Once again, Private Eye (No. 1456) stoops from the elevated world of politics and Fleet Street to uncover the murky goining-on in the world of Doctor Who.

This is discussed at some length in episode 87 of the Diddly Dum Podcast.

 

 

Today’s unveiling of a new female companion for the Doctor also marks the launch of Feistywatch.

As detailed in this previous blog post, the BBC is incapable of letting a female companion go by without heralding her at some point as “feisty”.

My previous post stopped at Amy but here are just a few examples of Clara getting the “feisty” treatment, all either from the BBC or put into Jenna Coleman’s mouth by the BBC:

Coleman said her character was “mysterious” and “very down to earth, but feisty and curious too”. (The Sun)

Jenna-Louise Coleman has described her character Clara as “feisty”, marking her down as “a mysterious one” (Daily  Mail)

Jenna-Louise Coleman has said that she plans to bring a ‘feisty’ edge to her role as Doctor Who’s new companion Clara. (www.whatsontv.co.uk)

Clara will be missed by the Doctor, by Rigsy, maybe even by Ashildr and certainly by the many whose lives she touched. But Clara Oswald, the funny, feisty, heroic and human Impossible Girl, will be missed most keenly by us. (www.bbc.co.uk)

The first person who brings to my attention an example of new companion, Bill, being described as “feisty” by any arm of the BBC or by Pearl Mackie herself will win a Golden Ticket.

 

“Doc Whom is Required” – a revelation which will come as a shock to regular readers of this blog. Nevertheless, it’s the title of Episode 52 of the Forty-Two to Doomsday Podcast – “Doc Whom is Required” is now online and features as a guest that venerable blogger, podcaster and all round scapegrace, Doc Whom…oh hang on, that’s me…courtesy of Rob and Mark, the owners of the third and fourth most convincing Australian accents in podcasting.

We compare Australian and British accents, our differing TV landscapes and puzzle over the conundrum that is the unusual distribution of Doctor Who podcasts worldwide. We reveal the true reason why the British built an Empire, then strap yourselves in as we turn to why fans should say whatever they really think about Doctor Who.

42TD’s podcast blog can be found here.

Their Facebook page can be found here.

Their Twitter account can be found here.

 

 

 

What a curious photo it is of Peter Capaldi and Janet Fielding which has been doing the rounds.

Strangely similar to a photo of Kenneth Williams and (not yet Dame) Maggie Smith. Especially given that it’s the same building in the background.

Scottish connection? Maggie Smith connection? Maybe they’re doing Miss Jean Brodie Meets The Daleks.

If I never again hear someone asking if the Doctors now need to be renumbered in the wake of “Day of the Doctor”, it will be too soon.

If it were only a bit of fun or mischievous shit stirring, I could understand it. But some people have been asking the question in serious tones, as if it were conceivable that any sane person would answer “yes”.

The fan mentality of course naturally drives us every waking moment to draw up lists but there are limits. Do we draw up lists of the order in which we love members of our family?

This isn’t like positing the existence of a Season 6B or insisting on referring to the New Who series  as Seasons 27 onwards. This is the Doctors we’re talking about.

Each time that we call Matt Smith “The Eleventh Doctor”, we’re not simply pointing out his position in a list. “The Eleventh Doctor” is not his number, it’s his title. The question of what any one Doctor’s title should be is only seriously open for question at one point – the point at which his predecessor regenerates into him. At that point, we look at his predecessor’s title, add one and get the new title. And it sticks. It’s as much a part of him as his bow-tie or hand-flapping.

It may seem easier in the current climate to imagine that the Doctors’ titles can be adjusted at a whim. Steven Moffat has had to bugger about with the number of Doctors in order to artificially bring forward the end of his regeneration cycle. Quite why he did this is a mystery, or actually not much of one. It’s not as if he’d come up with a genius idea for solving the problem of a brand new regeneration cycle. The idea that the new cycle needed to begin at the 50^th anniversary in order to relaunch the Doctor into the next 50 years is the sort of specious writerbabble bullshit that Doctor Who’s showrunners come out with in the modern era whenever they need to give an authoritative sheen to what is usually just a writer’s whim. I suspect that Steven Moffat just wanted to be the man who solved the regeneration cycle question, just as his predecessor used the Hand Doctor regeneration to give an extra dramatic kick to a series finale cliff-hanger. Thus the concept of regeneration, which used to be a momentous event and a milestone in our childhood memories, is reduced to a mere banality.

Imagine if you will that the previously unsuspected extra Doctor had been inserted into the hazy period between The Second Doctor’s trial at the end of “The War Games” and The Third Doctor falling out of the TARDIS at the start of “Spearhead from Space”. Would anyone take seriously for a moment the suggestion that Jon Pertwee should henceforth be referred to as The Fourth Doctor? That the grand old man himself should be elbowed along the bench to become The Fifth Doctor? It’s too risible to even contemplate. Tom Baker is so indelibly “The Fourth Doctor” that the words themselves almost cease to have any internal meaning. It’s a title, not a number.

Thankfully, even Steven Moffat hasn’t tried to go against nature and gave the John Hurt incarnation the convenient title of “The War Doctor”.

One is almost tempted to wonder whether, for the people seriously asking this question, Doctor Who and the Doctors themselves exist in their hearts or in a formula at the foot of some statistical analysis spreadsheet. Not for nothing does “analysis” begin with those four letters.

Have some bloody heart, people!

 

Ever since ARMY OF GHOSTS, I’ve been negotiating with that intergalactic Noel Edmunds, Dorium Maldovar, to swap a pristine Weetabix packet from 1975 for a Void Sphere.

I cunningly fed my baby blue dupe rumours that this packet contained the fabled “Tom Baker 2 (alternative disco pose)” character card.

The Weetabix themselves after nearly 40 years were now just dried up and withered husks so the resemblance to the original was perfect.

Just like the Second and Third Doctors inching towards the safety of the TARDIS as Omega reached mesmerised for that fatal recorder, I sidled nonchalantly towards the door as Dorium slipped that first nervous finger under the flap and reached into the packet. As he withdrew the precious contents, I scarpered with my Void Sphere, cackling in triumph: “I have the Roycastil. Nothing can stop me now.” Yet still they return to me in my worst nightmares – Dorium’s screams of disappointment: “Four identical White Robots! Again!”

Now, armed with the only vehicle capable of shattering the impenetrable cultural barriers between alternate universes, tomorrow I plan to smash through from London to The North and return home to the bosom of my family in Manchester for Christmas.

London

Yes, there’s a danger that I could become trapped forever in the Void between worlds (the Watford Gap) but the promise of again scenting that sweet Northern air, of feeling the dagger of ice to the bone which is the kiss of a Mancunian raindrop, of hearing the honeyed breath of those vowels, all these give me hope that I will soon tread once more those cobbled lanes of my youth.

When I walk through Market Street in the dark, I can touch with my hands the green on the walls and underneath where the piss has puddled.

 Manchester

As the year draws towards its close, could we ever have expected that the anniversary month would prove so multiply orgasmic? Happy memories! Until the New Year then, as we say in the UK “Merry Christmas”, as they say in the USA “Happy Holidays”, as they say in Canada “We like hockey” and as William Hartnell said in that famous, fourth-wall-breaking toast: “A Happy Christmas to all of you white people at home.”

As brilliant as An Adventure in Space and Time was, the show was completely stolen by a fabulous cameo performance. Not Jessica Raine. Not Sacha Dhawan. Not even Brian Cox.

They were all cast into the shade by that amazing doughnut-like building they somehow found to film it all in and around. Well done to the BBC location scouts. It really looked like the sort of building you could imagine creative people working in. Whoever built it must have had some real balls and vision.

Wherever it is, if this building ever comes on the market, it would make an ideal location for, say, the television functions of a large public service broadcaster. Or, failing that, some sort of paramilitary organisation. That funky entrance lobby could easily be turned into a laboratory. As for that central courtyard, what more ideal location for filming Strictly Come Dancing? Somehow, when I look at that fountain, tap dancing comes irresistibly to mind.

I doubt that the BBC would ever get the chance to acquire the building though. Who in their right mind would dream of selling such an iconic architectural masterpiece? Certainly no-one with any feeling for history or for the elevation of value over cost.

In a triumph which will humiliate the Middle East Quartet, Big Finish have announced (here) that a series of Fourth Doctor/Second Romana audio adventures is on the way.

Rick Briggs, brother of the less famous Nick Briggs, announced to cheering crowds throughout the Middle East: “What we have done here today could be done the whole world over.”

George Galloway MP has commented: “This is a depressing move by Tom and Lalla and sets a precedent which could cost innocent people votes.”

Sue Perryman tweeted: “Lalla Ward? Was she the Master?”

Ian Levene, the Phillip Morris of the 1970s, tweeted: “I stake my reputation on Tom and Lalla never recording any plays together and that is my final word on the subject.”

The Verity podcast posted on Facebook: “Announcing the return of a female Time Lord on the brink of the 50th anniversary is a naked attempt by the patriarchal oligarchs at Big Finish to dilute the worldwide demand for a female Doctor.”

Tom Baker (147) who played the nation’s favourite Time Lord was not available for comment but his answerphone message said: “Big Finish? I’m afraid I don’t remember them. But I do remember the name of the pub outside their recording studios. Perhaps I could have the sound effect of a cabbage on my shoulder in this new series. I could be the Master, you know.”

A spokesman for Doctor Who fans observed: “Hurray!!!!!”

Overcome with joy at the news, a spokesman for a Doctor Who internet fan forum immediately announced: “We have closed all discussion of Big Finish’s plans for a series of audio plays featuring Tom and Lalla. Any mention of this subject will result in a lifetime ban.”

A few years ago, I posted a deeply snide comment on the blog of some political journalist. Several weeks later, I had that weird experience as if you’ve missed the last step on a flight of stairs when I saw my comment printed verbatim in Private Eye in a profile of said journalist.

I experienced the same feeling this week when reading “Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who”, Neil Perryman’s recent book about his blogged journey with his wife, Sue, through all of Doctor Who. Hang on, thought I while reading an italicised quote lifted from the comments left on their blog, that delightfully wry yet overly wrought and heading nowhere in particular prose style looks strangely familiar. Then I experienced a feeling that I’d misssed not one step but a whole flight. Almost as if I’d missed a ladder and fallen off a caravan roof. Lordy! That was me. So I spent half an hour re-reading it and the surrounding paragraphs in a futile attempt to divine whether it had been quoted as an example of the ready wit to be found among their blog followers or as an example of what pricks some of them were.

I carried on reading what has to be the best Who-related book to have been published in some years. I confess that I wasn’t going to bother with it at first as I wrongly assumed that it would be little more than an anthology of all the reviews which I’d already read on Neil and Sue’s blog. Instead it’s Neil’s story of his life as a Doctor Who fan and his life with Sue. Why would you be interested in this rare example of the two concepts of “a life” and “a Doctor Who fan” coming together? Well, it’s written in such an engaging style that it’s hard not to be hooked from the first sentence.

Every chapter could be a Saturday teatime in itself. As he faces down a gang of knuckle dragging gorillas in a college TV room, you hold your breath as you did when the Fifth Doctor faced a firing squad. As two bigger boys corner him in a school playground, you feel the tension you felt when the Ood advanced on the Tenth Doctor and Rose chanting “we must feed.” Is there going to be unspeakable violence or will they turn out to be friendly? As he visits Sue’s family in Hartlepool for the first time, you’re on the edge of your seat as you were when the Fourth Doctor encountered the Sisterhood of the Flame. Will these strange dwellers of a distant land take him to their hearts or burn him at the stake?

Where you have tense cliffhangers, you must have surprise reveals too. In the list of improbable concepts, Neil Perryman as a rugby player is up there with Ian Levine as a ballet dancer or a member of the Restoration Team taking a vow of silence.

However, the undoubted star of the book (and reason enough on its own to read it) is the eponymous wife herself. To be honest, although Sue seemed very nice, while reading their blog I’d never quite grasped why she was receiving so much adulation. On reading this book though, the scales fell from my eyes. Although it took several pages before I twigged that Sue wasn’t literally the daughter of Denis Taylor, it quickly becomes clear that the alpha male of the Perryman household is the Irene Adler of the world of Doctor Who fandom and perhaps even of all Hartlepool.

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex…there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” (A Scandal in Bohemia)

What a woman! For selfless sacrifice on the altar of the family, the 3D specs story alone is enough to raise her on a pedestal. And I defy you to hold back the tears as she offers to “put up some shelves” for Neil in her beautiful home.

It’s a wonderfully entertaining book which you shouldn’t miss and, if you don’t come away from it understanding a little more about life and Doctor Who, you will at least come away resenting the author for his wholly undeserved luck in snaring The Woman.

(This review was written by the “Doctor Whom” blog’s resident book reviewer, John Levene. The editor apologises for any transcription errors in this posted version but the draft copy was received covered in Guinness stains.)