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Hamster Book Club - Paradise Towers by Stephen Wyatt (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  The Doctor and his three can companions heard this last
• 0:03
  exchange as they crept stealthily out of the service
• 0:06
  lift and into the corridor. They were breathing heavily from
• 0:10
  their frantic descent, and the gloom of their surroundings
• 0:13
  immediately oppressed their spirits.
• 0:15
  But they had to persist. Led by the Doctor, they edged
• 0:19
  their way along the slimy corridor, as near to the Chief
• 0:22
  as they dared to come without being spotted by the cleaners.
• 0:26
  From there, flattened against the wall, they were able to pick
• 0:31
  up the fatal last exchanges between the chief caretaker and
• 0:34
  his pet. You see my pet?
• 0:37
  The chief was saying, still struggling to get control of the
• 0:40
  situation. All these bodies disappearing.
• 0:43
  People are beginning to notice, you know.
• 0:51
  The two words were magnificent in their dismissiveness.
• 0:55
  What did you say? The Chief peered through the
• 0:57
  smoke at the eyes, horrified by what he heard and saw.
• 1:01
  I am ready now. I have my plan.
• 1:08
  The eyes were brighter and redder than ever.
• 1:11
  The chief was babbling now, completely unnerved.
• 1:14
  Look. It's it's nice to have you
• 1:17
  chattier than usual, my pair, but I do think you might be a
• 1:20
  bit more grateful for all I've done for you.
• 1:27
  The voice boomed through the rapidly clearing smoke.
• 1:31
  I need only one more thing from you.
• 1:35
  The cleaners were edging the terrified chief caretaker
• 1:38
  through the doorway now towards the evilly glowing eyes.
• 1:42
  From his viewpoint, the Doctor could see only part of what was
• 1:45
  happening, but he could hear the roaring from louder and louder,
• 1:49
  and see the outlines of a large pulsating machine in which the
• 1:53
  eyes were located. What something do you shriek?
• 1:56
  The Chief as the cleaners forced him relentlessly on.
• 2:00
  And suppose I won't give it to you?
• 2:02
  We have no choice. The voice replied, and the
• 2:07
  Doctor saw the machine start to burst apart in a horrific
• 2:10
  explosion of energy and matter. The eyes glowed, still stronger
• 2:14
  and stronger. As the panel around them
• 2:16
  crumbled away. And then a tube like Dome
• 2:20
  started to slowly descend from the ceiling of the inner
• 2:23
  sanctum. The chief was edged nearer and
• 2:26
  nearer until he stood underneath it, totally deprived of all
• 2:28
  speech. The voice seemed to be
• 2:31
  everywhere. Now and.
• 2:36
  Everyone in paradise. The Dome started to descend over
• 2:44
  the luckless chief, and he gave one last cry as it enveloped
• 2:48
  him, and the energy was everywhere, cracking like
• 2:51
  flashes of lightning all around the Dome.
• 2:53
  Sparks shot everywhere, and the stout doors themselves sizzled
• 2:56
  and buckled with the power. Then the machine eyes were gone.
• 3:01
  No sound came from inside the Dome, and wherever Kragnol was,
• 3:05
  he was no longer in his prison. The studied doors banged too,
• 3:08
  with a crash. The doctor was so appalled that
• 3:11
  he was thankful not to see anymore.
• 3:13
  The same was true of his companions, who stood still,
• 3:16
  mesmerized, staring at the door, their eyes seared by the image
• 3:19
  of the crumbling panel, the descending Dome and the last
• 3:22
  sight of the petrified chief. Welcome back to the Hamster book
• 3:35
  club. My name is Trash Compactor and
• 3:39
  build high for happiness. I'm here today with a rather
• 3:44
  sinister zombie ish looking Michael Mills.
• 3:48
  Michael, why don't you introduce yourself with your Kang name?
• 3:52
  I'm billboard and all the Lib Dem Kangs are on alive.
• 3:55
  Oh, you sound even more Grangeual than they do in the TV
• 3:58
  show, you know. Yeah, there's a general to get
• 4:01
  straight into it. There's a certain tone with the
• 4:02
  Kangs of someone's too scared to sniff glue, isn't there?
• 4:07
  Have you seen that that YouTube video?
• 4:11
  It's a wonderful parody of Grange Hill, right?
• 4:13
  And it sounds like a cross between the Kangs and Ace.
• 4:17
  From the Andrew. Cartmel era, all the dialogue,
• 4:20
  the inflections, the sort of shitty non swearing, all of it.
• 4:24
  It's like, my God, there's the inspiration right there.
• 4:27
  Marvelous stuff. Michael, I believe you are
• 4:31
  responsible for us reading Paradise Towers today, so please
• 4:34
  explain yourself. Yeah, because we've done a
• 4:37
  couple of target novelisations in the past.
• 4:40
  We did The Giggle and we did The Gunfighters with Mr. James Lark,
• 4:44
  2. Bangers.
• 4:46
  Two absolute bangers, but but we sort of made life easy for
• 4:52
  ourselves talking about them because they both build on the
• 4:56
  TV versions of their respective stories in quite big and
• 4:59
  conspicuous ways. You know, there's a heck of a
• 5:01
  lot going on in the Gunfighters that's not there on the screen.
• 5:03
  And the giggle does all sorts of whimsy that you can't possibly
• 5:08
  capture on iPlayer. So I thought, well, you know,
• 5:13
  is, is there no point doing Doctor Who and the Invisible
• 5:17
  Enemy or similar? But they thought actually,
• 5:20
  sometimes what might be interesting is to if we could
• 5:23
  look at a book where it is ostensibly quite close to the TV
• 5:28
  version, but maybe in taking away the production side we get
• 5:32
  a different view of the story that's being told.
• 5:36
  Well, I'm also intrigued to have this conversation with you as
• 5:39
  well because you have eluded to in previous episodes, including
• 5:43
  your top ten list that we did in a hurry in the park that the
• 5:49
  Sylvester McCoy era targets. Certainly the latter end of them
• 5:54
  are, you think are some of the better Doctor Who books.
• 5:58
  Oh yeah, I mean, all right, thinking people know that season
• 6:02
  26 is astonishing series of Doctor Who, but that run of
• 6:07
  novelisations is God's dear battlefield ghost, like the
• 6:12
  curse of Fenrik survival. You read those four books, put
• 6:16
  them out in a box, put them out in one of those collected
• 6:18
  Penguin editions, Michael, you would think that Doctor Who in
• 6:23
  1989 was going to run and run and run for a million years.
• 6:27
  I had great fun talking about survival with David Gillespie
• 6:30
  Pratt, which was far rougher and more violent than the TV version
• 6:36
  and it could be. And I had a wonderful time
• 6:39
  talking about remembrance of the, which was, you know, the
• 6:42
  first new adventure effectively. And you and I and James Locke in
• 6:47
  the future are going to be talking about Battlefield, which
• 6:50
  used to regard extremely highly. But still amongst the stories in
• 6:56
  the Sylvester McCoy era, there's still, you know, stuff like the
• 6:59
  greatest show in the Galaxy there.
• 7:01
  There's Cursor Fenrick that I haven't covered, you know, Ghost
• 7:04
  Light, What did you choose? I mean, we've already said it,
• 7:07
  but please go ahead. Yes, as the listeners who have
• 7:11
  eyes or ears will be aware, we are talking about Paradise
• 7:16
  Towers by Steven Wyatt. I'm really pleased you chose the
• 7:20
  story from season 24, the much maligned season 24.
• 7:25
  I'm very keen on this year and I do have an an ice breakout,
• 7:30
  shall I say, an ice hot question for you at the start.
• 7:34
  And that is the man who I probably think is responsible
• 7:37
  for the show having something of a renaissance in his last three
• 7:42
  years, the classic series. Andrew Cartmail.
• 7:45
  What on earth do you think, Michael Mills, that he brought
• 7:49
  to Doctor Who because things changed?
• 7:52
  They they did, didn't they? Conspicuously.
• 7:55
  And I'm just listening to a couple of your very excellent
• 7:58
  commentaries with Dylan Rees of this parish about the first few
• 8:02
  stranger videos recently. And there you made a surprise.
• 8:07
  What have you made? A surprisingly intelligent
• 8:08
  point, which was that it would make surprisingly.
• 8:12
  It would have made a lot of sense if Season 24, the first
• 8:15
  Sylvester McCoy series, had followed on from the
• 8:19
  cancellation. So Doctor Who we watch
• 8:23
  Revelation of the Daleks with the Colin Baker end of his first
• 8:26
  series, a Doctor Who's off there.
• 8:27
  It's cancelled. Michael Grade got rid of it
• 8:29
  along with the beauty pageants and all the other crap that you
• 8:32
  felt had been accruing within the schedules for a long time.
• 8:35
  Him. And was it Jonathan Powell, the
• 8:36
  head of drama? Do you?
• 8:40
  Know what they cared so little about?
• 8:42
  Doctor Who. Yeah.
• 8:43
  That when he was interviewed about it recently, grade.
• 8:46
  He didn't even realize it came back after the hiatus for four
• 8:50
  years. He thought it only had a year
• 8:51
  and then it gone. I mean, he says that that has if
• 8:56
  if he very. Naughty man.
• 8:58
  If he were the sort of the sort of person who would attend one
• 9:00
  that has the air of a convention anecdotes, doesn't it?
• 9:04
  I'd say they cared so little about Doctor Who that they
• 9:08
  brought it back because that was the bizarre thing, right?
• 9:11
  That there was such an outcry. They thought, you know what?
• 9:14
  It's not worth. It's not worth the effort of us
• 9:16
  not making this. OK.
• 9:17
  It's however much from the drama budget.
• 9:20
  Let's just do it and leave it to die.
• 9:23
  And I mean, in in Richard Marsden's excellent biography of
• 9:27
  John Nathan Turner, he interviews Russell T Davis.
• 9:30
  So he sort of has this sort of Russell T Davis has this sort of
• 9:33
  coric function and is utterly scathing.
• 9:36
  And his his take on all of this, which I think is the right one,
• 9:39
  is it said if you want, if they wanted to cancel Doctor Who in
• 9:43
  1985, that was entirely within their rights.
• 9:46
  And there were, there were arguably good reasons for doing
• 9:48
  it, you know? They come back and bite him on
• 9:51
  the butt. You know Michael Beals.
• 9:52
  But stick by your guns and do it.
• 9:55
  And if you'll and leave it, and if you're going to bring it
• 9:58
  back, then bring it back and support it.
• 10:00
  Don't just bring it back and leave it to die, which is what
• 10:02
  they did, really. And so then you got the try of
• 10:04
  the Time Lord, which is an insanity of a series.
• 10:07
  Whatever you might think of the individual episodes, the idea
• 10:09
  that the idea that you, you have been, you have had your reprieve
• 10:13
  and it's being brought back and they don't change anything other
• 10:17
  than that. You put out 14 episodes of a
• 10:20
  sustained critique of the very show that you're making that.
• 10:24
  Is in. Danger of being.
• 10:26
  Cancelled. I mean, it's bold if nothing
• 10:28
  else. We sometimes actually talk about
• 10:30
  the wilderness year stuff here a lot and we say did the BBC know
• 10:34
  this was happening or this shows no one was paying attention?
• 10:37
  I think Trial of the Time Lord shows no one was paying
• 10:39
  attention right. And yet.
• 10:41
  And yeah of course that all kind of led to crisis didn't it
• 10:43
  because it was such a a shocking way to production to to to
• 10:48
  produce ATV show and approach its revival.
• 10:51
  Eric Saywood script editor leaves John Nathan Turner has to
• 10:56
  get a new person in. By all accounts this is what
• 10:59
  here such bad bloods between them that not only did he not
• 11:02
  want Eric Saywood back he didn't want anyone relate.
• 11:04
  You had any working relationships which has the
• 11:06
  happy result of meaning we get a load of new writers joining the
• 11:11
  show in in season 24 with a new script editor.
• 11:15
  I mean, I have a feeling that karma would have gone that way
• 11:18
  anyway. He wouldn't have relied on old
• 11:20
  hands. He knew a lot of young people
• 11:22
  that were desperate to write, you know, imaginative stuff.
• 11:25
  Yeah. And I think Jonathan Turner was
• 11:27
  both was was was for a variety of reasons minded to go along
• 11:32
  with that, even if it wasn't. Maybe that's maybe the bad
• 11:36
  blooded convention story, but either way I think you get the
• 11:40
  sense that he was stepping back a little bit sometimes in this
• 11:43
  era. Do you know what's super
• 11:44
  interesting very quickly, because we'll move on from JNT,
• 11:48
  is when you read Cartmel's account of JNT, it's such a
• 11:52
  balanced view in that he says, you know what, he had his fault
• 11:56
  flaws. He wanted to add things to the
• 11:58
  script that we didn't need. He could have tantrums.
• 12:02
  He didn't want to work with people that were good.
• 12:05
  You know, all of that stuff. But also, you know, he he had
• 12:08
  the tenacity to pull great show of the Galaxy back and get it on
• 12:12
  the screen when literally nobody else could have done that.
• 12:15
  You had to fight tooth and claw for it that he pulled in
• 12:18
  astonishing actors like Cartwell gives a very, I think more
• 12:23
  positive than negative reading on JNT.
• 12:25
  And it's so interesting that Eric Saywood strikes me as a
• 12:29
  very meek, and I'm not a man who can fight his corner.
• 12:34
  Yeah. He doesn't strike me as somebody
• 12:35
  who's good with conflict. Clearly, Cartmel, a younger man
• 12:39
  who's got fire in his blood. Yeah.
• 12:41
  And JNT tries to treat Cartmel in 24 the way he was treating
• 12:47
  Eric Saywood. And on a location shoot, Cartmo
• 12:50
  goes, I'm going back to London. I do not want to be around you.
• 12:54
  I'm going back to London. This is not the job I signed up
• 12:56
  for. Good luck.
• 12:58
  I walked away, went back to London and JNT, to his credit,
• 13:02
  picked up the phone, apologized to him, said please come back.
• 13:05
  And from that day on, they started working together.
• 13:08
  And it's almost like at that point, I think it was still in
• 13:10
  the banner, man. You can see the era shaping.
• 13:13
  And it's a producer and a script editor working together.
• 13:18
  Yes, 100%. So you asked what, what did
• 13:21
  Andrew Cartmel bring? And I think the truth is that he
• 13:25
  brought a confidence, a youthful confidence.
• 13:29
  It's a cliche, but I think it's true.
• 13:31
  You know, this was his first big telly job, wasn't it?
• 13:33
  He'd be working for an IT company when he got the call up,
• 13:36
  I think to come and be script editor of Doctor Who.
• 13:39
  He knew young writers who wanted to do it.
• 13:41
  He had interesting ideas of what he wanted to do with Doctor Who.
• 13:45
  I think it's been spoken about a lot.
• 13:46
  You know, I'm going to, I'm going to say the name Alan
• 13:49
  Moore, but also others, you know, he he was, he was a he was
• 13:52
  a geeky young guy in 1987 who had been seeing the ways in
• 13:58
  which so many other long running science fantasy characters had
• 14:06
  been reinvented and how they've been used to explore these, you
• 14:08
  know, writers like Alan Moore, like Neil Gaiman, like Frank
• 14:11
  Miller, all these and, and, and many as well as everything
• 14:14
  that's going on back home in the UK in 2000 AD and I think wanted
• 14:19
  to bring some of that to Doctor Who and I think.
• 14:21
  He clearly consumed a lot of comics, right, because I think
• 14:25
  he he brings a visual eye to his scripts.
• 14:29
  There's just stuff in his era that I just can't see anywhere
• 14:32
  else but it belongs on. I mean Paradise Towers is a
• 14:35
  great example that pool cleaner you know that belongs in a full.
• 14:38
  Page comic strip with Mel being grabbed under the water by that
• 14:42
  crabby robot in the pool and stuff like that.
• 14:46
  Yeah, and dragon fire even more so.
• 14:49
  And I think although season 24 tends to have the reputation of
• 14:52
  being the weakest of Sylvester Mccoy's three series, I think
• 14:56
  that's probably still true. At least as received wisdom
• 14:59
  goes. It has had a little bit of a a
• 15:02
  little bit of a renaissance. I think with that time, people
• 15:05
  are able to appreciate and maybe because the opinion had got so
• 15:08
  low of it, people are able to come back to it going, oh, let's
• 15:10
  have a look at this heap of trash, shall we?
• 15:12
  And go actually, do you know what?
• 15:14
  There's some really good stuff in here.
• 15:16
  And I think even more so since, and I'm very proud of you, Joe,
• 15:18
  for not doing this in your podcast.
• 15:20
  So, so many Doctor Who podcasts have been built around the idea
• 15:24
  of doing the pilgrimage, of watching the whole thing in
• 15:27
  order that I think you've got a lot of fans seeing.
• 15:30
  On my head by my dad there. Thank you very much.
• 15:34
  I'm pretty really proud of you, Joe, that so many fans have done
• 15:39
  that and watched it in order. And now when you get to this
• 15:42
  point, and I think it is here, I think Paradise Towers is the
• 15:46
  point at which someone opens a window and you go, oh, thank
• 15:52
  fuck for that. It is the first story since
• 15:55
  Vengeance of Varos to have no continuity in it whatsoever.
• 16:00
  And before Varos it's something like Castro Valva or something
• 16:05
  like no Castro Alva got constant.
• 16:06
  I don't know. But there's there's only a
• 16:08
  handful of stories in the 80s and they basically start here
• 16:12
  where there's no continuity and it's just full of original
• 16:15
  ideas. Yeah, he does.
• 16:17
  Sort of. I know.
• 16:18
  I think he has on occasion referred to himself as the
• 16:20
  showrunner of Doctor Who, Andrew Cartmel.
• 16:22
  This is And there is. I don't.
• 16:24
  Think that's unfair? I don't think it's unfair,
• 16:25
  certainly. I mean, I know that would
• 16:27
  literally have been his role. I know, I know in terms of what
• 16:30
  what the title showrunner means, he didn't do that, I don't
• 16:32
  think. But I think there is something
• 16:36
  of he's the he's the first script editor who comes in with
• 16:40
  AI would argue a very clear vision of how to do new things
• 16:44
  with Doctor Who in a different way and a very clear idea of
• 16:47
  refreshing it. I think others have come in and
• 16:48
  changed things, Season 7 being a very good example.
• 16:52
  But I think there is such a turn into a new and and sudden turn
• 16:58
  into a new decade. It almost feels like Doctor Who
• 17:04
  had been stalling and stalling soil.
• 17:05
  What, what did Andrew Cartmel bring?
• 17:07
  Andrew Cartmel brought the late 80s to Doctor Who.
• 17:10
  Suddenly you watch, you watch Paradise Towers.
• 17:13
  And for all of its production limitations, it feels like it's
• 17:17
  made by people who have been absorbing media that wasn't that
• 17:24
  that was in cinemas. That was cool.
• 17:25
  The, the, the young kids who would like Doctor Who.
• 17:30
  Yeah. A new audience.
• 17:31
  It feels like he's trying to bring a new audience in.
• 17:33
  I think one of the things that is brilliant about this era of
• 17:35
  Doctor Who, when you watch it back, and in some ways it's more
• 17:37
  obvious in something like Paradise Towers than more
• 17:39
  obviously celebrated episodes, is it looks like a really good
• 17:44
  kids show from 1987. And, and, and that also makes
• 17:48
  sense of a lot of its flaws, right.
• 17:49
  And suddenly, you know what? This is for kids.
• 17:52
  This is for 12 year olds who want to watch Doctor Who.
• 17:54
  And what do 12 year olds, 10 year olds, 11 year olds want to
• 17:58
  watch in 1987? Well, they all they want to
• 18:02
  watch all the stuff. They're just a bit too young to
• 18:04
  watch all that they don't yet know about.
• 18:05
  You know that this is like the older brother saying read 2080
• 18:09
  or you'd like Alan Moore when you're older.
• 18:12
  Or have you, have you have you seen, have you seen Rambo or
• 18:16
  Commando and stuff like that? You know, it's really good.
• 18:20
  It's for the first. Is that are we supposed to be?
• 18:22
  Is it? We'll get on to this.
• 18:25
  For the first time since about 1980.
• 18:28
  It feels like the people making Doctor Who have realised that
• 18:31
  the opposition isn't the final series of Blake 7.
• 18:35
  Yeah, absolutely. I, I think as well he has the
• 18:39
  bravery to try really wild things as well, far more so than
• 18:44
  say it was. There was a touch of it in
• 18:47
  Davidson's time, I think. But then we got very safe and
• 18:49
  very sort of looking to the past and having the latest sideman
• 18:53
  story, the latest Dalek story, whatever.
• 18:55
  If Cartmel's doing continuity, if he's looking back, he has
• 18:58
  something to say about all the things he's unit, the Cybermen.
• 19:03
  I mean, he's trying to make the Nazi parallel.
• 19:04
  I'm not sure what's going on, the Daleks especially, but on
• 19:08
  the whole he's pushing forward. He's absolutely pushing the show
• 19:11
  in a brand new dressing. I think he brings a sense of the
• 19:13
  domestic to Doctor Who as well, which we haven't had for a long
• 19:16
  time. We're in people's houses, you
• 19:19
  know, people have family relationships.
• 19:22
  Can you imagine anyone in the in the previous seven years of
• 19:26
  Doctor Who doing anything as normal as use a vending machine?
• 19:32
  No. It just doesn't.
• 19:34
  It doesn't, You know, we're obviously not back in the the
• 19:38
  present day with Paradise Towers, but we are in this sort
• 19:41
  of parallel reality where a lot of speculative fiction and
• 19:45
  science fiction often exists. You know, we've mentioned 2008
• 19:48
  any number of times already, but another name we're going to
• 19:51
  mention again, JG Ballard or William Golding, you know,
• 19:55
  these, these these sort of people.
• 19:57
  Often it, it's, it's, it's to that one side, right?
• 20:00
  It's a world, one step side. And I really like that because
• 20:03
  it allows this tension between the domestic and the
• 20:05
  fantastical. And you know what, I'm going to
• 20:06
  critique myself. I said, ignorantly me a moment
• 20:09
  ago, that he was the first script editor to come in with a
• 20:12
  clear vision of how they could change.
• 20:13
  Doctor Who, of course. Christopher H bid me.
• 20:15
  Christopher H bid me, but the difference is I.
• 20:17
  Think that I did. Think I.
• 20:19
  But the difference is, as I'm sure you also thought, Andrew
• 20:22
  Cartmel. He came across as somewhat less
• 20:25
  contemptuous of his audience. And of the show.
• 20:29
  And of what had just come, I think he sort of said, you know
• 20:31
  what that worked for what it was, but let's try this.
• 20:35
  Yeah, yeah, there is with Paradise Towers.
• 20:37
  So let's talk about the TV version of it.
• 20:38
  And we're not going to conflate the TV version and the book
• 20:41
  version, as so many people on Goodreads do.
• 20:44
  So many, honestly. Oh, it's like 3 paragraphs on
• 20:48
  the TV series and a tiny bit at the end saying, yeah, the
• 20:50
  novel's all right. The novel's quite like the TV
• 20:52
  version. Yeah, without Richard Bryers.
• 20:56
  That's what everybody was saying.
• 20:57
  Without that Richard Bryers performance in episode 4.
• 21:00
  Yeah, Richard Bryers gets a bit of a hard rap, really, because
• 21:03
  it's the Kragnon performance in episode 4 that's the problem.
• 21:06
  First 3 episodes playing the chief caretaker for what?
• 21:08
  For what the episode as it is produced wants to achieve.
• 21:11
  He he does exactly the performance that he's been cast
• 21:13
  to give, right? I think it's great.
• 21:15
  Yeah. This apartment is substantially
• 21:18
  larger. You know, It's wonderful.
• 21:21
  I don't even mind him as Cragnon.
• 21:23
  Why should a zombie be cool looking?
• 21:25
  Why can't he be looking a bit spasmodic and weird?
• 21:28
  You're controlling a body that you're not used to controlling.
• 21:30
  It's fine and we're doing it already.
• 21:35
  Well, this is fine. I think we should establish our
• 21:37
  feelings on the TV version before we move on to talking
• 21:39
  about the novelization, right? I think the TV version has huge
• 21:44
  conflict between what's on the page and what director Nicholas
• 21:49
  Mallett does with it, but there is enough on the page to make
• 21:55
  those 4 episodes absolutely worth watching that it's
• 21:58
  certainly in the world building. I think the designers do a
• 22:02
  pretty good job of Paralyzed House as well.
• 22:05
  Yeah, I think it's it's very watchable.
• 22:09
  But like a lot of Season 24, it's kind of camp but very
• 22:17
  sinister underneath that camp, and it's an uneasy mix.
• 22:22
  Yeah, I would. I would agree with that
• 22:24
  assessment. As I actually said to you before
• 22:25
  we started recording, Paradise Towers is a form of Doctor Who
• 22:29
  that is philosophically defensible, but you wouldn't
• 22:32
  show it to anyone who didn't normally watch Doctor Who.
• 22:35
  And there's lots of reasons for that.
• 22:36
  The, as you say, the production, the staging is very stagy.
• 22:40
  Everybody lined up in front of the camera.
• 22:42
  They bring things in a line. The sort of performances that
• 22:45
  are going on in, in the background, even from, you know,
• 22:47
  really, you know, some some really quite good actors in
• 22:51
  there as well. It's not that problematic.
• 22:52
  It's just they're working against what the script wants to
• 22:54
  be, which is the script wants to be this darkly comic horror
• 22:59
  satire, and yet a lot of. JNT is producing it.
• 23:05
  And JNT is producing it, so everyone's wearing panto
• 23:07
  clothes, right? And those poor can girls have
• 23:10
  you know it's their first time in ATV studio.
• 23:13
  God bless them all. There is a.
• 23:16
  Staginess to those. I mean, you know, if you were
• 23:18
  doing this now, they'd be fairer, wouldn't he, those
• 23:20
  girls? Oh, 100% I mean, but this is
• 23:24
  where the potential is. It's much easier to imagine
• 23:27
  Paradise Towers being made for 21st century Doctor Who than it
• 23:30
  is a lot of a lot. Again, arguably some better
• 23:35
  remembered stories. I think it's easier to remember
• 23:38
  imagine Paradise Towers being made in let's say 2000 and five,
• 23:41
  2006 than it actually is Ghost Light if I'm being completely
• 23:45
  honest with you. Well, Ghost Light seems so of
• 23:49
  it's time to me. Yeah, that's why where is where
• 23:52
  is Paradise Towers fits into a into a continuum of Doctor Who
• 23:55
  with the long game or gridlock. You know, they're the same sorts
• 23:58
  of worlds. Easily.
• 23:59
  Like, I don't want to criticize because I've got some really
• 24:02
  good things to say about the Doctor and Mel, certainly in the
• 24:05
  book, but you could swap out pretty much any Doctor and
• 24:09
  companion. There's nothing definitively.
• 24:12
  This has to be the 7th Doctor and it has to be male.
• 24:14
  You just need a curious doctor. And a plucky young assistant to
• 24:19
  be in this story. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 24:22
  And I think there is, there is a feeling throughout it of a new
• 24:28
  world being born even as an old one dies.
• 24:30
  You know, there's a lot still there of the problems that
• 24:33
  Doctor Who was having it's production up to this point.
• 24:37
  But but some sight of the sight of the world.
• 24:41
  That is a coming. Well, actually, you mentioned
• 24:44
  that it's quite a camp series. It's a famously camp series.
• 24:46
  I mean, when they did the when they did the Blu-ray trailer,
• 24:48
  that was basically how camp can we possibly make this?
• 24:52
  Is that the 24 karat? One the 24 karat 1 the Blue Kang
• 24:57
  leader selling her travel company.
• 25:02
  I did. The best material committed to a
• 25:04
  film with Mel in it, you know, in the last couple of years.
• 25:09
  That is a leading. That's that's bait, Yeah.
• 25:13
  But I do think Paradise Towers is the one story of the season
• 25:18
  where the camp undercuts it or the story because I think time,
• 25:24
  I think Delta and the banner man, it's all part of sort of
• 25:27
  1950s milia. I think Dragon Fire is going for
• 25:30
  this big glitzy 2000 AD Halo Jones sci-fi, of which maybe the
• 25:36
  balance isn't there, but camp is definitely a part of money.
• 25:38
  Out there, that's the. Problem.
• 25:40
  No, those billowing curtains of ice.
• 25:44
  We stood an authorisation of dragon fire at some point, and I
• 25:47
  mean time in the run, if you didn't have the camp, there'd be
• 25:49
  nothing left, right? That is a leading statement.
• 25:55
  But Paradise Towers, I do worry that that that camp is acting
• 26:00
  against what the what the TV story wants to do.
• 26:03
  Having Croagnon in the sparkly silver suit, having the Kangs
• 26:08
  with their brilliantly made-up hair, It doesn't act.
• 26:11
  It's it's working against what the world that the script is
• 26:15
  trying to produce should look like in order to have its
• 26:18
  effect. So you said something to me on a
• 26:22
  message which really helped when I was reading the book and you
• 26:27
  basically said divorce yourself from the TV show and just read
• 26:31
  it as the book. I just want your exact words.
• 26:32
  But that was what you were saying to do, just take the book
• 26:34
  on its own terms. What really stood out to me was
• 26:38
  it's effectively a blow by blow account of what happens on the
• 26:43
  screen without much. There's a self you can't be some
• 26:48
  funny bits and things like that. It feels completely different in
• 26:52
  prose in my head, which means it's all there in the script,
• 26:57
  hits the screen. It's all there in the script
• 26:59
  because it's there in the book in a Yeah, the tone is very,
• 27:02
  very different. Oh yeah, and there'll now be
• 27:04
  some light jazz music as we move into the bit where we talk about
• 27:07
  the novelisation. Do do do.
• 27:09
  I'll put in the prospectus music from Paradise Tower.
• 27:13
  Marvellous. OK.
• 27:16
  And so the novelisation, yeah, So question, question for you,
• 27:21
  Joseph Ford. Sorry, trash compactor.
• 27:25
  Did you see the TV version in your head when you were reading
• 27:31
  the novelization? Yes and no an.
• 27:37
  Intriguing response that requires greater illustration.
• 27:42
  I think I saw my version of the TV version.
• 27:44
  I think I'm, I, I got a greater sense of the play, the, the
• 27:48
  scale of Paradise towers. It wasn't just the same square
• 27:52
  we get coming back to in the book.
• 27:54
  It felt big and it felt dirtier and the kids felt rougher and,
• 28:01
  and all of that I could conjure in my head.
• 28:03
  Unfortunately, some of those images from the TV show, you
• 28:06
  know, the the lights on the top of CRO Agnon, they're just so
• 28:09
  ridiculous and stuck in my head that the second he's down in in
• 28:12
  the basement and he's going hungry.
• 28:15
  All I can see is those neon lights.
• 28:17
  He can tell me this scary red lights coming out of the smoke
• 28:21
  as much as he likes. There is something of the Sesame
• 28:24
  Street about Paradise Towers, isn't there?
• 28:27
  Yeah, what if Sesame Street create a horror movie?
• 28:30
  There it is. But he adds little touches as
• 28:34
  well, Blood on can clothes that the rat's teeth of the resi's.
• 28:41
  I mean, all this stuff which we'll get into, which just made
• 28:44
  it a bit edgier and a bit more dangerous.
• 28:48
  So I think I, yeah, I think in my head it was a lot scarier on
• 28:52
  the page. But also as well, because the
• 28:55
  lights were being said in such a overtly theatrical way, they
• 29:00
  were funnier as well. I was laughing at certain points
• 29:03
  in the book as well. There was some proper wit in
• 29:05
  this. So mostly, yes, occasionally,
• 29:07
  no. That that TV show, the imagery
• 29:10
  of some of it is just so potent. It's jammed in my head.
• 29:14
  Yeah, yeah. I think unless you're reading an
• 29:17
  authorization of ATV version that you're really not familiar
• 29:20
  with and and even then haven't seen production stills off,
• 29:22
  you're always going to have the legacy, aren't you?
• 29:24
  I think when I, well, when I was reading it, I was actually
• 29:27
  reminded of maybe because it's the 7th Doctor way back to my
• 29:30
  take. It was taken right back to the
• 29:33
  start of my Doctor Who reading and remembered what Robert Perry
• 29:35
  and Mike Tucker said about their 7th Doctor in Ace books, which
• 29:39
  was that they always wanted to try and produce the wide screen
• 29:42
  version of McCoy era Doctor Who. So the stories were kind of
• 29:48
  totally consistent with what you would have got then, but the
• 29:51
  budget was so much bigger and the scale of it was so much
• 29:53
  larger. You remember those enormous
• 29:55
  cruel monsters coming out of the sea on Coralie?
• 29:58
  We are doing storm harvest one of these days.
• 30:00
  Oh no. It's fabulous.
• 30:03
  And that was what I saw got hit. You know, you can't get rid of
• 30:05
  the sets, but if you let, if you relax your mind's eye a bit and
• 30:09
  then suddenly, as you say, as they're described here, those
• 30:12
  the corridors aren't corridors, they're streets, right?
• 30:15
  And the swimming pool really is this magnificent.
• 30:19
  Useful marble floors, you know, not just a couple of pot plants
• 30:24
  in the corner. And some very obvious set
• 30:26
  dressing. No, and the, the, the, the
• 30:29
  cleaning robot is this sort of mechanical crab that sounds like
• 30:32
  it's out of Sonic the Hedgehog or something, but monstrous.
• 30:35
  And, and the, the, the basement where Kragnon is, that's just
• 30:39
  this vast industrial space with this, these blah in my head,
• 30:43
  like this blast door keeping back a furnace behind that opens
• 30:47
  up and, and you've basically got, you know, a pit into hell
• 30:51
  there. I mean, you take away that
• 30:52
  production and you see it. What's fascinating about
• 30:55
  Paradise Towers? For every good reads of you
• 30:57
  saying this is one of the closer adaptations compared to the
• 31:01
  superior novelizations of Battlefield and The Curse of
• 31:04
  Frederick. Oh, you've met them, have you?
• 31:07
  Oh, we've met. We've all met them, Joe.
• 31:10
  Half of the people that are on this podcast, yeah.
• 31:14
  We're not here to name names, but the listeners can fill in
• 31:16
  the blanks. And I think you're right.
• 31:20
  What you get when the production isn't there is it lays bare the
• 31:23
  intent of the script, which is this story that OK, we're going
• 31:29
  to say it, we got it. However many minutes we got in
• 31:31
  Ring the Klaxon, we're going to say the one fact that everyone
• 31:35
  knows about Paradise Towers, which is that it was inspired by
• 31:39
  the novel High Rise by JG Ballard.
• 31:43
  Shock, horror. Ring the klaxon again.
• 31:46
  Joe Ford has read a book, but it's not a Doctor Who.
• 31:51
  That's right, faithful listeners.
• 31:52
  Joe did some research. I.
• 31:54
  Didn't I? Couldn't.
• 31:55
  Be buggered. Read it 13 years ago.
• 31:56
  It's only 200 pages. It's not long I'm.
• 31:59
  A busy. Man, I had Tom Hiddleston
• 32:01
  reading it in my ear and he's got a lovely voice.
• 32:03
  You know, for an audio book. And and what did you think of
• 32:09
  High Rise and its relationship to Paradise Towers?
• 32:11
  I loved High Rise. It has very little to do with
• 32:16
  Paradise Towers beyond the fact it is set inside a building that
• 32:21
  everybody lives in that has fallen to pieces.
• 32:25
  Beyond that, the similarities, they're just not there.
• 32:28
  High Rise starts with the place kind of functioning and you
• 32:33
  watch it falling apart. Paradise Tower starts, it's
• 32:36
  fallen apart. That's it.
• 32:37
  Society has gone to hell already so dramatically they're coming
• 32:41
  from very different places. Also, high rise very has a very
• 32:47
  clear sort of social commentary where the rich live at the top,
• 32:50
  the middle classes live in the middle, and the lower classes
• 32:53
  live at the bottom. And the there's some very
• 32:56
  interesting and ugly and uncomfortable and feces smeared
• 33:01
  and vomit induced stuff going on as this society falls apart and
• 33:05
  people decide that they don't want to play by the rules
• 33:08
  anymore and everyone gets a bit feral and nasty.
• 33:11
  It's very unpleasant and remarkably.
• 33:15
  Plausible. And in no way like Paradise
• 33:18
  Towers, in no way I mean, I, I, the structure of it, the tone of
• 33:24
  it, it's nothing like Paradise Towers at all.
• 33:26
  It's just that it's a building. That's the inspiration here.
• 33:29
  A building in which things have gone to shit, to use the phrase
• 33:33
  Yeah. I think there is a bit of a fan
• 33:35
  myth that's emerged among people who have seen Paradise Towers
• 33:38
  and not read high Rise, which is that Paradise Towers is somehow
• 33:41
  just high rise. And that's what I thought.
• 33:44
  Yeah, and it's the sort of shit I would be telling.
• 33:46
  You right now if I hadn't have read it.
• 33:48
  And this is one of the many ways in which doing this book club
• 33:50
  has improved you as a person, Joe.
• 33:53
  Yes, and. Just exposure to you, yeah.
• 33:57
  But I but I do. I wouldn't say there's no
• 33:59
  relationship. I think we'd just go back to
• 34:01
  it's inspired by, if you take the ideas and some of the
• 34:03
  aesthetics of high rise and you wrap that skin around the
• 34:08
  skeleton of a Doctor Who story, to use a needlessly grim phrase.
• 34:15
  Appropriate. Paradise Towers is what you get,
• 34:17
  and isn't some of that thing of taking ideas for adults and
• 34:22
  showing them to the more intelligent kind of child, which
• 34:25
  is this is how you introduce kids to these ideas that will
• 34:27
  then lead on to them reading High Rise or JG Ballard or
• 34:31
  William Golding even. There's a lot of William
• 34:33
  Golding. Yeah.
• 34:33
  I think a lot of this really comes through in the book
• 34:36
  because you don't have that lacking production.
• 34:39
  You don't have the lack of sense of scale.
• 34:41
  I think that's something you really get in in the novel is
• 34:44
  that scale. It is that sense.
• 34:45
  The Paradise House is huge. I mean, I think it's described
• 34:48
  here in passing as being a sort of artificial planetoid.
• 34:51
  It's a sort of nowhere place really on screen.
• 34:55
  You don't sort of deliberately don't get any sort of context.
• 34:58
  But here it literally is a world in in and of itself.
• 35:01
  The annoying thing about Paradise House on the screen is
• 35:03
  you get the start of every episode.
• 35:05
  You get that very unimpressive looking block, don't you?
• 35:09
  You're like, OK, so why don't they just leave, you know,
• 35:12
  Whereas on here it's that's it, that is the planet.
• 35:14
  Like you say, there is nowhere to go.
• 35:16
  It's just here. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 35:19
  And it, it looks a bit too nice and it doesn't.
• 35:21
  I've never felt that that exterior gels with the interior
• 35:25
  either, you know, it looks more like an office block or
• 35:28
  something. It doesn't.
• 35:29
  Whereas in my head when I'm reading this, when I'm reading
• 35:31
  the the book, I think you do get the better impression of
• 35:34
  Paradise Towers of being this, this brutalist epic piece of
• 35:40
  construction. You know, like like the Barbican
• 35:42
  on steroids or something like that.
• 35:45
  And if ever been in the Barbican, ever gone for a
• 35:47
  wander, ever tried to find the aviary in the bar in the
• 35:50
  Barbican? You ever tried to find the
• 35:52
  toilets in the Barbican in the interval you will be wandering
• 35:57
  for hours. All of the stairs in the wrong
• 35:59
  places so much. I felt the last time I went to
• 36:03
  Selfridges, you know? Well, and and did that lead to
• 36:07
  simile violence ends? Well, I can imagine if they were
• 36:09
  all locked in there, you know, there would definitely be a
• 36:11
  class war. There should be a Doctor Who
• 36:14
  story set in a Giant supermarket, shouldn't there?
• 36:16
  Well, a supermarket or a department store.
• 36:18
  There was going to be 1 in Patrick Troughton's time called
• 36:20
  the Big Store, but they made the faceless ones instead.
• 36:24
  Well, I'm going to set it in in Megamarket TMTMTM Do not touch,
• 36:29
  not touch creature. I'll tell you what I loved about
• 36:34
  the setting is, like, why it sets this up.
• 36:38
  Yeah, as almost textbook Doctor Who, right?
• 36:40
  Nasty villain down below, squabbling factions waiting to
• 36:44
  be united, sinister bureaucracy holding together this evil
• 36:49
  regime. What the Doctor has to do by the
• 36:51
  end of this is cut that red tape, unite the people, defeat
• 36:55
  the villain. It's tower block under siege.
• 36:57
  Yeah, but it's the the way he depicts the setting, it makes
• 37:02
  all of that feel original. The the the factions that he
• 37:07
  puts in there, the Kangs, the Rezis, the caretakers, all that.
• 37:10
  I mean, I sort of came away going.
• 37:12
  Yeah. That's, that is a a typical
• 37:14
  Doctor Who story there him going in, bringing people together,
• 37:17
  defeating the evil, going Actually, I've got some things
• 37:20
  to say about the end of the book as well.
• 37:22
  But yeah, I just thought the the details that he put in
• 37:26
  presenting the setting meant that all of those old, hoary old
• 37:29
  cliches of Doctor Who felt really fresh, felt it felt
• 37:32
  original. Well, because you know what he's
• 37:35
  done. You only bloody well know what
• 37:37
  he's gone and done, which is that he's gone and dropped
• 37:40
  Doctor Who into the dystopian nightmare of Thatcher's Britain.
• 37:45
  So his. Face.
• 37:47
  Famously, The Happiness Patrol was a satire of Thatcherism and
• 37:50
  fate. Equally famously, Andrew
• 37:52
  Cartmel. When asked in his interview what
• 37:54
  do you hope to achieve as script editor of Doctor Who, he said to
• 37:57
  bring to Margaret Thatcher. You know, Michael, families are
• 38:01
  very important for people's happiness.
• 38:04
  I don't know what you're talking about.
• 38:06
  But again, with the book, because he's able to bet just
• 38:10
  with little details, I feel like Stephen Wyatt's here able to to
• 38:14
  get across that satirical element of what's going on
• 38:16
  because, you know, meant compared Paradise Towers to the
• 38:18
  Barbican. And this is a very British
• 38:21
  story. It's a very latter half of the
• 38:24
  20th century British story. It's it's that sort of miserable
• 38:27
  ISM this idea that we leapt towards the future and it was
• 38:30
  shit that we we built this, the war happens and we were going to
• 38:36
  be reborn out of it with all of this great architecture, cities
• 38:40
  in the sky, you know, streets in the sky.
• 38:42
  That was the phrase like, that's what this is all echoing back
• 38:44
  to, right. And we all know these high rises
• 38:47
  became, you know, often not particularly sought after places
• 38:51
  to live because of some of the difficulties in in the way they
• 38:54
  were constructed and the way they were treated and the way
• 38:57
  the people living in them were treated, right.
• 38:59
  So I think it's deeply satirical.
• 39:01
  And this is coming out originally in 1987.
• 39:04
  This book is published in 1988. So it wasn't far turn around.
• 39:07
  And here in the book, you get this clear idea of who is being
• 39:10
  satirized here. So you've got you've got the the
• 39:13
  Kangs. And do you know what?
• 39:15
  I, I sort of got it for the first time with the book, which
• 39:17
  is they're meant to be drukes, right?
• 39:19
  They're meant to be drukes from Ashley Burgess's Clockwork
• 39:21
  Orange by way of the kids on the island from Lord of the Flies,
• 39:24
  right? These little girls that got left
• 39:26
  there and they've developed into these horrible gangs who OK the
• 39:30
  points made, they don't kill each other.
• 39:31
  That's a bit rubbish I think, but the point is that they've.
• 39:36
  Become Kangs UN alive. It's not the Kang way, you know,
• 39:39
  Michael. Boo Boo.
• 39:42
  Most effective moment. Of the whole team.
• 39:44
  Piggy die, and now let's eat him.
• 39:47
  Precisely, I mean the the the brilliance of opening it with
• 39:50
  the death of the last yellow Kang, right, because that gives
• 39:53
  you a dynamic world and it gives you a sense of threat.
• 39:56
  And here we get I think you can infer from the TV version that
• 39:59
  possibly the yellow Kangs were even the greatest, strongest
• 40:02
  tribe at one point, which was why they were haunted down.
• 40:03
  So this is this is really being wiped out but.
• 40:07
  But there is this idea of, you know, they are youth in revolt,
• 40:09
  that they are the demonized youth who, you know, in late
• 40:12
  80s, all, all the shopping, the old shopping ladies, the Rezis
• 40:15
  going through the, the, the shopping precinct where the
• 40:19
  fountains dried up years ago. That never worked in the 1st
• 40:23
  place anyway. Being threatened by these kids
• 40:25
  who actually are the products. I work in a shop in the middle
• 40:29
  of a town. This is more relevant now than
• 40:32
  it ever was, I'm telling you. But yet at the same time, he's
• 40:38
  also, you know, they are a a product of their society.
• 40:41
  And so he shows you the other elements of the society that led
• 40:43
  to the creation that these kids didn't come from nowhere, right.
• 40:45
  So the Rezis who are hiding themselves away from these kids,
• 40:48
  but who are in their own ways, certainly more selfish.
• 40:52
  The Kangs have a sense of society and friendship.
• 40:55
  And yet we, the only Rezis we meet, are an elderly lesbian
• 41:00
  cannibal couple and one of them who can't wait to jump into jump
• 41:05
  into their boots the moment they're dead right.
• 41:08
  Glorious. And that's before we get to the
• 41:10
  caretakers, who I will argue are a satire of the police as the
• 41:15
  paramilitary arm of an oppressive state.
• 41:17
  Oh, go on. That's as far as my a lab.
• 41:20
  Thesis. At some point I have to remember
• 41:22
  we're talking about a kids book from the late 80s.
• 41:24
  Well, but there's lots going on in it though.
• 41:26
  I think that's what we're coming to the conclusion of here.
• 41:28
  I also feel as well, Steven. White's in my head, all right,
• 41:30
  And he's meant to pull out all the things I'm absolutely
• 41:33
  terrified of. Yeah, right.
• 41:35
  Children that are out of control and might hurt me.
• 41:38
  Terrifying. Old people are really scary.
• 41:41
  I don't care what anyone says. All right?
• 41:43
  There is something sinister. Especially old women.
• 41:48
  And God almighty, I fucking hate being stuck together in red
• 41:52
  tape, bureaucratic red tape. I mean, they care, don't scare
• 41:55
  me, but they fucking annoy me. There's a lot in there for me to
• 41:58
  get hold of though, you know, And go, do you know what?
• 42:01
  Presented in the right way, this is all very scary, this place.
• 42:05
  And because, because the caretakers have their rules, but
• 42:09
  the rules aren't working right. They're trying to keep the space
• 42:11
  together and the whole place is falling apart.
• 42:14
  That feeling, that feeling of anarchy, ruling and chaos and
• 42:22
  that basically you can, you can, you know, capture a young girl
• 42:26
  and eat her and that one's going to stop you.
• 42:31
  That's really scary, right. And that high rise had a lot of
• 42:34
  that, a lot of fat society. We can do whatever we want.
• 42:39
  Yeah. And, and obviously this is PG13,
• 42:42
  it's Doctor Who, but it is there.
• 42:46
  No, it's 100% there. And the, the details that Steve
• 42:50
  for all that lot is taken out, it was stripped away, shall we
• 42:52
  say. The little details he chooses to
• 42:55
  add are all very telling, aren't they?
• 42:57
  So the Kang's armor is the Kang's outfits are here
• 43:01
  described as being vaguely resembling those of samurai,
• 43:03
  from which I think we take, you know, the idea that all panels
• 43:06
  made-up of stuff, which is a great image.
• 43:08
  And also Japanese stuff was really cool in the late 80s.
• 43:12
  So there's a little bit of your cultural awareness that wasn't
• 43:15
  necessarily present on scene, on screen.
• 43:18
  And we'll keep coming back to the rat's teeth because he
• 43:21
  mentions it a couple of times and it's such a potent image of
• 43:25
  this old woman with these hideous rat's teeth sort of
• 43:28
  scurrying, can't wait to get, you know, chomp her leg off.
• 43:32
  It's really scary. Oh, and the first first time Mel
• 43:34
  turns up at the Rezi's apartment, we do get the the
• 43:39
  implication that they are clearing away their previous
• 43:43
  victim. I mean, is there an element of
• 43:47
  the, you know, the the witch trying to get Hansel and Gretel
• 43:49
  into the oven of Tabby and Tilda?
• 43:52
  I was definitely getting getting hints of that.
• 43:55
  Yeah. I think there's definitely a bit
• 43:56
  of that and I think that. Her in with the cookies and the
• 43:59
  cream. Rest your little feet, my dear.
• 44:02
  Yeah, within this society, no one is nice.
• 44:06
  I mean, ultimately the Kangs and the Rezis are one rank because
• 44:08
  it's a Doctor Who story, but they are people who have to be
• 44:12
  very much saved from their own individualist age of greed.
• 44:18
  No such thing. There's no such thing as society
• 44:21
  in Paradise Towers until they are made to recognize their
• 44:26
  external the external threat which lies there to all of them.
• 44:32
  What about the language then? I think it's really interesting
• 44:36
  and this is where I mentioned the drew stuff from A Clockwork
• 44:38
  Orange, you know, with Nat Saturn, the the made-up language
• 44:41
  that Ansi Burgess, you know, this is, this is a book in the
• 44:45
  tradition for, I'm going to say 12A because I remember we were
• 44:48
  based in the UK audience, which is doing for that a book that
• 44:54
  is, that is drawing on JG Ballard and Anthony Burgess and
• 44:57
  and William Golding of, of the collapse of societies of the
• 45:03
  emergent, the re emergence of humanity's worst instincts
• 45:07
  against one another and the way which will ultimately all tear
• 45:10
  ourselves apart is quite bleak view of life.
• 45:13
  And so there's definitely an element of the of I think the
• 45:16
  droogs there about the Kangs in their conception absolutely does
• 45:20
  not come across. But again, in this sort of kids
• 45:23
  way, you know, why, why are they, why are the, why are they
• 45:26
  the blue Kangs, red kangs and the yellow kangs, right?
• 45:29
  Because it's, well, they're primary colours because it's
• 45:31
  childish. Hey, school houses, you know,
• 45:33
  they, when I was in primary school, they were our house
• 45:35
  colours. There's a bit of that.
• 45:37
  And then this emergent language that is based on their
• 45:41
  environment. And I think, you know, that's
• 45:42
  the key, that's the thing that's really making it clear if anyone
• 45:44
  who's not paying attention that they are products of Paradise
• 45:47
  Towers, they aren't. They are not to the threat.
• 45:50
  I think that sort of a doctored language, Yeah.
• 45:54
  In science fiction, it can go one or two ways.
• 45:56
  It can be very clever or just agonisingly terrible.
• 46:01
  I mean, I could really love a number of Star Trek episodes
• 46:04
  where they try and do this sort of thing, and it's, yeah, just
• 46:07
  don't watch them. But I think this is really
• 46:10
  clever because it makes sense of the world.
• 46:13
  Well, once you understand the world they're in, it helps you
• 46:15
  to make sense of the world they're in as well and how
• 46:18
  they've adapted to it. And it's witty and it's smart.
• 46:22
  I like things like, oh, he wants to how you do catch us if you
• 46:26
  can, you know, things like that. It's it's kids language, but
• 46:29
  it's sort of being adapted in really clever ways.
• 46:31
  Yeah, yeah, it serves, it serves a purpose here, doesn't it?
• 46:34
  It's meant to be witty, but it's also meant to be childish.
• 46:36
  I'm I remember it being one of the things that people used to
• 46:38
  hold up as being quote UN quote cringe worthy end quotes about
• 46:43
  paradise, how it was all of this language like, oh, it's a bit,
• 46:46
  it's a bit all bebop and rocksteady, isn't it?
• 46:48
  It's a bit of it's time, but it's meant to a baby.
• 46:51
  It is, but not in a bad way. It's meant to show that these
• 46:53
  are children that are developments being retarded
• 46:55
  because they've not had any adult supervision because
• 46:58
  they're adults aren't there, and the adults who are present have
• 47:00
  no interest in them other than either to ignore them or hide
• 47:05
  from them in the Rezis or to enforce the law upon them.
• 47:07
  I mean come on people, how deep a satire do you want?
• 47:11
  You need a sort of rough cockney accent.
• 47:14
  You don't need those feathered red wigs.
• 47:16
  That they're wearing. Like, do you know what I mean?
• 47:19
  As presented, it does come across very pony, but as red I
• 47:24
  just it was just very, very clever.
• 47:26
  What I also thought was clever was something that could have
• 47:29
  been annoying, which is the the caretakers rules and regulations
• 47:34
  and names. But why it's thought about that.
• 47:37
  And if you read them out loud, they all float.
• 47:40
  They all have a caretaking of a 345 structural Section 3, you
• 47:44
  know, and all of the lines they have as well.
• 47:46
  What's it? Hang on, I'm going to try and do
• 47:47
  one. Please bear with me.
• 47:50
  Report from floor 109. Chief.
• 47:53
  It's believed that two of the altars have fallen down.
• 47:56
  The standard XY2 waste disposal unit of it just all flows it.
• 48:01
  He's somebody who's written dialogue for the stage a lot and
• 48:04
  you can tell he can put words in people's mouths and that that
• 48:07
  could be really annoying because there's a lot of subsections.
• 48:12
  You know in this. It's very Douglas Adams, isn't
• 48:16
  it? At times the language.
• 48:17
  And they're exactly the right generation to have of writers to
• 48:20
  have, you know, really absorbed that 10 years.
• 48:22
  But the the cleaning robots, they've got a proper name.
• 48:24
  They're called Megapod cleaning robots, which is such a serious
• 48:28
  cybernetics core name, isn't it? But it is it's.
• 48:31
  Excited me aged 11 though, you know.
• 48:34
  Oh Megapod. My God, 100.
• 48:36
  Percent. I think if I I do sometimes
• 48:38
  wonder, you know, I was, I was kid in the 90s, so not quite the
• 48:45
  right age to have Doctor Who books in the school library.
• 48:47
  There was surprisingly one or two, but I think they were BBC
• 48:49
  books. And I do sometimes wonder if I'd
• 48:52
  found a an old Target novelization knocking around,
• 48:55
  would I have enjoyed it? And I'm not always sure.
• 48:58
  I think I'd have loved Paradise Towers.
• 49:00
  I'd have loved this one because of that wittiness.
• 49:03
  I had a that image of the pool cleaner grabbing mail.
• 49:08
  It never left my head. It was just the coolest thing
• 49:11
  I'd ever seen. So yeah, at the age 11, I
• 49:14
  absolutely loved it. Did you notice as well how the
• 49:16
  caretakers are all fat and lazy and slow in this as well?
• 49:22
  Whereas. And that was absolutely his
• 49:24
  idea. But unfortunately, in casting on
• 49:28
  the TV, you've got Clive Merrison and a few others.
• 49:31
  And they're, you know, it's it's not the only time this happens
• 49:34
  between Wyatt's vision and the people that are cast.
• 49:38
  Let's talk about pecs in a minute.
• 49:40
  But yeah, like, you really can see what Wyatt was going for,
• 49:44
  can't you, in the book? Yeah, they're they're all a bit
• 49:48
  too neat and tidy. They're all a bit too off as a
• 49:51
  court, apart from the one younger chap who hangs around
• 49:54
  with Clive Merrison with the slightly tatty, slightly tattoo
• 49:58
  uniform. That they, it doesn't suggest
• 50:01
  the time that's been appeared, that's been rundown or anything
• 50:03
  that has gone to seed. You know, I think the Paradise
• 50:05
  Towers in the book feels like an end point or a product of decay,
• 50:10
  whereas in the TV version those elements are just too in
• 50:13
  conflict. So you've got these really
• 50:14
  smartly pressed uniforms being walked around dirty streets.
• 50:18
  I mean it's a plot point later on, isn't it?
• 50:21
  He makes a point of saying it when the chief caretaker is
• 50:23
  taken over by Cragnon. He's a dirty, stained uniform,
• 50:28
  comes out pristine but. If he goes in pristine, well,
• 50:32
  you rather. Lose the point there.
• 50:35
  Yeah, exactly. And let's talk about Pex,
• 50:38
  because I think if there is one character or one element of the
• 50:41
  whole thing who's in who is completely revealed by the book,
• 50:48
  it is Pex. Because no, no critique of the
• 50:53
  ACT himself. We're not here for that.
• 50:58
  Pex is meant to be a take off of Rambo of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• 51:04
  Isn't he Schwarzenegger? Yeah.
• 51:06
  It's 1987, Doctor Who's taking the piss out of Stallone and
• 51:11
  Schwarzenegger? Of course it is.
• 51:12
  It's culturally aware again. And then they cast a Welsh
• 51:15
  theatrical agent and it cuts the feet out of the joke.
• 51:21
  It does. And the bit when you find out, I
• 51:24
  mean, he's portrayed as annoying, right?
• 51:26
  Because he's going around smashing in doors and tearing
• 51:29
  lights off and throwing them and all this.
• 51:31
  But there's no indication until the point hits in the book that
• 51:37
  he was a cowardly Cutler. He chose to not go and fight in
• 51:40
  the war. That's supposed to be a twist.
• 51:42
  It ain't A twist on TV, all right?
• 51:45
  No, when he when he comes bursting, when he comes.
• 51:49
  Slight plot problem. In Paradise Towers, there are
• 51:51
  two separate scenes in which Pex bursts into the rest of his
• 51:53
  apartment to save that, but they've got.
• 51:56
  Very efficient caretakers, you know, actually.
• 51:58
  We know they don't. Leaving that aside, when he
• 52:01
  makes his first appearance, bursting through the door to
• 52:04
  save Mel, it's meant to be a kind of Oh my God, finally
• 52:07
  someone who knows, you know, a hero finally in all of this.
• 52:10
  Who does it on screen. You go.
• 52:11
  Who's this short arse? But it makes a great moment of
• 52:15
  the second time that happens, doesn't it, where Mel is in a
• 52:18
  moment of extreme peril and he bursts through.
• 52:21
  He doesn't have a clue what's going on in there.
• 52:23
  The second he sees a knife, he's like, Oh my God, you know, tries
• 52:26
  to run away. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 52:30
  And I I, I saw the point of pecs within within this story here
• 52:36
  now. And yeah, but that just reminds
• 52:41
  you so much. What's going on on elsewhere?
• 52:43
  Shall we, shall we touch on Croagnon?
• 52:48
  Hungry. Go on.
• 52:51
  Yeah. Great Doctor Who name, right?
• 52:54
  It's a great doctor and I think he's a great.
• 52:55
  Villain. I think he's a great villain.
• 52:57
  So one of the things that's really great about Paradise
• 53:01
  Towers and like we've touched on it a little bit here, you know,
• 53:03
  all this domesticity, all of this satirical, recognizable,
• 53:09
  one world to the left type storytelling is that it is
• 53:13
  contrasted all the way through with the utterly fantastical and
• 53:18
  the transcendent. So all of this is happening
• 53:20
  inside a some of that is scale. So all of this is happening
• 53:24
  inside a skyscraper that is a planet in and of itself, but
• 53:27
  sometimes also about actually the world as it is being
• 53:30
  presented. What is all of this fitting
• 53:31
  into? You've got, you think about it
• 53:34
  and you've got this. It's all taking place in this
• 53:36
  tower, at the top of which is heaven and at the bottom of
• 53:41
  which is the devil. And this constant movement
• 53:44
  between heaven and hell the whole way through.
• 53:46
  And it's not an accident. I mean, again, I'm not wanting
• 53:49
  to disappear too far at my own arsenal.
• 53:51
  I realize that train has long since passed on this podcast,
• 53:54
  but there's a reason that they keep calling him the Great
• 53:56
  Architect, right? That's a phrase with meaning and
• 53:59
  history and it's not an accident the someone as smart as Stephen
• 54:01
  Wyatt is using that phrase. For those not aware, the Great
• 54:04
  Architect of the universe is a phrase from Christian theology.
• 54:07
  I think importantly for this most associated with Freemasonry
• 54:13
  and it's sort of a neutral term for referring to the Demiurge
• 54:17
  that that's which created the universe in and through
• 54:23
  Freemasonry scene in the form of an architect, the one who laid
• 54:25
  down the rules and and constructed the world that we
• 54:30
  cannot understand. And that's basically what's
• 54:34
  going on with Kragnol, right? That he is this, this dark gold,
• 54:37
  this this fallen Angel who was thrown out by his own creation
• 54:41
  and locked away, right. And I think some of that is even
• 54:46
  caught within his name, right. And maybe I'm reading too much
• 54:49
  into this, but I was thinking CRO Agnon.
• 54:51
  CRO Agnon. What's that reminding me of?
• 54:53
  And it's both a CRO Magnon, which is an early form of human
• 54:57
  settler, first human settlers in in Europe, I think.
• 55:00
  And and Freddy Krueger, because let's not remember Nightmare on
• 55:03
  Elm Street was effing huge on video at this time.
• 55:05
  And here we've got a story in which Undead the killer, tries
• 55:09
  to take it out on the children whose parents murdered him.
• 55:12
  So I don't, I genuinely don't think.
• 55:14
  That's I mean I didn't make the link but I do like that.
• 55:18
  Let's call it a new fact. Let's say.
• 55:19
  Let's say it's definitely the case.
• 55:20
  Absolutely, we were saying when I spoke to Stephen White and
• 55:23
  there's a Planet disc, he said that exactly to me.
• 55:25
  Thank you. But also, you know, this, these
• 55:29
  are ideas that are that, you know, we've got terms like
• 55:31
  paradise here, this being used at paradise.
• 55:34
  You know, we think of it as like late 80s kind of Club Tropicana
• 55:38
  drinks are free. But paradise is a phrase from
• 55:41
  all of this theology about heaven and hell and the roles of
• 55:44
  the mortals and, and overthrowing God's right.
• 55:47
  And the great architect even starts.
• 55:50
  You know, if I'm, if I'm getting particularly high on the Haribo,
• 55:53
  I start to think about things like, you know, William Blake
• 55:56
  and Eurozone, who was one of the figures from William Blake's
• 55:59
  legend, diary and mythology that he created who was one of the,
• 56:02
  was it 4 elemental beings? And was importantly, you've
• 56:05
  probably seen a picture of him because it turns up all the time
• 56:08
  of this figure who looks like God holding the compass points.
• 56:14
  Oh, down over creation. But importantly, it's not, it's
• 56:17
  not God, it's Urizan who is this primordial being who kind of
• 56:20
  believed himself to be God and was the one who set laws.
• 56:25
  And so is there kind of has this?
• 56:26
  Like Cragnon? Like Cragnon and there's this
• 56:28
  tension of being this kind of this dark God, this one who was
• 56:30
  assumed the place of of ruler over mortal men.
• 56:34
  And you go, I mean, I don't want to sound ridiculous, but this is
• 56:38
  all in there. And in the book, you really get
• 56:42
  that. I mean, it is very funny.
• 56:44
  It's all pulled down to the very mundane level of he designs
• 56:47
  buildings and heaven is an enormous swimming pool.
• 56:51
  Maybe that's the joke, right? But I think it is I think it's a
• 56:54
  joke. This is this is if this if this
• 56:57
  story were in 2018 would make complete sense.
• 57:00
  And all of that would make sense.
• 57:01
  And I think also that idea of it's almost a kind of like
• 57:04
  Manichaean worldview where you have this sort of light trans
• 57:07
  this this transcendent world of light and then the the mortal
• 57:11
  material realm that is dark, right?
• 57:14
  And it is the material world that that is dragging people
• 57:18
  down in all of this. But then it's not an accident.
• 57:21
  This is all about architecture either, because there is that
• 57:23
  whole thing of, you know, wisest crack on hate because they don't
• 57:25
  appreciate his creation. OK, that's God, but that is also
• 57:28
  architect, you know, is sort of form V function.
• 57:31
  It turns into this kind of manicurist worldview.
• 57:33
  I think when we talked about sick building on the podcast, we
• 57:36
  touched on. Frank Lloyd, definitely some
• 57:38
  parallels, isn't there? Yeah.
• 57:40
  And we talked. About before Waker Agnon, I'm
• 57:42
  seeing some parallels. And we talked about Frank Lloyd
• 57:45
  Wrights on that, you know, famous American architects built
• 57:48
  beautiful, stylish homes that look like nothing you'd believe,
• 57:52
  impossible to live in because wouldn't.
• 57:54
  Want to touch a thing? Well, and if anything breaks,
• 57:57
  it's thousands of dollars to replace them because every draw
• 58:02
  is uniquely built, you know, and that is the thing, as I
• 58:05
  understand it, in architecture of the Form V function debate,
• 58:08
  people have to live here versus how can we build something that
• 58:10
  is beautiful? Can you take this analogy to its
• 58:13
  conclusion then please with Croagnon?
• 58:16
  So him taking over the the chief caretaker towards the end of the
• 58:22
  story and walking him around and then sort of being defeated by a
• 58:26
  door knob fit that into your story.
• 58:31
  Dark God is reborn as man and is killed to save us from our sins.
• 58:37
  He's the Antichrist. Thank you.
• 58:40
  No further questions. Applause, applause.
• 58:44
  What I will say is, I mean, I don't know where to start with
• 58:47
  all that you just said. What I will say is.
• 58:51
  I thought the amount of back story you get about Kragnon is
• 58:54
  perfect. Yeah, it's enough to make the
• 58:57
  story makes sense. He did other.
• 59:00
  Buildings he murdered. A lot of people in those
• 59:02
  buildings, the people got together, they trapped him down
• 59:06
  underneath. That's all you need.
• 59:07
  Again, it's like a comic strip. It's what you get in the box at
• 59:10
  the start of a comic strip when you're going from 1 issue to
• 59:13
  another, you know? Yeah.
• 59:14
  And and I'm sure there is a fanish part of all of us that
• 59:19
  writes those good read reviews saying it's quite like the TV
• 59:22
  version that wants more explanation, that wants more
• 59:27
  background. It would be.
• 59:28
  So tedious though, wouldn't. It and counterproductive.
• 59:31
  You know his name was Howard Croagnon.
• 59:33
  He went to the he went to the, he went to the architecture
• 59:38
  school on Plexus 9. Miracle City was based on Miles
• 59:41
  and it got destroyed by the Daleks.
• 59:42
  You know all that bullshit. If this was a new, you know, a
• 59:45
  new Adventure 8 Doctor book, unfortunately we'd be 280 pages
• 59:49
  and you'd get all of that. Exactly but.
• 59:52
  William Blake I'm sure as well. Probably Stephen Wyatt, but as
• 59:59
  you say, he, you know, he's smart.
• 1:00:00
  Guy's written for the stage. He understands that actually
• 1:00:02
  what Paradise Towers needs is less context.
• 1:00:05
  It really it needs to be kind of taken back to its essential
• 1:00:08
  elements. To see what's going on is what
• 1:00:11
  you can. You can see it all moving so
• 1:00:13
  much more clearly in the book, can't you?
• 1:00:16
  It needs to be a contained setting, doesn't it?
• 1:00:18
  It needs to be a contained setting where nothing's
• 1:00:21
  happening outside of this story in order for it to feel as
• 1:00:24
  claustrophobic as it wants to be.
• 1:00:26
  But everybody to feel trapped inside even sort of Miracle City
• 1:00:30
  and all of that. It's a bit much.
• 1:00:31
  I don't need the details really. But unfortunately, we, we do
• 1:00:35
  know we need an explanation as to how we got down there in the
• 1:00:38
  basement. I mean, I don't know quite know
• 1:00:40
  how they did it or how he puts himself into the chief caretaker
• 1:00:45
  or any of that. But you know, it's science
• 1:00:46
  fiction. We'll go with it, you know?
• 1:00:49
  They do make the possession of the chief caretaker utterly
• 1:00:54
  horrific in the book, though. That's.
• 1:00:56
  Horrible, isn't it? Yeah, it's.
• 1:00:58
  Far more. It's less than.
• 1:00:59
  Richard Breyer's staring up at a bright light going, you know.
• 1:01:03
  It, it, it it's like, isn't it like lightning?
• 1:01:07
  The thing explodes. Tearing over his body the the
• 1:01:11
  Kraken on destroying the computer banks is his old body
• 1:01:14
  in order to do all this. And then when the chief
• 1:01:17
  caretaker comes out, he's this as he as we mentioned, there's
• 1:01:21
  this thing about his uniform having been bleached white by
• 1:01:26
  the power that is that has been has course through his body and
• 1:01:30
  these scrubs having the sort of wolfish grin.
• 1:01:32
  He's like, he's like the big bad wolf appearing and he's he's the
• 1:01:37
  complete opposite of Richard Buys performance, utterly
• 1:01:39
  charismatic, charismatic in the sense of his sort of animal
• 1:01:42
  magnetism effect on others. He commands the scene once he's
• 1:01:46
  there and you do think. Oh shit, the shit has hit the
• 1:01:50
  fan. I do think Wyatt Prose is a
• 1:01:53
  little underrated as well. Reading those good reads reviews
• 1:01:56
  and people didn't really, you know, they're going, oh, it's
• 1:01:58
  just, you know, script the page. But actually I took down some
• 1:02:01
  notes of some moments where he made me feel uneasy reading it
• 1:02:05
  because of the words he was choosing.
• 1:02:08
  There's a bit where Tabby and Tilda are talking to Maddie and
• 1:02:12
  she goes there's always something left behind.
• 1:02:13
  Rather an odd remark of Tilda's Maddie for order since she as
• 1:02:17
  she spoke she was pouring the bones leftover from the meal,
• 1:02:20
  which we know as a person, into the waste disposal unit.
• 1:02:24
  It made a rather alarming gurgling noise as the bones
• 1:02:27
  disappeared into its metal jaws. I was like that's horrible male
• 1:02:35
  trust up like a Turkey as the 2 old ladies bustled all over the
• 1:02:38
  kitchen, the waste disposal unit throbbing ghoulishly like he
• 1:02:43
  just makes the setting come alive.
• 1:02:45
  And I loved was when he makes the claw that comes out and
• 1:02:51
  drags them into the waste disposal unit.
• 1:02:53
  He says this the claw that had so terrified Mel had reappeared
• 1:02:58
  from behind the flap and was snapping greedily at Tildas
• 1:03:02
  back. The claw pounce like it's alive.
• 1:03:05
  You know, it's great stuff. Yeah, there's a brilliant it's
• 1:03:09
  very unchrist Chibnul in the way in which it manages to tie up
• 1:03:13
  all of its elements. Right.
• 1:03:15
  So you have these scenes in which Mel is being menaced by
• 1:03:18
  the Rezis and you're like, oh shit, they're going to, they're
• 1:03:20
  going to eat. Let's take a moment.
• 1:03:22
  Let's take a moment. This is this isn't Perry being
• 1:03:24
  turned into a bird. There are two people who are
• 1:03:26
  going to eat Doctor Who's assistant.
• 1:03:28
  It is also the the. One part of the production that
• 1:03:32
  Wyatt said in that Desert Planet Discs interview that he thought
• 1:03:37
  was spawn in the TV show, that the two actors playing Tabby and
• 1:03:41
  Tilda and all of those things, it was exactly how he visualized
• 1:03:45
  it. Yeah, yeah, that that works,
• 1:03:48
  that works well. And but, but the fact that
• 1:03:51
  they're not just trying to kill her, that the waste disposal
• 1:03:54
  shoots where they're going to feed her bones is also setting
• 1:03:56
  up the the main plot and the main threat rights.
• 1:04:00
  They're not just trying to trying to eat you.
• 1:04:01
  This whole building is trying to eat you.
• 1:04:03
  There's probably a Russell T Davis version of this where they
• 1:04:06
  get a bit more out of the idea that the whole building is
• 1:04:08
  coming alive and trying to get you.
• 1:04:10
  I mean, just the description. The kitchen knife she was
• 1:04:13
  holding glinted ominously in her hand.
• 1:04:16
  I mean, she's threatening it with a knife, for fuck's sake.
• 1:04:19
  They're going to. Carve her up.
• 1:04:21
  I I genuinely don't think you'd be allowed to do that now on
• 1:04:24
  screen. Not in a kids show, not in a kid
• 1:04:26
  show. It's too imitable.
• 1:04:27
  It would be definitely be cut. It's and, and yeah, he still
• 1:04:32
  Peppers those scary scenes with lines like see if you can spot
• 1:04:36
  the basil and things like that. You know, that's really funny.
• 1:04:40
  It's a fine line to get right, being sort of uneasy and scary
• 1:04:44
  and being very witty at the same time.
• 1:04:46
  Not everyone's got it, but I think Wyatt is just on the right
• 1:04:50
  line. Yeah, it's it's it's brilliantly
• 1:04:54
  well judged. And I think also beyond that as
• 1:04:55
  well, though, is also the kind of existential horror of it.
• 1:04:59
  You know the bit that all when you start reading between the
• 1:05:02
  lines of some just you're told some you're told given
• 1:05:05
  background here, but you start reading between the lines.
• 1:05:08
  Easy to skate over when you're familiar with the program.
• 1:05:11
  But what what did happen to the in betweens?
• 1:05:15
  They all went off to fight a war and none of them came back.
• 1:05:18
  How grim is that? Why are the Kangs who were left
• 1:05:22
  there as children? So they were the children.
• 1:05:24
  They're all girls. So there's a war being fought
• 1:05:28
  with all the boys, child soldiers out there that has
• 1:05:33
  completely consumed this entire society.
• 1:05:35
  Paradise Towers. You know, a bit like.
• 1:05:38
  That yeah, yeah. In some great big furnace
• 1:05:41
  somewhere. Paradise Towers is the best
• 1:05:44
  place to be in this world, and that tells you something.
• 1:05:47
  About it can I ask you a couple of questions of things that
• 1:05:51
  didn't make sense to me Why is Mel so obsessed?
• 1:05:55
  We're going to this fucking swimming pool.
• 1:05:58
  It's a very bizarre character point.
• 1:06:01
  Every time we come back to her, she's like, oh, look at the.
• 1:06:04
  Pool next scene. Oh, all right.
• 1:06:06
  But if we get stuck, we'll meet at the pool.
• 1:06:08
  OK, The next scene. Look, pecks, I must get to the
• 1:06:11
  pool. I'm like, all right, you cannot
• 1:06:13
  want to swim that badly. Yeah, it's it.
• 1:06:18
  The kind reading would be that it's a postmodern critique of
• 1:06:21
  Doctor Who companions. Do you think that's the case?
• 1:06:25
  No, I don't think it is. It's, it's, it is, it is a bit,
• 1:06:29
  it is a bit odd. And I suspect it's what a lot of
• 1:06:31
  people who hated on Mel for a long time and maybe still do it.
• 1:06:33
  It's probably what they're remembering of the whole kind of
• 1:06:36
  oh, come on, pecks, it'll relax you.
• 1:06:38
  And like, frankly, we're all with pecks on this.
• 1:06:40
  This is not a safe place to be. And nothing that you have seen
• 1:06:43
  has told you that it is OK to do this.
• 1:06:45
  You've got no reason to believe that it's fine.
• 1:06:48
  Or our Bonnie, like, the dialogue in this year is fruity
• 1:06:51
  enough that it kind of needs to be underplayed a bit.
• 1:06:54
  Yeah. And she's there going, you know?
• 1:06:56
  Oh, pecks, is it true? Sent by powers you're not
• 1:06:59
  allowed to name. And oh, boy, bless her.
• 1:07:03
  She didn't have a hope. OK, my other question is this.
• 1:07:06
  Why is the chief caretaker feeding CRO Agnon people?
• 1:07:12
  Well, we do get a little bit more of that, don't we?
• 1:07:14
  In the book, Just a little bit of character elements in the
• 1:07:16
  book, which is suggesting that he's, he's really quite lonely
• 1:07:20
  and he's quite driven down by all this too.
• 1:07:23
  And he believes he has a pet, you know, on screen.
• 1:07:25
  That's just Richard Prize doing, you know.
• 1:07:27
  Well, pet, my lovely, what's the matter?
• 1:07:30
  Which actually is quite it's quite nicely done.
• 1:07:32
  You know, he he understands what the production wants from him.
• 1:07:34
  Whether that should be what it wants from him is another
• 1:07:37
  matter. But the idea that it's his
• 1:07:40
  little, this is his little bit, he's human too.
• 1:07:42
  This is his little bit of warmth in all of this.
• 1:07:44
  You know the most terrible people thought again.
• 1:07:46
  It's there in the Happiness Patrol with Helen A and Fluffy,
• 1:07:50
  right? Fifi.
• 1:07:51
  Fifi Sorry bad fan he. Would have been a great name for
• 1:07:55
  it though. One demerit that that, you know,
• 1:08:00
  Hitler loved his dog and all that stuff, that this is his bit
• 1:08:04
  of humanity. It's like he's.
• 1:08:05
  Playing it like a little Hitler, isn't he so?
• 1:08:07
  Yeah, exactly. And yet he's being played by it.
• 1:08:11
  And that this, there's almost an element of tragedy to it, right?
• 1:08:13
  That he ends up being consumed by the one thing he cared for.
• 1:08:17
  It's so dark, So dark. But kind of great, right?
• 1:08:22
  Oh, utterly comic. Well, we haven't really talked
• 1:08:24
  about the doctor. No.
• 1:08:27
  Now, Wyatt wrote this with no idea who was going to play the
• 1:08:31
  doctor. He didn't know it was going to
• 1:08:32
  be Sylvester McCoy. So he he wrote it as doctorish
• 1:08:36
  as he possibly could, right. So the doctor walks out and he's
• 1:08:39
  got natural curiosity and he's very charming with the people
• 1:08:42
  that he meets. And he very quickly starts
• 1:08:44
  investigating and putting things together.
• 1:08:47
  What actually happens is it's a pretty sound characterisation of
• 1:08:51
  Sylvester Mccoy's doctor. This could be the formation of
• 1:08:55
  Sylvester Mccoy's doctor. Yeah, it it is good.
• 1:08:59
  And it is one of the more sort of Doctor does the classically
• 1:09:02
  Dr. things. It is one of the surprise
• 1:09:04
  surprisingly rare in Doctor Who. The Doctor Who does actually
• 1:09:07
  turn up and get all the rebels together and lead them to
• 1:09:09
  overthrow it, but it doesn't happen as much.
• 1:09:11
  I'll say it doesn't, but it's not in every story like you sort
• 1:09:14
  of think it is. Sometimes it's probably this.
• 1:09:16
  And the Sun Makers are the most obvious examples.
• 1:09:20
  But he is very doctorate in this.
• 1:09:22
  And I do think it's certainly in the TV version and it carries
• 1:09:24
  across to the book as well. You do get moments where you
• 1:09:28
  really see what Sylvester McCoy brings doctor, and also what
• 1:09:30
  Andrew Cartman and the writers are seeing that they can do with
• 1:09:34
  the Doctor as a character, how they can sort of reinvent him
• 1:09:36
  for the 80s, make him a more modern version.
• 1:09:40
  Who is this unassuming little man who sort of wanders into
• 1:09:43
  things and is not taken terribly seriously, which, you know,
• 1:09:48
  Colin Baker was obviously not. He was very much the opposite,
• 1:09:51
  marching in and taking commands and sometimes being thrown in a
• 1:09:54
  cell because of his desire to do so, but never under assumed.
• 1:09:57
  I think even Davison really kind of because popping has had so
• 1:10:02
  many companions, kind of had this head boy attitude sometimes
• 1:10:05
  about him, you know, whereas so I still could have that thing
• 1:10:08
  that you've not really seen since trash.
• 1:10:11
  And I know it's an obvious comparison, but maybe even more
• 1:10:13
  so of just no one really taking him seriously, no one really
• 1:10:16
  looking at that guy apart from the chief caretaker who, you
• 1:10:21
  know, on the TV. You wonder, why does he think
• 1:10:23
  he's the great architect in the book?
• 1:10:25
  You get it. Which is because he sees that
• 1:10:26
  this is the one guy who's coming in and seems interested in it
• 1:10:29
  all and seems to be able to see the system from the outside.
• 1:10:32
  It makes sense of him saying kill him, doesn't it?
• 1:10:35
  In the TV store, you're like, how did we get here?
• 1:10:38
  Like there's two scenes, right? I think there's two scenes.
• 1:10:42
  McCoy nails him in the TV show, but it's all there on the page
• 1:10:46
  as well, so it's there in the script.
• 1:10:47
  It's the using the rules against the two caretakers to escape.
• 1:10:51
  Out the door, which everybody loves, but that just shows how
• 1:10:54
  wily the 7th Doctor is right using their own rules against
• 1:10:58
  them. Yeah.
• 1:10:59
  And I do think that shows because I think, well, that's a
• 1:11:02
  fun scene. I think it could have been
• 1:11:05
  utterly tiresome if it had been overplayed or someone else had
• 1:11:08
  been doing it and. He does underplay that scene.
• 1:11:10
  But he does. He's got, he's so good when he's
• 1:11:13
  being light. That's the thing with Celeste
• 1:11:16
  McCoy. When he when Chipnall, I said
• 1:11:18
  something bad about Chipnall. So I said something nice about
• 1:11:19
  Chris Chipnall when he brought Celeste McCoy back in The Power
• 1:11:22
  of the Doctor, and that there was a reason that the scene
• 1:11:25
  between him and Ace is so much more effective than the one
• 1:11:27
  between that Davidson and and Tegan is, is because he touches
• 1:11:32
  on that lightness, that sweetness, that slightly, you
• 1:11:35
  know, aloofness is a much used phrase, but that's sort of what
• 1:11:37
  we mean. It's the idea that through some
• 1:11:39
  of the new adventures and some of the BF audios, frankly, the
• 1:11:43
  idea of him being the grand arch manipulator turns into this
• 1:11:47
  boisterousness. If we, you know, sort of.
• 1:11:51
  Oh no. Why?
• 1:11:52
  And do you know the conclusion they reached in the last day,
• 1:11:55
  the 8 hour epic? The conclusion they reached,
• 1:11:58
  right, was that he was so the master manipulator at the end.
• 1:12:03
  Yeah, that he was actually the most evil force in the universe
• 1:12:06
  and had to die because he was so corrupt by that point.
• 1:12:10
  Like, how do we ever get there? Yeah, exactly where it.
• 1:12:15
  Was so fucking charming. Why are you doing this to him?
• 1:12:18
  And it also misses the joke. I mean, if you ever watch those
• 1:12:20
  audition tapes for the screen tests of him and the other two
• 1:12:24
  chaps who did it, you see that that's what the script is
• 1:12:27
  painting the doctor as is this guy who's just quite unassuming.
• 1:12:31
  He's just going to come. He's going to talk to you.
• 1:12:32
  You think he's a bit odd? Absolutely.
• 1:12:34
  You know, he's, he's there should be a Doctor Who episode
• 1:12:38
  where he sat on the seats in a New York Police precinct
• 1:12:41
  surrounded by all the much more obviously rough and troubling
• 1:12:44
  people. And he's just sat there in, in,
• 1:12:45
  you know, three seats from the end and no one's paying
• 1:12:48
  attention. But he's working everything out.
• 1:12:51
  And it's because he has that quietness.
• 1:12:52
  It's because he has that aloofness that, that then you
• 1:12:55
  see that, that, oh, no, actually, this is the master
• 1:12:58
  manipulator. This is the guy who's running
• 1:13:00
  everything from the side of the spider's web.
• 1:13:01
  This is the guy who sees it all. It doesn't work if he's shouting
• 1:13:06
  that. What you said, which Colin would
• 1:13:08
  have done, what you said earlier about people underestimating
• 1:13:12
  him. So there's a the second thing I
• 1:13:14
  want to talk about was when the the chief caretaker.
• 1:13:17
  Is. Interrogating him, right?
• 1:13:19
  I've got a light right in his face and it starts with all the
• 1:13:22
  power in the chief and the doctors in the seat, and it ends
• 1:13:26
  with the doctor having turned the entire scene around.
• 1:13:29
  He grabs the light, he takes the power from him and he's got the
• 1:13:33
  light and he's interrogating to him at the end.
• 1:13:35
  And that's Mccoys, Dr. is it? You underestimate him and he
• 1:13:38
  comes in. And he's a sly little bugger I
• 1:13:41
  love. That about him.
• 1:13:42
  I love the scene where he's he lures Kragnon to his to in into
• 1:13:48
  the into the trap and he's challenging him.
• 1:13:50
  And again, it's because of that, that cheekiness, that
• 1:13:55
  understatedness of it all. Yeah, you can.
• 1:13:57
  I don't mean to hate on Colin, but you can see how Colin Baker
• 1:14:00
  would have done it with Croak Norton, Come and Face Me and all
• 1:14:03
  the rest of it and. There's a place for that Doctor
• 1:14:06
  Who, but. There is a place for that.
• 1:14:08
  But I think the very particular thing that Sylvester McCoy
• 1:14:10
  bought, and it reminded me of why I loved Sylvester McCoy as a
• 1:14:13
  kid when I was first discovering Doctor Who, He was my favorite
• 1:14:15
  doctor. I mean, I'll turn that around
• 1:14:17
  and say I would never in a million years give McCoy Collins
• 1:14:21
  speech Power Man conspirators, Dalek Sontar and suck because he
• 1:14:25
  just would have gobbled that. It would have been hideous.
• 1:14:28
  Every actor has their strength, right, playing the Doctor, but I
• 1:14:31
  just, I don't know. I think if he's not completely
• 1:14:35
  there in this story, the 7th Doctor, he's forming, they're
• 1:14:39
  figuring out, you know, and, and he's likable, but he's clever.
• 1:14:43
  He's really interesting. Yeah.
• 1:14:46
  I mean, to bring it all back to what we were saying at the start
• 1:14:48
  of the episode, it's where you start to see that golden era of
• 1:14:54
  Doctor Who begin to coalesce. Yeah.
• 1:14:58
  And it's very exciting. Well, look, anything else you
• 1:15:01
  want to cover? Anything in your notes?
• 1:15:02
  I mean, what about the ending then?
• 1:15:04
  Poor old Pecs. Poor old pecs.
• 1:15:08
  I mean, why it can't do much to save the ending, but he gives it
• 1:15:13
  a go. I think you definitely
• 1:15:15
  understand a bit better why Kraknod walks into an obvious
• 1:15:19
  trap, which on screen just does not work.
• 1:15:21
  And a lot of that is down to, you know, non controversy corner
• 1:15:26
  here. Richard buys his performance as
• 1:15:28
  Kraknod is not good. There's there's hacking about,
• 1:15:33
  there's hamming it up, and then there's Wheeling in the entire
• 1:15:36
  butcher's cart. Right.
• 1:15:37
  It's been polluted with flesh, living flesh on the page.
• 1:15:41
  That's a Gray line. Yeah, it's terrible.
• 1:15:44
  It's it's it's a terrifying line.
• 1:15:46
  I was like, Oh my God, this guy is horrible.
• 1:15:49
  And there's the lines about, you know, actually quite effective
• 1:15:52
  in part 4 where he's just drawing the red lines through
• 1:15:55
  the floors going up the tower. And here he's got the extra
• 1:15:59
  detail about, you know, the Rezi's heading up while those
• 1:16:02
  who could get there in time. That's really.
• 1:16:05
  Explicit in the book isn't. It.
• 1:16:06
  Yeah, basically anyone that hasn't.
• 1:16:08
  Is has been killed. This is a.
• 1:16:11
  Massive. He's a bit annoyed as well by
• 1:16:12
  all the bodies that are littering up the place, but
• 1:16:15
  don't worry, they care the the cleaners will come and get them
• 1:16:18
  later, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:16:21
  And when he, you know, gets lured in by pecks into the trap
• 1:16:25
  that will destroy him, you do get a sense that, you know, why
• 1:16:27
  does he do that? And on screen, you just don't
• 1:16:29
  know why. He knows it's, he knows it's a
• 1:16:31
  trap. He thinks it's likely to be a
• 1:16:33
  trap, but here you understand that it's because it's his ego,
• 1:16:40
  it's his vanity. He's the great architect.
• 1:16:42
  He is vain and he is brought down by his vanity and he wants
• 1:16:47
  to believe he can take them out that easily.
• 1:16:49
  But it's that simple for him. I love as well though how the
• 1:16:53
  climax there, all of those scenes between Mel and Pecks
• 1:16:56
  actually mean something because he is going to run away and then
• 1:17:01
  he just can't look her in the eye and run away and he goes
• 1:17:04
  back and he kills himself. So it just makes that
• 1:17:06
  relationship count at the end. Yeah, Chris Chipnall was not
• 1:17:10
  paying attention at that point. Well, it wasn't self sacrifice.
• 1:17:13
  I think he. Well, no, Chris Chibnall's
• 1:17:15
  paradise house would have ended with Mel going pecs.
• 1:17:17
  Could you please kill yourself so I can live for the next
• 1:17:19
  story? Did you read the line that when
• 1:17:23
  the Doctor's looking at the perspective as it says, it's an
• 1:17:25
  experience like no other. The Doctor agrees mentally, but
• 1:17:29
  personally he would have exchanged it for a weekend
• 1:17:31
  locked in a hotel with the Daleks.
• 1:17:34
  That made me laugh out loud. I would very, very quickly just
• 1:17:38
  like to talk about the scene between the chief caretaker and
• 1:17:41
  Maddie. Why on earth are you selecting
• 1:17:44
  that scene? I hear you ask.
• 1:17:46
  Why on earth are you selecting that scene?
• 1:17:48
  Because it's Wyatt thinking about the setting not as a
• 1:17:52
  Doctor Who story, but as a setting in its own right.
• 1:17:55
  You've got 2 characters, no regulars.
• 1:17:58
  They've got. They absolutely have got their
• 1:18:00
  own motives within that scene. There's bribery, corruption and
• 1:18:03
  cover up. He wants to hide the.
• 1:18:05
  Fact that people have been murdered.
• 1:18:07
  She wants a bigger room. And they just feel like real
• 1:18:10
  people within the setting, totally away from it being a
• 1:18:13
  Doctor Who story. It's the scene where you get the
• 1:18:16
  best insight into what's living in Paradise Towers has actually
• 1:18:19
  been like up to this point. This is how this place operates
• 1:18:22
  day-to-day. Oh, and the other thing I found
• 1:18:24
  most amusing towards the end was obviously the doctor pulls
• 1:18:29
  together the Kangs, the Caretakers, the Rezis, they're
• 1:18:32
  all working together to bring down Kragnon.
• 1:18:34
  And how that manifests is the Rezis have tablecloths, the
• 1:18:40
  Caretakers have explosives, and the Kangs have.
• 1:18:43
  Crossbows, and they use them to destroy the cleaners.
• 1:18:46
  It just comes down to such a. Ridiculously simple level.
• 1:18:49
  But it's kind of fun. It is fun.
• 1:18:51
  It is fun. I have a line here where I just
• 1:18:54
  described it as cannibal lesbians of Thatcher's
• 1:18:57
  apocalypse. I think that was a tagline, you
• 1:19:01
  know, when he was going for it. I mean, going back to what I
• 1:19:04
  said at the start of the episode, when we're talking
• 1:19:06
  about Cartmel on paper, every story in Season 24, it just is
• 1:19:13
  wild. It's mad.
• 1:19:15
  Yeah. And you think, God, there's no
• 1:19:17
  way we can bring that to the screen.
• 1:19:18
  That's just crazy. I just, like, he fucking went
• 1:19:21
  for it, didn't he? Come now he's like, Dad, just do
• 1:19:24
  something totally innovative, mad, fun, scary.
• 1:19:29
  Oh, I love it. I love it.
• 1:19:30
  I've got such an affection for this season.
• 1:19:32
  Yeah, I, I do. And I think you can see.
• 1:19:35
  And it is sort of straight out of the gate.
• 1:19:37
  Here's all my ideas. Here's what we're doing, Doctor.
• 1:19:40
  I will refine them in later seasons.
• 1:19:42
  Yeah, it's season 24. Season 25 in particular, I think
• 1:19:46
  is is where you see season 24, but with more of a sense of how
• 1:19:51
  it's done and what you can do and how to get those across.
• 1:19:53
  You know, the greatest show in the Galaxy is very easy to see
• 1:19:56
  as a as a descendant of season 24, right, But sort of done with
• 1:20:00
  a better understanding of what could be achieved.
• 1:20:02
  Well, on ABBC budget, absolutely.
• 1:20:05
  Well, look, do you have anything else to sort of summarize your
• 1:20:08
  thoughts about Paradise Towers? I think we've had a great time
• 1:20:11
  with this. I think we've earned earned the
• 1:20:14
  right to kick back by the pool with a crispy can of fizz aid.
• 1:20:19
  Oh well done. And you know, whilst we've been
• 1:20:21
  talking, I have thought up a top three that we can end this on in
• 1:20:26
  the last 10 minutes. This is exciting, isn't it?
• 1:20:28
  Listening, it's. Very mundane.
• 1:20:30
  Unfortunately, we've been far too positive.
• 1:20:34
  About the Sylvester McCoy era today, right?
• 1:20:36
  So I feel like we should. That's a balance.
• 1:20:41
  So I'm going to ask you now. And so you have to think quick
• 1:20:44
  across books, comics and TV and audios.
• 1:20:49
  OK, The worst three 7th Doctor stories, shall I start?
• 1:20:58
  Please. OK. #1 immediately just sprung
• 1:21:02
  to mind Dreamtime. It's a big.
• 1:21:05
  Finish audio set in Australian Aborigine space and has all the
• 1:21:13
  problems that you can imagine that would come with that.
• 1:21:18
  It's from the man who brought us the gallery, The Sandman, So
• 1:21:21
  there's lots of detail, but it's very, very boring.
• 1:21:25
  And poor Sylvester McCoy is forced to take sort of drugs and
• 1:21:29
  go off and have vision quests and things like this.
• 1:21:32
  And yeah, it's very bad indeed. And for poor old Hex.
• 1:21:36
  It was his second story. After the harvest.
• 1:21:40
  And yes, well, things got better from that point on.
• 1:21:44
  Now why don't you tell me why you loathe time in the Ronnie?
• 1:21:50
  Loathe time of the Rani. I think the Emperor has no
• 1:21:54
  clothes. I think that we've gone so far,
• 1:21:58
  we can take this whole revisiting, reappraising things
• 1:22:01
  a bit far and sometimes we should just acknowledge when
• 1:22:04
  things are a bit shit. Are you talking about time of
• 1:22:08
  the Rani? I'm talking about time of the
• 1:22:09
  Rani here, of course. OK, go on, come on, explain
• 1:22:13
  yourself. I would refer listeners to your
• 1:22:16
  episode with James Lark on the Book of Time of the Rani if you
• 1:22:19
  want. He had fun.
• 1:22:21
  Yeah, he had fun, but not in the way it wanted you to.
• 1:22:25
  I. Thank you for listening to that,
• 1:22:26
  I wondered if you would. I think it shows that if Andrew
• 1:22:31
  Cartmel had not come in when he did that there was no intention
• 1:22:36
  by the production team to learn any of the lessons of previous
• 1:22:39
  seasons. It looks like it could have been
• 1:22:43
  with the exception of the quite good bubble trap CGI and the
• 1:22:48
  tetrap costumes. It looks like it could have been
• 1:22:50
  done in 1978, not 1987. I think the camp overrules the
• 1:22:59
  plot to the point of absurdance. I think having the Rani dress up
• 1:23:04
  as male and pretend to be male is just dreadful.
• 1:23:08
  It's just it's it's. We had that conversation before
• 1:23:11
  about, you know, how straight you have to be to enjoy certain
• 1:23:15
  things, how gay you have to be to enjoy certain things.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah, I think you're so far so, so straight, right?
• 1:23:23
  Now you know. You can't possibly find the
• 1:23:25
  delight in that. I can find the delight in
• 1:23:29
  Sylvester Mccoy's performance straight off the bat.
• 1:23:32
  I think he's, I think he's good. I think he proves himself quite
• 1:23:35
  well. Thank God they got rid of the
• 1:23:36
  whole mixing metaphor stuff, because that really doesn't
• 1:23:39
  work. But the bit where he, you know,
• 1:23:42
  his first scene where he jumps up, marches around only one
• 1:23:45
  question, who, who, who, where am I, who am I and who are you?
• 1:23:49
  You know, that he, he does that really well.
• 1:23:50
  And he, I think, immediately shows why he was the right
• 1:23:52
  person for the role. But you've just got endless,
• 1:23:55
  endless scenes of the Rani pretending to be male when the
• 1:24:02
  audience knows she's not male. The Doctor doesn't that.
• 1:24:04
  But there's zero tension to any of it.
• 1:24:08
  I mean, imagine a version of that with Peter Capaldi and
• 1:24:13
  Michelle Gomez and written by Stephen.
• 1:24:15
  Moffat Oh my God, what are you doing to me?
• 1:24:19
  I'm educating you. Making my world a worse place.
• 1:24:26
  I just think there's no tension to any of it.
• 1:24:29
  I don't care. It's ridiculous.
• 1:24:31
  It shows all the worst lessons of all this.
• 1:24:33
  You know, we talk about ice hot being good.
• 1:24:34
  Loy Hargill. What?
• 1:24:37
  The Holy Grail, of course. That's so clever.
• 1:24:42
  The time brain is just a big brain.
• 1:24:45
  A time brain. I mean, come on.
• 1:24:47
  There's we, we forget there's. Arguments falling apart.
• 1:24:50
  I am. No, so much of it is just set in
• 1:24:52
  a SPA. Yeah, gay sauna.
• 1:24:55
  I want to go. Look, I respect that you enjoy
• 1:24:59
  it, but I don't know they're the ways in which a prospective
• 1:25:03
  young child audience would be brought into Doctor Who.
• 1:25:06
  I know what you're saying or I'm too stupid to critique.
• 1:25:08
  It I know what you're saying. For the benefit of the
• 1:25:12
  listeners, he is, in fact nodding.
• 1:25:15
  Well, let's move on to our. Second choices, shall we?
• 1:25:18
  OK, I would like to choose a new adventure next, of course, and,
• 1:25:22
  and my choice is oh of course. No Future by Paul Connell, where
• 1:25:29
  the meddling Monk teams up with the Vardams, you know, and every
• 1:25:34
  other bizarre bit of continuity you've ever had.
• 1:25:37
  And for some reason Bernie Summerfield hangs out with
• 1:25:39
  Johnny Rotten and everyone gets together at the end as a massive
• 1:25:43
  hug. Have you read No Future?
• 1:25:46
  I've not yet had that pleasure. People say that sometime.
• 1:25:49
  Never was a bad end of an arc. Jesus Christ it is hideous.
• 1:25:54
  We have spoken about it before though.
• 1:25:56
  I think it's Cornell at its laziest, and I'm going to push
• 1:25:59
  it back to you. I am going to say, and this this
• 1:26:03
  is with a slightly heavier heart, Cats cradle times
• 1:26:08
  Crucible, Oh. What was one of the worst ones
• 1:26:11
  ever? It's harsh, isn't it?
• 1:26:13
  But I want to. I want to go for a different
• 1:26:15
  type of bad, right? Because it's impenetrable.
• 1:26:19
  It's impenetrable, and I think also it had a bad effect.
• 1:26:26
  Or maybe it's just the most emblematic example of the 90s
• 1:26:29
  obsession with Time Lord mythology.
• 1:26:32
  This endless looking back into impenetrable law that was not
• 1:26:39
  interesting was in no way easily readable to the audience, if
• 1:26:45
  that makes sense. Compare it to something like
• 1:26:47
  Father Time, which one we talked about that way back when.
• 1:26:50
  We talked about how deep the law is in that, but how you can just
• 1:26:52
  skim over the top of it and get everything you need to do times
• 1:26:55
  Crucible is making life hard for you.
• 1:26:58
  I think it led to a lot of bad behaviour.
• 1:27:00
  It did ultimately give us Long Barrow and maybe I really like
• 1:27:03
  Long Barrow and maybe that's why I dislike it because it's like
• 1:27:06
  Long Barrow but bad. But I, I, yeah, worst ever is
• 1:27:11
  difficult to say, but it's definitely one I really struggle
• 1:27:14
  with and one of the Sylvester McCoy 7th Doctor stories that I
• 1:27:19
  really got the least out of you. Know for the last one I really
• 1:27:22
  want to say ATV story and I'm sitting there sort of racking my
• 1:27:25
  brain and saying can I genuinely say one of those 12 stories is
• 1:27:30
  one of his worst stories? They all have a level, even
• 1:27:33
  Silver Nemesis, which is weak, you know?
• 1:27:37
  But fuck me, it's fun to watch. It's sunny, there's a lot of
• 1:27:41
  action. There's some wonderful guest
• 1:27:43
  actors in it. McCoy and Ace have wonderful
• 1:27:46
  chemistry in it. Happiness Patrol, I say.
• 1:27:49
  There is a disconnect there again, between what's in the
• 1:27:53
  script and what hits the screen. But boy, he's got some things to
• 1:27:57
  say and some high drama. That's fabulous.
• 1:28:00
  So I might have to avoid TV series all together.
• 1:28:04
  And I'll join you in time in the Ronnie.
• 1:28:06
  Good grief. So for my last choice then, Oh
• 1:28:11
  yes, oh God, yes. The dark husband.
• 1:28:16
  Have you listened to this? I have, yes.
• 1:28:19
  Doctor Who has envisaged as a blokey sitcom with with Hex
• 1:28:23
  getting drunk and trying to fuck everybody.
• 1:28:25
  I don't know what's going on. It's basically Doctor Who does 2
• 1:28:30
  pints of lager and a packet of crisps and I am far too gay to
• 1:28:36
  enjoy that. What do you think of the unbound
• 1:28:40
  story Exile in that case? Even worse.
• 1:28:44
  Is that that's the one where the man drinks so many pints that
• 1:28:47
  eventually they start to taste like cheese?
• 1:28:50
  And so he calls himself Cheese. That's the one.
• 1:28:56
  Nicholas Briggs Humoraye's finest.
• 1:28:58
  Well come on then, I can see you furiously going through your
• 1:29:01
  phone now trying to find a last story to pick on.
• 1:29:05
  Yeah, I'm just trying to remind myself, you know, me, I don't
• 1:29:07
  really hate that much. Bullet Time by David A McKinsey
• 1:29:10
  was one that I really struggled with.
• 1:29:12
  I re and it's a shame because I love so many of his books.
• 1:29:15
  I really do. I think he's he's, we need to do
• 1:29:17
  one of his books at some point because I was a.
• 1:29:19
  We've got one planned in, haven't we?
• 1:29:21
  Sanctuary, we do, so bear that in mind.
• 1:29:26
  But Bullet Time I really struggled with and maybe it was
• 1:29:28
  because of when I read it. As mentioned earlier, I sort of
• 1:29:32
  got into Doctor Who books, reading the Mike Tucker Robert
• 1:29:34
  Perry 7th Doctor books, and when I'd run out of one of them to
• 1:29:39
  read, I've spotted there's another 7th Doctor one here on
• 1:29:42
  the shelf. Bullet time.
• 1:29:43
  Let's read that. And it was at that age,
• 1:29:46
  everything I didn't want a Doctor Who story to be.
• 1:29:48
  It was very macho. It was not very fantastical.
• 1:29:54
  It was very grim dark. It's the one where, spoiler
• 1:29:57
  alert, Sarah Jane might or might not be killed.
• 1:30:01
  It was sort of wanting to, looking back now, maybe I'd
• 1:30:03
  enjoy it now if I went back to it.
• 1:30:05
  I think probably trying to be a bit John Woo, which is a
• 1:30:07
  reference I wouldn't really have understood at the time.
• 1:30:09
  But I think Mckinty himself even said that he was sort of trying
• 1:30:16
  to pastiche the Virgin New Adventures, that he wasn't
• 1:30:19
  necessarily a fan of the New Adventures Doctors he's
• 1:30:22
  popularly conceived, and that he wanted to write a story that
• 1:30:27
  showed him to be a villain, that showed him to be not a nice guy.
• 1:30:31
  And I think that's fair enough, but it in terms of seven Doctors
• 1:30:35
  stories I've struggled with, Oh, I really struggled with that
• 1:30:39
  time. And maybe that's because he did
• 1:30:40
  his job well and it. But it's like I said about the
• 1:30:43
  last day earlier, I think when you'll get coming to that
• 1:30:45
  conclusion that, yeah, I just want to expose the 7th Doctor as
• 1:30:49
  a nasty piece of work that's kind of missing the point at the
• 1:30:53
  7th Doctor, I think. And As for McKinsey, I don't
• 1:30:57
  think you can produce that much output without a range of
• 1:31:01
  quality that you don't hear every time.
• 1:31:03
  You and me will cover some great stuff by McKinsey, but we all
• 1:31:08
  have our off days. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:31:11
  Don't read Bullet Time. Do read The 11th Tiger.
• 1:31:13
  Oh, I've just read it. I'm doing it soon.
• 1:31:16
  That was fabulous. The bit where the 1st Doctor had
• 1:31:19
  his Yoda moment and did all that Kung Fu was amazing.
• 1:31:23
  Michael, where are we going next?
• 1:31:25
  I mean, we've just had a lovely foray into the 7th Doctor now.
• 1:31:27
  We was going to hop straight to another 7th Doctor story, but we
• 1:31:31
  thought we'd sort of break it up a little bit with something
• 1:31:35
  quite new. Something quite new.
• 1:31:37
  We're actually taking a step back to before what Yes we're
• 1:31:42
  doing Doctor Who, The adventures before from BBC Books.
• 1:31:48
  An intriguing short story collection where the people
• 1:31:53
  write in those short stories is everything from the current
• 1:31:58
  editor of the range of books, Beth Axford, to actors that have
• 1:32:02
  appeared in the show, Janet Fielding Ingridola, to writers
• 1:32:06
  that we know and love. So it's going to be an
• 1:32:08
  interesting spread of stories. I have no idea what story is
• 1:32:12
  there before, though. I hope they're going to tell us
• 1:32:13
  within it. Yeah, I hope so.
• 1:32:15
  It's, I'm intrigued by the premise and I hope they do
• 1:32:18
  something interesting with it. I really do.
• 1:32:20
  I hope of what happened just before all of these and the
• 1:32:24
  different ways you could approach that, you know, I'm.
• 1:32:26
  Going to entice you with one thing then.
• 1:32:28
  Before we go, Ingrid. Oliver's is before Day of the
• 1:32:31
  Doctor. I do know that.
• 1:32:36
  Can she write a story, though? Let's find out anyway, Michael,
• 1:32:39
  thank you. Or should I say billboard?
• 1:32:42
  Thank you very much for your and honestly, those readings on
• 1:32:46
  Paradise Towers there, I mean, I'd never get it from anyone
• 1:32:49
  else. Heaven and hell.
• 1:32:51
  I mean, we've been all over the place today.
• 1:32:53
  How am I supposed to win this sort of thing?
• 1:32:54
  With a witty Bond mod, he's hot doctor.