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

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:07
  My name is Joe Ford and I'm here today with a very special guest,
• 0:12
  Mr. Michael Mills. Hello, Michael.
• 0:15
  Couldn't open here, Ford. It's coming in again out of the
• 0:20
  rain. You've got to do a whole podcast
• 0:23
  with that accent, OK? But.
• 0:26
  Oh, that's not my normal accent. Oh hi.
• 0:29
  I lived in Wales until the age of 23.
• 0:31
  Listen to how I sound. I'm doing a ridiculous put on
• 0:34
  accent every time I speak. Where are you from originally
• 0:36
  then? Wales 1st 23 years of my.
• 0:39
  Life Oh, you're from Wales and now you live in London?
• 0:41
  Yes, can I speak like this? Yeah, you just sound like you're
• 0:45
  from London now. Hello, Welsh.
• 0:48
  What happened to your accent, man?
• 0:50
  A little thing called education and effort.
• 0:57
  Well, that was a small clue as to.
• 0:58
  What we are going to be talking about today, which is the target
• 1:02
  novelization of the Giggle, which is something that you
• 1:06
  suggested I think. Yes, I did, because I always
• 1:11
  thought I'd. Explain yourself, Sir.
• 1:13
  Well, I was just trying to be a good fanboy and consumer and
• 1:18
  keep up with these novelizations that they did of the David
• 1:21
  Tennant, Catherine Tate specials as they came out last year and
• 1:25
  you know, Star Beast One was good.
• 1:27
  Sort of what you expect or want from a Gary Russell
• 1:29
  novelization. It's the story, but with some
• 1:31
  more virgin Missing adventure style interludes and background
• 1:35
  going on. Wild Blue London by Mark Morris.
• 1:39
  Much more straightforward, but probably necessarily so to make
• 1:41
  that story work. And then The Giggle came along
• 1:45
  and I've got about, I've got about Third halfway through it
• 1:49
  and I thought, Joe's Joe's going to start talking about this
• 1:53
  before anyone else does. So yeah, plus I've got enough
• 1:56
  notes here that I can chat about it.
• 1:58
  So this is the first time somebody's contacted me and said
• 2:01
  you have got to read this. So immediately I downloaded it
• 2:04
  on Kindle immediately, and then learn afterwards that actually
• 2:11
  reading this on the printed page is an entirely different
• 2:13
  experience. I think the Kindle version of
• 2:16
  this, the printed paid version, and from what you tell me, the
• 2:20
  audio version are three very different beasts.
• 2:24
  Yes, that's. Yeah, I mean, it is.
• 2:26
  We'll get into this. But you know, people don't say
• 2:28
  that about Terence Dixie's Doctor Who in the underworld.
• 2:31
  I've read Underworld recently. You know it's fabulous, but you
• 2:34
  like that one. You can get to the story a lot
• 2:37
  more easily when you're not distracted by all of the special
• 2:40
  effects. Do you know the best fact about
• 2:42
  Underworld? Underworld saw a massive jump in
• 2:45
  its viewing figures part way through the run, and it may not
• 2:49
  be a coincidence that that's because it was broadcast over
• 2:53
  Christmas 1977 and on the 27th of December 1977, Star Wars Long
• 2:59
  came out in UK cinemas, was a huge hit.
• 3:02
  Presumably all these kids went home, thought I love sci-fi,
• 3:05
  let's watch Doctor Who tonight. And it was Underworld.
• 3:09
  I think it was episode 2. You know it goes up to like 11.7
• 3:12
  million or something ridiculous like that.
• 3:14
  People, people listening to this, won't even need to check
• 3:16
  the dates because they'll know better than me.
• 3:18
  But I'm I've discussed this with people and I I wonder if that's
• 3:22
  where Doctor Who's reputation for rubbish special effects
• 3:25
  began. That's a good possibility.
• 3:27
  You've got to make an argument there.
• 3:29
  And I do believe then the ratings plummeted back down to
• 3:31
  about 7 million after that. So they, you know, it's the
• 3:34
  biggest hike. And then the biggest drop.
• 3:37
  Between poor and the world blame for everything.
• 3:42
  The Knicker factory in Coronation Street wasn't that
• 3:45
  named after it. Let's see, what was it called?
• 3:49
  Yeah, there's a there's AI. I've watched about 3 episodes of
• 3:52
  Chorus in my life, but I don't know if there's still this.
• 3:54
  But for a long time there was a there was a Knicker factory in
• 3:57
  it and it was called Underworld, and I'm pretty sure that was
• 3:59
  because there were Doctor Who fans on the production team.
• 4:04
  Oh, it might have been Gareth Roberts.
• 4:05
  Let's move on. Let's.
• 4:06
  Move. On Yeah, we were.
• 4:09
  Learning about that last time, weren't we?
• 4:10
  I will look. Before we start talking about
• 4:13
  the giggle, I've got a question for you.
• 4:15
  Because we've I've asked you about your favorite Doctor Who
• 4:18
  order. I have asked you about your
• 4:20
  favorite Doctor Who book. Now we're going in the other
• 4:23
  direction. You know, and it's not very nice
• 4:25
  and name in shame, but you know, let's let's be balanced.
• 4:30
  What's the Doctor Who book that you picked up and started
• 4:33
  reading and wished you didn't? Well, I was listening to a
• 4:38
  previous episode of this podcast in which one of your guests
• 4:41
  asked this question said Resurrection of the Daleks by
• 4:45
  Eric Saywood and and I'm not one to join a pylon so I'm going to
• 4:50
  say Revelation of the Daleks by Eric Saywood which contains the
• 4:54
  line. This is where I was forced to
• 4:56
  kill dad. It's so sad.
• 4:58
  He was the Super father and one of the greatest agronomists in
• 5:01
  the Galaxy and it's that sort of naturalistic dialogue for which
• 5:05
  for which mid 80s Doctor Who is best remembered.
• 5:09
  But I mean it's it's, it is so sad that book because I really
• 5:15
  like Revelation of the Dialects. It's flawed, but it's probably
• 5:18
  far and away the best story in that season.
• 5:21
  And I won't be taking questions, but it is obviously flawed
• 5:24
  because it's from that season. But in a way that you think more
• 5:27
  could be done with it, right? You could like like the
• 5:29
  novelization of Battlefield or something like that.
• 5:31
  You can take a story that's that's not quite there and even
• 5:34
  things out and explore that and it's an absolute mess.
• 5:38
  It's People often say things about books and novelizations
• 5:42
  that they're not very well written, but I think as you
• 5:44
  heard that it's genuinely not very well written.
• 5:46
  You wonder how this got past editorial processes.
• 5:49
  Sometimes it goes on it, it tries to expand things but goes
• 5:54
  off in the most bizarre directions in terms of what it
• 5:58
  was to talk about. So he had seen a whole, and I
• 6:00
  hesitate to call it a subplot, but the attention it's given
• 6:03
  makes it a subplot about about how the Daleks use hydrostatic
• 6:07
  architecture. So they they pump water through
• 6:11
  through pipes or something to hold their buildings up, I
• 6:14
  think. I'm sorry, what's where is this
• 6:16
  all coming from? The.
• 6:18
  Trouble with Revelation is it's such AI always say let's park,
• 6:22
  whether it's a good Doctor Who store or not, because the Doctor
• 6:24
  Benny features. It's a good piece of mid 80s
• 6:29
  science fiction and via all those fantastic double acts,
• 6:33
  those sort of quirky, eccentric double acts, he carves out a
• 6:36
  really interesting corner of the Galaxy.
• 6:39
  Great characters and interesting things going on.
• 6:42
  And so I just feel like. All the back.
• 6:44
  Stories of those characters are there to be told because they're
• 6:47
  so interesting, and you're telling me none of that happens.
• 6:50
  I mean, it's been a couple of years since I read it, so
• 6:53
  presumably a lot of it has been jettisoned from my brain since,
• 6:55
  but certainly nothing happens that my brain considered worth
• 6:58
  retaining. But it's, you know, I'm not the
• 7:00
  biggest Eric Sayward fan in the world, but it's not like he
• 7:03
  can't do some snappy dialogue or some nice lines the the, the
• 7:07
  line in Revelation, the Daleks, you know, Dav was saying, I
• 7:09
  believe that would create what is termed consumer resistance.
• 7:14
  That's the best line the characters had since Genesis of
• 7:16
  the Daleks. You know, where where is all of
• 7:19
  that? And we were talking about this
• 7:20
  on Twitter as well. And so.
• 7:24
  So this led to people putting forward their own favorite
• 7:28
  quotes from the book. And there's a description of
• 7:29
  Davros's head swiveling its usual 360°.
• 7:35
  It's a custom 360°. Now we know he's in that tank
• 7:38
  that can swivel about, but I don't remember before revelation
• 7:42
  of Daleks, his head doing a full on Exorcist twirl, but it's.
• 7:45
  Just on a very basic level, it's such an odd way to put words
• 7:49
  together. Yeah, you know, Well, to say,
• 7:51
  you know, I have to kill my dad. How sad.
• 7:54
  You know, it's very casual, isn't it?
• 7:58
  He was the greatest agronomist the world has the Galaxy has
• 8:01
  ever seen. No, he was the greatest dad.
• 8:04
  And the greatest agronomist. I remember, you know my offer.
• 8:09
  I put the audio version of Revelation of the Dialects on
• 8:12
  and we only got about that. I listened to some shit that he
• 8:15
  puts on all right, but I only got 5 minutes into it and I said
• 8:18
  please turn this off. And it was for the exactly the
• 8:21
  reason you just said there. The the way he assembled a
• 8:26
  sentence felt so unnatural. Yeah, I couldn't even remember
• 8:31
  who was reading it. Was that Dan Stark?
• 8:33
  It was Terry. Malloy.
• 8:35
  Oh, it was Terry Malloy. Yeah.
• 8:37
  And you know, Terry Malloy is a good actor, but he is struggling
• 8:41
  with that, with those words. Because there's there's there's
• 8:45
  a difference between just straightforward dull prose and
• 8:50
  and, as you say, words that just don't seem to fit together in an
• 8:54
  order. In a previous life I used to
• 9:00
  review books from a magazine in South Wales and you'd get a lot
• 9:05
  of local authors and first time authors sending their books in.
• 9:09
  And there was A and some of them were great.
• 9:12
  And one of the joy of that job was that you would read books
• 9:14
  that you had never read before and you you weren't unlikely to
• 9:17
  get much publicity. But this was your chance of
• 9:19
  going, no, this is really good, let's champion it.
• 9:21
  But by God, you'd have to read some shit as well, and you'd
• 9:24
  quite often get basically self published, more or less.
• 9:29
  But were these local authors? Yeah, but these were people you
• 9:32
  could meet on the street. Oh, one of them.
• 9:35
  One of them really very much took against one of my reviews.
• 9:38
  She wrote a whole blog post about how mean I've been.
• 9:41
  What did you say? I can't.
• 9:44
  I can't remember. It was a it was basically a very
• 9:48
  thinly veiled literary adaptation of the author's own
• 9:54
  life Post University and was just that sort of writing that,
• 10:00
  you know, it's so deep in meaning because it keeps telling
• 10:02
  you it's so deep in meaning and every chapter ends with.
• 10:05
  But little did we know that that was the last time we would see
• 10:09
  Colleen, or little did we know that those words would have more
• 10:13
  significance. And she wrote, she wrote a blog
• 10:15
  post after this came out that my my editor kindly sent to me in
• 10:18
  which she quoted the opening line and then said, and this is
• 10:22
  just for Christmas, She said it's Christmas, but Scrooge has
• 10:25
  come early And she quoted, but the opening line of my review
• 10:28
  was like and then it goes on like that for six more sentences
• 10:33
  because these were not long reviews, you know, these were,
• 10:35
  these were little. Corporate pages, obviously only
• 10:36
  seven sentences long. Long, I said to my editor.
• 10:40
  She actually read 7 sentences. I actually read 350 bloody
• 10:43
  pages. How how did that blog post end?
• 10:46
  You know, watch your back meals? Something like that.
• 10:52
  I know where your office is, all right.
• 10:55
  I've been I I was in fear of becoming Cardiff's own Salman
• 10:59
  Rushdie for a while, but by that point I moved city.
• 11:04
  I mean, I feel like we've, we've talked two books.
• 11:06
  It is the same. There's a lot of gold in there,
• 11:10
  but there's also a lot of sort of amateurs, first time authors
• 11:16
  in there as well, some that get better, some that don't, and
• 11:19
  there's a lot of just sort of OK in there as well.
• 11:24
  Paul Miles said this, I think, on his blog when he was writing
• 11:27
  about how he enjoys reading all sorts of things and literary
• 11:30
  fiction, but also tie in fiction and bodice rippers and all the
• 11:34
  rest of it and thrillers, he said.
• 11:35
  Because there is a there is obviously a joy and a reward to
• 11:40
  take from reading a fantastic work of literature, but there's
• 11:43
  an equal and different joy to be taken from discovering those
• 11:45
  diamonds in the rough. And that's, that's as you say
• 11:49
  that's the. Well, we keep going, isn't it?
• 11:51
  That's why we keep going through Revelation of the Daleks by
• 11:56
  Alex. Will tear through all these
• 11:58
  turgid targets in order to find a giggle or a Dalek.
• 12:02
  I think that's a line from an Eric Sayward script.
• 12:07
  Well, he wrote the most turgid target of all The Twin dilemma,
• 12:10
  when he was riffing Douglas Adams.
• 12:12
  Oh, do you know what I Well, I preferred the twin dilemma to
• 12:16
  Revelation of the Daleks. Well, as in prose, actually, I
• 12:19
  think it's quite. And when Colin Baker reads that
• 12:20
  as well, he's having great fun with it, yeah.
• 12:23
  Yeah, I think. I think that's the point.
• 12:25
  I think maybe that's that's where that novelisation falls
• 12:28
  down. Revelation is that, at least in
• 12:30
  Twins Dilemma, he's understanding, he's
• 12:32
  understanding the intent of the story, he's understanding where
• 12:35
  it's going, and he's trying to take it that little bit further.
• 12:38
  Revelation of the dialects, It doesn't actually feel like the
• 12:42
  story has any understanding of what worked, was good in the
• 12:47
  original. And so the ways in which it's
• 12:48
  trying to push it out, the way it's trying to expand it, just
• 12:52
  feel old and and jagged and like you've got an elbow sticking in
• 12:56
  here and it's all very awkward. I don't want to be incredibly
• 13:00
  ageist because I'm sure a lot of authors created brilliant work
• 13:04
  later in life. Probably more more than no.
• 13:10
  I just wonder if Eric, say, would maybe have passed his best
• 13:13
  now and should have just left that alone.
• 13:16
  I mean they've they've certainly, they certainly
• 13:18
  weren't you know like I said don't like to join a pile on,
• 13:22
  but they certainly were not well roundly received.
• 13:25
  My opinion does not seem to be out of keeping with what's
• 13:29
  others said. And I do, yeah, I do, I do.
• 13:33
  I do slightly wonder why they were done in that way when you
• 13:37
  consider what they've done with some of the other novelizations.
• 13:41
  But yes. But I.
• 13:43
  Feel mean now? Well, no.
• 13:44
  Now I'm going to be mean, so don't worry.
• 13:46
  We'll both be being mean and then we'll be really kind to
• 13:48
  James Goss. So my choice is like, you know,
• 13:54
  an esteemed author choosing to write for Doctor Who, which is
• 13:59
  kind of astonishing. My I wish I'd never read it is
• 14:05
  The Coming of The Terror Files by Michael Moorcock.
• 14:09
  Oh, now, I've never read any Michael Moorcock, so I can't
• 14:12
  tell you how this compares to the all I can tell you is it was
• 14:15
  like wading through fucking treacle trying to read this
• 14:19
  book. Now I'm going to read you the
• 14:20
  plot synopsis that's on Wikipedia.
• 14:22
  OK? Because this sounds amazing.
• 14:26
  In order to avert the impending collapse of the multiverse from
• 14:28
  mysterious dark toys that have begun to appear, the Doctor and
• 14:33
  Amy joined the Terra Files, a group of humans in the far
• 14:36
  future obsessed with recreating the Earth's distant past and
• 14:39
  reenacting medieval Earth sports.
• 14:42
  The Doctor and his new friends complete in the Grand Tournament
• 14:45
  in the Magia Star system, which lies on the border of parallel
• 14:49
  realities. The prize of the contest is an
• 14:51
  ancient artifact called the Arrow of Law, saw also by the
• 14:55
  Doctor's old foe, Captain Cornelius and his crew of space
• 14:58
  pirates. Now I think that sounds
• 15:00
  incredible. Yeah, Captain Cornelius.
• 15:04
  That'll be Jerry Cornelius, who is the reoccurring character
• 15:09
  from from the works of Michael Moorcock.
• 15:12
  Have you read the works of Michael Moorcock?
• 15:15
  Well, I've read one or two pieces, not a huge amount and
• 15:21
  the but the first thing for his I read was the coming of the
• 15:23
  Terra files did. You like it?
• 15:28
  I didn't get it. I think is the fair way of
• 15:30
  saying I didn't. I didn't take against it.
• 15:33
  I didn't get a huge amount out of it, but I generally got the
• 15:35
  feeling that I wasn't. I wasn't getting how this story
• 15:39
  is working or how I meant to engage with it.
• 15:41
  Having read a bit of his other stuff, now I need to read more
• 15:44
  of it. It would be interesting to go
• 15:47
  back and try and read it as a Michael Morcock book and not as
• 15:50
  a Doctor Who book because I I suspect.
• 15:53
  That didn't feel like a Doctor Who book at all.
• 15:56
  Like, it took a long time for the Doctor and Amy to appear and
• 15:59
  actually do anything sort of relevance in the book.
• 16:02
  But the thing that annoyed me most was the prose itself, which
• 16:06
  was so dense with such long sentences.
• 16:10
  And you know, I'm not a stupid blow.
• 16:12
  I did pretty well. You know, I I asked my English
• 16:14
  at school. You know, I I know, big words.
• 16:17
  But it it was linguistically over complicated and so I was
• 16:24
  having to reread Censuses again and again, just trying to figure
• 16:27
  out what the hell they meant. And you know, this is a talk to
• 16:30
  tie in book. I thought I shouldn't have to do
• 16:32
  this much work to enjoy the story.
• 16:35
  And so I just honestly, when I say it's like waiting for a
• 16:38
  treacle and I remember I would read pages again and again to
• 16:42
  the point where I just went enough, I'm doing too much work
• 16:46
  to try. And actually, you know, it was
• 16:48
  like a Greek text that I was having to translate.
• 16:51
  It was a baffling thing. And I read the plot synopsis
• 16:56
  afterwards, like in total. And I said, this sounds like an
• 16:59
  incredible book, but there are so many barriers between how
• 17:04
  this is presented and how it could be presented.
• 17:08
  Yeah, it it just irritated me. This comes, this comes back to
• 17:12
  something that we discussed on the Book Club previously when we
• 17:15
  talked about damaged goods, which is how far can you go with
• 17:17
  the Doctor Who book before it stops being a Doctor Who book?
• 17:20
  And I do wonder if coming to the Terafiles is an example of that.
• 17:25
  Is it just a work of fiction that is operating in a
• 17:28
  completely different manner from how Doctor Who books tend to
• 17:33
  work or should work in order to be in order to be discernible or
• 17:41
  readable but almost like computer readable as as Doctor
• 17:46
  Who? If your brain is trying to
• 17:47
  unpick this as this Doctor Who story following its structures
• 17:49
  and its rhythms and its importance is, is this something
• 17:51
  entirely different? Because I've only read a bit of
• 17:54
  this stuff, but I know it is incredibly into textual and
• 17:56
  relational and and mind expandingly big and often
• 18:01
  surreal. I would love to read more of
• 18:05
  that and then return to this and try and see it as a part of that
• 18:08
  and maybe get a better sense of that.
• 18:09
  But then, if what you're trying to do is actually write a Doctor
• 18:13
  Who book, maybe that's maybe that's where you've gone too
• 18:18
  far. And maybe the rest of sort of
• 18:20
  Doctor Who fiction is responsible for that.
• 18:22
  Then I've come to expect a certain level of mundaneness.
• 18:26
  Doctor Who? Pros And so I'm having to work,
• 18:29
  really. It was like I felt the same when
• 18:31
  I was reading Transit recently, which comes with a glossary at
• 18:34
  the back in order to understand like.
• 18:37
  And I don't think any book should have a glossary.
• 18:39
  But it basically was telling me that there was language that I
• 18:42
  wasn't going to understand in this and I was going to have to
• 18:45
  work really, really hard. And I don't know if I'm just not
• 18:48
  willing to work that hard on a Doctor Who book.
• 18:50
  And the question then becomes, should you whose whose failure
• 18:54
  is it? Is it your failure or is it
• 18:55
  Michael Moorcock's? All I'm saying is Michael
• 18:58
  Moorcock was listed as one of the 100 greatest authors of all
• 19:00
  time by the Times So. It gives a fuck while I think,
• 19:04
  man. Not Michael Moorcock.
• 19:07
  But sort of circling around to damage goods, like, yeah, we
• 19:10
  talked a lot about whether that worked as a Doctor Who book or
• 19:13
  not, but both of us appreciated how that was written, how
• 19:17
  accessible it was and sort of how vivid it was on the page.
• 19:21
  Whereas I I couldn't tell you how vivid this was on the page.
• 19:24
  I couldn't. Understand half of what I was
• 19:26
  reading, so. Yeah.
• 19:28
  And I do remember there was a muted response to it when it
• 19:31
  came out. So again, I don't think I was
• 19:34
  sort of against the tie by saying this is a bit much, but
• 19:39
  maybe maybe you need to be a little better read than me to
• 19:43
  appreciate that one. I mean, there is, there is this
• 19:45
  whole Canon of contemporary British authors whose work is
• 19:53
  defies genre to some extent, or perhaps just spreads itself
• 19:56
  across many genres. And is is difficult and is
• 19:59
  complex and is. Oversaturated with ideas and
• 20:03
  images, you know. There's Michael Moorcock by
• 20:05
  Getty Balls. You can also talk about people
• 20:07
  like Alan Moore. Is is another example.
• 20:12
  Brian Aldis maybe to a lesser extent all those sorts of
• 20:15
  authors. It it is a genre in and of
• 20:17
  itself and it isn't always easy and it is sometimes difficult to
• 20:21
  discern. Is this is this no good or have
• 20:25
  I just failed to understand it because my?
• 20:27
  Brain. My brain doesn't operate on that
• 20:30
  level. I I I was, and I was really sort
• 20:33
  of questioning myself rather than Michael Moorcock.
• 20:37
  Which is, which is his great success, and in some ways that
• 20:40
  is a sort of victory. Cheers, Michael.
• 20:44
  Thanks. It's not.
• 20:44
  It's not. I'm talking to both of you now.
• 20:47
  All right. There's not your limit then.
• 20:50
  I'm not. Even just talking about Doctor
• 20:51
  Who now, what is your limit? How far?
• 20:53
  How dense are you prepared to go with a book?
• 20:56
  Now, how much? Work.
• 20:57
  Are you prepared to put? Is there a bit of point where
• 20:58
  you've been like, yeah, do you know what I'm supposed to be
• 21:01
  reading for fun? I've got a busy life.
• 21:03
  This is too much. I think you can get away with an
• 21:07
  awful lot if you're vibing with the book.
• 21:09
  And a lot of it comes down to how how much do I like the feel
• 21:15
  of where this is going and how it's making my brain work and
• 21:18
  the things it's trying to do? Because there are undoubtedly
• 21:22
  difficult books that I've enjoyed, and they're quite
• 21:24
  simple books that I have found to be turgid and unreadable
• 21:28
  despite Despite that, but I mean.
• 21:31
  Well, I bet you could flip that on it's head.
• 21:32
  I bet they've been difficult books that you haven't enjoyed,
• 21:34
  and simple books that you've really enjoyed.
• 21:37
  Yeah, no, that's true. I I mean, I I I did redo disease
• 21:42
  on summer holiday from university in my younger days.
• 21:45
  And nerd, nerd. And the main reason I did that
• 21:50
  was so that I could drop into conversation that I read
• 21:51
  Ulysses. Were you dating your missus at
• 21:56
  that point? No, I wasn't.
• 21:58
  But you know, I got. That was the clincher.
• 22:01
  Got it out there earlier, how early?
• 22:04
  I had read Ulysses. As I seem.
• 22:07
  To get married. Doesn't James Joyce say in
• 22:10
  Ulysses? I don't know.
• 22:11
  I've not read it. But that that felt like that
• 22:16
  that felt like like work in. And I'm not saying, you know,
• 22:21
  I'm not saying James Joyce wasn't very clever and I'm
• 22:24
  certainly, much as Michael Moorcock doesn't care what you
• 22:27
  think, James Joyce's place in the cannon is not going to be
• 22:30
  battered by my. I didn't get all of you disease.
• 22:33
  But I do. I do think it's not an accident
• 22:37
  that when when I've best understood people's appreciation
• 22:41
  of it in the years since, it's because it's been presenting it
• 22:45
  in segments or in sections, often performed.
• 22:48
  That sort of thought, you know, flow of thought tends to make a
• 22:50
  lot more sense. When When?
• 22:51
  You hear something? I've got our seed coming at the
• 22:54
  Terrafiles on the stage in order to understand it.
• 22:58
  No, you need to hear it stripped across the day on BBC Radio 4
• 23:02
  with a selection of British the Britain's finest voice.
• 23:05
  Actors, prepare to get that far. But then maybe the point there
• 23:09
  is that is, what do you engage with different types of work
• 23:13
  for? So if you sit down and try and
• 23:15
  read Ulysses for the fun of it on a summer holiday, I don't
• 23:18
  think it's going to work. But if you can engage with bits
• 23:22
  of it section at a time and just try and pick a part as a mental
• 23:26
  exercise, what's going on and how it's operating, how that's
• 23:28
  making you feel and what he is trying to do and how far he's
• 23:32
  trying to push limitations of conveying thoughts and emotion
• 23:36
  from one brain to another through the printed words,
• 23:38
  that's really interesting. But fundamentally the fact that
• 23:42
  it is banned printed words can fool you into thinking that all
• 23:47
  of those things trying to do the same thing.
• 23:49
  And so maybe with the coming of the Terrafiles, Michael Moorcock
• 23:52
  is fundamentally just trying to do something very different.
• 23:55
  And I I admire the ambition. Yeah, Yeah, exactly.
• 24:00
  And I I admire the ambition of Mr. James Joyce.
• 24:04
  I can just see James Joyce and Michael Moorcock sitting on the
• 24:06
  cloud now, nursing a pint going, did you hear that Hamster Book
• 24:09
  Club this week? Yeah, the pair of twats, Yeah.
• 24:13
  I'm pretty sure Michael Morcock's still alive, so that's
• 24:15
  another. Insult.
• 24:16
  Oh, God. Oh, Jesus Christ.
• 24:20
  Sorry, Michael. OK, well, look, I'll tell you
• 24:30
  what. Let's move on to A.
• 24:34
  Book that I'm going to say, is simply written because I don't
• 24:40
  think there's any strenuous prose in The Giggle, but I do
• 24:46
  think it covers a lot of ground and it has a lot of substance
• 24:53
  given that it's, what, 220 odd pages?
• 24:57
  Long or with that? Yeah, it it's having to do an
• 25:00
  awful, awful lot. So my first question to you
• 25:04
  about this then is how do you think this translates from
• 25:09
  screen to the printed page? Well, I will both caveat and
• 25:15
  begin my response with something that I don't think you tend to
• 25:19
  do on the book club. So you're not an episode.
• 25:20
  I've been an episode I've been on, which is to give a spoiler
• 25:23
  warning. Now, I'm assuming if you've
• 25:26
  listened, if you're listening to this, you have seen the most
• 25:31
  recent episodes of Doctor Who. If not.
• 25:34
  What is wrong with you? Presumably your partner has put
• 25:36
  this on to help you get to sleep A.
• 25:41
  Million sounds. Good night, sweet ladies.
• 25:43
  Good. Night.
• 25:45
  Can you do any sort of? ASMR Now then, please can you do
• 25:48
  the rest of the episode like that?
• 25:50
  Hija, this what follows is a spoiler warning for Doctor Who
• 25:55
  and the giggle. Bye question mark who has
• 25:59
  written Doctor Who and the Giggle.
• 26:01
  Because if you've seen the TV episode, you may think you know
• 26:04
  everything that happens in this book, but you don't.
• 26:07
  So in the rest of this discussion, we're going to spoil
• 26:09
  it rotten. We certainly are, yes.
• 26:11
  That is always the Hamster way, whether Luke Malloy likes it or
• 26:14
  not. This would be a difficult book
• 26:17
  to to explain what it does and how it does it and how it
• 26:21
  relates without change, without changing, I think so.
• 26:25
  I said earlier that The Star Beast was your sort of virgin
• 26:29
  missing adventure adaptation. Wobbly Yonder was your
• 26:32
  necessarily very clean and straightforward adaptation of
• 26:35
  it. This is, this is the Virgin new
• 26:39
  adventure Doctor Who novel adaptation.
• 26:43
  The only thing that I can think to compare it to that we've had
• 26:45
  since Blimey probably the 90s, is Stephen Moffat's The Day of
• 26:49
  the Doctor novelisation. In terms of how post modern and
• 26:53
  how far beyond what we've seen on the screen, we're going to
• 26:55
  just explode it and to use the very different format of writing
• 27:00
  to explore the same story. I'll make another another
• 27:05
  comparison very quickly. I think this is the most playful
• 27:09
  Doctor Who book I've read since Johnny Morris's The Tomorrow
• 27:13
  Windows, way back at the end of the 8th Doctor run.
• 27:17
  Yes, that's another very good comparison.
• 27:19
  I I didn't think you got Doctor Who books like this anymore, if
• 27:23
  I'm honest. Unless they were written by a
• 27:25
  former showrunner who can get away with doing how?
• 27:27
  Do you think you're allowed to have this much fun?
• 27:30
  No. Writing a Doctor Who book.
• 27:33
  And yet it is quite, it's quite disarming.
• 27:37
  It sneaks up on you in terms of what it's doing.
• 27:39
  There is a there is a confidence throughout this book in its
• 27:42
  execution, in the degree to which it is willing to hold
• 27:46
  things back for you, and to only slowly, as in a game, reveal its
• 27:51
  hand as it begins. It feels like it's going to be
• 27:56
  another quite straightforward one.
• 27:59
  Doctor Donna, back in there you get the whole bit with Mr.
• 28:03
  Charles Banerjee visiting the toy shop in the 1920s.
• 28:05
  And yes, it's a yes, I remember this.
• 28:07
  I can picture this. I know how this happened, but as
• 28:11
  as it starts to go on, it starts to introduce little bits of
• 28:13
  playfulness into what's going on.
• 28:15
  You start to get bits where it takes a little sidestep away
• 28:18
  from from what has been what you've seen on screen, moments
• 28:21
  where it begins to comment. Just little asides at first
• 28:26
  about things that are happening. I I kept, I was reading at at
• 28:31
  bedtime and I kept saying to Martha Roth, who is James Goss
• 28:34
  talking to? Yeah 'cause there was something
• 28:36
  there with these Weird. Asides that seemed to be just
• 28:38
  for me. Yeah, it's exactly it.
• 28:41
  It is exactly that. And you you realize that the
• 28:44
  book, the narrator is talking to you as in that sounds like an
• 28:49
  obvious thing to say who else is going to be he's you could be
• 28:51
  talking to. But no literally that the
• 28:53
  structure the form of this book is that the narrator is telling
• 28:57
  you you reading it this story and that the person who is
• 29:01
  writing it may not even be the person who has it says name is
• 29:05
  on the cover. What should we just go straight
• 29:09
  out what's you slow let's just go for it.
• 29:12
  What you what what you begin to learn is that this book, this
• 29:18
  story is being recalled and told to you by the toy maker that he
• 29:24
  gold that he is, has taken control, literally taken control
• 29:28
  of the narrative and he's unspooling it back to you and he
• 29:34
  is going to play with you And that you, the reader, are every
• 29:37
  much a part of his game as the Doctor and Donna and little
• 29:42
  Storky Bill and all the rest of them.
• 29:45
  And it is a full blooded, mercilessly mirthful and.
• 29:56
  Scathing at times. Scathing and quite cruel book.
• 30:00
  And that's the toy maker James Coss has trapped you in his
• 30:04
  game, along with the characters. You have to.
• 30:10
  You have to. Go through puzzles in order to
• 30:12
  proceed with the book. There's an entire Choose Your
• 30:15
  Own Adventure section where you're hopping back and forth
• 30:20
  and he knows if you cheat because you have to cheat to get
• 30:23
  out of it, and then he goes, I know you cheated.
• 30:27
  There's a fantastic bit where, so the bit where the bit where
• 30:31
  in the TV episodes Donna is having to find her way through
• 30:36
  all of the corridors and all of the doors and he starts to give
• 30:39
  you choose your own adventure style options of where you go.
• 30:42
  As you say, some of them lead into endless loops, which is the
• 30:45
  only way that you can get out of it is to skip ahead and see
• 30:47
  where and see how you get out of it.
• 30:48
  There is one bit where if you follow it it takes you all the
• 30:51
  way back to a much earlier chapter.
• 30:54
  The start a much earlier chapter where they are still in UNIT HQ
• 30:56
  and you suddenly realize that chapter really weirdly began
• 30:59
  with the line you've you've oh you shouldn't be hit on a note
• 31:04
  you've fallen down a long snake. I was reading this I I got on
• 31:09
  Twitter and I I I tweeted or blue sky James Goss saying I
• 31:14
  thought I'm stuck in the corridors and can I just say I
• 31:16
  hate you. And I said I've just ended up
• 31:20
  back at. And even when you're out of all
• 31:23
  of that. There's a bit later on where he
• 31:26
  goes. The next part of the book is
• 31:28
  just a load of boasting. He goes, So if you want to skip
• 31:31
  ahead, go to move whatever and you think, oh, it's going to be
• 31:34
  him boasting. It's not.
• 31:36
  It's the bit where the Doctor gets one over on him and he just
• 31:38
  doesn't want you to endure him being embarrassed.
• 31:42
  He's so clever. It's so funny.
• 31:45
  It is, it is. It is so clever, and I mentioned
• 31:51
  that one of the things that the Twin Dilemma novelization does
• 31:56
  that revelation of the Dialects failed to do, was understanding
• 32:00
  the themes of the book of the original TV episode and trying
• 32:04
  to accentuate them and push them further.
• 32:06
  What this brilliantly pulls out of the of the TV episode is that
• 32:13
  real meditation on the nature of games.
• 32:16
  And when we talked about damages last time, one of the things we
• 32:18
  kept coming back to was this idea of Russell T Davis as being
• 32:20
  a very cruel writer. And that is AI think phrase that
• 32:25
  reoccurs here in terms of my thinking about it, which is that
• 32:31
  it's the cruelty of games. You know, there's there's a lot
• 32:33
  of meditation on what it means to play games or why we do it,
• 32:37
  or what happens when we do that. There's lines like every player
• 32:44
  of the game is conceited, arrogant, They think they can
• 32:47
  beat the person they're playing. There's lines like games.
• 32:51
  They're simply illusions with rules, that's all.
• 32:53
  Games are pretending at life endlessly until it stops.
• 32:57
  This idea that what's the point of doing this?
• 32:59
  Why are we doing this? Why are we going over this?
• 33:01
  Why it is a They can be a structure for licensed cruelty
• 33:08
  and humiliation and at the same time they're also kind of
• 33:11
  pointless that they are something we do and they engages
• 33:15
  us and they can distract us from everything else that is going
• 33:18
  on. And yet ultimately they serve no
• 33:19
  purpose other than to sort of create these arenas for combat,
• 33:23
  potentially at least as they're presented here.
• 33:26
  And what's fantastic because you're being told this by the
• 33:28
  toy maker who is, as you've intimated, something of an
• 33:30
  unreliable narrator is an incredibly conceited 1 is that
• 33:33
  it gets you into his head because he's talking to you.
• 33:36
  You understand this character so much better than even certainly
• 33:41
  as he was presented in, you know, the 1960s, Certainly I'd
• 33:45
  argue that he has in any of the many spin off appearances he
• 33:49
  he's made since then. And I think even potentially
• 33:51
  more so than the Russell Davis episode itself, that obviously
• 33:53
  that's building on what he's done.
• 33:55
  That he is he is a a God who has nothing to do other than to be
• 34:03
  cruel, and that he's using that infinite power to mock
• 34:09
  Immortals. Because everything is if you are
• 34:11
  a God, then everything is pointless, right?
• 34:13
  There is no end to it. You can do anything, so why not
• 34:16
  do it playing games, which presents a framework of meaning
• 34:19
  that perhaps doesn't mean anything else.
• 34:20
  And he knows that it all means an awful lot to you.
• 34:25
  He is the worst person to play Monopoly with because he's the
• 34:30
  person who has to win. He's the person who has to take
• 34:34
  this opportunity to get one over on someone else.
• 34:37
  It's something that doesn't matter but clearly matters
• 34:39
  emotionally to them when it means nothing.
• 34:42
  And I think when you get to that moment where the 14th Doctor
• 34:46
  says to him on on screen and here why are you so small?
• 34:51
  It bloody well lands in this book because you have been
• 34:54
  straight into his head and you have understood everything that
• 34:58
  he is trying to achieve and getting out of this, which I
• 35:01
  don't think you always have done.
• 35:03
  When that character has been presented in the past, he's just
• 35:06
  been a bit of a Batman villain. I think, I think what he says.
• 35:10
  Why are you so small? The toy making the Reds.
• 35:12
  Well that one called me boss prize.
• 35:15
  There's a wonderful bit during the door sequence.
• 35:19
  I'm going to read it. I've I've sort of got some
• 35:21
  quotes here. I came into this universe with
• 35:23
  such delight. Shuffle, shuffle.
• 35:25
  And I played them all, Doctor. I've toyed with supernovas and
• 35:28
  turned galaxies into spinning tops.
• 35:31
  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. I gambled with a God and made
• 35:34
  him a jack-in-the-box. I made a jigsaw out of your
• 35:37
  history. Did you like it?
• 35:39
  And there's lots of very economic paragraphs like that
• 35:44
  for every character, but even for the toy maker, which gives
• 35:48
  you, it's that Rusty Davis thing of giving you like an enticing
• 35:53
  one liner which you can build up a whole picture in your head
• 35:56
  with. You do it there, you know, It's
• 35:58
  like when he's talking about the time warp in in those first Four
• 36:00
  Seasons, but done with such economy.
• 36:05
  I was, I was so impressed throughout.
• 36:07
  And actually you said about there were like hints and clues
• 36:11
  at the beginning of the book as to the fact that it might have
• 36:14
  been the toy maker. He makes a couple of references,
• 36:20
  one bit he describes as the Doctor tried to gather his
• 36:23
  thoughts, but they were rolling across the pavement like spilled
• 36:26
  marbles. And so he's just referencing
• 36:28
  games all the time. And I kept thinking, oh, that's
• 36:31
  James Goss being very clever, bringing in lots of game
• 36:34
  metaphors, The whole sort of chaos that's happening on the
• 36:37
  earth, he goes. The whole thing, the whole
• 36:40
  magnificent chaos. If you took one step back and
• 36:43
  and to the side it looked orchestrated almost like a
• 36:47
  dance, a set of moves. There's lots of little hints
• 36:51
  like that. When I was reading it for the
• 36:52
  second time, knowing where this was going, I thought quite a
• 36:56
  clever Sod it. Really is.
• 36:58
  And I think Russell T Davis has has intimated that we're going
• 37:04
  to see more exploration of this idea of Doctor Who versus Gods
• 37:08
  in the coming series, and I think James Goss is really in
• 37:12
  tune with that. Again, we talked about damaged
• 37:15
  goods. We talked about that Russell T
• 37:16
  Davis idea of existential horror, the idea that humanity
• 37:19
  is up against something that that exists on a plane of
• 37:27
  meaning and transcendence, whatever, that we can't even
• 37:31
  begin to comprehend. And that's one thing when it's,
• 37:34
  you know, weapons from the Time War Daleks descending.
• 37:36
  But here it is literally a God. What would it mean if a God came
• 37:39
  down and made the earth, its toy room and you see it, the scale
• 37:42
  of the destruction in the story. And as you say in that, just in
• 37:46
  in those descriptions, James Goss captures his his view of
• 37:49
  all this. There's a there's a reference to
• 37:51
  the destruction of London. There was being a fire atop the
• 37:55
  post office tower and it burned like a birthday candle.
• 37:59
  Yeah, it's such a such a so chilling for the, you know how
• 38:06
  small it makes something so terrible in the eyes of this
• 38:09
  character. And yet he's delighting in that
• 38:11
  because he understands that because he gets that this is
• 38:14
  cruel. He gets that this is horrible
• 38:15
  and that's what he likes doing. But in order to legitimate that,
• 38:19
  he has to do it through the structure of a game because it
• 38:22
  gives him license, a ways through which he can enact
• 38:25
  cruelty and best others. There's wonderful, tricky ways
• 38:28
  as well because he is sort of an omniscient narrator.
• 38:32
  He sees everything around him. So, like, how do we best the
• 38:36
  toymaker when he's the one telling the story?
• 38:38
  How do we surprise him? So there's a wonderful.
• 38:40
  Bit where Colonel Wimbraham is coming up.
• 38:44
  Behind him and he literally says As I spoke, I was of course
• 38:47
  completely unaware that Colonel Wimbraham and Private Coal was.
• 38:51
  Sneaking up at me one gentle step at a time, and it's just
• 38:56
  full of playful descriptions like that.
• 39:00
  Yeah, it's it's wonderful. I mean he he does just capture
• 39:04
  that that the playfulness of that character, the the
• 39:09
  cockiness and the main year of that character as well.
• 39:12
  And frankly, the the arrogance and the patronizing nature of a
• 39:17
  God as a God would be, you know, this is, this goes all the way
• 39:21
  back. You know.
• 39:22
  Russell D Davis is an Oxford grad.
• 39:24
  A comment if it was English little classics he did.
• 39:26
  But he's fully versed in all this stuff of what the gods
• 39:29
  were. If outside of judeo-christian
• 39:32
  tradition, right. The Greeks, where these are not
• 39:35
  necessarily. These are powerful, powerful
• 39:39
  figures who should be feared as much as they should be revered.
• 39:43
  And they're not necessarily likeable in any way.
• 39:45
  They're not necessarily someone you should.
• 39:48
  They're not an eye. They're not an ideal in the way
• 39:50
  that say of the, you know, traditional Christ figure is
• 39:53
  that that they do play games. Some of this, it goes back as as
• 39:58
  as a story that goes back as far as storytelling, the gods coming
• 40:02
  down and toying with mortals. It's not a line from Notting
• 40:07
  Hill. She's a God.
• 40:08
  And you know what happens to mortals who mess with gods?
• 40:12
  Fuck does it every time. And I feel sad that you know
• 40:16
  that though. Oh, I'm incredibly I've read
• 40:20
  that. I have read Ulysses.
• 40:23
  Marry me. I love the line.
• 40:26
  I love the line of the toy maker here.
• 40:28
  If you hold a butterfly in your hand, let it go.
• 40:30
  If it comes back to you, it is yours forever.
• 40:32
  But if it goes head first into a desk, then maybe it was a
• 40:34
  rubbish butterfly all along, which is his description of Mel.
• 40:38
  I also love the fact that he elaborates on the sort of
• 40:43
  sequence where the Doctor basically says come on, you
• 40:45
  know, come with me, that off remakes to the Master.
• 40:48
  You know, we'll, we'll travel, we'll be Celestial reclaiming
• 40:52
  Celestial as not being something iffy and racy and actually, you
• 40:56
  know, being travelling the stars.
• 40:58
  And there's a sort of further description as to why the toy
• 41:02
  maker likes being on Earth and the games that he can play with
• 41:06
  people. And he quotes here.
• 41:08
  At one point I made every opinion supreme.
• 41:11
  That's the game of the 21st century.
• 41:13
  They shout and they type and they cancel.
• 41:16
  And as well as sort of giving him more back story, he does
• 41:21
  make some fabulously pointed comments about today's society
• 41:27
  in this book as well. Oh.
• 41:29
  It is. It is gloriously and incredibly
• 41:32
  of the of the moment. I I have no doubt that this is a
• 41:35
  Doctor Who book that people will still be reading in 20 years
• 41:37
  time. What they're going to make of
• 41:39
  half of this, I don't know, but it will be.
• 41:42
  It will be a fantastic insight into this.
• 41:45
  We get whole sections about the US presidents.
• 41:48
  That's one of the first real breakaway moments is there's a
• 41:51
  subplot introduced about the president wants to get his hands
• 41:55
  on the nuclear codes, and you turn the page to the next
• 41:59
  chapter. And it's a it's one of those
• 42:01
  mazes like you get in a kids magazine that says you are
• 42:04
  inside the brain of the presence of the United States.
• 42:07
  Can you find your way out? Did you do it?
• 42:10
  No, I didn't. Oh, I'm not.
• 42:13
  I'm not playing your games toy maker.
• 42:17
  You shouldn't have. Read on then.
• 42:20
  He knows if you cheat, but it is great.
• 42:24
  I mean even down to the there was a bit coming up in that I
• 42:29
  knew was coming up in the story that I very much wondered how
• 42:33
  they would possibly. You're talking about the musical
• 42:37
  number, aren't you? They're talking about how do you
• 42:39
  do a musical number in print. And the answer is, of course,
• 42:43
  that you have a copyright lawyer to tell you that you can't do
• 42:48
  it. She goes, and I'm a music.
• 42:51
  Copyright lawyer, just you try putting anything down on this
• 42:54
  page without clearance and see what happens.
• 42:56
  And he has a row of her, doesn't he?
• 42:58
  And she goes, do you know what? You can have the La La LA's
• 43:01
  because that's just a standard rhythm, but anything else that
• 43:05
  I'll have you mate. She says.
• 43:08
  She says, Have you got the rights to that song?
• 43:10
  Says. I created that song.
• 43:12
  I'm afraid my clients disagree. Then he points out that he's
• 43:16
  turned he's turned the Spice Girls into into Dolls.
• 43:20
  Who he's he's tied to the tracks of his train set with Posh
• 43:24
  Spice, driving the train towards them.
• 43:26
  You think there are children not born yet who are going to get
• 43:31
  into Doctor Who because they so love the adventures of the 19th
• 43:34
  Doctor and they're going to go back and revisit this book and
• 43:38
  they're going to be going, I'm sorry, what?
• 43:40
  But that's what's wonderful about it.
• 43:42
  And that adds adds to the energy and that.
• 43:44
  Connection. You've seen Notting Hill, right?
• 43:48
  So I'm assuming then you may have also seen Spice World the
• 43:50
  movie. Oh, I'm very much of the age
• 43:52
  where I saw Spice World, the movie it's.
• 43:54
  Delirious, isn't it? Honestly, it's the most terrible
• 43:56
  film with the most talent I've ever seen Packed into it.
• 44:00
  But it's so sort of out there, that film I could actually see
• 44:03
  that sequence of the toy maker turned them into, you know,
• 44:06
  possible is driving the train on the track.
• 44:08
  That could actually happen in that movie, I think.
• 44:10
  Well, you know, that is, that is a really good comparison,
• 44:13
  because the thing about that film as well is that it is
• 44:16
  another product exactly of its exact moment in time.
• 44:21
  Yeah, everything that happens. In that is the Zeitgeist.
• 44:24
  Exactly. All of the cameo appearances,
• 44:27
  all of the things that are being referenced, Everyone that's in
• 44:29
  that that is specifically, I want to say 1997.
• 44:35
  And that's one of the things that's, it's actually quite fun
• 44:39
  about revisiting it now because it is just like being plugged
• 44:43
  straight back into a moment in time.
• 44:44
  What? Madness happened to the world
• 44:46
  that gripped them with this spice fever.
• 44:48
  In fact, there's a sequence in that film.
• 44:49
  I'm sorry, I'm going totally off topic here.
• 44:51
  Do you remember where they're in the bus and they're being chased
• 44:53
  by the police and they're in their bus, which is like a
• 44:56
  TARDIS. It's bigger on the inside than
• 44:57
  the out and they go quick. Over London Bridge, but the
• 45:00
  bridge is going up and so they go, oh, we're.
• 45:02
  Going to have to. Floor it, and so the the bus
• 45:05
  goes into the air and suddenly the bus turns into terrible
• 45:07
  model work and flies over. The bridge because because in a
• 45:13
  fittingly and and you know comparably met away, that whole
• 45:16
  sequence is at the same time being described by the producers
• 45:19
  who are pitching the film version of what's going on.
• 45:22
  They go and they try, they they jumped London Tower Bridge, they
• 45:25
  go. Sounds expensive and cuts to
• 45:27
  this really crap. Models to watch that.
• 45:29
  Movie. Now, there might be a lot of
• 45:31
  parallels with this book. This is Doctor Who's Spice World
• 45:34
  the movie. No wonder it's so entertaining.
• 45:37
  I mean that with all, with all the phrase I can possibly put
• 45:41
  upon it. But you know, I will say there
• 45:42
  is one enormous difference in this.
• 45:44
  And you said the word earlier. This book's got by.
• 45:48
  Oh yeah. So it it's nasty in places while
• 45:52
  it's making you laugh, it's that sort of uncomfortable line
• 45:54
  between being very funny and very dark.
• 45:56
  The plane that goes down at the beginning is said to have hit
• 45:59
  three housing estates. Like that's as many deaths as we
• 46:03
  got in damaged goods. I think in a paragraph, you know
• 46:08
  that we see describes that those soldiers being turned into
• 46:13
  balls, you know, and you learn about a little bit about their
• 46:16
  back story as it's happening. It's terrific.
• 46:19
  There's a sequence where the three people that were guarding
• 46:23
  the gun, what's that gun called? The.
• 46:27
  Galvanic Rae. Oh, well done.
• 46:29
  You truly are a Doctor Who fan. They've been pushed over the
• 46:32
  edge but turned into a bouncy ball and and various toys and on
• 46:37
  the way down we learn a little bit about their back story and
• 46:39
  that they will be falling forever.
• 46:42
  Yeah, it's quite horrific in places.
• 46:45
  There's there's a, there's a line which gets straight to the
• 46:48
  heart of what the toy maker actually does, where he says I
• 46:52
  carve my playing pieces from souls and you're like, oh, that
• 46:57
  is it's. Just a few words.
• 46:59
  Yeah, and and yet he also gives the character this element of, I
• 47:07
  don't wanna say tragedy, but you get the sense that this is a
• 47:10
  this is, you know, behind the clan make up there's tragedy.
• 47:14
  Oh, who weeps, who? Yeah, but I am Pagliacci, all
• 47:18
  the rest of it. And yet there are moments where
• 47:21
  he does begin to just dip into where has the toy.
• 47:24
  Why is the toy maker doing this? Why does he want to play games?
• 47:28
  Why does he want to do any of this in the 1st place, operate
• 47:33
  on any sort of level. And he talks about his toy room
• 47:38
  and talks about how he was born, as is mentioned of the episode,
• 47:43
  in the sort of dark underbelly of the universe, a cold place, a
• 47:46
  very lonely place. And that he created his toy.
• 47:50
  Rumors I've got the exact quote, but putting up putting up chip
• 47:55
  board and wallpaper against the darkness so that he had this
• 48:00
  little space where he could be happy in this little space where
• 48:03
  he could play, but that the cold always crept through and that is
• 48:10
  again a. Clinch, isn't it?
• 48:12
  That cow would always crept through.
• 48:14
  There is this element of, you know what else about games?
• 48:17
  It's a return to childhood, right?
• 48:19
  It's it's an inherently childish act to engage in, in playing
• 48:24
  games. And there is that quite deep
• 48:29
  idea of the toy maker as, I don't want to say, a little lost
• 48:33
  child. So I don't think he said it's, I
• 48:34
  don't think it's that Star Trek episode.
• 48:36
  What? He's coming.
• 48:37
  For if he's a little lost child, he's a sadistic little lost
• 48:41
  child. But he's the little lost child
• 48:43
  inside all of us, you know, You can make metaphors there about
• 48:45
  that idea of growing up and the pretence that you need to put
• 48:48
  away childish things and games. The idea that's all of all of
• 48:52
  this is a happiness against the the horror and the
• 48:56
  meaninglessness beyond. It will.
• 48:58
  What else are you going to do When, and we mentioned this
• 49:01
  around damaged goods, which is that Russell T Davis believes
• 49:03
  that you know when you die, that's it.
• 49:06
  That the universe is inherently meaningless and we create
• 49:08
  meaning within it. And that's kind of the exercise
• 49:11
  that the toy maker is doing here, that some of this maybe in
• 49:15
  some ways all began as an effort for him not to be lonely, for
• 49:18
  him to play with others. And yet he is cruel because of
• 49:25
  because he is. Because he's a God, and he's
• 49:27
  dealing with mortals that no one can measure up to him that he's
• 49:31
  disappointed in them. It is saying profound things is
• 49:34
  and that's the toy maker's way of sort of filling the hole at
• 49:41
  the end of the book. Rusty, you said it had damaged
• 49:44
  because when we talked about it, about how he doesn't believe
• 49:46
  anything beyond. So live your best life now and
• 49:49
  you have the Doctor come to that conclusion at the end.
• 49:51
  This is what I was fighting for all along, surrounded by
• 49:54
  friends, having fun. It actually comes to a very warm
• 49:57
  conclusion. This of like life is about the
• 50:00
  moments, the best moments you have in your life, you know with
• 50:04
  the people that you love. Yeah.
• 50:06
  And again that's a good example of how James Goss is really work
• 50:10
  is really work following the grain of what Russell T Davis is
• 50:15
  trying to do and yet bringing his own his own ability to it.
• 50:18
  He's not just trying to ape Russell T Davis's language.
• 50:20
  He's going, yeah, yeah, I get this and then and then and then
• 50:23
  and this and that. Yeah, you're right.
• 50:26
  That theme come comes through in the end of what do you do with
• 50:29
  this with this time here to bring meaning to it because
• 50:33
  Rusty have thought he's very cruel.
• 50:35
  That is always counterpoint pointed with hope.
• 50:37
  He he also has a lot of faith in people's in some people's
• 50:42
  ability to be good and there are people who are worthwhile the
• 50:44
  doctor's joy. When he sees Mel again he's like
• 50:46
  isn't oh Mel's a good person. Mel's a lovely person.
• 50:50
  You know Kate for all Kate Stewart.
• 50:52
  I think we get some more insights into her character.
• 50:56
  Well, no, I mean, I'm going to come on to all the characters
• 50:58
  one at a time in a second, because I I think this is the
• 51:00
  most insight I've ever had into Kate Stewart, and I like her in
• 51:05
  this. I did as well.
• 51:07
  I mean, I've always, I've always enjoyed Gemma Redgrave's
• 51:11
  performance on screen. What?
• 51:12
  Is wrong with you, man. I've always had a thing for posh
• 51:17
  girls. What can I say?
• 51:18
  I did love the bit where she was spun into the wall that was.
• 51:21
  Amazing Donna had spent most of her life asking to speak to the
• 51:24
  manager and this woman then finally fitted the bill.
• 51:30
  Oh, and there's a wonderful sequence where we learn that
• 51:34
  Kate Stewart's got this group of friends and she goes to the baby
• 51:38
  showers and she goes to the parties and she's a shoulder to
• 51:42
  cry on when they split up with each other.
• 51:43
  And she's living up perfectly normal social life, and anytime
• 51:49
  anybody asks her about her work, she just goes, oh, you know, the
• 51:52
  usual. And she skilfully manages to
• 51:55
  avoid. In fact, she even says she's
• 51:57
  quite insidious because sometimes she learns things that
• 52:00
  are like a precursor to an alien invasion from her friends and
• 52:04
  things like that. But it was that sort of detail.
• 52:06
  I was like, my God, I've been waiting 6 bloody seasons for
• 52:09
  this. Those friends include Ang, who
• 52:15
  works in the city. This is a Doctor Who book
• 52:20
  podcast, so I'm just going to ring the little Angie Kapoor
• 52:23
  klaxon, right? There is it Andrew with AJ.
• 52:25
  It's Andrew with AJ. And J of course come.
• 52:27
  On. Come on, come on.
• 52:30
  James. James Goss.
• 52:31
  We see you. We see you there.
• 52:33
  There's. There's insight into and Dane
• 52:36
  the Doctor did this as well. There's insight into her
• 52:40
  relationship with her father as well, and there's a wonderful
• 52:44
  sequence where she details the Doctor turning up in Bessie to
• 52:48
  take her off to Is it ballet lessons or something like that?
• 52:51
  The first, the first time she met the doctor was when her dad
• 52:54
  was down to pick her up from school.
• 52:57
  But he couldn't make it because he's dealing with the giant
• 53:00
  cockroaches or something like that.
• 53:02
  And so the doctor volunteers to take her instead.
• 53:04
  And then at the end it says that was yeah, that was the first
• 53:06
  time that Kate met the doctor. Wonderful.
• 53:08
  And the doctor just goes. Well, you know, and I was.
• 53:10
  Free. So of course I can, you know.
• 53:13
  Oh, and there's a wonderful signal.
• 53:14
  So I'm going to quote it here. One because it really does.
• 53:19
  Like when Russell Davis started doing alien invasions one after
• 53:22
  another, it got to a point where Stephen Moffitt had to cut the
• 53:25
  cord eventually and throw them all up Amy's crack or wherever
• 53:29
  he put them. And Kate Stewart has a sequence
• 53:32
  where, and I quote she never could work out what lay behind
• 53:37
  that misapprehension. At first she'd assumed it was
• 53:39
  some kind of perception filter cast over the Earth, but after
• 53:43
  the Flux, she realized that it was what it was, just what
• 53:46
  humanity did to itself. The skies had burned, the
• 53:48
  streets had filled with alien soldiers, and once it was all
• 53:51
  over, there was a week or two giving to survivors charities, a
• 53:55
  few controversial opinion pieces questioning whether it had
• 53:58
  really happened. And then a minor royal would do
• 54:00
  something even more minor, and the entire planet would decide
• 54:04
  that they'd rather talk about that and just never mention the
• 54:07
  other thing again. And they were always right.
• 54:11
  And it's just sequences like that from her point of view.
• 54:14
  And I'm like, I wish, I wish I was seeing that cake on the
• 54:17
  screen. Yeah, and and yeah, as you say,
• 54:20
  this book being so incredibly and wonderfully of the moment,
• 54:24
  doesn't that feel like a very 2023-2024 thought of three or
• 54:29
  four years ago? We were in the middle of a once
• 54:31
  in a century global pandemic, and we couldn't imagine how
• 54:35
  things would ever return to normal people be the same.
• 54:38
  And yet, to a certain extent, at least on a societal level, we
• 54:42
  already seem to have kind of dropped.
• 54:43
  It down. They barely talk about it.
• 54:45
  Do we? Yeah.
• 54:46
  And that really, that moment, I just thought, click, you've made
• 54:50
  sense of it. This is what societies do, you
• 54:52
  know, going even further back, Spanish flu killed four people
• 54:57
  in the First World War. And yet we didn't really talk
• 55:00
  about it as anything other than the historical curiosity.
• 55:04
  Society forgets, does forget these things.
• 55:07
  It's always at least on the motion level, maybe not as a as
• 55:11
  a plot point for a Popular Science fiction TV series.
• 55:14
  It's always much more interesting when you can find a
• 55:17
  genuine or at least recognizable and emotionally understandable
• 55:25
  explanation for these contrivances rather than coming
• 55:27
  up with I Love the Cracks in Time storyline.
• 55:29
  That's a great series. But this this just feels you go
• 55:32
  no. Do you know what?
• 55:33
  Actually, you're right. The analogy is there because
• 55:36
  this is happening all the time. Yeah, yeah.
• 55:39
  It's like, it's like, I don't know.
• 55:40
  I mean, I lost my mum. It's like losing a parent, you
• 55:42
  know? And it's like you cannot let
• 55:43
  that dominate your thoughts all the time.
• 55:45
  Otherwise you can't go on. You sort of tuck it away in the
• 55:48
  back of your mind. Every now and again you think
• 55:50
  about it, but you go on. But it's just like that with
• 55:53
  alien invasions. I can't believe I've just made a
• 55:56
  link between those two things, but there we go.
• 55:59
  Also, well, well, we're talking about.
• 56:01
  There's also a lovely bit about how Kate learnt so much more
• 56:04
  about her father from reading the and his life from reading
• 56:07
  the unit files than she ever got to him, which again, talking
• 56:11
  about parents. These are people that we have
• 56:15
  such one of the literally strongest genetic connections of
• 56:20
  in in the world. You know, we're literally what
• 56:23
  they were born from, right? First they gave us life and we
• 56:27
  spend years, decades potentially living with them.
• 56:30
  And yet how many of us are fortunate enough to actually
• 56:33
  feel like we actually know our parents?
• 56:36
  How many of us have ever actually sat down and had that
• 56:38
  conversation? And again, it's it feels weird
• 56:40
  to say it, but capturing Kate Stewart in that moment feels
• 56:44
  real, because there's something that she's saying about her dad,
• 56:47
  who ran a secret intelligence organization that fought alien
• 56:50
  invasions in the 70s or 80s and actually does the same, Do you
• 56:52
  think? No, I I get that.
• 56:55
  And that is, it's so much more nuanced and adult and to put it
• 57:02
  bluntly, good, than all of the 90s fanfic that just wants to,
• 57:08
  you know, torture characters and go, oh, but what if they
• 57:12
  suffered, you think? Well, no, no.
• 57:14
  But that's I I get her that bit more now than I ever.
• 57:17
  Have but it does it with such brevity.
• 57:19
  It doesn't scrimp on the pace. It's still telling the story
• 57:22
  that we saw on the screen. But in the same breath it is
• 57:25
  giving you these massive insights into these characters
• 57:29
  and these comments on today's society.
• 57:32
  You know, I'm doing these playful things with the
• 57:34
  narrative. It when I say this is a
• 57:36
  substantial book, I don't mean in the sense that it's Michael
• 57:39
  Morcott style prose, you know, which I literally cannot
• 57:44
  interpret. It goes by by like a lick this
• 57:47
  book, but sort of individual paragraphs just contain enough
• 57:52
  for you to think about, you know, for an hour.
• 57:55
  And you you keep going. But there was lots of things
• 57:57
  that were just lingering in my head after I was reading them.
• 58:01
  And yet he's also an incorrigible troll, so Kate has
• 58:04
  read the files on her father's encounters with gel guards,
• 58:07
  axons and the devil goblins from Neptune.
• 58:09
  No, you think that's niche? Hang on.
• 58:11
  There was one bit there where I was like, my God, gods is a is a
• 58:14
  deep fan is when he said what is it?
• 58:16
  The doctor ran on ahead like a child entering Whipsnade Zoo,
• 58:21
  which is a line from the Ark. Do do goes.
• 58:24
  I bet it's Whipsnade Zoo. Oh, some fans may be mollified
• 58:30
  to learn that Kate does think about Allsgood at one point.
• 58:34
  Yes. Well, that's all right then.
• 58:38
  Oh fuck me. I love that sequence on the TV
• 58:40
  so much. Did you see someone who done one
• 58:43
  about and his old friendly Brigadier died alone, having
• 58:49
  waited for him to turn up Every night he goes, his corpse was
• 58:53
  resurrected by the Cybermen missing.
• 58:56
  Well, that's all right then. Honest to God, the way Russell
• 59:00
  Davis picked up all of those. Terribly sort of awful.
• 59:04
  Seasoned climaxes in that scene. I was like, yeah, the flux was
• 59:08
  never explained. Yeah, she did become a puddle.
• 59:11
  Yeah, she's. I'm going, yes.
• 59:14
  Why? You remind us of all these very
• 59:15
  strange events that happened in the past.
• 59:17
  Oh, but I I absolutely love and admire him for the fact that
• 59:22
  although this is a relaunch he is in, he is very consciously
• 59:26
  not wiping away what's gone before.
• 59:27
  He is making that part of the doctor's story.
• 59:30
  Stephen Moffitt said this, which is that you don't need to invent
• 59:33
  a secret or this pre timeless child.
• 59:35
  So this wasn't him, you know, sub tweeting, he said You don't
• 59:38
  need to invent a secret origin for for Doctor Who.
• 59:42
  His back story is the 60 years of television that we've been
• 59:45
  watching. And that sequence is one of the
• 59:46
  best examples of that, of the point glorious.
• 59:49
  The You know, yeah. The emotional point of that
• 59:51
  scene is him taunting, taunting the doctor by explaining to
• 59:54
  Donna just how shit his life has been since he last saw her, and
• 59:57
  how much danger she might well be in at the same point.
• 1:00:01
  Yeah, yeah, he's drawing it out of things that have actually
• 1:00:03
  happened. I care more about the timeless
• 1:00:05
  child after two episodes or three episodes that I did in the
• 1:00:09
  whole of the Chris Chibnall era. And that is that speaks an
• 1:00:12
  incredible generosity of writer as much as as much as anything
• 1:00:15
  else. Yeah, he could have pushed away
• 1:00:17
  from that completely and said, you know what, that was a bit of
• 1:00:20
  a that wasn't popular. Well, you're not going to do
• 1:00:21
  that. It's like, no, I'm going to
• 1:00:23
  extract the good from it and play with it.
• 1:00:27
  Games again? Oh, do you know what?
• 1:00:29
  There was another very deep continuity References.
• 1:00:31
  Did you see the bit where it said Donna Victorious turned and
• 1:00:34
  tossed away the body of Stookie Sue.
• 1:00:36
  I was like. Is he talking about Time Lord
• 1:00:38
  Victorious from Waters of Mars or that dreadful, you know,
• 1:00:42
  multi platform storyline that they did?
• 1:00:45
  All of the above? All of the above.
• 1:00:48
  Can we turn our attention to the Doctor, then?
• 1:00:51
  Because from the very beginning of this book, there we are.
• 1:00:54
  He's painting the picture of the Doctor as being sort of
• 1:00:57
  exhausted and well, weary, and we're sort of leading up to
• 1:01:01
  where the story goes. How did you think that was
• 1:01:04
  portrayed in the book? I I I really liked it again.
• 1:01:09
  I thought that he really emphasized and was able to
• 1:01:16
  extrapolate on a lot of what was going on there.
• 1:01:18
  And he he basically the idea of the fact, the idea that the
• 1:01:20
  Doctor is the ways again, in which we sort of lie to
• 1:01:24
  ourselves about why we're unhappy or why we're struggling,
• 1:01:26
  which is he, he has the Doctor very conscious of the fact that
• 1:01:30
  he has been through a lot. I think it says here, you know,
• 1:01:32
  it's only been 15 hours since he regenerated.
• 1:01:36
  And it details all the things that he's been for.
• 1:01:38
  Isn't it the Daleks in the comic strip?
• 1:01:40
  Yeah, feet to me. Wobbly.
• 1:01:43
  Yonder. All of that in 15 hours.
• 1:01:46
  And he thinks he's exhausted because of because of that And
• 1:01:48
  that is reinforcing all don't like that he hasn't stopped
• 1:01:51
  running this whole time this whole life And and then is you
• 1:01:56
  know, laying that groundwork for for then later on when Donna
• 1:02:00
  says to him, when the 15th boxer says to him, no, you're tired
• 1:02:04
  because you've never stopped running.
• 1:02:06
  You know this has been going on the whole time.
• 1:02:08
  That glorious bit where the 15th Doctor just lays out everything
• 1:02:11
  that the Doctor has, has that he, he and his past self have
• 1:02:15
  been through. And talk about Deep Dive,
• 1:02:17
  Lagopolis, Adric, the Pandorica, it's all in there.
• 1:02:21
  But again the reason that works is and again Speaking of that
• 1:02:24
  generosity and that openness to look back on things where
• 1:02:26
  Officer Davis I think he said this.
• 1:02:28
  It might have been an unleashed in passing that the idea with
• 1:02:32
  that is not to necessarily mention the big fan favorite
• 1:02:36
  moments but and actually what are the biggest things that the
• 1:02:39
  Doctor? What are the biggest threats
• 1:02:40
  that the Doctor has faced on a sort of just actual quite step
• 1:02:44
  back level. And it is stories like Lugopolis
• 1:02:47
  where the entire universe is under threat for all that
• 1:02:49
  happens in quite a boring way. Half the universe, and I think
• 1:02:53
  it's the other half the universe, was the flux.
• 1:02:54
  So there's not a lot of universe Lex.
• 1:02:56
  Really. I think someone did do the maths
• 1:02:58
  recently, trying to work out how much of the universe is
• 1:03:00
  currently left compared to what was there in 1980.
• 1:03:03
  Well. We keep ending up on Earth.
• 1:03:05
  Well, exactly. And that's done really well
• 1:03:10
  because it's also on TV without one to sound obvious.
• 1:03:16
  The giggle is a very visual story.
• 1:03:18
  So a lot of the toy makers threat is is conveyed visually.
• 1:03:22
  It is soldiers being turned into bouncy balls.
• 1:03:27
  It is. More on that later, but go on.
• 1:03:29
  Sorry on that later. It is puppet shows and infinite
• 1:03:33
  corridors and the Doctor's exhaustion.
• 1:03:36
  It, you know, it comes through David Tennant's performance,
• 1:03:39
  which he does wonderfully. It's just someone who just seems
• 1:03:42
  tired but but tired in a way we can't let yourself stop And so
• 1:03:48
  there is a job there for James Goss to keep that going across
• 1:03:51
  when he doesn't have those crutches, when you don't have
• 1:03:53
  the actors performance when you go and you can't see what's
• 1:03:56
  happening. And some of that stuff is the
• 1:03:59
  sort of thing where you have to you know and the audience knows
• 1:04:03
  you're going to have to re engineer how to operate.
• 1:04:05
  Like like the dance sequence, the musical number, but other
• 1:04:10
  parts it is. It is getting that emotion
• 1:04:12
  across without someone literally on screen in front of you acting
• 1:04:17
  tired and got to undermine their performance.
• 1:04:20
  Do you know that there was one passage where he's so
• 1:04:25
  effectively, evocatively managed to make me understand precisely
• 1:04:30
  what the Doctor was going through by bringing it down to a
• 1:04:33
  very human level? That I understood.
• 1:04:35
  I'll quickly read the passage, he goes.
• 1:04:38
  You reading this? You're human.
• 1:04:40
  Your soul carries around the weight of all your mistakes,
• 1:04:42
  your missteps and regrets. It heaves and groans with them.
• 1:04:47
  Every morning you wake up knowing that the burden has only
• 1:04:49
  grown heavier in the night. Every crossword, every unhelpful
• 1:04:53
  e-mail, every heartbroken, unbearable.
• 1:04:56
  And you. Your lives are so short.
• 1:04:58
  Imagine the weight that the doctors carried several thousand
• 1:05:02
  years of wrong terms and I that's it.
• 1:05:04
  That's all I need to know, what he's going through.
• 1:05:08
  Yeah, because it's an idea that was very much there in the
• 1:05:13
  latter days of RTT. One of, you know, the doctors
• 1:05:16
  only got different. Being honest didn't always
• 1:05:19
  entirely work for me because it did often just come down to
• 1:05:22
  brooding and, oh, I'm a Time Lord, I operate on levels that
• 1:05:26
  you can't understand. But but again, as you say here,
• 1:05:29
  James Ross brings it to that humid level.
• 1:05:31
  He makes it, as we did other things, understandable for us.
• 1:05:35
  He related to what we know and creates that, you know,
• 1:05:39
  empathetic response of, oh God, yeah, imagine that, because
• 1:05:45
  there's a lot of horror in this book, in the original story as
• 1:05:47
  well. And we spoke a lot about Russell
• 1:05:49
  Davidson horror last time. In order for horror to work, at
• 1:05:53
  least for you to be actually scared rather than just like
• 1:05:56
  frightened you, you need it needs to actually engage with
• 1:06:00
  you. It needs to actually speak to
• 1:06:02
  you. You can't just be reading it
• 1:06:03
  passively. But that goes for so much else
• 1:06:08
  that the book needs to achieve as well.
• 1:06:10
  These books need to achieve and I, I I I think as well something
• 1:06:15
  as simple as tiredness. You don't need to turn this into
• 1:06:18
  a giant godly thing because we've all felt tired.
• 1:06:20
  We've all felt the weight of things we've gone through
• 1:06:22
  before. We've all thought, oh, you know,
• 1:06:25
  God, what's the, you know, when does when does this stop?
• 1:06:28
  When do you actually get a break from life?
• 1:06:31
  And yeah, no. And thank you for reminding me
• 1:06:34
  that bit, because it it it is a very skillful, odd moment of
• 1:06:41
  taking something that Doctor has tried to do so often and
• 1:06:45
  possibly quietly and as you say, without any great statement
• 1:06:48
  doing it really well. Better than this.
• 1:06:52
  Better than, like you said, all of those, let's say new
• 1:06:56
  adventures and I've doctor books that try to psychoanalyse the
• 1:07:00
  Doctor and so and torture him in various ways for us to get under
• 1:07:04
  his skin. And that in just one paragraph,
• 1:07:07
  actually, in a way that I understood.
• 1:07:10
  And at the end, once the toy maker's defeated, it's like he
• 1:07:13
  sags, doesn't he? But then he looks out and he's
• 1:07:16
  like the world is still burning and Donna goes, this isn't your
• 1:07:20
  fault. You feel like you've got the
• 1:07:22
  whole weight of the world on your shoulders and this isn't
• 1:07:24
  your fault. You didn't do this.
• 1:07:27
  It's really, really well done and to the point where the by
• 1:07:32
  regeneration it feels like a rebirth, you know?
• 1:07:35
  And it feels very satisfying that one doctor, our doctor is
• 1:07:41
  allowed to rest and another doctor our doctor, it's allowed
• 1:07:46
  to jump, jump away and and have more adventures, but sort of
• 1:07:50
  fresh and energetic and up for it again.
• 1:07:53
  Yeah. It's such a it comes across as
• 1:07:56
  an incredibly kind thing to happen.
• 1:07:59
  But there is an emotional because that's the thing with
• 1:08:01
  Russell Davis's writing is ultimately his his his plot
• 1:08:05
  resolutions do tend to come down to vibes.
• 1:08:07
  And I'm not the first person to say that and it's a case of
• 1:08:10
  therefore how well do you vibe with it.
• 1:08:12
  And he with the by regeneration you really do because because it
• 1:08:17
  has that emotional resolution overweight being taken off of a
• 1:08:24
  reward that that was something he explicitly talked about.
• 1:08:27
  Of course you know in the end of Time the Doctor getting his
• 1:08:29
  reward And yet there's almost a there was a very telling little
• 1:08:35
  moment in the commentary for this where they when it's coming
• 1:08:39
  up to the 14th Doctor when you when you think well at least
• 1:08:42
  anyone who hasn't isn't has been on Twitter thinks the 14th
• 1:08:45
  Doctor's about to regenerate into a shujiatwa where a safest
• 1:08:51
  basically says he's given David Tennant better last words at
• 1:08:55
  this time. I thought when his last word is
• 1:08:59
  Alan Z which actually is such a better last word for that
• 1:09:04
  character than I don't want to go which is too meta for its own
• 1:09:07
  good. I thought that at the time.
• 1:09:08
  I've never thought anything. Do you think Steven Moffat took
• 1:09:11
  the piss out of that brilliantly?
• 1:09:14
  Yeah. And there is a degree to which
• 1:09:16
  this feels like almost we talk about these terms almost like a
• 1:09:20
  sort of do over of of David Tennant's previous exit because
• 1:09:24
  it's really trying to hit a lot of the same notes.
• 1:09:29
  But I think does it better both on screen and certainly in this
• 1:09:34
  book than it did in 2010. I think it's it's a do over of
• 1:09:38
  both his exit and Catherine Tate's Donna's exit as well.
• 1:09:42
  And in both cases, it's very satisfying because the last
• 1:09:46
  thing in the world while that I wanted was Donna's memory gone.
• 1:09:50
  And the docs are being utterly miserable.
• 1:09:53
  But but the idea of the two of them, you know, setting up house
• 1:09:56
  and having jolly adventures and skipping off to the past and the
• 1:09:59
  future every now and again, but just having a nice normal life
• 1:10:02
  on earth surrounded by like, lovely people, well, I can get
• 1:10:06
  behind that. That's sort of ending our one.
• 1:10:08
  Yeah, and if I may insert my own head cannon at this point, I
• 1:10:12
  choose to believe that the house he buys is the house on Allen
• 1:10:15
  Rd. I like, I like to think that
• 1:10:18
  like maybe the 2nd, the 7th Doctor put it up for sale so
• 1:10:20
  that he's in France. Is it?
• 1:10:23
  That's what. Isn't it?
• 1:10:25
  Where did you get that from? I.
• 1:10:26
  Swear that was on the unleashed. As well, he goes, it's some
• 1:10:29
  beautiful house in France. Well, he he he in the book, he
• 1:10:33
  buys it off a very nice British estate agent.
• 1:10:36
  That sequence is just glorious, isn't it, where he goes in and
• 1:10:40
  goes, oh, it turns out I was being paid for saving the Earth
• 1:10:42
  for all those alien innovations all those years.
• 1:10:44
  So there's the money. Can I have that one, please?
• 1:10:46
  That looks nice. And then adds that he's got a
• 1:10:49
  pension because he's over 67. He goes She's very young.
• 1:10:54
  Somebody can have one, if I'm honest, but oh, it's just
• 1:10:57
  glorious. There's another passage here as
• 1:11:00
  well where he's got the impossible task of having to sum
• 1:11:04
  up the technically the first Doctors and that's, you know,
• 1:11:08
  all the doctors up until this point with his bio regenerated
• 1:11:11
  life. And he goes.
• 1:11:13
  The old Doctor saw them all running from too many rooms,
• 1:11:16
  full of severe men in cloaks, running through corridors,
• 1:11:20
  running over the dust of alien worlds, always running from
• 1:11:23
  fireballs and death rays and cruelty, feeling the universe
• 1:11:27
  was falling apart around him, and he was holding it together
• 1:11:30
  in his bare hands while he ran. And the thing that was stopping
• 1:11:33
  him from tripping and dropping everything, the thing, the thing
• 1:11:37
  that was keeping him, was his friends.
• 1:11:40
  Oh well, that was gorgeous. Yeah, and again, there's it's
• 1:11:45
  that idea of what looking at what is the the emergent meaning
• 1:11:51
  of Doctor Who, not what are law is so boring.
• 1:11:56
  And one of the things I like about Doctor Who compared to
• 1:11:59
  Star Trek or Star Wars or Babylon 5 or whatever, is that
• 1:12:02
  it's quite light on actual law. And when it's at its best,
• 1:12:06
  certainly Post revival, it's actually just tended to look,
• 1:12:11
  what are the stories we've told and what's the cumulative effect
• 1:12:13
  of all that? And what do we learn about these
• 1:12:15
  people and these characters? And well, why?
• 1:12:18
  This is a man who always has to have someone by him, and I I'd
• 1:12:24
  really like the idea that that's because he wants a friend,
• 1:12:26
  because he wants sovereignty, because he is lonely or is at
• 1:12:30
  risk of being lonely. I find that much more rewarding
• 1:12:37
  and and insightful and rewarding as a story than The Runaway
• 1:12:44
  Bride. Sometimes I think you need
• 1:12:45
  someone to stop you type thing. You think, no, that's boring and
• 1:12:48
  it's angsty. And God, I hate angst and that
• 1:12:50
  doesn't mean you can't do emotion.
• 1:12:51
  It's me. God says the sadness in this
• 1:12:53
  book. There's cruelty in this book
• 1:12:54
  that's different to angst and hand wringing and what have you.
• 1:12:58
  And what I liked about the 60th anniversary specials was, you
• 1:13:03
  know, we had the great big Bam Bam, 5 Doctors for the 21st
• 1:13:07
  century of the day of the Doctor, and that was great.
• 1:13:09
  But you can't just do that again.
• 1:13:12
  We have Big Finish. You need to do something a bit
• 1:13:16
  different. And I I like that idea of
• 1:13:18
  pausing and reflecting and maybe summarizing everything that's
• 1:13:21
  happened. Like after it's less obvious
• 1:13:24
  what what what it's doing to mark the anniversary, but in
• 1:13:26
  some ways a lot deeper and more meaningful of just going what
• 1:13:30
  what if the story rolls to an end here?
• 1:13:33
  Like if this is probably the closest it's come to if you had
• 1:13:35
  to write the last Doctor Who story and there is a sort of
• 1:13:40
  quite paralleling of of the toy maker and the Doctor here.
• 1:13:44
  Again, not ostentatious. It doesn't spell out its
• 1:13:47
  argument at any point, but these are both lonely gods.
• 1:13:50
  That's why the Doctor officers travel together, because they
• 1:13:52
  can relate to each other. And let's not forget, when they
• 1:13:54
  made the Celestial Toy Maker, the idea was that the Toy Maker
• 1:13:57
  was another of the Doctor's Rex. So they are.
• 1:14:00
  They were intended to be directly comparable as
• 1:14:03
  individuals. But these ideas that they they
• 1:14:07
  their responses to their low, to their positions of loneliness,
• 1:14:11
  of the darkness, It's France them of perhaps the lack of
• 1:14:13
  understanding of their own origins or fear of it.
• 1:14:16
  And they both respond to that by reaching out to others.
• 1:14:19
  But one does it through seeking friendship and love, I I guess,
• 1:14:27
  and the other does it through wanting to compete and wanting
• 1:14:30
  to beat others and draw them in and take ownership of them.
• 1:14:35
  A very different responses. And again that is a very very
• 1:14:38
  very Russell T Davis idea. It's a theme that runs through
• 1:14:41
  so much who's writing and not just Doctor Who that, as you
• 1:14:44
  say, there is only a void beyond the beyond the walls, there is
• 1:14:49
  darkness cold and life is the toy room, I suppose if you want
• 1:14:52
  to really extend this metaphor. And so it's the case of what do
• 1:14:56
  we do within this room to make anything of it?
• 1:14:58
  Because games are ultimately meaningless.
• 1:15:01
  Life ultimately doesn't have any meaning other than that which we
• 1:15:04
  impose on it. And that, yeah, that idea is put
• 1:15:09
  forward and it's put forward through these two characters and
• 1:15:11
  their own responses. And ultimately the toy maker
• 1:15:14
  loses because he's created the rules of his existence and those
• 1:15:17
  are the rules of existence. You win or you lose.
• 1:15:18
  If I'm not winning, I'm losing. Whereas the Doctor has created
• 1:15:22
  kindness and love and support for him and from him and from
• 1:15:26
  himself as well as a result of that.
• 1:15:28
  You know, I think there's a you could argue and read it as the
• 1:15:30
  15th Doctor is born of him, as a result of everything that he's
• 1:15:35
  learned from others and that they've put into him.
• 1:15:37
  But he can become this character with that insight and that self
• 1:15:40
  reflectivity and that kindness towards himself, and yet does it
• 1:15:44
  without spelling out its thesis in any big way it is.
• 1:15:48
  What I love is that last scene in the Garden because ultimately
• 1:15:51
  the Doctor's reward is his friends.
• 1:15:55
  And it is. It's a conclusion that the
• 1:15:57
  series keeps coming to. I'm sure it will keep coming to
• 1:16:01
  in Time to Come. It's what happened at the end of
• 1:16:03
  Journey's End where Sarah Jane steps out the TARDIS and says
• 1:16:06
  you always seem like you're such a lonely person and you've got
• 1:16:08
  the biggest family in the world. When Matt Smith regenerated, Amy
• 1:16:12
  Pond turns up in the TARDIS, his best friend.
• 1:16:15
  When Jodie Whittaker regenerated that, it's called the Power of
• 1:16:19
  the Doctor, the conclusion is the power of the Doctor is her
• 1:16:21
  friends all coming together. You know at the end of that, and
• 1:16:25
  it's the same at the end of this as well with some of the
• 1:16:27
  loveliest characters we've ever met in Doctor Who.
• 1:16:29
  You know, Donna Nell, and I'm going to include Sylvia and I
• 1:16:33
  don't care. I can't think she's great and
• 1:16:36
  what a reward. It's so nice to see him happy,
• 1:16:39
  you know, at the end after all of this.
• 1:16:42
  Yeah, yeah. It's it's a wonderful story.
• 1:16:45
  I I loved it on screen and I think if possible, I I loved it
• 1:16:51
  even more in print. I think it's two very different
• 1:16:57
  things though. I think the experience of the
• 1:17:00
  book and the experience of the episode, it's telling the same
• 1:17:02
  story, but I get completely different things out of it.
• 1:17:06
  I get all of the the extras that we sort of talked about here,
• 1:17:09
  the extra backstories and the diversions and the the quirky
• 1:17:14
  twists and and narrative tricks with the book and with the TV
• 1:17:19
  show. I was getting all the visual
• 1:17:20
  splendour and you know, the funny musical number that you
• 1:17:24
  were never going to get in this. And like you said, the emotion,
• 1:17:27
  because that's what Russell brings to Doctor Who is, is the
• 1:17:29
  emotion. Yeah, I think it's wonderful.
• 1:17:32
  And that's the nice thing about these novelisations is, you
• 1:17:34
  know, there is room in all of our hearts for, you know,
• 1:17:38
  straightforward novelization that recounts the story we loved
• 1:17:42
  in the in in in decent prose. But I think it's if you're going
• 1:17:49
  to do that, especially if you're going to do it these days, it's
• 1:17:52
  one thing when that's a relic of the 1970s that you can now get
• 1:17:56
  being written nicely on audio. But I think if you're going to
• 1:17:58
  do the new, you do need to bring something extra to them.
• 1:18:02
  You do need to exercise that opportunity to revisit the story
• 1:18:06
  in a different form. And you know, I think I think
• 1:18:11
  they've mostly succeeded with the new series, ones that I've
• 1:18:13
  read. Goss is good enough to do.
• 1:18:14
  Let's not forget Goss is somebody that took on Ryan and
• 1:18:18
  Douglas Adams book, you know like and succeeded.
• 1:18:22
  Yeah, so you know he's he could more than take on a Rusty Davis
• 1:18:25
  script. Not that I'm saying that it's
• 1:18:27
  not as good. Well, look, we've sort of
• 1:18:30
  covered the Doctor a bit. We've covered Kate Stewart a bit
• 1:18:34
  Donna and Mel. Yeah Mel, FACT fans are like
• 1:18:40
  this. This will definitely turn up on
• 1:18:41
  the wiki if it's not already. They reinsert the bit that was
• 1:18:45
  cut where the 14th Doctor's about to regenerate, and Mel
• 1:18:48
  goes off on a tangent explaining the plot of Time of the Rani.
• 1:18:51
  I wonder if he had the original script right.
• 1:18:53
  No, actually, too much of this is written as if he's seen in
• 1:18:56
  the episode so. I was.
• 1:18:58
  Well, here you go, fat fans. James Goss ran AI forget the
• 1:19:03
  name of it now, but basically a convention to celebrate the
• 1:19:06
  anniversary of Target Books last year, which I went to, and they
• 1:19:11
  had a panel of him and Steve Cole talking about.
• 1:19:18
  So there's a panel at the Target Books Day celebration with James
• 1:19:23
  Goss and Steve Cole, and Scott Hancock was there as well,
• 1:19:26
  talking about these novelizations before, before
• 1:19:28
  they were allowed to really say anything about them.
• 1:19:31
  And they were explaining that the process for Gary Russell and
• 1:19:36
  Mark Morris and James Goss was that they were they had to go
• 1:19:41
  down to Cardiff to a special room and they had to sit in this
• 1:19:44
  room and they were shown the Star Beast with like someone
• 1:19:48
  looking over their shoulder. And then when the Star Beast
• 1:19:50
  finished, Gary Russell was told he had to leave because he only
• 1:19:52
  had to novelize the Star Beast. So he had to go.
• 1:19:56
  I don't know if Mark Morris was there but then James Goss got to
• 1:19:59
  watch the rest of it. But I'm pretty I if I, if I
• 1:20:02
  remember rightly he said that when he started writing it he
• 1:20:05
  was only allowed to see I I think it must.
• 1:20:11
  He wouldn't have put in these terms, but I think it must have
• 1:20:13
  been up to where. The toy maker shoots the 14th
• 1:20:16
  Doctor, and he had to write the novelization like, up to that
• 1:20:19
  point. And then he was only given the
• 1:20:23
  final script pages like much closer to time.
• 1:20:26
  Wow. Yeah.
• 1:20:28
  And. Not that we don't trust you,
• 1:20:29
  James, but. No, but I mean, that's how tight
• 1:20:33
  it was around, around everything that he he had to write.
• 1:20:35
  Mostly, and it's still got out about by regeneration.
• 1:20:39
  Well, exactly. James Goss, we know it was you,
• 1:20:41
  all right? He he was as surprised as the
• 1:20:44
  rest of us. He'd never seen that bit of the
• 1:20:45
  episode, yeah. Is that what I've got to write?
• 1:20:51
  No. That's just fan speculation.
• 1:20:56
  So, you know, so it's it's pretty remarkable you when you
• 1:20:59
  think about the situations which some of this has to be written.
• 1:21:05
  But no, it was really good. But we were talking about Donna
• 1:21:10
  and Mel. Donna I no, I think, I think
• 1:21:13
  Donna does really know. I think that line that I quoted
• 1:21:16
  earlier about Kate, about Kate Stewart's about her whole life,
• 1:21:20
  she'd been asking to speak to the manager and this is finally
• 1:21:22
  someone who fit fitted the bill. It's a wonderful line because it
• 1:21:26
  tells you so much about both people involved in that, I
• 1:21:29
  think. Her.
• 1:21:30
  Haggling, the money, 120 grand and five weeks holiday.
• 1:21:33
  Done and. She goes Oh.
• 1:21:39
  But you do but as well in the whole corridor, choose your own
• 1:21:43
  adventure bit. We talk about you are Donna in
• 1:21:45
  that, that's that's your position.
• 1:21:46
  You're trying to get Donna through the corridors.
• 1:21:48
  And he does make her very a very good viewpoint figure for her
• 1:21:56
  sense of of dislocation of both because she's dealing with these
• 1:22:01
  surreal things that are happening.
• 1:22:03
  But also this way, which is back into this old life like this has
• 1:22:06
  happened, this has happened before.
• 1:22:08
  So that whole bit where if you go down the wrong, if you take
• 1:22:10
  the wrong turn the user and eventually you end up back at
• 1:22:12
  unit HQ and you're reading the same words again about how she's
• 1:22:16
  been here before. This is all very strange, which
• 1:22:19
  is both the second time you read it, a gag about the fact that
• 1:22:22
  you've been sent back in the story.
• 1:22:23
  But it's also a reflection on the fact of, oh, her whole life
• 1:22:26
  that she's completely forgotten about for 15 years is now
• 1:22:29
  suddenly back and she's suddenly living it all again.
• 1:22:32
  And does take a brief moment to pause and reflect on that in a
• 1:22:35
  way that actually there isn't space for.
• 1:22:36
  So it's not a criticism of the TV episodes.
• 1:22:38
  They just don't have space to do this to the same way of.
• 1:22:41
  He sums up her reclaiming that life so beautifully.
• 1:22:44
  He goes she sort of missed this. Sort of didn't.
• 1:22:47
  That's all you really need to know.
• 1:22:50
  Yeah. Again it's a wonderful economy
• 1:22:52
  of language. But no, I I really like to hear.
• 1:22:56
  I I've always enjoyed Catherine Catherine Tate's performance as
• 1:22:59
  Donna. I've not always found
• 1:23:02
  necessarily Donna in and of herself to be the most
• 1:23:05
  compelling character, especially in a lot of tie insurance.
• 1:23:07
  I think because so much of her, so much of her story in that
• 1:23:11
  first in in the in series 4 is the arc and it's a wonderful
• 1:23:16
  lot, but it's very rewarding. But I don't think it's
• 1:23:18
  necessarily one that helps people who are writing ties,
• 1:23:21
  because there's nowhere to go in it.
• 1:23:22
  I think Catherine Tate brings so much to it as well.
• 1:23:25
  Like, it's certainly like emotional resonance.
• 1:23:28
  And no one really saw that coming.
• 1:23:31
  But what she was useful for here was she can see how tired the
• 1:23:36
  doctor is, you know, that That he's all skin and bones, that
• 1:23:39
  he's sagging. That he's.
• 1:23:40
  Yeah. And she's the one that keeps
• 1:23:41
  selling him. Something's wrong, you know,
• 1:23:44
  like you're not yourself. This is too much, you know?
• 1:23:48
  So it totally makes sense at the end that he's recuperating with
• 1:23:51
  her. And she doesn't even say to him
• 1:23:53
  at the end, doesn't she? You don't have to stay forever.
• 1:23:56
  Yeah, because he is. As you say, it's an idea that
• 1:23:59
  Doctor Who keeps returning to. And yet, often Doctor Who's big
• 1:24:03
  emotional moments are about love or or guilt or forgiveness, the
• 1:24:08
  rest of it. And that's absolutely fine.
• 1:24:12
  But it's odd how rarely it actually properly engages with
• 1:24:18
  the deeper meaning of friendship.
• 1:24:20
  Because, God help me, I'm about to quote Zagreius.
• 1:24:25
  There's a bit. Lives inside your head and eats
• 1:24:27
  you when you're sleeping. The very same.
• 1:24:30
  You know him. There's there's a bit in
• 1:24:33
  Zagreius where Nicholas Courtney, as the Avatar of the
• 1:24:36
  Tardis says, has a mind. About you have to remind me of
• 1:24:39
  that. Go on, go on.
• 1:24:43
  Friendship, friendships. Flame burns on when love has
• 1:24:48
  flickered and died or something like that.
• 1:24:51
  We never had a wasted education, Michael.
• 1:24:54
  Honestly, I mean not when you were listening to the greatest
• 1:24:57
  at the same time. I mean, I'm not going to sit
• 1:25:00
  here and tell you it's like when I read James Joyce's eulogies,
• 1:25:04
  but I very. Little will compare to that.
• 1:25:08
  But I do think, I do think there is an emotional truth to that
• 1:25:12
  line, which is actually the thing that is wonderful about
• 1:25:14
  friendship is its persistence, the way of which you do learn
• 1:25:18
  about people. And you get these.
• 1:25:19
  You, you, you come to understand people over time as well as as
• 1:25:23
  friends, as people you care about perhaps in a with less
• 1:25:29
  hang ups, with less weight, with less expectations certainly upon
• 1:25:33
  them than you might through through love.
• 1:25:36
  You know through deeper forms of of romantic or familial love
• 1:25:40
  that that quite relatively uncomplicated and honest at its
• 1:25:44
  best, friendship at its best is open and honest and lightly
• 1:25:47
  worn. And those moments that is
• 1:25:50
  brilliantly captured with the Donna Dr. relationship here
• 1:25:53
  which is like you know you can be fighting gods.
• 1:25:56
  You can be saving the universe from the flux.
• 1:25:59
  You have lost all these people so close to you, but you know
• 1:26:02
  I'm your mate and mate, you're knackered, you're.
• 1:26:06
  Knackered. I do love the bit when he's
• 1:26:09
  dying, though. She goes like, I don't care what
• 1:26:11
  you do to me, I'm going to be with him.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah. But whoever thought that that
• 1:26:14
  first scene in The Runaway Bride, that this is where we'd
• 1:26:17
  end up with these two, you know, going through?
• 1:26:20
  And I'll always quote this scene, that bit at the end of
• 1:26:22
  Forest of the Dead where she goes, Are you all right?
• 1:26:24
  Yeah, because I'm all right, too.
• 1:26:26
  Like something. There's just something special
• 1:26:29
  with these two. That, yeah, she's.
• 1:26:33
  I'm his mate. No, no, I just want a mate.
• 1:26:36
  Oh. That's a great line.
• 1:26:39
  It's a great line. You're a long streaker.
• 1:26:41
  Nothing. Yeah.
• 1:26:43
  But it's but it is wonderful isn't it that he just just to
• 1:26:46
  give to give Doctor Who a friend and it's it's rare that he has
• 1:26:51
  had that so little and such a in everything that we have seen of
• 1:26:57
  him and and you know and and their lives have some sees that
• 1:27:01
  but you say who would have expected it from that first
• 1:27:03
  scene But again that's true to friendship right friendships.
• 1:27:07
  There's no speeds dating for friendship I mean I'm sure there
• 1:27:10
  is there's the Internet. Silicon Valley's ruined
• 1:27:11
  everything. But you know that's not how
• 1:27:14
  friendships are forms. There's no, oh, when was our
• 1:27:16
  first date? You know someone you work
• 1:27:18
  alongside for how many years and you get sat next to them on your
• 1:27:23
  first day and then they the your first child's gold parent
• 1:27:28
  somehow down the line, You know, you know when it could.
• 1:27:33
  You know, we've spoken about death a bit here.
• 1:27:35
  When it comes, when it comes to your funeral, when people, you
• 1:27:38
  know, one of the greatest things, well, greatest
• 1:27:41
  testaments I ever thought could be made to my grandpa was that
• 1:27:44
  when he died, there was standing room only at the back of the
• 1:27:47
  church. And that's not, that's not
• 1:27:49
  family And former wives, as far as we're aware.
• 1:27:52
  That's friends. That's friends, right?
• 1:27:55
  That's the people you met along the way and who decided no, do
• 1:27:57
  you know, Or actually with no, with no commitment or no way.
• 1:28:01
  It's just someone I'm sticking alongside.
• 1:28:05
  And I do think that's wonderful. I do think it is really nicely
• 1:28:08
  captured in Catherine. I think it's in those moments
• 1:28:12
  where Doctor Who transcends being sort of science fiction
• 1:28:16
  into being something a bit more meaningful.
• 1:28:19
  Yeah, I mean, you don't get this in Star Trek.
• 1:28:23
  I do think the stars have to align, though.
• 1:28:25
  Like, I think the actors, the chemistry has to be there.
• 1:28:28
  It has to be there in the writing.
• 1:28:30
  Tom Baker and and Elizabeth Slayden, you know, I mean, make
• 1:28:34
  your own, you might say Matt Smith and Karen Gillan.
• 1:28:39
  I probably wouldn't, but you might.
• 1:28:42
  But you know what I mean? It happens.
• 1:28:43
  Once in a blue moon. And I think this book captures
• 1:28:47
  why. One, why it was worth bringing
• 1:28:50
  them both back, and two, just everything that was special
• 1:28:54
  about that and giving it a satisfying resolution as well.
• 1:28:58
  Yeah, no, 100%. And Doctor Who has tried it at
• 1:29:02
  different times, as you say. It does have to align to work.
• 1:29:06
  I I I ultimately think in the Chipnall era.
• 1:29:09
  The Jodie Whittaker, Yasmin Finney duo?
• 1:29:13
  I think not Yasmin Fini. No.
• 1:29:16
  You mean Yasmin Khan, don't you, Yasmin?
• 1:29:18
  Khan. Sorry. 30th Doctor and yeah,
• 1:29:22
  Who's Yasmin Fini? She plays.
• 1:29:25
  Doesn't Yasmin Fini play Donna's daughter?
• 1:29:29
  Yes, I'm I'm terrible with names.
• 1:29:32
  I mean so. I mean, there's two Yaz's.
• 1:29:36
  Yaz Khan and and the 30th I'll start this again.
• 1:29:44
  I think they did get there in the end of the 13th Doctor and
• 1:29:46
  and Yaz ultimately and the power of the Doctor.
• 1:29:49
  Those last scenes between them. Oh.
• 1:29:51
  Beautiful. They're beautiful.
• 1:29:53
  I think it was messier along the way, you know, the first time,
• 1:29:56
  she says to Yaz. You're the most wonderful.
• 1:29:58
  You're the most special. Person I've ever met.
• 1:30:00
  You have to earn that, don't you?
• 1:30:01
  Why? Yeah, you do have to earn that.
• 1:30:04
  No harsh on Yaz, but I don't see it.
• 1:30:06
  I think sort of from Eve of the Daleks onwards, I was totally on
• 1:30:09
  board with the two of them. Yes, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:30:13
  So that so they have done it before.
• 1:30:15
  Obviously that had that extra special little sort of wrinkle
• 1:30:18
  of does does Yas want more from that and you know how does that
• 1:30:21
  sort out which which was nice. I think there's been discussions
• 1:30:25
  on this podcast previously well as well about what's the point
• 1:30:27
  of fits in the books, because everyone sort of likes fits, but
• 1:30:30
  what's because? He loves the Doctor, that's why.
• 1:30:33
  Because he's his mate, yeah, he's his friend.
• 1:30:36
  And I think that was the idea. That was all Like, what if we
• 1:30:38
  just give the doctor a friend got?
• 1:30:41
  That sequence in Half Life when they're both naked with their
• 1:30:44
  bottoms touching each other in the TARDIS.
• 1:30:46
  Well, clearly you haven't changed.
• 1:30:49
  Sits very happily in my mind. Fat fans Matt D'Angelo played
• 1:30:55
  Fitzcryner in the Big Finish audios.
• 1:30:58
  Also considered for the role by Big Finish was 1 Matt Smith.
• 1:31:02
  No, really. Yeah.
• 1:31:05
  Wow. Oh no.
• 1:31:07
  Matt Di Angelo is much prettier. Obviously.
• 1:31:09
  Got the role now he sits in my head every time I read a FITS
• 1:31:12
  book. So.
• 1:31:15
  Well, do you know what? Let me let me take us across to
• 1:31:18
  Mel then, because I've got a I've got a wonderful quote here.
• 1:31:22
  Again. Brevity.
• 1:31:24
  Economy. Eyes Older than her Years.
• 1:31:27
  Tick. Infinite Patience.
• 1:31:29
  Tick. Dress for a difficult meeting
• 1:31:31
  with Armageddon. Wow.
• 1:31:33
  Bomb proof as a seaside donkey? Definitely.
• 1:31:37
  Donna knew what was coming next. These two were old friends.
• 1:31:40
  I mean, that's just perfect. It's no, it's brilliant.
• 1:31:44
  And you know, God bless them. Mel, Mel, Mel If the Gear of Our
• 1:31:53
  Lord 2023 Bonnie Langford is playing Melanie Bush on Prime
• 1:31:58
  Time. BBC One talking about the Viking
• 1:32:01
  funeral of Sabalong Glitz. I'm not sure TV could get any
• 1:32:04
  better than that, if I'm honest. You know, I mean, in terms of
• 1:32:07
  ticking all my fanboy boxes, it's still everything I need.
• 1:32:12
  And you know what? This book goes even deeper.
• 1:32:14
  Did you catch that bit about Daryl and the Bannermen?
• 1:32:16
  Was it? Mel gave her a sympathetic
• 1:32:18
  glance. Good luck getting answers.
• 1:32:21
  Good luck getting an answer to that from the Doctor.
• 1:32:24
  She'd once fought an interstellar war at a holiday
• 1:32:26
  camp on Barry Island with Honey. But this comes back to your
• 1:32:32
  right. This is what's this is what's
• 1:32:33
  glorious about the 6th anniversary celebration and and
• 1:32:37
  Russell T Davis's attitude towards Doctor Who is it.
• 1:32:39
  It all happened. You can't disavow.
• 1:32:42
  You can't disavow any of it. It's all, I don't want to say
• 1:32:45
  Canon because that's there, but it it all happened.
• 1:32:48
  You can't pretend somebody didn't.
• 1:32:49
  You can't come in and just like etch or sketch it all away and
• 1:32:52
  say we're going to start again because that's your story.
• 1:32:54
  That's the lives these characters have led.
• 1:32:56
  If you're writing Mel Bush, her story is that she was the person
• 1:32:59
  that that happened to and she's lived a life since and she's now
• 1:33:02
  back here and she's the products of all of those things.
• 1:33:04
  And you, you know, you can make lines of it and the silliness of
• 1:33:07
  some of those stories dealt with.
• 1:33:09
  The Bannerman is not in the 1st place of story.
• 1:33:11
  That's taking itself too seriously, but me making light
• 1:33:15
  of them also understand that we make light of things that
• 1:33:17
  happens in our lives and this, but treat that with respect.
• 1:33:24
  And here she and here she is now and.
• 1:33:26
  The fact that James Goss managed to get a reference to Time in
• 1:33:29
  the row and he dealt with the Banner Men and Dragon fire in
• 1:33:31
  this book. Bravo, Sir.
• 1:33:34
  I mean, but if you're going to bring Mel, what would the point
• 1:33:37
  of bringing Mel back if you didn't be right, You go, oh,
• 1:33:41
  Bonnie Langford's got profile, you know, that would be it.
• 1:33:44
  No, it was just brilliant. And you know, I don't think like
• 1:33:49
  she's a sort of a side character in there.
• 1:33:50
  She's providing the expertise that she needs to.
• 1:33:53
  It's introducing her so she gets a meteor role later on, I think,
• 1:33:57
  which we know is coming in the next season and I think possibly
• 1:34:00
  the season after as well. From what I've been reading this
• 1:34:02
  week, recurring character Melanie Bush, I'm there for it.
• 1:34:09
  Mel has outlived Ruby Sunday. Oh, she has something.
• 1:34:15
  She's outlived ICE and everyone else as well.
• 1:34:18
  I can't get my head around the fact that Bonnie Langford is
• 1:34:20
  younger than Sophie Aldred. It doesn't compute.
• 1:34:24
  Do you not think? I mean, I saw a picture of the
• 1:34:26
  pair of them at a Phantom convention this week, and I do
• 1:34:28
  think I just been kind of spawning.
• 1:34:31
  I couldn't possibly comment. I mean well let's just both
• 1:34:37
  agree that Mel's fairly fabulous is.
• 1:34:39
  I mean we've we've basically said that all the characters
• 1:34:42
  work here right The doctors the doctor works what the so the the
• 1:34:48
  last word box we have a tick there is the 15th doctor there
• 1:34:52
  in Shooty Gatwas Dr. How do you think he how do you think he
• 1:34:57
  burst onto the page I mean. I I he captures the energy
• 1:35:02
  really well. You you get all of the the
• 1:35:05
  confidence and the just just the charisma that pours off that
• 1:35:10
  man. Yeah, he's, he's.
• 1:35:11
  Smile, Michael. That smile.
• 1:35:14
  Yeah, and again, but again, you can't get that on the page.
• 1:35:16
  And he does caps out really well.
• 1:35:17
  He had the, you know, the answers, the energy, the
• 1:35:18
  refreshness, the sort of excitement for yes, I'm Doctor.
• 1:35:20
  Come on, like, I've sorted you out, but now I just want to, I
• 1:35:23
  want to go off. I want to like, I want to get
• 1:35:25
  stuck into it all. Let's, let's go.
• 1:35:28
  I mean, we don't get any particular additional insight
• 1:35:31
  into the character at this point.
• 1:35:32
  And you know that that bit at the end with the bio
• 1:35:35
  regeneration of what happens afterwards, I think it's not
• 1:35:38
  going to surprise anyone to learn that that's one of the
• 1:35:39
  bits that James Goss isn't, doesn't get to expand on anymore
• 1:35:44
  because you know that's that's moving into something else and
• 1:35:46
  that's where we're going, not where we've been.
• 1:35:49
  Saying that though, the way that that is spaced on the page is so
• 1:35:55
  beautifully done. Tell me, because I've I have
• 1:35:59
  read the Kindle version. I've listened to the audiobook
• 1:36:02
  by. So on the page you've got, it
• 1:36:06
  tells them to pull and you get. I think on the Kindle you do get
• 1:36:10
  the the the word pull massive, filling up a whole page, going
• 1:36:15
  up one page and out the the next page.
• 1:36:17
  Then you turn the page and you've got one side of the page
• 1:36:23
  is the 10th Doctor in a truncated paragraph, and the
• 1:36:27
  other side of that same page is the 15th Doctor, and it explains
• 1:36:32
  what's happening with the two of them at the same time.
• 1:36:35
  Oh, amazing. And can I just say, you know, a
• 1:36:37
  small this small round of applause?
• 1:36:41
  It's for the typesetters. They've done a brilliant job
• 1:36:44
  with this. I can't agree.
• 1:36:46
  You say. You want me to do what now?
• 1:36:48
  Like. Oh yeah, and I must be said, I
• 1:36:50
  think whichever way you read this, you'll get something out
• 1:36:53
  of it. Because the Choose Your Own
• 1:36:54
  Adventure bit is particularly joyous in the Kindle, because
• 1:36:56
  it's literally just hyperlinks. So you don't even have to flip
• 1:36:59
  back and forth. You're just going on to the next
• 1:37:01
  bit. And the bit where the toy maker
• 1:37:04
  makes his appearance clear on the page is wonderful because he
• 1:37:08
  he basically goes fuck off James Goss.
• 1:37:11
  He goes the giggle by the toy maker.
• 1:37:14
  Me. It's a fake title page.
• 1:37:18
  It's glorious. Oh.
• 1:37:20
  Very very. It's got a lot about.
• 1:37:21
  I need to get a logo drawn up or something.
• 1:37:25
  Well, well, I'm very well aware. We've been talking now for an
• 1:37:28
  hour and 15 minutes about the giggle and I'm sure we could
• 1:37:30
  talk longer anything. I know you've got modes.
• 1:37:34
  Anything you want to cover before we move on to
• 1:37:36
  recommendations. Can I just mention that the toy
• 1:37:39
  maker played the black and white Guardians.
• 1:37:41
  He turned them into voodoo dolls, kept them in a crate for
• 1:37:44
  millennia, then gave them to a seamstress in Kalamazoo to use
• 1:37:46
  his pink cushions as a reference to their little knitted faces,
• 1:37:51
  twisted in, twisted into infinite pain.
• 1:37:54
  Or something. I.
• 1:37:56
  Mean that's oh. No wonderful stuff.
• 1:37:58
  So many Easter eggs like that. I also wanted to mention, I did
• 1:38:02
  say I was going to come back to this, how he makes the sort of
• 1:38:06
  the weird deaths in the book really count by giving sort of
• 1:38:10
  scant but quick detail. So the sequence where the
• 1:38:14
  soldiers are turned into bouncy balls, it's just ridiculous.
• 1:38:19
  One moment there were soldiers with guns and orders and dreams
• 1:38:22
  and ambitions and girlfriends and Nana's, waiting for them
• 1:38:25
  back home with their pet dogs. One did the keto diet, the other
• 1:38:28
  love jam tarts. That was them.
• 1:38:30
  In that one moment, and in the next moment, bounce, bounce.
• 1:38:34
  They were a stack of lovely bouncing balls.
• 1:38:37
  Big ones, small, 1 balls of every colour, toppling and
• 1:38:40
  bouncing and rolling and bouncing everywhere.
• 1:38:42
  Bouncy, bouncy. I mean, that's horrific.
• 1:38:46
  It's it's awful. And that through the remains of
• 1:38:48
  the scene, he comes back to you. Bouncy, bouncy it is.
• 1:38:50
  It is Jed. You would Lee.
• 1:38:53
  Horrific, as you say, it's just by the end of that I felt you're
• 1:38:57
  reading it, so you're in control of the speed at which you're
• 1:39:00
  reading it. This is a process you're doing,
• 1:39:02
  and yet you feel completely pummeled by the end of that
• 1:39:05
  whole sequence. Even more so, I think in some
• 1:39:07
  ways than the version on screen. There's another moment, as well
• 1:39:10
  as another very dark moment, where essentially it's a
• 1:39:15
  condemnation of humanity, because the Doctor's basically
• 1:39:19
  saying the toy maker's done this, but this had to be there
• 1:39:23
  in order for this chaos to erupt.
• 1:39:26
  But it's not only the giggle. Don't go thinking you've got the
• 1:39:29
  an excuse. The human race might be clever
• 1:39:32
  and bright and brilliant, but it's also savage and venal and
• 1:39:35
  relentless. All the anger out there on the
• 1:39:38
  streets, the lies and the righteousness, that's human.
• 1:39:41
  That's you. That's who you are.
• 1:39:43
  Using your intelligence to be stupid, poisoning the world and
• 1:39:47
  hating each other. You've never needed any help
• 1:39:50
  with that. Gosh.
• 1:39:54
  Using your intelligence to be stupid is Russell.
• 1:39:57
  T Davis is just. Like my life, Michael.
• 1:40:00
  Well, also in just expressing in half a line what we've spent two
• 1:40:03
  podcasts trying trying to say about his writing.
• 1:40:07
  Yeah, pretty much. And this does have it.
• 1:40:09
  It has that sort of viciousness of damaged goods.
• 1:40:14
  It's not, it's not as sort of graphic and as no, no, it is
• 1:40:18
  nasty. What am I trying to say?
• 1:40:21
  It's it's more playful, but it. It it is, it is more, it is more
• 1:40:27
  playful. The underlying horror and ideas
• 1:40:31
  about what is being visited upon people are the same, she
• 1:40:34
  mentioned. It is that extensive, the
• 1:40:35
  extensive idea of you confronting something that you
• 1:40:38
  have no hope against. But in order to mitigate that
• 1:40:42
  and translate that for a family audience, it is done through
• 1:40:45
  playfulness and turning people into bouncy balls rather than
• 1:40:49
  having stone fetuses erupt from their stomachs.
• 1:40:54
  And and yes, at the same time and what James Goss is very
• 1:40:58
  clever with is making the fact that that violence is here
• 1:41:01
  playful in some ways more horrific.
• 1:41:03
  But this is not someone. This is not war.
• 1:41:06
  This is not someone deliberately and explicitly engaging in an
• 1:41:10
  act of violence against you. This is a game to him, and that
• 1:41:14
  makes it even worse what's happening to you.
• 1:41:16
  It's happening because he thinks it's funny.
• 1:41:18
  And that's why it makes total sense in the end, that he's
• 1:41:22
  defeated by a game of catch, something so simple because he's
• 1:41:25
  playing by the rules and he'll always play by the rules.
• 1:41:28
  I love the bit where both the Doctor and Don the Doctor and
• 1:41:32
  the toy maker. Look at Donna Appalled.
• 1:41:33
  Which she goes, well, he's going to cheat.
• 1:41:38
  That was never going to happen. And actually I did like as well.
• 1:41:41
  I like the fact that this solution to this very tricky
• 1:41:46
  situation was this simple, because that's exactly what
• 1:41:49
  happened in the Celestial Toy Maker.
• 1:41:52
  Yeah, James Dos. James Goss does get in a couple
• 1:41:54
  of cheeky references to the select the original Celestial
• 1:41:57
  Toy Maker as well. There's a Yaru for me.
• 1:42:01
  Yaru. Yaru and he he threatens to
• 1:42:05
  introduce the copyright lawyer to his electric dance floor.
• 1:42:11
  And also, I might be misremembering because I have
• 1:42:13
  not read this book in 20 years, but now we think about it.
• 1:42:17
  Isn't the whole thing about the toy room being built against the
• 1:42:21
  darkness? Isn't that from divided
• 1:42:24
  loyalties? Very possibly.
• 1:42:27
  And Gary may have had a little bit of input here, aren't he?
• 1:42:29
  Yeah, that's true. That's true.
• 1:42:32
  And the only good thing to come out of divided loyalties, if I'm
• 1:42:34
  honest. The thing I most remember about
• 1:42:37
  Adric's smelly pajamas. Do you remember that bit?
• 1:42:39
  Oh no, I think a mental block. Tegan goes.
• 1:42:42
  Oh, he he absolutely honks. He's not taking off those
• 1:42:44
  pyjamas for ages. It's very strange.
• 1:42:48
  I I just remember the the Time Lord Breakfast Club scenes.
• 1:42:53
  Oh, Gallifrey 90210. When remember they did The Sarah
• 1:42:57
  Jane Adventures because CBBC had wanted to do young Doctor Who
• 1:43:01
  and that's basically on that. Gary's there.
• 1:43:04
  I'll write it. I love you, Gary, but don't
• 1:43:08
  write that again. Anything else you got for us on
• 1:43:13
  the Giggle? No, I mean, we could, as you
• 1:43:18
  said, we could go on for hours, but oh, get it read.
• 1:43:22
  Get it. Read it.
• 1:43:23
  It's. It's a quick read, but there's a
• 1:43:26
  lot to it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:43:30
  Can I can I finish off the giggle then by, you know, this
• 1:43:33
  is hamster, so this is my my sort of shtick.
• 1:43:37
  But there is one passage here where me and the toy maker are
• 1:43:41
  one and he says the old doctor had won the jacket and trousers,
• 1:43:46
  the new Doctor had the prize for the shirt and tie, the boxes,
• 1:43:49
  the socks and the shoes. And then the toy maker has.
• 1:43:53
  Excuse me, I must just go over to the fanfics to see what they
• 1:43:56
  made of this back in a few hours.
• 1:43:58
  And then later on he makes another reference to his to the
• 1:44:01
  two of them hugging and he goes, oh, I'm going to go back to the
• 1:44:03
  fanfics again. Hang on and see what they make
• 1:44:05
  of this, I mean. It's very mess at this.
• 1:44:09
  Oh, it's so mess. And again, that just works as a
• 1:44:11
  really good way of showing, not telling his his God like status,
• 1:44:16
  right He He literally transcends the reality of what he's talking
• 1:44:20
  about. He is aware of the fictional
• 1:44:22
  nature of all that is occurring. So it's not just a funny joke,
• 1:44:25
  it also serves a real narrative purpose.
• 1:44:28
  Did you like the reference to the four and a half hour YouTube
• 1:44:32
  video? Complain?
• 1:44:33
  Did you say that bit? Where?
• 1:44:36
  He goes, don't bother go. You know, I don't care if the
• 1:44:38
  continuity is wrong, don't bother.
• 1:44:40
  Create a four and a half hour YouTube video correcting me
• 1:44:45
  that's specifically aimed at that fella you know who's just
• 1:44:48
  brought out the Steven Moffett one that's five hours long.
• 1:44:50
  Oh no. What?
• 1:44:51
  Yeah, it was it. Well, you know, there's the
• 1:44:53
  chimney one before, wasn't there?
• 1:44:54
  That was. Oh, yes, I've not.
• 1:44:57
  I've not watched it. I simply.
• 1:44:58
  There's there's now AY, Series 7 or Series 8 is the worst bit of
• 1:45:03
  television ever made. And that's also five hours long.
• 1:45:07
  You spend you use your intelligence to be so stupid.
• 1:45:14
  Perfect place to end that Michael.
• 1:45:24
  What recommendation do you have for me this week?
• 1:45:27
  Well, sticking with the themes of novelizations that expand
• 1:45:33
  beautifully, what a scene on screen I would like to recommend
• 1:45:36
  for anyone who's not read it or more commercially relevant these
• 1:45:39
  days listened to it. The novelization of The Curse of
• 1:45:43
  Fenrik. Oh, it's made choice.
• 1:45:47
  Why? Well, because I I watched The
• 1:45:52
  Curse of Fenrik again very recently for the first time in
• 1:45:54
  many years, and it's a wonderful story.
• 1:45:57
  I think the highest praise I can give it.
• 1:45:58
  As I say, it's one of the few bits of classic Who that if my
• 1:46:00
  wife walked in on me watching it, I wouldn't feel embarrassed.
• 1:46:04
  But it is, it is. It is such a dense story and
• 1:46:08
  such a dense script and there's so much going on there that you
• 1:46:10
  really have to watch it several times to fully actually start to
• 1:46:14
  pick apart what's going on in the layers of the story that
• 1:46:16
  we're only getting hints of. And it's great on screen, the
• 1:46:20
  novelisation, it's one of those sort of proto new adventures
• 1:46:24
  that they did towards the end of the original Target run opens up
• 1:46:29
  the story, gives it room to breathe.
• 1:46:31
  And so we can begin to, you get to see glimpses of the back
• 1:46:37
  story into the minds of so many of the characters, things that
• 1:46:43
  were only hinted at on the screen.
• 1:46:45
  That's both in terms of continuity.
• 1:46:46
  So there's for example, there's all sorts of interludes that
• 1:46:50
  detail the history of of Maiden's Bay and the and Fenrick
• 1:46:56
  and the characters. They're wonderful.
• 1:46:57
  It's a great bit with you talk about Bram Stoker visiting and
• 1:47:00
  hearing the legends, which both fills in all the legends and
• 1:47:03
  ties into other things. There's a magnificent sequence
• 1:47:05
  where we get told in the style of the translation of the
• 1:47:09
  Arabian Nights, the story of the Doctors rich in previous battle
• 1:47:14
  with Fenrik I've. Forgotten that?
• 1:47:17
  Yeah, it's wonderful. Elfin Rear or something like
• 1:47:20
  that is the name of it. But it's it's oh, it's
• 1:47:22
  wonderfully done. It's it's just so clever.
• 1:47:26
  But also with the characters themselves as well.
• 1:47:28
  So the the, the, the sort of gay relationship between Billington
• 1:47:35
  and Judson which is which is it's wafer thin on the screen
• 1:47:40
  but that is that is expanded upon and.
• 1:47:43
  Breaking back or something when he's watching a boy playing
• 1:47:46
  games. It's there's a rug.
• 1:47:49
  Yes. There's a rugby match where
• 1:47:50
  school Judson's back was broken cheering it.
• 1:47:55
  And Millington has carried the the guilt of this for the rest
• 1:47:59
  of his life, and that that's sort of informing a lot of
• 1:48:01
  what's going on in the episode. That really does demonstrate
• 1:48:05
  what those McCoy target novels were doing completely
• 1:48:10
  differently to anything that came before, because you just
• 1:48:12
  didn't get anything like that before.
• 1:48:14
  No, no, not at all. Yeah, similar, you know they are
• 1:48:20
  the antecedents to the giggle really.
• 1:48:22
  And that you know that expansion, and not just
• 1:48:26
  expansion but also increased depth and and you know,
• 1:48:30
  articulating things in a, in a, in a in a better way, because
• 1:48:33
  you also get that chance at a second pass, right?
• 1:48:34
  Not suggest that the television versions are some, you know,
• 1:48:39
  weaker draft for for these books.
• 1:48:41
  That's a bit weird to suggest. But you get that as well with,
• 1:48:44
  you know, the Battlefield novelisation.
• 1:48:46
  Has. I mean, I think as a that's far
• 1:48:48
  superior as a novel. Yes, no the.
• 1:48:51
  TV one's great fun, don't get me wrong, but.
• 1:48:54
  But even. But it's got the similar thing
• 1:48:56
  that the Curse of Fenrick is doing of actually every
• 1:48:58
  everything that everything that makes this work was there in the
• 1:49:01
  original. We're just we're going over
• 1:49:04
  again. And this time we can see what
• 1:49:06
  didn't work the first time or what we need to articulate more
• 1:49:09
  to bring out. Because actually the Curse of
• 1:49:10
  Fenrik. And you can miss it easily the
• 1:49:12
  first time that you're watching it through.
• 1:49:15
  As you know, it's a fairly straight adventure story.
• 1:49:16
  But the novelization really gets this idea of what is happening
• 1:49:19
  here is a convergence of wheels within wheels that cross time
• 1:49:23
  and space into the future and far into the past.
• 1:49:27
  And it's just it it it's just a brilliant TV story that somehow
• 1:49:35
  manages to be even better in the book because it has the freedom
• 1:49:39
  and the space to do what it wants to do, both in literal,
• 1:49:42
  you know, story terms you can fit more story into a book and
• 1:49:46
  also things that they just wouldn't have been able to do on
• 1:49:48
  TV in 1989 in the Kids Adventure Show.
• 1:49:52
  It's fantastic. There's parallels to the giggle
• 1:49:54
  there, you know, and what you just said there.
• 1:49:56
  A. Great TV story made even better
• 1:50:00
  by the novelisation. Yes, and is available in audio
• 1:50:03
  book form read by Terry Malloy, who's given rather better
• 1:50:06
  material to work with than when he did Revelation.
• 1:50:09
  To Terry Malloy, What a choice he.
• 1:50:12
  Does it quite well. Or he's a great actor, but.
• 1:50:15
  They usually choose somebody like doesn't Oh no, Rue Leska,
• 1:50:19
  reads Happiness Patrol. Actually, they have made some
• 1:50:21
  weird choices. They do.
• 1:50:24
  Sophie Aldrick can't do them all.
• 1:50:26
  Oh, she can't do any of them. Have you heard her?
• 1:50:28
  Oh. Oh, sorry.
• 1:50:29
  No. I'll be quiet.
• 1:50:31
  What have you got against Sophie Ultra?
• 1:50:33
  She's. A terrible audio actress I think
• 1:50:37
  she's possible on. TV But yeah.
• 1:50:40
  Bonnie Langford, on the other hand.
• 1:50:42
  Superb. Have you heard her?
• 1:50:43
  Reading of error? The verboids.
• 1:50:46
  No. Oh, it's glorious.
• 1:50:48
  Go find it just for her. I was trying to unpick Pip and
• 1:50:50
  James prose. I shall go straight to it now.
• 1:50:55
  But first read the cursor Fenerick novelisation.
• 1:50:58
  I just do remember that being just superb.
• 1:51:03
  Can I recommend an epic two-part novel by Lawrence Miles called
• 1:51:11
  Interference that famously came right at the bottom, completely
• 1:51:18
  unjustifiably, of a Doctor Who book poll?
• 1:51:23
  And I'm not sure what people have got against this incredible
• 1:51:28
  story. I think perhaps that it had the
• 1:51:31
  nerve to rewrite the end of Planet of the Spiders and have
• 1:51:36
  the 3rd Doctor die alone on the planet Dust in a particularly
• 1:51:41
  Well, it's an unheroic moment, isn't it?
• 1:51:44
  It's. I mean, I'm assuming you've read
• 1:51:46
  Interference. No.
• 1:51:47
  Do you know what it it's probably boxed up my parents
• 1:51:51
  attic right now. It sat on my It's OK, I've had
• 1:51:57
  it long since the one. The one thing anyone knows about
• 1:52:00
  interference is that they killed the 3rd doctor a different way.
• 1:52:02
  But it's it has a huge amount to do.
• 1:52:05
  It reintroduces Sarah Jane in a way that makes her just a
• 1:52:10
  thoroughly competent professional, and absolutely the
• 1:52:13
  best friend of the Doctor. It writes out Sam Jones in
• 1:52:17
  possibly her best showing, and that's a very inconsistent
• 1:52:20
  companion, but gets her a brilliant last story.
• 1:52:23
  It tells an enormous story full of huge science fiction ideas,
• 1:52:31
  one of which is that Fitz Reiner lives an entire life, gets
• 1:52:36
  absorbed into the Faction Paradox, turned into a twisted
• 1:52:40
  version of himself, and is ultimately murdered at the end
• 1:52:46
  of this run of books. I mean, it's massive in every
• 1:52:49
  single way, but it's it's a very smart story told in typically
• 1:52:55
  entertaining Lawrence Miles prose with brilliant
• 1:52:58
  characterization. It's it's unforgettable, like in
• 1:53:02
  terms of describing sort of alien cities and things like
• 1:53:06
  that. Some of the some of the imagery
• 1:53:08
  is so vivid I can't imagine White Link is at the bottom of
• 1:53:12
  those poles. I think it's what you and I have
• 1:53:15
  discussed before that it kind of strays quite far away from what
• 1:53:20
  we consider to be Doctor Who. But it's probably as bold as
• 1:53:25
  Doctor Whoever got in print and just on the page count alone,
• 1:53:29
  it's nearly 700 pages long. It's certainly the biggest story
• 1:53:34
  that the BBC or Virgin books ever told.
• 1:53:36
  So I'll suggest you go into the attic and dust that down and
• 1:53:41
  read it, because you know it's a hell of a route.
• 1:53:44
  Oh, I definitely need it is unfinished business.
• 1:53:48
  I don't think Doctor Who books have ever had a writer like
• 1:53:53
  Lawrence Miles who's so able to just explode the mythos and to
• 1:53:59
  sort of reassemble it based on its core concepts and to look at
• 1:54:05
  them anew and in different ways. And to actually look at their
• 1:54:09
  significant meanings and to create these these this whole
• 1:54:12
  cosmology and this whole sort of secret map of Doctor Who Inc
• 1:54:17
  interconnectedness. Then the alien bodies is rightly
• 1:54:22
  lauded in Christmas. On rational Planet Planet, when
• 1:54:24
  you read it, you're trying to keep running to keep up with it.
• 1:54:27
  It's. Christmas on the Rational
• 1:54:28
  Planet. The only story where the TARDIS
• 1:54:31
  alone saves the day. It's just glorious.
• 1:54:34
  But he's funny as well. He's such a funny writer, yeah.
• 1:54:37
  He writes great witty lines and silly jokes that are bit in
• 1:54:40
  alien bodies where he's like, you know, why don't you just
• 1:54:43
  invite that bloody Daleks to auction my body to?
• 1:54:47
  And he's like, oh, you. Didn't you know?
• 1:54:49
  And then it turns out it's the bloody Crotons that have come
• 1:54:51
  instead, because they've destroyed the Daleks on the way.
• 1:54:53
  He's such a funny writer. Oh, there's the sequence I
• 1:54:59
  remember from Alien Bodies is the bit where the Doctor sort of
• 1:55:01
  casually jumps out of a window of an office block.
• 1:55:05
  They're like, Oh my God, and the TARDIS is waiting.
• 1:55:07
  He just falls through the door. But then there's a reference to,
• 1:55:10
  like, on the monetary the TARDIS.
• 1:55:12
  There's just a little screen where he's been working out for
• 1:55:15
  ages what the exact angle is. He'd need to be able to pull off
• 1:55:18
  this stuff. One last joke, although I'm
• 1:55:22
  especially recommending interference, but I seem to have
• 1:55:24
  straight across Twain. Just anything by Laura smiles.
• 1:55:27
  They're all amazing, the bit where the doctor finds out what
• 1:55:30
  was being auctioned in the ziggurat and Kioso, who I think
• 1:55:35
  is supposed to be tracks, I think from the Armageddon
• 1:55:38
  factor. Goes it's your body.
• 1:55:42
  And the last line of the chapter is like he didn't ever think
• 1:55:45
  this would happen, but the doctor's jaw literally dropped
• 1:55:48
  and then he punches him in the face.
• 1:55:51
  Oh. It's glorious, Michael.
• 1:55:56
  Of course we could. You and I have assembled a small
• 1:55:58
  list of books that we're going to read going forward, and we
• 1:56:02
  could be picking up a Lawrence Miles, you know, epic to read.
• 1:56:07
  Or instead, we could head straight to the back to the
• 1:56:11
  start of the 8th Doctor books and read.
• 1:56:14
  The Eight Doctors by Terence Dicks.
• 1:56:18
  Yes, which I believe also lingers towards the bottom of
• 1:56:21
  the Doctor Who book polls. This is what the people want,
• 1:56:25
  proper literature. I thought I was going to have to
• 1:56:27
  beg. Somebody's agreed that I was
• 1:56:29
  desperate to cover that one. And when you suggested it, I was
• 1:56:32
  like, oh Hallelujah. I believe you're you've started
• 1:56:36
  it already I've. Started it and finished it.
• 1:56:39
  We'll keep your powder dry, all right, but you are smiling if
• 1:56:45
  you managed to get through that bit with a 6th Doctor and trial
• 1:56:47
  of a Time Lord. You're a brace cell.
• 1:56:50
  What could this enigmatic giggle mean?
• 1:56:53
  Well, I cannot wait to do that, but for now, thank you very
• 1:56:58
  much, thank you very much for your dreadful read, for your
• 1:57:01
  reading on the giggle and for your recommendation, and I will
• 1:57:05
  see you next time. Thank you, Joe.