Chase The Shadows Away

It was a Wednesday, they were in London, and the quiet hum of the TARDIS engines was just about to be undercut by the sound of a ringing phone.

Clara made it to the console first. It was a game they played, on those rare occasions when someone called. Her relationship with the Doctor had begun with a phone call – come to think of it, so had his relationship with her, although it was a different phone and different planet. At least she thought it was a different planet; in truth Clara only half-remembered it, and it hadn’t actually happened yet. These things were complicated. He had been younger then, a quite different man in every literal sense of the word.

Now he was old and grey and often grumpy. There were days they saved the universe, and then there were days she felt like a glorified public relations officer. All too often, the days matched.

She lifted the receiver, ignoring the Doctor’s glare. “Hello?”

Clara blinked. “One second.” Handed him the phone. “It’s you.”

Frowning, the Doctor held out his hand. “Who is it?”

“No, I mean you’re – oh, just take it.”

The Doctor lifted the receiver to his ear, and then his eyes widened to an incredulous stare. “How did you get this number? Well, yes, I mean I know it’s mine, but – no, you’re not supposed to be able to call me! It breaks every rule in the – black hole? What black – never mind, don’t tell me, it’ll come out in the wash. Her? That was Clara. You know, Clara. You really don’t remem- how long’s it been?”

He paced back and forth next to the console, free hand darting over his temples. Now it was clawing at his hair. Making a yak-yak gesture, during which he rolled his eyes at Clara. She was goggling, although mostly at the phone cord, which was in serious danger of getting twisted around his neck.

“You want me to go where? Oh, them. Right. But why?…seriously?”

Concluding the call, the Doctor dropped the receiver in its cradle, with a little more force than Clara thought was probably necessary. “God, what an insufferable idiot.”

“That was you.”

“Yes, well, I’m my own worst critic. How’s your Swedish?”

* * *

At the precise moment the door to the Stockholm studio burst open, Benny Andersson had been trying to do three things. First, he’d been trying to identify the strange vworp, vworp noise he’d just heard outside. Second, he’d been wondering whether it might be something he could sample and use as an introduction to a song he was working on (an as-yet untitled ditty about a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by sentient snails). And third, his sense of recall was performing a desperate catfish through the rubbish bag that was his subconscious in an attempt to work out precisely where he’d heard it before.

His thought processes were interrupted by the arrival of a silver-haired man who looked to be in his mid-to-late fifties, wearing a purple blazer over a tieless white shirt buttoned to the collar, and the sort of expression that meant business. Benny wasn’t sure whether it was the hey-let’s-do-another-musical sort of business, or the accountants-with-folders sort. The second was not something he savoured. But this man didn’t look much like an accountant; he looked like the world’s dourest conjuror.

“Hello, you two,” said the newcomer. “How’s business?”

It had taken Benny two-and-a-bit paragraphs to remember he was not alone in the room. He glanced over at Bjorn, who had been in the middle of constructing a Lego model of the Big Bang Theory set. Bjorn built Lego sets whenever he was blocked. He also liked to pound a toilet brush against the rail of the balcony while singing the Lithuanian national anthem. This was a closely-guarded secret: there was always the possibility of paparazzi intrusion, but so far they’d been lucky.

Benny regarded the stranger with astonishment. “Who are you, and how did you get past security?”

The man was carrying a notebook; he opened it to a specific page and made a tally mark with a ball point pen. “And that’s…thirty-seven marks for opener number five,” he said. “That’s almost as popular as ‘Halt, you’re an enemy of the Daleks’.”

Benny was reaching for the phone on his desk when the stranger held up a single finger. Just wait. “Melbourne,” he said. “March 5^th, 1977. You were trapped in your hotel room and curtain was half past eight. The incident with the mutant sponges.” The stranger leaned over the desk and offered a cheery, if slightly sinister grin. “Do you remember?”

Benny’s jaw dropped like a plummeting lift. He was too transfixed to glance over at Bjorn, but suspected he’d experienced the same reaction.

“Doctor?” said the astonished Benny, after a moment.

“In the flesh. How’ve you been?”

“My god! That must have been…forty years ago!”

“Well, your maths is still good,” the Doctor mused. “Must be all the fish.”

“You’ve aged,” said Bjorn. “In fact your face is completely different. And you’ve got more…Welsh.”

The Doctor was affronted. “Scottish!”

“Right, right,” said Bjorn, trying his best to look abashed. “I always get those two muddled.”

“I like the jacket, though,” said Benny. “I never really cared much for those pinstripes.”

“So you remember?”

“How could we forget? We still talk about that night. We even did a song about it. The title track on our last album.”

The Doctor regarded him curiously. “I thought The Visitors was about Russian dissidents?”

“Well, you know. You have to code these things,” said Bjorn. “No one would have believed the truth.”

“So what brings you here?” said Benny. “So late in the day?”

“Yeah, do you need money?” This was Bjorn. “Only most of ours is tied up in investments, and – ”

“I need you to make another album,” said the Doctor, simply.

Benny and Bjorn’s jaws dropped almost as far as they had when the Time Lord had announced his identity. The Doctor heard something click in Benny’s face, and winced; he’d feel that in the morning.

It was Bjorn who recovered first. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I need you to record a new album. You and the girls. Well, women. Shouldn’t really call them girls. Clara’s always lecturing me about that.”

“Clara?”

“My friend. She’s gone out sightseeing, but she’d love to meet you both.”

“A new album?” Benny was rubbing his jaw. “Now? After all this – but why?”

“We left that behind a long time ago,” said Bjorn. “There’s a lot of water under that bridge.”

“There’s a lot of water under every bridge. That’s the purpose of bridges. They let the water move. Give you a sense of where it’s going, where it’s been. Bridges are brilliant for offering perspective.” The Doctor was walking around the room, gesticulating with his hands in the manner of an animated lecturer. “Unfortunately they only get you so far. Sometimes you just have to walk off the bridge and go down to the water.”

He was facing them now “Because it’s never too late to start again.”

“But still…why? Why now?”

“Because I’ve a feeling that in a few years, people are going to really need it. Specifically me. But also everyone else. You disbanded, what, thirty-five years ago? What have you done since?”

“We wrote an award-winning musical about chess and had cameos in Mamma Mia,” replied Bjorn, somewhat frostily.

“Yes, well. I mean apart from that. Besides, there’s another record inside you both. Well, all right, the four of you. You need the four of you, otherwise you’d just be ‘BB’.”

Benny regarded him with interest. Then he sighed. “They’ll never agree to it.”

“Then convince them. You’re good at the emotional stuff. And I refuse to believe – ” And now he was once more pacing the room, rummaging through cabinets, leafing through piles of papers, examining DATs – “that you’re not still writing.”

“We-ell…” Benny drew out the syllables like smoke rings. “We did have that one about the computer.”

“Don’t Shut Me Down?” Bjorn scoffed. “That’s going nowhere. The tune’s not bad, but the lyrics are terrible.”

“Our lyrics were always terrible. In any case, we could tweak it. Make it about something different.”

“Good. Good start.” The Doctor – who was now sitting in a chair opposite Bjorn’s desk – clapped his hands, then put his feet up on the table. “What else?”

Bjorn tried to ignore the lack of social grace. “There’s one about a cat witnessing an argument between an alcoholic woman and her husband.”

“Make it a dog. Dogs have compassion. Cats don’t care at all. Plus their claws are annoying.” The Doctor was well into his stride now. “Keep ’em coming.”

“We were playing around with Irish music; that yielded…possibilities. And there’s one called Keep An Eye On Dan – ”

“Dan? Who’s Dan?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Well, find out.” He jumped up. “I’m not asking for a tour or anything. Just one more album. Go out smiling.”

Despite himself, Benny was smiling now. “You know what?” he said to Bjorn. “I really think we should.”

“All right,” said Bjorn, meaning it. “Let’s.”

The Doctor grinned. “Trust me, people will love it. Well, probably. The ones that matter.”

“We’d better get to work,” Benny said to Bjorn. “Find those lead sheets we did a while back.”

“Oh. There’s one more thing.” The Doctor was already on his way out, but he’d now turned back, Columbo-style, and was fishing a piece of paper out of his jacket. “When you’re done, send a copy to this chap. With a note that says this.”

Nothing about this made any sense to Benny, but that had been the pattern for this afternoon. And as the Doctor hurried out and then hurried back in again with a young, starry-eyed brunette on his arm, Benny sat down at the keyboard and began to play, wondering if this could possibly go anywhere at all.

* * *

Some time later, and in drastically different circumstances, the Doctor stood in the middle of a quaint pastoral scene on a ship where time ran at different speeds depending on where you parked.

It was appropriate, really, given that the passage of his own life was so difficult to measure. How long had it been? Chronologically, a few millennia. Maybe. He didn’t know when Mondas had started its drift. For him, it had been just over a thousand, most of it languishing outside Missy’s makeshift jail, scribbling lecture notes and occasionally assisting the Templars. That was assuming you didn’t count the several billion he had spent punching a wall. He never knew whether he should.

The Doctor stared out at the field and considered its random promises. Before him lay a pleasant rural backdrop, hedge-lined fields rolling away to pastured common land, bordered by forests thick with oak and ash and beech. Somewhere in the lower decks, aided in no uncertain terms by their convenient proximity to an event horizon, the Cybermen were evolving and rebuilding at an unprecedented rate, and it was inevitable that they would make a repeat appearance – almost certainly in a sleeker costume and carrying a far nastier gun. The Doctor had found he could do many things over the centuries, but even he couldn’t stop the passage of time – time, the enemy of us all.

It would likely be a bloodbath.

He’d worry about that later. Right now, he had a point to prove.

Nardole was still sitting outside the farmhouse, face hunched over the laptop, peering at it over the the rim of his glasses. Occasionally he would prod at one of the keys, almost with hesitancy, like a child discovering at the corpse of a woodland animal they’re not sure is dead. The Doctor wondered if he was actually dealing with the Cyber threat or playing Roblox.

He cleared his throat as he approached, and Nardole looked up. “Ah. There you are, sir.”

“How’s it going?”

“There’s still some lag on the payload delivery, but I think we can compensate. Hope we can, anyway. Otherwise it’ll be short and not very sweet.” The Doctor coughed. Nardole looked at him quizzically: the Doctor interpreted it (correctly) as his what-in-the-love-of-heaven-is-he-gonna-ask-me-now look.

“The, um. The thing. There was a thing I asked you to look after. Some time ago. Had it sent to you. Only I don’t know about it until now, which is when I’ll ask you to give it to me.”

Nardole’s eyes were momentarily blank. Then somewhere inside his head a penny dropped: if you listened carefully, you could almost hear the clang. “Oh, that!” he said. “Yeah, been carrying that around with me for months. Bit random, though. Can’t think why you’d want it.”

He fished into his jacket pocket and produced a small flat cardboard sleeve, not quite square. “Had a note attached, said ‘Keep it with you and don’t tell me.’” The Doctor took the sleeve, staring at the cover artwork: the dark brown of space, a star poking over the edge of an unidentifiable planet.

He found himself nodding in approval, which prompted Nardole to say “I take it that this is somehow important?”

“Depends on your perspective.” The Doctor was reading the back of the case. “Either way, thank you. Particularly for keeping it secret.”

“All part of the service.” Nardole resumed tapping at his laptop. “I mean it’s probably pushed something important out of my head, but never mind.”

The Doctor grinned as he walked away. “Have a look down the back of the sofa. Things have a habit of turning up.”

“Back of the sofa,” Nardole muttered to himself, but there was humour in it.

* * *

The Masters – both of them – were leaning against a stile, watching a cow.

“Do you ever wonder,” the bearded one was saying, “about the Matrix?”

“The one on Gallifrey?” said Missy.

“No, that terrible science fiction film.” The Master shifted his stance; the wood was itching. “I saw it, back when I was running for Prime Minister. And it struck me that if you’re going to have some sort of rogue AI conquer the world, you really don’t want to use humans for a battery source.”

“Why not?”

“They’re impetuous. They don’t listen. That’s the whole point of the film; people are never happy with what’s given to them. Whereas if they’d used a cow – ”

“There’d have been no rebellion.” Missy finished the thought. “The cow wakes up immersed in liquid, it’s a bit confused, they plug it back in, it’s none the wiser. It just eats grass all day, perfectly content.”

“Plus,” said the Master, “cows are big. You’d need far fewer of them, which makes administration much easier.”

“Yeah. They could call it the Mootrix.”

“Good title,” offered the Master. He turned his attention to the Doctor, whose boots made soft prints in the evening grass. “Oh, it’s you. Whatever it is, you can lift it yourself.”

“Actually, no.” The Doctor scratched the side of his nose. “I came back to check something. The conversation we had earlier.

“That?” the Master sneered. “Why are we revisiting that?”

“Something you said. I asked you about the odds of beating the Cybermen.”

“And?”

“What’d you say?” The Doctor stood, arms folded, biding his time. “I mean your exact words.”

The Master eyed him contemptuously. “I said it was about as likely as an ABBA reunion.”

“Yeah.” The Doctor fished into his pocket, and then placed the CD into the Master’s outstretched hand. The Master rolled it over. “So? Some kind of bootl – wait.” He was examining the date. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“They reformed.” The Doctor wore the merest hint of a smile. “New album. Nearly forty years after the last one. Even managed a tour, of sorts.”

“Did they do that song about the gorilla?” Missy was leaning over the Master’s left arm, reading the track list. “I always liked that one.”

The Master glowered at her. “Not helping.” And then, turning back to the Doctor: “This is fake.”

“I’ll think you’ll find it isn’t,” said the Doctor.

“Then why didn’t I know about it?”

“Oh, well, you’re a busy man. Slash woman,” the Doctor added, acknowledging Missy. “You can’t be on top of every temporal anomaly.”

The Master thought this through for a moment, internal cogs whirring in a blaze of tempestuous logic, and then he pointed at the Doctor with an angry finger. “You cheated!”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” the Doctor smirked. “Either way, I get to win this one.”

The Master threw the CD to the ground, and then stomped off. The Doctor dropped to a low squat to pick it up, brushing away the flecks of dirt. “Litterbug.”

“So what was that?” asked Missy, who’d decided that if her counterpart wanted a sulk, he was on his own. “Other than a bit of metaphorical tackle waving.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows shot up. “You can talk.”

“I can, actually,” said Missy, hand on her hip. “But in all seriousness, you did that by contacting your earlier self, right? How’d you even manage it?”

“It’s the black hole,” said the Doctor. “Bends time. Means the phone works. Kind of.”

“And you rang…you.”

“An earlier me. Got him to pop over to Stockholm. Called in a few favours.”

“Then why in God’s name didn’t you get him to help here?” Missy was incandescent with disbelief. “Bring the TARDIS over? Trigger a meltdown? Be a lifeboat? Anything?”

“Because he never did,” the Doctor explained. “Or rather, I never did. I’d have remembered. We can’t cross the timeline, Missy. You know that.”

“So what was the point, then?”

“I don’t know. Fun, maybe? It’s been sorely lacking round here these past few weeks. Maybe there’s nothing actually wrong with spreading a little joy, even if things are rubbish and we’re all about to die horribly. And besides…”

He moved just a little closer, and dropped his voice to that low, measured tone he adopted when he wanted to be serious. “I wanted to show him that even when you’re certain of the outcome, the universe has a way of surprising you. And that people change, even though they don’t always want to.”

For a moment, Missy said nothing. Then she glared at the Doctor. “You think you know me.” And with that, she turned on her heel and stomped off in the direction the Master had taken, in the futile hope that the Doctor hadn’t seen her lip trembling.

He watched her go. Wondered if he could have handled the conversation better, and decided that it didn’t matter. It isn’t about how much water you put on the seeds you plant, he realised. They grow when they’re ready. And sometimes you don’t get to see.

A snatch of remembered melody drifted into his head. Can you hear the drums, Fernando…?

The Doctor walked back across the field. Perhaps Bill was awake.

Occupy White Walls Does Doctor Who (part two)

Last time we spoke, I was telling you about art. Well, not art so much; more the practice of curating it. There are probably rules to this, although I’ve never bothered to learn them; it’s more a matter of common sense. Bench positioning is crucial. Watch your lighting. Galleries with wallpaper are a gamble: everything looks better on white. You need to make the most of blank space, to hang with care and consideration, allowing the artwork room to breathe.

I can’t remember at which point I decided to build a TARDIS interior, but it made perfect sense. Here was a space you could fashion from the ground up with walls and doors placed more or less wherever you want: the notion of a space that opened out onto a seemingly infinite expanse was actually quite easy to do. I called it, for want of a better title, @biggerontheinside.

What I really wanted was to do a nice sort of walkthrough where I film myself wandering around the place, telling you all about it. But my ageing PC is simply not up to the job, and the 7 FPS bit of test footage I managed to cobble together was enough to convince me that this was, at least for now, a terrible idea. I may rethink a little further down the line – everyone likes videos – but for the moment you will have to put up with still images and a bit of narrative from yours truly.

We start out in the Twelfth Doctor’s study.

Well, sort of. You can get a vague idea of it, can’t you? I mean there are bookshelves and wine bottles and a desk of sorts, although it’s way too big. The mirror over at the far end is a teleport that leads you back to my main gallery, and the window beside it overlooks a pleasant little courtyard. But it’s the blue wall in the corner you need to look at. As entrances go it’s pretty terrible, but it’s where the magic begins.

The main console room, if you hadn’t guessed, is designed to be a variant of the one Capaldi was using. You can’t easily do round rooms in OWW, but it sort of works, particularly if you’ve got one of those fish-eye effect filters on your phone. The main problem was assembling a central column which had a sufficiently convincing time rotor, or at least something that might pass as a time rotor. I got round it by using a tree.

Dotted all around the TARDIS are little passive-aggressive exchanges between the Doctor and Nardole. I realised they’d spent about a thousand years together, so they’re basically flatmates. This first one is a nod to ‘The Pilot’.

Can I say at this point that I was really quite pleased with the corridor lighting? It isn’t often you find something in OWW that just fits what you’re trying to do, but this one really gels.

Wander a little further along and you’ll encounter the library – specifically the one Clara wanders into during ‘Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS’. You can’t see it properly here, but it’s a vast, multi-levelled thing, and thankfully nowhere near the swimming pool.

It’s no great secret that ‘Journey’ ranks among one of my least favourite episodes – seriously, it’s a great big turkey of a tale – but it did provide me with a fair bit of inspiration for this little collection. One of the silliest things about the episode was the Architectural Reconfiguration Suite (you remember, the one with the Stuff That Can Make Other Stuff), but I’ll go out on a limb – pun intended – and admit that it was quite fun to build. Lighting is very resource-hungry in OWW, but I managed to pull this off without overloading the system. You know, apart from the crashing.

Now we get to a bit that’s entirely made up. It occurred to me, fairly early on, that I really ought to put some actual art into this place, and thus I came up with the idea of the Memory Garden, a place in which the Doctor stores paintings and mementoes of his previous exploits, sort of like the Batcave. This is half Oxford college quadrangle, half National Trust driveway.

I tried to make sure that everything in this room had at least some Doctor Who connection, no matter how tenuous. This is the ‘City of Death’ pillar; Van Gogh has one all to himself.

When you examine a piece of art in the in-game AI, you have the opportunity to leave comments about it, both positive and negative. That photo on the right has a thread full of people saying “DON’T BLINK!”

‘Journey’ wasn’t the first Doctor Who story to feature extensive exploration of the TARDIS. We also saw a fair bit in ‘The Invasion of Time’, although for some reason in that story the corridors resembled an abandoned hospital. Still, wander down the stairs in my TARDIS and you’ll discover a whole basement full of nods to this particular story. Here, I’ve tried to recreate the Undergallery.

Baker didn’t always hang out in the white room. At times he favoured a secondary chamber done out in panelled wood, and that was an opportunity to try out something a little different. As I think I mentioned before, console rooms are a pain in the neck to do, because it’s extremely difficult to build a hexagonal structure, so this will have to suffice. At least the wood is convincing.

Just along the corridor from the secondary console room was the botanical garden, as seen in ‘Invasion’. There are a lot of plant and tree assets in OWW, so I made the most of them. If it looks a mess, that’s deliberate.

Perhaps the bit I’m most proud of is the swimming pool. It’s not the one we saw in ‘Journey’ – that dimly lit Olympic sized one that Clara witnesses as she’s wandering the corridors, although I daresay I could have had a go at that if I really wanted. No, this is the one in which Leela takes a plunge just before they head back to Gallifrey at the beginning of ‘Invasion of Time’. It’s a more little art deco than it was on TV, and I don’t know why the Doctor’s built a sauna at the far end, but ours is not to reason why.

I may have mentioned before that the default floor in OWW is water. So it was dead easy to build a pool: you just create it at ground level and the water is filled in for you automatically. See the mosaic on the right? I built that, tile by tile. It took ages, but as with everything else in this inconsequential little vanity project, it was totally worth it.

And that’s your lot. I’m still building in OWW, irregularly, but the latest project is going to be a long time coming, given that it’s a full scale recreation of Portmeirion, as seen in The Prisoner, right down to the plastic bubble on the beach. When it’s done, you can see it. Until then? Be seeing you.

Have I Got Whos For You (shameful catch-up edition)

You’re not supposed to apologise when you’re a politician. Dominic Cummings didn’t. Boris hasn’t. Trump certainly didn’t; I don’t think he’s capable of remorse. But I probably should: I’ve let you all down. You’ve been sitting there, on tenterhooks, awaiting something new and bloggish from the BoM crew (a crew consisting of one balding middle-aged man in a severely untidy study), and what happens? Nada. Zip. Zilch. I can picture you all, crying into your beds at night, anxiously hitting the refresh buttons on phones and tablets and sobbing at children and significant others: “ALL I WANTED WAS SOMETHING TO HELP ME THROUGH LOCKDOWN AND HE CAN’T EVEN MANAGE THAT!”

What? What do you mean you haven’t?

There have been…difficulties in the house over the last few weeks, and while we’re stumbling towards a temporary and uneasy equilibrium I’ve kind of had my hands full. And on the occasions they’ve been empty, I’ve been drained. Lockdown seems to have done that to people; we’ve all slowed down a bit. Perhaps I’d be able to cope with this better had we not been in the throes of a pandemic; there’s nothing better for destroying your motivation to do stuff than the knowledge that you more or less have to do it because you can’t go out.

That’s not to say I haven’t been producing content. There’s loads of it, and it’s all stacked up like an M20 Brexit run. Shall we clean out the pipes?

We start in early January, with the news that archaeologists in Pompeii had dug out the remains of what appeared to be a Roman fast food stand, complete with serving holes and some questionable artwork.

I’d love to visit Pompeii. I’d love to visit anywhere, come to think of it; you don’t appreciate small local jollies until that’s all you can do. Last May was Thomas’ birthday: we drove out to East Hendred, not too far from here, and walked through a small patch of woodland. At any other time of year it would have been a mundane afternoon out. In the midst of a pandemic, it was an adventure.

—

There’s always TV, of course. For example, early February saw the Super Bowl, which led to the obligatory Photoshop.

—

While the rest of the UK languishes inside, Boris is spotted riding his bike in Olympic Park. How do we know this?

Meanwhile in the TARDIS: Exhausted, disheartened and under-equipped, Rory is in desperate need of assistance as he battles to save the life of his patient. Fortunately the Doctor and Amy are on hand with a solution.

Of course, the big news so far this year (I use the word ‘news’) loosely concerns the rumours about Jodie Whittaker’s imminent departure, with ‘a source’ leaking the announcement to the Mirror. The BBC have neither confirmed nor denied this information, which is a euphemism for ‘it’s probably true’. It would certainly fit the mould: three series and that’s your lot, it seems, and I wonder what would happen if Whittaker were to actually regenerate in front of a companion who clearly loves her, or who is if nothing else becoming excessively clingy. If nothing else it’d be a bit of a laugh.

Say what you like about the Mirror, but they have form: they knew about the shift to Sundays, they knew about Walsh and Cole, and they clearly have a man on the inside, even if that man turns out to be Chibnall. But until it turns out to actually be the truth, it’s probably best if we treat such rumours with a heavy dose of salt.

Speaking of salt – well, no. Not salt, per se, but Weetabix toppings. In one of the least likely pairings since fish fingers and…well, you know, Weetabix have teamed up with Heinz to offer what is for many of us a frankly unorthdox breakfast solution. I’m fine, I don’t eat the stuff anyway, but it’s caused a furore over social media, largely because we’re in the middle of lockdown and there’s sod all else to do; not even a field trip.

—

We’re told to work from home, which is fine unless you’re a freelance piano teacher and your pupils don’t actually want to have online lessons, or your internet connection is rubbish, or you happen to be a cat.

But however bad things have been, chances are you’re having a better time of it than Donald Trump. Having spectacularly failed to mount the coup he’d allegedly been inciting – despite the best efforts of armed protesters who stormed the Capitol – the 45th President of the United States found his options running out and his supporters waning (well, some of them) and ultimately he had no choice but to slink off with another Donald who’d found himself suddenly removed from office.

It gets worse. Next thing you know the public at large is demanding Trump’s removal from Home Alone 2, a cameo filmed in one of his hotels and which he allegedly bullied the production team in order to secure. It rarely gets played in network broadcasts these days – it’s easier, I suppose, to simply avoid the headache – but the stills are out there on the internet, lingering like smears in the bathtub, and it seems the planned course of action from the clicktivists is to saturate Google with Photoshopped images that show Macaulay Culkin in conversation with someone else, so as to bump the displaced President down the search results.

Oh well. In for a penny.

But perhaps Trump’s biggest disaster was the loss of his Twitter account – a potent and powerful tool that enabled him to spread false information, rally his troops and (if nothing else) stay in the headlines of a press who hung on every misleading, poorly-spelled word. The permanent suspension that eventually hit in January was too little, too late, but you can’t entirely blame Twitter for not taking action until it was certain they wouldn’t be hit with an executive order demanding they cease and desist all operation immediately (which is, let’s face it, exactly what he would have done). As it stands, I’ve heard he took some rather drastic steps in an attempt to get himself reinstated.

—

We’ll finish with some of those Bernie memes. You know. The ones that got everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Who knew the simple act of sitting cross-legged on a chair wearing a pair of mittens could have such a gargantuan impact on web traffic? What happened to us all to make us lose our minds like this? And yes, I’m using the third person quite deliberately, because this really was a gift to those of us who do this sort of thing more or less daily. And thus I made a few myself.

See you again soon for more silliness, and possibly even something with a bit of substance to it. But don’t hold your breath…

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 (generally vague edition)

It’s a beautiful morning here in lockdown city – and, having pulled an all-nighter, here’s the Doctor waiting patiently for the Epic Games store to refresh so he can download GTA 5.

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You will have watched the Prime Minister’s announcement on Monday with…well, I don’t know. There was a lot of conflicting information and I was thoroughly incensed by it. Not so much the confusion over whether or not you’re supposed to go to work – it’s a moot point in our house – but the denial of culpability, a broadcast that was intentionally vague not because we have an idiot in Downing Street but because we have someone who is in fact very clever, and who knows that if he words things correctly he’s off the hook.

Let me (or, rather, let someone else) put it this way:

Sir Humphrey: We’ve issued a clarification of the slogan, Prime Minister.

Jim Hacker: Good. Will we be withdrawing the campaign?

Sir Humphrey: No, Prime Minister, it’s important that the message gets out.

Jim Hacker: What, even if people don’t understand it?

Sir Humphrey: Especially if they don’t understand it. That way, if the restrictions are too stringent and cause economic problems then we can say our message supported relaxing them, and if they’re too lax, and cause a second wave, then we can say our clarification clearly said the rules weren’t being relaxed.

Jim Hacker: So the purpose of the clarification is to put us in the clear?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, Prime Minister.

“Yes,” I can hear the Tory supporters chanting, “but the British public need to be free to make up their own minds! They don’t deserve to be treated like children!”. To which I will respond with “Boaty McBoat Face”, and drop the mic.

Anyway, the only real response from lunacy like this is to mock it, so here’s a deleted still from ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’.

—

The slogan itself was memed to death, mostly with pop lyrics (most of which were very funny, although I do wish I’d got to ‘Hot Dog / Jumping Frog / Alberquerque’ before someone else). There were also nods to Father Ted (‘Down with this sort of thing!’ / ‘Careful now’ / ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’). Me, I spent ages thinking about how you could spin it into a Doctor Who reference before coming up with this one:

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Then there are the alert slogans, which had no sense of scale or timing but which were nonetheless self-explanatory. At least they are now I’ve put Daleks in them.

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Oh, and there’s the alert scale; we’re currently at amber, and I do wonder if when we go up to red someone’s going to say “Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.”

“What about radiation?” someone asked on Twitter. “Or plague?” I told them I’d run out of numbers.

There has been some actual Doctor Who news this week, as Moffat admits in an interview that he’s always thought of Colin Salmon’s antivirus character from series 4 as a future Doctor, living in the library computer to keep River Song company; it’s utter bollocks of course, particularly as it’s only come to light now, but I suppose after series 12 anything’s possible.

—

The warm weather last weekend brought out the crowds, of course, with beaches flooded with tourists, although some people were at least willing to enforce social distancing.

Elsewhere the nation was out in force to celebrate V.E. Day, as thousands of households marked the defeat of the Axis with street parties and mass singalongs, of a kind not seen since the last spate of street parties to celebrate the Queen having some sort of birthday or something. I’m not one to kill the mood but there was something almost jingoistic about the furore of national pride, given that it was marked in the Daily Mail as ‘A Victory over Europe’ (possibly a typo, but almost certainly a Freudian Slip) and that in the midst of waving union flags and shouting about taking our country back people seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t a British victory, it was an Allied victory, and that we wouldn’t have won it without the Russians and the Yanks. And I’m really not sure how I feel about marking every sodding anniversary with another blowout, even if this one had to be observed from behind closed doors. I do Remembrance Sunday, because it’s important we mark it somehow, but…well, let’s just say that this wasn’t really about the Second World War, was it? Nonetheless, I accept I am a minority view, and I share my views with people who will understand them, as well as occasionally dumping them on a blog no one reads.

Of course, not all of it went smoothly, as evidenced by this screen grab from Katharine Jenkins’ performance outside Buckingham Palace.

—

You do wonder what on Earth Churchill would have made of it all, although even if he were around to ask, I can’t help thinking our questions might have taken a different tack.

“Come on, be reasonable. It’s a bank holiday and I’ve not been outside in weeks.”

Have I Got Whos For You (Coronavirus edition)

Yes, well, I think two weeks of radio silence is long enough. I spent quite a lot of it building a TARDIS-themed virtual art gallery (coming soon to a WordPress feed near you!) and rolling my eyes at people on Facebook who still have no idea who Brendan actually was, or are convinced that Chibnall’s shat all over the legacy of Doctor Who, or who think the Master is lying, or any combination of the above. That’s until we all started talking about getting coughs instead; I’m frightened for my elderly father and the schools are about to shut, but at least the moral outrage over Series 12 is dying down.

Anyway: there are quite a few unrealised blog posts lying around in my drafts folder, and seeing as we’re all going to be stuck at home for the forseeable future you might as well have something to read. But before we get to any of them, we really ought to do a news update.

First, there’s the fallout from Rishi Sunak’s publicity phot, as a certain other high-ranking politician with dodgy scruples asks if you would like the good tea or the bad tea.

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Over on the Naismith Estate, Max Von Sydow is upset that he and Timothy Dalton have both turned up at the Time Lords’ New Year’s Eve party wearing the same dress.

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And it turns out some members of the public have an unorthodox approach towards celebrating No Smoking day.

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Secret recordings reveal the real culprit behind Prince Harry’s prank call from Greta Thunberg.

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At the BBC, there are internal complaints that the new sanitisation procedure is borderline excessive.

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Donna Noble regrets not packing her own bog roll.

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Sometimes washing your hands isn’t quite enough.

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And on the streets of Cardiff it seems that not everyone is taking government guidelines seriously.

“Jesus. Clara. SOCIAL DISTANCING.”

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.”

 

Have I Got Whos For You (Star Wars-tinted interlude)

We open with a deleted scene from ‘Cold War’.

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You always wondered why they favoured close-ups for that scene, didn’t you? Well, now we know.

I was up at six this morning scrubbing through the Rise of the Skywalker trailer for stuff to Photoshop. Heaven knows there was no other reason. I was about to say I can’t remember when Star Wars trailers got so dull, but actually I can: it was the moment they released the full trailer for The Last Jedi, which was to all intents and purposes a direct copy of the one they did for The Force Awakens, and the moment that you realised that not only had they decided to emulate the teasers, they were also doing the same for everything else. I know I probably shouldn’t moan about this but there is something very lazy about the whole process: this idea that because something works you do it again, in exactly the same way, purely because people expect it.

So in no particular order, you have…ominous voiceovers! People glaring through the blades of ignited lightsabers! Running through forests / corridors / the snow! Wide shots of battle fleets! Cruise ships! Spacecraft flying through explosions! Ambiguous shots of first generation characters who might be killed off! General tedium! Next time, can we have a little information on the actual story? I’m not suggesting the entire story – the world does not need another Double Jeopardy – but something, anything that the gossip rags can talk about with actual substance, rather than combing Reddit threads for fan theory. God the rumour mill is tedious this time around. If it’s not mind games about Rey’s parentage or the redemption of Kylo Ren, it’s people trying to decide whether C-3PO is going to turn evil or sacrifice himself for the rest of the crew, or possibly both. At the same time.

They also talk about Matt Smith, of course – whom we assume was cast as the Emperor, although there was some fun to be had going back through the trilogy working out who else he might be playing.

—

What else has been going on? Well, the fallout about whether Doctor Who has become too politically correct continues in earnest, with the Real Fans on one side and the True Whovians (I leave it to you, dear reader, to determine which is which) on the other, and the likes of yours truly in the middle – wondering whether history is destined to repeat itself, wondering when “bad writing” became a cop-out soundbite for describing something you didn’t particularly enjoy without actually making the effort to explain why, and also wondering how it’s possible for a bunch of human beings to be so obnoxious and generally shitty to each other about a wretched television programme.

—

I mean God almighty. Still, on the upside, it’s something to read while you’re trying to circumnavigate Occupied London.

“How are we supposed to get through that lot?”

I’m not sure how I feel about Extinction Rebellion. I’m not sure how I feel about Greta Thunberg either, to be honest, but I suppose that’s the point – just as E.R. wouldn’t exactly be doing anything of consequence if we didn’t find them a nuisance and a pain. They’re getting out there and doing stuff, and perhaps that’s better than not doing anything, which is what I do. There are conversations to be had about their use of Starbucks and McDonalds, rather than the home-grown organic fair trade produce I presume people expected them to be carrying in those cotton rucksacks – either you can criticise them for double standards, or you can applaud them for doing what they can and acknowledge that everybody’s human, with the possible exception of some residents of South Dakota. I tend to veer between one extreme and the other, according to how generous I’m feeling. Still, it’s better than the Mercedes van-driving idiot who appeared on Good Morning Britain dressed as a vegetable – and who then, having already crossed the line between effective parody and preposterous nonsense while most of us were still in bed, proceeded to drag out a banana from his pocket and pretend it was a phone, in a scene worthy of Bert and Ernie. Now there’s a Rubbish Monster waiting to happen.

“Yeah, the red one next to the – hold on a second. Ah, Doctor. We meet again.”

To take our minds off all this, Emily and I elected to catch up on Holby City – we’d watched the episode where the plucky Scottish nurse was trapped in the holiday cottage with baited breath, and then lost interest when it sputtered out in a disappointed sigh as things failed to resolve the way we hoped (i.e. with a corpse). Here’s a fun fact: if you unravel the small intestine in any adult male, it will stretch to precisely the same length as this ludicrous Chloe and Evan story arc, where the locum doctor followed the predictable path from ex-boyfriend to current squeeze to husband to demented abuser within the space of a few weeks, before finally meeting his death when the respitory machine malfunctioned and Kate Stewart’s son left it just a little too late before telling anybody. Suffice it to say the bastard had it coming – he was a slippery customer and would almost certainly have weaseled his way out of things, as we were told in a clumsy monologue that reinforced, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to a walnut, precisely how justified Cameron had been in his breaking of the Hippocratic oath. Evan was a nasty piece of work – a plot device used for issue highlighting, which is always Holby at its most annoying – and he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that meddling kid.

Things are back to normal now, except Sacha Levy appears to have gained the ability to teleport across from the hospital entrance to the taxi rank, completely unobserved, as long as the cameras aren’t on him. Weeping Angel, anyone?

—

It was Emily wot noticed. That should probably go on record, because she gets huffy when I don’t acknowledge her as the source for these things. (It reminds me of a paper that arrived in the proofreading pile some years ago: the first draft read “Professor ____ also acknowledges his wife, H.C. _____, who read through the original submission”. When the corrected proof came back from the authors, the final paragraph read “Professor ____ also acknowledges his wife, H.C. _____, who read through the original submission and provided many helpful amendments”.)

And she has been brilliant these past months: has that been written down yet? She is so much better than she realises: the rock and the anchor and the port in the storm and all the other cliches you can think of – but a cliche doesn’t invalidate truth. She is the best of both of us, and in a world where everything is hazy and grey and mad, she will carry you home.

Seriously. I could do this all day.

The One with the Friends Titles

In many ways it feels like yesterday. That sense of envy, the homage to stressed-out Village life (capital intentional) where people are happy and unhappy at the same time, where humdrum jobs and complicated (or non-existent) love lives are made bearable by the people you hang out with. I was almost seventeen and it seemed such a carefree way to live: these twenty-somethings who existed in a hubbub of late films and spontaneous baking sessions and endless cups of coffee. I had just found, in the real world, an uneasy point of entry into a peer group in which I never really belonged and in which I was, for the most part, an outsider: a Gunther to everybody else’s Ross and Rachel, surrounded by ostensibly lovely people who would never actually call me.

But when you’re that age recognition of any sort is important, and you start to draw parallels. During more reflective moments, in evening conversations conducted over cider or Grolsch in our local pub, I would compare myself to Ross – heartfelt, sincere and slightly pathetic Ross. The analogy worked: Ross really was a bit of a dickhead. I didn’t see it at the time, seeing as I only recognised what how awful I was years down the line. Still, Phoebe was always my favourite – good old Phoebe, who was unable to think a sentence through in her head before saying it out loud (“There isn’t always time!”) and whose songs alone made the show worth watching, if only to detract from the tedium that was the Ross and Rachel love story. They wound up having a baby (by accident) and settling down, presumably in Scarsdale where the schools are good. We don’t know. I still don’t think I’ve seen that last series; the novelty had long worn off and my life had moved on.

It’s become fashionable to sneer at Friends, to dump the word ‘problematic’ into discussion as if that covered the multitude of readings: as if it is as simple as calling it homophobic (it isn’t), fat-shaming (guilty) and disproportionately white (so were the social lives of most people watching it). As ever, things are more complicated and as ever, the internet isn’t interested in grey, not least when black and white looks so much prettier. As far as I’m concerned Friends lost some of its sheen once it became markedly less Jewish, at least in terms of the humour it was producing, and when the characters disappeared up their own backsides in order to become stereotypical parodies of themselves, instead of rounded people: in other words, taking what the audience found funny and building the entire show around it, rather than writing something that could actually be called interesting. But I had this conversation a couple of years back, if you can call ‘conversation’ an eight-hundred word pot-stirrer I did for Metro that actually did reasonable traffic, not least because there were a number of people willing to haul me over the coals for it – or, as a particularly cynical American wrote on Twitter, ‘The one where the straight white man gets to have his say’.

What’s left? A series of eight stills from Doctor Who, accompanied by (hideously in)appropriate Friends episode titles. I have eschewed the obvious ones – hence, The One With The Flashback isn’t there, simply because it wouldn’t be funny. The rest of it sort of works. I don’t watch Friends anymore, for the same reason I don’t re-watch Doctor Who: there is too much TV out there I haven’t seen yet. But it  was a big part of my life for years, and it would be churlish to deny it that sense of cultural importance, at least on a deeply personal level: programmes like this are a comfort blanket, a sense of reassurance, a Friday spent in familiar company even if the conversation is only ever one way. It would be nice if we could just view it as that, instead of having all this other baggage. It would be nice, but I don’t think it’s going to happen, which is why I tend to keep out of it these days.

Anyway, those images.

How you doin’…?

Have I Got Whos For You (Twelfth Doctor Special)

Unposted meme count is currently 126 and counting, which means it’s time for another bonus edition: stuff I haven’t got round to uploading yet, loosely themed simply because there are so many languishing in that folder that they’ve developed their own tribe system. Today it’s the turn of the Twelfth Doctor – the one whose hair became more and more difficult to Photoshop the longer he stuck around (God alone knows what would have happened if they’d got him to commit to a fourth series). There’s something very stern and serious about him, of course, which makes him the perfect Doctor to mesh with children’s programmes. And in many cases here, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The last time we did one of these, it was Thirteenth Doctor related and I got called a ‘retarded Jodie shill’ by an idiot. (That wasn’t all he said, but I blocked some of his other comments.) I suspect there will be no such remittance from today’s outing. Well, hopefully.

 

First, this. Appropriate, given what day it is.

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Dr Venkman. Dr Stantz. Dr Spengler. Dr Smith.

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Presented without apology.

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“I suppose you’ll be wanting me to help you out of there in a moment.”

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During a little downtime, the Twelfth Doctor and Darth Vader recreate the Hand of God.

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“Are you sure we’ve never met?”

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Doctor Who: Face The Ravenclaw.

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I can’t believe I didn’t do this one years back.

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“We’re not touching that with a barge pole.”

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One day, in Teletubbyland.

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“Yeah, tell you what, we’ll take it back to the yard, see if we can recycle any of it.”

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Well, it sort of works.

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“I think we’d better be heading back to the TARDIS, Bill.”

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And finally.

Tune in next week: same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.