Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

December 26, 2023

The Church on Ruby Road Review

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I’ve had “Goblin Song” stuck in my head for two weeks now. The other day when I was just throwing songs on from my iPhone whilst we sat around making dinner I put it between They Might Be Giants and 100 gecs and it fit in perfectly logically. It was fun—a nice bit of time spent in the buildup to Christmas constantly anticipating the song because Murray Gold wrote a really solid novelty earworm. It was a provocation of course—all the publicity here focused on the goblins, starting from “he’s not a myth he’s an actual thing” in Doctor Who Unleashed, in an ostentatious “oh yeah we’re doing this now” swerve from two weeks ago.

By the time it hit within the episode (at the halfway point of course), of course, it felt perfectly reasonable. I mean, if nothing else we’re doing Labyrinth. Of course it has a musical number. Davies is nothing if not a student of television grammar. (See also the way the credits transition straight into Davina McCall interviewing Ruby in an entirely coherent rendition of Long Lost Family, delivering Ruby out of the TV schedule in a literal virgin birth.) Plus we had one basically last week. And then Davies flipped his second card—the entire second half of the song in which the Doctor and Ruby sing and dance their way out of the goblins’ web.

It’s great, of course. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before, luxuriating in the sheer libidinousness of Gatwa’s Doctor, smoothly transitioning out of the astonishing decision five minutes earlier to have him actively thirst for the Aristotlean coherence of the goblin tapestry. The Doctor learns the story he’s in and unstitches himself from it and it’s sexy as hell (and gosh has Davies decided to have fun with the fact that “hell” is allowed as a swear).

All of this makes the ending more striking. Because, of course, the episode doesn’t quite end. Indeed, its final moments are oddly broken things, not least because they’re a structural reprise of the horror scene of the Doctor’s subverted victory, We see the Doctor crying when he leaves Ruby at the church and declines to probe the mystery of who left her. Then there’s the slightly weird stretch of him popping in and out of Ruby’s flat where her little old lady neighbor watches on, and then there’s a scene mirroring the Doctor figuring out that Ruby was gone with Ruby figuring out where the Doctor has gone. But what’s really weird is that the ending is entirely on Ruby—a wordless “bigger on the inside” scene and perfunctory “I’m the Doctor” and that’s it save for the midcredit mystery. It’s jarring, especially with that vertiginous moment of the Doctor fretting that he’s the bad luck—a beat that never actually resolves except inasmuch as when we next see the old woman she’s complicit in the Doctor’s narrative, nodding Ruby into the TARDIS.

The problem, if you will, is that this ending doesn’t actually work with the logic of the episode.…

December 25, 2023

God Rest Ye Erudite Gentlemen

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Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. And those that don’t, for that matter. Absolutely no reason you should be obliged to have a shitty December 25th just because you don’t go for a holiday.

I’ve got a busy day and while I’ve got time carved for watching The Church on Ruby Road, I’m far less confident that I will have time to get a review up before tomorrow. We’ll see, but don’t go endlessly refreshing the page wondering where it is, y’know?

But I’ll offer a small festive treat in its place—the latest edition of my periodically evolving Christmas playlist. Designed to work in four roughly CD-sized chunks (the four versions of O Come, O Come Emmanuel are the dividers), it freely mixes classical, pop, and idiosyncrasies of personal taste from across decades. I’ve got it up on both Apple Music and Spotify.

Hope you have a good holiday, and that someone got you TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8. If they didn’t, you can still grab it on Amazon.…

December 18, 2023

Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter Twelve: 1963

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Moore’s move into self-published and wholly independent comics had an obvious cost. The bulk of the Watchmen money had been spent failing to get Mad Love going, and none of Moore’s personal projects were advancing or earning money; A Small Killing was trapped under the crumbling wreckage of Victor Gollancz’s sale, Lost Girls and From Hell were coming out in Steve Bissette’s Taboo, which managed to produce seven issues in five years and only paid $100 per page, to be split between Moore and the artist, and Big Numbers simply didn’t exist. By 1992, Moore was broke and only nominally a comics writer, in that he simply did not have any current projects that were actually coming out anywhere.

And so in the spring of 1992, when Bissette approached him with an offer of work, Moore was receptive, even though it would mean wading back into the mainstream American comics industry that he had so definitively departed five years earlier. Bissette was in fact acting as a messenger—the job offer was from Jim Valentino, who wanted Moore and Bissette to do an issue of a comic called ShadowHawk. And in 1992, Jim Valentino was very possibly the single most interesting man in all of comics.

Valentino got his start in the late 70s/early 80s post-underground scene, appearing in anthologies like Dope Comix alongside underground veterans like Aline Kominsky-Crumb to tell the story of a bad trip on belladonna, or putting out his solo book Yer Basic Comix. He wrote a backup feature for Dave Sim’s Cerebus called normalman, about the one non-superpowered person in a world of superheroes, which eventually turned into a series, first at Sim’s Aardvark-Vanaheim, and then with Renegade Press when Deni Loubert effectively kept the title in the divorce, then went on to do a book of autobiographical comics called simply Valentino.

Eventually his career saw him drift into superheroes, and he settled into a job at Marvel writing and drawing Guardians of the Galaxy. This had been a longstanding minor property at Marvel, first created in 1969 by Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake along with Gene Colan. The team languished in obscurity for two decades hamstrung by the detail that they were from the 31^st century and thus largely outside of Mravel continuity, but around the turn of the decade Tom DeFalco, then editor-in-chief at Marvel, saw the concept as a way to cash in on the popularity of the new Star Trek series. Coincidentally Jim Valentino had just worked up a proposal for the characters, having been a fan of the most substantial effort to date to make the spacefaring team work, a stretch of issues by Steve Gerber, who had long been notable as one of the figures in superhero comics with the closest ties to the underground, and so he joined the book as a writer/artist.

Valentino’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy offered a gradual evolution over the twenty-nine issues that he did. On the one hand, his roots as a cartoonist are evident, especially early on, but he was adept at using these as a springboard for clear, expressive storytelling.…

December 9, 2023

The Giggle Review

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If you go look at the Patreon-exclusive Discord thread I have for this episode—and yeah, I recognize this is an extremely venal opening sentence—there’s a moment where I note that the second pre-released clip, with the “David Tennant spits out ‘the Toymaker’ in the same voice he did ‘the Macra’” moment, was squarely at the twenty minute mark, and where I bet on another big turn at 40. And yes, I knew my spoilers and was expecting bi-generation, but I still just want to start by pointing out the fucking clockwork of it. In fact there’s another turn at roughly 30–that’s where the “return to 2023” beat happens, neatly bisecting the second act. And I think that’s key, in the face of the sheer, stupid cheek of this episode, to understanding why it works so well.

I mean, it’s worth saying it out loud, just so I can get it quote-posted on Tumblr—a pantsless Ncuti Gatwa emerges like Athena, instantly establishes himself as the faggiest Doctor ever to fag, then hits the TARDIS with a giant mallet because “we won the game, you get a prize honey” to split it in two so that David Tennant can be the Doctor forever. You can’t make it up, not least because Russell T Davies already did. It sounds like a joke, and in many ways is—the clue’s in the title and all. It was essentially spoiler-proofed, because anyone who’s the sort of fan that’s pouring over spoilers reads that and is just left wondering how this could possibly work out. And the answer is that it’s being done by a damn maestro of the form who understands how to structure the mother of all throat clears before you go and reset the show for gen alpha TikTok users.

The central trick is, of course, that third act pivot into doing a multi-Doctor story for the anniversary after all, with David Tennant having turned out to be the past Doctor all along. That is, above all else, simply fabulous television, and Davies understands that all you actually have to do is put it on a platter. Everything around it is just a series of decisions about tone—an almost mechanistic execution of scaffolding to ensure that moment is a thunderous drop that sends the dance floor wild instead of landing with a damp thud of authorial perversity. It’s fitting that he has the Toymaker attack through television because at the end of the day this operates through literally nothing save for the fact that Davies understands how to use the medium to engineer what is at the end of the day its original pleasure—its creation of cultural events. At the end of the day, there are rules, and Davies knows how to play.

Much as with Rose, there’s a real temptation to break it down scene by scene, but this is the fast reaction, so let’s work in outline. Like I said, three act structure. Act one uses a cold open to put two premises on the table: Neil Patrick Harris is a weird evil guy and he’s done something to television.…

December 2, 2023

Wild Blue Yonder Review

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Well gosh, that was nice, wasn’t it?

More than anything, I’m just delighted that Davies bothered. Like, the three specials structure could have been all big ones. This slot could have been a big scary Cybermen one or something, and the Fourteenth Doctor era would still feel complete and varied across the three. By most reckonings that would have even been the better idea. But no, instead he decided that this should actually feel like a season of Doctor Who and have a weird one in the middle. There’s something absolutely decadent about spending a third of your big Tennant-Tate reunion trilogy doing something that feels as though it’s overtly striving to be described as “proper Doctor Who.”

I remember, way back on the Forest of the Dead podcast commentary, which is legitimately one of the best forty-five minutes it is possible to spend on being terminally That Sort of Fan, Davies, Tennant, and Moffat enthusing about the first episode of The Ark in Space and how you could just shoot it with no changes to the script and it would still sparkle. And now here we are, with Davies doing an episode that begs for comparisons to Heaven Sent and Listen in its “a cheap one proving I can still write” ostentation—a weird spooky two-hander on a spaceship.

Well. “Cheap.” Obviously this continues to luxuriate in the stupidity of its budget from the moment they step out into that corridor set, which of course looks fantastic. The CGI body horror is genuinely startling. You suspect it still did come out cheaper than The Star Beast, but it’s still being ostentatious in its quality across the board. There’s ambition and confidence in every shot of this, and like Isaac Newton it’s frankly sexy as fuck.

What shines for me is the character work. The parallel scenes of the Doctor and Donna trying to figure out who the fake is (and note the very sly decision to do a deceptive shot-match so that the fake Donna comes out of a green corridor like the one we just saw Donna in) in which Donna gets it and the Doctor doesn’t, which sets up the subsequent beat of the Doctor IDing the fake Donna based on the fact that she volunteers to insult her own intelligence. Or even just the ways in which the not-things (as the subtitles charmingly call them) work—the grinning sadism with which Tennant delivers “when something is gone it keeps existing” is beautifully chilling. Davies has always been strong when he lets his nihilistic streak shine, and he uses it here—along with two phenomenal leads—to make cosmic horrors feel at once convincing and charismatic.

It feels significant, then, that it’s the not-thing version of Donna that relates so emphatically to the devastation Flux. And I don’t mean that as snark about Chibnall. For all that I deadpanned “yeah man, I felt that way about the Chibnall era too” during the Doctor’s frustrated tantrum, the thing that’s really striking about Davies astonishingly gracious salvage job on the emotional desolation of his predecessor’s tenure is the not-thing’s awed “you have owned it” and the way it sells the horrified tumult of this new version of Tennant, reeling from a trauma to rival the Time War.…

November 25, 2023

The Star Beast Review

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There’s a moment, about halfway through the episode, where the Doctor observes something about a seemingly dead soldier. We don’t immediately see what, but it’s clear that it surprises the Doctor, and we watch him draw a conclusion and take on a new course of action. It’s an extremely small thing. But it’s tight, logical storytelling. And it’s followed up immediately by having the laser beams failing to affect the taxicab—a moment that’s subtly foregrounded specifically to get the audience to go “ooh, that looks a bit cheap actually” in amidst a scene that’s otherwise showing off that Disney+ money—become an actual plot point, a modern day “the man in a rubber suit is secretly a man in a rubber suit.” All of this in service of keeping the audience engaged and thinking through the premise as the episode navigates its showpiece reveal. It’s good, sharp writing, textbook both in its mastery of the basics and in how good an example it makes of what competence looks like.

Let’s leave it at that and move on to actually discussing the first new episode of Doctor Who in, what, six years?

It is, obviously, backward looking. I mean, of course it is. It’s the 60th Anniversary Special. It was going to be backward looking even before you factor in the return of Davies and company. This isn’t a criticism, and if you think it is then you need to unplug your brain from the hot takes competition that is Doctor Who discourse on social media—a phrase that’s frankly as dated as “DoctorDonna”—and remember how utterly ephemeral this two week bubble of neo-Tennant is and how very different a place Doctor Who fandom is going to be in just a month. The job description here is “remind people what they loved”—reawakening the pleasures of 2008. That’s clear from the direct-to-camera intro that all the advance reviews weirdly fixated on as if it’s particularly innovative. (It is, but the clever thing is juxtaposing those 4K shots of Tennant standing over a lushly colored space background and, subsequently, Donna on a laptop in a kitchen with the 480p flashback clips, subtly announcing progress even as they stoke up the fires of nostalgia.) The episode starts with thirty seconds of Rachel Talalay delightedly twirling the camera around David Tennant and then running him smack into a physical comedy bit with Catherine Tate. The hits keep coming: Rose, what x3, Donna missing a crashing spaceship, “your great great granddad,” and then cap it all off with a joke about David Tennant being old. (Added comedy—he was already thirty-five in 2006 when he first took the job.) If you had any love for the era in question—and the record plainly shows that I do—then you’re back in the saddle and loving it before he’s even gotten in the taxicab.

From here Davies plays it two ways at once. On the one hand he’s in deeply familiar territory on multiple levels. It’s not even that Davies does these giant comedy-action curtain raisers better than anyone.…

November 20, 2023

T-5

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Right. I’ll have the end of Last War in Albion Volume 3 out later in the week—I haven’t had time to typeset it since getting back from ten days in the UK, and anyway, I want to do this first.

Right now we’re just under $300 a month away from my review of The Star Beast being public. Will we make it by Saturday? Will the review just go public Sunday morning when a bunch of people discover it’s paywalled and join? Will I just fail to get my Patreon back up to where I need it to be? We’ll all find out together over the next few days! But if you want to see my thoughts on the return of Russell T Davies, right now the way to do it is to back my Patreon at any level.

As for podcasts, well… let’s change that goal a bit. Because, frankly, I don’t want to not do the podcasts. I have too good a guest list to not do the podcasts. So those are happening, and are Patreon exclusive until the Patreon hits $3300. And just to whet the appetite/spur some subscriptions, I’ll go ahead and announce the guest list. This time around instead of having one guest per special I decided to go all out and have two people on for each one.

For The Star Beast I figured that, since it’s a comics adaptation, I should get some other Doctor Who fan comics critics. So how about Sean Dillon and Ritesh Babu? Yeah, I thought that’d do.

Knowing so little about Wild Blue Yonder made picking guests harder, so I decided to keep it in the family. Joining me for what is, bizarrely, her first Eruditorum Presscast ever it’ll be Christine Kelley. And because the classics are classics for a reason we’ve got Jack Graham, who proclaims himself to be dreading watching this shit and says it’ll be Extremis all over again.

And as for The Giggle? Kate Orman and Jon Blum.

Need that Patreon link again?

Meanwhile, I thought I should probably offer a roundup of some of what’s already up on the Patreon. First off, I reviewed all six episodes of Tales of the TARDIS.

That’s a bit ephemeral, ultimately. But I’ve also just put up the TARDIS Eruditorum entry for Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children, which is, if I may be so bold, a banger. (The entry, I mean.) That means that I’ve got all of the first two Whittaker seasons covered. The first season’s even up in a nice ebook, and I’ll go through and tag the second one to make that easier for everyone to find.

Speaking of ebooks, I’ll be shipping out the Kickstarter orders for TARDIS Eruditorum v8 this week. And as soon as I do, all Patrons will be getting the ebook of it. And the $50+ tier will be getting print copies.

Perhaps $50 a month is rich for your blood. I understand. But one of the best ways to get these reviews public is to look at the higher tiers, so maybe you’d consider $25 a month, which gets you writers notes and other such things.…

November 13, 2023

Last War in Albion Book Three, Chapter 11: A Small Killing

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“Within a fortnight it can all fall down, the luminous Wurlitzer palace of our youth: no luck, no school, no happy home. The job down at the skinning yards… the tide comes crashing in, and sweeps us all away.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Although the slow motion disaster of Big Numbers, along with his less ruinous but still time-consuming efforts on From Hell and Lost Girls, occupied much of Moore’s time in the wake of Watchmen, these sorts of projects—self-published or put out in friends’ self-published anthologies—were not what he’d initially imagined his post-DC career to be. As he put it, “my intentions at that time were that I would work for book publishers. I was getting an awful lot of offers from book publishers asking me to do graphic novels for them, which seemed like a good option to me because I’d own my copyright, I’d be dealing on more equitable, grown-up terms.” In practice this never materialized, in part because the graphic novel boom that was leading these book publishers to take interest in the medium was quickly being squandered by the actions of the very publishers Moore was leaving. In practice, Moore would only publish one work with such a publisher, a 96 page graphic novel called A Small Killing that he did for Victor Gollancz’s short-lived VG Graphics imprint.

Victor Gollancz was notable, at least in the late 1980s, as one of the UK’s most prominent family-owned businesses, existing since the 1920s and publishing authors such as George Orwell, Daphne du Maurier, Kingsley Amis, and John le Carré. In the 1960s the publisher became a notable science fiction publisher, developing an eye-catching yellow trade dress that stood out and helped establish the publisher as a brand unto itself. In 1990, however, in the midst of Moore’s work on A Small Killing, Gollancz was sold to the US publishing giant Houghton Mifflin, which in turn sold it on in 1992, with a third and final sale coming in 1998. Combined with the petering out of the graphic novel boom, A Small Killing became a niche title—it got an American edition from Dark Horse in 1993, and then came back into print in 2003 from Avatar as part of their authorized ransacking of Moore’s back catalog. Moore would eventually identify it as “the most underappreciated work that I’ve done.”

Working with Moore was Oscar Zarate, an Argentinian artist who grew up as a devoted fan of Alex Raymond and Hugo Pratt and worked as an assistant in the Argentinian industry before migrating to advertising and, in 1971, Europe, this latter move to escape the right-wing military government of Argentina. There he sought work and ended up working for the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, where he worked with writer Richard Appignanesi on Lenin for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, part of the collective’s iconic For Beginners series, which used comics as a medium to explain the thought of prominent philosophers and scientists. He went on to illustrating comics adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe before, in 1987, connecting with comedian Alexei Sayle for a graphic novel called Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian.…

November 6, 2023

Last War in Albion Book 3, Chapter 10: Big Numbers (Remainder)

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Hey folks. I’ve decided that the serialization of LWIA v3 is simply far too delayed, and that I’m going to get through it in a series of three omnibus posts so that it’s wrapped up before the 60th Anniversary Doctor Who Specials. Right now those are still set to be Patreon-exclusive, with roughly $370 a month to go before they happen on the site. You can help by backing my Patreon, where I’ve got reviews of the first five installments of Tales of the TARDIS up, with the last going up later today.

Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore became fascinated by fractals, or at least by what he thought fractals were.

The blue world spins below me, fragile as glass, a vast and delicate ornament. Naked creation crackling and streaming off in all directions. Clouds are not spheres. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. These things are abstractions of reality. The geometry of nature, like the geometry of life itself, contains infinites.” – Grant Morrison, Animal Man

Allow a moment of fancy. It will not escape notice that Dewdney’s introduction sounds very much like something Alan Moore might write, and thus almost tailor made to capture his eye. Could this article in fact have been his introduction to the Mandelbrot set? Certainly Moore was an avid reader of popular science magazines. He generally favored New Scientist, but it’s easy to imagine him passing by a newsstand and seen the striking visualization of the set on the cover, a crackling flame tongue in all its mad and infinite detail. If so, and if he picked up the issue out of curiosity, what would he have learned? Much of the article consisted of semi-technical explanations of complex numbers and computer programs that would have sailed over his head, but his eye would surely have been caught by the thrilled descriptions of how “the numbers inside remain to drift or dance about. Close to the boundary minutely choreogrphed wanderings mark the onset of the instability. Here is an infinite regress of detail that astonishes us with its variety, its complexity and its strange beauty,” or the lush descriptions of the recurring patterns within the set: “a riot of organic-looking tendrils and curlicues sweeps out in whorls and rows. Magnifying a curlicue reveals yet another scene: it is made up of pairs of whorls joined by bridges of filigree.” Ultimately, however, one suspects the key detail, beyond the breathtaking illustrations, would have been the subheadline billing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex object in mathematics” would surely have been eye-catching. (Indeed, Moore parroted the line in an interview, describing the Mandelbrot set as “the most complex shape in mathematics, and possibly the most complex shape in the universe.”)

It is worth unpacking that complexity a little. In the case of the Koch snowflake, zooming in on the image generates the same pattern. Pick a single point to zoom in on and you’ll see an endlessly repeating jagged series of triangles.…

October 23, 2023

Review: Tough Crowd, by Graham Linehan

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I suspect that by posting this I’m on my way to a really shit day. Please consider improving it by supporting my Patreon so I can continue to create and publish work like this in a world that would much rather platform people who want me dead than me.

Every time there’s another one of these prominent media-pushed anti-trans books one of us dutifully steps up and takes one for the team in offering a review. Grace Lavery stepped up for a triple header and did Bindel, Stock, and Joyce in the LA Review of Books. Gretchen Felker-Martin, having killed her off in Manhunt, offered an absolute savaging of one of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike things. And as a trans media critic specializing in British television, the release of Graham Linehan’s memoir means that my time has alas come.

Let’s start with the headline: this is a very bad book. I cannot imagine anybody who generally likes my stuff will enjoy much of anything about it. I cannot imagine anybody getting anything of value out of it. Even for Linehan’s fellow virulent transphobes it would seem to offer only the hollowest of pleasures, although I can’t in good conscience pretend that’s not their thing. But broadly speaking I encourage you to not bother reading this book, and if you for some reason feel you must read it, do not under any circumstances pay money for it. I sure as hell stole mine.

To get more into the meat of it, “very bad” is a statistical average of what are in fact two books welded together by a bizarre interlude in which Linehan attempts to make a brilliant “checkmate trannies” sort of argument. The first of these is an ordinarily bad memoir of a sitcom writer, while the other is an almost indescribably bad account of a man’s complete psychological collapse. Linehan presents this bifurcated narrative up front in his subtitle, which promises to tell how he “made and lost” his career. Indeed, as he explains, he lost more than that, including his family and all of his friends.

Well. Clearly not all of them. His book features blurbs from Jonathan Ross and Richard Ayoade, among those from a few less notable old career contacts and fellow professional bigots. These suggest the book will be “funny,” “honest,” “complicated,” and above all “compelling.” The overall result is a book that, to put it in the sort of Catholic terms that start to pathologize him, feels like a confession, though of course, one devoid of any repentance. “Here is how I pushed everyone away” says the man whose friends are blurbing his book and who is giving numerous interviews to promote it. “Don’t you think I’m compelling?”

The first part of this argument—the sitcom memoir—functions as a sort of “I used to be somebody” windup to the sob story. And he did—a level of prominence roughly akin to what Steven Moffat had pre-Doctor Who, which is to say that he was well known among UK sitcom fans who paid attention to the writer’s name.…

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