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March 28, 2024, 07:49:46 PM

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Old Doctor Who - Part 4

Started by Ambient Sheep, June 04, 2020, 11:02:35 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Deanjam

Peter Davison when he sees Paul Darrow in Timelash.


notjosh

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1112525139329044

So what is the correct plural of a Doctor Who? Have we had 13 Doctor Whos, or 13 Doctor Who?

Replies From View

Quote from: notjosh on June 22, 2022, 07:14:15 AMhttps://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1112525139329044

So what is the correct plural of a Doctor Who? Have we had 13 Doctor Whos, or 13 Doctor Who?

Doctor Whos


daf


Replies From View

If - for the sake of argument - the name is "Doctor Who", then the plural is "Doctor Whos" of course.

Check it using the standard test:

- "How many Macaulays Culkin are in this room?"
- "How many Macaulay Culkins are in this room?"

frajer

Since the rooms in the TARDIS are infinite, odds are there's a Culkin lurking in one of them.

Replies From View

Quote from: frajer on June 22, 2022, 09:12:37 AMSince the rooms in the TARDIS are infinite, odds are there's a Culkin lurking in one of them.

all of them though?

Sounds a bit far-fetched that he might be lurking in all of them.

Replies From View

Across the multiverse there must be so many Culkins in operation that it's the very opposite of Home Alone.

It's Home Packed To Fuck With Culkins

purlieu


The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham

This is Book 2 in the series Other Authors Try to Do a Lawrence Miles.

The last Doctor Who book by Simon Bucher-Jones was the pretty much unreadable The Death of Art, a story with the dubious honour of being my least favourite New Adventure. While his Benny book was much better, my expectations were still... cautious.

Turns out it's really not too bad. Effectively a sequel to Alien Bodies, The Taking of Planet 5 picks up the stories of the Celestis - former Celestial Investigation Agency operatives who have fled corporeal life and set up home in a mini-universe to flee the Time War - and the Time Lord Homunculous, posing as a UNIT agent. Between them, they are all investigating the appearance of the Elder Things and Shoggoths from Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness in Antarctica. That isn't me using my knowledge of the novel to fill the gap: this city is a fictional construct based on the Lovecraft book. Time Lords are now posing as Elder Things, their regenerations forced into weird shapes as a necessity of the war. Scenes on one of the nine Gallifreys have Looms working overtime to produce soldiers, with injured and rebellious Time Lords thrown in as raw matter. Meanwhile, in prehistoric Earth, the Lovecraftian city is being used as a breeding ground for War TARDISes. It's all a bit heavy going. The plot involves the Time Lords on Earth planning on freeing the Fendhal from its time loop on Planet 5, and using it as a weapon in the war; a rogue Celesti, however, has realised that the Fendahl has been consumed by a Fendahl predator - a creature that feeds on ideas and is a threat to the universe - and is planning on freeing that and sending it to destroy the Celesti's bubble universe, in order to stop our universe being destroyed by strange, universe-sized creatures called Swimmers that exist outside the multiverse.

Confused? You haven't seen the prose yet. There's a huge amount of technobabble and metaphysical rambling scattered throughout the book, the kind of thing that doesn't really make any actual sense, and is fine in small doses, but really quite tedious when it appears multiple times a chapter. Throw in the fact that the Doctor is largely ineffectual - again - and it could easily be a stinker.

Thankfully, the boldness and scale of the ideas keeps it all very interesting. The characterisation of the regulars is great - Fitz is funny, Compassion is intriguingly cold and uncompassionate, the Doctor is curious and entertaining - and the humour is excellent, when it appears. There's an interlude about a planet whose population forgets what circles are which is superb.

Ultimately, it's a book that tries to combine hard SF, Lawrence Miles's more fantastical mythos and a whimsical runaround and falls apart because of how badly it fits together. There's a good story in here, but it's not as easy to find as it should be. Still, there's a hint that Compassion might not be who she claims, which will no doubt form a bigger part of the ongoing arc at some point.

Next time on Doctor Who... we're back in new author territory again, with Peter Anghelides.

pigamus

What are the chances of these books ever being republished? I suppose it would be a massive rights nightmare

Some of the PDAs were republished relatively recently, covers looked like:



The old BBC website did enhanced e-books for a few novels but that was a while ago (and the website seems to have gone to internet heaven).

QuoteThere's an interlude about a planet whose population forgets what circles are which is superb.

One of a bunch of interludes that range from the jovial to the genocidal. I think there's even a Curse of Fatal Death reference. All set the wider threat rather nicely.

Taking of Planet 5 is one I still own in paper form as its just so bonkers. I think its one of the few books that took firm cues from Miles and, of those, does them the most justice. I wouldn't want a series of these, mind, just a reminder that there's this storm coming.

"Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, armed with a big stick"

Also: https://jaowriter.net/2014/08/14/throwback-interview-mark-clapham-2002/

Warning, some spoilers within.

QuoteNext time on Doctor Who... we're back in new author territory again, with Peter Anghelides.

he did not-werewolf one Kursaal way back in EDA #8

purlieu

Quote from: A Hat Like That on June 22, 2022, 01:39:48 PMhe did not-werewolf one Kursaal way back in EDA #8
Oh God.

I do find it surprising these books are so out of print, to be honest. I mean it's pretty clear by this book that they'd already given up on trying to capture a new, more casual audience off the back of the film and were just going full steam ahead with supernerd fans only type stories, but you'd think with the revival series, there'd be more interest. I'm curious to see if any end up as PDFs on the Wilderness Years box. I wonder if we'll get any Big Finishes on that too.

I love the idea of Scales of Injustice being one of the reprinted novels, especially as a Silurian book, when it basically uses a very straightforward The Silurians rehash as a background for Gary Russell to introduce his C19 and twins plots that he'd mine for the next ten years. It's not a very easily accessible book. Bleak as it is, Blood Heat would be a far more suitable Silurian reprint. Maybe Jim Mortimore told them to fuck off.

pigamus

Quote from: A Hat Like That on June 22, 2022, 01:25:26 PMSome of the PDAs were republished relatively recently, covers looked like:



The old BBC website did enhanced e-books for a few novels but that was a while ago (and the website seems to have gone to internet heaven).

Oh that's interesting, I didn't know that. Presumably sales didn't set the world on fire. Plus you would imagine at least one or two of the original authors wouldn't readily agree to them all being republished anyway.

purlieu

There was a monster collection series and a history collection series. Hilariously, the Sontarans are represented by Terrance Dicks's expanded novelisation of the 1994 fan film Shakedown. The history ones are all excellent, mind.

They also did a series of reprints of one book per Doctor in a series for the 50th anniversary. All bar one were from the Virgin or BBC novels, the exception being a reprint of the Remembrance of the Daleks Target book for the Seventh Doctor. The Eighth Doctor novel was Earthworld, by Jacquline Rayner, originally published in 2001, around midway through that particular range. Think that one is the only EDA that has ever been later reprinted with a different cover.

Midas

#1757
A number of the books were also made available in 2011 as low quality "print on demand" reprint copies for some reason. Think these can still be readily purchased.

mjwilson

Quote from: purlieu on June 22, 2022, 05:27:51 PMMaybe Jim Mortimore told them to fuck off.

He's done a lot of that.

Also he brought up Blood Heat as a sort of special edition thing where he went back to his original version.


JamesTC

Into the Michael Grade interview on the Season 22 set.

Michael Grade insisting that he couldn't take into account overseas sales of Doctor Who into account because Doctor Who was funded by public money and then a few minutes later is talking about how he was promoting the show in America with Peter Davison because, as Matthew Sweet so wonderfully clarifies, the money from overseas sales is put right back into the BBC.

Maybe the BBC just didn't operate in a financially sensible way back then and simply only took decisions based on the current budgets available but that seems like incredible mismanagement. I can't imagine BBC Enterprises would have been happy with the higher ups during the 80s.

Matthew Sweet is a great interviewer. A shame he won't really have any interviewees where he has to pleasantly provide the rope to hang one's self with.

daf

I'd read that they'd replaced Savile at the end of the fix with the Sontarans with something else - (when Tegan says "Doctor look at the screen, it's monstrous!", and Colin adds "It's revolting") - I naturally concluded that they'd used a picture of . . .

Spoiler alert
Michael Grade
[close]

I think they made the right decision not to do that, but I wouldn't have blamed them if they had!



JamesTC

On the subject of A Fix With Sontarans. What an arsehole JNT was to poor Nicola Bryant.

Spoiler alert
She refused to do a pantomime and as punishment she was treated like shit on set and they replaced her with Janet Fielding in the mini episode to basically prove a point.
[close]

Malcy

Always got the impression from old interviews that I've seen of JNT that he was a bit of an arse.

Norton Canes

Spoiler alert
Quote from: JamesTC on June 23, 2022, 06:06:48 PMShe refused to do a pantomime and as punishment she was treated like shit on set and they replaced her with Janet Fielding in the mini episode to basically prove a point.

I'd only understood that Nicola was 'unavailable' for A Fix With Sontarans. Have you got any links to the 'refused to do a pantomime' angle? (I could ask on Gallifrey Base but feel it would be opening a whole can of worms...)
[close]

Spoiler alert
Yeah, what I've always understood about it was that the sketch was recorded only a few days before it went out, and Nicola Bryant was on holiday at the time.
[close]

grainger

ISTR reading that Anthony Ainley wanted to play the Master more seriously, and JNT was on set insisting that he do it "more pantomime" (it might have been a different phrase, but it was along those line).

JamesTC

Quote from: Norton Canes on June 23, 2022, 06:56:32 PM
Spoiler alert
I'd only understood that Nicola was 'unavailable' for A Fix With Sontarans. Have you got any links to the 'refused to do a pantomime' angle? (I could ask on Gallifrey Base but feel it would be opening a whole can of worms...)
[close]


Nicola talks about it in her interview on the Timelash disc of the new set.

jamiefairlie

Quote from: Malcy on June 23, 2022, 06:11:37 PMAlways got the impression from old interviews that I've seen of JNT that he was a bit of an arse.

He killed the show with his shit ideas.

Replies From View

Quote from: Malcy on June 23, 2022, 06:11:37 PMAlways got the impression from old interviews that I've seen of JNT that he was a bit of an arse.

Phwoar

Gurke and Hare

I'm enjoying the pdf production notes as always. The list of people whose availability they checked for the DJ in Revelation of the Daleks is amazing. Freddie Starr! Jim Davidson! Shakin Stevens! David Essex! (who, where most people have a simple "not free" against his name in the list has a big "NO")