Stephen Cole is one of the most consistently good Doctor Who writers, and I was glad to pick up this Telos novella when last in London - a range that has not always impressed me, but this is one of the good ones. It is a little odd - the old man and the girl who travels with them only decide at the end of the story that they will adopt the identities of "the Doctor" and "Susan", and the story combines the fairly standard base-under-siege-by-telepathic-horror story with a rather subtly done reflection on establishing and keeping identity. Worth looking out for.

The Tenth Doctor wakes up in a mysterious museum which appears to contain relics of his past lives; tended by Martha Jones, he finds himself reliving certain experiences of each of his previous nine incarnations, until he works out what is really going on. (Set shortly after Journey's End.)

With any multi-Doctor story, you have to assess the writer's success in characterising each Doctor (and companions), and with comics you have to grade the artists' ability to depict the actors' faces as well. The Forgotten scrapes a pass mark on both counts. There are some seriously jarring notes in both the One/Ian and Three/Brigadier scenes, which suggests that Tony Lee doesn't quite get the male companions (Jack Harkness is in the vicinity but unseen at a later point in the narrative). And unfortunately Stefano Martino, the artist for issue 3, is rather awful at portraying Ten, Four and Five. (Pia Guerra and Kelly Yates are at least adequate for the other five issues.)

At the same time there is definitely cause for fannish glee. There are an awful lot of companions featured here (in order: Susan, Ian, Barbara, Steven, Jamie, Zoe, the Brigadier, Jo, Sarah, Harry, Leela, Romana II, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion [!], Peri, Mel, Ace, Rose and Martha) and most of them are at least half-decently done. Putting aside my whining about the recognisability of the faces, the art is excellent. The story has a certain internal integrity and ties in rather well (as it turns out) to New Who's Season Four, though with a decent number of continuity references to the whole of the series. Thoroughly good fun.

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.

( 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 |

...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.)

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 |

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.

A Doctor Who Missing Adventure novel, featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and the Gunpowder Plot. I think this is the first Who book I have actually given up on. I found the first hundred pages stylistically dull, historically stupid (James I's father was not blown up at Bannockburn, the Doctor is rather unlikely to have tried staying at monasteries in England in 1605) and really offensively anti-Catholic. I skimmed a couple of online reviews of the whole thing to see if it might be worth persevering, but I rather got the impression that it just gets stupider and more annoying. I am glad to say that Roberts' other efforts at this period (DWM comic strip "A Groatsworth of Wit" and TV story "The Shakespeare Code") are much more successful.

There are some aspects of this book that are so awful that I almost wanted to claw my eyes out. It is set in the city of Byzantium (the future Constantinople / Istanbul) in the first century AD. The city's population appears to be mainly Jewish (divided between Zealots, Christians and those in between), with a Greek minority and a settled Roman ruling class. It has minarets. Huge thudding mistakes and discrepancies abound in the Latin phrases (one recurring example - the senior Roman government official in the city lives in the villa praefectus). And the first century city has minarets. The presentation of characters' names is horrendously inconsistent - some are Latinised, some Grecianised, some Hebrew (or possibly Yiddish), and one who is called "Fabulous" (sic). And he seems to think that there were minarets in the city before the Turkish conquest of 1453, and six centuries before the foundation of Islam. Even the transcription of the opening of St Mark's Gospel in Greek is incorrect, which is pretty astonishing as all you have to do is find a copy of Nestlé-Aland - I've got one I can lend you if you like. But (as you may have noticed) I keep coming back to the minarets; it's only one word in one of the book's rare descriptive passages, but it demonstrates the utter superficiality of the author's research into the historical setting.

The train-wreck of the author's attempts at world-building made it difficult to absorb the actual plot, but I did my best. It is set between the first and second scenes of The Romans - it turns out that the Tardis falls off a cliff near Byzantium and the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki all get separated when they get swept up in a riot in the city. A thinly contrived sequence keeps them separated until the end of the book when they discover the Tardis has been taken to Italy; in the meantime the Doctor has helped the local Christians write the Gospel of St Mark. Topping writes Barbara rather well, Ian very badly, and the Doctor and Vicki tolerably. (There is a framing narrative with Ian and Barbara, now married in 1973, taking their son to a museum where they see Ian's old sword.) The most memorable of the supporting characters are some nymphomaniac Roman ladies, and that is not saying much.

I am having difficulty deciding whether or not this is the worst Doctor Who book I have read. The only ones that approach it in awfulness are Eric Saward's novelisation of The Twin Dilemma and Topping's Telos novella Ghost Ship. In the end I think Byzantium! takes the prize for sheer quantity of awfulness; it is roughly twice as long as the other two combined. I will send my copy to the first person who asks nicely; I have no interest whatsoever in keeping this book in my collection.

Driving up and down the peninsula yesterday I had the chance to enjoy a couple of the recent Companion Chronicles which I had somehow missed.

( The Darkening Eye: the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and ensemble with a dimensional anomaly )

( Transit of Venus: the First Doctor and Ian with Cook and Banks on the Endeavour )

So, two plays with somewhat imperfect scripts which are both very much lifted by the guest star.

...but if you get hold of "It's Your Funeral", the 11th episode of The Prisoner, you can see Mark Eden (Marco Polo) as Number 100, Derren Nesbitt (Tegana) as the incoming Number Two, and Martin Miller (Kublai Khan) as the watch-maker. Nesbitt is in a strange blond wig and thick glasses, but Eden looks just like in the surviving pics from his Doctor Who appearance three years before. Miller's hair is a bit shorter but it's a surprisingly similar character.

Also Wanda Ventham, who is in The Faceless Ones, Time and the Rani and most memorably Thea Ransome in Image of the Fendahl, is here briefly as a computer attendant, and Angelo Muscat, the recurring Butler, was a Chumbley in Galaxy 4. And for a different cult TV link, Annette Andre, who is the main female character in this story, Number 50, is Mrs Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Edited to add: see pics from "It's your funeral" here and here.

Alas, the 1967 Doctor Who annual is not as good as its predecessor. I remember finding it in an older cousin's house when I was very young, and being gripped by the first story, "The Cloud Exiles", in which the Doctor (or "Dr Who", as he is consistently referred to here) rescues the Ethereals from non-corporeal exile after some initial misunderstandings. On rereading, I still thought it was the best story in the book; the worst is the sole cartoon strip, whose title is "Mission for Duh" (sic). Walter Howarth's graphics are if anything better than the previous year; the stories, however, are not as good on the whole.

I'm working up a small project on William Shakespeare's appearances in the Doctor Who universe. I think I now have a comprehensive list of them, which I will list below the cut, listed in three different orders. Still thinking about how I might put this together more creatively.

( Shakespeare and Who )

I watched the video-tape version of this story almost exactly two years ago, and then bought the DVD when it came out a couple of months back. My review of the VHS version was pretty positive; I am even more enthusiastic about the DVD, and I think it is now one of those Who stories which you could show someone who had never seen the series before to try and get them to understand what it's all about.

Sure, it's unusual in that it was the first ever story set entirely on contemporary Earth (with the regular cast the right size, that is); it's decidedly odd in the casual discarding of Dodo as a companion (when one remembers the angst associated with more recent departures!); it has a significant weakness in that the actual War Machines themselves are a bit crap (though far from the worst robotic monsters ever seen on Who, and salvaged a bit by good directing).

But despite these weaknesses, it remains a generally well-written, well-acted, well-made and likeable story, and the restorers have done a fine job of injecting more life into it. . On the DVD, the informational sub-titles are informative. The Blue Peter extracts (make your own Post Office Tower!) are fun. The film of Tony Benn revisiting it forty years on is almost moving (as is the famous restaurant). The commentary/gossip between Michael Ferguson (director) and Anneke Wills (Polly) is not terribly deep, but they deliver just about enough to justify their fees.

One point they make about Hartnell is that he would sometimes vary his lines. This may explain the slight oddness of his his final exchange with Dodo; I wonder if it is an improvement on the original line from the script?

Anyway, warmly recommended.

Paul Cornell has a wonderful project of his Twelve Blogs of Christmas; I missed out on NaBloPoMo; but I thought that in the run-up to the broadcast of The Next Doctor on Christmas day, I would try to do a series of posts on each of the ten Doctors so far, and rather than do my usual more analytical treatment I would explain what each of them means to me.

( The First Doctor, as played by William Hartnell )
Whoblogging index: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten

Big Finish's series of Companion Chronicles, two-hander audio plays featuring companions of the first four Doctors, get better and better. Here we have Susan, Victoria, Jo and Leela brought back to life by Carole Ann Ford, Deborah Watling, Katy Manning and Louise Jameson, recounting adventures that we never saw on screen.

( Here There Be Monsters )
( The Great Space Elevator )
( The Doll of Death )
( Empathy Games )

All of these are recommended.

OK, now that I have read all 161 Doctor Who novelisations, and since I am jetlagged and awake, I am going to favour you with my personal top picks (and then a rough ranking of the others). You will find my reviews of each of the novelisations (plus also other spinoff literature and audio plays) here.

( The Best: Doctor Who and the Daleks )
( Doctor Who and the Romans )
( Doctor Who - The Rescue )
( Doctor Who and the Dæmons )
( Doctor Who - The Curse of Fenric )
( Doctor Who and the Green Death )

( Honorable mentions )

( Good Efforts )

( Average stuff )

( Less good  )

( Poor efforts )

( Dire: Doctor Who - Time Flight )

( The Worst: Doctor Who - The Twin Dilemma )

8) Doctor Who Annual [1966], [rumoured to be mainly written by David Whitaker]

( the first of many )

7) Campaign, by Jim Mortimore

( the one that got away )

10) All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane

I enjoyed this tremendously. The Doctor, Ace, and Bernice Summerfield, in nineteenth-century London, get mixed up with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson; and all five of them are then confronted with an invasion of Earth by the forces of Azathoth from the planet Ry'leh (sic). Mixing the mythoses (mythoi?) of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft is risky, but Lane has done it very well - lots of borderline steampunk in his Victorian settings, most of the narrative told in the first person by Watson (who inevitably develops a liking for Benny), cameo appearances from Pope Leo XIII, the San Francisco fire of 1906, and the smart missiles from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels.

Apart from the wonderful romp of the setting, Lane is also pretty smart about reinforcing our willing suspension of disbelief. Is Sherlock Holmes real or fictional in the Whoniverse? We get a rather neat answer here. On top of that, the entire narrative is nicely presented as a flashback, Benny and Ace perusing Watson's account, and then critiquing him as an unreliable narrator.

Strongly recommended, especially for fans of Holmes or Cthulhu who may for some reason not have encountered Doctor Who.

Brilliant.

Well, after posting and analysing the Best of Who and Worst of Who polls, the obvious next thing to do is combine them. So, a definitive final judgement by Livejournal: the best of the best, the worst of the worst, and deciding whether those stories that got two or more votes in each poll are Good or Bad.

( poll )

And yes, I will probably do one about the audios next.

There were some surprises here, most of all the surprise that more people voted than in the previous poll. Myself, I find it much easier to decide which story I like least than which I like most; perhaps I am unusual in that regard.

Anyway, as before, going in order of decreasing consensus by Doctor.

( Ninth Doctor: The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances )
( Fifth Doctor: The Caves of Androzani )
( First Doctor: The Dalek Invasion of Earth )
( Sixth Doctor: Revelation of the Daleks )
( Seventh Doctor: Remembrance of the Daleks )
( Fourth Doctor: Genesis of the Daleks )
( Second Doctor: The Mind Robber )
( Third Doctor: Inferno )
( Tenth Doctor: Blink )
( Eighth Doctor: Err, yes. )

So that's it. Thanks for playing, and I shall probably do the same this time next year or thereabouts.

For those who felt last week's poll was too negative:

( favourite Who stories )

Continuing my project, these are the novelisations of the Season 20 stories, plus one that got away from Season 19 and the anniversary special. A number of these confounded my expectations.

( 5) Doctor Who and the Visitation, by Eric Saward - better than expected )
( 6) Doctor Who - Arc of Infinity, by Terrance Dicks - standard stuff )
( 7) Doctor Who - Snakedance, by Terrance Dicks - standard stuff )
( 8) Doctor Who - Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade - better than I expected )
( 9) Doctor Who - Terminus, by John Lydecker - the best of this bunch )
( 10) Doctor Who - Enlightenment, by Barbara Clegg - starts well, ends with a whimper )
( 11) Doctor Who - The King's Demons, by Terence Dudley - the least impressive of this bunch )
( 12) Doctor Who - The Five Doctors, by Terrance Dicks - a guilty pleasure )

This brings me to the end of Nyssa's run on the show. As with a lot of the brainier companions, she doesn't transfer particularly memorably to the printed page. Although she does bring with her a tragic back-story, losing first her father and then her whole homeworld, this fades more and more into the background as time goes on. Having said that, there are a couple of stories - eg Black Orchid, Terminus - where she is pretty central to the action and this works well.

Nyssa of course continues to feature on Fifth Doctor audios from time to time, including on several of the best Big Finish stories - The Mutant Phase (with Daleks), Primeval (a sort of prequel to The Keeper of Traken), The Game (which brings back William Russell rather gloriously) and two particular favourites, Creatures of Beauty (which has a very unusual format but none the less works) and most of all Spare Parts (the origin of the Cybermen). Any or all of these would be a decent jumping off point to get into Big Finish, if you haven't already done so.

This is what the poll reveals as the Worst Who stories (listed in order of decreasing consensus by Doctor).

( Fifth Doctor: Time Flight )
( Second Doctor: The Underwater Menace )
( Ninth Doctor: The Long Game )
( Sixth Doctor: Timelash )
( Seventh Doctor: Time and the Rani )
( Third Doctor: The Mutants )
( Tenth Doctor: tie between Love & Monsters and Fear Her )
( Eighth Doctor: what do you think? )
( First Doctor: tie between The Chase and The Gunfighters )
( Fourth Doctor: The Horns of Nimon )

Thus is revealed the accumulated weight of Livejournal. I am in line with the majority on only three of the nine where there is a serious contest; blue_condition, whose debate with me sparked this, does rather better. So basically, Pete wins the argument.

Sparked by a debate between blue_condition and myself, I must ask the following questions:

( which is the worst story of each Doctor? )