Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

Turn Her Into a Weapon, Just to Bring You Down (So Vile a Sin)

10

I’ll Explain Later

Well, technically we’ve skipped the rest of the line.

So Vile a Sin, the fifty-sixth and final of the sixty-one New Adventures, concludes the Psi-Powers arc. The novel was infamously delayed when Aaronovitch suffered a hard drive crash and was unable to face the prospect of rewriting large swaths from scratch and in an ultra-compressed timeframe. Accordingly, Kate Orman stepped in to finish the job from what chapters remained and Aaronovitch’s outline, and the book was put out five months late, more or less the day that Virgin’s license to publish Doctor Who books expired. It has tons of big plot points, most notably the death of Roz Forrester. It’s once again quite acclaimed (noticing a pattern in the latter New Adventures?). Dave Owen says that “Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman utterly typify the very best of the New Adventures.” Lars Pearson praises how it “makes Roz one of the most determined and self-actualized companions ever.” Sullivan’s rankings lodge it in with the rest of the Kate Orman books at fifteenth, with a 77.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s November of 1996. The Spice Girls are, unsurprisingly, still at number one with “Say You’ll Be There.” More surprisingly, they’re unseated after a week, giving them only a two week run, as Robson & Jerome take number one with “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.” That lasts two weeks, then Prodigy come in with “Breathe,” which finishes out the month. Tony Braxton, Michael Jackson,  the Fugees, the Backstreet Boys, and Madonna also chart, the latter with Evita’s weird zombie bonus track composed by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for the movie version.

In news, the Tories narrow the gap between them and Labour to a mere seventeen points. The Channel Tunnel catches a bit of fire, and the Stone of Scone is installed in Edinburgh Castle after seven hundred years of being in England, which is largely symbolic, but a very important symbol. Outside of the UK, President Clinton wins re-election and Benazir Bhutto is tossed out of power in Pakistan. And, because it’s fun to say, Tony Silva is sentenced to seven years in prison for an illegal parrot smuggling operation.

While in literature… nothing. No New Adventure comes out. There was supposed to be one, but, well, you know the story. This book forms the single weirdest whorl of chronology the blog will ever cover. Not only does it form part of the tail end of the New Adventures where they were still publishing Seventh Doctor novels after the TV Movie, it was released out of sequence even within the Virgin line. The usual line about this is that this ordering blunted the book’s major moment, the death of Roz Forrester, which was, inevitably, revealed in Bad Therapy the month after So Vile a Sin was meant to come out. Two problems present themselves here. First, the idea that Roz was marked for death was going around fandom for months prior to it being officially revealed.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 47 (Touching Evil, The Grand, Springhill)

, 8

Let’s change the camera angle slightly, however, and look at Russell T Davies’s career in general as of the mid-90s. He was, at the time, undoubtedly a successful television writer. He was not, however, the Russell T Davies of legend. He was a working writer, making a living entirely off of his writing, and with rising acclaim. But he was not a superstar of television yet. And perhaps more importantly, his work just isn’t up to the standard of what his later work is like. I pointed Monday to the dividing line seems to be the overdose that Davies cites as what got him working on Queer as Folk. We will, of course, do a Pop Between Realities on that show when we get to its appropriate time period in late January and look at where Davies’s work really started to feel like Russell T Davies.

What is perhaps most striking about his projects immediately prior to Queer as Folk is that they are aggressively, unrelentingly dark. Which may sound familiar, because it’s exactly what we were saying about Damaged Goods on Monday. Indeed, let’s go one further. If Damaged Goods does not read like the Doctor Who novel you’d expect the writer of Rose to write, it reads exactly like the novel you’d expect the writer of Springhill, The Grand, and a small bit of Touching Evil to write.

Let’s start with Touching Evil. The show is actually created and mostly written by Paul Abbott, who is another one of the absolute superstars of British television (and who we’re not done with either). Davies only wrote one episode of it, the first half of the first season’s finale. Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray’s T Is For Television, which has been an indispensable reference for both this and the previous entry, suggests that the episode is evidence of how well Davies could write to the specifications of someone else’s show. Aldridge and Murray suggest that the script is unrecognizable as Davies’s work, but this isn’t quite fair. If Davies is writing to spec, after all, the spec is Paul Abbott’s, one of his closest friends and collaborators. It’s not accurate to say that Davies and Abbott are indistinguishable – they’re certainly not. Abbott is more inclined towards a structure of set pieces to generate scenes of intense drama. Davies, left to his own devices, prefers to give characters sparks of intense drama in amongst otherwise low key scenes. It’s not that he eschews the set piece – quite the contrary, he loves a good set piece. But he builds to his set pieces out of character interactions. Davies’ trademark move is to give a character a soaring and triumphant monologue stemming out of relatively ordinary action. Abbott likes to crank the action up to eleven and watch the characters respond.

You can see this difference clearly enough across the two episodes of Touching Evil. Davies’s episode ends with a character confessing to another that he’s committed a vigilante murder. Abbott’s episode continues along this line of plot.…

Continue Reading

The Eighth Doctor Schedule

36

Since we’re on the cusp of the Eighth Doctor era, I suppose we should lay out the schedule for the next four months for people who want to play along at home. As is typical of me, I’ve only listed  Eighth Doctor Adventures and Big Finish Audios here, with the various side trip entries remaining oblique for my amusement.

Where legal copies of things are available I have linked to them. I encourage you to buy them.

Also, we’ve got Lungbarrow coming up on December 14th. That’s also available as a free ebook via the Internet Wayback Machine – you can grab it here. And though it’s old news, I never actually linked Human Nature‘s free ebook either. Nor, I think, did I link to where you can buy Death in the Family, the Big Finish audio we’re covering on the 17th,

The people advocating for Seeing I will see that they are disappointed. For these things we have book versions.

12/28 The Dying Days (Free! And legal!)
12/31 The Eight Doctors

1/4 Vampire Science
1/7 War of the Daleks
1/11 Alien Bodies
1/14 The Scarlet Empress
1/18 The Infinity Doctors (UK link)
1/21 Unnatural History
1/28 Dead Romance (UK link)

1/30 Interference
2/4 The Blue Angel
2/6 The Shadows of Avalon
2/11 The Ancestor Cell
2/13 The Burning
2/15 Father Time (UK link)
2/18 Storm Warning
2/20 Sword of Orion
2/22 Stones of Venice
2/25 Minuet in Hell

3/1 Earthworld
3/8 The Adventuress of Henrietta Street
3/11 Invaders from Mars
3/13 The Chimes of Midnight
3/15 Seasons of Fear
3/18 Embrace the Darkness
3/20 Time of the Daleks
3/22 Neverland
3/27 Camera Obscura

4/1 Zagreus
4/3 Scherzo
4/5 The Creed of the Kromon
4/8 The Girl Who Never Was
4/10 Human Resources (Part 2)
4/12 Lucie Miller/To the Death
4/19 Sometime Never
4/22 The Gallifrey Chronicles (UK link)
4/24 Scream of the Shalka
4/26 This Town Will Never Let Us Go (UK link)

Coverage of the new series will begin on May 1st.…

Continue Reading

What the Rest of Us Do (Damaged Goods)

9

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped the largely panned but relatively plot-important The Death of Art.

Damaged Goods is by some chap named Russell T Davies, which by most accounts is the most important thing about it. Ancient Gallifreyan horrors on a 1980s council estate, with no shortage of gay culture, it would be exactly what you expected Russell T Davies in the Virgin era to be if it weren’t for all the cocaine. Very much liked, though. Dave Owen at the time declared it to be “currently [his] favorite New Adventure.” Lars Pearson, more recently, but still well before the new series was announced, said that like the definite article, it is “sometimes forgotten in Virgin New Adventures tidal wave,” although it is “one of the most mature” Doctor Who stories ever. Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, which it should be noted are mostly pre-new series, puts it as the seventh best New Adventure with an 80.7% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s October of 1996. Deep Blue Something are being one hit wonders with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” That unsurprisingly doesn’t list as the Chemical Brothers take over with “Setting Sun.” That also doesn’t last, with Boyzone’s “Words” going to number one. Which, of course, can’t possibly hold up to the Spice Girls’ second single “Say You’ll Be There.” Celine Dion, Donna Lewis, Blackstreet, the Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Phil Collins, and LL Cool J also chart, so it’s exactly as bad a month as you think it is.

In news, the former prime minister of Bulgaria is assassinated. The second OJ Simpson trial begins, because once just wasn’t enough. New Zealand agrees to pay $130 million in compensation for the 150-year-old treatment of the Maori population. And Laurent Kabilia makes significant progress towards his eventual takeover of what is still Zaire at the time. And the Conservative government’s majority manages to fall to a single seat as Peter Thurnham defects to the Lib-Dems.

While in books, it’s Damaged Goods. Like Human Nature, the perspective on Damaged Goods has shifted fundamentally since its release. Upon release it was well-liked, but sandwiched in amongst the final year of New Adventures it was, if we’re being honest, forgettable. It didn’t brutally kill off Liz Shaw, come out months late and by a different author, have Benny schtupping the Eighth Doctor, reveal the secret origins of the Doctor, or add to Kate Orman’s terrifying tally of books in a relatively short period of time. It was just a very good novel by a moderately successful television writer. Russell T Davies was still years from Queer as Folk and from becoming Russell T Davies, and he was nearly a decade from being the one who brought Doctor Who back. It was still quite acclaimed – Sullivan’s rankings shut down not long after the series returned, due in part to a lack of people submitting ratings, so its high rating there can’t be entirely chalked up to a surge of new series fans – indeed, it has by some margin the fewest votes of any novel in the top ten, and the third lowest number of any New Adventure.…

Continue Reading

The Select Few, All With Their Stories of the Doctor (Return of the Living Dad)

63

I’ll Explain Later

Return of the Living Dad, Orman’s second novel in five months and one of a staggering three-and-a-half novels she releases in a one year period (with another half coming out four months later, and another full one coming eight after that), features the return of Bernice Summerfield to the New Adventures after a… three month absence. So not really that big a gap, actually. It squares away the old plotline of what happened to her father during the Dalek wars. The answer is that he got time warped to 1983. So that’s unexpected. It’s a Kate Orman book, so everyone loves it. With Paul Cornell providing plotting assistance to boot, so, you know, even better. Lars Pearson goes with “one of Orman’s masterpieces,” Dave Owen at the time said that Orman provides “many profound insights into the lives of her characters, and indeed, people in general.” It’s eighteenth on Sullivan’s rankings, squarely in the narrow range Orman’s books all occupy.

——

It’s August of 1996. The Spice Girls are at number one with “Wannabe.” Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Los Del Rio, Alanis Morissette, Robbie Williams, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Underworld, Backstreet Boys, IMC, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, R.E.M., George Michael, Bryan Adams, and Ant & Dec all fail to unseat them despite making it into the top ten. Alanis Morissette at least manages to dominate the album chart for the entire month. In news, NASA tentatively answers David Bowie with “yes.” Bob Dole wins the Republican nomination for President. Prince Charles and Princess Diana are officially divorced. Osama bin Laden declares a jihad against the United States.

While in books, Return of the Living Dad. But let’s jump forward a bit. Let’s have a look at last month’s Doctor Who Magazine – issue #453 if you’re reading this from the future. In it is a four page feature commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Love and War and thus of the creation of Professor Bernice Summerfield. This is, to say the least, extraordinary. It is, of course, too soon to know for certain, but it is unlikely that Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester are going to get a four-page feature in a 2015 issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Even the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ major companion, Fitz, whose six-year tenure as a companion is second only to Ace in sheer length, is unlikely to be so honored. There is, in other words, something extraordinary about Benny.

Part of it is simply that she is an enduring character. From 1992 to 1996 she was a regular companion. Even after her “departure” in Happy Endings she made three  major appearances in the eleven subsequent books, plus a brief one in So Vile a Sin. Then came a two-and-a-half year run as the lead character in the Doctorless New Adventures line from 1997-1999. Concurrent with the tail end of these were Big Finish’s audio adaptations, which were where they proved their credentials and managed to get the Doctor Who license in 1999. The Bernice Summerfield audio line continues to this day.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 46 (Our Friends in the North)

, 10

We’ve alluded a couple of times to the changing nature of the BBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you start from 1984, when Michael Grade took over at BBC1, and go to 1995 there are only two instances in which a BBC1 or BBC2 program wins the BAFTA for Drama Serial or the nearest equivalent award. Obviously Grade was only in charge of BBC1, but let’s use his ascent to mark a particular attitude about what the BBC was. There were two more instances where BBC Scotland won, but let’s for the moment also treat them as a separate thing. Then, from 1996 to 1999 BBC1 and BBC2 had a straight sweep of the category for four years, and won seven of the twelve from 1996 to 2007. And inaugurating that sweep was Our Friends in the North.

Clearly something changed. And yet it’s difficult to straightforwardly identify what, exactly, it could have been. John Birt made a major reorganization of the corporation in 1996, but it’s difficult for a variety of reasons to just hand him credit for a revitalization of the BBC’s drama efforts. And after all, the BBC remained top notch in the world of comedy. Nor is it even accurate to say that Our Friends in the North marks the point where the BBC returned to the top of its game in producing prestige dramas: that’s clearly 1995 and Pride and Prejudice.

It is tempting to allude to a nebulous idea of a broader cultural swing. The Labour Party was, at this point, seemingly all but certain to regain power whenever the next election happened. There certainly was, in the broad sense, a swing towards a more leftist vision of the country, although the question of how leftist New Labour was is vexed to say the least. The swing back to a more confident and prestigious BBC coincides thematically with that even if the actual causality is borked. And that causality works well, in particular, with Our Friends in the North, a story largely about the material arc of leftist politics in Britain over a stretch of time that coincides almost perfectly with that covered by this blog.

But there are some fundamental issues in play here, and ones that we’ve only ever touched on in passing, so let’s slow down and look at the component parts of this. First is the BBC itself. One of the fundamental mantras of this blog has been that it is a terrible mistake to treat the BBC as though it resembles a commercial television station of the sort that produces virtually all of American television and most of the rest of British television. This is due to the fact that the BBC is not only a public service broadcaster as opposed to a for-profit channel, but also to the fact that there are decades of history of the BBC that have given it an entrenched vision of its role in Britain that stubbornly fails to be completely erased.…

Continue Reading

The First Settlers Called it the Crystal Feast (Christmas on a Rational Planet)

56

Speaking of Christmas, and the general season of gift-giving it implies, have you considered just how much all of your friends and family want copies of the first two volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum in book form? You should probably make their dreams come true.

Unless, of course, you don’t think they’d want a copy. Then you should think about just how good family or friends they are, and whether they deserve to have their dreams come true. Then you should get them copies anyway.

Volume 1 (William Hartnell): (US) (UK). Volume 2 (Patrick Troughton): (US) (UK).

——
I’ll Explain Later

We skipped GodEngine, to someone’s sorrow, I’m sure. It had Ice Warriors and lots of continuity references.

Christmas on a Rational Planet is the debut book of Lawrence Miles, which is almost certainly the most important thing about it. It features the intrusion of the raw forces of chaos into our universe and Chris making the decision as to what the fundamental nature of the universe should be, albeit manipulated by the TARDIS. It also introduces the idea of Eighth Man Bound, a Time Lord game about previewing your future regenerations. Lars Pearson, still a number of years away from employing Lawrence Miles, calls it “delicious, but a bit text-heavy and fragmented as hell.” Dave Owen, at the time, bemoaned the release schedule, saying that if the book had “been among the first handful of New Adventures it would have been immediately seized upon as radical, unprecedented, and exhibiting a fresh approach to Doctor Who storytelling,” but suggesting that the disposable nature of the novels means that it won’t get the second reading it deserves. Shannon Sullivan’s rankings have it embodying mediocrity – at thirty-first out of sixty-one it is the median New Adventure with a 69.1% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide (worth it for the attempt to figure out if fan rumor of a reference to every Doctor Who story is true. It’s not – Miles misses thirty-three even by a sympathetic count).

——

It’s July of 1996, one of those months where the number one single changes weekly. Baddiel, Skinner, and the Lightning Seeds start us off with “Three Lions.” Then we get The Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly,” Gary Barlow’s “Forever Love,” and finally the real news in The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” Los Del Rio, Underworld, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Belinda Carlisle, and Mariah Carey also chart. While in news, Dolly the sheep is successfully cloned, Boris Yeltsin is reelected, and Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-abortion domestic terrorist, bombs the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

In books, it’s Lawrence Miles’s debut novel, Christmas on a Rational Planet. Which means we finally have to do Lawrence Miles. Except he’s not Lawrence Miles yet. Which is an odd thing to say, but bear with me. Lawrence Miles, the grand figure of myth who provided the primary creative vision of the Eighth Doctor era, has his debut novel with Alien Bodies. That’s the book with which Miles immediately seized the crown of “most interesting writer in the line.”…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 35 (Happy Endings)

, 11

Technically, actually, everything until Boxing Day should either be a Pop Between Realities or a Time Can Be Rewritten post, but we’re not going to do that. Still, it’s worth starting by making this point explicit, since we’ve been sidling up to it for two weeks now. This is the book that came out the same month as the TV Movie. This creates the single biggest whorl in the timeline of Doctor Who. The TV Movie aired in May of 1996. The final New Adventure didn’t come out until May of 1997, and for the purposes of this blog we’re actually going to go to September of 1997 and Lawrence Miles’s novel Down before we tack back and do the TV Movie.

I went back and forth on how best to do this, and ultimately went with this. The main reason is, honestly, that I’m organizing the book versions by Doctor, so it makes sense to keep the blog organized that way. (Though ironically this does mean I’m breaking Benny’s timeline somewhat badly by covering Oh No It Isn’t! and Down prior to the TV Movie. This is because, on the whole, it makes more sense to keep those in the same book as the majority of the Virgin material.) And more broadly, because the TV Movie didn’t have that much influence on the tail end of the Virgin line except conceptually – through the very fact of its existence and what that meant for Virgin.

Which was, of course, that the party was over. Remember that the Virgin line was actually a fluke. Virgin Books had bought out WH Allen, and thus acquired Target in the process. The New Adventures came when they realized they were out of television stories to novelize and asked if maybe they could do some original novels, to which the BBC, having just cancelled the series, basically said “yeah sure, whatever” to. And so they did, and they turned out to be successful and actually alarmingly good, and so the BBC used the TV Movie as an excuse to take the rights back. So the Virgin line went into a year in which the Doctor they were using had already been regenerated on television and the line itself was facing cancellation.

This isn’t the first time that the future of Doctor Who has consumed its past. The Five Doctors and all of Season Twenty-One, for instance, aired after the announcement of Colin Baker as the next Doctor, rendering all of those stories the lead-up to an already-happened ending. The way in which the big press launch of Matt Smith preceded the 2009-10 specials season made this even bigger, with David Tennant’s regeneration happening as a cultural event nearly a full year before it actually got televised. But this is by some margin the most extreme: Sylvester McCoy regenerated into Paul McGann on television, and then we went back to Sylvester McCoy stories for a year.

It was, of course, not immediately clear how everything would play out.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 45 (Babylon 5)

, 86

There is a moment familiar to everyone who has ever enjoyed Babylon 5 in which they make the cataclysmically dumb mistake of trying to get someone else to watch it. It goes like this: “It’s a huge five-season story arc that was planned out from the start. The first season is mostly crap, but the second one has some really good stuff in it. And the third and fourth are quite good…” and then somewhere around admitting that the fifth season is also a trainwreck you realize that the case for Babylon 5’s quality is actually enormously strained.

And it’s true. It’s much, much easier to list the things that are very wrong about Babylon 5 than it is to articulate the case for it. I mean, the case isn’t that hard: the show’s basic conceit, a five year novel in television form, plotted from the beginning to lead towards a pre-defined endpoint that would pay all of its threads off, is impressive. Yes, the use of television for a multi-episode story arc had precedent, but J. Michael Stracyznski was the first person to really try plotting an entire multi-season arc out and executing it. It’s a sprawlingly hubristic little number, but it’s also the first stab at the sort of thing that is these days taken for granted: of the things that Vince Gilligan is praised for in Breaking Bad, the fact that he had a coherent plot for the whole thing barely makes the list. It’s expected these days. Even if you don’t have one (*cough* Lost *cough*), you’re supposed to pretend that you do. (The zenith of this is the almost completely [and rightly so] forgotten Fox series Reunion, which featured a murder mystery as part of its central premise. When the show was cancelled the producers promised they’d reveal who did it before, a few months later, admitting that they hadn’t actually worked that out by the time the show was cancelled.)

Which, actually, is largely what Straczynski did. The original five-year-arc was reprinted in one of the volumes of the Babylon 5 scriptbooks, and basically completely diverges from what happened in the series somewhere in the rage of season four. Some of this, at least, was caused by Michael O’Hare departing at the end of the first season and a new lead character being created, but only some of it. The larger arc that Straczynski mapped out could well have played out with Bruce Boxleitner’s replacement character. Furthermore, whole major story arcs are missing. In the original outline the plot about the war with the Shadows (then still called the Shadowmen) spilled out past the five year mark and into the sequel series. In practice Straczynski wrapped it up towards the beginning of Season Four. This is partially down to the fact that it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fifth season and thus that Straczynski had to accelerate his plotting, but the compression isn’t quite as dramatic as people say – Straczynski has said that if he’d known for sure there was a fifth season then the eighteenth episode of the fourth season would have been the finale, involving only four episodes of compression.…

Continue Reading

Overwhelming Presence

, , , 1

Just been reading the lovely Colin Baker’s (less than warm) remarks about his encounter with Jimmy Savile on the… umm… Daily Mail website.  Bleurgch.  I won’t link.

Found this delightful comment below.  As ever, click to enlarge.

It may be trolling, of course… but I doubt it.  It has the ring of genuine idiocy about it.

It restores a little bit of one’s faith in humanity to see that even the Daily Mail readers downvoted this icky little splat of blinkered, slavering, buttmunching cockwitttery.

Just shows.  It’s a jungle out there.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 291 292 293 294 ›»