Always Keep Your Bowler On In Times Of Stress,

We're approaching the end of the first week of the Tattie Holidays already. The skies are full of straggling, honking chevrons of migrating geese; the trees blaze bronze and umber; and surprisingly, the sun was beating down yesterday. I've been going into work for the last couple of days to catch up with my marking. On Saturday, however, I attended a Literary Studies conference at Glasgow Uni, which I very much enjoyed. I talked about S1 with my nephew and in a positively aquatic Giffnock on Sunday, I watched Dr. Who with my mum for the first time in seven years.


My own S1 had asked a few times when we'd see the debut of the "Girl One". I don't want to comment on it today- viewers didn't even see the opening titles, last episode and I had the feeling that it was a bit bland, a bit vanilla, even though Jodie W had boundless energy and warmth. I think I'll give my opinion next week. I'm still unpacking, after all, after seven weeks.

In unboxing the contents of Cumbernauld Road, I discovered a fully-functioning Sony Walkman from the early 90s and quite a batch of cassettes, including the one above. In the mid-90s, I found Barry Letts's BBC radio serial The Ghosts of N-Space very silly and very long; it didn't even have the right theme tune. N-Space itself, a kind of limbo for spirits and devils, very tellingly has never been revisited in DW to my knowledge. Now, however, it was a great pleasure to listen to the voices of a Tardis team, where all the cast are no longer with us. I can easily forgive the terrible Italian accents and the bizarre take on parapsychology.


In those distant days, I was more interested in Paul McGann's new Doctor - minted six Time Lords ago now! Big Finish is frolicking through his timeline with two series: Ravenous 2 is on its way and, as ever, the second box-set in the Eighth Doctor Time War series features four one-episode stories.


In The Lords of Terror by Jonathan Morris, the Doctor returns perky new companion Bliss (Rakhee Thakrar) to her home planet, to find the Time Lords have converted it into a war-world. Like the companion in the Starship of Theseus, Bliss has her past re-written- or unwritten- by Gallfreyan machinations.
Guy Adams' Planet of the Ogrons is continuity-heavy but quite touching: it introduces Julia Mackenzie as The Twelve, the tweedy new old lady regeneration of Mark Bonnar's Eleven (a parody of Jodie Whittaker, perhaps). We also meet the tragic Doctor Ogron- an Ogron in a cravat- and a fiendish Dalek experimenter.
In the Garden of Death continues Adams' story. It's The Prisoner  again, but set in a jungle internment camp. We see/hear the ruthless, murderous side of the Twelve in her pragmatic killing of Victor Maguire's cyborg prisoner ( who sounds terribly like McGann at times).
And what of the twinkling Scouse magician? In Jonah, he's now a submarine captain, coping with Cardinal Ollistra and a Lovecraftian cosmic entity on an ocean world.


With the passing of Jacqueline Pearce, will Ollistra be replaced in the next boxset? After all,  we've already heard her as the War Doctor's audio antagonist. That's the problem with this range: we know unambiguously how it ends. A battle-hardened Doctor regenerates on Karn into Young John Hurt. Nothing very much else can happen and the scale of the stories ( like the War Doctor series) is rather small - Commando book pastiches informed by Nicholas Briggs' rather hackneyed Brexit-y ethos- compared to the delirious imagery of RTD. (2/5 Talmars for Scousers and Skaro).


Oddly, in a week which saw the announcement of a third boxset of BF audios with David Tennant, The Tenth Doctor Chronicles also seems quite redundant, if for different reasons.  In the tradition of Tim Treloar and Frazer Hines, twenty-ish vlogger Jake Dudman supplies an uncanny impression of  the absent Doctor, especially in  his attention to "shh" sounds and plosive Bs, for four short stories with guest performers.
Taste of Death reunites the Doctor and Rose Tyler in a parody of our obsession with celebrity chefs and fine dining; Backtrack is a tourist tale of UFOs for the neglected Martha Jones; Wild Pastures by James Goss is set in a retirement home with the cantankerous Sylvia Noble; while Last Chance evokes a less familiar aspect of Douglas Adams' legacy in an environmentalist adventure which re-introduces slinky adrenaline junkie, Lady Christina De Souza.
I fervently wish there had been a whole series of Tenth Doctor/ Christina adventures in 2010 and hopefully her own boxset will meet that need for me. Meanwhile, Dudman's impressions make me want to try his Eleventh Doctor Chronicles. Backtrack is the least successful of these stories, perhaps because Martha just wasn't that interesting while Goss's story touches on the loneliness and indignity of old age through humour. 3/5 Talmars


In the monthly range,  and at sale prices in Aberdeen's Forbidden Planet, The Contingency Club returns to the world of male privilege visited in the second-ever monthly release,  Mark Gatiss's Phantasmagoria. The Red Queen of the alien Contingency is wagering against her brother with a plot to usurp Queen Victoria ( although there's a red herring about mesmerism).
Janet Fielding's Tegan is appealingly bolshy and compassionate toward a genetically engineered army of footmen . She eclipses, as ever, the "junior" members of this Tardis crew. This is a slow-moving and unmemorable adventure, introducing an alien culture which would benefit from further exploration. 2/5 Talmars.

Iron Bright is a RTD celebrity historical from the promising Chris Chapman, whose layered adventure The Middle engaged me earlier this year. Here, Sixie teams up with Isambard Kingdom Brunel to thwart an invasion of  London by spectres from a parallel world in 1828. It's a slow burner but quite cosy for autumn, with influences drawn from DW's Empress of Mars and Quatermass and the Pit. It's also another Companion-free release, so it's a pity that Becky Wright's winning and plucky servant Flo wasn't invited aboard the Tardis. (4/5 talmars)

Unusually, my train journey to Glasgow wasn't soundtracked by Doctor Who this time.
Too Many Targets is adapted from an early 90s novel by John Peel ( who novelized some of Terry Nation's longer Dalek stories for Target and wrote a couple of pastiche Nation novels for the BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures of the mid-90s). Targets was co-authored by Dave Rogers, whose books on the tv Avengers were constant companions of  mine in the mid-80s.

The storyline is The Five Doctors for the Avengers: Steed is joined by Dr. Keel, Cathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King in a struggle against Dr. Armstrong, the creator of the Cybernauts. The setting is Mrs. Peel's company, Knight Industries. While I'm not really interested in the pre-Peel series, I enjoyed Beth Chalmers' interpretation of the leonine Cathy Gale.  I think Robert Portal voices the resurrected Armstrong in  an impression of  Robert Lang : the memorable disfigured sadist Felix Kane in "The Last of The Cybernauts...???" (who also played the murderous silent stalker in the Thriller episode, "I'm The Girl He Wants To Kill"). Emily Woodward's Tara King is a bit bland, much like the unfortunate agent but I enjoyed this surreal caper. (4/5 Bowlers)


Upcoming: DC's Thriller; Wonder Woman Earth-One; Dreadstar; Kull the Destroyer and River Song. Oh and steel in Sheffield.


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