This week, Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by renowned Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, but we spend most of our time lurking among the bookshelves frightened by our own shadows. And despite the customary non-stop chattering, it’s all about Silence in the Library.
Notes and links
Fans of the Vashta Nerada will also enjoy the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? in which the gang are confronted by a terrifying skeleton in a space suit, characteristically called the Spooky Space Kook.
The Library of Babel (1948) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he imagines a library the size of the universe, which contains every book ever written, in a series of hexagonal rooms lined with shelves full of 410-page books containing every possible combination of letters. It’s a weird and interesting thought experiement. You can find a copy of the story itself here. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explores the idea further in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996).
Johnny’s magnum opus is his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
This week, Peter’s having a quiet drink, Brendan’s spending a suspicious amount of time in the toilet, Max has gone for a walk in the woods with Sacha Dhawan, and Nathan is looking at dirty postcards and reminiscing about the days when he still used to get out of this chair. Plus, Agatha Christie’s here for cocktails. So be sure to watch out for The Unicorn and the Wasp.
Notes and links
Nathan has dim memories of three Agatha Christie miniseries, adapted for TV by Sarah Phelps, who is writing a second series of RTD’s A Very English Scandal in 2021. These adaptations were And Then There Were None (2015), Witness for the Prosecution (2016) and Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
The Doctor reminisces about rescuing Charlemagne from an insane computer, a scenario taken directly from a Doctor Who story on the BBC website: The Lonely Computer, by Peter’s old friend Rupert Laight.
This Guardian article from 1999 theorises that Agatha Christie disappeared to get back at her cheating husband, and that her amnesia was feigned to conceal this fact. Nathan learned this story, like everything else he knows, from a tweet. (You can see his reply here).
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This week, we basically stand around gloomily watching a fish drown until Todd cheers us up with some surprisingly athletic backflips. It’s The Doctor’s Daughter.
Notes and links
During the recording of our episode on 42 last year (Episode 170: I Believe Beryl Reid as a Freighter Captain), Brendan and Todd enter an unholy pact to reunite on this week’s episode to redeem The Doctor’s Daughter. With the most terrible consequences.
A few days before we recorded this episode, Chris Chibnall was interviewed in the Radio Times, saying that he would love one day to bring back some of the show’s earlier companions, like Amy, Rory, Ace and Tegan.
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This week, Nathan is crushing on that nice Colonel, James is crushing on a cloned replica of himself, and Peter is crushing on that nice young man who runs the local startup cult academy. And all the time, Adam Richard is roaming this suburban street with an axe, looking for cars to attack. It’s the end of the world, as usual: it’s The Poison Sky.
Notes and links
Adam’s TV show Outland (2012) screened on ABC-TV and told the story of five queer science-fiction fans thrown together after the breakup of their local fan group. Adam was co-creator, co-writer and one of the stars of the show. Outland was must-see TV for another small group of queer science fiction fans who would one day grow up to create the podcast Flight Through Entirety.
In March 2020, Catherine Tate returned to Big Finish with Jacqueline King in the Kidnapped! box set, in which Donna teams up with an old school friend to fight aliens in the Doctor’s absence.
Freeman Agyeman has just made her Big Finish début, but not in a Doctor Who story: instead, she’s joining Eve Myles in Torchwood: Dissected, released in February 2020.
As we said last week, Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Peter ponders the similarities between Luke Rattigan and convicted fraud Martin Shkreli, who is literally one of the world’s most appalling people.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch Up the Women, a BBC4 sitcom created by Jessica Hynes, starring Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and the Rattigan Academy’s very own Ryan Sampson.
Adam
Adam recommends The Stranger, Netflix’s answer to Broadchurch, produced by Nicola Shindler’s Red Production Company (Years and Years, Cucumber, Queer as Folk).
Peter
Hoping for the Rutans to make a return to Doctor Who, Peter suggests that you should watch Horror of Fang Rock, which we covered in the our delightfully named Episode 50, The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive.
And he’s particularly keen for you to watch Netflix’s Elite, a Spanish teen drama in which attractive young people have sex and occasionally murder someone.
Nathan
Nathan finds depressing parallels between life in 2020 and life in 2060 as depicted in Avenue 5, a new HBO science-fiction comedy series by Armando Ianucci (The Thick of It).
This week, we’re joined again by Adam Richard for a discussion about RTD’s early-season two-parters, sidelining the main characters, the military, cloning, Sontarans, and the perils of spending too much time with our families. It all smells very much like The Sontaran Stratagem.
Notes and links
Martha is now engaged to the impressively handsome Thomas Milligan from Last of the Time Lords, who is played by Tom Ellis, who can now been seen in the titular role in Netflix’s supernatural police procedural Lucifer.
Sergeant Benton’s pretty new replacement in this version of UNIT, Ross Jenkins, is played by Christian Cooke, who was recently one of the suspects in the BBC adaption of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
Take a drink, dear listener. In her TARDIS Eruditorum article on The Time Warrior, El Sandifer explains that Bob Holmes did not create the Sontarans as a second-tier race of Doctor Who monsters; what he created there instead was the character of Linx.
If you’re young enough, you might not know that Christopher Ryan — who plays General Staal in this story — first became famous as Mike the Cool Person in the Thatcher-era BBC comedy series The Young Ones. He went on to play Jennifer Saunders’s long-suffering ex-husband Marshall in Absolutely Fabulous.
Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Peter is still, unaccountably, nowhere to be found. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
This week, James is admiring Mr Halpern’s hardware, Richard’s showing a PowerPoint presentation to some very important clients, Todd’s trying desperately not to fall over this railing, and Nathan’s ranting incessantly about Marx while seriously regretting his lunch order. Welcome to the Planet of the Ood.
Notes and links
Keith Temple was well-known for a BBC TV Movie called Angel Cake (2006), in which the Virgin Mary appears in some rock buns baked by Sarah Lancashire, to miraculous effect. You can read an interview with both of them about the production here.
Temple has also written a number of books, including It’s Behind You, in which a washed-up soap actor starts to receive death threats in the post while she’s doing panto, with hilarious results.
This week, while Nathan’s lying on the couch hungover, James is in an ecstatic vaporous trance, and Brendan’s admiring his latest avant-garde objet d’art, we are unexpectedly joined by friend-of-the-podcast, Erik Stadnik, who we hope will (eventually) find it in his heart to save us from the latest impending apocalypse, The Fires of Pompeii.
Notes and links
Strap yourself in. There’s a lot this week.
The Doctor’s previous and completely contradictory visit to Pompeii is chronicled in the first Big Finish audio starring Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford, called The Fires of Vulcan.
Roman historian Mary Beard defines the Dormouse Test like this: "[In a modern recreation of ancient Rome,] how long is it before the characters adopt an uncomfortably horizontal position in front of tables, usually festooned with grapes, and one says to another: ‘Can I pass you a dormouse?’”
This article appeared just days before our recording: the remains of one victim found in Herculaneum revealed that their owner’s brain turned to glass in the heat of the eruption.
David Whitaker was, in many ways, the creative genius who gave us Doctor Who, and in his very early novelisation, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, he not only gives his take on how history works, he also explains the morality of the Doctor’s historical adventures. A must-read.
Caroline Simcox finds a new way to approach historical Doctor Who adventures in Big Finish’s The Council of Nicaea. Son of the Dragon, by Steve Lyons, covers similar territory.
Tat Wood’s About Time 9 is the (sort of) definitive guide to Series 4 and the 2009 specials. No sign of About Time 10 yet, but we’re desperately hoping it will arrive before 2021.
We’re back for a new year, a new companion and an exciting new series of the Biggest Thing on TV These Days. But first, we have a simple and effective new weight-loss programme to explode. It’s Partners in Crime.
Notes and links
So, if you want to find out more about how this era of the show from Russell T Davies himself, you must take a look at The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter, which contains his candid real-time account of how this final RTD series developed. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
In The Writer’s Tale, Russell says that the Adipose were inspired by the horrific puppet creatures that pursue a Vauxhall Corsa in this appalling advertisement.
Whereas Nathan had always assumed that they had been inspired by the horrible food creatures that featured in an ad campaign for Wrigley’s chewing gum. (Which would have had to travel back in time five or so years for that to be possible.)
The Supernanny was a British reality TV show in which Jo Frost would turn up at your home and explain to you exactly how terrible your parenting was. It had been running on Channel 4 since 2004.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby and James is @ohjamessellwood. Peter continues to deprive himself of the world’s biggest source of cat pictures and targeted harassment, so Twitter fans will just have to do without him. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We’re planning to continue releasing episodes of sixties spy-fi nonsense despite the delayed release of No Time to Die.
In our highest-rated episode since 1979, Nathan, James, Todd and Richard celebrate Christmas aboard the Titanic with champagne, buffalo wings and Kylie Minogue. It looks like it’s going to be a successful maiden voyage — after all, the episode is called Voyage of the Damned.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We’ve just released a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, in which we comment on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which shares a surprising amount of DNA with You Only Live Twice.
Episode 179: Mrs Golightly’s Happy Travelling University and Commentary
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Our farewell last week was so heartbreaking that we decided to sneak in one last episode before Christmas. So, here are Terry Wogan and John Barrowman to introduce a heartwarming episode of Flight Through Entirety, in which Nathan and James are joined by Steven B and Dan from New to Who to discuss the 2007 Children in Need special, Time Crash.
Steven and Dan are two of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories which might be of interest to New Series fans. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast, and you should immediately subscribe to the podcast in your podcatcher of choice.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We’ve already recorded a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, which should turn up in your feed any day now.
We’ve survived our first year of post–Camille Coduri Doctor Who, and our only full year in the company of the charming and charismatic Freema Agyeman. So, what did we all think?
Notes and links
The Angry Black Woman stereotype combines sexism and racism, and seems designed to discourage black women from speaking out. You can find out more about it in this article from the BBC; this article from Forbes discusses ways of combating it.
As we’ve said before, Derek Jacobi had previously played a weird robot version of the Master in Scream of the Shalka, a Doctor Who story written by Paul Cornell and released by the BBC as a Flash animation in 2003. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU).
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby and Richard is @RichardLStone. Peter doesn’t know what Twitter is and just wishes you would all stop asking him about it. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We’re planning to release a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger this year, so make sure you keep updating the podcast feed every few minutes between now and the end of December.
It’s the last episode of Series 3, so we’re walking the Earth and telling anyone who’ll stand still for long enough about our favourite television show in the whole world. It’s Last of the Time Lords.
This week, Todd wants you to go back and watch Tom Baker and Louise Jameson in The Invasion of Time, which we discussed in Episode 55: Timothy Dalton’s Pyjamas.
James
Quite rightly, James recommends Life on Mars, in which John Simm plays a present-day police officer who finds himself stranded back in 1973.
And Richard recommends John Lanchester’s article in The London Review of Books, Good New Idea, in which he makes an argument for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income.
We’re on the run this week — skulking in shadows and eating chips while talking about the Master’s backstory and the deplorable state of British politics. Which is a normal Sunday for us, even when we’re not talking about The Sound of Drums.
Broken News was a six-episode comedy series shown on BBC Two in 2005, which recreated the experience of channel surfing across a range of 24-hour news channels while some weird and incomprehensible news story is breaking. We love it.
This week, we’re joined by TV’s Adam Richard to talk about Martha, the Master, Heather Locklear, Coronation Street and Russell’s original plans for the end of the season. And we also talk about a little Doctor Who episode that we like to call Utopia.
Notes and links
Scream of the Shalka was a Doctor Who story written by Paul Cornell and released by the BBC as a Flash animation in 2003. It starred Richard E Grant as the Doctor and Derek Jacobi as a weird robot version of the Master, who was kept captive in the Doctor’s TARDIS. It was released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU).
Unlike so many Doctor Who YouTubers, Brendan loves Doctor Who. And what more proof of this do you need than his web series Say Something Nice, in which he goes through all of the lowest-rated Doctor Who episodes and says something nice about them. Bless him.
Another Master, Geoffrey Beevers, joins Tom Baker in a battle of terribly mellifluous voices in Big Finish’s Death Match, whose key scene Brendan recreates expertly during this episode.
And our final Master for the week is Alex Macqueen, who eventually reveals himself opposite Sylvester McCoy in the Big Finish story Dominion.
This week, we’re joined by Lizbeth Myles from Verity! podcast to discuss a terrifying romantic comedy about the brevity of human life. It’s called Blink. People seem to like it.
Notes and links
Nathan’s allusion to a Phrygian king at the start of the episode comes from a half-remembered story in Herodotus Book 2, in which the Egyptian king Psammetichus kept two children in isolation, believing that they would grow up speaking the oldest human language.
This episode’s conceit and the name Sally Sparrow were first used by Stephen Moffat in a story in the Doctor Who Annual 2006 called What I Did in My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow. You can read it here.
And, of course, we never stop mentioning Stephen Moffat’s breakout TV show Coupling, which is essential viewing for Moffat fans (if somewhat problematic at times). Here’s what Elizabeth Sandifer had to say about it.
Simon, Todd and Nathan are still trapped in 1913, which is better, at least, than being trapped in chains, a collapsing galaxy, every mirror, or a scarecrow. With World War I on the horizon, all three of them await the answer to a single question: Will John Smith have the courage to leave the stage, so that the Doctor can confront The Family of Blood?
Notes and links
A group of scarecrows inflicted on the Doctor the horrifying fate of regenerating into Jon Pertwee in the 1969 Doctor Who comic The Night Walkers. The Fourth Doctor also met walking scarecrows in Tom Baker and Ian Marter’s Doctor Who movie treatment Doctor Who Meets Scratchman, novelised by James Goss in 2019.
When The Family of Blood was released in 2007, Harry Lloyd was playing Will Scarlett in the BBC’s Robin Hood (which also starred Patrick Troughton’s grandson Sam). He can be seen in this episode’s corresponding Doctor Who Confidential episode, looking very sweet and just ever-so-slightly stoned.
The Inner Light is a highly regarded episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard, in the blink of an eye, lives an entire life as a Californian hippie whose community is devastated by the effects of climate change.
Picks of the week
Todd
Wisely, Todd recommends watching Horror of Fang Rock. You could also listen to our Horror of Fang Rock episode, The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive.
Simon
Simon recommends taking a look at Jessica Hynes in another role, in the BBC sitcom W1A, set in the BBC itself. It’s on Netflix in the US, probably, but not in Australia, where it used to be available on iView but isn’t any longer. In the UK, its on Amazon Prime Instant Video. Television is delightful in 2019, isn’t it?
Nathan
Of course, Nathan recommends Paul Cornell’s original novel. He thinks Chapter 8 is particularly good. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU).
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Well, the Doctor has been exiled to Earth again, but instead of hobnobbing with lizard men, he’s spending his time flirting with Matron and delivering incredibly tedious history lessons. There’s some indefensible name-dropping in this episode, including local radio star Simon Moore, but after all, that’s just Human Nature.
Buy the story!
You all have actual video of this episode on disc already, I imagine, so here are some links to Paul Cornell’s original Virgin New Adventure. It’s very good, and even better in places. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU).
Notes and links
In honour of Simon’s return to the podcast, here’s the TV Tropes entry for the KickTheDog trope, in which a villainous character confirms their villainy by doing something pointlessly cruel early on in the narrative.
It’s been a while since we mentioned that the entirety of Blakes 7 is available to watch for free on YouTube, so here’s a link to the episode Nathan mentions, Series 2 Episode 2, Shadow.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll get you a detention by deliberately including several obscure Roman obscenities in your Latin prose composition homework.
This week, we hop aboard the SS Pentallian just in time for it to start plummeting into the heart of a blazing sun. And so while we wait for our inevitable incineration, we answer trivia questions about Bananarama, forget everyone’s names, throw shade on the Captain’s marriage, and spend far too much time crawling around the ship, gurning and gnashing our teeth. Fortunately, it’s all over in 42 minutes.
Notes and links
The 1972 film Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel, features — spoiler alert! — a sentient ocean on an alien planet.
Fans of real-time narrative in cinema will also enjoy Run Lola Run (1998), Fail-Safe (1964), and The Set-Up (1949); United 93 (2006) is also good, but might be more difficult to enjoy.
Lis Sladen gets to do some much more enjoyable possessed-by-aliens acting in the third story of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, Warriors of Kudlak.
And there’s coffee in that (sentient) nebula in the sixth episode of Star Trek: Voyager, The Cloud.
This week, we’re hosting our first ever black-tie function, and you’re all invited! Nathan’s scoffing all the canapés, Brendan keeps being mistaken for the waiter, and somewhere upstairs is a roaring and slavering Colin Neal, who will join us later — we hope — to discuss The Lazarus Experiment.
Guga Mbatha-Raw appeared in the Series 3 Black Mirror episode San Junipero. She also played Ophelia to Jude Law’s Hamlet in a production in the West End and on Broadway in 2009 — she is interviewed about it here.
This week, we discuss human nature, animatronic willies, easily avoidable deaths, and the ethics of cooking pork. Which is probably all just a way of distracting ourselves from the Evolution of the Daleks.
Notes and links
The script for this episode is clever enough to borrow from David Whitaker, the Doctor Who script editor who wrote the cleverest Dalek stories from the 1960s. To find out more about him, have a listen to our episode on Evil of the Daleks, which is Episode 13: Airwick Gatport.
James identifies one of the influences on this story as a period-appropriate adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau called Island of Lost Souls (1932), starring Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau.
And last of all, our founder and dear friend Brendan has revived his YouTube channel and is producing huge quantities of fantastic content every day now. Please like and subscribe.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch James Whale’s classic Universal film Frankenstein (1931), which is undoubtedly an influence on this story. After that, you should immediately go and watch Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Finally, you can round all that off with a read through Paul Magrs’s series of novels, the Brenda and Effie Mysteries, in which the Bride of Frankenstein, who now runs a B & B in Whitby, solves supernatural mysteries with her friend Effie. Audiobook versions are also available, some of which are brought to life by our very own Anne Reid, (Audible US) (Audible UK) (Audible AU)
Peter
Peter wants us to curl up on the sofa and re-visit Blood Harvest, a Virgin New Adventures novel by Terrance Dicks, and a sequel to his TV story State of Decay.
Richard
Richard wants only what’s best for us, and so he thinks we should all pour a small glass of whisky, draw the curtains, switch on the turntable and listen to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Because we should.
Nathan
Nathan was not allowed to pick Russell T Davies Years and Years again, even though it screens in Australia on SBS starting on 6 November. Instead, he wants you to read Eric Saward’s novelisation of Resurrection of the Daleks, which is every bit as good as you might expect.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll force you to read our lengthy post on Gallifrey Base which explains in leaden detail that this episode has no idea about how DNA actually works.
