This week, Nathan, Brendan and Richard take some time off from running around bomb craters in Central London to talk about sex, death and the terrifying prospect of Life After Eccleston. Still, we get through it all unharmed and alive: it is, after all, The Doctor Dances.
Notes and Links
Brendan mentions an article in Kotaku by Heather Alexander, in which she complains that queer characters in video games too often fall victim to the Bury Your Gays trope.
Picks of the Week
Brendan
Brendan’s first pick is the first in a series of fan-made audios called The Ninth Doctor Adventures — Cold Open, which is set before the start of Series 1.
Richard
Richard recommends Mrs. Miniver (1942), directed by William Wyler and starring Greer Garson, in which a middle class family living in an English village live through the outbreak and first few months of World War II.
He also mentions Fires Were Started (1943) in which civilian firefighters in London try to protect an explosive factory, The Next of Kin (1942), which depicts the terrible consequences when a gossipy housewife is overheard by a Nazi spy, and finally Their Finest (2016), in which Strawberry Fields from Quantum of Solace gets a job as a secretary working for a film production company making propaganda films during the Blitz.
Brendan again
And then Brendan is back with an original production by Big Finish — ATA Girl, which tells the story of the women who flew aircraft in the Air Transport Auxiliary during World War II. It was created and directed by our very own Louise Jameson, and both Richard and Brendan really recommend it.
Nathan
Less interestingly, Nathan recommends the four new Target novelisations which were released this year: Rose, The Christmas Invasion, The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time.
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 basically tell everyone about the under-the-table arrangement you have with the butcher to maintain your supply of pork.
This week, Brendan, Richard and Nathan are cowering in the Anderson shelter in the backyard, listening to the sirens and wondering what on earth happened to that nice little tow-headed lad from number seventeen. Turn off your mobile phones and keep your hands and feet inside the light field — it’s The Empty Child.
Notes and links
Reference is of course made to several of Steven Moffat’s shows: the surpassingly brilliant Press Gang — when are we doing the Press Gang podcast? — and Coupling, which is not Moffat’s first attempt at sex comedy (see also Joking Apart, or don’t), but is definitely his most successful.
Fans of things with Daleks in them will enjoy Dark Eyes, another Big Finish box set extravaganza starring Paul McGann and some people, and some mutants in bonded polycarbide armour. It’s good, apparently.
Richard refers to John Boorman’s 1987 film Hope and Glory about a nine-year-old boy’s experience of growing up in London during the Blitz.
Big Finish again. Brendan refers to Joe Lidster’s The Siege of Big Ben, a Short Trips release read by Camille Coduri. He also mentions Erasure, which makes a cheeky reference to the original unfilmable script The Killer Cats of Gin-Seng, a story ultimately replaced by The Invasion of Time.
This week, Nathan, James and Special Guest Star Dan from New to Who sit around in a circle to discuss our feelings of loss, our anxieties about our parents’ love, and all our deep-seated fears for the future. It’s our way of celebrating Father’s Day.
(Sorry about the sound quality on this one. Nathan sat the mixer board right next to the gravitic anomaliser and shorted out the time differential.)
Notes and links
Timewyrm: Revelation was Paul Cornell’s first Doctor Who novel and the third novel in the Virgin New Adventures series. It doesn’t have anything much in common with the plot of Father’s Day, but it certainly shares its concern with love and sacrifice and forgiveness.
Sapphire & Steel was a science fiction (?) series on ITV, starring Joanna Lumley and David MacCallum as strange supernatural forces who investigate and correct weird time anomalies like the ones in this story. It’s slow, but it’s often very weird and upsetting.
Good news, everyone. The entirety of the 1995 miniseries Steven King’s The Langoliers is available for you to watch on YouTube. It’s like Father’s Day, but without any of the distractly competent writing or direction. More about it here.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley and James is @ohjamessellwood. 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. And you can find increasingly rare facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
Daniel is one of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories and introduces the Classic series to new fans. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.
Flight Through Entirety can also be found on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll wait out the front of the church at the next wedding you attend and berate you mercilessly about your terrible life choices.
Jodie into Terror
We also have a new Doctor Who podcast project called Jodie into Terror. Every Tuesday night, after watching the new episode of Doctor Who Series 11, we’ll have a brief chat about our first impressions, and then release the audio afterwards. That’s at jodieintoterror.com and on Twitter at @JodieIntoTerror. If you’re from the near future, it will also be available on Apple Podcasts.
Bondfinger
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve recorded our last James Bond commentary for now, and we’ll be releasing it in the next couple of days. But we have commentaries for all of the previous Bond films, as well as for some weird things that aren’t proper Bond films at all.
This week, Todd is fiddling with the central heating, Nathan is stuck among the rafters roaring incoherently, and friend-of-the-podcast Peter Griffiths is using the wrong verbs and kissing complete strangers. Welcome to the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire — it’s The Long Game.
Notes and links
According to Dr Elizabeth Sandifer, Davies did submit a version of The Long Game to the Doctor Who production office, only to have it rejected by Script Editor Andrew Cartmel. So there you go.
Genre fans who have not watched Simon Pegg and Doctor Who guest stars Jessica Hynes and Nick Frost in Spaced (1999–2001) really should give it a go. It’s a sitcom that’s hyper-aware of what we like to call genre tropes, and it’s really very funny and sweet.
Bleak House (2005) was Andrew Davies adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, which ran for 15 30-minute episodes in late 2005, and starred Anna Maxwell Martin, as well as Doctor Who alumna Carey Mulligan, as well as Torchwood’s Burn Gorman, Gillian Anderson and Charles Dance. Not everyone was very happy about it.
Who gave Dodo syphilis? It was Daniel O’Mahony, author of the Virgin Missing Adventure novel The Man in the Velvet Mask, in which the Doctor and Dodo meet the Marquis de Sade in an alternative version of post-Revolutionary Paris. Avoid. Or better still, read El Sandifer’s take.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter can only be followed in real life. But he will call the police. 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. And you can find increasingly rare facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
Over on Bondfinger, we are coming ever closer to recording and releasing our commentary on the utterly forgettable SPECTRE (2015). Until we get there, please consider checking out our commentaries on the DanielCraigera, thePierceBrosnanera or the TimothyDalton era.
This week, Nathan and James are joined by Steven B from New to Who, and spend a couple of hours running up staircases in Cardiff, desperately trying to avoid a shrieking pedal bin with memory banks stuffed with exabytes of hardcore pornography. It’s your favourite episode of the season — Dalek.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law Beryl Vertue was Terry Nation’s agent when he wrote The Daleks, which means that she was responsible for the deal that gave him the ownership of the the Daleks. She had moved on to bigger and better things by 1967.
Steven B mentions a couple of characters similar to Van Statten, including Frederick in John Fowles’s The Collector, and the Collector in Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman’s BBC Doctor Who novel Unnatural History.
Dalek writer Rob Shearman has written an number of Big Finish audios, famous for their grotesque black humour. These include Jubilee, which this story is partly based on, and which we discuss in our Colin Baker Big Finish episode. We also mention The Holy Terror, starring Colin Baker’s Doctor and featuring a shape-shifting alien penguin.
Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke have also written a series of books called Running Through Corridors, in which they watch their way through Classic Doctor Who and say lots of lovely things about it. (If they can.)
In the episode of The Goodies called Sex and Violence, Mary Whitehouse analog Desirée Carthorse (perennial fan favourite Beryl Reid) commissions the goodies to make a sex education film called How to Make Babies by Doing Dirty Things. (Did you know that The Goodies has finally been released on shiny plastic disks? Amazing.)
Steven B is one of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories and introduces the Classic series to new fans. More about that later. Meanwhile, you can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.
This week, James is cleaning the kitchen, Max is standing up and making a difference, and Nathan is hiding in the cupboard under a pile of official documents with only the port decanter for company. The Slitheen are still on the rampage, and only a plucky leftist parliamentarian can stop them. It’s World War Three.
Notes and links
The Slitheen’s relatives the Blathereen appear in The Gift, the final story of Season 3 of The Sarah Jane Adventures. They’ve been painted red, and are voiced by Miriam Margolyes and Simon Callow, delightfully.
Nathan claims that the CGI Slitheen never appear again, and that’s not quite right. One is used in Boom Town, to create the effect of Blon shedding her Margaret costume. But, in any case, they never get to go for a run again. (And I’m not rewatching Revenge of the Slitheen or The Lost Boy to find out if that’s true.)
Fans of the password buffalo will enjoy the Big Finish audio Vampire of the Mind, in which Colin Baker’s Doctor faces off against the Master, played by Alex Macqueen.
In 2017, Russell T Davies and James Goss published an anthology of poetry about Doctor Who called Now We Are Six Hundred: A Collection of Time Lord Verse, illustrated by Davies himself. If you’re upset by what happens to Harriet Jones in The Stolen Earth, it’s definitedly worth a look.
James was right: here’s an article about Newsnight’s revelation in 2007 that British nuclear weapons were protected by bike locks.
And, of course, you’re almost certainly going to want to watch Dimensions in Time again.
Picks of the Week
Max
A Very English Scandal is a three-part TV mini-series by Russell T Davies, released earlier this year on the BBC. In it, the leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant) puts out a hit on his former lover Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) to keep him quiet about their relationship. It’s brilliant. And it actually happened.
Doctor Who was broadcast on Twitch earlier this year, and as a result, the phrase London, 1965 became an instant meme on Twitter. It is also the opening caption of the first episode of A Very English Scandal.
Max also plugs Paddington 2, also with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, as well as Scottish actor Peter Capaldi.
Nathan recommends NBC’s philosophical afterlife sitcom The Good Place, by Brooklyn Nine-Nine creator Michael Shur. Its third season starts in the US this week.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Max Jelbart is @max_jelbart. 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 also find intermittently amusing and incredibly accurate facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
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 make our next episode title a silly double entendre to conceal the fact that it contains a serious discussion of twenty-first-century geopolitics.
This week, Nathan and James are joined by friend-of-the-podcast Max Jelbart to discuss perennial fan favourite and stone-cold classic Aliens of London. Spoiler alert: we all like it.
Notes and links
Doctor Who’s last soap-genre mashup was not an unqualified success — it was the thirtieth anniversary special that none of us had been dreaming of, as the Doctor and his friends collide with the cast of EastEnders in 1993’s Dimensions in Time.
Not for the last time, one of us mentions The Writer’s Tale, Russell T Davies’s account of his last few years as Doctor Who showrunner. It’s very candid and informative — an absolute must-read.
A massive supernatural event is also covered by the world’s media in RTD’s brilliant miniseries The Second Coming (2003), starring Christopher Eccleston and Lesley Sharp (Midnight).
RTD returned to commenting on the lives of gay men in Cucumber (2015) — this time looking at the differences between gay men in their forties and younger queer people in their twenties. It’s brilliant, but utterly harrowing.
Before the Weeping Angels, before the Silence, before the Monks, Steven Moffat brought us the Tersurons, unseen aliens who communicated by “precisely modulated gastric emissions”, and who were the butt of a number of jokes in Moffat’s first ever Doctor Who story, The Curse of Fatal Death.
After the untimely death of Lis Sladen, RTD and Phil Ford created Wizards vs Aliens, to take the place of The Sarah Jane Adventures in the BBC children’s television schedules. Among the cast were Annette Badland, Gwendoline Christie and TV’s Brian Blessed. It’s usually good, and sometimes actually great.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Max Jelbart is @max_jelbart. 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 also find intermittently amusing and incredibly accurate facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
This week, our flight takes us to nineteenth-century Cardiff, where Nathan is worried about the stiffs, Todd is shocked by all this talk about the butcher’s boy, and James is teaching Charles Dickens to enjoy life again mere months before he dies of a stroke. Turns out that we’re all just The Unquiet Dead.
Notes and links
Todd mentions Mark Gatiss’s Big Finish story Phantasmagoria (1999), starring Peter Davison and Mark Strickson, which he manages to get Charles Dickens to name-check in this episode.
Simon Callow’s willy can be seen in the film adaptation of E M Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), which also features an important cameo from Rupert Graves’s willy. Worth a look. (Not just for the willies. Honestly, grow up.)
This week’s episode of Flight Through Entirety contains over 200 special effects shots and was recorded in a delightful civic temple somewhere in Cardiff. It’s not quite the new normal, but we’re definitely on our way there. Welcome to The End of the World.
Notes and links
(Whatever happened to the Buy the story section? I used to love that.)
Russell T Davies’s historical miniseries Casanova starred David Tennant as a mouthy romantic lead, and meant that we were all fairly certain that he would be the new Doctor when Eccleston’s departure was announced.
Another hint came from Tennant’s appearance in The Quatermass Experiment (2015), which was a live-to-air remake of Nigel Neale’s 1953 TV series.
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 replace our moisturiser with acid, sneak up behind you in the bathroom and scare the crap out of you when you’re trying to shave.
– I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?
– Rose.
– Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!
The wilderness years are finally over, and we’re back at last with an entirely new series of Flight Through Entirety, in a reassuringly familiar format.
This week, Nathan’s new job is giving him airs and graces, Brendan is carrying a whole bunch of Semtex for some reason, Richard finds a strange man in his room, and Todd’s skin has a strange and unconvincing glossy sheen. Welcome to a whole new era of Doctor Who — it’s Rose.
Buy the story!
This has always been our favourite part of the shownotes, but now that we’ve reached the Twenty-First Century, it’s no longer needed, so it’s appearing here for the last time.
From now on, Doctor Who is available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming literally everywhere, and was released on all of these media very soon after broadcast. So you probably own it already. In several digital formats.
Notes and links
In 2003, the future of Doctor Who looked very much like Paul Cornell’s Scream of the Shalka, starring Richard E Grant as the Doctor, which was a web series available (alas no longer) on the BBC website. You can see the trailer here). It was released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
The scripts for all of Series 1, including an introduction and a copy of the pitch document, were released as a book back in 2005. It’s definitely worth your time.
Fans of undistinguished pop starlet Billie Piper will definitely enjoy her 2000 hit, from the fondly remembered album Walk of Life. You can find the music video on YouTube, or you could always ask Todd to lend you his CD.
Rose was novelised by Russell T Davies earlier this year, and was released in a range of Target novelisations from the New Series. They’re all pretty good.
Damaged Goods is Russell T Davies’s brilliant but deeply upsetting contribution to the Virgin New Adventures range, first published in 1996. Unavoidably, a Big Finish adaptation also exists.
In this impressive tweet, Doctor Who showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat scowl menacingly at Michael Grade, who cancelled Doctor Who after a rough night in 1985. (Not pictured, Chris Chibnall.)
Fans of knowing all kinds of crucial nonsense about the production of Doctor Who (and that’s all of you, admit it) will enjoy Doctor Who: The Complete History, a blisteringly comprehensive history of everything it’s possible to know about the entire programme.
We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?
Brendan, Richard, Nathan and Todd fly backwards in time through the entirety of the Classic Series. Who are our heroes and villains? What stories should you watch, avoid, or remake on a film budget? And what, finally, have we learned about Doctor Who, and about each other?
Thank you very much for listening. And no, you have something in your eye.
All you do is talk and talk and talk
In fact, this isn’t quite our last flirtation with the Classic Series. We still have three commentary podcasts to record: Enlightenment, with Peter Davison, Revelation of the Daleks, with Colin Baker, and a Sylvester McCoy story that our listeners are still voting on. It’s not too late to cast your vote, just head over to our shownotes for Episode 129 and make your views known.
Notes and links
The Nth Doctor, by Jean-Marc Lofficier, discusses in depth the unmade film scripts that preceded The TV Movie.
This week, we’re celebrating the end of another tiresome millennium: Brendan’s dressed as Madam Butterfly, Nathan’s mooching about in the morgue as usual, Todd’s going on about his boots for some reason, and Richard has made a terrible mess in the Console Room. It’s the 1996 TV Movie!
Well, that’s democracy for you
There’s still plenty of time for you to vote for a story for us to cover in our upcoming Sylvester McCoy commentary podcast episode. No rush though. You can probably afford to worry about it later.
Buy the story!
This one’s quite complicated. The TV Movie was one of the first stories to get a DVD release, way back in 2001, in the UK only. It finally got a Special Edition release in 2010/2011 (Amazon US) (Amazon UK). This release was also part of the Revisitations 1 Box Set, along with The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani, only available in Australia and the UK (Amazon UK). An upscaled Blu-ray version was released in 2016 in the UK only (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
We don’t plan to cover fan favourite Dimensions in Time, which was a one-off Doctor Who/EastEnders crossover broadcast on BBC1 in November 1993, as part of Children in Need. However, Brendan says you’ll enjoy this version, which includes production notes by Andrew Orton.
Friend-of-the-podcast Gary Russell wrote the novelisation of this story, published in 1996, written before Gary got to see the actual episode and available in bookshops before the audience had either. It is now, sadly, out of print. You can read some of Gary’s thoughts about the novelisation here.
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 relaunch the podcast as an ill-fated series of remakes of previous episodes featuring American actors in major roles and including a number of inept Star-Trek-inspired continuity errors.
– My lady, who is that little man?
– Oh, glorious evil. It is he?
We’ve reached the end of another era. Three years at the tail end of the Classic Series, reviled by some, forgotten by others, and not watched at all by a sizeable proportion of the audience. But all four of us love literally every single aspect of it without exception. (Quiet, Todd!)
There’s always a choice
And now it’s time for you to vote for a Sylvester McCoy story for an upcoming commentary podcast episode. Vote wisely!
Nathan mentions The Stranger, a video series created in the 1990s by BBV, starring Colin and Nicola as more quiet and sombre versions of their Doctor Who characters. You can watch the first episode, Summoned by Shadows, on YouTube.
Big Finish has released a series of Lost Stories audios based on the production team’s sketchy preliminary ideasforSeason27. And no, we’re not doing an episode on it.
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 send Nathan over to your place to go on and on about that one time that Sylvester played the spoons on his chest. Just like he did to the Rani, you know.
Bondfinger
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve already recorded our final commentary for the Pierce Brosnan era, so we’ll be releasing it in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, our three previousBrosnancommentaries are still available, and so are ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton films.
There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace, we’ve got work to do!
This week, all four of us assemble on Horsenden Hill to light a fire, muck about, and discuss the last story of the 26-year run of the Classic Series. It’s Survival.
Fans of the music of Dominic Glynn will also enjoy FTE’s multi-award winning radio drama Time Inc.
The Planet of the Cheetah People (Cheetos in the constellation of Acinonyx) operates like a single biological entity. The Gaia Hypothesis postulates that the Earth operates in the same way.
For the second time, Nathan’s pick is the New to Who podcast, which covers those Doctor Who stories which you might actually want to watch, particularly if you’re a fan of the New Series.
Brendan
Dominic Glynn has recently released an EP called The Happiness Patrol Remixes, with new versions of the superb incidental music he composed for that story
Todd
Fans of both unnecessarily long films and TV’s Sylvester McCoy will want to rush out and buy the Blu-ray box set of The Hobbit Motion Picture Trilogy. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
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 secretly cancel your favourite TV show so that you don’t realise for a couple of years that it’s over forever and is never ever coming back.
Bondfinger
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve resumed our long-delayed flight through the Pierce Brosnan Era, which is nice, with the release of our latest commentary on The World Is Not Enough.
Our commentaries on the firsttwo Pierce Brosnan films are still available, and so are ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton films.
This week, we’re far too busy fending off Haemovores to talk about The Curse of Fenric. Fortunately, we’re each possessed of a deep and abiding faith: Nathan in Barbara, Richard in German Expressionism, and Brendan in the essential goodness of human nature.
Buy the story!
The Curse of Fenric was released on DVD in 2004/2005. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
According to this story, humanity will eventually evolve into sucker-faced blue monsters with seeds sprouting out of their heads. In the Blakes 7 episode Terminal, Servalan essentially reveals that humanity really evolves into the Taran Wood Beast.
If you want to learn more about the life of Alan Turing, you could watch the film The Imitation Game (2014), which did take some liberties with the details of Turing’s life story, or you could read Alan Turing: The Enigma (2000) by Andrew Hodges. We mention some of the people that inspired Turing’s work, including Kurt Gödel and Lewis Carroll. Turing was pardoned by the British government in 2013.
Nicholas Parsons is as famous as possible in the UK, as the host of Sale of the Century from 1971 to 1984 and as the host of the radio quiz show Just a Minute, from 1967 to the present day.
Here’s the story of Sonequa Martin-Green meeting Nichelle Nichols on the red carpet at the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery.
Ace has another difficult conversation with the Doctor in the Big Finish adaptation of Paul Cornell’s Love and War.
We’ll be returning to complete the Pierce Brosnan era any day now, but in the meantime you can still enjoy our commentaries on the firsttwo Pierce Brosnan films, and ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton Era.
This week, Nathan’s outraged by Richard’s blasphemous theories, while Brendan just wants to be a real ladylike. Don’t tell your probation officer — it’s Ghost Light.
Control asks the Doctor to “spare a farthing, guvnor” — her climb up the evolutionary ladder is based upon the 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.
Gwedonline calls Ace Alice, which is the most obvious reference to Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, but Nathan points out that this story owes much more to Alice than that.
After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, God places an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden to prevent them from returning.
Fans of the song That’s the Way to the Zoo will enjoy this rendition by the hosts of the Splendid Chaps podcast, one of the inspirations for Flight Through Entirety. If you have never followed a link from our shownotes, break your habit, and follow this link immediately.
Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who movie script, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen will be released as a novel by James Goss some time in January. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
Fans of FTE outside of Australia might not be aware of the non-binding non-compulsory postal survey which our wretched government is using to determine whether LGBTI people get to enjoy legal equality with every bogan arsehole who enjoyed threatening to beat us up in the playground when we were children.
And, finally, here’s a list of the amazing contributions Marc Platt has made to Doctor Who over the years since this story was first written.
Doctor Who in Ten Seconds
Brendan’s accelerated recaps of Classic Doctor Who are finally back, with some speedy ten-second summaries of all of the stories from Season 8.
We’ve now got a bunch of James Bond commentaries banked and ready to release. While you’re waiting for us to get our act together, you can enjoy our previouscommentaries on the Pierce Brosnan films, and ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton Era.
It’s the final season of the Classic Series of Doctor Who, and to celebrate, Brendan, Nathan and Richard are blowing up either an archaelogical site or the entire world. Let this be our last Battlefield!
Buy the story!
Battlefield was released on DVD in 2008/2009. Included in the release is a re-edited special feature-length version. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Richard Franklin’s novel Operation H.A.T.E tells a the weird story of Captain M, whose narrative has been completely stripped of all overt Doctor Who references for intellectual property reasons.
This story’s writer, Ben Aaronovitch, is now an accomplished novelist. But, back in the day, he had terrible difficulties meeting publication deadlines. Marc Platt ended up writing the novelisation of Battlefield, and Kate Orman had to step in to finish a crucial New Adventures novel, So Vile a Sin, when Aaronovitch couldn’t meet the deadline (he claimed his hard drive had failed).
Doctor Who in Ten Seconds
Brendan’s accelerated recaps of Classic Doctor Who are finally back, with some speedy ten-second summaries of all of the stories from Season 8.
Our long-awaited commentary on Die Another Day will be recorded next Friday, probably. While you’re waiting for that — and who wouldn’t be? — you can enjoy our previouscommentaries on the Pierce Brosnan films, and ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton Era.
Remember the 1960s, when this podcast first began? We had such high ideals, and we enjoyed making people happy. Well, it’s 2017 now, so welcome to our bitter, jaded and utterly mercenary take on The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.
The pebble drowning in his lake
Campaigning for our postal plebiscite has turned predictably nasty, but it’s very important for everyone to have their say on this issue: which Colin Baker story should be the subject of our upcoming commentary podcast? Head over to the show notes for Episode 121 to cast your vote.
Buy the story!
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was released on DVD in 2012. (That was easy.) (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
Brendan’s “surprise mirror” remark is totally incomprehensible unless you’ve seen this literal music video of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. Watch it now.
The first episode of Australian comedy series Outland featured a gay Doctor Who fan who briefly considered abandoning his date when he made a crack about Daleks being unable to climb the stairs.
Chris Chibnall will be taking the reins of Doctor Who any day now. Here he is on the BBC’s Open Air programme in 1986, criticising The Trial of a Time Lord.
The Pakleds from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Samaritan Snare were intended to be a parody of Star Trek fans.
This sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie depicts Stephen Fry’s reaction to increasing choice in the media landscape. Watch it all the way through — there’s a lovely surprise in there for fans of Doctor Who.
Richard identifies 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) as one of the inspirations for this story. The eponymous Doctor is played by Tony Randall in some appalling yellowface. Check out the trailer here.
Picks of the week
Brendan
Take a deep breath. Brendan’s first pick is Doctor Who on Holiday a remix by Dean Gray of The KLF’s Doctorin’ the TARDIS, featuring Green Day. It’s good.
Richard is off on a top-secret mission to Piz Gloria right now, so our coverage of the Brosnan era will resume in a few weeks’ time. While you’re waiting, you can enjoy our previouscommentaries on the Pierce Brosnan films, and ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton Era.
This week, Brendan’s listening to some meaningless jazz, and Nathan’s hanging from a tree in his underwear, while Richard rides — to destiny. All things shall soon be ours: it’s Silver Nemesis.
Ungrateful wretch
The cost of our plebiscite has blown out enormously, and we reserve the right to completely ignore the result, but it’s almost certainly still worth casting your vote for the Colin Baker story that will be the subject of our upcoming commentary podcast. Head over to the show notes for Episode 121 to make your views known.
Buy the story!
Silver Nemesis was released on DVD in 2010. As usual, it was released on its own in the US (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia, it released strapped to Revenge of the Cybermen in the unimaginatively titled Cybermen box set. (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
This episode’s title is taken from Shakespeare’s most improbable stage direction, in The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene 3, alluded to by Lady Peinforte in Part 2.
Death Comes to Time was an animated webcast on the BBC website in 2001, starring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Jacqueline Pearce, John Sessions and Stephen Fry. It’s terrible, but you can still hear it as an audiobook in the US (Audible US), or as a CD in the UK (Amazon UK).
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve stalled in the middle of the Brosnan Era, and so our commentary on The World is Not Enough (1999) has been delayed. In the meantime, you can enjoy our previouscommentaries on the Pierce Brosnan films, and ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton Era.
This week, we’re manic, reactive and endogenous, as we contemplate fondant, marshmallow, and the practical problem with leaving someone alive. Make sure you’ve paid your poll tax — it’s time for an outing with The Happiness Patrol.
On with the Motley
In our ongoing postal plebiscite, you’ll be voting on which Colin Baker story will be the subject of our next commentary podcast. Take your mind off the horrors of democracy, head over to the shownotes for Episode 121, and cast your vote.
Buy the story!
The Happiness Patrol was released on DVD in 2012. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), while in the UK and Australia, it was inexplicably released as part of the Ace Adventures box set, along with Dragonfire (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
Richard continues to feud with the hosts of the New To Who podcast. They’re all very attractive.
Dog lovers will find today’s upsetting media landscape impossible to navigate without referring to doesthedogdie.com.
The sound, look and feel of this story owes a lot to noirish thriller The Third Man (1949).
Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) was a dogshit piece of legislation enacted by the viciously homophobic Thatcher Government that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality. It remained in force in the UK until 2003.
Neither Richard nor Nathan have ever even heard of T-Bag, a British TV programme about a weird witch who travelled around time and space collecting weird objects. For the last few years of the show, T-Bag was played by Georgina Hale, our very own Priscilla P. (It’s horrifically bad. Take a look at one of the episodes from Season 3 here.)
