Eruditorum Press

Devoid of both military and civilian applications.

You Were Expecting Someone Else 15 (The Curse of Fatal Death)

, 156

The Curse of Fatal Death is a 1998 comedy spoof of Doctor Who written by Steven Moffat. It’s also embedded below this paragraph. If we want to get accusatory, of course, it’s also a work of cynicism by somebody who doesn’t really like Doctor Who and only wants to mock what’s wrong with it. There is, puzzlingly, an entire line of thought about Moffat that works on this logic, insisting as it does that he does not actually like Doctor Who very much, and how he’s only interested in writing for it in order to show how smugly superior he is to it. Not that I think any of my quite respectable and sharp readers would actually go with this line of argument, even the camp that doesn’t like Moffat. But this is still a surprisingly persistent line of argument. 

Though for the sake of honesty, at least, we should probably admit that there are less adamant versions of the argument that we could make if we were so inclined, and that these versions are perhaps more compelling. Most of them would focus on the infamous tipsy ranting session he had with Paul Cornell, David Bishop, Andy Lane that got transcribed by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club for their fanzine Time Space Visualizer, in which he made several of his most trotted out quotes like, “If you look at the first episode of Doctor Who, that betrays the lie that it’s just the 60?s, because that first episode’s really good. The rest of it’s shit,” “some old actor like Tom Baker would come to a shuddering halt in the middle of the set and stare at the camera, because he can’t bear the idea that someone else is in the show,” and “You’ve got Patrick Troughton, who was a good actor, but his companions – how did they get their Equity card? They’re unimaginably bad.” These quotes do not endear Moffat to some people.

There are two defenses to mount here. The first is that the easier to find version of this ranting session is the one at the Doctor Who Interview Archive, which reformats it to look like an interview. It wasn’t – it was four fans drinking and bitching on tape. The DWIA version cuts out all the stuff that isn’t Moffat, and a fair amount of the stuff that is, completely losing the sense of tone and giving a terribly misleading sense of what was going on, making it sound like an interview where he was the center of attention. The full interview makes him come off much better, in part because it sets up the sort of conversation that was actually being had – one that Moffat is quiet for long stretches of. And he comes off much better in it.

But why reach for the weak defense. Let’s go for the strong one: he’s right. I mean, I love 1960s Doctor Who – and, crucially, so does Steven Moffat. But the Hartnell era is a mess.…

Continue Reading

And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to…

, , , , , , 3

This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great.  It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff.  Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes.  Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.

Here’s a snippet:

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’.  I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too.  I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar).  See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.

Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty.  Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:

 Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?

(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here.  Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity.  It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)

Why do I care about movies and TV shows?  *Sigh*  Look, fiction matters.  In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).

Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued.  Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.

 *

ADDITIONAL:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html

 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html

*

YET MORE (27/01/13):

“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…

Continue Reading

Review: ‘The Reactionary Mind’ by Corey Robin

, , , , , 1

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah PalinThe Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Superb.

As an historian of ideas, Robin concentrates on the patterns of thinking within conservatism, but never seems to say that conservative actions and policies stem entirely from ideology. Indeed, he frequently points out the ruptures between theory and practice… yet he can usually find hidden resonances within the conservative idea/s that are consistent in ironic, unexpected ways, ways that often make seemingly paradoxical dissonances between theory and practice seem much more explicable.

Disjointed, of necessity (since this is a compilation of previously published essays on a variety of subjects), there are still clear and original linking ideas which are spelled out mostly in the new introduction. Conservatism is fundamentally a reaction to the loss of privilege, or the challenge to privilege from the oppressed. Conservatism is much less enamoured of stasis, familiarity etc than it thinks it is. Conservatism is much more depressive and melancholy than many people think. It is dependant upon left-wing ideas to provide it with negative stimulus. It is animated by a preoccupation with violence. It is more revolutionary than it pretends, being often as critical of ancient regimes as of radical challenges. Etc.

Robin delineates these ideas with a selection of profiles and intellectual traceries, hunting down the lineages of certain preoccupations through history. The most entertaining chapter is probably his thorough and brief (it need not be extensive to be thorough) takedown of that malignant mediocrity Ayn Rand. The most piercing is probably his analysis of the malaise that afflicted and spurred on conservatives after the supposedly-desired triumph over communism. The analysis of conservatism as an ever-changing yet essentially consistent range of ideas that prize the retention of privilege is tested and found highly persuasive as he charts conservative disillusion with capitalism triumphant after the end of the Cold War.

It’s hard to imagine anybody interested in modern politics coming away from this book without a lot more to think about.

View all my reviews…

Continue Reading

A Cosmos Without Iris Wildthyme Scarcely Bears Thinking About

20

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped… oh lordie. Kursaal (58th on Sullivan’s rankings), Option Lock (37th), Longest Day (67th), Legacy of the Daleks (72nd), Dreamstone Moon (59th), Seeing I (A quite reputable 9th, and will be covered in the book), Placebo Effect (62nd), and Vanderdeken’s Children (56th), a list that more or less explains all on its own why I skipped them. This is The Scarlet Empress, the novel debut of Iris Wildthyme, who we already dealt with way back in the Pertwee era, but who is basically a loud drunk woman who may or may not have really had all the adventures the Doctor pretends to have. Lars Pearson calls this “a sensuous story, full of colors and scents.” At the time, Dave Owen called it “perfect carefree holiday reading.” It is the 18th most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, or so people say. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide.

——

It’s September of 1998. The Manic Street Preachers are at number one with “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.” In fact All Saints are next with “Bootie Call,” so, you know, that turned out to be wrong. Robbie Williams goes next with “Millennium,” then Melanie B with Missy Elliott and “I Want You Back.” Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Boyzone, Aerosmith, and Savage Garden also chart. My ex-wife really liked Savage Garden. Hindsight is 20/20.

While we’ve been not paying attention to anything… there have been some things. Titanic came out. The US military accidentally killed twenty people in Italy by having a low-flying plane cut the cables of a cable car. Windows 98 comes out, and the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya are bombed by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But the big news, frankly, is that the Belfast Accord is signed, bringing something approximating stability to Ireland for the first time in decades. During this month, on the other hand, Google is founded. Since I have a friend turning in her resignation at her current job so she can go work for Google today, we’ll take that as a good omen.

While in books, The Scarlet Empress. Marvelous. So, this book is terribly clever. This goes without saying. And it’s the sort of book that absolutely should exist within Doctor Who. But to some extent we should draw a line here and ask how it is that we got to September of 1998 without any book like this existing. Here we are, a hair’s breath from thirty-five years of Doctor Who, and we finally have a piece of unabashed and unflinching postmodernism that starts explicitly from the premise that Doctor Who is a genre and that its rules are narrative. We’ve flirted with it before, of course, but it’s been one note in a larger composition, so to speak – a facet of a larger point.

The obvious thing to contextualize The Scarlet Empress with is the aesthetic of frockery that dominated the Virgin era. Of course, there are some difficulties here – first among them that Magrs, in his afterword to the book, admits to having had some frustration with Virgin, both with the overly manipulative take on the Seventh Doctor and on their turn towards science fiction where he preferred magical realism.…

Continue Reading

Rip This World Apart For Just One Cell (Alien Bodies)

78

Alien Bodies, by Lawrence Miles, is the landmark Eighth Doctor Adventure – the one that changed everything. It introduces Faction Paradox, the War, kills off the Doctor, introduces the Dark Sam plot, and probably does a fair number of other things I’m not thinking of at the moment. Steven Moffat has praised it. Everyone has praised it. Everyone. It’s the fourth most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, with an 84.1% rating.  Jackie Jenkins, guesting for Dave Owen in Doctor Who Magazine, declared that it “nourishes itself through constant questioning,” which sounds like a touch of faint praise. Lars Pearson, unsurprisingly for someone who would go on to publish Miles’s Faction Paradox series, calls it “one of the best ‘Who’ novels ever.” Lawrence Miles, meanwhile, says that it “isn’t even that good.”

——

It’s November of 1997. Aqua is at number one with “Barbie Girl,” and I think we’ll just leave that to be a metaphor. For something. I refuse to decide what. It lasts nearly all month, and then is finally overtaken by a massive supergroup covering Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” in support of the BBC and the license fee, which is to say that things are clearly changing in terms of the BBC and it’s willingness to be proud of itself. Backstreet Boys, Chumbawumba, Spice Girls, LL Cool J, Natalie Imbruglia, Moby, Hanson, and a duet between Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion also chart.

In news, MCI and WorldCom merge to become MCI WorldCom, which then became WorldCom, which then imploded in a massive and spectacular accounting scandal to nobody’s surprise and nobody’s edification. Mary McAleese is elected as President of Ireland, succeeding Mary Robinson in the world’s first female succession of another female as an elected head of state. The BBC begins online news service having previously only covered a few specific events, and the British Library opens a public reading room at its new not-in-the-British-Museum site.

While in books, we finally get to the bits where Lawrence Miles becomes Doctor Who’s driving creative force. It’s a short period – we’ll be out of it by the end of the month – and yet is by any definition one of the most important things to happen in the space between the TV Movie and Rose. It’s also terribly controversial, both because of the scope of Miles’s ambitions and ideas and because of his, shall we say, somewhat abrasive style. This sets up something of a choice. For the most part, all things being equal, I like to keep the lens on the present of Doctor Who. The Wilderness Years are a bit of an exception, in that I let the new series hang over them. The reasoning here is fairly simple: to present the Wilderness Years as they were would be to read them with a sense of continual despair at the fact that Doctor Who is never coming back, because that’s what we all genuinely believed more or less until Rose’s ratings came in. This, while authentic to the time, is a very silly way to read them now, so instead I’ve let the knowledge that the series does come back seep into things simply because it makes it feel less absurd.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 51 (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

, 87

There are a vast number of potential paragraphs beginning with “the really brilliant thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is…” It is one of the most emphatically innovative and transformational shows in the history of television. There is no case to be made that it’s one of the most popular television programs ever – it toiled in the low ratings expected of The WB and UPN (more about which in a moment), but nor was it some televisual equivalent of the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall show, where nobody watched but everybody who did watch was terribly important. The show changed everything: the nature of fandoms, the standard model of how to write both genre television and “regular” television, and the landscape of American television.

The latter of these is perhaps the least interesting in terms of this blog, but it’s important both in understanding how the show came about in the first place and, at least somewhat interestingly, in understanding how Doctor Who could become a hit in its own right in the US. The key thing to understand about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that it exists because the channel it debuted on, The WB, was an unsuccessful minor channel. Broadcast television in the US works very differently from how it does in the UK. The entire country is served by regional channels, the bulk of which affiliate with national networks. The big three up into the 1980s were NBC, CBS, and ABC, each of which have essentially 100% coverage of the country. An affiliate commits to showing certain numbers of hours of national programming in the correct time slot, but fills the rest of the schedule either with local programming or material bought for syndication. (There’s also PBS, which still uses the affiliate model, but is basically what Rupert Murdoch would have the BBC be if he got his way, i.e. Wholly dependent on continually running fundraisers to stay alive.)

In the 1980s the big three were joined by a fourth network, Fox. The way in which a new network launches is important to understand: it has to acquire affiliates from across the country, scooping up existing low-rated channels. In markets where no such channel exists or will sell the new network simply won’t exist, or will exist as a secondary affiliate of an existing network, showing programming at odd hours of the night. Accordingly, Fox was at first much smaller potatoes, having lower penetration and lower ratings, which meant that big ticket obvious hits went to the other three while Fox had to content itself with oddball programs like The Simpsons and The X-Files. Then, in 1995 two more networks launched: The WB and UPN. By then Fox was reasonably sized and they were the small potatoes – sufficiently small, in fact, that they merged together to form The CW in 2006 because they couldn’t stay afloat on their own.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally made for The WB, although it jumped to UPN for its final two seasons.…

Continue Reading

AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED! (War of the Daleks)

71

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped The Bodysnatchers and Genocide, which languish in the forties of the seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures unloved and unhated. We’ll be doing that a lot. War of the Daleks is the last of the books commissioned under Nuala Buffini (actually, this and Legacy of the Daleks apparently came in at the same time), and is absolutely loathed. It has… um… Daleks in it. And a very, very infamous retcon, which I talk about in enough detail below as to not be worth outlining here. It’s 66th out of 73. Lars Pearson says that the retcon in question “will skewer you in pitchfork-like fashion,” while at the time Dave Owen calls it an “unambitious tribute… rendered in hackneyed prose that should not have survived editing.” Ouch. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s October of 1997. Elton John is at number one with “Something About The Way You Look/Candle in the Wind ’97.” This gets at one of the news stories we’ll talk about in a moment, and raises the question of what could possibly unseat a cathartic tribute to Princess Diana from the charts. Answer: The Spice Girls, with “Spice Up Your Life.” The Backstreet Boys, Oasis, Will Smith, Janet Jackson, Aqua, and Chumbawumba also chart, the latter with an unabashed and straightforward execution of The Manual. In news, since we last checked in Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Princess Diana died, causing everyone in America to be inexplicably upset, Scotland voted to create its own parliament, as did Wales, and Mother Theresa died too. While during this month, the Grey Lady goes color, and the BBC gets a new logo.

In books, meanwhile, War of the Daleks. That War of the Daleks is a mind-wrenchingly awful book at least mostly goes without saying. Still, since this blog is written for a non-specialist audience, we may as well rehearse its flaws. First among them is the simple fact that Peel is not a great writer. He never has been. And so with a book in which he’s stuck with an ambiguously characterized Doctor and a new companion he makes a harder swing to Generic Doctor than any previous book. Peel’s Generic Doctor is apparently Pertwee, with Sam defaulting smoothly to Jo Grant. But this masks the larger problem, which is that Peel is spectacularly uninterested in any of these newfangled ideas that have been cluttering Doctor Who up for the last ten years and just wants to do good old-fashioned adventure stories.

As a result War of the Daleks is overtly and consciously an imitation of Terry Nation’s style. The Doctor gives generic moral lessons of the most banal sort, mostly about following orders and duty and various other things. Peel is fascinated by the divisions of Dalek society and by describing Dalek weaponry and various special Daleks in detail, and more or less uninterested in stitching together an actual plot. On top of that, the plot he has is riddled with holes. To take only one example, in chapter seven Davros is informed that there are still Daleks loyal to him on Skaro, and treats this as good news.…

Continue Reading

One Morning You Awake, And Your Humanity Is a Dream (Vampire Science)

24

I’ll Explain Later

Vampire Science, the second Eighth Doctor Adventure, does Vampires in San Francisco, and is pretty straightforward in that regard. It’s by Kate Orman, now joined by soon-to-be husband Jon Blum, who will co-author three of Orman’s four Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s reasonably popular. Dave Owen calls it “a far more intellectually rewarding read than The Eighth Doctors, which is perhaps understatement. Lars Pearson calls it “a playful – if sometimes overly sappy – story.” Overqualifications aside, it’s the twelfth most popular Eighth Doctor Adventure, and one of only five from the first twenty books to end up in the top half of that list. (For whoever was asking, the lowest-ranked is The Infinity Race.) DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s July of 1997. Puff Daddy and a bunch of other people remain at number one with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Two weeks later Oasis unseat them with “D’you Know What I Mean?,” only to have Puff Daddy take it back a week later.  No Doubt, Hanson, Verve, Sheryl Crow, R. Kelly, and Coolio also chart. God, that brings back memories. None of them are good. In happier news, the Pet Shop Boys also chart in there, and Radiohead does quite well for themselves on the album charts with OK Computer. In news, the month opens with the UK handing Hong Kong over to China. The drug fen-phen, a dieting drug, turns out to, erm, kill people. Andrew Cunanan shoots and kills Gianni Versace, and scientists announce DNA analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton supporting the “out of Africa” theory of human evolution.

While in books, Vampire Science. The BBC Books line was, as the current idiom goes, a bit of an omnishambles at launch. So the only sensible way into Vampire Science is in light of that mess. In a period as hazily documented as the BBC Books era some care is necessary in any authorial criticism. Nevertheless, tea leaves exist and I politely welcome anyone with more information to correct me here, especially since I know several figures with personal involvement read the blog. Orman and Blum thank the writers of the next two Eighth Doctor Adventures, Paul Leonard and Mark Morris, for their collaboration in developing the tone and approach of the Eighth Doctor. Conspicuously absent from this list is Terrance Dicks. Separately, in his notes on The Dying Days, Parkin mentions having wanted to incorporate references to The Eight Doctors but being unable to, but does incorporate a reference to Vampire Science. Taken together, these facts suggest that The Eight Doctors was written more or less in isolation, with Dicks not meaningfully participating in the larger development of the line beyond the obligatory and perfunctory introduction of Sam.

This run of three books in which real attempts at making the Eighth Doctor work as a character and concept are bounded on the other end by War of the Daleks, which we’ll deal with on Monday. Like what The Eight Doctors seems to be, War of the Daleks was essentially put into the line fait accompli along with Legacy of the Daleks.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 50 (Neverwhere)

, 70

For all that the TV Movie was a staggering aesthetic failure, it’s telling that so many people in the UK watched it. Yes, nobody actually liked it, but in a way that’s preferable from the perspective of someone who wants something resembling Doctor Who to come back on television and under the name “Doctor Who.” There is, in the wake of the TV movie, at least a clear mandate for Doctor Who’s return. The details on what that return should look like beyond “not like a generic piece of American cult television” were hazy, but it was at least clear that people wanted something Doctor Whoish on their television screens. Jonathan Creek, as we saw, did a good job of feeling like what Doctor Who would feel like if the BBC put some effort into it, but in many ways it is therefore Neverwhere that is more interesting, being as it demonstrates what mid-to-late 90s Doctor Who would look like if the BBC completely half-assed it.

It’s tempting to say that the answer is “not very good,” but saying that requires a slightly strange misreading of history. It’s true that there are many things that are deeply wrong with Neverwhere and that the series disappeared more or less without a trace initially. But one has to take a step back and look at this within the larger arc of Neil Gaiman’s career in order to quite understand what’s going on here. The first thing to realize is that in 1996, Neil Gaiman wasn’t Neil Gaiman yet. His career consisted of some time as a journalist/freelancer followed by considerable success in US comics. His lone novel was Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett. He was not even a star writer in the UK, little yet in the US. So his doing a fantasy series for BBC2 was a substantive increase in his profile. He wasn’t a novelist doing television – he was a jobbing writer who bounced around media. And in 1996, at least, Lenny Henry’s co-creator credit on the series undoubtedly carried more weight than Gaiman’s name.

On the other hand, Neverwhere was clearly the beginning of Gaiman’s breakout. The US release of his novelization of it and, a few years later, the text from his illustrated novel for DC Comics, Stardust, paved the way for his big debut with American Gods, the novel that firmly lodged him as a major writer. So whatever the inadequacies of the television version, Neverwhere is clearly seminal – the first real step in Neil Gaiman going from a writer who’s influential to a writer who is absolutely huge.

All of which said, there are some inadequacies to the television version. Put simply, and this is hardly an unusual criticism, Neverwhere looks kind of rubbish. It was set to be shot on video and then “filmized,” but the filmization was abandoned after it had already been shot. This means that it looks like it was shot on video, which is generally taken to be synonymous with looking cheap.…

Continue Reading

Shabby Efforts

, , , , , , , 4

I’m sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I’ve missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was ‘Night Terrors’.  I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of ‘A Christmas Carol’, which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith).  I was hoping that I’d either get my mind changed by the catch-up session – i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn’t just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel – or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with ‘Night Terrors’ (see here) put me off the project again.  Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it’s actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents.  Dispirited, I quit again.  So, I’ve not seen anything after ‘Night Terrors’.  And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer’s analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I’d missed back in the day.  I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them.  Still, I was going through college and university at the time.  I had other things to read.  The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It’s the same with Big Finish.  I’ve heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output – at most.  I guess I just haven’t tried hard enough. 

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line… well, I think I’ve read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that… I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once.  It was called ‘The Burning’, as I recall.  It’s possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me.  In this respect, anyway.  But the point I’m limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don’t.  I don’t know what’s so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance.  Never read ’em.  Never will.  I also don’t know (not from personal experience anyway) what’s so bad about ‘The Eight Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 289 290 291 292 ›»