The Planet That Cried Wolf

The fact that I'm still using Blogger makes me feel a bit of a Luddite. I don't even have Insta! In addition, I've tried to use AirBnB over the last three days and found it the most byzantine, ludicrously complex site I've ever experienced. And this is simply because I don't have Wi-Fi at home. I might not be enough of a narcissist or a technician to use it at all. I think I might be better off just booking into the Premier Inn for the February half-term. Or living off grid in a cabin.

I'm a lot happier since I muted "Independence/ Yes Movement/AOUB/ Sturgeon/Indy/ Yesser and Transgender" on my antique, three-year-old mobile. The frenzy of Scottish Twitter, with its increasingly far-fetched and twee proclamations of inclusion, its entrenched sectarianism and its fixation with other people's genitals, was making me feel ill. I would still prefer to live in an independent country, capable of making its own decisions for its populace and rejecting far-Right values. And maybe when we Boomers are all dead, Scotland might- might- be less screwed up and more fitted to join the Nordic countries.

The most recent episode of Dr. Who was in accusatory mode too, and probably as heavy-handed as me. Jodie made me laugh but Orphan 55 was a shrill condemnation of mass migration and environmental exploitation. It was also a bit of a mash-up of Tennant episodes ( Midnight and Voyage of the Damned ) with the last Robert Holmes 4-parter from 1986. I'm curious to see how tomorrow's Tesla-and-Edison story turns out.

There's still a dearth of new 13th Doctor fiction in 2020, although she has the lead entry in the Target Storybook. This is a lovely evocation of those early 70s Achilleos paperbacks but the individual pieces aren't very memorable. Colin Baker's tale references his Big Finish audio companions and Steve Cole revives Fitz and Trix from the BBC books of the early Noughties. George Mann revisits the War Doctor and there's a bittersweet final short story by Terrance Dicks, which returns to the Season 6B idea of The Two Doctors and the BBC book World Game ,with a narrative twist.Maybe I'll learn to like the other entries in the future.
(2/5 Talmars)

I think my Christmas present Revelation of the Daleks represents the final  novelisation of a Classic Who tv story. Following last summer's Resurrection, Eric Saward's slim volume doesn't quite have the same grisly flavour that his 80s serial had. It's still a sour and nasty story however and, interestingly, the absurdity of Alexei Sayle's Scouse DJ seems to prefigure the modernity and pop culture focus of the Seventh Doctor's final years.

There's a new sequence where Sixie and a captive called Alex destroy the mothballed Daleks in Tranquil Repose, which gives the Doctor more agency than the original. But I wasn't particularly gripped by the book, which is drawn from one of my least favourite eras of the series.

The Daleks also appear on audio in Big Finish's imaginary Sixties fifth anniversary Who story, Daughter of the Gods.This team-up of the First and Second Doctors (Onesie?Twosie? Is that what Who-vers on Twitter would say?) is really about a much more minor character however.

Katarina the Trojan handmaiden is one of the most obscure Sixties companions. I've only seen her in minutes of one rescued episode and she's not even the focus of her most famous, surviving scene- albeit one of the most brutal and chilling in the early years of Who.
 The performance of Ajaz Awad -as in the 2019 River Song BF episode Companion Piece- is one of dignity with a faint exoticism but the story itself is a slow-moving and ponderous one. I think it would've been a pacier and frothier affair in 1968. Foamier, too, probably.

The Daleks are represented more effectively in Dalek Attack: Blockade and other stories. This is the second Dalek audio annual  and like the first, it ends on a paranoid note of gloom and terror. The very first story, The Fugitive reminds me a little of Look and Read's famous Boy From Space, laced with something two decades older: staunch, Brexit-y schoolboys, stuffy uncles, and oriental Venusians. But the Anti-Dalek Force stories are neurotic or macabre riffs on infiltration and body horror- the same clammy, Cold War atmosphere of Blake's Seven. Louise Jameson, Matthew Waterhouse and Jon Culshaw join Nicholas Briggs as readers of these space adventures from the late Seventies. 4/5 Talamars.

I'm marking prelim papers for the next week; maybe I'll  actually master the AirBnB app for space flats and learn how to use my futuristic Galaxy a10 space phone. Coming up later this month, probably: Batman 1949, Thanos, Steranko and Teen Titans.

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