10
  olds interested in Doctor Who rather than 30 year olds, which
• 24:13
  which was the main audience, right?
• 24:16
  Because Stephen Baxter wrote 1, didn't he?
• 24:18
  Stephen Baxter, Yeah. Michael Moorcock.
• 24:20
  Yep, that was fucking decipherable, that book.
• 24:23
  Yeah, I'm not sure why. That's what I've read the.
• 24:26
  Head nor tail of that. Book No.
• 24:28
  I took a Michael Moore Moorcock on holiday with me and I didn't
• 24:32
  open it. I stole.
• 24:32
  I did. I cracked it open and then
• 24:35
  closed it again. And yeah.
• 24:37
  When it was your holiday. I love the idea of Michael
• 24:40
  Moorcock. I love the the descriptions of
• 24:43
  his books, a bit like Alan Moore's fiction.
• 24:46
  I love the idea of Alan Moore's fiction and his his novels.
• 24:51
  But I just know that I would struggle so much with them.
• 24:56
  I've got a good idea now of how much of this stuff that you've
• 25:00
  read. One more question for you,
• 25:02
  though, before we go into downtime.
• 25:04
  Yeah, that is, you've written a book yourself, haven't you?
• 25:10
  So, well, I can. I can.
• 25:12
  Talk First time you've looked shy to talk then in this call.
• 25:16
  No, I'm not. I'm not shy.
• 25:17
  I was trying to, I was trying to work out how to get around the
• 25:19
  fact that I've written a few books.
• 25:21
  So, so I, I make a joke a bit, but I'm going to do it again.
• 25:27
  I don't like to talk about it, but I wrote a big, I wrote the
• 25:30
  big finish on the demons. So I spent, I spent longer than
• 25:34
  I should writing a shorter than usual study of the demons,
• 25:40
  witchcraft and Satanism and Faust and and the whole range of
• 25:44
  things. I've also done the usual thing
• 25:48
  of a fan of my age of writing things essays for anthologies
• 25:53
  for charity. So if you're friends with Jr.
• 25:56
  Salsall, at some point you end up writing a short a short essay
• 26:00
  on a book for something I've written.
• 26:02
  Drabbles which are now, you know, completely impossible to
• 26:07
  get hold of because the number of people that wrote in the book
• 26:10
  are now in prison or they're, they're being arrested.
• 26:14
  Which is I know you're talking about now.
• 26:16
  It's a story in my life. I wrote a story for Seasons of
• 26:19
  War, which again, you can't buy Seasons of War, which is a fan
• 26:22
  fiction because at least three people on that are now.
• 26:26
  I've now served time, served time.
• 26:28
  You need to watch out who you're hanging out with, you know?
• 26:30
  I mean, I mean my story was very far away from their stories so I
• 26:36
  was quite insulated. But more recently, I was
• 26:39
  recruited by a friend in Exeter to write 1 of candy Jars Benton
• 26:47
  stories. Yes.
• 26:49
  That's so that's the latest thing.
• 26:50
  That was good fun. That was that was me.
• 26:53
  Because I don't often write fiction.
• 26:54
  So I've written, well, I wrote the season of war thing and then
• 26:59
  this. Those, those are the bits of
• 27:00
  fiction. I've written poetry, but those
• 27:02
  are the bits of fiction that I've written.
• 27:04
  I'm so I really, I was feeling that it was the time, time in my
• 27:08
  life to try writing fiction again, to see, well, partly to
• 27:13
  get an idea out on the page to see if I could do it, but also
• 27:16
  to remind myself that actually I find writing fiction harder than
• 27:20
  I think it it should be. We slag off this book in a
• 27:24
  minute, all right? Yeah, so it was good fun.
• 27:28
  It was good fun, right? Reading it, writing you.
• 27:30
  Know, do you remember I put that picture in the Strangest and
• 27:33
  Space chat? I was about to read that Benson
• 27:35
  book and I was being really pissy about it and then I read
• 27:38
  the bloody thing and it was great fun.
• 27:40
  I really enjoyed it. That, yeah, I mean the editor.
• 27:44
  So the editor's really good, Tim.
• 27:47
  He's really conscientious, he's really nice and he cares about
• 27:52
  it. So just quickly, the Benton, the
• 27:56
  Benton stories from Candy Jar are kind of framed as Benton's
• 28:00
  running a pub and he's sort of telling the locals stories from
• 28:05
  his life. So you kind of have to, it has
• 28:09
  been first, first person narrative, which is really
• 28:12
  difficult with Benton because he's an idiot.
• 28:14
  And my story in Season of War was first person, but it was I
• 28:19
  did first person the Brigadier. And the Brigadier, you know,
• 28:22
  must have gone to university in Sandhurst so he could have the
• 28:25
  big words. So I was able to write whatever.
• 28:27
  So he was sort of, you know, he was thinking these great essays
• 28:31
  of thought about the Doctor and he was being nostalgic and
• 28:34
  stuff. Benton you can't do that.
• 28:36
  Benton I was writing these big, big things and I was thinking,
• 28:39
  well, Benton would never think that.
• 28:41
  He would never have that sophisticated a thought.
• 28:43
  So it had to be like paired down.
• 28:46
  So I was sort of, you know, reading Ian Fleming's Bond to
• 28:50
  try and get that kind of really condensed, sort of simplified.
• 28:54
  So it was it was difficult, but they are, you know, they're
• 28:57
  really well edited and it's a good it's a rich mine of of
• 29:03
  stories because he's he was in wartime on his own.
• 29:06
  So it's kind of, I haven't, I don't think I've seen that
• 29:11
  either. But I know that it's, you know,
• 29:14
  it's special. So you can write stories where
• 29:17
  John Levine doesn't necessarily have to act in them.
• 29:20
  And this connects with downtime so he can't ruin them.
• 29:24
  So actually you end up with something quite interesting.
• 29:29
  I. Yes, I wonder how much John
• 29:32
  Levine does he have Any input in those books?
• 29:34
  No, I. Can imagine why after meeting
• 29:38
  him. Yeah.
• 29:39
  Oh yeah. Well, that's almost a perfect
• 29:41
  segue for us to go into talking about downtime.
• 29:44
  Yeah. So I'm going to ask you, first
• 29:47
  of all, like what was your overall thoughts on the book
• 29:50
  before we sort of start picking it apart a little bit.
• 29:53
  How did you find the route? So for context, I was on
• 29:59
  holiday, I was in Bermuda, which I'm lucky enough to be able to
• 30:04
  go on holiday too. So I read this sat in the sun in
• 30:09
  front of the swimming pool. So I was in a good state of
• 30:11
  mind. I was in a good state of mind
• 30:13
  when I read, when I read downtime, I was in a happy
• 30:16
  place. I really liked it.
• 30:20
  It was much better than I thought.
• 30:24
  And this is you've already mentioned this off mic, but
• 30:29
  clearly, clearly there's like there's an opening, a long
• 30:34
  opening, then you get downtime and then you know that that's
• 30:40
  the kind of the the video thing and it's the long opening.
• 30:43
  The long opening I thought was amazing.
• 30:45
  I thought that was so well written.
• 30:48
  And clearly if they had the, the budget to go off on location.
• 30:53
  So do we do spoil? We have to do spoilers.
• 30:56
  So the the opening is the opening is Victoria Waterfield
• 31:00
  basically being haunted in in present day or not not present
• 31:07
  day, but 1980s London where she's being unceremoniously
• 31:13
  dropped off by the doctor and adopted by these people.
• 31:15
  So she's slightly damaged and she's being haunted by basically
• 31:21
  memories of the great intelligence.
• 31:23
  So suddenly it becomes a bit like Tegan in Snake Dance.
• 31:26
  It's all about sorts of, you know, the effects of these
• 31:29
  previous stories is haunting her in a way that you didn't think
• 31:32
  that they would having watched whether fair or whatever
• 31:36
  abominable statement. So she's being haunted and then
• 31:39
  she's drawn to go to the Himalayas, to track through the
• 31:42
  Himalayas, to go back to that stand monastery, to kind of try
• 31:47
  to uncover some some of these memories and sort of, you know,
• 31:52
  resolve some of the the trauma that she's experienced.
• 31:56
  And that that passage is sort of lovingly written and it's really
• 32:02
  leisurely play paced and it's really easing you into a story.
• 32:07
  And it's clearly what the story that Mark Blatt wanted to tell
• 32:12
  originally. And again, it's really
• 32:16
  fascinating watching them, watching Ian Levine's proposed
• 32:20
  introduction. And then obviously, you know,
• 32:23
  the, the actual, the actual story this this downtime has,
• 32:27
  it's a bit like Sharda. It's got sort of multiple
• 32:29
  different versions. And that's quite interesting.
• 32:33
  In Doctor Who, you don't get many texts.
• 32:36
  You get the original Daleks story that has multiple
• 32:39
  openings. You now get, yeah, Sharda, I'm
• 32:45
  trying to think of where else you'd get get sort of
• 32:49
  alternative openings like that or different different sorts of
• 32:52
  stories. Oh, Human nature now has
• 32:55
  different versions, different versions as well.
• 32:58
  I mean, if Big Finish pick up downtime, then it's going to be
• 33:02
  a sort of this perfect kind of a.
• 33:04
  Multiverse of downs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:07
  And that kind of that kind of different ways of viewing it
• 33:13
  makes it quite interesting to me because I always like, I always
• 33:16
  think if you've got something that's that that's inviting
• 33:21
  study, then if you look at it in One Direction, you see, you
• 33:26
  know, something flat and not very interesting.
• 33:28
  You have to look at it in multiple directions to actually
• 33:31
  understand what the intention is of of the original.
• 33:36
  And even Ian Levine's, it's clearly not the intention of the
• 33:41
  original, but that tells you something about the original.
• 33:44
  The fact that he's, he's weirdly gone with Sylvester McCoy and
• 33:50
  it's, it's weird, the Doctor, he's trying to shoehorn the
• 33:53
  doctor in. I mean, it tells you a lot about
• 33:56
  downtime. It tells you a lot about Ian
• 33:58
  Levine and you know, where his affections lie, where his
• 34:01
  loyalties lie, and how how his brain works in trying to
• 34:05
  canonize everything and bring everything into the series.
• 34:09
  It must be exhausting. That obviously.
• 34:12
  I mean, yeah, he probably gets a lot of sleep on his bed made of
• 34:16
  money. That's what I that's what I
• 34:18
  always think. I mean, you know, he's I look
• 34:21
  looking at the amount of self-awareness.
• 34:24
  So does he only listen to this podcast?
• 34:27
  Very. I very much doubt he listens to
• 34:29
  any. The only podcast he listens to
• 34:30
  are the ones he features on. Yeah, yeah, he goes to seat,
• 34:34
  listening to himself. Those five hour interviews, he.
• 34:37
  Does. And then I said to her, he say,
• 34:39
  would Jesus Christ? Yeah.
• 34:43
  And Richard Biggles, a total prick.
• 34:45
  Yeah. So Ian Levine, he said he must
• 34:50
  be tired, but he doesn't have to sort of self-awareness, I
• 34:52
  wouldn't imagine to lie awake at night.
• 34:54
  So he he goes to sleep dreaming of Ian Levine, I would imagine.
• 34:59
  But celestial toy Baker? Yes, but to his credit, to his
• 35:02
  credit, he has produced stuff. Yeah, Doctor in distress.
• 35:08
  Yeah, and the the AI missing adventures.
• 35:12
  You are right though, he really wants to turn this into like a
• 35:16
  canonized Doctor Who story, doesn't he?
• 35:18
  Whereas Mark Platt, who's the original writer of the script
• 35:22
  for the video that this is the novelization of, he don't want
• 35:25
  to do that at all. He does have the Doctor come in
• 35:27
  at the end, but it's just a little cameo and it's just, and
• 35:30
  that scene is all about Victoria rather than the Doctor.
• 35:33
  Whereas you're right, he wants to give Victoria this massive.
• 35:36
  It's like an episode of Race Across the World where you see
• 35:39
  her go from place to place to place and it's she endures
• 35:42
  hardships and she meets a guy and there's like an almost
• 35:45
  romance going on there. Is it where he helps her out and
• 35:48
  then she gets to the debts in monastery.
• 35:52
  That's where the video starts. Yes, yeah.
• 35:56
  And that's kind of that's kind of also where it starts slightly
• 36:01
  falling, falling apart. I think it's the book, although
• 36:04
  actually, actually it's a bit blurrier than that.
• 36:07
  It kind of comes and goes, but you can see that Mark Platt to
• 36:12
  these missing adventures. They're kind of allowing him to
• 36:16
  write a Doctor Light or a Doctor absent story.
• 36:22
  And obviously when, when I was buying them when I was a
• 36:25
  teenager or 20 or whatever, that would put me off because, you
• 36:29
  know, I like the Doctor and it's good.
• 36:31
  I, I would be reading these stories thinking when's the
• 36:34
  doctor going to turn up? When's the Doctor going to turn
• 36:36
  up? Actually, now we've been tuned
• 36:39
  by Doctor Light's episodes of the series, and it's kind of
• 36:44
  more acceptable now. So I found it.
• 36:46
  I mean, I'm just, I just accept. I didn't even notice that the
• 36:49
  Doctor did or didn't turn up. I wasn't.
• 36:52
  I didn't want him or her to turn up.
• 36:55
  When you've got Victoria and Sarah and the Brigadier and the
• 36:59
  Yetis and the Great Intelligence, that's quite a lot
• 37:02
  of Doctor Who in there. Already and Kate Lesbridge,
• 37:04
  Stuart. I mean a little bit as well,
• 37:07
  Bambera. Yes, yeah.
• 37:09
  Oh, yeah. So that.
• 37:11
  Yeah. So, so I didn't miss the doctor.
• 37:15
  And also this is kind of, you know, again, reading the Target
• 37:18
  books. I didn't.
• 37:20
  Did I read these? No, I didn't.
• 37:21
  But Turdo and the EarthLink Dilemma and Harry Sullivan's War
• 37:26
  and Canine Company, these were sort of Doctor absent stories.
• 37:31
  I didn't really read them because I couldn't see the
• 37:34
  point, but actually, Harry Sullivan's War, I really want to
• 37:39
  write. I'm going to read at some point.
• 37:40
  I've got it on my Kindle. Coming to a book club near you,
• 37:44
  Harry? Sutherford's War I'm I'm tempted
• 37:46
  to read that. If you said you read James Bond
• 37:48
  books, well, that's basically how that reads.
• 37:51
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ian Martha is, you know, he
• 37:55
  is a good, he's an intelligent guy and he's a good author and
• 37:58
  he loves the character. So.
• 38:00
  So I was fine with that downtime, but it does go off.
• 38:04
  It does go off the boil when it gets to for me, when it gets to
• 38:07
  the university, that's when it started.
• 38:09
  I. Think is wrong with that is I
• 38:12
  feel as if the first 40 pages or the the whole thing leading up
• 38:16
  to the start of the movie, that feels like a Mark Platt book.
• 38:20
  It's it's got sort of substantial prose and there
• 38:25
  isn't too much dialogue and he's doing a lot with imagery and
• 38:28
  emotions. The second the film starts, he's
• 38:31
  stuck telling the film. Yeah.
• 38:33
  And so suddenly it gets a bit, he said, she said.
• 38:36
  There's a there's some good character stuff in there, but
• 38:38
  suddenly it feels less like a Mark Platt book and more like
• 38:42
  Mark Platt like, because he knows he's got to tell that
• 38:44
  story. Yeah.
• 38:46
  And yeah, and yeah. Did he have to tell that?
• 38:48
  I mean, he had to tell that story.
• 38:49
  Did he have to tell it in this? Because clearly they chose a
• 38:52
  university setting because they could film at wherever
• 38:57
  university. It was really for free.
• 39:00
  So that that kind of that kind of institution helped.
• 39:04
  I can't remember the city, the, the, the London scenes.
• 39:07
  I. Didn't imagine.
• 39:09
  No, so, so he's in bed to those and they were quite good.
• 39:12
  So watching the sort of the broader effect of the great
• 39:16
  Intelligence incursion, that was quite interesting.
• 39:19
  But it's just when it gets into this weird kind of weird kind of
• 39:26
  university setting. So I, it made me feel, it made
• 39:31
  me think of Dark Season, which was the Russell T Davis
• 39:34
  children's TV series, which was great.
• 39:37
  But that was as soon as I would watch when I was younger and
• 39:41
  think, why aren't they just making Doctor Who?
• 39:44
  Why can't he just just let him make Doctor Who?
• 39:46
  Because it's clearly Doctor Who but there's no doctor in it.
• 39:49
  This is feels. Cheap Jacqueline Pearce coming
• 39:53
  up out of the floor inside that massive robot.
• 39:56
  And I kept thinking, I mean, this is Doctor Who.
• 39:59
  Why don't they just make Doctor Who?
• 40:00
  Yeah. So that's, so that's what I was
• 40:03
  thinking. That's the one point in this
• 40:05
  novel that I was thinking, actually, this is dated now.
• 40:08
  This feels dated. This feels like it was written
• 40:11
  in the 1990s because this is exactly, you know, this is an
• 40:15
  adaptation of something that looks very 90s and also made me
• 40:19
  think of School Reunion, which again, felt very 1990s to me.
• 40:27
  It actually made me think of the the Quatemass series from the
• 40:33
  late from the late 70's, the one with John Mills in it.
• 40:36
  Oh, that's the only. One I haven't seen.
• 40:39
  No, it's it's kind of not. It's a bit depressing, I find,
• 40:43
  because it's got that kind of new agey stuff.
• 40:47
  There's a lot about and that wasn't that wasn't the 90s, but
• 40:51
  it was sort of ahead of its time.
• 40:53
  But there was something in the 90s.
• 40:54
  There was an obsession with the 70s and the 90s, an obsession
• 40:58
  with the new age and with hippies, but with the darker
• 41:01
  side of hippies. So the other the other book is
• 41:04
  Rags the the Doctor Who. I've want to say 8th Doctor or
• 41:11
  no it's. It's past Doctor, it's Mick
• 41:12
  Lewis, it's the 3rd Doctor and Joe and astonishingly violent
• 41:17
  book. Very violent.
• 41:18
  Really liked it when I was a kid because you know, that sort of
• 41:22
  folk, folk horror, kind of weird things happening.
• 41:26
  But it's very kind of dated now that idea that there are gangs
• 41:31
  of New age hippies roaming the countryside who who could, might
• 41:34
  or might not be violent isn't something we have any more at
• 41:38
  the moment. And I'm pretty sure it's it's
• 41:41
  the 70s obsession with the 60s and 70s that that kind of bred
• 41:46
  it. It's sort of juggling too.
• 41:50
  I'm guessing that was sort of big fears at the time if you're
• 41:54
  an older person, and that's fear of kids getting above themselves
• 41:59
  and fear of technology and it's mixing the two together.
• 42:04
  But it does take this because I was reading this going, yeah,
• 42:06
  this is written in the mid 90s when, you know, the World Wide
• 42:10
  Web was a very primitive thing and we didn't really understand
• 42:14
  it's reach. Yes, yeah.
• 42:16
  If this was written now, I think Platt would have more fun with
• 42:20
  the idea. There are sequences towards the
• 42:23
  end where the great Excel, he's sort of flexing his muscles in
• 42:27
  the in the World Wide Web and he's doing things all over the
• 42:30
  world. But it's just a tiny bit of the
• 42:32
  book. Yeah, it's really, it is really
• 42:36
  interesting that that is in the nascent world of the World Wide
• 42:40
  Web. There's a lot of sort of, and
• 42:42
  this is how hacking is portrayed in in Hollywood as well.
• 42:46
  It's a lot of kind of you go down this route or you go down
• 42:49
  that route or this route is infected.
• 42:51
  So literally computer viruses are like viruses spreading down
• 42:54
  phone lines and into your computer and then out of your
• 42:57
  computer. And actually, that's not, as it
• 43:01
  turns out, that's not the frightening thing about the
• 43:04
  Internet. The frightening thing about the
• 43:05
  Internet is it allows people to speak their mind.
• 43:09
  And it turns out that there are, Am I allowed to swear on this
• 43:12
  podcast? Turns out there are a lot of
• 43:15
  cunts in the world and you really don't want them to speak
• 43:19
  in their mind. But the Internet allows them to
• 43:22
  connect with others. And then and then that kind of
• 43:25
  reinforces that. And that's how they group
• 43:27
  together. They actually group together
• 43:28
  within the Internet. This, it's still the Internet is
• 43:32
  basically the path that this energy goes down and then it
• 43:35
  affects you outside and it kind of, you know.
• 43:39
  It's sort of the potential of the idea.
• 43:41
  It is literally the wires, isn't it?
• 43:43
  That's the impression. I got yeah, Yeah.
• 43:46
  And it hypnotizes you. So it's all about the sort of
• 43:48
  hypnosis of the Internet. And to be honest, I mean, in
• 43:52
  downtime, it's already a sort of a dated idea, and it's an
• 43:55
  overused idea, and it's a bit sad.
• 43:57
  I actually prefer less technology, less explanation.
• 44:04
  I quite like the sort of mystery of of, I mean the mystery of
• 44:09
  Weber fear. I mean, Weber fear does the same
• 44:10
  thing, but with tube tunnels. So it's kind of, it's still
• 44:14
  about conduits being networks being infected.
• 44:17
  It does go. Supernatural though in.
• 44:20
  The way there's a supernatural, there's a weird.
• 44:22
  Supernatural. I think so, yeah.
• 44:25
  I I I think as 1/3 Yeti story, I've still, I'm still kind of
• 44:32
  interested in the, the proposed kind of Scottish story with
• 44:39
  Jamie. Yeah, that, that would interest
• 44:42
  me. Even though, you know, as time's
• 44:44
  gone on Web of Fear and Abominable Stoneman, I don't
• 44:47
  think they've held up all that well.
• 44:50
  I've, I'm still got soft spots for them, but they're not the
• 44:54
  best written stories. They're very A to B to C, but I
• 44:57
  still, yeah, that's the third Yeti story.
• 45:00
  I'd quite like to watch the thing.
• 45:02
  That sort of confused me was the the great intelligence seems to
• 45:06
  have this enormous reach. Yeah.
• 45:08
  And he's hypnotized this entire school, and he's got all these
• 45:11
  kids working for him and people in high positions, and they're
• 45:13
  in Parliament and they're he's doing all sorts.
• 45:15
  And yet the thing that's stopping him from coming to be
• 45:18
  is the fact that he doesn't have a figurine of a Yeti.
• 45:21
  And the thing that defeats him at the end is just these silver
• 45:24
  balls all falling on the floor. I mean, well, again, it's it's
• 45:32
  sort of sounds like the sort of thing you you could you could
• 45:36
  video in the 1990s with very little budget and with a good
• 45:40
  camera angle. But then the endings of these
• 45:45
  things, all of these, the endings are the hardest thing to
• 45:51
  write. I think in you, you have to be
• 45:54
  Russell T Davis. So you can write a really shit
• 45:57
  ending, but you can cover it up with like, with dynamic, like
• 46:02
  conversation and emotion and, you know, you just surf through
• 46:06
  or you're Stephen Moffatt and you cover it up with witticism
• 46:10
  or you know, yeah. Or, or A twist or a second guess
• 46:14
  or something. I.
• 46:15
  Can't do finales, can't he? None of them.
• 46:17
  No. Or you're Chris Chibnall and you
• 46:18
  just don't bother with the finale.
• 46:20
  You just you just you just end the story with with Graham
• 46:24
  talking about how I'll he is and that never comes to anything.
• 46:27
  All those plot Freds, I've just beaten them.
• 46:29
  I. Thought yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:31
  Whereas I think, I think the endings, particularly in the new
• 46:35
  adventures and some of these, some of the first time writers
• 46:39
  and also probably the multiple writers, it's very difficult.
• 46:43
  They find it very difficult to come to a satisfying ending
• 46:46
  that's been seeded throughout. And I think on the telly, the
• 46:51
  old series, you know, that was fine because it's episodic,
• 46:56
  because you're watching it for the ride.
• 46:57
  You can get Seeds of Seeds of Doom where they just blow the
• 47:01
  thing up, or you can get, you know, hand of Fear where they
• 47:04
  just throw it down a chasm or X where they just blow it up
• 47:09
  again. But the.
• 47:10
  Ride's been amazing. So who?
• 47:12
  Cares. Yeah, in a book, In this one,
• 47:14
  it's slightly disappointing because the book starts so well,
• 47:17
  it builds so well. And then you get this kind of,
• 47:22
  as you say, this kind of countrywide or global kind of
• 47:27
  threat. And how do you how do you end
• 47:30
  that without, without the Doctor at least?
• 47:33
  How do you kind of, you know, I mean, you maybe kill the
• 47:38
  Brigadier. That would be the only.
• 47:41
  Well, I mean, that would have been a bold ending.
• 47:44
  He doesn't. He basically says, Miss Smith,
• 47:46
  you're not. You've got to go and turn the
• 47:47
  power off and then he'll be defeated.
• 47:49
  So he runs in and just throws a Yeti into a console and that's
• 47:52
  it. Yeah, not wanting to blame my
• 47:54
  own trumpet, but my, my amazing Seasons of War story, which you
• 47:58
  can't get anymore because of prisons and stuff, I, I, I did
• 48:03
  actually come to the conclusion that killing the Brigadier was
• 48:07
  the only way to conclude the story, the story effectively.
• 48:10
  Did you kill the Brigadier? I killed the Brigadier, in fact.
• 48:14
  In fact, I was really proud of this ending.
• 48:16
  I'm going to tell it to you. It's spoiler alert.
• 48:19
  It's all about crinoids and the idea that crinoids infect you.
• 48:25
  And and so the the Doctor, the War Doctor needed a good solid
• 48:31
  human to be infected who was very close to death so that it
• 48:36
  could contain, contain the crinoids spores, and then the
• 48:40
  human would sacrifice themselves to kill the cranoid off.
• 48:43
  And so I chose the Brigadier in his final days in a nursing
• 48:47
  home. I had the ward up to visit him,
• 48:49
  knowing that he was about to die, and then leading him off on
• 48:52
  the final adventure purely so he could be infected by a cranoid
• 48:55
  to die to neutralize the cranoid.
• 48:58
  Because the last act that he would do on his deathbed would
• 49:01
  be to save the Earth one last time.
• 49:03
  Yeah, yeah, I was. I was proud.
• 49:06
  I was proud of the ending that I didn't finish with an explosion.
• 49:09
  Can you? Please go back in time and
• 49:10
  rewrite the ending of this book then.
• 49:12
  Please, I'm now feeling a little bit pompous that I've seen Mark
• 49:16
  Mark that who is a great writer. So Mark that wrote ghost light,
• 49:21
  right. OK, I love ghost.
• 49:25
  I think Ghost Light is one of the the it's it's the TV series
• 49:30
  where it doesn't fade as I watch it so I can if I watch it, I
• 49:37
  don't think well, it was better. I remember when it was a bit
• 49:39
  better than this. It gets better every time I
• 49:42
  watch it. A lot of those Mccoys do get
• 49:44
  better each time I watch it. There's.
• 49:47
  So many references and jokes and influences in that every time I
• 49:52
  watch it I go away and search out something else and then I
• 49:55
  add a fella on with, you know, more PhDs to his name than I
• 49:59
  care to mention. Doing the commentary on that
• 50:01
  one. And as we go going through the
• 50:03
  episodes, he's pulling out every bloody influence from books and
• 50:07
  cinema. And also, and I'm going, man,
• 50:09
  I'm at I've watched this 50 times and I didn't realize half
• 50:11
  of this. Yeah, and it was broadcast at
• 50:14
  what, 735 on a Wednesday on BBC One.
• 50:18
  That's that's insane that something this weird and rich.
• 50:23
  The last one as well, they just got there, you know, almost
• 50:27
  perfection. But I will say that the script
• 50:30
  for downtime it is not the script for Ghost Live.
• 50:34
  Right. OK, yeah.
• 50:37
  So is Mark Platt Hamper is he? So presumably he's is he given
• 50:43
  like A5 doctors British brief of what to include?
• 50:49
  I end up so basically the behind the scenes of it that I know of
• 50:52
  thanks to Dylan Reese's fabulous downtime book.
• 50:57
  It's a great book. It's a great.
• 50:59
  Book I know I can't afford it yet, but I will.
• 51:01
  I do actually want to do want. To oh, he's got review copies.
• 51:04
  Get him to send you one. OK.
• 51:07
  Basically, one of the finances fell out, and then Ian Levine
• 51:12
  stepped in 15 grand and a load of demands.
• 51:16
  So suddenly there's a shopping list of things that had to be in
• 51:19
  this thing, including his incidental score.
• 51:21
  It was originally going to be Mark Ayers.
• 51:23
  He's like, no, I'm doing the music if you want my money, you
• 51:25
  know. Oh.
• 51:27
  Jesus. So I can imagine some of this
• 51:30
  stuff, all of those characters, the Brigadier, Sarah, somewhere
• 51:34
  along the lines, he was given a bit of a shopping list and said,
• 51:37
  right, go and do this, go and write this.
• 51:40
  And it's a good pacey script and everyone gets something to do
• 51:45
  more or less. And there are some good
• 51:48
  character beats. Although there's big characters
• 51:50
  that I need to talk to you about because I really hate the way
• 51:53
  they do terrible things to classic companions in the Virgin
• 51:57
  Avengers. But it isn't trying to be
• 52:01
  literate like goes like, is it? It's trying to be a sort of
• 52:04
  pacey thriller. Yeah, I mean, it works.
• 52:08
  I mean, it's already, it's the the book works.
• 52:12
  The Brigadier Sarah Jane Victoria, They are a trio that's
• 52:18
  actually worth bringing together.
• 52:20
  They work in. This isn't a sort of a John Peel
• 52:23
  kind of fan fiction mash up of disparate ideas.
• 52:28
  This is kind of, it brings in little bits from the past, but
• 52:32
  it's quite satisfying. What they do with Victoria, I
• 52:35
  presume, is what you're well. I just like because there's so
• 52:39
  many new adventures especially, but missing adventures as well,
• 52:43
  you know, where they shoot dodo and give her an STD and and they
• 52:49
  kill off Liz Shaw at one point in eternity weeks.
• 52:52
  And it's like, why can't any of these people go on?
• 52:54
  So I have fulfilling lives. Poor Victoria.
• 52:56
  She went on to be a spinster who never found love, who basically
• 53:01
  is obsessed by the loss of her father.
• 53:05
  And she's a really unhappy woman.
• 53:06
  And right up until the end of the book, I thought at the end
• 53:09
  of the book, fine, she realizes she's been tubed and then she
• 53:13
  goes on to have a happy life and then she just goes to the top.
• 53:16
  So oh, well, you know, I'm going to go travelling off something.
• 53:19
  And I was like, I really wanted her to because like Sarah in
• 53:22
  this is written with real energy and humour.
• 53:24
  She's very funny. She has some scenes on the phone
• 53:26
  with Canine where she's really funny.
• 53:28
  I'm like, OK, she's clearly gone on and had a fulfilling life,
• 53:30
  but what did you think of Victoria in this?
• 53:34
  I think it's not unexpected. I think it's that period where
• 53:40
  where they mistakenly thought that have a strong character.
• 53:47
  You needed trauma and you need the darkness.
• 53:51
  Darkness equals death. It's like this grim dark sort of
• 53:55
  drive. And it comes from, you know, you
• 53:59
  see it in Batman, Tim Burton's Batman or Batman, but Tim Burton
• 54:04
  sort of starts it out. So I think Victoria's quite a
• 54:09
  thin character in the 60s. I think she's pretty poorly
• 54:16
  acted. So so it's kind of I can see
• 54:23
  where they're they're going to try.
• 54:26
  And I mean, and it kind of makes logical sense that you can't
• 54:30
  drop someone off 100 years after their time in an adopted family
• 54:35
  and expect them not to have some trauma.
• 54:38
  And the trauma that Marc Platt gifts her makes sense out of the
• 54:45
  stories that she was in because she was in Scary stories.
• 54:48
  She was clearly traumatized in Fury from the Deep.
• 54:52
  But to suggest that actually been possessed by the great
• 54:55
  intelligence had sort of lingered with her.
• 54:58
  That was quite a clever use of past Doctor Who.
• 55:02
  So in terms of in terms of what they the dark things they do
• 55:07
  with companions, this was probably a lesser example for
• 55:13
  me. At least it made her it did make
• 55:15
  her interesting and making her the sort of the misguided
• 55:18
  villain of the piece, Victoria, who's this kind of, you know,
• 55:22
  bland, vanilla, neutral, kind of slightly screamy character to
• 55:29
  actually do that. And it's kind of a gift to
• 55:33
  Deborah Watling as as well, presumably because, you know, as
• 55:38
  you've seen, apologies to, I'm sure there are fans of
• 55:41
  Dimensions in Time, but she plays young Victoria in
• 55:47
  Dimensions in Time. And it's, you know, it's awful.
• 55:51
  I I remember watching that moment and thinking that I would
• 55:56
  probably rather be having AI don't know, a colonoscopy or
• 56:02
  something instead of watching her and John Pearl.
• 56:05
  We desperately trying to, you know, get into some sort of
• 56:09
  character. The trouble is, at the beginning
• 56:11
  of the Downtime movie they try and age her down so she's
• 56:15
  playing that younger Victoria in the Debts and Ministry and put
• 56:19
  her in this terrible wig. And oh.
• 56:22
  Bless her, you said she wasn't well acted on the TV.
• 56:25
  Things have not improved. In 20.
• 56:27
  Years so divorced of Deborah Watling.
• 56:30
  Actually, Victoria comes alive quite interestingly on the page.
• 56:35
  Yes, yeah. I mean, the the book, the book
• 56:37
  obviously helps the you take, it takes Deborah botting out
• 56:42
  Deborah botting out of the equation.
• 56:46
  But I think she's more interesting here.
• 56:47
  I quite like I, I think Sarah Jane Smith, it's difficult
• 56:55
  because again, like Sharda, like all of these things, Sarah Jane
• 56:59
  Smith has so many different sort of incarnations now.
• 57:04
  So. So let's let us count the
• 57:06
  incarnations. OK, let's do it.
• 57:07
  Original Series, yeah. So that's one kind of that's
• 57:10
  kind of two. So you had sort of hurt we and
• 57:13
  Tom Baker maybe 2 incarnations. They are.
• 57:16
  Two kind of different characters.
• 57:18
  Yeah, it's like Clara and 7B and then Clara.
• 57:21
  And Capaldi, they're two different people.
• 57:23
  Yep. Then canine, that's two canine
• 57:26
  and company is 1/3 third. Yeah.
• 57:28
  I would say 5 doctors is 1/4. Yeah, because she that she feels
• 57:32
  divorced from all the others. So yeah.
• 57:34
  Yeah, I would say that. School reunion is 1/5 I would
• 57:40
  say that then her the Sarah Jane adventures.
• 57:45
  I mean school reunion and her main series appearances of are a
• 57:50
  fifth then Sarah Jane Adventures is separate from that.
• 57:55
  I would say there's the is it Big Finish, Sarah Jane you have?
• 58:00
  Two seasons of that. Two seasons of that and also the
• 58:05
  paradise of deaths goes to Ben Space.
• 58:08
  Yeah. So that's 8.
• 58:09
  Sort of like a 90, Sarah, yeah. Yeah.
• 58:12
  So that's yeah. There's also like a Sarah Sarah
• 58:15
  in Interference which is an 8 Doctor.
• 58:18
  Matthew Lawrence. Miles book completely separate
• 58:21
  from all of these other continuities that's. 9 Let's not
• 58:24
  forget downtime that we're talking about, but also also
• 58:27
  dimensions in time as well, which he is completely.
• 58:30
  I mean, that's hungover. Liz Slay didn't probably get
• 58:33
  through anything. Yeah.
• 58:35
  So that, I mean, 11 different sort of, she possibly more than
• 58:40
  any other character in Doctor Who has played this character in
• 58:45
  different formats, in different kind of the different levels and
• 58:49
  pictures. And it was nice seeing her in
• 58:52
  this. I mean, the effects of that is
• 58:54
  she's quite recognisable. I mean, you can see there's only
• 58:58
  so much you can do with Sarah Jane Smith before it connects
• 59:02
  with one of the other, the other strands.
• 59:03
  So this is a kind of a canine in companies Sarah Jane Smith maybe
• 59:09
  with a bit of the kind of big finish or a bit anticipating the
• 59:12
  big finish adventures. So, so it was quite it was quite
• 59:16
  nice. I don't think she had a lot to
• 59:18
  do. There is a wonderful bit where
• 59:20
  she's on the phone to canine and then she goes, just give me the
• 59:22
  bloody information and he's arguing very.
• 59:25
  She goes, I've got 3 words for you.
• 59:26
  Pets wins prizes. All right.
• 59:28
  It was great. I mean, that doesn't taste it at
• 59:31
  all. Well, that's that's that's the
• 59:34
  other unfortunate thing of the 90s books is very often you had
• 59:37
  chapter titles which were songs of the time, and they're just
• 59:41
  packed full of pop culture references that mean nothing
• 59:43
  anymore. Yeah, yeah, nothing yet.
• 59:46
  So there'll be a so it's getting to a nostalgia state.
• 59:51
  There'll be a tipping point. And then there's the Brigadier,
• 59:55
  who again, he's just can't sort of the Morden undead.
• 1:00:00
  He's in modern undead state. That's where he is in his
• 1:00:03
  school. And I thought we were in trouble
• 1:00:06
  because he started off and he's having all of these dreams of
• 1:00:09
  being on the beach with enormous London Underground size.
• 1:00:12
  And I don't know if you remember, but they do visualize
• 1:00:14
  that in the movie. I remember those bits.
• 1:00:16
  Yes, but then she's not too bad, those bits.
• 1:00:19
  But, and I thought we're in New Adventures territory now, you
• 1:00:22
  know, dreamscapes, lots of metaphors.
• 1:00:25
  And then that all stopped after a bit.
• 1:00:27
  And he's, there's a scene at the beginning, isn't there, where
• 1:00:31
  he's talking to Group Captain Gilmore from Remembrance of the
• 1:00:35
  Dialects. It's about the creation of Unit,
• 1:00:37
  isn't it? Well, I'm, I'm like I said, I'm
• 1:00:39
  reading remembrance of the dialects at the moment.
• 1:00:41
  And there's a chapter at the chapter beginning where it's
• 1:00:47
  it's like a historical document that said the formation of unit
• 1:00:51
  what started with the counterintelligence group, which
• 1:00:54
  is going to remembrance of the Daleks.
• 1:00:56
  So actually they are linking things up to.
• 1:00:58
  The TV sets in. Clever ways.
• 1:01:00
  Yeah, and Mark Platt is one of, you know, he is the class of
• 1:01:04
  1989, isn't he? So so it makes sense that that
• 1:01:08
  he's trying to connect it. I thought that that that was
• 1:01:12
  cute putting it in the book. It didn't do anything because,
• 1:01:18
  you know, it sort of gives a background to UNIT, but then
• 1:01:22
  UNIT is in this, but in a completely different form, or
• 1:01:26
  it's been sort of, you know, it's been taken over.
• 1:01:30
  And so so there is a bit of sense in giving a background to
• 1:01:33
  UNIT and given the context of the Brigadier.
• 1:01:36
  But if you're reading downtime, you don't really need to have an
• 1:01:40
  explanation of how the Brigadier connects with UNIT.
• 1:01:43
  You probably are already aware it is fan service, but pleasing
• 1:01:48
  pleasing. I mean, it's really nicely, you
• 1:01:50
  know, and it gives the Brigadier a bit a bit to do.
• 1:01:53
  And actually it probably helps recall the Brigadier because the
• 1:01:57
  problem with the Morden Undead school teacher Brigadier is it's
• 1:02:01
  never really that convincing. I don't think that he's he's
• 1:02:05
  living in a particular state it. Was supposed to be Ian it.
• 1:02:08
  Was supposed to be Ian. Shoehorn to Brigadier into that
• 1:02:11
  role, yeah. And Nicholas Corley's game, but
• 1:02:13
  yeah. Yeah, he gets away.
• 1:02:14
  He gets away with it. But you have to sort of squint
• 1:02:20
  to see the character in that situation.
• 1:02:23
  And that I've always found that quite depressing that I mean,
• 1:02:27
  takes. So what it does basically, I
• 1:02:31
  don't know if you've seen Tinker Taylor Soldiers by.
• 1:02:35
  What the TV show? Well, any any version really.
• 1:02:38
  I've saw the movie, but I found it.
• 1:02:40
  OK, so the the movie works so so the movie The main plot point in
• 1:02:46
  that is a guy a spy is sent into Czechoslovakia to get some
• 1:02:53
  information and he's captured and tortured by the Russians
• 1:02:56
  smuggled back to the UK and he ends up broken in a public
• 1:03:00
  school teaching teaching school kids at the public school living
• 1:03:05
  in a caravan in the school. See where you're going with this
• 1:03:08
  now wounded, haunted by his past.
• 1:03:12
  Tinker Taylor, the TV series famously had it as a production
• 1:03:17
  assistant or something. Peter Grimwade, who's the
• 1:03:19
  director of Morden. And so Morden Undead is
• 1:03:21
  basically Tinker, that bit of Tinker Taylor soldiers by.
• 1:03:25
  But it kind of makes more sense with the Brigadier than Ian in
• 1:03:30
  that if you sort of see it as a sort of a wounded soldier who's
• 1:03:35
  been sent into this public school to kind of recuperate.
• 1:03:39
  But it's very depressing. It's depressing in Tinker
• 1:03:42
  Taylor. It's depressing here that he's
• 1:03:44
  being reduced to the fact that he.
• 1:03:46
  Has a breakdown in Morgan. And I'm like, I don't want to
• 1:03:48
  see this stalwart figure of the Seven Seas, you know, old and
• 1:03:52
  decrepit in a job he's probably not enjoying too much, having a
• 1:03:55
  nervous breakdown. Yeah, I don't want to see that.
• 1:03:57
  And I'm the guy that killed him off.
• 1:03:59
  Yes, Remember, I put him in. I put him in a fucking nursing
• 1:04:02
  home even. Ben Aronovich didn't do it you.
• 1:04:05
  Know you thought. About it, yeah.
• 1:04:08
  What was great about, because you're right, he is in a bit of
• 1:04:11
  a reduced state at the start of this.
• 1:04:12
  And I thought we were going down the Victoria route again of
• 1:04:15
  like, oh, he's really miserable when he's passed his best and
• 1:04:18
  they call his his old unit Ace, the blunder days, you know?
• 1:04:22
  And he's thought of as a bit of a joke.
• 1:04:24
  Then he has a bit of a sort of character redemption when he
• 1:04:28
  gets to reconnect with his daughter, he gets to meet his
• 1:04:30
  grandson. I thought all that stuff was
• 1:04:32
  great. It's charming, Yeah, it is nice.
• 1:04:35
  And to have give him a daughter, to give him a personal life that
• 1:04:42
  goes beyond comedy. It's complicated, isn't it?
• 1:04:46
  Because I prefer Ben Aronovitch's sort of vision of
• 1:04:50
  the Brigadier. I mean, it's a bit of a boring
• 1:04:52
  vision because he just goes to garden centers.
• 1:04:54
  But the Brigadier living in a nice house and occasionally
• 1:04:58
  helicoptering off to adventures, I kind of think that's more
• 1:05:01
  Brigadier like. But it is a bit dull to put him
• 1:05:05
  in a in a caravan basically is depressing.
• 1:05:09
  But giving him fleshing out his private life, giving him a
• 1:05:13
  daughter that is kind of, I mean, it's a it's a good idea.
• 1:05:18
  I mean, there's no two ways about it, just.
• 1:05:21
  We must broach the Kate problem because either he really likes
• 1:05:25
  the name Kate and names all of his daughters Kate, or this is
• 1:05:29
  our Kate Lefred Stewart from the TV series.
• 1:05:33
  I mean, I mean, I'm going to say something controversial.
• 1:05:37
  I don't see downtime as being connected in any way to the TV
• 1:05:43
  series. So I, I see this a bit like a
• 1:05:47
  bit like the, the novel Human Nature where they can sort of,
• 1:05:50
  you know, cherry pick, cherry pick the best bits and actually
• 1:05:53
  televise it. I mean, she's a she's.
• 1:05:55
  A little action heroine at the end of the book.
• 1:05:58
  Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, I think
• 1:05:59
  actually they've, they've taken, I mean, quite sensibly, Steven
• 1:06:04
  Moffett, the the genius, Steven Moffett.
• 1:06:06
  Oh. That man, yes.
• 1:06:08
  It's very I. Don't recognize him by that
• 1:06:10
  term, but go. On very sensibly sort of mind
• 1:06:13
  all of Doctor Who, including downtime for good ideas
• 1:06:17
  laboriously, yes, go on and and I think I think Kate Leopard
• 1:06:22
  Stuart is a good idea that he sort of picked up up and run
• 1:06:27
  with. I think she's probably more
• 1:06:29
  interesting in downtime because she's she's clearly different
• 1:06:35
  from the Brigadier and she's not trying to continue.
• 1:06:37
  There's something weird about Kate left Bridge continuing
• 1:06:40
  UNIT, like it's some sort of monarchy and she feels.
• 1:06:46
  She feels more like a character, doesn't she?
• 1:06:48
  Indeed she does, and she's also there to say something about the
• 1:06:51
  Brigadier. So in the modern series, Kate
• 1:06:55
  left Bridge Stuart is there as a replacement for the Brigadier or
• 1:06:58
  be it one that has a sort of a different personality or a
• 1:07:01
  different route, more science than the military up until the
• 1:07:05
  point where she actually becomes a military, whatever they sort
• 1:07:08
  of we're going to say she. Had a different personality
• 1:07:11
  depending on which showrunner was writing.
• 1:07:12
  For her, well, I think there probably is that as well.
• 1:07:16
  So she she doesn't, she's there as a sort of an individual
• 1:07:20
  character in the series. Here it's sort of as a way of
• 1:07:24
  kind of underpinning the Brigadier, giving the Brigadier
• 1:07:27
  something, something to do, giving the Brigadier somebody to
• 1:07:33
  be in jeopardy because obviously she has this kind of, she had
• 1:07:37
  this, this little figurine. So yeah, she's nicely drawn.
• 1:07:42
  I mean all the, I mean, Mark Platt is really good at
• 1:07:46
  characters and I think he he, I mean, it's a bit dark with
• 1:07:52
  Victoria, but he does, he does flesh around, so to speak.
• 1:07:56
  I loved her visiting her mum's grave at the start and then
• 1:08:01
  never finding the grave that she keeps going back to the church
• 1:08:03
  because she doesn't know where it is.
• 1:08:05
  And then at the end of the bit she finds it and that's where
• 1:08:07
  the Doctor meets her. I thought that was really
• 1:08:09
  lovely. Yeah.
• 1:08:10
  It's just those little bits that you've never saw on the TV
• 1:08:12
  series about a character. You know, we're so busy doing
• 1:08:15
  action adventure all the time, we can't really pause.
• 1:08:18
  Maybe 2 by the sidemen, that one bit where they pause and her and
• 1:08:22
  the Doctor have that nice little moment.
• 1:08:24
  Yeah, all the all the end of Fury where actually she reveals
• 1:08:28
  that, you know, she's not having fun anymore.
• 1:08:32
  Just just that that kind of Tegan moment.
• 1:08:34
  And it's actually less, it was more sudden with Tegan.
• 1:08:38
  I think it made more sense here that she's sort of, you know,
• 1:08:42
  actually she's not cut out for this.
• 1:08:45
  She's just. Traumatic year, isn't it?
• 1:08:47
  Yeah. Vice Warriors, Daleks.
• 1:08:48
  Cybermen. Yeah.
• 1:08:51
  What did you think then? Because those were like the
• 1:08:53
  three main characters. One of my issues with this, and
• 1:08:57
  I like you, I did enjoy reading this.
• 1:08:59
  I thought it was a sort of mix, but I did enjoy it was there was
• 1:09:03
  just too many people in it. You then had Christopher, who
• 1:09:08
  was Victoria's second in command, who in the video
• 1:09:11
  version is a very camp sort of a character and actually
• 1:09:15
  translated quite well in the book, as well as this sort of
• 1:09:18
  oily, slimy, he's trying to weasel his way into power.
• 1:09:24
  You've got Travis in there as well.
• 1:09:25
  You've got the DJ in there, you've got the kid, the Daniel
• 1:09:30
  Hinton, you've got the tramp Harrods in there as well.
• 1:09:35
  You've got the traitorous unit. Oh, Cavendish.
• 1:09:39
  Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of people.
• 1:09:41
  And one thing I what I loved about that opening section was
• 1:09:46
  it was entirely focused on Victoria and Victoria's point of
• 1:09:49
  view. The second we hit the
• 1:09:51
  university, there was like chapters where you were just
• 1:09:56
  bouncing from one point of view to another.
• 1:09:59
  And I'm like, who is this book about anymore?
• 1:10:01
  So I think it's more about what is it, what genre is it?
• 1:10:06
  So the the opening feels sort of mystical and supernatural and
• 1:10:12
  kind of it's all about Victoria and her trauma and her journey.
• 1:10:17
  But I think Mark Platt, when he wrote the the film, presumably
• 1:10:23
  he wanted to write a sort of conspiracy thriller.
• 1:10:26
  So one of these paranoid conspiracy thrillers that were
• 1:10:29
  really big in the 1990s, sort of enemy of the states kind of
• 1:10:33
  thing. And for that you need, you need
• 1:10:36
  multiple characters because you need to demonstrate how the
• 1:10:39
  conspiracy is sort of passing from one place to another.
• 1:10:43
  So here you have the source of the conspiracy, which is the
• 1:10:45
  university and the structures within the university.
• 1:10:49
  And then you have the results of the conspiracy, which is the
• 1:10:52
  school kid, but also the military.
• 1:10:55
  And, and so you have to have characters there.
• 1:10:58
  So it's always going to be white character heavy.
• 1:11:03
  But my problem with that was like, there was huge stretches
• 1:11:06
  where Sarah wasn't in it. She vanished for about 70 pages
• 1:11:10
  or so and then just pops up at the university and I'm like, I'm
• 1:11:13
  sorry, I thought you were done in the book.
• 1:11:15
  We were dealing with other things, so he was sort of having
• 1:11:18
  to pick things up and put things down quite a lot.
• 1:11:22
  But yeah, I guess it was he was trying to do a techno thriller
• 1:11:26
  as. Well, wasn't he?
• 1:11:27
  Yeah. And it might be a symptom of of
• 1:11:30
  it being an adaptation because presumably if I was making this
• 1:11:34
  into a film, it would take Sarah Jane quite a long time to reach
• 1:11:38
  the action. But you'd still sort of, you'd
• 1:11:41
  cut to her driving frantically and then come back and then drop
• 1:11:44
  driving frantically. Whereas in a book, you can't do
• 1:11:48
  that in the chapter. You'd have like a chapter and
• 1:11:51
  then a little short chapter saying, Meanwhile, Sarah Jane
• 1:11:54
  was driving frantically. She's still, she's still coming.
• 1:11:57
  She hasn't arrived yet back at the action.
• 1:11:59
  So it's kind of maybe it's just a fact of the something written
• 1:12:06
  for a film doesn't necessarily work if you try to translate it.
• 1:12:10
  But then I think Mark Platt should have, should have had the
• 1:12:17
  freedom. I mean, presumably he had the
• 1:12:18
  freedom to write what he wanted. I mean, I don't know how what
• 1:12:22
  the legal situation is if you're adapting downtime, who owns the
• 1:12:27
  rights to downtime and how much power they have to say no.
• 1:12:31
  Mark Platt You can bookend it with stuff, but the actual story
• 1:12:35
  of downtime has to be exactly as you'd see it on, pretty much as
• 1:12:38
  you'd see it on the screen. I.
• 1:12:40
  Mean it's his script, isn't it? So I'm assuming it's to do with
• 1:12:44
  what he wants as long as he puts, you know, With thanks to
• 1:12:47
  Ian Levine at the start of the book.
• 1:12:48
  Obviously, yeah. So I don't know.
• 1:12:50
  I don't know, maybe maybe he just, he just didn't take take
• 1:12:54
  the writing far enough in that middle section.
• 1:12:57
  It really is the university section, which for me is where
• 1:13:01
  it just became a little bit sort of bogged down.
• 1:13:04
  But it's dated. I mean, you know, it's it's
• 1:13:07
  perfect for the 1990s. Everything was set in the
• 1:13:10
  university in the 1990s with this weird sort of technology.
• 1:13:14
  I think I think the the issue is, is in that opening section,
• 1:13:18
  he can make that as cinematic as he wants.
• 1:13:20
  You can see exterior long shot of the Himalayas and all this
• 1:13:25
  because because that wasn't in. But the second you're doing the
• 1:13:28
  movie, well, they had a budget and he's telling the story that
• 1:13:31
  they told with a budget. And you can tell, you can tell
• 1:13:35
  in the book. And I think that's a bit of a
• 1:13:36
  failure. You can tell when they get, it's
• 1:13:40
  almost like they opened that university section by saying at
• 1:13:46
  the meantime, in a university in the West of England, in a
• 1:13:49
  surprisingly deserted university in the West of England that
• 1:13:52
  looks very cheap to film in this, this and this was
• 1:13:55
  happening. It's just you can tell it's a
• 1:13:59
  cheap place to film in, even from the book Marc.
• 1:14:02
  Platt and Rusty Davis and Steven Moffett.
• 1:14:05
  Actually, yes, I am, because when Rusty Davis wrote the
• 1:14:09
  novelization of Rose, he wrote the climax of that that he would
• 1:14:13
  have loved to have seen on the screen.
• 1:14:15
  So, you know, the London Eye comes off its hinges and the
• 1:14:18
  Autons are attacking worldwide. Moffett then wrote Day of the
• 1:14:22
  Doctor, and he suddenly got a chapter at the end of that book
• 1:14:25
  where it's not just the Doctors turning up in clips in Tardises.
• 1:14:29
  He's actually got them playing an active role on Gallifrey,
• 1:14:32
  saving children and doing all of this stuff.
• 1:14:35
  And Mark Platt could have done that with this.
• 1:14:37
  He could if he wanted to, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:14:41
  And maybe maybe he was in love with, with what he'd written on
• 1:14:45
  screen. And maybe there was an
• 1:14:46
  expectation. Maybe he was asked to write an
• 1:14:50
  adaptation. And there's, you know, fair
• 1:14:53
  enough, because he wrote, he had he adapted and his adaptation of
• 1:14:56
  ghost Light is from memory, one of the straighter of that
• 1:15:00
  series, beautifully written, but it's not it's not really got the
• 1:15:04
  sort of the the fan kind of fireworks that cursed Benrick
• 1:15:09
  had and remembrance of the Daleks had well now
• 1:15:12
  interestingly, historicalized battlefield.
• 1:15:16
  And that did He took what was probably one of the week of
• 1:15:18
  McCoy, yeah, Yeah. And made it sing in price.
• 1:15:22
  I mean he gifts he basically produced a.
• 1:15:24
  Birthday present for Ben and Ronovich because he probably
• 1:15:27
  wrote the story that Ben, Ben and Ronovich wanted to be on
• 1:15:31
  screen but failed to failed to get there.
• 1:15:33
  I don't know if you've ever heard the battlefield.
• 1:15:36
  Commentary but he's on there we've got Andrew Cartmel and the
• 1:15:40
  two of them are just slagging it off from the beginning to the
• 1:15:42
  end. They're so embarrassed by it all
• 1:15:45
  and you've got Angela Bruce and Sophie Aldridge they're going oh
• 1:15:47
  boy, shut up we love making this all right so just let us enjoy
• 1:15:51
  and have you seen that on I think it's the Blu-ray that.
• 1:15:54
  I've got of the the writers going to a pub and sitting down
• 1:16:01
  and it's Ronan Monroe, Benenronovich Cartmel, Ian
• 1:16:06
  Briggs, and they're so nice. That's actually sort of
• 1:16:11
  therapeutic because they're talking about Battlefield and
• 1:16:13
  he's doing his usual. It wasn't what I wanted.
• 1:16:16
  I'm embarrassed by this bit, this bit.
• 1:16:18
  And actually, they've just watched it and they're saying,
• 1:16:20
  actually, no, this is, you know, it's really good.
• 1:16:23
  And Battlefield is it's good. I mean, compared to some of the
• 1:16:27
  the ship that Doctor Who was churning out in the 1980s, to be
• 1:16:30
  honest, Battlefield at least was inventive and it had
• 1:16:34
  personality. It was just, you know, misguided
• 1:16:38
  in parts and chopped up. Chopped up for goodness sakes.
• 1:16:41
  Exactly. I love that character.
• 1:16:45
  She's really good and. She needs to.
• 1:16:47
  You know, again she. Would have needed to have been
• 1:16:50
  in Doctor Who in 2005, but she should have come back.
• 1:16:54
  They should have brought her back.
• 1:16:56
  So Battlefield I'm generally fine with, but Mark also resists
• 1:17:03
  the temptation to do the the kind of the too much fan
• 1:17:07
  service, I think. I mean, there's plenty here that
• 1:17:09
  he could have brought in and touches to the past and he sort
• 1:17:14
  of resists it. I mean, I thought, I thought
• 1:17:18
  there was a fair bit of that. When?
• 1:17:19
  When? You started having Gilmore and
• 1:17:21
  Bambara and all these people that weren't in it, but actually
• 1:17:25
  it, but it never felt as if it didn't belong there.
• 1:17:28
  It did feel as if it was part of the story that he was trying to
• 1:17:30
  tell. And like, you know, I don't know
• 1:17:32
  how familiar you are with these names, but Craig Hinton and
• 1:17:36
  let's say Gary Russell and David A McKinsey who wrote books where
• 1:17:40
  they are just stitched together from old Doctor Who stories.
• 1:17:42
  And I mean my, my go to. And he's a really nice guy.
• 1:17:46
  And I loved, I loved his adaptations of Power of Daleks,
• 1:17:49
  Evil of Daleks and the Daleks Master plan.
• 1:17:51
  But John John Peel's new adventures, missing adventures
• 1:17:56
  are unreadable because they're that they're like here we are
• 1:18:01
  opening explaining a bit from Power of Daleks and connecting
• 1:18:04
  it to frontier in space. And then we move into this that
• 1:18:07
  connects it to Day of the Daleks and explains this from Death of
• 1:18:11
  the Daleks and, and there's this story there just on War of the
• 1:18:15
  Daleks. Which is a John Peel Dalek book
• 1:18:17
  for the Day of Doctor range with somebody who loved that book.
• 1:18:21
  And it was so utterly atrocious on every level.
• 1:18:25
  I had to be so delicate on the Yeah, but it should be good.
• 1:18:29
  I mean, it should be right up. It's it's like hair's breadth
• 1:18:33
  from being really exciting to read.
• 1:18:36
  It's like who killed Kennedy? That kind of, you know, there's
• 1:18:42
  there's just about enough fan fiction fan service you can put
• 1:18:46
  in where it's sort of that's that's quite good, but that's
• 1:18:49
  probably enough. If you tip over 1 little bit
• 1:18:52
  over that and suddenly it gives you fan indigestion.
• 1:18:55
  Basically it just you start sucking.
• 1:18:57
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And downtime doesn't do that.
• 1:19:02
  It's it doesn't I don't think it gets to that tipping point.
• 1:19:05
  I think it stops quite short but still has AI think it has a
• 1:19:08
  satisfying amount, which you have to have if you're having
• 1:19:11
  all of these characters coming back.
• 1:19:13
  But most importantly, I think it takes those.
• 1:19:16
  Established elements and tells you something new about them.
• 1:19:19
  Yeah. If you're going to play with the
• 1:19:20
  pieces, add layers, add things to their story.
• 1:19:23
  And it does that with a Brigadin.
• 1:19:24
  It does that with Victoria. And to a lesser degree, it does
• 1:19:26
  it with Sarah as well. Yeah.
• 1:19:28
  Whereas John Peel, nice guy and. I loved his adaptations again,
• 1:19:32
  of power of Daleks, even of Daleks and Daleks master plan.
• 1:19:35
  John Peel's obsession is with explaining, filling in the gaps
• 1:19:39
  between things. And that's not that's that's not
• 1:19:43
  a bit of interest really. I mean, you know, by the
• 1:19:47
  Terrestrial Index or the officiate books or Lance Parkins
• 1:19:52
  history of the universe. Fascinating, brilliant,
• 1:19:55
  brilliant, really impressive, but not a story.
• 1:19:58
  But you know, you can read it. That's true, but that doesn't
• 1:20:01
  make a a coherent story. The more I'm doing the book
• 1:20:05
  club, the more I'm. Realising that, and this is a
• 1:20:08
  bit mean, but go with me, there's two types of Doctor Who
• 1:20:12
  book writer for original novels, and that is those that are smart
• 1:20:18
  enough and talented enough that they could write books outside
• 1:20:23
  of the Doctor Who sphere and have proven to do that.
• 1:20:25
  Paul, for now, Ben Eronovich, Lance Parkin, Andy Lane, Andy
• 1:20:30
  Lane. I'm sure Mark Platt must.
• 1:20:31
  Have done some work. Away from Doctor Who because
• 1:20:33
  he's a very, very smart writer. And then there's those writers
• 1:20:37
  who got the gig because they're in the right circles and they
• 1:20:42
  can write a book on time and, you know, and I'm going to throw
• 1:20:45
  a few names out, maybe Christopher Beulis, Gary
• 1:20:49
  Russell, Craig Hinton, John Peel, you know, where if a a
• 1:20:56
  professional publishing house saw their work and it wasn't a
• 1:21:00
  Doctor Who won and they'd probably go, yeah, this isn't
• 1:21:03
  really good enough. Yeah, I think I'd agree with
• 1:21:05
  that, although I had that I'd. Say there were three.
• 1:21:08
  There were the the authors who clearly are capable of writing
• 1:21:13
  outside of the Doctor Who's there and have done so
• 1:21:16
  successfully. So as you say, Cornell,
• 1:21:18
  Benaronovich, Andy, Blame, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:21:24
  I hate to say it, but Gareth Roberts, Gareth.
• 1:21:27
  Roberts, They're the ones who. On poor Mars, of course.
• 1:21:31
  They're the ones who obviously they're suited to writing Doctor
• 1:21:35
  Who stories and nothing else, some of whom are quite content.
• 1:21:39
  I doubt Gary Russell has ambitions to be a great
• 1:21:44
  novelist. I think he just had the time of
• 1:21:46
  his life writing skills, injustice and you know, the
• 1:21:50
  pedal on the pedal on Peloton, Peloton story.
• 1:21:54
  I think he'd be absolutely fine just writing Doctor Who stories.
• 1:21:58
  I think the third is the authors who could write outside Doctor
• 1:22:03
  Who. But for some reason haven't
• 1:22:05
  broken free so you can see them. I mean, Lawrence, I think.
• 1:22:08
  Lawrence Miles. Oh, for sure.
• 1:22:10
  Really well written. Really.
• 1:22:12
  Inventive, I mean. He invented Faction Paradox, and
• 1:22:16
  he's got this kind of inventive imagination.
• 1:22:19
  He's got, you know better. One of his shears, Rivers of.
• 1:22:21
  London he's got. He's that series in him.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah. To do Yeah.
• 1:22:26
  Yeah. Ultimate mainstream for people
• 1:22:28
  to fall in like trouble is he burs too many bridges.
• 1:22:30
  Yeah, he's mad. So he's completely insane and he
• 1:22:33
  pisses everybody. Off I'll put Jonathan Morris in
• 1:22:36
  that bracket as well. He.
• 1:22:37
  Absolutely has got the talent to go.
• 1:22:39
  Yeah, he did blood, blood heat. Did he do blood heat?
• 1:22:42
  Johnny Morris, he did. Festival of Death and
• 1:22:45
  Acrophobia. Tomorrow, Windows and a feast of
• 1:22:48
  Big Finish and Doctor Who comic strips as well.
• 1:22:50
  But he's just, he's busy mates with Stephen Moffett and he does
• 1:22:54
  Timey. Why me?
• 1:22:56
  As good as Stephen Moffett. And he actually got his name on
• 1:23:00
  a list of Stephen Moffett's toy and writers that he wanted to
• 1:23:04
  write for the series, but they tried out the first name and it
• 1:23:07
  went so wrong, the list got scrapped and never got a chance.
• 1:23:11
  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's luck,
• 1:23:14
  isn't it? But it's still, you know, there
• 1:23:17
  are, there are good writers. There are, there are, I think
• 1:23:21
  there are a few. There aren't that many bad
• 1:23:23
  writers. I I think, I think it depends
• 1:23:27
  what hat you're wearing or what it had you've, you've got on
• 1:23:29
  when you're reading it. But there are, there are just a
• 1:23:33
  few that are unreadable. But but actually you haven't
• 1:23:36
  read 1 of mine yet. OK, but I.
• 1:23:40
  Can read 1 of yours, so yeah. Heading to a book club near you?
• 1:23:44
  What's? It called, by the way, the
• 1:23:45
  Benton. Far one.
• 1:23:48
  It's called the Chimes of Whitby.
• 1:23:51
  Whitby Bay. Yeah, Whitby, Yeah.
• 1:23:56
  Which I wrote. After going on.
• 1:23:58
  Holiday to Whitby and I've come up with, I've come up with
• 1:24:01
  another one that I'm going to pitch and it said surprisingly
• 1:24:05
  in Bermuda because I went on holiday to Bermuda.
• 1:24:10
  I see where you get your yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
• 1:24:12
  What you know right when you went to Whitby.
• 1:24:14
  Bay, did you go up that? Hill, right to the top to that
• 1:24:16
  church. Yeah.
• 1:24:17
  Gorgeous out there, isn't it? It's called it.
• 1:24:19
  But I was. I was sold on the fact that.
• 1:24:21
  The hill is actually like, really difficult to get up and
• 1:24:25
  loads of steps. Not bad, not too bad.
• 1:24:29
  Oh, Mars has read a whole series of books.
• 1:24:30
  Sit there. Hasn't he the Brenda and nephew
• 1:24:32
  ones? Yeah, but also I've I've read
• 1:24:35
  so. One of the the inspirations when
• 1:24:38
  I was in Whitby, I bought, oh, you can't really read it, but
• 1:24:41
  it's backwards formula. It's backwards Whitby child,
• 1:24:44
  Whitby child. So it's all about kind.
• 1:24:46
  Of witches in. Whitby And it's just an
• 1:24:49
  atmospheric place. And it's an atmospheric place,
• 1:24:52
  but something that may or may not be connected to the story
• 1:24:56
  I've written. It's also where Dracula lands
• 1:24:58
  when it comes to Britain in the Demeter.
• 1:25:03
  So who knows, you know, it might be connected.
• 1:25:06
  You don't have vampires in your Benson story, do you?
• 1:25:09
  Not vampires, plural. Right, I'm on to Amazon tonight.
• 1:25:15
  Yeah, there we go. Well, look, let's let's tie up
• 1:25:20
  our downtown conversation then we what do you think was the
• 1:25:23
  biggest strength and the biggest weakness of this book?
• 1:25:27
  I think the I'll start with the. Weakness.
• 1:25:30
  I think the biggest weakness was Mark Blatt's reluctance to leave
• 1:25:35
  what was clearly his film script to do something a bit more a bit
• 1:25:40
  more timeless, a bit more kind of ambiguous from the author of
• 1:25:45
  Ghost Light. I think Ghost Light being the
• 1:25:49
  the ultimate of sort of ambiguity, and Doctor Who the
• 1:25:52
  opposite mysterious story. I think it feels like he's kind
• 1:25:57
  of at that phase where he's scarred by this, by this
• 1:26:01
  reputation for being the elusive writer, and he's just trying to
• 1:26:05
  write a clear A to B to C thriller.
• 1:26:09
  And I think that makes the middle of the novel flat.
• 1:26:13
  But the biggest strength is the flip side of that and that's the
• 1:26:17
  opening. And that's Victoria being
• 1:26:19
  haunted by Traverse and travelling to travelling to
• 1:26:24
  Tibet and this, this idea of visiting an old Doctor Who
• 1:26:29
  location. And it's actually sort of, you
• 1:26:31
  know, broken down and it's creepy and it's not what she was
• 1:26:34
  looking for and it's a mistake and it's a trap.
• 1:26:37
  And that feeling of claustrophobia.
• 1:26:39
  Really well done. And I think that was, and that
• 1:26:43
  happened at the beginning. So it's enough to sort of draw
• 1:26:45
  you in. And it, you know, it kept me,
• 1:26:47
  kept me reading it. I mean, I'm, I'm in my 40s and I
• 1:26:50
  happily read this book in Bermuda.
• 1:26:54
  In Bermuda. Yeah, I was in a.
• 1:26:55
  Good state of mind. Weirdly enough, my biggest
• 1:26:58
  strength and my biggest weakness are the.
• 1:26:59
  Same thing. I think it's the biggest
• 1:27:02
  weakness was there was at some points of this book just too
• 1:27:06
  many people for me to focus on. And I don't think he was being
• 1:27:10
  very clear with. There was points of the book
• 1:27:13
  where I thought it was about 15 people and I couldn't figure out
• 1:27:18
  whose story he was trying to tell, whereas I absolutely knew
• 1:27:21
  his story he was selling at the start because it was all on one
• 1:27:23
  character. But I thought the biggest
• 1:27:26
  strength was, and this is what lifts it above so many because
• 1:27:30
  this is effectively a target, right?
• 1:27:32
  It's a novelization of something that was made is those 3
• 1:27:37
  characters, Victoria, Sarah, the Brigadier, and a couple of the
• 1:27:41
  other character beasts as well. It's so strong, it really
• 1:27:44
  elevates watching the video, I think.
• 1:27:48
  And he does. He takes the Brigadier on a
• 1:27:50
  journey, he takes Victoria on a journey.
• 1:27:52
  So it's not just an excuse to bring them back and play with
• 1:27:55
  the toys is adding to their story.
• 1:27:58
  So I thought his character, I always think his character work
• 1:28:01
  is superb. I only ever think Mark Platt
• 1:28:03
  falls down when he lands on a science fiction idea and he
• 1:28:09
  leads into it so much he forgets about the people in the story.
• 1:28:12
  And that's mostly his big finished work.
• 1:28:14
  That's novels. Well, yeah.
• 1:28:16
  There you go. There's a good example.
• 1:28:17
  Yeah. So would you would you recommend
• 1:28:20
  me now? Watching downtime?
• 1:28:24
  Yes and no, because I can't. I can't yes and no watch, I
• 1:28:28
  know. It's a tricky one.
• 1:28:30
  Do you know what the biggest? I think the biggest flaw with.
• 1:28:32
  Downtime is Christopher Barry directs it, and he's got a 70s
• 1:28:37
  sensibility about his direction, so it's.
• 1:28:39
  It wants to be pacey and he's doing long, lingering shots just
• 1:28:44
  like you would have done in the 70s.
• 1:28:47
  And it's got Deborah Watling in it as well.
• 1:28:48
  Yeah, which which sort of, but Nicholas Cole, he's great in it.
• 1:28:53
  Elizabeth Sladen's Taking it. The Yeti are shot in daytime,
• 1:28:57
  and they're really, they're cuddlier than they were in the
• 1:29:00
  Abominable Snowmen. So they're not for, I don't
• 1:29:03
  know, I think I think this is the best version of downtown
• 1:29:06
  apart from me and Levine. Apart from me and Levine, Yes,
• 1:29:12
  yes, yes I. Couldn't ask you?
• 1:29:14
  Did you even remember what that was all about?
• 1:29:16
  Is he playing a grand chess game across all of time and space
• 1:29:19
  with the great intelligence I To be honest, I've watched 5
• 1:29:23
  minutes just for the. Novelty of saying Sylvester
• 1:29:26
  McCoy, I wasn't really following following his block.
• 1:29:30
  It just got the script as well. It's probably got that on the
• 1:29:32
  table. Yeah, as you read now.
• 1:29:35
  Well, OK. Well, thank you very much for
• 1:29:38
  reading Downtime. You're welcome.
• 1:29:40
  What I'm going to ask you next is I gave you a little bit of
• 1:29:44
  homework. Do you remember?
• 1:29:45
  No. Oh, recommendations.
• 1:29:47
  That's right. Yeah.
• 1:29:48
  Oh brilliant. What book would you like to?
• 1:29:51
  Recommend for people to read. So I've been reading Hornblower,
• 1:29:59
  so this is the first thing. So I was I was going to
• 1:30:02
  recommend the Sloughhouse series, the Slow Horses series,
• 1:30:06
  which is currently on Apple TV. The books are phenomenal.
• 1:30:10
  The kind of I'm recommending two things at once.
• 1:30:13
  The books are phenomenal. It's this kind of Le Carre.
• 1:30:17
  It's all smiley. Like I was saying, Tinker
• 1:30:18
  tailors, I'll just buy. But the flip side of that, what
• 1:30:21
  if, what if it's that? But it's basically they all live
• 1:30:24
  in dustbins and they're all like CD and they're all kind of
• 1:30:27
  corrupt and unsuccessful. And they've been put into a
• 1:30:30
  special section of MI 5 where they're or MI 6 where they kind
• 1:30:34
  of kept apart from everybody else, but they still end up
• 1:30:37
  getting involved in these kind of plots.
• 1:30:41
  It's a brilliant TV, really good TV series, really CDCD set of
• 1:30:46
  novels, modern novels. So those are worth worth
• 1:30:49
  checking out. But Hornblower, the Forrester's
• 1:30:53
  Hornblower written in between the 30s and the 60s sounds like
• 1:30:58
  it would be really dated and dull.
• 1:31:01
  But actually they're they're kind of really witty and they're
• 1:31:05
  really dramatic and really detailed.
• 1:31:08
  So if you like something like Sharp, which you know, I've read
• 1:31:12
  the Sharp books because I, I remembered the TV series, so I
• 1:31:15
  got into the books. But if you like that kind of
• 1:31:18
  that kind of historical adventure, then Hornblow is
• 1:31:21
  actually, you know, worth digging out.
• 1:31:26
  Up to date, an up to date recommendation.
• 1:31:28
  Do you know what you are the first person ever not to
• 1:31:30
  recommend? Anything Doctor Who related as
• 1:31:32
  well. Oh really?
• 1:31:33
  Oh should I recommend a Doctor Who?
• 1:31:35
  You can. Recommend whatever the hell you
• 1:31:37
  want. The only doctor.
• 1:31:38
  Who thing I've read in the last four years.
• 1:31:40
  Down time, downtime and Birthright.
• 1:31:44
  Oh, that's right. You talked about that on the
• 1:31:46
  other one. Well.
• 1:31:48
  Matt, if I haven't scared you off, would you be willing to
• 1:31:52
  come back and read another book sometime?
• 1:31:53
  Yes. Yeah, I'd be willing to read
• 1:31:56
  another book. And.
• 1:31:56
  Then I might come back. Well, I'll tell you what.
• 1:32:01
  I. Mean you can either choose that
• 1:32:02
  right this second or we can talk about it off Mike.
• 1:32:06
  I mean, we've, we've talked about screening the Shackler.
• 1:32:09
  Shalka Yes. Have have you done that one yet?
• 1:32:12
  No. I haven't.
• 1:32:13
  And that's that's not. Only the novel, which is quite
• 1:32:17
  short, so you get through it quite quickly.
• 1:32:18
  It's only about 150 pages, but it's got a huge making of at the
• 1:32:23
  back of the book as well really, which is really interesting.
• 1:32:26
  OK, so. Let's maybe we do that, maybe
• 1:32:29
  with the caveat that I'll have to check my Kindle to make sure
• 1:32:31
  it is actually readable. But I'm sure it will be after
• 1:32:34
  Richard E Grant's recent appearance in Rogue.
• 1:32:37
  Yeah, that's true. That Where can people find you
• 1:32:42
  online? And in broadcasting, so you can
• 1:32:46
  listen to me on a lot of. Strangers in Space, I've been on
• 1:32:49
  like 400 of the episodes, so I'm a sort of a stalwart of
• 1:32:53
  Strangers in Space. You can probably find me on
• 1:32:56
  Facebook and Twitter. If you ask your question, what
• 1:32:59
  do you prefer? Because obviously strangers in.
• 1:33:01
  Space. You guys cover such an eclectic
• 1:33:04
  bunch of stuff, you know, box TV, films.
• 1:33:07
  What's your favorite thing to talk about on there?
• 1:33:10
  I do. I still like Doctor Who.
• 1:33:12
  I mean, we kind of ran. Out I used to do the Blue Box
• 1:33:15
  podcast, the Starburst magazine with Jr. and we talked about
• 1:33:18
  purely Doctor Who's. So we sort of started running
• 1:33:20
  out of Doctor Who to talk about. But I really love talking about
• 1:33:23
  Doctor Who because I don't watch a lot of it.
• 1:33:26
  I don't read a lot of it. This encourages me to rewatch
• 1:33:30
  things and to think about, you know, new ways of looking at
• 1:33:33
  Doctor Who. So the what If episodes or the
• 1:33:36
  thematic episodes looking at horror and Doctor Who, it's
• 1:33:39
  just, and I don't have to do any homework for it because it's all
• 1:33:42
  in my head somewhere. But yeah.
• 1:33:45
  And film, I mean, you know, I'm, I'm a film fan, so I can see
• 1:33:49
  your bookcase right now. So yeah, if you give me a film
• 1:33:52
  to watch. I'll I'll watch it and.
• 1:33:54
  I'll give my opinion on it. Well, if you like Doctor Who and
• 1:33:57
  you'd like what ifs. And you don't want to do too
• 1:34:01
  much homework. I think screaming the shark was
• 1:34:03
  absolutely perfect. Yeah.
• 1:34:04
  Ticks all those boxes. OK.
• 1:34:06
  OK. Matt, thank you very much for.
• 1:34:08
  Your time, it has been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:34:10
  You're welcome. Thank you very much, Joe.