“The final battle is fought out in the tiniest part of TC3 at Television Centre”
I think Douglas Adams writing [Doctor Who] to order for the BBC in 25-minute instalments with this many sets and that many actors is very different from Douglas Adams the radio writer, or Douglas Adams the novelist. The stage directions are peppered through with things like, ‘As many explosions as we can manage’ or, ‘K-9 comes out at what passes for full speed’.
Gareth Roberts on his novelisation of ‘Shada’, a 1979Doctor Who serial penned by (then script editor) Douglas Adams. The story was abandoned mid-production because of BBC industrial action triggered by a demarcation dispute over the operation of the Play School clock (yes, really), and though the extant footage has been released on home video (with linking narration by Tom Baker), this is the first time the story has been officially adapted in print.
The two other stories Adams wrote for Who — ‘The Pirate Planet’ and the classic ‘City of Death’ — are yet to be novelised.
“I begin to lose hope that I will ever meet Tegan”
Answered (partly): the most puzzling mystery in Doctor Who since… well, since every creative decision made by producer John Nathan-Turner from 1984 onwards
Doctor Who scribe Gareth Roberts has, via Twitter, supplied the answer to a question that has puzzled Who fans and casual observers since the broadcast of his 2010 episode ‘The Lodger’: “What in the name of the Terrible Zodin is the deal with that creepy painting?!?’
Turns out it’s a portrait of Victorian music hall entertainer Dan Leno. But questions remain. Why is it there? Is it significant? Is that what Nick Cave would look like if he shaved off his new moustache?
Bugle spoiler alert: the latest episode has both producer Chris and producer Tom in it! It’s pretty much The Three Doctors of Bugle episodes! (Except with wall-to-wall plum-jokes.)
“As if time itself were gnawing at its own entrails”
Mike Lynch at Nannygoat Hill offers an examination of Doctor Who, its central character and its enthusiasts in the form of a Ballardian short fiction-cum-psychiatric essay, as though the program itself were a series of ‘disaster reports’ detailing ever-increasing threats to humanity, the universe, and temporal reality itself; metaphors, as the essay suggests, “for some crisis of the mind’s ability to retain an integral image of itself over historical time”.
“Less a Christmas carol and more Christmas karaoke”
“An ever-present part of many people’s childhoods”
Yesterday I spoke to ABC666 Canberra about the death of Elisabeth Sladen, who played legendary companion Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who. You can hear the interview below. (Note: you may think you hear the presenter calling me ‘Chris Smith’ at the end, but you’d be wrong.)
As the Ninth Doctor himself might have said, “Give the man a medal”.
“You were my Doctor”
David Tennant: not shy about his obsession with the Fifth Doctor. I’m starting to get a bit worried.
The last of the Lebanese chickpea seeds (of doom)
Who knew that Australia possesses the last surviving crop seeds of certain varieties of Lebanese chickpea? Sparing us the nightmare scenario of a future devoid of farting hippies, Australian farmer and scientist Dr Tony Gregson has preserved these and other seed samples in the Arctic environs of that mother-of-all spice racks, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
But seeds? Snow? Doom? (Okay, doom in the sense of ‘doomsday, preparation for’, but still.)
