This Blog In September 2001: Day Seven.

Life Talking to a commuter buddy today about her siblings, it occurred to me I've never really faced up to being an only child. She was talking so candidly about her problems and all I could say was 'I don't really understand the dynamic' - which is true, no matter how artificial it sounds. When you're an only child you assume that your brothers and sisters would be your best friends - there when you need them, always someone to talk to. But over the years I've realised that actually there can be a lot of pain and heartache involved. You'd end up loving and hating them for the same reasons. It's easy perhaps to say that such and such a friend is like a brother or sister to me, but I've found that no one can be that close - once the family front door is closed there isn't much you can say or do. This essay seems to have grasped most of the main points. I do feel like I have had to make more of an effort in social situations - I can be introverted and a bit of a loner if I need to be (and lately, well...) - and I have met only children who find social interactivity really difficult. But for me it's a default setting - I much prefer the company of others - you can learn more about the world from talking to someone than reading a book at times - which is exactly what happened today when I spoke to that commuter buddy. QED.

Music Leona Naess 'Comatised' feels like an album you've heard a hundred times. We have hints of Beth Orton, Pal Shazar and Bjork. No Alanis histrionics here, though. This album feels like a letter to and describing some nebulous lover: "He fills the room like champagne / into an empty glass / as they slighter to him like snakes / through the grass / his stance is quiet with grace/ before they throw him / into the rat race / and he turns to me to say / I'm a lonely buy / Even with the life, I asked for." This isn't a great album - only one or two tracks ('Lazy Days', 'Northern Star') stand out. But then I'm sitting still as I listen. I've a feeling as I squat behind that plastic table on the train to work tomorrow it's calming influence will make me positive for the day ahead. What is it with that title?

Food Just a quick link to Jill's Gradely Scran - the most addictive food site I've ever visited. This works so well because the receipes are easy to follow yet far from simplistic. Mr. Hyperbole has now left the building...

This Blog In September 2001: Day Six.

Wish list So yes, I've done it. A wishlist. It seems no weblog should be without one - so as you glance to your left you'll see it nesting. Creating the list was strange feeling - as though even more than the weblog we have a straight to the point description of my interests. I'm not sure if this is 'a good thing'. Since every list seems to have a 'star prize' in there is 'The Stanley Kubrick Collection' if only because he looked a bit like my Dad.

Quote "What if you were in the queue and there was no one else there? [spoken by a work colleague]

This Blog In September 2001: Day Five.

People My paradoxical personality is wrapping itself around the Kate Winslet story. I'm in a spin because I hate celebrity gossip - most of it lies or statistics. But here is someone I genuinely like as an actress and a person - and it's hard to see someone go through this kind of thing in the glare of the media. Rather like Minnie Driver, Winslet is an actress first - anything else is a by-product. We have a girl who has appeared in one of the biggest (although not greatest) films of all time. Yet decided not to even try and build on the position (realising a once in a lifetime moment) and made a string of quite personal small films of greater quality and depth which in the stretch of a career she is more likely to be remembered for (something co-star Leo would do well to remember). I mean you've got love the fact that after Titanic one of the only TV shows she 'did' was 'Ready Steady Cook'. Libby Brooks insightful article in 'The Guardian' today uses slightly longer words to make the same point: "Kate Winslet has always stood apart from the celebrity panoply of talents, teases and tragic heroines. A redoubtable actor, she radiates a fearless emotional honesty in person as well as in performance. Intelligent, immoderate and inconsistent, she calls a spade a bloody shovel." *

Book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film is a string of essays describing the problems involved in adapting what is essentially a theatrical form to cinema. It's an academic work and so the writing is quite dry at times and because we have essays we have repetition - how many times you can write about Olivier's 'Richard III'. There are three essays of note. 'Videos and its paradoxes' looks at the use of video as a study aid, and how the productions on show can colour the student's view of the play - so Anthony Hopkins characterisation of Othello in the BBC production is wildly different to Lawrence Fishburne's in the recent film - neither is necessarily correct, but the student might not make that connection. 'Filming Shakespeare's history: three films of Richard III' offers the best and most honest review of Pacino's 'Looking for Richard' I've read, treating the film on it's own merits and not as a version of the actual play. Finally, 'Flamboyant realist: Kenneth Branagh' again tries to re-dress the critical mauling his films have been subjected to - there really isn't anything like the four hour 'Hamlet'. The one disappointment is 'Shakespeare's cinematic offshoots' which looks at adaptations which are re-imaginings of the text. It's cursory, anodyne and misses out 'In The Bleak Midwinter' and 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead'. Why?

Games Unlike, seemingly the whole entire rest of the country, my first computer was an Acorn Electron. No 'Mony On The Run' or 'Horace Goes Skiing' for me - my favourites were 'Chuckie Egg' and 'Snapper'. So I've gone positively cock-a-hoop over The Stairway To Hell, the site of an Electron emulator. There isn't anything better than watching my Pentium dissolve into the familiar black screen with Acorn sign. As well as images of every game imaginable, there is the option of plugging a tape deck into your sound card and loading games straight from cassette....not that Sphinx Adventure was ever worth that wait...

* Sigh.  I had planned to keep comments to a minimum, but it's important to note I was not stalking this woman.

This Blog In September 2001: Day Four.

Commuter Life The most striking person I know lives around the corner from me. I know not her name or where she is from. I've heard her speak but once. She is a girl out of time. She's modelled herself on the paintings of Rossetti, her red hair tied up in a bun, her skin a milky white. She wears flowery dresses, blue cardigans and a velvet coat of emerald. She carries a crochet shopping bag. She's breath-taking as she weaves about the modern world, amongst the business suits and tracksuits, seemingly unconcerned by pollution and concrete. I saw her on the train the other day and it seemed incongruous that she would be travelling anywhere. To me she always just seems to be just there - and that's where I hope she'll stay. *

feeling listless classics I watched this Metafilter thread develop in real time. I was amazed to find this page anywhere. The gentleman involved has decided that widescreen films actually censor the picture. Not a serious point, but he goes at it hammer and nails. So I could not post it to Mefi - and found out actually how many people visit the blue screen heaven. When I initially found the page, the counter (now sadly broken) read 41 hits. By the time the Mefiers had been at it - well you can see... I'd keep popping back every so often after the thread was long gone, and it eventually reached over 5000 - before mysteriously returning to zero... **

* Sigh.  I had planned to keep comments to a minimum, but it's important to note I was not stalking this woman.  It was supposed to be a kind of "slice of life" piece.

** Of course I now know that Mr Lettershlocking was partially correct.  Some widescreen films on VHS & DVD did matte out the top and bottom of the image (see the sterling work of YouTuber Outside The Frame).  The flipper DVD of Top Gun literally does this, with the widescreen version just cropping the top and bottom of the image on the full screen side of the disc and still not fulfilling the director's vision (or whatever) as was the ambition elsewhere.

This Blog In September 2001: Day Three.

Time A bit previous with this - but it's September. Already. In the year 2001. I remember as anyone whose left full time education will, what a milestone this month was. Never mind your birthday, as you entered your school or college you were one year older and you felt it. The signs were obvious. Each year you were drifting further backwards in the assembly hall (until, if you went to my school, you were on a balcony, hidden from view). You'd look out across the school yard and see even more people younger than you. Suddenly you found that the subjects you were follow would eventually have some bearing on the rest of your life. At college the work would become progressively harder, and there would be more of it. Then after over a decade and a half - it stopped - and September became just another month. Until this time. This time I realised I'm going to be twenty-seven in two months. I'll officially be old. Or what I thought was an old person when I was eight.

Review! The Brit-com Coupling's second series begins tonight. Unfairly referred to as a rip-off of 'Friends' (mostly by me) the first series went from a shaky start to a must see programme. More likely to take risks than the American show (and at times much funnier), other than the premise of three men & three women talking about sex, the writer Steven Moffat takes the format in another direction. The episode everyone talks about features a mis-understanding regarding the advances or not of a girl who speaks Hebrew. As Mark Lawson writes in The Guardian: "The point about Moffat is that, unusually among television sitcom writers, he works in the genre of farce. Critics have often suggested that farce is impossible to write in a contemporary setting because the plot motor of the form - the need to lie to prevent loss of face or exposure - is implausible in a society which has ever less sense of shame." This was a stumbling block Moffat encountered with the great lost sit-com of the Eighties, 'Joking Apart' - which at one point played out the classic plotline of having three different lovers in different rooms - something Oscar Wilde was a dab hand at. Let's hope this new series gets the airing it deserves... (Update! Just saw the first episode - gives a whole new meaning to 'I'd give an arm and a leg...')

Liverpool life I thought I'd leave you today with something I've always noticed but which is never referred to. One of the great pubs in Liverpool is 'The Pilgrim', close to the Anglican Cathedral. An old style drinking hole, it's only concessions to modern life are adverts for Red Bull all over the walls and a massive new jukebox graced with recent chart hits. Patrons sit in booths at tables covered in mosaics and they cook one of the greatest English breakfasts known to man. The brick walls are broken up by giant mirrors. At some time other other an artist, possibly at the local art college, has been commissioned to draw giant pencil drawing of 'The Beatles' at various moments of their career and these have been glued to the mirrors with clear Fablon. So we have the Lonely Hearts Club Band; John and Yoko; Paul and Linda; and at the centre, the four on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' - only actually, when you take closer look - it's John, Ringo, George and for some unaccountable reason, the Shakepearean actor Derek Jacobi in a Beatles wig. Take a look next time you're in there and wonder if that artist was watching re-runs of 'I Claudius' at the time...

This Blog In September 2001: Day Two

Sculpture The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds is an exhibition and study venue dedicated to three dimensional art objects. For me, it's one of those places I'll always have a connection to, not just because I worked there, not just because this was the place which cemented my interest in art, but also what it represented for some of the time at university. If my first year was messy, the second was even worse - the house I lived in was from hell, full of people I didn't get along with at all (stories to come you can assume). But when I knew I couldn't go home, there was one place I could go which was a place of calm - away from them, away from study, away from the world. Even on the days I wasn't working there I knew I could drop in, see my friends, and feel the world fall away. This was the place where art first made me cry * and where I went to my first private view.

One of the strengths of the gallery is the connection to artists. I've always been more interested in the production of art, rather than the subject itself, so I was always impressed by the fact the institute could get world renowned sculptors to visit to talk about their work. At the end of this month, their new exhibition 'Close Encounters: The Sculptor's Studio in the Age Of The Camera' looks at photographic representations of the artist's studio. Such pictures can be earth shattering - to see what are probably some of the most famous works of art in one space together before they disappeared to the four corners - some of them before ink has dried on the sketches or the varnish has dried on the carvings. If ever there was a show to get me back to Leeds this is it...[via The Henry Moore Institute Newsletter]

* Georgina Starr's Crying is still one of my favourite pieces, a devastatingly naked burst of emotion at a time when such things couldn't simply be posted online.  Starr recently posted on Instagram about how a gallery displaying the piece created an uncanny AI replica.  She says, "The replicant disturbs me, like peering into a broken looking glass."  I've also just noticed she actually quotes from my original blogpost on her website's review page.  

This Blog In September 2001: Day One

Life  With the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 upcoming, I thought I'd repost what was on this blog exactly twenty-five years ago this month, warts and all.  When these were written, I would have been twenty-six, old enough to know better but not old enough to understand why I should know better.  At the time, there was also a "Blog of the Day" feature but I'll remove any which aren't still online to retain the writer's privacy (even if they're on the Wayback Machine).  Some links will also be lightly updated with a more contemporary source if necessary (such as linking to a song on YouTube).

Erm... When I was a student (mid-nineties) I knew two things. The first was that by the year 2000 my life would be complete. The second was that club music in all it's forms was the work of the devil to draw the populace away from real music. And I pretty much kept that opinion for much of the rest of the decade. Then last year something strange happened. I was standing in record shop and the DJ began to play 'GrooveJet' by Spiller featuring Sophie. Here was a record almost designed to talk me around to the Ibiza way of thinking. A dance record with a good lyric and melody of sorts which also had the kind of structure I'd never heard before. I walked to the counter and bought the thing straight away - and listened to it five times as soon as I was home.

My distrust of dance music still exists, much of it seeming too easy for words. There are the exceptions - the crossover music which I now feel myself not only appreciating but going positively radio gaga over. I'm becoming particular impressed by R&B. During my long and delayed train journey home tonight, I was welcome of the company of Mary J Blige and her 1997 album, 'share my world'. I should not like this album.  But here I am, listening to it again whilst I write this. I want to gas on about her vocal range (extraordinary) or the production (as you'd expect, with glimpses of genius) And as I 'groove' along to the track 'round and round' I've come to a startling conclusion, and believe me, this is something of a revelation...there isn't one type of music I don't like....

Actually that may not be true. I'd run a mile from Kenny Rogers, James Galway and in fact most people with beards. And I'll draw the line at boy bands. And Atomic Kitten (mention number three on this weblog - six to go possibly).* But when it comes to everything else, I think I can - if not rave - at least understand. There isn't probably anything better at one o'clock in the morning having had many beers than throwing your weight around S Club 7's 'Reach for the Stars'. The rush of a Slipnot concert will be extreme. And quiet stylings of Vangelis lead you into believing that a calmer world is possible. The only boundary in music should be quality...

Interview!  Nelly Furtado interviewed by Caroline Sullivan of 'The Guardian': "She begins chirpily and stays that way, answering even facetious questions with a desire to provide whatever's required. "So you're like a bird? What kind?" I inquire. "A seagull," she says seriously. "I was really inspired by a great book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull [the drippy new age classic by Richard Bach]." Journalists find it difficult to get a handle on Nelly - she can't be clumped in with Alanis, Christina, J-Lo or Tori because she's all four, with a hint of Natalie - and looks unnervingly like Courtney.

* This is what passed as a running gag in the early days.  There have been a few since then mostly in relation to the Sugababes.

Odeon London Tottenham Court Road

For Toy Story 5.  Cinema Treasures charts the fortunes of this spot, its path to Odeon not too dissimilar to lot of high street screens.  Opening in 1981 as the Classic 1-2-3 Central Cross, it was taken over "by the Cannon Group and it was re-named Cannon on 6th December 1985. It was taken over by MGM Theatres on 6th March 1992. Taken over by the newly formed ABC Cinemas chain on 19th July 1996. Merged with the Odeon Cinemas Group, the cinemas were renamed Odeon on November 10, 2000."  

Screen Two is a typically wedge like auditorium of the kind which happens when a newer cinema is trying to pack in as many screens as possible in the real estate they've bought.  Still warm outside, the air-conditioning was cranked up so high I shivered.  A few talkers led to me moving a couple of times.  The usher was kind enough to give me two cups of water because I clearly looked dehydrated after my adventures in Greenwich.

In the corridor to and from the screens, there are photographs from film premiers in 2014, presumably from Leicester Square, which is a bit strange considering that isn't here.

Photos from other franchise releases did feature, but most of them showed someone who'd since been cancelled or should have been.

Odeon Greenwich

For Moana (the live action remake).  Took the cable car across the Thames and walked half an hour in the scorching hot weather.  When the back of my neck started to burn the only thing I had was a spare t-shirt.  A red one.  With X-Wings on the front.  Avert your eyes.

There's your treat for this blog's twenty-fifth birthday in a few days.  I was just starting to grow out my beard ready for The Odyssey to add some light haptic understanding of the culture in Nolan's epic.  I should probably buy a hat or remember where my towel is.  

This colosseum shaped edifice doesn't look like a native Odeon build and sure enough, as Cinema Treasures explains, it was originally a UCI site, part of The Filmworks sub-chain.  It hasn't changed much comparing their old photo to this close-up I took on the day and Google Street View.  The Pizza Hut is still open.

As you can see this is one of the locations which is still Fanatical About Film because it would be probably quite awkward to replace the sign.  Having missed the midday lieMAX screening, I settled for the next available and once again on this adventure found myself in a completely empty auditorium but for myself.  Due to the incredibly hot weather, the aircon was cranked up inside and since I'd only worn a t-shirt, I froze.  Had to deal with a low end buzzing sound from the speakers throughout which I mentioned to an usher at the start but wasn't dealt with.  The manager had apparently been informed but did nothing/forgot.

Doctor Who The TV Movie (The Target Novelisation)

Books  Probably an odd choice of reading given, hands gesticulating, everything.  But between catching up with the Eighth Doctor audios, spending a hundred odd hours playing Star Wars Jedi Survivor, work and life, I've fallen behind on the books.  This felt like a good way to get back in the habit, what with it being a novelisation of a story I only rewatched a couple of weeks ago thanks to the gorgeous 4K restoration and a book I've most read before, albeit over twenty years ago.

Looking back at my first review from back in 2005, originally written for the Behind The Sofa group blog but archived here, it's noticeable how little my writing style has really changed in the ensuing decades, apart from describing them as Time Lords rather than timelords, something which was drilled into me pretty quickly by friend of the blog Graham Kibble-White.  I like the ending of the review although it fails to notice the reference to the last time Doctor Who went off air in 1989.

Most of my opinions still stand although my understanding of how the Seventh Doctor "dies" is clearer thanks to the film itself and this book.  It's not the gunshots which kill him, they remove the bullets which should lead to a relatively straightforward recovery.  It's the surgeons including Grace, misunderstanding the Doctor's anatomy, that his increased heart rate is due to having two hearts, a fact which is explained away in their heads by a double exposure on the x-ray.  It's the probe which Grace pushes into his body which kills him.  I am an idiot.

As Gary Russell says in the new preface, this TARGET edition allowed him to put back in some of the material which his editors in 1996 suggested be removed because this was supposed to be a bold new era for the franchise and embellish in other ways.  We get to enjoy the details of the Doctor's mission to retrieve the Master's remains (the younger version of me is very pleased).  When Chang Lee opens the Eye of Harmony, we're given descriptions of all of the previous Doctors rather than the glossing over from the previous version.  

Not only that, but he's embellished a bit too with concepts which have only become spin-off continuity more recently: It's clearly President Romana who gives the Doctor his mission to retrieve the Master's remains.  When the Doctor considers Ace's fate, A Charitable Earth is mentioned tying it in to the lockdown era continuity around his former companion.  There's plenty more listed on the TARDIS Wikia page although which says they're deviations from the film but seem more like someone's done a line-by-line comparison between the two books.

Between the TV Movie itself and the various novelisations, which is canonical?  All of them, none of them, who's to say?  People have all kinds of fanilisations of how continuity works in Doctor Who, including Gary himself at various points, that the TV series is one universe, the audios another, the books another.  But I'm a completist.  It's all canonical.  But it's also constantly in flux so in some versions of history the Doctor is half-human on his mother's side and in others, as portrayed in this book for example, he's clearly joking.  

Placement: LOL.

We Need To Talk About Kara Zor-El.

Film  Just briefly.  There are typically two indicators that I'm not really enjoying a movie: either (a) I fall asleep, or (b) my film studies brain cells kick in and start looking for flaws. Supergirl (2026) currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 57%, which, even given what's about to appear below, still seems like a particularly rough score. It's six percent below The Marvels, a score that should arguably be 73%, given that you generally have to automatically add 10% to any RT aggregate if it's an action feature with a female protagonist, as the predominantly male review corps doesn't tend to like that sort of thing. Ballerina is an 85%, Salt is a 71%, and Cleaner is 61% (which is still too low). This makes Supergirl a 67% picture, which seems about right.

As I suggested on the socials, unlike some other similar releases, it's not one from which I left punching the air. I tried, I wanted to, but as a few reviewers have noted, it begins well yet eventually becomes an unsurprising, generic mess of sci-fi tropes of the kind I usually enjoy but somehow fails to resonate. Perhaps it's the deeply average, one-note villain. Perhaps it's the clichéd approach to the outback universe, where everywhere is a shithole planet full of miscreants. Could it be that in creating a story around a pretty much invincible character, it spends much of the runtime finding ingenious ways of physically de-skilling her when, much like Superman, she has enough mental scars to hold her back? Or is it the sense that we're watching a sub-par Guardians of the Galaxy featuring only Star-Lord?

I think the most damaging aspect, and this is where my analytical side takes over, is that after a while, Supergirl stops being the protagonist of her own movie and lacks agency in many of her scenes leading up to that point. The most obvious examples happen in the flashbacks, particularly the key moment when she lands on Earth and meets her cousin. She can't speak "standard" yet, but the whole scene is played from Clark's POV as he shambles about trying to make her feel welcome. Shouldn't we be seeing her perspective on suddenly being on a planet where she doesn't understand the language or what is happening in general? We shouldn't be able to understand what Superman is saying in these scenes; David Corenswet's dialogue should be gibberish.

However, it's the back half of the film when the structure really becomes unstuck. In the comic that inspired the project, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, much of the story is told from the perspective of a new character, Ruthye Marye Knoll. This is repeated in this loose adaptation, where she fills the role you might find for a Doctor Who companion. On screen, she cuts a very Arya Stark figure, even if she only has one name on her list. Whereas the comic was part of a continuum of Supergirl stories in which stylistic shifts add depth, it's very odd that in Kara's screen debut, they've chosen to distance the audience from her for much of the second half while this other girl's struggles move to the forefront. Supergirl is lying in a cave, waiting for a different coloured sun to rise.

The biggest mistake for me is perhaps in the final shot of the film.  Apparently a reference to the Superman and Lois conversation in Superman (2025), which had the Justice Gang fighting a kaiju in the background, Kara sits opposite Clark and gives him the news that she's remaining on Earth for now, trying to make her home there.  Again, the scene is mostly played from her cousin's perspective and the final beat is Clark running off screen to deal with Krypto and it's he who has the final line.  It's admittedly very funny, because everything Krypto does is funny, but it's extremely odd that we don't then have a close-up of Kara relaxing into her new home, happy that she's completed her journey.  But it feels redolent of a film in which the title character's feelings aren't always at the forefront.

Doctor in Discomfort.

TV  You will have heard the news about Doctor Who going out to tender for  a new production company, with RTD2 and Bad Wolf walking away after cancelling Schrödinger's Christmas Special. The BBC says they "have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode," whereas Russell says via his Insta:

There's no point trying to litigate whether anyone was lying about there being a Christmas Special. With no new Doctor announced or news of a special and a series, it was becoming pretty clear that it was a placeholder in the schedules, just in case, easily filled with another hour of Strictly.

But to the point: I'm pretty positive about the whole thing. The BBC hasn't said they're shutting up shop: no more Doctor Who for now, see you in a couple of decades. They're asking for presentations from other production companies, which will all have their own ideas on a new direction for the show, and it'll be recommissioned like any other series. Perhaps the choice of showrunner and actor will be included in those pitches, alongside the kinds of stories they'll want to tell.

Here are some of the things I hope those pitches will include, and yes, this is a rare occasion when this blog's usual format goes out of the window and I allow bullet headings to darken its door:

• A soft reboot.  Don't ignore what's been seen until now, but don't refer to it either. Make this a proper jumping-on point for new young viewers and those who may not have watched the show recently.

• No major story arcs.  Make it largely standalone again. If there's a throughline, it could be as simple as the developing friendship between the companion and the Time Lord. Make things lower stakes again—no global or intergalactic catastrophe every other hour.

• Longer seasons. Facilitated by a return to the old format of twenty-five-minute episodes and cliffhangers. This will help with the budget because it'll help to amortise costs across multiple episodes.

• None of the previous showrunners. We've had more Prime Ministers in the past twenty-odd years than Doctor Who showrunners, and all of them burned out eventually—some of them before they'd even had an episode produced. Give it to someone younger and perhaps not a white male. Someone with a different perspective. Can someone check if Abi Morgan is still interested?

• Spin-off writers. One of the best decisions RTD1 made right at the beginning was to hire writers who worked on Doctor Who in other media, all of whom, in fact, had helped launch the Eighth Doctor at Big Finish. Do something similar again, with the newer crop who might not have written for TV before but understand how Doctor Who flows.

• A consistent timeslot. Make it the show which kickstarts Saturday evening, and with a shorter individual runtime, it's less likely to interfere with whatever else might be on.

• No iPlayer premieres. That was just asking for trouble.

• Romola Garai as the Doctor. There's still time.

Plus let us not forget, Doctor Who is currently in production for television: 52 x 11-minute episodes over two series for CBeebies, which happened through a similar tendering process to the main show. We don't know what that will look like. Who will voice the Doctor? Their companion? Who's writing the thing? Will it have returning monsters? How much story can you actually tell in ten minutes plus credits? Is it canon?

Rendition (Rutans vs Sontarans)

Audio  Charming. One of the results of listening to a concentrated number of Eighth Doctor stories in the past few weeks, with so many set during the Time War, is forgetting the sheer pleasure of hearing a version of the Time Lord and his companions when there are minimal psychological stakes and the characters are drawn along much simpler lines: a Doctor who shambles about until he doesn't, a naïve but brave Scot, and a haughty but loyal mathematician. Here, they find themselves on a medical ship where a group of Rutan war-wounded are in danger of being obliterated by the Sontaran battlefleet. But, overseen by a nurse who is part Ratched, part Mary Poppins, they find solace in war poetry influenced by Wilfred Owen. Into that tumbles the Eighth Doctor to help Zoe get the engines repaired and distract a Sontaran spy. For most of it, he's in a Tiggerish mode, but he also has the Web of Time on his mind and doesn't want to be discovered in a way which suggests he'll be appearing on a few more covers in this series yet.

Placement:  This and the next two inlays in the series have the Eighth Doctor in his TV Movie costume with the fourth also featuring Charley and C'rizz.  So I'll put this after The Battle of Giant's Causeway in what seems like is going to be a mini-era.  For now.

Ahead of Time (Short Trips Volume 13: Tales from the Vortex)

Audio  At the centre of the story is a killer idea. What if there were a substance the destruction of which sends a person one year into the past, and the way to fix any changes made is to find exactly the same ounce of the metal and destroy it again in the past? What if that happens over and over and over again? As Paul Booth's story proposes, it would probably end up in the breakdown of a society. But what if someone does all of that on purpose? Foreshadowing the destruction witnessed by the Eighth Doctor during the Time War, and echoing the fate of Bliss's planet in Volume 12, Ahead of Time is propulsively told, with some excellent material for Charley—clearly enjoyed by India Fisher—especially one scene which is as good as anything in the mainline audios. It's especially moving when it speaks to memory and trying to recapture what's been lost.

Placement: Though I was somewhat distracted by how much knowledge Charley has about the Time Lords and trying to square that in the timeline, going back and looking at Neverland, she's already pretty knowledgeable of their existence right at the start. The Doctor's already made her very aware of who they are, or she's been reading the TARDIS Databank during some idle moments.  So between Minuet in Hell and Invaders From Mars?

Salvage (Short Trips Volume 12)

Audio  Bliss!  Wiped from existence in the Time War boxsets, an ignominious fate brought about due to Rakhee Thakrar's work schedule prevented her from appearing in the boxset which would ultimately be called Cass, it's an absolute pleasure to hear from her again, albeit in a Short Trip set between previous stories.  Unlike some Short Trips too, this feels like a vital part of her story and goes to the heart of who Bliss is and her origins, another of the Eighth Doctor orphans in time, either due to paradox or as in this case because her entire timeline was destroyed behind her.  Where does all of that lost matter go?  The people?  The places?  The things?  Salvage goes some way to at least explaining what happens to some of it, although it's a story best experienced without much foreknowledge so you won't hear any more of the story from me.  Max Curtis's text captures the era and characters perfectly and it's read extremely well by Adèle Anderson, who digs deep into the heartache of what unfolds.

Placement: Salvage explores the psychological weight of timelines that have been rewritten and people that have been "lost" to the war. This serves as a perfect thematic prologue to Volume 3, which opens with State of Bliss—an episode specifically dedicated to exploring the multiple, shifting timelines of Bliss's existence created by the conflict.

It's a Wonderful War (Christmas: It's a Wonderful War and Other Stories)

Audio  Happy Christmas. Again. One of the results of your blogger catching up on Eighth Doctor stories in a bunch is the number based on special occasions, particularly Christmas. The effect has been much like bingeing through the revival television series with a festive special every two to thirteen episodes (depending on increased production costs at the time and if there was a gap year). This was clearly an extra-special challenge: set a Christmas story during the Time War. Taking inspiration from Frank Capra's magnum opus, Jonathan S Powell's script sees mining foreman Galen Smith dreaming of leaving the planet and making for the stars. But like George Bailey, events continually keep him from leaving, and he even has a guardian angel—but probably not the one you're expecting.

Stunning, and I use the word carefully. The Time War at Big Finish has become a multi-stranded affair with dozens of characters and ongoing storylines, almost its own franchise, so entering a one-off story set within it isn't without some trepidation. Unlike some stories, however, it keeps the focus on an ordinary man in extraordinary times. He serves as our viewpoint character as elements of the wider mythology are delivered to us. I do tend to enjoy war stories that show the effects such conflicts have on the victims rather than generals and politicians vying for power. Although the Eighth Doctor's intervention is rather more complicated than Clarence's in the original text, it still keeps George's—sorry, Galen's—sacrifices in focus. There's also a brilliant twist that causes you to rethink everything you've heard and makes you want to listen again.

Placement:  Feels early.  Perhaps set before the Eighth Doctor's own Time War stories?

Part Three (Dark Gallifrey: Master!)

Audio   Baffled.   In the olden days and actually still in recent days, this would have been released as boxed set so I would have listened to the first two instalments before discovering what the Doctor's involvement is, as was the case with something like Hooklight.  But without an infinite budget, I decided to just buy the episode with Paul McGann on the cover and although this has a "previously on", it's more of a refresher for listeners who're already wearing the t-shirt.  I got the gist though and this has the Bruce Master at his dastardliest, which is the notion of the Dark Gallifrey series, to show some of the greatest villains at their most playful (similar to the Omega/Davros/Master series in 2003).  The Eighth Doctor first appears speaking backward via radio link before revealing the plot to the protagonists of the story then having a sword fight with the Master.  It's quite a cameo.  Few machinas have deus-exed with quite this aplomb.

Placement:  He's in his leathers so perhaps just before Time Lord Victorious just after discovering The Truth About Peladon?

The Force of Death (BBC Audio Exclusive).

Audio  The last of the four BBC Audio Eighth Doctor stories written by Andrew Lane (so far) does not provide the showdown between the Time Lord and the journalist the finale of the last adventure promised, which probably for the best because I don't know what that would look like.  Instead the Doctor is genuinely pleased to see MacFarlane as the two of them investigate the prototypical elements of an alien encounter: mutilated cattle, zombies and a giant mythic sea creature.  But the enemy isn't Zygons or Homo Aqua, it's something even more dangerous.  Dan Starkey's version of the Eighth Doctor has become more Beatles with every reading and now its reached full McCartney, which is honestly perfectly fine, the scouseness of McGann's own interpretations has oscillated subtly over the years anyway.  For the rest of it he's called upon to offer a Fouracresathon of Irish accents which just goes to show how talented he is.

Placement:  What's the perspective the Doctor suggests has caused him to forgive or at least understand what MacFarlane did in the previous story and the suggestion he's going to have to choose a side?  I think that put this squarely in the close to Night of the Doctor territory, just after The Silent Priest.

The Teeth of Ice (BBC Audio Exclusive).

Audio  The third in the annual Andrew Lane-scripted Eighth Doctor stories for BBC Audio sees the regular viewpoint character, the indomitable reporter James MacFarlane, visiting a remote base at the South Pole to interview an explorer, the intimidatingly named Pentius Rochdale. Predictably, all hell breaks loose, with bodies starting to pile up and wild animals as the potential aggressors. So far, so John Carpenter's The Thing. Fortunately for the denizens of this base, the chief of medicine is the Eighth Doctor, and he's typically suspicious of the gap between what seems to be happening and the reality. Produced again by Big Finish veterans Gardner, Darlington, and Ainsworth, the Eighth Doctor—as you'd expect to hear in those rival audios—is present and correct, and well realised by Dan Starkey in his voiceover. At the length of a CD, it gallops along like the team of huskies in a BBC Four slow TV special (which is paradoxically very fast) right through to a pretty dark ending with echoes of Storm Warning and a wedge driven between the Doctor and MacFarlane. The fourth and (so far) final instalment in the series, The Force of Death, feels very ominous indeed.

Placement: The cover has the same photo of Paul McGann as the second, in a smaller circle, but it still feels like there's been a gap between the two. So, let's place this just after the Titan Comics, when his sense of humour is still intact.

Sunset (Planet Krynoid: Nightfall)

Audio  If you'll excuse the blasphemy, Jesus, this is grim. Nick Briggs pops in at the start of each episode to repeat the content warning from the website, "This release contains adult material and may not be suitable for younger listeners"—which you would think wouldn't be required for something on audio where you can't actually see anything, but parts of this are absolutely horrible and would obviously give children nightmares. If the Hinchcliffe era worried Whitehouse, this would have put her in Cromer—sorry, a coma. At one point, I had to stop the tape and walk away for a bit. Congratulations, folks; this is horror Who at its most heinous.

The first episode, Jonathan Morris's Sunlight follows a similar path to parts of the Alien franchise, which it might well do given that they're both about eggs of sorts. One of the Krynoid seed pods is found during the maintenance of the satellites that keep the lamps on at the otherwise dark and cold colony planet of Sunlight. The local representative of this story's equivalent of Weyland-Yutani wants to keep the thing intact in case there's anything they can take advantage of, even though the Governor of the colony says (rightly!) it should be destroyed immediately, with Reece Shearsmith giving this otherwise cowardly individual his most officious voice acting.

Structured like a disaster film, we're introduced to citizens who are affected at all levels. Which means that when the Eighth Doctor arrives in the second instalment, Sunset by Jonathan S Powell, via unconventional means, it's into an already established group of characters. Although he absolutely fulfils the obligations that might usually be expected of him during a colony-under-siege story—explaining who the monsters are, suggesting how the people in charge have fucked things up, and outlining what could potentially be done to save the day—the various families at the heart of the story remain central. Although for most of them, things still don't end well.

During VHS clipshow The Tom Baker Years, the actor behind the teeth and curls infamously misnames The Seeds of Doom as Invasion of the Krynoids or The Krynoid Invasion, which always conjured in my mind seed pods bombarding a planet, with the sentient vegetable biomass overwhelming the population. That is exactly what the final episode, the fittingly titled Darkness by Chris Chapman, gives us, with scenes straight out of John Wyndham. It's during one particular scene here that I needed to take a break. There are Threads levels of hopelessness on display—or rather, on speaker—and although it does end on the potential for hope, a sequel boxset is incoming. Like I said, Jeeeesus.

Placement:  The Eighth Doctor was apparently travelling with Liv when his end of the story kicked off. Given that he's wearing his leathers on the cover, and assuming that Helen isn't chilling somewhere, this intriguingly puts it between Dark Eyes and Doom Coalition. They both appear in the next Planet of the Krynoids boxset, so I'll also see what we learn there and move it if necessary.