A long time ago, in a cyberspace far, far away….

It is a period of civil war. Rebel fans, striking from a hidden forum, have won their first victory against the evil Corporation.

During the battle, fans managed to steal secret plans to the BBC’s ultimate weapon, iTunes, an armored commercial juggernaut with enough power to destroy an entire franchise.

Pursued by the BBC’s sinister agents, the Restoration Team, four brave podcasters race home aboard their egos, custodians of the stolen plans that can save their show and restore the missing episodes to the galaxy…

Listen in to the holographic message contained in this podcast unit as the rebel scum are joined by JRba (the Hutt) Southall in Part 1 of a review of Doctor Who’s first attempt at a series arc in Season 16 (The Key to Time season) – in which we find that Al keeps Issue 5 of Doctor Who Weekly under his mattress, that Doc’s ability to siphon coffee through his nostrils is useful for clearing out Thrill Sucker infestations, that JR could stage a palace coup in an empty room and in which The Rev reveals the criminal masterminds behind lumpy custard.

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Extensive show notes illustrating these ravings from our padded cell are also available on the podcast blog.

Susan hears Episode 2 of The Diddly Dum Podcast and falls to the ground screaming: “Grandfather! I’ve hurt my mind!”

Listen in as The Three Who Drool go on location in the Death Zone to present Episode 2 of The Diddly Dum Podcast live from Rassilon’s Tower.

Having arrived separately at the Tower and linked by Skype, Al (above), Doc (between) and The Rev (below) continue to choose their fave classic and modern Doctor Who stories.

In which we find that The Rev is no respecter of received wisdom when it comes to favourites, that Al can’t get treatment for Rassilon’s Horn on the NHS and we discover why sales assistants in soft furnishings fear Doc.

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The Three Who Drool present “Journey into Terror”, the introductory podcast of the Diddly Dum Podcast, involving your humble blogger, which is now available to download on iTunes.

In which we find that an empty 1970s Dalek bubble bath counts as an action figure, that there’s no tea for the Doctor and Harry, that the show has a missing comedy story and that savages can look great in rugby shirts.

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Disaster strikes! The frail bark which is the Doctor Whom blog has been caught between the Scylla of the Blue Box Podcast and the Charybdis of self-love. Despite frantic backing of oars, my vessel has been sucked down into the maelstrom of Doctor Who podcasting. Serves me right for taking the plugs out of my ears and listening to the Sirens.

Last week JR Southall, the eminence grise of the Blue Box Podcast (and when it comes to eminences, they don’t get any more grise than him) invited three of the most persistent email critics of his opinions onto the podcast to see that podcasting was not as easy as he imagined that we imagined.

The multiple vehicle pile-up which resulted is now available here on Starburst and here on iTunes in the form of “Round Rabbit”, episode 89 of the Blue Box podcast.

At the end of this grim farrago, JR issued a challenge – if you think you can do worse, do it.

So we did. After a few days of flurried setting up of Twitter accounts and dedicated email accounts and a host blog, Al No, Rev and your humble blogger recently attended the birth of THE DIDDLY DUM PODCAST.

As Doctor Who fans, we realise the futility of aiming for accuracy in our forthcoming podcasts. Instead we shall aim to be beautiful. For if truth be beauty then beauty must be truth. So please don’t seek for beauty in our truthfulness. Seek instead for truth in our beauty and you will be rewarded.

Must dash as I need to edit Reason #1 in my “Top 5 Reasons for Unsubscribing from Doctor Who Podcasts” in order to give me wriggle room. I had no idea when I wrote it that one day the “flat-vowelled droning monotone” of a Northern accent curing insomnia in the podcasting community would be my own.

(With “The Edge of Destruction”, we reach Part 3 of our Name Dropping journey through the First Doctor’s character arc as represented by his changing ways of addressing Ian: in which Ian gets a dressing gown, the Doctor gets a dressing down and Valerie Singleton make a cameo appearance.)

It’s difficult to draw conclusions about character arcs from this story as they’re all behaving strangely because of the situation. My contacts in the farming community are of the opinion that “The Edge of Destruction” is entirely a character piece and I can see what the teat-tuggers mean but, given how they’re all behaving, an off-character piece might be more accurate. The Doctor has certainly become more in control and more commanding than in the first 2 stories. He’s like a malign elf with great self-possession.

Their being off their mental trolleys also makes this is a slightly hard story for gathering evidence as to what any of the characters call each other. Even Barbara starts by calling Ian “Mr Chesterton”.

Since we’re gathering statistical evidence to inform Doctor Who scholarship for years to come, this also seems to be a good opportunity to start analysing all the various injuries suffered by Susan throughout her tenure. The sort of things which appear in the following sort of complaint: “Oh, (insert the word Ian, Barbara or Grandfather here), I’ve hurt my (insert name of body part here)”.  We kick off with a double whammy here as poor Susan has hurt both her neck and head.

To be fair to Susan, she’s not as useless in this story as she generally is in my memory. For the first time since the pilot episode, she appears here as that unearthly child again as she threatens Ian with the scissors. Quite scary, almost alien and completely Elizabeth Taylor (or do I mean Tina Turner?) with that hair.

Curiouser and curiouser (said Alice), we see that Carole Ann Ford, when shot from a ground level camera, is the dead spit of Valerie Singleton. With Peter Purves due to join the TARDIS crew one day, can we expect the tribute to the classic Blue Peter trio to be completed before Ian departs as he perhaps pulls down his trousers to show off a large thigh bruise? We can butt hope.

For those of us who spent our childhood wondering just what lay beyond the console room, it’s strange to see how early we were shown another room in the TARDIS. And it’s not as if they needed the extra room. There’s a real sense of space in the console room here which was perhaps never matched until the TV Movie in 1996. Even the Time Rotor works far better and more smoothly on this original TARDIS set than in most later sets of the classic series.

Barbara continues to be a glorious revelation as she gives the Doctor another of her wonderful dressings down: “Don’t be so stupid. How dare you! Don’t you realise, you stupid old man, that we’d have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian hadn’t made fire for you? And what about what we went through against the Daleks? Not just for us, but for you and Susan too. And all because you tricked us into going down to the city. Accuse us? You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us. But gratitude’s the last thing you’ll ever have, or any sort of common sense either.” How did the female companion archetype ever degenerate from this to Jo Grant?

Finally, it’s entirely possible that “the spring was stuck” is a better explanation than we get in the Deus Ex Machina resolutions to some New Who series arcs.

On to the point of our journey – what modes of address do we find the Doctor using for Ian in “The Edge of Destruction”? We get 1 x Mr Chesterton, 5 x Chesterton, 1 x Charterhouse (though he’s possibly teasing deliberately here), 2 x young man, 2 x dear boy and even one instance of just “sir”. Susan starts calling Barbara “Barbara” for the first time here. When will she start calling Ian “Ian” and will she beat the Doctor to it?

No name-calling pattern seems to be emerging yet so the tension mounts. However, at the end of the story, the Doctor is clearly behaving more friendly (friendlily?) towards Ian and Barbara, possibly out of guilt, so maybe he’ll start to unwind towards them from now on. I must watch the next story, Marco Polo, closely to examine the Doctor’s every facial twitch and slightest gesture to see if they tell us anything about his developing relationship with Ian.