Forty

It's a sunny, autumn morning in Elgin but there's a chill in the damp air. I've haven't posted in a while; I was off work for a couple of days for the first time in years with a throat infection which robbed me of my voice. Then, last weekend, I paid a flying visit to Glasgow for the annual Association of Scottish Literary Studies conference, where guest speakers lecture on set texts in the school curriculum. I've already used the free poetry book, Voices of Scotland twice with S2 and S3 ( and I was runner-up in the school's poetry competition!)

This weekend marks the fortieth birthday of Doctor Who Weekly; I bought it in East Kilbride along with Starburst 14, 40 years ago today. Repeats of the exploits of Steed and Mrs. Peel were still three years away on the undreamed-of Channel 4; I was more interested in them and found DWW a wee bit juvenile for my 16-year-old sensibilities. Equally undreamed-of would be the further audio adventures of both sets of characters. Here's what I've been listening to in September and October.

The Eighth Doctor Time War 3: I'm enjoying the performance of Ranee Thakrar as Bliss in these box-sets. Her line readings are spontaneous and conversational, which takes great craft. I also enjoyed hearing John Scougall, a university mate of my late friend Gary Stirling. John sounds happy and enthusiastic and features in State of Bliss, a byzantine, timey-wimey story about Bliss's timeline trap. The legendary Wendy Craig also plays a shipwrecked alien on a medieval planet in the enjoyable Fugitive. The selling point for Whovians is Michael Jayston as The War Valeyard, trapped in a time loop and wiping out the Daleks. The Valeyard isn't a favourite of mine and here, like Colin Baker, Jayston sounds elderly and is saddled with terrible dialogue like "It matters not", Please, no more.
A pleasant but inessential 3/5 Talmars.


The sixth boxset in the Diary of River Song series is very entertaining and set on the fringes of previous televised, "Classic Who" adventures of her husband . An Unearthly Woman smacks of a Taste of Honey at Coal Hill School. It's very camp and very funny. Ralph Watson sounds very elderly too as doomed Capt. Knight  in Yeti adventure, Web of Time. Peepshow is a jolly swipe of Carnival of Monsters with Clive Woods in the companion role and a sweet cameo from Tim Treloar's Third Doctor. The Talents of Greel attempts to redeem Li H'Sen Chang features an inadvisable music hall duet with Christopher Benjamin's Jago. But as River herself says "What don't I do, sweetie?" The racism of The Talons of Weng-Chiang remains indefensible but BF's Brexit-y tin ear doesn't prevent them trying.
A frivolous 3/5 Talmars.

2016's UNIT: Silenced is the third boxset for Kate Stewart, Petronella Osgood and the rest. I wasn't especially wild about Extinction or Cyber-Reality but here, especially thanks to Warren Brown, this series is a bit stronger. It begins with the kind of "Blind Woman Terrorised" suspense that Brian Clemens or Wait Until Dark might deliver. It then continues with an audacious satire about Nigel Farage and UKIP and then takes off into gruesome murders in outer space. There are lulls and some plot points felt a bit unclear but this was a prescient and satisfying conspiracy thriller, building on 2011's Day of the Moon. 4/5 Talmars

The next three reviews are of the regular, monthly BF series of Who. It's been a while since I listened to one and I somehow forgot they don't feature pre-titles sequences! I was left pretty cold by Andrew Smith's corny Dalek tale but the adventures either side of it were terrific.
Memories of a Tyrant was very refreshing: a slightly camp space opera, in the vein of the BBC  books of the late 90s. A murder mystery that stretches Colin Baker ( playing a vainglorious political prisoner in a mining penal colony), it reminds me of Algis Budrys' novel and film Who? Justin Richards already trod this path in Dreams of Empire but that was largely fun-free; here, we get killer space squids and ambulatory plant-people. (5/5)

Harry Houdini's War is also very enjoyable, It starts in media res as the escapologist investigates German spies and time portals with the Doctor. but is old Sixie the traitor he appears to be? The theme of misdirection reminds me of F For Fake, which inspired my rummer-up poem and there's a clue to the story in the theme toon itself. (5/5 again!)

Finally, Tartarus is unusual since it's a two-parter but it's the same length as a four-parter. It's also a crossover with BF's Cicero range, which I haven't tried. And it's also a pastiche of Ray Harryhausen movies with cute references to the Wizard of Oz. It's perhaps more succinctly described as Underworld meets The Romans. I didn't care for the doomy foreshadowing about Marc, the new companion (and also Peter Davison's nephew). That morbid note and the Mad Computer resolution were almost redeemed by the deus ex machina gag but the former still assures 4.5/5 Talmars. A very close-run thing though.

I'll been reading a lot of Star Trek graphic novels during the Tattie Holidays and the Horror Channel began a repeat run of Space:1999 the other day. I was struck by the slo-mo, fish-eye lenses and the eerie glissandos which all contribute to the bleak tales of be-flared horror on Moonbase Alpha. I've just started BF's audio re-imagining of the series; the theme toon is more funky and somehow more "Barry Gray" than the original and Dr. Helena Russell has more of a "potty mouth than Barbara Bain's ice maiden incarnation. More observations to come...

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