09 Multiple resignations from government triggering inopportune by-elections
15 Johnson lied.
18 Father's Day
30 Barbenheimmer begins
Review 2023: A Review of 2023: May.
19 It's widely reported New York is sinking. Here's the original paper.
24 The new Drama Actors Roundtable from The Hollywood Reporter is published. A couple of days later Twitter notices this perfectly timed and ignored line from Jeff Bridges
Review 2023: A Review of 2023: April
01 The Guardian forgets April Fool's Day, does this instead.
02 "This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account."
03 Artemis II crew announced. Includes first female and African American astronauts on a lunar mission
19 There is no news.
21 Star Trek: Picard's superb finale broadcasts in the UK. God, what a great series.
The Crowd (Doom's Day)
It's immense fun. It takes time to get a handle on Doom's character because the first quarter of her story is told through shorter comic strips in DWM and a couple of Titan Comics which use Missy as the focus. But once the longer form storytelling kicks in through the novel, the audiobook and then the Big Finish plays and Sooz Kempner's vibrant performance in the title role, we're more clearly able to understand the irony of her chasing after a figure who would completely repudiate her chosen profession.
Which is exactly what happens when Doom runs into the Doctor and Charley in the penultimate hour. She stumbles into their mission to preserve causality from The Crowd, a race of intergalactic tourists who, rather like the miscreants in Gary Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha, visit scenes of death and destruction for kicks and having exhausted the usual venues are now creating disasters and have it in for Thomas Becket and Canterbury. What follows in Lizzy Hopley's script are the usual hijinks intermixed with heated discussions concerning the time traveller's morality and methods.
The Crowd is the most Doctor-centric story of the whole series and Paul's clearly in his element with all of this, bringing out the Doctor's darker side from later in the Big Finish timeline especially when Charley's not around for various reasons. But India is also loving playing up to the Edwardian's similar dismissal; over the years Charley's offered a diplomatically light touch even against the darkest of foes, but Doom really rubs her up the wrong way and the feeling's mutual, the assassin referring to her a Pollard throughout.
The Eighth |Doctor at his most hard line, even authoritarian. He hates Doom and everything she stands for and says so to her face, slowly remembering the occasions when they've met before from his point of view in his first, second and sixth incarnations (Doom's met him in later versions and not really gotten along with them either presumably because they remember this meeting with greater clarity). He's life's champion and at every turn he tries to distance himself from her and even when they have to ally with one another, he's less keen than if she'd been the Master.
The effect of this is for us to re-assess how we've reacted to Doom's adventures. As consumers of various franchise content, our suspension of disbelief changes depending on what we're watching, reading or listening to. Having a hired assassin as the protagonist allows us to bend out morality to accept that for her missions to be a success she has to outright murder people and we might even cheer her on as she does so. On occasion she does find a way of dodging the murder of innocents, but bumping off crime bosses is fair game.
Except now we have the hero of the franchise, usually our hero, pointing out the moral implications of that lifestyle. Some of the hours are structured like Doctor Who stories but with someone who has a different moral compass at the centre and now we're beginning to question our own enjoyment of events and its the first occasion when Doom herself takes a good long look at her lifestyle. That makes this one of the richest of the various hours and makes the whole trip worthwhile - well that and the hilarious twist in the final hour, but you'll have to read that yourself.
Placement: Charley says she and the Doctor have been travelling for a while so let's put it just before Time of the Daleks to help that make sense.
Review 2023: A Review of 2023: March
01 Twitter pretended everyone was a new user
15 BBC journalists went on strike for a different reason.
18 Red Nose Day
20 Doctor Who's multi-platform event Doom's Day announced. Stars Sooz Kempner. Fandom has a meltdown.
21 My Dad tested positive for COVID. I had a meltdown.
22 Boris Johnson gave evidence to the parliamentary standards committee. It did not go well.
24 Got COVID
25 COVID
26 COVID
27 Felt a bit better but still COVID
28 COVID. Reached infinity in Marvel Snap
30 Donald Trump indicted. Gwyneth Paltrow won. It was a busy day.
Review 2023: A Review of 2023: February.
01 James Gunn announced an amazing new slate of DC films. #firejamesgunn quickly trends on the socials.
07 Rose Day
09 New deputy Tory chairman Lee Anderson MP asks BBC Nottingham drive time presenter Verity Cowley ten times if she's a liar when she questions him about his mistruths, then he asks that the interview not be played. They played it. In full.
22 UK Twitter spent the morning trying to work out why Hannah Waddingham had been chosen to present Eurovision
28 PM Rishi Sunak said the following and redefined irony: "Northern Ireland is in the unbelievably special position - unique position in the entire world - in having privileged access not just to the UK market… but also the EU single market. Nobody else has that. No one. Only you guys, only here."
Review 2023: A Review of 2023: January.
That Day The joke about the annual reviews on this has usually been that they're not really annual reviews as such and often had nothing at all to do with the twelve months preceding them. But after the anniversary nonsense last year (and this year and as we've discussed next), I decided that just this once I would actually do a review of the year.
Almost every day this year I've been collecting what seem to be the most significant or at least the most talked about news stories or happenings and keeping them as a list. Sometimes I've just written something else or kept a record of something so outlandish it had to be saved for posterity. If something looks especially esoteric, I've probably forgotten for a couple of days and wanted to fill a gap.
Ferris Bueller says “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Here's 365 examples of me doing just that. It's all the stuff you either may have forgotten or didn't see in the first place. Each piece will be accompanied by one of a favourite song containing the name of the month.
Anyway, to January which began with something which probably defined the year.
03 The video I posted to Twitter of Maddy from The Traitors in Casualty is retweeted by Maddy from The Traitors, who then replied
04 I had a job interview.
06 I did not get the job.
11 Michelle Yeoh won a Golden Globe. Told house band to "shut up" when they tried to play her off.
14 Read in this book that the original Norse Loki transformed himself into a mare so he could be impregnated by a stallion and give birth to an eight legged horse which then became Odin's favourite steed. Sadly this did not happen in season two of the Disney+ series.
17 Match of the Day interrupted by sex noises: “I Don’t Know Who’s Making That Noise”. Later Gary Lineker gave an interview to Newsnight about it from the back of his car home.
22 The extent of Jeremy Renner's injuries revealed after snow plough accident.
23 I caught the first of the 777-class trains to join the Merseyrail network. We went to Kirkby.
24 This year's Academy Awards announced. Everything Everywhere All At Once nominated for all the awards, all of them, altogether.
25 After a long search, I bought a new bookcase from Argos to store my Doctor Who discs.
27 Video shows police brutally beating Tyre Nichols—then laughing about it. The protest were peaceful so the media moved on within a couple of days.
28 The Age decided that rather than honouring the request of a theatre to only send people of colour to a play featuring people of colour in order to help give opportunities to people of colour, not to send anyone at all because it would be "tokenism". The arts editor is a person of colour.
30 There's a general sense that January is never going to end. Brexitcast reunion.
Firelight (Once Upon A Time Lord)
The story opens with ten frame collage in which each incarnation of the Doctor up to the Tenth (not including War) is show explaining the modus operandi of the main villian, the Pyromeths, creatures who "feed on the precise psychic energy that's released whenever we create imaginary worlds, characters, and conflicts" a little bit like the birds in The Scarlet Empress or Akhaten in The Rings of Akhaten. Like Big Finish, they love stories.
The Eighth Doctor appears in a single panel in his Dark Eyes leathers talking to Molly because we're in deep cut territory (the Sixth Doctor's chatting with Frobisher) standing next to the TV Movie console on the opposite corner to the visually similar Secondary TARDIS Console Room from the Hinchcliffe years. He's the one who directly references Scheherazade, the storyteller from 1001 Nights (which I had to look up because I didn't know her name).
There's nothing more to it than that. Why Eighth and Molly? I've asked Mr Slott on the socials but don't really expect a reply, he's far to busy. There's no mention of it in the interviews I've tracked down either. It's notable that Big Finish doesn't have a credit and neither does DWM for Frobisher which is odd considering all of the notices for the Daleks and Cybermen. Perhaps there's some kind of shared domain business.
Placement: The TARDIS Wiki places it between The White Room and Time's Horizon. Let's go with that.
Christmas Links #24
‘I cried for hours’: the moments people realised truth about Father Christmas:
"Suspicions start to become aroused around the age of eight, shows psychology study."
"The Hallmark and Lifetime networks are known for their prolific output of made-for-television holiday movies each year. Even in the age of streaming, they bring in impressive cable television ratings, perhaps aided by how easy they are to leave on while, say, baking several batches of gingerbread for a tree lighting ceremony."
"Thirteen years after a theatre opened, its first full-scale pantomime has been "worth the risk", it said."
"The festive favourite that’s also incredibly divisive…"
"Ed Emberley has been drawing and making art for children's picture books for six decades now. Some of his work include instructional drawing books, inspired by his belief that everyone can learn to draw."
"More than 21,000 people have signed a petition calling on a bishop to intervene in the row after the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, in the Avellino hamlet of Capocastello di Mercogliano, features what appears to be two mothers, rather than just Mary and Joseph."
"If you’re exhausted from that radio station on your presets that flipped to all-Christmas the day before Thanksgiving and has been playing nothing but Mariah, Wham!, Brenda and Burl ever since, here’s a tonic: 40 great holiday songs you probably haven’t heard."
"Christmas time is upon us, and though children loathe getting new clothes for gifts, they best put on that new itchy sweater or slide on those unwanted socks. Or else risk being eaten alive by a giant cat, at least according to Icelandic folklore."
"Over a dozen celebrities got into the giving spirit with the Los Angeles Mission on Dec. 22 for the non-profit’s 87th Annual Christmas Celebration."
"Do you remember the "Christmas Bells" advertisement for Hershey's Kisses that debuted in 1989 and that has been aired—with minor changes in 2012 and 2020—every holiday season since? In the ad, Hershey's Kisses, arranged into the shape of a Christmas tree, become handbells as they play "We Wish You A Merry Christmas.""
Christmas Links #23
Last Christmas scores Christmas number one, beating Sam Ryder and Mariah Carey:
"Wham!'s Last Christmas has been crowned this year's Christmas number one, 39 years after it was first released."
"Christmas trees without the dreaded needle drop? Researchers are growing them now."
"The pair talk training, festive traditions and bringing joy and happiness to people at home on Christmas Day."
"A ghost story for Christmas."
"From festive TV to presents and food, Guardian correspondents round up Christmas traditions across the continent."
"In Gulatingslova, the law of the Gulathing law province in Norway, there are strict rules for the brewing of ale before Christmas."
"Nigella's recipes from her 2023 BBC Christmas Special are inspired by local ingredients from both the Dutch and Indonesian culinary cultures of Amsterdam, creating dishes that are both simple and celebratory to make our Christmas deliciously do-able and joyous!"
"The British Medical Journal’s Christmas edition publishes sincere research about zany topics."
"Christmas 2023 could be America's least snow-covered in at least 20 years. Meteorologists consider a white Christmas one in which there is at least one inch of snow on the ground Christmas morning."
"From IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE to ELF, I've curated a collection of scripts that should inject some holiday spirit into your screenwriting education."
Christmas Links #22
Mystery of Raphael masterpiece may have been solved by Bradford-made AI:
"Algorithm concludes most of Madonna della Rosa was by renaissance master – but not the face of Joseph."
"Algorithm concludes most of Madonna della Rosa was by renaissance master – but not the face of Joseph."
"This week: some notable Christmases, and some festive maps. But first: sorry, I’m going to get soppy on you."
"It is a much loved festive film - and for one cinema It's a Wonderful Life is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving."
"Maria Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" has been the soundtrack of the holiday season for nearly 30 years. Why has this song become a rare modern Christmas hit?"
"We continue our countdown of your picks for the greatest Christmas comic tales with the new (and award-winning) Christmas origin of Ace the Bat-Hound."
"Birmingham prison was opened in 1849, prior to that criminals were sent to Warwick to suffer their punishment."
"With roots dating back to the 13th century, Gryla is not to be messed with."
"Hotel prices and tourism numbers are up as New York City goes through its first holiday season with new rules that ban nearly all Airbnbs and other short-term rentals."
"Whether you’re spending the festive period by yourself or with people that don’t make you feel seen or supported, Christmas can be a time that exacerbates feelings of loneliness. Here’s what you can do to ease them."
"As the sun sets on the narrow streets of Africa’s largest informal settlement, children hurry to change from daily clothes into pointe shoes and other ballet gear."
Christmas Links #21
"When I started this set of articles about flash frames, right back at the beginning of the year, I never thought it would end up taking five parts to tell this story properly. In particular, I never really wanted to get into the nitty gritty of endless Young Ones repeats."
"Researchers suspect euphoria and intimacy of season may be behind spike in cases."
"Christmas has finally come home: In a sweet, new YouTube video, Darlene Love reunites with David Letterman and Paul Shaffer for the first time in nine years to resume a longtime holiday tradition that capped off the Christmas episodes of Letterman’s late night talk shows for 28 years."
"Between all the new gadgets being opened, video games being downloaded, and Premier League matches to watch, the UK's broadband networks will be under extreme pressure to deliver over the festive period."
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle:
"On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the public domain. The first movies in which the iconic mouse appeared – Steamboat Willie and the silent version of Plane Crazy – were made in 1928 and works from that year go into the public domain in the United States on New Year’s Day 2024."
"On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the public domain. The first movies in which the iconic mouse appeared – Steamboat Willie and the silent version of Plane Crazy – were made in 1928 and works from that year go into the public domain in the United States on New Year’s Day 2024."
"A former church in Ohio houses what's believed to be the world's largest privately owned collection of Christmas movie memorabilia."
"A popular "Santa's letterbox" in Coventry has been stolen and the owner has called for it to be returned."
"So I can now say that I’ve seen Santa with Muscles. That was not a thing I could have said two days ago. It was a better time, then. A more innocent time. I reflect sadly on what I’ve lost in the interim. Brain cells, certainly. A bit of sanity (And you all know the kinds of movies I indulge in. I have none to spare). The will to live."
"And other strange evergreen decor evolutions, from retro-kitsch to glow-in-the-dark."
"The day after Christmas, my family gathered around a bare branch stuck into the sand of a Cape Cod beach with boxes of stale crackers, cereal, and pretzels to celebrate what my mom had dubbed “Seagull Day.”"
Christmas Links #20
Effect of a doctor working during the festive period on population health: natural experiment using 60 years of Doctor Who episodes (the TARDIS study):
"Age standardised annual mortality rates in England, Wales, and the UK from 1963,"
"Age standardised annual mortality rates in England, Wales, and the UK from 1963,"
"The Victorian era was not as dusty and monochrome as we think; a new exhibition and a research project, Chromotope, explores a wave of chemical breakthroughs that brought colour to the people."
"It’s the most ... romantic time of the year?"
"Thieves have stolen the lights from a Christmas tree, leaving a village heartbroken."
"Elaborate food boards may not be practical, but some say that's not the point."
"A children’s Christmas party in Belfast with lots of fancy goodies and balloons."
"Crazy expensive dried citrus, cheap sh*t, a system of waste and compost as a natural fertiliser and political act...but is compost also spiritually nourishing?"
"If holiday music seems designed in a lab to get stuck on repeat inside your head for all of December, well, it kind of isall of December, well, it kind of is."
"At a recent NOAA workshop, another participant gifted all of us these wonderful “hard hat” float ornaments. The perfect blend of nerdy oceanography and 3-D printing."
"For astronomers peering into the depths of the universe, Christmas came a little early this year."
Christmas Links #19
"Analysis: many Christmas babies have traditionally carried a key sign throughout their lives of when they were born in the form of their name."
"Here's a selection of mildly-concerning vintage Christmas meals that you can make yourself this holiday season. With so many food items to choose from, it can be overwhelming to make up your mind."
"In this video, I connected some christmas electric toys to the WANPTEK DC power supply using wires. I continuously applied increasing voltage to the toys, starting from 5V and going up to 30V."
"The early music ensemble of the Folger Shakespeare Library offered a compelling Christmas program at St. Mark’s Episcopal."
"Dozens of runners dressed as Santa have raced along a beach to try to catch a Christmas pudding."
"At the outbreak of war in 1939, the BBC evacuated its newly-formed Radio Drama Company of actors, led by Val Gielgud, to Worcestershire."
"Brilliant festive photographs recently unearthed from our archives."
"The most popular Christmas movies seem to come primarily from the Forties."
"Professor complains that show’s Oxbridge bias is even more pronounced in Christmas specials and calls for public debate."
"The 68th Eurovision Song Contest takes place in Malmö, Sweden in May 2024."
Categorical Imperative (Short Trips: Monsters)
Placement: Charley's here, so the gap between the first two seasons.
The Glass Princess (Short Trips: The Muses)
The Eighth Doctor appears in the final scene, leading the girl towards her final moments. It is, as you might expect, horrendously sad and it's through his words the writer, Paul Leonard, articulates another element of the Moffat era, seven years earlier, that it's just a fairy tale, an articulation of Sleeping Beauty with the Time Lord in the role of the Prince. But honestly the section which really punched me in the gut is the moment when the Seventh Doctor gifts her a small blue badge in the shape of a boat which has been passed on by Ace who says she doesn't need it any more: "She said to tell you that you had deserved it. It's a badge really, not a brooch. It's only given to people who are very special. Very brave."
Placement: Outrageously, I think I'm going to retcon this in the Time War era, in the period when he's dealing with unfinished business.
Christmas Links #18
How to avoid food poisoning this Christmas – and the dreaded freezer burn:
Successfully storing and cooking your Christmas meat is just the beginning. Freezing your leftovers without ruining them is almost as vital.
"Here are some creepy AF Krampus cards from Christmas past. These cards, part of a genre called "Krampuskarten", are far from your run of the mill Hallmark holiday cards."
"A project from an anti-discrimination creative arts organization pairs LGBTQ+ youth in need of help with donors willing to give it."
"This tradition melds literary and holiday pleasures into a single event."
"In the latest TV Legends Revealed, find out whether How the Grinch Stole Christmas originally had a bank commercial mixed into the iconic special."
"Have you been dreaming of a white Christmas? Well, the chance of that dream becoming reality may be increasing - but only for some."
"It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm."
"The Homemade Eggnog Recipe from Mount Vernon (and the Story Behind It)."
"John O’Donnell has been enjoying receiving Christmas cards for the first time in his life."
"But how many gifts?"
The Turn of the Screw (Big Finish Short Trips).
Placement: During the EDAs perhaps? The Radio Times gap?
Klein's Story (Survival of the Fittest)
In the course of events she meets that timeline's Eighth Doctor who's using the alias Johann Schmidt after having regenerated from Seventh who was gunned down whilst evading capture, his TARDIS already confiscated. In his dialogue, Paul McGann affects an ever so slight German accent but he's still the man he'd become in the main timeline, albeit following the plans set in motion by his previous self to rectify the cause of events which he (spoiler warning!) succeeds in doing whilst simultaneous helping political prisoners evade the Nazis. The Doctor hates fascists, no matter the timeline.
Placement: The newly renamed "Alternative Eighth Doctors".
Christmas Links #17
Bye-bye booze! Five ways to have a fun, fabulous, totally dry Christmas:
"Many people want to enjoy the festivities without drinking – but come up against relentless pressure. Here is how to resist temptation."
"A print-only recipe of mine from back in the day. First published in the Bury Free Press (and editions) Christmas section, December 2018."
"A family in Kentucky had a surprise when a baby owl was discovered nestled in their Christmas tree - the bird had gone unnoticed for several days."
"In November 1996, my parents took my brother and me to the city that neighbored our small town to do some shopping, a task I loathed."
"Tim Burton’s superhero classic is Christmas rom-com you don’t realize is a Christmas movie or a rom-com."
Christmas party at Taco Bell in San Pedro turned into a night of debauchery in 2022, lawsuit claims:
"A former cashier who filed the suit claims she quit her job after reporting the revelry and enduring threats and vandalism."
"It doesn’t matter how you try to buy that next console, movie, toy, or meal, it’s all bad."
"Baphomet is a pagan idol, and I fail to see how it is scarier than the Johnson's outdoor Christmas decor, which features Santa Claus landing a helicopter atop an inflatable manger scene."
"How a whip-wielding butcher became St. Nick’s sidekick."
"Are you muddling through somehow or hanging a shining star upon the highest bough?"
Canaries (The Wintertime Paradox)
Also off the rails is the conclusion to the story as two masks arrive for display on the last of twelve available plinths with a note which reads, "Worn by a long-forgotten cult who worshipped impossibility and contradiction." Yes, folks, it's the Faction Paradox. In the middle of this ambitious multi-format event, the author Dave Rudden makes reference to one of the Wilderness Years greatest creations. As his Reddit AMA reveals, Alien Bodies was the first piece of Who media he consumed, which he found deeply confusing but he's loved the Faction in everything he's read of them.
Placement: Various TLV timelines have different ideas, so I'll just list it at the end of that section to be on the safe side.
Death To The Doctor (Doctor Who Magazine #360)
The gag of the strip is that Valis, along with a number of second string villains with delusions of grandeur gather together to find a plan to defeat the Doctor once and for all. This a few years before a similar team up in TV's The Pandorica Opens, although that consisted of main A-listers plus whatever else was lying around in Neil Gorton's creature shop, whereas this has losers like The Mentor ("Oh right like --" "Yes ... but not copying. It's purely coincidental!") Art is by Roger Langridge, so it's clearly supposed to be funny and fortunately it is, very much, although final few panels are rather poignant as the Doctor and Martha land amid the aftermath.
Placement: After TV Action! perhaps?
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