The Queen and I

Greenbelt, August 2019. We are at the close: a raucous singalong under the canopy, led by the house band. Sensing what is coming, I lead the family quietly away before the last encore. But it’s too late: they are finishing with ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, the song my mother requested at her funeral, which was four days ago. My children burst into tears. And supporting relatives come and put their arms aroud us, and we are united in grief.

I can still recall the minister some days before, saying “You may find it’ll take a while to be able to listen to the song again”. He was basically right, although I found the sadness had lessened by the time it turned up in Sonic The Hedgehog the following February. Eventually you learn to live with things. Besides, it’s a fitting way to remember her: my mother was judgemental as heck in November 1991, telling us how much that man had wasted his life, but she still listened to the music. We both did.

I’ve loved Queen for years, although it was a bumpy start. My aunt and godmother, looking for inspiration for Christmas gifts, was advised to buy me some Queen albums on cassette: she plumped for Queen II, which years later remains a personal favourite, and Hot Space, which…well, doesn’t. It doesn’t help that when you’re young you tend to miscategorise music tremendously; I would say, when asked, that I enjoyed “Heavy metal, like Queen”. Years later I discovered Slayer, and the penny dropped.

Hot Space is a big hot sparse mess of an album and we won’t dwell on it, but Queen II is its polar opposite: an over-indulgent, over-produced slab of absolutely brilliant fantasy rock. How can you fail to love a record that features a song called ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, references Poe, and then leads out with ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’? And that’s before we get to all the powerhouse riffs and Beach Boys nods in ‘Father To Son’, which is possibly my favourite Queen track of the early 70s. Sure as heck beats anything from The Game.

Years later I heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time; it grew on me and now I rather enjoy it, although it’s overplayed and over-referenced and singalongs are a nightmare because people always, ALWAYS add that extra “No!” before the second “We will not let you go”, which is fine unless you’re trying to play the damned thing at a party. I use the word ‘play’ with a certain looseness; mostly I just bash out the chords and then let the drunken guests take over for the changes my untrained fingers have never quite been able to handle, although I daresay they could if I practiced hard enough. There was one particular evening, in the student bar at Devonshire Hall, Leeds, in September 1996 that is forever etched on my brain. They kept bringing me drinks and I kept bringing them songs; we jammed to ‘Three Lions’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and I was, for the only time that year, the most popular person in the room. That was a good night.

Then you get round to buying all the albums on CD and introducing them to your children (‘Good Company’ is a particular favourite), and before you know it it’s 2019 and they’ve done a biopic which gets, at least, the music right, provided you can live with the anachronisms about when things were written. I watched ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in a village hall with the two eldest; most of the film was spent tutting at things that didn’t happen and looking at cats, but at least it looks pretty, and I watched the final blistering twenty minutes with a big grin on my face, which I suppose is the point. Still, it’s hard not to be a little annoyed at some of the dramatic license – from the silly (Freddie accidentally inventing his portable microphone stand during their first ever gig) to the eyebrow-raising (basically everything from Hot Space to Berlin).

And can we please, for the love of sanity, have a music film other than Almost Famous that doesn’t depict all journalists as callous bastards? Some of us work very hard for what little coffers they pay and it’s debasing to see us reduced to a blank-faced stereotype at a press conference. I wouldn’t mind, but Bohemian Rhapsody is largely presented as fact, or at least the version of fact that the surviving members of the band wanted to tell; it’s clumsy and formulaic next to Rocket Man, which sets up an unreliable narrator in its first five minutes and then allows you to fill in the gaps yourselves. It is truth disguised as fiction, whereas Rhapsody is the complete opposite. Still, Gwilym Lee’s quite good.

Anyway. Here we are, and I’m doing my lyric-to-screenshot thing. It was tricky, because it isn’t: Queen often delved into the realms of sci-fi and fantasy (they have two movie soundtracks to their name) and it’s comparatively simple to find obvious lyrics. I have deliberately tried to plump for the obscure: there is nothing from ‘Princes of the Universe’ or the like, because it isn’t funny. Hopefully these are.

Philip

We were in the car. I was gearing up for the triumphant final chorus of ‘Baker Street’ – you know, that incredible moment when you’re expecting the sax again and instead you get Hugh Burns’ guitar solo – when the radio went dead. This isn’t entirely out of character for Jack FM, who, while generally pretty reliable given their dependence on pre-recorded announcements and a queue of MP3s, are not averse to the odd bit of dead air. I tutted in annoyance, and carried on up the A34.

A minute or two later the tuner kicked into life again, only instead of bombastic voices spouting innuendo and bad puns it was two people having an actual conversation, something that simply doesn’t happen once the breakfast show’s finished. I caught the words ‘world tour’ and turned to Daniel. “Google Prince Philip,” I said.

He did, and then announced “Ah. Yes, he’s died.”

No more Gerry Rafferty, then. Instead we got all the stuff the BBC have kept stored on that petabyte hard drive for Operation Forth Bridge (presumably so named because it never seems to bloody end). We had the tributes, the historical documentaries, the archive footage, an entire afternoon’s worth of half-mast flags billowing in the breezes of early spring, and of course that inevitable bit when every single political commentator and writer and religious figure they could get without breaking Covid regulations crawls out of the woodwork to have a chat, saying almost precisely the same thing that the last person did. Meanwhile the only network channel broadcasting anything else is CBeebies, and even then people were complaining, either because a ‘BREAKING NEWS’ banner took up the bottom third of the screen or because Mister Tumble wasn’t wearing black.

“Yes, I know you don’t like the colour. But the BBC are putting their foot down, and it’s just for a couple of weeks.”

I know the Facebook groups well enough to leave the subject of Prince Philip well alone, particularly since the Harry and Meghan interview that seems to have damaged Anglo-American relations to an extent not seen since the Boston Tea Party. I don’t know, I assume it’s because Meghan’s one of theirs, and therefore any hostility she encountered within the Royal Family must have been racism or xenophobia or a little bit of each. It’s not at all possible that she didn’t get on with people simply because no one really gets on with their in-laws. Depending on what you read, Meghan Markle is either a strong, independent and blameless woman who’s become a victim of racist bullying, despised by the establishment because she didn’t fit the mould, or an opportunistic prima donna who was awful to the palace staff, contemptuous of Kate Middleton and whose modus operandi was to drive a wedge between Harry and his brother.The fact that the most likely reality is an awkward combination of both does not seem to have occurred to anyone, at least anyone who reads the papers, but I suppose the world is so much easier when we can view it in black and white.

Anyway. I watched one thread crumble into a horrendous argument between people who thought Prince Philip was a national treasure and people who thought he was a bigoted racist, and found myself wondering whether it was in fact possible to be both, and whether people’s faults do not eradicate their humanity; nor should their good qualities prevent us from addressing their flaws. No one is either fully good or fully evil, and Doctor Who fans should know this as well as anyone; still, it’s quite an eye-opener when social media reduces any sort of sensible conversation to an us-and-them slanging match where you’re either on one side or on the other, and as awkward as they are to read and moderate they do serve as a timely reminder that most people in the fandom aren’t nearly as enlightened as they’d like to think they are. It only takes the death of a contentious figure to bring out the ugliness in people, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that while it’s not always possible to be kind, it is comparatively easy to at least be silent.

Anyway. There we were, mid-Saturday, wandering around Legoland (which we booked long before the prince shuffled off his mortal coil), me having completely ignored my own lesson about kindness when I was shouting at the kids to get ready at eight o’clock that morning, because “every minute we waste here is ten minutes in traffic”. I needn’t have bothered. For all my fears about gridlock and hordes of crowds lining streets they’d been instructed to avoid, the streets of Windsor were all but deserted, and it seems that for once people actually listened. Well, most of them.

“Oh,” I said, scanning the news. “There’s a topless woman been arrested outside Windsor Castle.”

Emily snorted. “Is it Barbara?”

“Too soon…”

They stuck the Legoland flags at half mast and apparently things went off without a hitch. I didn’t watch it. I didn’t even read about it. I don’t want to hear from body language experts and lip readers and disgraced butlers. Families get the right to grieve in private, even the ones we pay for. My father tells me they dropped the coffin into the floor so it could be taken down to the vault, which gave me the idea of being cremated at Blackpool Ballroom so that they could lower my coffin into the floor with the organist.

“At least you watched it,” I said. “Mum would have been pleased you watched it. You were never one for the pageantry.”

“Ah,” he said. “But no one does pageantry like the British.”

Which is probably true.

“You’re supposed to be holding a minute’s silence, not a minute Silence.”

Anyway. What do I do at times like this? I head over to Fireworks and do a bit of image manipulation. And for this I have ransacked – I admit with a certain amount of shame – the glossy photo special in the Daily Mail. Only now Prince Philip’s all over Doctor Who instead. Which is probably OK; I mean the Queen’s a fan.

I declare this thing open, whatever it is.

Have I Got Whos For You (edition 66)

Funny what she gets up when she thinks the cameras are off, isn’t it?

How do you do, fellow teenagers? I don’t have a single meme about Harry and Meghan; if you’re anything like me I imagine you’re heartily sick of the whole thing. This is a world of heroes and villains and ne’er the twain, it seems, shall meet: depending on who you talk to, Meghan Markle is either a strong, independent and blameless woman who’s become a victim of racist bullying, despised by the establishment because she didn’t fit the mould, or an opportunistic prima donna who was awful to the palace staff, contemptuous of Kate Middleton and whose modus operandi was to drive a wedge between Harry and his brother.

The fact that the most likely reality is an awkward combination of both does not seem to have occurred to anyone, at least anyone who reads the papers, but I suppose the world is so much easier when we can view it in black and white. No one likes an ambiguous, well-crafted villain with redeeming features. They want someone they can boo and hiss at. Anyway, enough. It’s way more complicated than I have time to discuss in this silly little blog.

We seem to have missed a few things, like St. David’s Day.

Or Valentine’s Day.

Or Pancake Day.

One of the big bits of Doctor Who news, of course – something we found out on New Year’s Day, immediately after the live broadcast (which I wasn’t watching, meaning I got to find out about it on Twitter) concerned the imminent arrival of incoming companion Dan, set to make his debut in the autumn, or whenever they get round to airing series 13. Dan’s a scouser, and you have absolutely no idea how difficult it was not to make jokes about nailing down bits of the console, but as it stands I managed to keep my humour contained. More or less.

News broke quite recently of the dissolution of Daft Punk, the dance hall stalwarts who’ve been making music together for nearly thirty years, and who’ve produced a shedload of songs that I’d forgotten they did. I do remember, some years ago, an appearance at a festival by Wurzel-esque comedy band Folk On, who were on fine form as ever but who managed to have everyone jigging along in the mud when they sang “We’re up all night to get some (milk!) / We’re up all night for good fun / We’re up all night to get folky…”. It’s a sad day for music, as while they were never really my thing I can’t deny that they’ve completely changed the scene and that ‘One More Time’ is a bangin’ masterpiece. Luckily the two of them seem to have already found another job.

We’re still in lockdown, whereby all but essential travel is banned – although that doesn’t seem to have stopped Banksy, who ventured from his native Bristol to my home town of Reading to scribble his latest drawing on the wall of the heritage masterpiece / public eyesore (delete as applicable) that is Reading Gaol. It’s Oscar Wilde, escaping with a typewriter, sheets tied together like in Colditz, something that never happened in real life. As far as we know, anyway.

“That’s it, nearly there. Just a little further. You know what, Yaz, I think I’m getting an idea.”

Elsewhere, in a forest in Hampshire, someone else is breaking lockdown:

My children have been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The eldest two spent New Year’s Eve watching a few back to back with the horror movie Us; I’d say I don’t know what was the most terrifying part of the whole thing but earlier in the evening we’d all been watching Cats, so I think you have your answer. In any case, Ramsay is a good deal more sprightly than he was in Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance, a show that seems to have been almost universally panned, although it’s good to know that they’re managing to make the most of the old TARDIS sets.

“Our first contestants tonight are Amy and Rory, from Leadworth in Gloucestershire…”

I read an interesting thing in the press the other week about a scientific dig that yielded unexpected results, and the instant thing I thought of was Lovecraft and shoggoths and albino penguins. But I also did this. You couldn’t not, really.

Politics, and the news that the Prime Minister has designs on a colossal subterranean junction is met with the mirth and condescension it undoubtedly deserves.

We giggle at these fancies, but is it such a terrible idea? It’s certainly a more practical solution than teleportation, which (and why does nobody discuss this?) effectively kills you and reconstructs an identical copy at the other end, unless you’re in The Fly or something. And yet when we’re watching TV we’ll readily accept teleportation, and faster-than-light travel, and the existence of wormholes, or a police box that can fly and open its doors to a completely different place a few seconds later.

“Just through there, sir.”

And I would rather be anywhere else than here today. Still. This week – 9th March as I write this – marks the week the schools officially reopen (they never actually closed, of course, and teachers never stopped working), meaning a return to something awkwardly like normality. Well, kind of.

“It’s lovely to see you everyone back, and I’m pleased you’ve all remembered your masks…”

Have I Got Whos For You (election omnibus edition)

As I write this, they’re still counting the ballots. Thus we open, perhaps inevitably, with a NASA update.

Waiting for this thing to wrap is like waiting for a new series of Doctor Who. Ninety per cent of it is simply reading arguments on Twitter, casually dissecting soundbites, tossing out manufactured evidence of hidden agendas and realising that whatever the end result, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people who aren’t happy with it. And inevitably James Corden is going to show up somewhere. It is tedious, this game of hourly refreshes and working out how fast the numbers are rising. And we endure it with the same morbid fascination we assign to a car crash, only this is considerably nastier. And so we endlessly swipe down on the phone, hoping that the display will refresh with something new and interesting and perhaps even definitive, and when it doesn’t we go back to the box sets.

“No, it’s just you need something to take your mind off it. Now, which one do you want to watch?”

Doctor Who has its fair share of displaced despots, of course. They usually come to a bad end. Sometimes they’re thrown from the roofs of convention centres. More often they’ll see the light at the eleventh hour, early enough for redemption, if not salvation. Usually they’re trying to forge a pact with the Cybermen, or (even more foolishly) the Daleks; these people have clearly never watched the show. But they have one thing in common: they usually die alone.

Even Fox News, who we thought would be stalwart Trump supporters to the end, have been gradually shifting their stance ever since the moment it became apparent that he might actually come in second. It began some months ago with a rare editorial that appeared to condemn his handling of certain issues, and then over the last few days there have been pockets of anomalies that have instantly trended: most notorious, the early calling of Arizona that prompted a furious phone call from Trump to Rupert Murdoch. It’s by no means done and dusted – I’ve had a friend tell me just this morning that he’s sat through half an hour of rhetoric that to all intents and purposes was an incitement to violence – but even within that there are pepperings of disapproval, the suggestion that he should accept defeat with dignity, which is a little like asking Bruno Tonioli to tone down the theatrics.

If I were an optimist I’d say that it reflects a more considered, editorially balanced stance, one that even leans in the direction of impartiality. But the likely truth is that Fox are the rats deserting the sinking ship. They called this months ago, and have spent the build-up to the election – and its immediate aftermath – in a gradual shift away from the apparent losers, mixed in with the same dogged approval in the vain hopes that we wouldn’t notice. And meanwhile, having lost all but his fiercest defenders, Trump remains, increasingly isolated and shouting at the advancing waves, insisting that he can win this even as every hour that passes only seems to reinforce the likelihood that he cannot.

“I STILL HAVE CONTROL OF THE CRUCIBLE!”

Did they cheat? Well, I’m really not in a position to say whether there’s been mail-in fraud: I’ve yet to see any evidence beyond viral videos of ballot burning that were later debunked, and whenever anyone from the GOP is asked to produce anything that’s actually credible the result is a spaghetti western’s worth of tumbleweed. Could it be that they’re just so determined to win at all costs they’ll say anything they like and hope that if they say it with sufficient volume and frequency, people will start believing it? Probably. It worked for Nigel Farage. It worked for the Mail. It probably works for Kim Jong-Un. And it rubs off. I’m not saying that everyone who voted for him is a deluded idiot – right or wrong, I suspect that it’s possible to come to the conclusion that he’s the right man for the job from a position of rational intelligence, as opposed to the slavish adulation that won him the vote. But the sensible people aren’t the ones who appear on TV. Certainly the image of Trump supporters, frantically bombarding the polling stations in undeclared states – demanding that all activity cease in states where he was winning and ardently continue in states where he was losing – brought one particular recollection to mind.

While all this has been going on, the UK has watched with a mixture of mirth and revulsion. The fact that America seems to be on the verge of a civil war is enough to conjure a certain sense of already seen, as the French might have said: when it comes to divisive political gambits that split the country we have form, I don’t think we’re in any position to be smug about it. Certainly the bulk of British people I’ve encountered online seem to see Trump as a joke, but he has his defendants, and they are as ardent (and frequently as ill-informed) as many of their Transatlantic counterparts. It all gets a little depressing when you’re scrolling through a Facebook feed to look for entertainment news, and everyone and their grandmother has an opinion about the election, and most of the time they can’t actually spell. But hey, at least there’s a new series of The Mandalorian.

“Yeah, they want it back now.”

Speaking of entertainment news, it was mostly about one man this week: the Hollywood legend and whisky aficionado (and, we must acknowledge, beater of women) that is Sean Connery. The first man to play James Bond on the big screen, he remains for many the definitive 007 (although the definitive Bond film is arguably The Spy Who Loved Me; certainly that’s the best of them). In later years his career was defined by memorable supporting roles in average films – The Untouchables springs to mind – along with a few absolute clangers (step forward, The Avengers) and one or two genuine classics (Finding Forrester).

But there was a point at which Connery ceased to be an actor and became an icon. It happens to many of the best: it’s happened to Michael Caine, who, as good as he is in the likes of Children of Men, is always playing Michael Caine. Similarly, at an unspecified point in cinema, right about the time he became a national treasure, Sean Connery largely stopped playing characters and started playing Sean Connery. And it didn’t matter whether he was playing Richard the Lionheart, Allan Quatermain, or Indiana Jones’ dad.

“What about the boat? We’re not going on the boat?”

Connery was, of course, one of those people we thought would never leave us, who lived out his twilight years quietly on the other side of the ocean, except when the press wanted a soundbite about Scottish independence. It is difficult to imagine Trump going gently into that good night: he’s more the David Tennant type, thrashing and screaming and eking out every last available second of his allocated time, arguably overstaying his welcome, before standing alone, even as he can hear the knocks on the door, murmuring “I don’t wanna go…”

If nothing else, it’s taken our minds off Covid, inasmuch as anything really can. We’ve supposedly entered Lockdown 2.0, although I’m really not sure how that works because we never really had a 1.1 or 1.4 or any sort of beta, unless you count the regional isolation programmes that hit the north of England in September and October. Indeed, the government is keen to avoid the word ‘lockdown’, precisely because of the negative connotations it brings to mind, and prefers to call it an advanced containment programme or something else I can’t be bothered to Google.

Myself, I prefer to call a spade a spade (is that racist now? Please tell me if it is; I can’t find a reliable source). Apart from bubbles and schools, it’s more or less as it was. The pubs are closed, and we’re not allowed to go out, except to exercise and acquire essentials. I guess it’s back to the Series 10 rewatch.

“You’ve been panic buying, haven’t you?”

Have I Got Whos For You (Halloween special)

We sure picked a creepy night for a drive, huh, Scooby Doo?

Let us delve, constant reader (I do have one, and you know who you are) into a world of the dark and freakish, where things go bump in the night and lightning flashes are timed with jump scares, and when someone hears a noise and calls out “Frank? Is that you?” it’s never Frank. Some of these are new – others I’ve been saving. (One is at least two years old. I don’t know what that says about me.)

We open (because this is Doctor Who) in deep space.

I must apologise to Cyanide and Happiness, whose work I have shamelessly reappropriated. Still, it kind of works.

Elsewhere on a near identical freighter:

I honestly don’t know what I was thinking with this one. It wasn’t Alien Day, because I covered that elsewhere. An appropriate caption might be “You’ve let yourself go, Peri.”

Back to Earth now, and a forest in Norway:

“Ah, we’ll take him with us. He looks harmless enough.”

I confess I got a little catty with this one. “What is it?” said more than one person. I explained. “Oh, right. Minecraft,” was the response. “That thing for little kids. No wonder I’m not interested.” This was on a Doctor Who forum. I mean honestly.

Of course Doctor Who is for kids. Just look at the warm and welcoming expression on Tennant’s face. He never stood a chance.

Meanwhile, in an old motel twenty miles outside Fairvale, California, an unsuspecting Matt Smith throws his case on the bed, his clothes on the floor, and takes a shower.

“It’s been a while since I bought women’s clothes.”

The Bates Motel is, of course, exactly the sort of place the TARDIS would land, given its propensity towards taking the Doctor to the most incessantly horrible places in the universe. Which has nothing to do with Gaiman’s “Where you needed to go” bollocks; it’s just if you’re on a tropical beach surrounded by dolphins there’s no story, unless said story involves singing dolphins and a heavy-handed message about plastic in the water. Oh well, it’s better than having sex with the fish.

Of course, in such circumstances the best thing to do is to hot-foot it to the TARDIS and simply go to the pub, assuming you pick a good one.

“That you, Clara?”

And pan out, and of course it’s revealed that all of this is taking place in a snow globe being held by a prince.

“Hang on, they’ve got the Paradigm Daleks. Can we go in?”

Have I Got Whos For You (two for the price of one edition)

Hello kids. Here, have a Pope meme. In fact, have two.

“You are consistent,” said Melinda Malovey (not her real name), discussing the first image, “in telling us in a passive-aggressive way that you don’t like the Thirteenth Doctor.”

Really? Gosh, that’s news to me. I assume it’s because the Pope is holding Whittaker in the same position that you’d hold the communion wafer that you’re about to break. So what, you figured he’s about to rip her in half? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to tear plastic? Maybe he’s about to part the legs and have a look to see if there’s anything up there, something I suppose we might ascribe to repressed Catholic sexuality. This is like a scene from Bottom or something.

No, listen: I wanted to do a Pope thing because everyone else was, and my initial idea was to have him holding Whittaker in the one hand and Darth Vader in the other, ostensibly as some sort of Who / Star Wars comparison, only when I actually did the Photoshopping it made more sense to leave her on her own. And people have jumped to conclusions because they only see half the stuff on your feed, and the Report button is just a swipe away. Which I suppose is the sort of thing that happens in groups; everyone makes assumptions, and everything betrays authorial intent.

If I sound a little testy it’s because I write this, dear reader, on an afternoon I’ve been muted for having a go at someone who refused to accept either the concept of male privilege or the fact that he was guilty of it, and when I challenged him on his (repeated) comments his reaction was “Oh, just leave me alone”. This was right before he became whiny and foul-tempered because I wouldn’t simply accept what the moderators referred to as “a difference of opinion” – there is, in some groups, a strong rule set that espouses Any And All Views, however insane, because it’s easier to lock the thread than it is to pick a side. So if you actually stand by your principles (something I do only sparingly these days) then you pay the price.

Anyway, these are my principles, and if you don’t like them I have others. There is political content in this blog, and on my page, and in groups that allow it. I make no apology for this. I see a lot of stuff I ignore, and if I’m arguing with you then there is usually because I feel strongly about it. And the government are fair game, particularly when they screw up the country as much as this elitist, xenophobic, dispassionate bunch of defund-the-BBC fuckwits are currently managing.

You know the worst thing about that Fatima photo? It was on a stock site, and they didn’t even ask permission – something they really should have done, given that her face is clearly visible. It’s another thing that was clearly Not Properly Thought Through – you know, like when you cut corners by killing the software design budget for your Track-and-Trace database, and doing it in Excel instead.

Anyway, Fatima’s OK now, and faces a bright future in ballet.

While we all sit around making jokes about reskilling, the Government have got on with the oh-so-serious business of dealing with the catastrophic state we find ourselves in by adhering to a needlessly complicated and logistically impractical workflow that aims to be both healthy and beneficial for schools and the economy and as usual doesn’t really manage to be either. In practice this means dividing up the UK into different segments and colouring them in. Their mandate for containing Covid has literally become a year seven geography lesson. I scoff, but it’s not funny at all if you’re in Liverpool.

It should be noted at this point that this applies to England only: Scotland and Wales have their own system. Indeed, Wales has gone on full alert, banning any visitors from Tier 3, with local law enforcement ramping up their security arrangements in order to repel would-be invaders.

Meanwhile, the 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign is hit by scandal, when a series of emails are discovered in the most unlikely of places.

“Dear Hunter, thank you inviting me to DC and – Jeff, is this your laptop?”

What else happened this week? Well, on Monday we got to see Jodie Whittaker research her family history, which proved to be far less interesting than I thought it was going to be – mostly because I’ve never watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and hadn’t realised how shamelessly manipulative it all was. We were treated to numerous images of Jodie looking by turns wistful and reflective, reading out loud everything we could see on the screen just before Phil Davis told us exactly what had just happened, as if recapping after a commercial break that only happens on BBC America. “I’ve never met them,” says Jodie, wrapping a scarf around herself, as she stands by a grave. “But I feel like I know them.”

Anyway, I made a drinking game out of it, which was a productive use of the time. And it was lovely to see Sid’s Cafe again.

The kids and I have been gaming. I’m on Rise of the Tomb Raider; Thomas is working his way through Geometry Dash and enjoying the Minecraft DLC in Super Smash Bros, along with its questionable victory screen. One game we all enjoy is Among Us, the whodunnit smash that’s currently enjoying a lot of press coverage in the wake of the announcement that InnerSloth have cancelled the sequel so that they can improve the original. The game, for the uninitiated, is a multiplayer murder mystery on board a spaceship on an unknown mission, designed for quick play.

In each round you’re assigned a role – either a crewmate or, if you’re lucky, imposter. The crewmates all have tasks to perform. The imposter’s job is to sabotage those tasks, and murder as many people as they can without getting caught in the act. By turns, the surviving crewmates vote on who they think the murderer is: the most popular choice is ejected, irrespective of whether or not they’re actually guilty. Rounds begin with the announcement that “There is 1 imposter among us.”

“It’s the current regeneration,” said more than one person. “She’s the imposter. #notmydoctor.” I really should have seen it coming, shouldn’t I?

Anyway, the idea of imposters and sabotage on a galactic freighter – a sort of interstellar Cluedo – really is quite Whovian in its concept; it plays out like ‘The Robots of Death’. We’ve been here before, but there’s nothing new under the sun and I can’t help thinking that some sort of episode based around it – however meta we go – might actually stand a chance of working.

“Oh God. Did it vent? DID ANYBODY SEE IT VENT?”

God Is In The Detail (12-05)

Give me a minute here, folks. I am running around the internet frantically trying to cram all these worms back into their can. Good grief what a week it’s been. You drop one little reveal and everyone and their sister thinks they have all the answers about where Chibnall’s going with his New Doctor. I’ve heard every single theory on offer – she’s Jenny, she’s Romana, she’s the Rani, she’s before Hartnell, she’s the Metacrisis Doctor – and I think we can agree on one thing and one thing alone, and that is that the eventual explanation will be a crushing disappointment, irrespective of how and when it occurs. Whatever happens next, you’ll all feel let down. I won’t say “I told you so”, except I probably will.

In the meantime the press have also got in on the act. Half the journalists writing are also fans (it makes, in my experience, for the very worst kind of reviews, but let’s not go there) and nothing gets people nattering like a bit of speculation. For better or worse, ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ may have been the most talked-about episode since ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’, and it’s given Radio Times the perfect opportunity to tell us all how clever it was, when they published a list of hidden clues and hints as to Ruth Clayton’s real identity.

I mean, I’ve taken a look, and it’s pitiful. It’s the work of a rank amateur – probably an unpaid intern with access to Wikipedia and a copy of The Doctor: His Lives and Times. They didn’t even pick up on the clock face, beyond the most cursorary of glances. My grandmother could have managed better, and she’s been six feet under since 2003. No, listen: if you want to know what was really going on, beneath all the bluster and the talk about the Timeless Child and the secret history of Gallifrey, you just need to dig a little deeper than the cryptic remarks these hacks think will suffice. Because if you examine ‘Fugitive’ – I mean REALLY EXAMINE it – there’s a shedload of hidden information and secret signs that reveal Ruth’s identity right from the get-go.

Let’s start at the very beginning – with the very first shot, in fact.

Ah, yes. Time, the enemy in us all. But you’ve noticed the hand positioning, haven’t you? Let’s break it down: the minute hand, you’ll see, is stuck at twelve, while the hour hand is firmly at eight, alluding to Doctors Capaldi and McGann respectively. Superficially this makes little sense until we look at the second hand, hovering between ten and eleven – alluding both to the Metacrisis Doctor, but also a meeting between Tennant and Smith.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? This is all about 2013, and ‘Day of the Doctor’ – the ‘Night of the Doctor’ minisode providing the McGann connection – and is a CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT suggestion that there were more than thirteen TARDISes in orbit round Gallifrey. Remember, just because you didn’t see Doctor Ruth’s TARDIS, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. You know, like genital herpes. Apparently. According to a friend of mine.

We move on, with rampant swiftness.

It’s the candles I want you to look at here, because their placement is not random, nor is it without significance. In order to understand the varying lengths, we need to do a little detective work, because each candle corresponds to a different Doctor, according to the number of episodes in which they featured. Hence the tallest candle (the second one from the left) refers to Tom Baker – who, at 172 episodes, is the longest-running Doctor of all time. And so on and so forth.

It took a little time, and I had to physically count the pixels, but we got there, and the end result looks like this:

(If you’re interested in where I got my information, by the way, you can take a look at the IMDB reference here. It’s a little out of date, as it doesn’t feature Whittaker’s Doctor, but it works for the purposes of what we’re doing.)

With me so far? Good. Written down from left to right the numbers look like this:

10  4  12  3  11     7  2  6  1  5

The first half – thrown together it reads 10412311 – is a product number for a bead collection produced by a company called Grace Lampwork Beads (I know. I know!!!). The product in question is a cluster called Deep Sea Wonder. Are you ready to see it? And before you do, have you ever wondered what an inside-out TARDIS console room might resemble? Because if you haven’t, think about it right now. Your mind is about to be literally blown.

You see what I mean.

The second half refers to a date – 7/26/15, an Americanised version of 26 July 2015. It’s the date Chris Froome won the Tour De France, but it’s also the date Leif Ove Andsnes performed Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms season. This works on two levels: superficially, it’s a nod to ‘Before The Flood’, specifically the moment the Doctor monologues about Beethoven’s Fifth (symphony, rather than piano concerto, but the cat’s still out of the bag). However, you’ll be stunned to discover that ‘Leif Ove Andsnes’ is an anagram of ‘invade onself‘, WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS EPISODE.

That’s enough numbers: let’s look at some of the more visual stuff. Very early in the episode, Ruth’s seen having breakfast, in a single shot that’s so loaded with detail I’ve had to annotate it.

There’s nothing much else to say about this, except for a health and safety observation: seriously, who keeps a wooden chopping board right next to a hob?!? I mean really. It’s all fun and games until the kitchen burns down. I just hope her smoke alarm batteries are working.

Finally, here’s a map. Ostensibly useless, but there’s a very, VERY big thing happening in this one.

Now, I want you to pay very close attention to that blue line. It takes its cue from the Soup Line, a concept Bill Drummond (of the KLF) envisaged a few years back. You draw a line on a map of the British Isles, intersecting Belfast and Nottingham (if you’ve done it right, you’ll end up at Ipswich). Should your house fall on the line, Bill Drummond promises to pay you a visit and make soup, simply because he likes soup. I have no idea whether he still does this, but I would like to hope so.

Now let’s take a look at this particular line, transposed to real world locations.

You can’t see it clearly, but having examined Google Maps I can confirm that the line intersects the following:

A – Aberdyfi

B – Knighton

C – Moreton-in-Marsh

D – Gravesend

And you don’t need me to tell you what this means, but for the sake of anyone who’s just wandered in here (help yourself to sausage rolls by the way; they’re still warm) then we’ll elaborate: the much-discussed “More than a Time Lord” scene from ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ is coming to fruition, via knights from Knighton and Arthur’s Morgana (a corruption of ‘Moreton’) in a pitched battle on the Welsh coast, leading to the eventual revival of THE SEVENTH DOCTOR. Which is obvious, really – we always knew he was Merlin; it’s just there’s no reason why Merlin had to be a man. Lest you’d forgotten, it’s all building to a revisit to Trenzalore (Gravesend), and the question that must never be answered, which is not “Doctor Who”, but “Should Great Britain leave the European Union or…”

Need we mention that Drummond was also partially responsible for ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’? We need not. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Radio Times.

The Doctor Who Fiction Collection

Update: It’s April 2022, and I’ve just refreshed this post to include the ABBA story that closed off last year. It was a slow year for DW fiction, largely because I was finishing the novel. Still, you take what you can get.

I recently finished a wonderful book called The Night Circus. It features, close to its conclusion, a seemingly minor character lecturing another on the importance of stories. “Someone needs to tell those tales,” he says. “When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”

Sometimes you write because you have the idea. Other times, you write because there’s a project, or simply because you need to, and the idea comes when you’ve brainstormed and head-scratched and run down a hundred different scenarios, none of them particularly good. And then sometimes the scenario will evolve out of a seed of an idea, reworked into something tangible and even, dare we say it, quite good. And sometimes it won’t, and you’ll go for a walk or brush the kitchen floor and wait for some unsuspecting narrative spark to drift past that you can pluck from the air. Most of all the process of writing is not always pleasant. Sometimes it is arduous and laboured and you press on, head to the wind, hand shielding your eyes against the storm, secure in the knowledge of nothing except the fact that this is not your best work, but at least it is work, and it is easier to rewrite a mess than it is a blank page.

But writing fiction using TV characters is the MFI (sorry, Ikea; I’m showing my age) of story construction. The characters come pre-assembled: you just have to put them together. You still have the job of establishing a setting – and, unless you’re playing it really safe, a supporting cast – but much of the work is done for you, the arduous task of establishing likeable protagonists already completed long ago by your intended audience. From one perspective it is cheating. From another, it is a template to enable ease of use, allowing you more time to concentrate on the story. Pick one.

I will, as a general principle, leave the character development to the novels: when I’m writing short fiction, it tends to be about Doctor Who. This particular collection spans a little over four years. Some of it is better than others: that’s as it should be. If every tale was only as good as the one that came before then we’d have a problem (if it was worse than the one that came before, we’d have a serious problem). There are Ice Warriors and Weeping Angels; the Doctor tangles with disgruntled matriarchs and angry villagers and, more than once, himself. You will have your favourites – I have mine. You don’t get to hear what they are. But you do get to read the stories. Enjoy them.

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Sleep No More: Behind The Scenes

(Brian of Morbius, November 2015)

We start, ironically, with something that isn’t really a story at all, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. To give a little context: in late 2015 I was burned out, bummed out and very nearly wanted out. Doctor Who had lost its sheen, and I spent most of series 9 drumming my fingers on a table top (in a rather irritating four-beat pattern) waiting for it to end. I’m over it now, but those were dark days. To cope with a lackluster and occasionally frustrating series I began to get creative in my reviews, and this one – which tackles, ironically, an episode I’ve come to rather enjoy – is perhaps the silliest of the lot, being one of those fictionalised fly-on-the-wall documentary type things that became big business the moment Ricky Gervais first stepped foot into Wernham Hogg. It would be interesting to find out whether any conversations like the ones depicted ever actually took place. I’d be willing to bet there were at least a couple.

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Dickensian

(The Doctor Who Companion, December 2016)

Write a Christmas-themed short story for The Doctor Who Companion? In 1500 words? No problem. Mostly. In this seasonal tale the Third Doctor is visited on Christmas Eve by a couple of spirits, with an obvious TARDIS-related twist. What I like about this is the stripped back Aristotle-esque nature of the setting: getting in and telling a story in one room and getting out again is something I really don’t do very often, so it was fun to rise to that particular self-imposed challenge. Oh, and there are jokes about vol-au-vents, because you always have to have a joke about vol-au-vents.

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Day of the Dead

(The Doctor Who Companion, October 2017)

The year after the run of Christmassy stories over at the DWC, the site’s fiction editor organised a Halloween project. The brief was simple: write a story about a monster in which the Doctor does not feature at all. One of the most challenging things about this was finding a way to bring the Angels to life and make them scary when everyone already knows what they are – everyone, that is, except for the poor sap who encounters them. This is ramshackle in places, but I think it just about hangs together. If you forward it on, you have to promise not to give away the ending.

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The Twelfth Doctor Gets A Phone Call

(The Doctor Who Companion, August 2018)

I’ve often wondered about the first time we see Peter Capaldi. His unanticipated blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in ‘Day of the Doctor’ – “No, sir – all thirteen!” – was one of the show’s key talking points, if only because you never hear about it again. It’s always possible that the Twelfth Doctor just turned up, knowing that was where he needed to be and when, but I’ve always liked to think that his immediate predecessor got in touch – something that could likely only happen once he knew there would be another Doctor coming along, which should give you some idea as to when this all takes place. The whole thing is a bit meta, but I quite like doing meta; it keeps me sane in between all the fan bitching.

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Love That In A Family Dwells

(The Doctor Who Companion, December 2018)

We don’t get Christmas specials any more, it seems. We certainly didn’t last year, a schedule change that caused a great deal of fuss amongst the online community, most of whom were suitably disgruntled that they would have to spend December 25th actually hanging out with family members rather than simply crashing in front of the TV. I seem to have been one of the few people who wasn’t bothered – I never enjoy Christmas Day episodes because when you’re in my line of work there is a sudden and immediate urge to blog about them, something I’ve frankly never wanted to do after several sherries and a bucket load of mince pies. New Year’s Day is a much better candidate, although I accept that I’m in a minority.

Anyway, to plug the gap between Ranskoor and ‘Resolution’, I came up with this, which tells the story of what happens when the Doctor and her fam visit…look, you’ll just have to read the thing and find out, won’t you? One advantage of doing a story which is deliberately comic in tone is that you can advance the plot and cram in all sorts of expository information simply by including as many unexpected non-sequiteurs as possible: it’s a creative risk, but it works, provided you get the tone just right. I still don’t know if I did, but it was one of those occasions where I actually enjoyed the writing process, as opposed to simply having written. Those moments are gold dust, and must be seized without fear.

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A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

(The Doctor Who Companion, August 2019)

Every summer, when we can, my family and I head down to the same camping field on the coast of Pembrokeshire. There we’ll indulge in campfire singalongs, quaff the local ale and spend hours on the beach looking for starfish and crabs. It usually buckets it down at least once, the clouds rolling in off the Irish Sea like an advancing invasion force, but you’re in Wales, and you basically come to expect it. In any case, that particular location (right down to a reasonably accurate depiction of its topography) is the setting for this little tale involving a lost Ice Warrior who winds up shipwrecked and blunders into, of all things, a village fete. Does the Doctor make an appearance? You’ll have to keep reading to find out – but it’s not a spoiler to reveal that several of the supporting characters are named after DWC staff, something I still don’t think they’ve noticed.

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Wedding Crasher

(Brian of Morbius, October 2019)

Emily and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage this autumn. I still remember that morning as if it were yesterday: rising, sleepily as we both drove to separate houses in Reading to prepare; the argument I had with the insurance company, ripe and bruising after the argument we’d had with my aunt the previous evening over the reception place markings. Eating brioche with the best man and his wife in their housing estate semi, the pacing in the vestry when she was ten minutes late, and then that thrilled, anticipated moment where you see her walking down the aisle, at her most radiant. On balance, it was a good day.

The wedding of Harriet and Nick does not go to plan. But they might get their happy ending, thanks to an unexpected interruption. This was written in a rush job, and it shows, but it hangs together by the thread of a poorly-tied ribbon long enough to load it into the back of the car to open after the honeymoon. A disclaimer: Nick is not based on me, and Harriet is not based on Emily, and while Harriet’s mother was cut from the cloth of a real person, that person was not my mother-in-law. Probably.

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Furby From The Deep

(The Doctor Who Companion, December 2019)

It’s the UNIT Christmas party, and the Third Doctor is reluctantly in attendance – along with Jo, the Brigadier, Yates, Benton and some sinister-looking toys. What could possibly go wrong? I’ve been wanting to write this for years – I even started it once, but there were technical problems and it was necessary to begin again from scratch. The intent was always to make it feel like something Terrance Dicks might have churned out, which means it concentrates more on the story it’s telling than the way it’s being told: Dicks had a flair for prose but was never one for literary flourishes, except where they were really needed. Does it feel like him? Probably not, but it has a beginning and a middle and an end, which is perhaps the best you can hope for. This will take you a while, so I strongly advise making a cup of tea first.

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Thursday

(Brian of Morbius, April 2020)

It was inevitable that we’d get a story about Covid. This skates around the issue, rather than confronting it head on: there is nothing more dull than a story that is actively about a pandemic, so it becomes the setting rather than the subject. Instead I wanted to do a two-hander, more of a conversation piece than anything else, which gave the Doctor and Graham the chance to catch up and perhaps heal some of the scars left by that awkward encounter they had at the end of ‘Can You Hear Me?’. Inevitably this meant inventing a prison break, and I suspect that this will age like milk, but you do what you can.

This was a deeply personal story for a number of reasons, none of which I’ll be divulging here – but there was a catharsis in the writing process and it enabled me to exorcise a couple of lingering demons. I guess you could call that a win, even though it didn’t really feel like it, but maybe that’s 2020 in a nutshell. Ilkley Moor is, by the way, a splendid place, and well worth a visit.

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The Memory of Trees

(The Doctor Who Companion, August 2020)

Holidays as we knew them went up the spout this year, but my family and I did get to Alton Towers in the summer, where we finally persuaded Daniel onto Nemesis (he loved it, as I knew he would). It was during the visit that Emily – organiser and route planner and gatherer of strange information – elected to show us the abandoned toilet block which is the talk of the online discussion groups, and it was while we were down there that I realised this is exactly where the Doctor would choose to park his TARDIS. I’d already decided to have them visit the Towers, and I knew it had to be Twelve, with Clara – series 9 Clara, lest you were wondering –  trailing along in his wake. (Actually it’s the other way round, at least to begin with, but never mind that now.) The Staffordshire estate may be home to some of the finest rollercoasters in the land but it’s also steeped in history, and has inspired a few spooky tales of its own. The tale of the chained oak seemed an obvious place to start, and there was never any real need to move very far away from it.

Not to give anything away, but it’ll become apparent as you reach the end of this that there is an unwritten companion story that fills in the gaps, waiting and lurking and anxious to be told. I might get around to it next year.

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Hic Manebimus Optime

(Brian of Morbius / The Doctor Who Companion, December 2020)

They say a sad tale’s best for winter. This is not a sad tale. And at the same time, it is: one of those ambivalent mood pieces couched in uncertainty, a pile of good things and bad things. When asked by Phil if I wanted to contribute to the inaugural Doctor Who Companion storybook (themed – inevitably – around companions), there was only one story I wanted to tell, and that’s the tale of the Ponds’ Christmas tradition. What does it say about this couple, I wondered, that they set the table every December 25th, for a man who never arrives? What does it say about him? What does it say about them? The results aren’t exactly cheery, but I actually had a lot of fun writing this, because there’s great narrative satisfaction in skating around an awkward conversation that almost but doesn’t quite turn into an argument. You have to keep balanced on a knife edge, and if you’ll excuse the pun, that’s a brilliant way of staying sharp.

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Chase The Shadows Away

(Brian of Morbius / The Doctor Who Companion, December 2021)

They say the planet’s heating up, but in 2021 hell froze over twice. First, Christopher Eccleston recorded and released his first Big Finish stories, returning to a role he’d not touched in fifteen years. Second, we got a new ABBA album: Voyage may not have exactly been up there with The Visitors, but it was affable and sparky and fun; four old pros showing they still had it. The story that grew out of that began life as something very different – an elderly woman, loosely based on my aunt, seeing out her last days in a hospice, much as my aunt had done that autumn, only to be visited by a ghost from the past. It was heart-rending and poignant and utterly shit. So I decided to do something a little less maudlin and a bit more fun, which is why you have Peter Capaldi running riot in Stockholm, trying to get the band back together. Well, he’s got a time machine…

Have I Got Whos For You (Mandalorian Edition)

Happy December! Did you know that the Master’s hatred of Will Ferrell spawned an unexpected seasonal tradition?

It’s Monday, which means two things. First, I’m entirely failing to finish tidying the lounge. Second, it’s time for our regular roundup of news and gossip from the world of everyone’s second favourite TV show (right behind Stranger Things, which I will get round to seeing one of these days). So what’s been going on in Whovania this week?

Needless to say, Jodie Whittaker has dominated. It’s not enough that we had two – two! trailers in the space of a week; we also have an episode title and guest cast. (At the risk of implementing a well-worn cliche, Doctor Who trailers are like buses, only they’re like buses in Reading town centre on a Friday night, because you have to wait ages and then two come along at once and you can’t actually hear yourself think on there for all the shouting and food fights and babies throwing toys out of prams. At least you can block these people on the internet; you can’t do that on the 38 to Purley-on-Thames.)

Still. I think we can all agree that ‘Spyfall’ really is a fairly dreadful title, although it did give me the excuse to do this, which almost works.

What happens in ‘Spyfall’? Well, there’s a bit of gubbins about rewritten DNA and Stephen Fry turns up playing a character called ‘C’. Whittaker herself is heard to mutter “The name’s Doctor…the Doctor” in a moment so gut-wrenchingly corny it could only have come from the hand of Chris “HELP ME WITH MY BEATLES QUIZ, MUM!” Chibnall, but this is the sort of thing I’m prepared to let go if I’m watching something enjoyable. ‘The Crimson Horror’ was thoroughly stupid, and occasionally excruciating, but it was also fun. Isn’t that really what Doctor Who is supposed to be about? Fun, and hopefully not too transparently woke?

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘woke’, really. It implies a heightened state of awareness, the notion that all those who are not transparently and overtly tuned in to injustice and equality and political correctness are in some way unconscious. It’s ridiculous terminology because there’s really nothing wrong with being asleep, particularly when you’ve spent a hell of a long time campaigning and fighting and you just need a bit of a rest. You never get the full story, really, do you, from someone who seems to be the opposite of ‘woke’? They’re just dismissed as fossilised dinosaurs who have no awareness of the world around them, rather than someone who has perhaps more awareness than you’d care to realise, and who has learned how to pick their battles, and who has decided that the best thing for their own state of mind is to give the outward appearance of being asleep.

“Yeah, I think we’re gonna have to cancel Christmas.”

While we’re at it, I have another pet hate I’d like to just mention and then talk about another day when I have more time.

Seriously, this is what happens if you let the internet write Doctor Who scripts.

There’s also news about the upcoming comic crossover in which Jodie Whittaker encounters the Tenth Doctor; one that had already given rise to speculation that he would appear in the next TV series for the current Doctor to castigate (in a conspiracy laden video I refuse to link to, because it’s bollocks and I’m not giving them the traffic). After much back and forth between the idiot fans who genuinely thought this was happening in the TV series and those of us who actually read beyond the headline, we’ve finally cleared up that this is a spin-off, and that whatever happens it’s probably not going to be hateful. I almost wish it was, really; you might as well give the haters something to really complain about.

In any case, it’s now emerged that said crossover will actually be a revisitation of the events of ‘Blink’, but from the perspective of both Doctors rather than Sally Sparrow. Unfortunately the most widely-shared link for this story came from Screen Rant, who ran with “BLINK TO BE REWRITTEN” (paraphrasing, but that was the sentiment), in a story I refuse to link to for reasons that should by now be obvious, and then all hell broke loose because many people, it turns out, are too thick to go any further than a fan baiting headline.

I had a near miss with writing for Screen Rant; did I ever tell you? I will spare you the details, but let’s just say there were one or two creative issues with their work ethic, and given the garbage they put out these days I think it was a lucky escape. Teaching piano is far more fun, and nobody tells you to kill yourself.

A little Star Wars news now, because I’ve got a stack of gags, and Jodie Whittaker’s got a bad feeling about this.

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There’s also an exclusive press photo from the Episode IX After Party.

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And this deleted scene from ‘It Takes You Away’ suggests that the BBC originally planned something quite different for last year.

It’s very easy to knock the direction Star Wars has taken, simply because it’s contemporary. You remember what you choose to remember, which was that the Ewoks were rubbish but at least they were cute rubbish, and that yes, Jar Jar was racist, but I suppose it was a long time ago and anyway it’s NOT AS BAD AS THAT STUPID SCENE WHERE LEIA SHOOTS OUT INTO SPACE. Likewise, there are a bunch of people yelling at Chibnall for producing an overly simplified portrait of racist white people in ‘Rosa’, simply because that was the best way to tell a story which (let’s be honest) was aimed at kids, and every single one of these people has completely forgotten the laboured monologues we used to get from McCoy and Pertwee and Hartnell, mostly when they were slagging off the military, or the lecturing about sweat shops in ‘Planet of the Ood’, or…I mean, if we’re going to throw any shade in the direction of last year, couldn’t we just agree that the monsters weren’t much cop? I don’t mind straight white men being the villains, because that’s kind of the way it always used to be, but the new creations they did include (benevolent or otherwise) weren’t so much offensive as simply dull. But that’s all fine, because Bradley Walsh has promised us that series 11 will feature some “absolutely terrifying monsters”.

Oh well, at least it’s official.

Have I Got Whos For You (Multi-Doctor Special)

I think this’ll be the last batch post for a while. We’ve taken a good chunk out of the meme backlog, and while there are still quite a few to go up, they can stagger in as and when, like drunk students crashing back into halls of residence after a night down the union. At least one of them might involve a traffic cone.

Today’s theme – if you hadn’t guessed – involves images involving more than one Doctor, which is something I do quite a bit when the ideas come. They do seem to come thick and fast these das, which is an indicator that I have more free time than is strictly healthy, but at least one family member appears to be following in my footsteps. This is both encouraging and slightly alarming. A bit like life, really.

We begin with a couple of Doctors celebrating the summer solstice, which should give you an idea just how long some of these have been hanging around.

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Meanwhile, in a nearby playground.

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Time Lord songwriter’s workshops.

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Impromptu lightsaber battles.

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Derby walking tours.

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Family reunions.

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Posted without comment.

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“This mirror’s brilliant; I look years younger.”

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So there’s this guy I found on Facebook who takes pet photos and one thing sort of led to another.

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“Bugger off, David.”

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Time Lord mid-air collisions.

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Edward set this up. Edward is five. I am worried about Edward.

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Finally, in the TARDIS…

“Yeah, I’d give it five minutes.”