This is a fascinating might-have-been, a six episode script for the first season of Doctor Who telling the story of a murder conspiracy against Alexander the Great, by Moris Farhi. It is moderately thrilling stuff: the plot is tight; the characterisation of the Tardis team, Alexander and his generals very good; the sense of historical predestination also consistent with Who as it developed.

But it could never have been made. It's not because of the numerous hostages to continuity offered by Farhi's script - language-teaching machine in the Tardis, the Doctor's belief in God, Susan's statements about their home time - these would have been weeded out in the editorial process. It is not even that the Tardis crew don't really impact events (though that is a weakness of the story). It is simply that it is too sad: Alexander's three closest friends all fall victims to the conspirators, followed by Alexander himself, leaving his realm to be divided between the complicit Seleucus and the loyal Ptolemy. As one of the commentaries in this edition puts it, Barbara and Susan shed more tears in this script than Rose Tyler does in her entire career.

We also have a bonus here, a single episode story (or perhaps the last episode of an unwritten longer story), The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance, in which the Tardis crew visits a planet where one of the locals literally dies of love for Barbara. It is also too sad to ever have been turned into a broadcast story, but I think that today's fanficcers would love it - it's totally in tune with the idea of takiing the show's characters to places that the show's writers never could.

So this is strongly recommended, though for slightly different reasons than I though it might be: good emotional character-driven writing, and a glimpse of how Doctor Who mght have been.

This cartoon is in today's European Voice, along with a profile of Catherine Ashton:



There is no explanation in the article of why she is depicted in this way, so a lot of European Voice readers will be mildly puzzled.

The Waters of Mars was shown while I was driving across southern Connecticut to catch my plane from JFK last weekend, so it was a day or two before I caught up with it. I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don't think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)

( The ending, and the Doctor )

I got home to find The Circus of Doom, episode three of the new The Hornet's Nest series, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, waiting for me. A half-day in Paris on Thursday gave me time to listen to it as I walked from the Gare du Nord to my meeting at the Tuileries and back. Unfortunately I wasn't wildly impressed; it seemed to me too similar to the second episode, The Dead Shoes, with the added demerit of a comedy foreign disabled character (played very well by Stephen Thorne, but that doesn't really help). I do hope that the fourth and fifth episodes, due out at the start of next month, are an improvement.

As I drove across Connecticut last weekend, I was listening to The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, one of the Bernice Summerfield plays released just over a year ago. It is a sequel to my favourite New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire, and features two brilliant actors, David Warner playing Mycroft Holmes and Peter "Nyder" Miles as the evil alien, as well as of course Lisa Bowerman herself. It would alas be slightly incomprehensible to those who don't know All-Consuming Fire but was great fun and consoled me for missing the broadcast on the other side of the Atlantic.

( November Books 17) Time Of Your Life, by Steve Lyons )
( November Books 18) Millennial Rites, by Craig Hinton )
( November Books 19) Spiral Scratch, by Gary Russell )

In summary, both Time Of Your Life and Millennial Rites are rather good, and Spiral Scratch improves after a weak start.

...and I am not being even slightly ironic:

She has a full-sized Dalek in her living room.

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn't previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny's ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

...Michael Moorcock to write Doctor Who book.

Of course, he has already included the Doctor and a Dalek in one of his earlier works!

( The Sensorites: 'You've checked everything, Doctor?' 'Yes, yes, plenty of fresh air, temperature normal...' 'Ah - just the Unknown, then?' 'Precisely!' )

( The Reign of Terror: 'I suppose you think you're very clever!' 'Well, without any undue modesty, yes!' )

( Planet of Giants: 'There are no earthworms that size on your planet!' )

( The Dalek Invasion of Earth: 'I've never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to...' )

I was originally planning this as a set of reviews just of the stories, but it's impossible to resist the temptation to reassess each of the regular characters as they depart. (Which is going to make the write-up after next rather fun...) ( Susan )

( The Rescue: 'My dear, why don't you come with us, hmm?' )

( The Romans: 'My first real sight of history!' )

So, a rather weak start and end to this run (The Sensorites being the worst Hartnell story so far) but a sequence of decent efforts in the middle, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

< An Unearthly Child - The Aztecs | The Sensorites - The Romans |

There is a minor character in this novel who is an unsuccessful author:

When Horace's book was finally published, it was viciously attacked by the critics. This was sad, as no-one had been able to disprove anything he had written. It was even sadder that the critics, blinded by their own prejudice, could not see the energy, grace and skill that had gone into the book's construction. Even if, as they believed, every word was untrue, they chose to ignore the incredible flights of imagination necessary to argue such a theory. But worse still - as they were supposedly people of education and letters - they could not see or appreciate the pure, good writing which was on the page. Although the book sold well, it was bought for all the wrong reasons. People would memorise passages from it, then regurgitate them at drinks parties, laughing. like blocked drains as they did. It had become chic to mock Horace. Unable to cope with the ridicule, Horace retired into obscurity. Two years later he died of a broken heart.

It's tempting to interpret this as Eric Saward justifying himself: a misunderstood and underappreciated genius, the quality of whose work will be apparent to the ages though not to the contemporary critic. Given everything else I know about Saward, actually, I am pretty convinced. Doctor Who - Slipback is a desperate attempt to channel Douglas Adams, even more desperate than the radio series on which it was based. Planets and people have comical names and bizarre characteristics; and threats to the universe are both gruesome and bathetic. I think this actually is a worse book than Saward's novelisation of The Twin Dilemma, though I'm not rereading it in order to form a more precise judgement. Certainly neither is interesting enough in their awfulness to be worth memorising and regurgitating at drinks parties.

Douglas Adams did it much better, not just because his prose style in general was vastly superior to Saward's but also because he had a coherent sense of world-building, both for his own fiction and for the Who stories he wrote; and his humour was self-deprecating rather than defensive.

...to see that the registrar in tomorrow's SJA episode is played by Zienia Merton, who was Ping-Cho in the 1964 Doctor Who story Marco Polo. I think this must give her the record for greatest elapsed time between her earliest and most recent appearance in Doctor Who and its spinoffs - apparently she is in Friday's episode as well so that will be 45 years, 8 months and 7 days since 22 February 1964. (Of course, that is counting televised versions only - Carole Anne Ford is in a Big Finish audio release as Susan later this year, 46 years on.)

Time to write up the two October releases from Big Finish - a Companion Chronicle with Lalla Ward reprising Romana II, and a new Five/Nyssa story set in the village of Stockbridge and partly in the twelfth century. I had read reviews of both of these over at Unreality SF (here and here) so this slightly coloured my expectations. I have to say that in both cases I enjoyed them slightly more than the Unreality SF reviewers did.

The Pyralis Effect is a standard Doctor and aliens runabout. My expectations for this were pretty low, based partly on steve_mollmann's review but largely on the fact that it is by George Mann, whose fiction and non-fiction has failed to impress me. The fact that it more or less held my attention to the end has to be considered a major triumph, and (given the discussion in the extra tracks of the number of rewrites extracted from Mann by Big Finish) a triumph shared by many. Let us consider it equivalent in quality to the average Season 17 story, and leave it there.

On the other hand, I quite liked The Castle of Fear. Partly, it made me nostalgic for The Kingmaker, which is one of my favourite Big Finish audios; it's not as good, but then few Who stories are. I hate John Sessions, and luckily all the bits I thought weren't funny enough were the bits with him in, so I was happy enough to enjoy the rest. A clever plot, just about as funny as it could bear (Sessions apart), and good stuff from Davison and Sutton. John Sessions fans (the mad, deluded fools) will like this one.

I have been pondering the amount of material on each Doctor available in the Whoniverse, considering TV, audio and novels/novellas (I'm not quite sure how to tabulate comics and short story collections).

( Screen time )

( books )

( audios )

Aggregating

For what it's worth, averaging out the rankings you get the following:

1. Four - Top on screen time, decent number of books, let down by his audios but is improving there
2. Eight - just tops books and audios, but way way behind on screen time.
3. Seven - strong competitor on audios and books, let down by screen time
4. Six - likewise
5. Three - decent mid-list on books and audios, pulled up slightly by screen time
6. One - tie with Ten broken by having more screen time though fewer books and same audios
7. Ten - now unlikely to rise higher, unless he starts doing audios
8. Five - surprised to see him this low, but only scores well on audios
9. Two - despite good screen time, has not been the most popular subject of spinoff fiction
10. Nine - poor chap, least books, no audios, and second shortest screen time

( October Books 12) King of Terror, by Keith Topping: Five, Tegan, Turlough and the Brigadier fight aliens in Los Angeles )
( October Books 13) Imperial Moon, by Christopher Bulis: Five, Turlough and Kamelion in steampunk lunar explorations )
( October Books 14) Superior Beings, by Nick Walters: Five, Peri and anthropophagous aliens )

I wouldn't really recommend any of these three to someone other than a Doctor Who completist, and would not really recommend King of Terror to anyone at all.

I am thinking about which Doctor Who stories fit into the steampunk sub-genre - indeed, some of them are elderly enough to have helped inspire it. Come to think of it, the whole concept of the programme, in which the leading actor, born in the reign of Edward VII was made up to look ten years older and in control of technology centuries further advanced, is part of the cultural mix from which steampunk emerged.

One has to be careful not to just include any story with a 19th-century or early 20th-century setting. There is nothing in the least steampunkish about The Gunfighters or Timelash, for instance, despite the supposed 19th-century setting of thee one and the presence of the young H.G. Wells in the other (and one would have to stretch a long way to include Pyramids of Mars or Black Orchid). But I think it's pretty clear that the following could be considered at least a little steampunk:

Evil of the Daleks - Victorian inventor produces time machine - what more could you want?

Talons of Weng Chiang - granted that the technology itself is not indigenous to the 19th century, but the attitude to Asian people certainly is. (And the recent Big Finish sequel, The Mahogany Murders, is definitely steampunk.)

Enlightenment - the sailing ships may be from all parts of history, and the centre of historical gravity probably nearer the 18th than 19th century, but really, I look at it and I say "steampunk!"

Tooth and Claw - rather than The Unquiet Dead, even though they both have 19th-century settings, because T&C has Queen Victoria and a telescope rather than ghosts and leaking gas.

(Imagine if The Red Fort had ever been made...)

Various thoughts about audios and books, but I'll pause here.

Somehow I never got hold of this lovely reference book on the first 20 years of Doctor Who when it was first published in 1983. Most of the material is of course familiar to me from many other sources, but there is a particularly nice piece by Barry Letts, who died only a few days ago. Lots of good illustrations too. Shame that Haining didn't get any contribution from Philip Hinchcliffe or Robert Holmes, but the pieces by Terrance Dicks and John Nathan-Turner are also above average.

...here is a video of every jelly baby moment from Doctor Who. (With added Brahms, for some reason.)

My reading rate has fallen off this month, partly because I have had some excellent listening on my commute.

( The Hornets' Nest: The Dead Shoes - Tom Baker and the haunted seaside entertainment )

( Kaldor City: Doctor Who / Blake's 7 spinoff )

( Bernice Summerfield, mid-series Seven )

( The War of the Worlds - 1938 version )

I bought a Philips MP3 video player a few weeks back, and have been using it for the purpose for which such things are made: watching early Doctor Who in sequence during my morning commute. (This has also cut down on the number of books I read, for which some may be grateful.) Recent research indicates that there are roughly 22,776 minutes of screen Who, so at 25 minutes a day it will take me the guts of three years to get through the lot. I have seen it all before, of course, but taking it sequentially and at a steady pace, along with watching the recons of the missing episodes, makes it a different experience.













Striking how often Barbara is the memorable companion in a lot of these. The Doctor is a very odd, weird, alien and compelling figure, with Susan of course in his wake (except where she is allowed character development in Marco Polo); Ian's memorable moments here are really in The Daleks, and to a certain extent The Edge of Destruction. But Barbara literally rules The Aztecs; the only early story I can think of off-hand which puts a companion closer to the spotlight is also by John Lucarotti, The Massacre. (Later examples are few and far between: Turn Left, of course, but that's about it.)

I've decided to do these six at a time, basically because that will synchronise nicely with the Hinchcliffe/Holmes seasons if I keep it up that long (counting Mission to the Unknown as part of The Daleks' Master Plan). In which case I will post the next of these in mid-November, though my travel schedule for the next few weeks may delay it.

< An Unearthly Child - The Aztecs | The Sensorites - The Romans |

Last month was a bonanza for us Who audio fans. Not only was there an extra Big Finish release, concluding the story of Charley Pollard, but Tom Baker returned to the role for the first time since 1981 (not counting The Thing We Don't Talk About).

( Hornets' Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares - The Fourth Doctor returns, with homicidal taxidermy )

( The Prisoner of Peladon - Ice Warrior refugees and the Third Doctor, as told by David Troughton )

( Paper Cuts: Six, Charley and dead Draconians. Or are they? )

( Blue Forgotten Planet: bye bye Charley )

( The Three Companions )

The Fifth Doctor novels have rather a good strike rate for me (the audios even more so). This confirmed the trend: a sequel to the Fourth Doctor's TV story Planet of Evil, with the Morestran empire, centuries later, destroying itself by experimenting both with anti-matter and harnessing the kinetic energy of the planets, at the same time riven by internal conflict between church and state. Messingham's concepts of anti-matter and planetary kinetics are pretty disconnected from actual science, but faithful enough to the spirit of the story which he is sequelling (and improving on). We have, as so often in Fifth Doctor novels, a rather good Nyssa storyline as she goes off investigating with dire consequences; Tegan is less well served. The Doctor here is somewhat damaged from his previous encounters with anti-matter (including Omega) which also takes the story in interesting directions. The Morestran politics are somewhat improbable but well told. I recommend this one.

Back in 1981 it seemed like centuries since the last Doctor Who reference book had come out (it was three years since the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who). We fans grasped eagerly at the two rather slim volumes produced in the break between the Fourth and Fifth Doctors. The first volume is a recapitulation of cast, crew and plot from the first eighteen seasons of Who; the second an A-Z of characters, creatures and concepts in the Whoniverse up to that point in time.

They are pretty thin by even the standards of the day. Characters and events from the less fashionable end of the Hartnell and Troughton eras get pretty short shrift (eg the entry in volume 2 for Ping-Cho, whch reads, in its entirety, "Chinese girl").

The two volumes are a good model for how to do a comprehensive guide for Who, but not a brilliant example of the execution. (Numerous misprintls - poor John Abineri!)

Somehow this didn't get posted on Sunday when I actually finished the book. It is rather a good romp with scary children and scary monsters, Ten and Rose and a creepy Welsh island. Very well read by Anthony Stewart Head.

The fourth series of Companion Chronicles from Big Finish is off to an excellent start.

( The Drowned World: Sara Kingdom's afterlife continues, with flashbacks )
( The Glorious Revolution: 1688 and all that )

It's striking that both of these plays are flashbacks from the point of view of Sara and Jamie, respectively, and that the framing narrative is given a decent prominence.

Meanwhile the main narrative of Big Finish plays is staggering along:

( The Company of Friends )
( Patient Zero )

Big Finish has been moving towards story arcs - the Fifth Doctor / Guardians one earlier this year, for instance - and it is a welcome change of gear: The Company of Friends suffers a bit because it goes the other way (four stories, rather than a third of a story, in the one release). The Companion Chronicles, which ought by rights to be rather more format-bound, feel a bit more vibrant right now.

When I first rewatched The Three Doctors a couple of years ago, my assessment of it was pretty harsh, but I gave it another go this last week and saw more merit in it this time. Back in October 2006 it was only the fourth Pertwee story I had watched, and I had not got very far into the Troughton era either, so my basis of comparison was not very broad; taken in consideration of the surrounding stories (especially the immediately preceding, overrated Season 9), The Three Doctors is not bad at all. (Though Terrance Dicks' novelisation is still an improvement on the broadcast original, particularly because the monsters are not visibly ludicrous.)

I revised upwards my opinion of three of the performances. First, Troughton is not just good, he is excellent, and rather steals the show from Pertwee. He gets a lot of the best lines - there is one about confusing the anti-matter blob by letting it watch television which must surely have been an ad-lib. Second, Courtney's Brigadier, if considered as an admittedly comedic authority figure, is actually pretty decent and he also gets some good nostalgia moments - thinking that Pertwee has changed back into Troughton and framing the situation as best he can. It's not the Brigadier of The Invasion or Spearhead from Space, but we haven't really had him around for a while. And third, the music is not half as bad as I remembered; I think it has to work hard to cover for the awful monsters, but does the job.

This time round I was watching the DVD, which includes a 1993 convention interview with Jon Pertwee and a 1973 Pebble Mill interview with Patrick Troughton - who looks very nervous and ill-at-ease, either he hadn't yet developed the convention-attending skills he later displayed until the day he died, or perhaps he just wasn't feeling well. There is also the 1973 Who retrospective from Blue Peter, starting with Pertwee (as himself) driving the Whomobile into the studio and then continuing with a potted history of the show, including Peter Purves introducing himself as Steven by showing Katarina's death scene from The Daleks' Master Plan - rather OTT for Blue Peter, I thought, but presumably we have Purves' choice of clip to thank for its survival when the rest of the episode was trashed.

My copy of the DVD itself has a rather special provenance. A few months ago I noticed that several items of Who memorabilia which had been sent to Verity Lambert as courtesy copies by BBC Enterprises were being auctioned on eBay (to raise funds for cancer research), and I ended up buying this DVD and (slightly by accident) a videotape of An Unearthly Child. The latter had been watched, but Lambert (who died in late 2007) had not opened the DVD, which she must surely have received, probably unsolicited, shortly after its release in 2003. On a couple of the First Doctor DVD commentaries, she remarks that she felt very sorry about Hartnell's increasingly poor health when they were working together; watching The Three Doctors, Hartnell's last acting role before his death, would hardly have made her feel better on that score, so I am not surprised that the plastic wrapper was still sealed when I got it.

( August Books 46) The Peacemaker, by James Swallow )
( August Books 47) Snowglobe 7, by Mike Tucker )
( August Books 48) The Doctor Trap, by Simon Messingham )

All standard stuff really.

So, what was happening on Earth while the Doctor and Jo were on Peladon? Well, UNIT found itself dealing with peculiar doppelgangers of senior officials, and had to call on the resources of the Master, despite his imprisonment, and of some bloke called Chesterton, who brought his wife Barbara along as well. And up in Faslane, there was a naval medic called Sullivan who turned out to be rather useful...

One of my least favourite things about the Third Doctor era is the Third Doctor, so it was with some hope that I turned to this Past Doctor Adventure set in his absence. (I had also enjoyed McIntee's Second Doctor / future Master story, The Dark Path.) My hope was largely justified. The Brigadier and the Master spark rather well, and there are lots of gleeful continuity moments (including a surprise reference to Delta and the Bannermen). Ian and Barbara take a while to bed into the UNIT environment, though, and the treatment of Barbara in particular isn't terribly satisfactory; Ian as temporary Scientific Adviser is almost Liz Shaw to the Master as Doctor.

The actual plot is basically decent but important details get drowned out by continuity squee (though of course most readers will be concentrating on the squee). McIntee has apparently said he would have liked the villainous Marianne to be played by Jacqueline Pearce, and I can see that. A fun experiment with the format.