Liverpool International Music Festival 2013 from the air.

Music Unfortunately it's quite difficult to tell what with the trees and child's fun fair blocking the view but, even accounting for food festivals, Africa Oye and random hot days, this may well be the most people I've seen in the field beneath my window. It's day three of the free portion of the Liverpool International Music Festival 2013 and this shot was taken at about seven o'clock this even just as today's final act, Robbo Ranx Ft Ghetto Youth International With Damian, Steven And Julian Marley, this being the world music day.

I've been out and about on all three days and the mood's been good natured.  I had a particularly transcendental moment yesterday afternoon sitting opposite the bandstand listening to Sophia Ben Yousef covering Nina Simone's Feeing Good (here's an earlier performance on YouTube) (and here's her Sound Cloud) though I didn't get along quite so well on Friday night with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.  I had a prime spot next to the stage but there were too many people with cameras and phones recording the experience rather than living it which became too distracting.  This essentially.

But overall, the event seems have been a success, especially if the rapidity of twitter comments is a guide almost all of which have been positive.  Perhaps it's a shame that there aren't more of the larger acts in the free portion, though we do have Rebecca Ferguson, The Christians and Soul II Soul visiting tomorrow which is an interesting mix.  Perhaps there'll be even more people for that.  Perhaps I'll need to take another photo.  Either way congratulations organisers for creating something new from old that Liverpool can still be proud of.

Antimony.

Music This is real find. Potentially Tom Lehrer's greatest contribution to education is his song The Elements, which in some schools is the primary way in which the children learn about the chemical elements because they've been put to fairly recognisable tune, except in my school where no one had heard of him.

Anyway, this very morning, I've discovered that there was an earlier version of the song, with all the same elements but not in quite the same order and it was recorded live in Copenhagen in 1967. Having heard the version on his "An Evening Wasted With..." live album so many times its strange to hear it done quite this differently and with a whole different set of ad-libs.



Found here at the home of improbable research.  There'll be a short quiz next period.

The Great Orion Nebula.

Spore.

Books Here we are then, the Puffin Eighth Doctor eBook, Spore by Alex Scarrow and it’s, well it’s, well it is what it is. It’s as Scarrow suggested it would be in the preview interview, an intellectual exercise in writing a Doctor Who short story about an incarnation that as far as the author’s concerned the public barely know anything about despite nine plus years of books, audios and comics (even though he’s apparently heard some of the Big Finish). Which sounds like a mean spirited way to start writing about what is a relatively short piece of writing, but like so many of these anniversary stories, it’s a missed opportunity.

The story is fine. It’ll be easiest if I quote it from the publicity: “In a small town in the Nevada desert, an alien pathogen has reduced the entire population to a seething mass of black slime. When the Eighth Doctor arrives, he realises this latest threat to humanity is horrifyingly familiar – it is a virus which almost annihilated his entire race, the Time Lords...” Scarrow has in mind some b-movie thrills on a Hollywood budget, in other words Outbreak, with the Lovecraftian elegancy of The Fog and given the character’s origins, to go big does sort of makes sense if the idea is to evoke the era even if as far as Scarrow’s concerned the character doesn’t really have one.

As the story progresses there is some really quite horrific business as to the implications of the pathogen work themselves out and the sense of hopelessness when one is faced with something outside of your control without an answer as to what it is. In that sense, this is the bleakest of all the plays and has a one-off companion to suit. With Captain Evelyn Chan, one of the team who’s been sent in to survey the problem, we have a figure who seems purposefully unheroic, who only exists to do the things human beings tend to do in extraordinary circumstances, panic and ask questions, lots and lots of questions.

If there’s a hole in the middle and think you know what I’m about to say, it’s where the Eighth Doctor should be. Now, the Eighth Doctor isn’t easy. In the olden days, for every Lance Parkin or Paul Magrs getting him right, there were countless others throwing together a generic Doctor hoping against hope that the reader wouldn’t notice. I do think Scarrow tries, but if this had another Doctor’s silhouette on the cover, I might have thought it was a bit off, but I wouldn’t necessarily have argued. There’s nothing to say McGann couldn’t say these lines, it’s just that the lines don’t sound like were written for him.

In other words, for the first prose Eighth Doctor story in a few years, we have a fairly generic Doctor walking through a fairly generic story. I didn't not like it but ... which is the worst thing you can say about anything.  That’s a shame. There is one moment which might have had some impact if it hadn’t also essentially appeared in the last television series, though to be fair that does have a different and rather good pay-off even if the ensuing scenes don’t really ring true and don’t sound like something the Eighth Doctor would say at all. At least I don’t think so. But since the Logopolis Tom seems like he’d pretty much hate Robot Tom, it’s also worth nothing that characters change.

What would I have liked? Well, for a story published as part of an anniversary, something that acknowledges the character’s history written by someone who’s clearly a fan. It needn’t be full of back references, this is aimed at a younger audience after all, but it could still have been some sort of celebration in the same way the Third Doctor story, Marcus Sedgewick’s The Spear Of Destiny was. I’m guessing Alan Barnes’s the Destiny of the Doctor instalment is just that and I can’t wait to hear that when I reach that point in my #whowatch. Until then, roll on the Ninth Doctor and the news of whoever’s writing that.

WHO 50: 2002: Death Comes To Time.

TV Older fans of Doctor Who always seem to have war stories about episodes missed, stories for which they’d only know the conclusion after reading the TARGET novelisation or even watching it in some home format sought illicitly. Usually this was due to some family holiday, birthday party at an ITV watching household or power cuts, at a time when the show, at least in its complete form, would be shown once. So if you missed episode four of The Art in Space, you’d have little to no idea of how the Wrrn were defeated.

Death Comes To Time was my version of that. Still is, and moreso since I’ve never seen or heard the conclusion. When it first began streaming online, I was still accessing the internet via a very shaky dial-up connection via a telephone line I only had limited access to due to the vagaries of BT’s surftime package, but I still managed to work my way through the pilot episode, the one originally created for broadcast in Radio 4 by producer Dan Freedman even though it was pretty clear, pretty quickly, the commissioners didn’t want it despite the cast and format.

It’s fair to say, having just heard Storm Warning, my appreciation levels were low. This might have been called Doctor Who and had actual Doctor Who actors in it, most of the time it felt like the work of someone who’d fundamentally misunderstood what the show was about, or worse, was simply rewriting the thing to bend it around some other idea they’d had. Plus, as I noted when I sent a comment to the BBC’s website about the thing, what was the point now that Big Finish were already creating such wonderful things? Why hadn’t they been commissioned? They were later.

That was in July 2001. By 2002, the website had commissioned Freedman to complete his story and that was uploaded between February and May 2002. I didn’t listen. Having been unimpressed with the pilot and now full ensconced in the Eighth Doctor stories from Big Finish, plus working in Manchester so with even less free time due to commuting, somewhere along the line, rather like Neil Cross's attitude to nuWho at the start it seems (see this month's DWM), it fell to the bottom of my list of priorities. It doesn’t seem to have even ranked a mention this blog though oddly, I did post a link to it on Metafilter, more as a service than anything.

All of which is of course different to Terror of the Zygons, which until recently was the only televised story I hadn’t seen. I’d missed that first time around because I was only a one year old and not really interested in anything more than long periods of eerie silence, I hear, designed to frighten the life out of my parents, along with the usual baby stuff. I didn’t know what language was let alone that it could be bent around to create exciting adventures around Scottish lochs. I’d always wanted to see Terror of the Zygons but kept putting it off. Death Comes To Time is entirely dissimilar.

At a certain point, I remember thinking I’d come back to it, but unlike the other subsequent webcasts it was fairly quickly removed from the website and expunged from history, so I missed that window. Subsequent CD and MP3-CD releases (remember them?) passed me by too due to the expense. Part of me was, I think, gripped by that strange fan anger and loyalty that with Big Finish creating such authentic material, I didn’t want to support "whoever these people were with their distorted garbage".

Just as a side note, I wasn’t the only one purposefully not listening to Death Comes to Time. When Real Time, Big Finish’s attempt at a webcast was released later that same year, its writer director, one Gary Russell, gave a very diplomatic interview in which he admits to also only having heard the pilot episode for reasons of then not being able to comment on them either way. But he did hear the pilot episode, so he must have had some opinion of it. He doesn’t give it. Instead he talks about how it simply let him see how the animation was done (with due notation that he's less diplomatic in this month's DWM).

Ten years later, I’ve a cooler head about it, but it still doesn’t mean I’d want to hear it. I quite like the idea that, as with the older fans who for ages only had the Radio Times 10th Anniversary special and their imaginations as a way of accessing some of the older stories, that I only have the fragment I’ve picked up from reviews and Ahistory (which makes a broad attempt at trying to fit it into continuity), with their outlandish talk of Ace becoming some higher being, the Brigadier flying a space shuttle and the Doctor making some supreme sacrifice.

None of which really makes much sense when I’ve sat through all six episodes of The Ghosts of N-Space, another cautionary tale from the spin-off universe that’s even worse than Timelash, which did at least have Paul Darrow. Perhaps I do still have some deep seated, sub-conscious anger that anyone could even think about creating a Doctor Who continuation that disregards the many years of other continuity created in the meantime culminating the crime of apparently trying to write the Eighth Doctor out of existence.

Perhaps at some point I will, perhaps, if I see it randomly on sale in some charity shop or cheaper than the usual thirty pounds on ebay. In theory I should do it as part of my attempt to watch and listen to all of broadcast Doctor Who before the 50th anniversary, which will (time permitting) no doubt take in Real Time, Shada and Scream of the Shalka, especially since the latter is meriting a dvd release. I’ll be “doing” Dimensions in Time and The Curse of the Fatal Death as well, for goodness sake. Death Comes To Time? Death comes to sense, more like…

Tiddlywinks.

Games H2G2 has a suitably impressive, if slightly ancient (1999, updated 2008) entry on Tiddlywinks:

"Like so many sports and games, tiddlywinks was transformed from child's play to competition by the British Establishment - in this case, at Cambridge University in the 1950s. The key elements in adding depth to the game were the standardisation of the pieces and playing surface, the development of a points scoring system, and giving the game a defensive element. The resulting game has been compared to a cross between chess and pool, with a 3-D element thrown in."

Also, from The Guardian archives: 5 January 1961: Peter Downes, tiddlywinks tycoon.

The Time Vortex.

TV Tonight I was watching Aaron Sorkin's really rather good The Newsroom and noticing that he was essentially still writing the same old characters (Don really is Josh isn't he?) and on reaching the Blackout episode was greeted with this scene which has the odd spoiler for if you haven't seen the series. Keeping in mind the events of recent months and especially the last few days, see if you can spot the moment when I started braying "Fuck Off!" at the screen. A lot.



That episode was broadcast almost exactly one year before the thing we both know I'm talking about but for which I'm not using the actual words because I'm as paranoid as Leo is in this clip. I mean Charlie. Though not that Charlie, obviously. Sorkin likes to reuse character names too it seems.

Anyway people who haven't been as preoccupied as me, did we already know this was happening and what was published since is simply an expression of it being deeper than we thought and that was what was so shocking or is this just some weird coincidence and art's become reality? Is that why more hasn't been made about this? I don't know. But there's also the wording. The ana, sorry, the person making the speech's justification is hilariously similar too.

On Heat.

Music Heat Radio's interview with MKS. Asks them about the toilet in Japan, which let's face it was fifteen years ago. Spends some of its duration trying to grasp how close they are now and what they think of other bands and whether they even like Sugababes 4.0. It's interesting to note how people's relationships with each other do change. Compare what Siobhan said in that Ponystep interview in 2009 with this reality and the current attitude and there's been some obvious sharing of information about that time and what sounds like a proper reconciliation.  Which is good.

Billy Zane.

Music On the other hand, there's Avril Lavigne's new video ...



... which only really makes sense if you read British comics in the 1980s and 90s, watched The Wonder Years and are a supporter of pissing off Guns N Roses fans. For all that it's majestic and shows a real resurgence in Team Lavigne. Also if this had Doctor Who dvd style production subtitles on it, at a certain point they'd say, "Danica McKellar is also one of the only actresses to appear in a video for both Avril Lavigne and Debbie Gibson"



Yes, I know.

The Space live streaming The Globe’s open-air battlefield performance of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays.

I think it's worth a big long title. I've been sent this email/press release:

We thought you might be interested to know that The Space will be live streaming The Globe’s open-air battlefield performance of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays from Monken Hadley Common, near Barnet, between midday and 10pm on Saturday 24 August, 2013.

The Space will present the live event from multiple different viewpoints and aerial cameras will also capture the stage, audience and landscape from above. The live stream will be complemented with an innovative digital programme which will give audiences access to all the information available to the playgoer. After the live broadcast, edited films will become available.

Tune in to http://thespace.org on Saturday - and we would be very grateful if you could tell your followers and readers about this. We will be posting more information on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I’ve attached the press release for more information but let me know if you need anything else.
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/files/2013/08/final_h6_barnet_filming_release.pdf

I've emailed to ask how long the edited versions will be on the website.

"What Makes A Box-Office Hit?"

Film The Media History Digital Archive collects together related link to the Internet Archive, specifically issues of ancient film and movie journals and magazines. There's far more than any human being could read in a lifetime, but worth bookmarking if you're looking for contemporary material related to films that have fallen into relative obscurity, like the amazing collection currently screening on BBC Two during the early weekend mornings.

Amongst the treasures is this collection of 1947 issues of Cinema Magazine which have hidden within columns by Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau, a set visit to The Treature of the Sierra Madre and short pieces catching first sight of the avant-guard and British Film Society Movement.

 But its all introduced with a fascinating article, "What makes A Box-Office Hit?" in which various luminaries answer the question. Here's what Terry Ramsaye, the critic and editor of the Motion Picture Herald has to say on the subject. I'll quote it in full to save you from having to look for it:

"The picture which is to be a box office hit will in important degree serve an audience of persons of both principal sexes in the age bracket between the later teens and earlier twenties. It will supply them with some basic satisfactions through vicarious experience, and with some eagerly sought information on the processes of loving and living. In that sense, and that chiefly, the motion picture of the entertainment screen is educational. That is enough, and all the customers want.

"No matter what the top-lofty persiflage and dressing of the merchandise may profess, the hit picture must be concerned with the service of human concerns which arise from sensory mechanisms and controls south of the navel, all done with both decor and decorum but with precise accuracy. That is decent, proper, fitting. No discoverable challenges to thought or intellectual processes may be profitably involved. Psychology is nothing, physiology is everything. That is because intellectual capacities and interest in abstractions, even though slight, are rare indeed, while nearly all of the customers have acute biological interests and attributes. The motion picture is far too expensive for the service of the minds of the few, while the instincts of the many are yearning. That is not at all deprecatory, but plain business sense — economic determinism is the word for it. The pabulum delivered on the screen is properly to be as elaborately decorated as the bridge club's luncheon salad, or the wedding cake, but the stuff inside must be the time proved McCoy. It is proved because it is both right and correct. That is inevitable because the typical human organism, which is to say the customer, is born so soon and dies so young, having commonly little capacity and never ever time enough for concerns much beyond the requirements of the re-production cycle.

"The hit picture must achieve the indicated approach despite the frosting on the cake, by simple devices of narration. The bad characters must be bad, the good must be good. The writing is to be done in black and white, even if the rendition is in color. It is almost impossible to make the picture too simple, or too obvious, and that is most proper. The persons of that great buying-power-majority do not go to the theatre to reflect and study, to concern themselves with anything save their immediate personal interests, which are even more plainly defined by the content of the newspapers' cartoon pages.

"All this is normal, healthy, adequate. A picture which adequately and gracefully serves the indicated audience and its wishes is a genuine work of art. The best producers do it that way with conscious skill, or, in some instances, with unconscious skill. Anyway it is skill.

"If you would rather read a book and dream your own pictures, that's your business. Pictures are made for customers and they have the authority."

Isn't that something?  Not much has changed in sixty-five years and however apparently more sophisticated "blockbusters" are, the result tends to be the same.  The point about them being "educational" is interesting though I think in this context it simply means "experiencing something new" rather than to actually learn something.

October, 1930.

Culture The Circus Scrap Book was an American publication that collected together old articles and newspaper clippings about big top entertainment. The contents of these are in turn being digitised by the Circus Historical Society and that includes the October 1930 issue which has a short profile of Linda Jeal, popularly known as "The Queen of the Flaming Zone".  She worked for PT Barnham and fell foul of his sensibilities:

"During the early days with the Barnum show, my costume was the subject of a controversy which would today be regarded as ridiculous. The display in public of one's limbs in those mid-Victorian days drew down upon the innocent offender all sorts of censure. We had not yet gotten over the excitement caused by the "Black Crook" and the "British Blondes," who, although severely criticized, drew liberally at the box office.

"Of course the requirements of my hurdle act would not permit me to use any but a specially designed riding costume. Because of the danger of fire, gauze, lace and ribbons were barred. I had to dress for the act as short and as close to the figure as possible. So I designed a neat, tight-fitting, jockey costume. In these days it would not be considered immodest. But in some localities at that time the ladies plainly showed their disapproval.

"It was Mr. Barnum's custom to have the women performers of his show come into the pad room before appearing in the ring to pass judgment on the costume. This was 1879. He expressed satisfaction with them all until he came to me.

" 'Miss Jeal,' said Mr. Barnum, 'you are the only one I find fault with. Your costume is a little too short. Some of the women criticize it severely and you know I have to study my public.' I wonder what Mr. Barnum would say if he could see the costumes the women of today have been wearing on and off the stage."

Vortisaur.

Music Rubbish. Rubbish. Boring. Rubbish. Amazing! Amazing! Amazing! Fellini! Amazing! Magic hour. End. Which is a needlessly critically mixed response to the Flatline video, especially since when these three were recording as the Sugababes, the promos were always simplistic. Overload saw the three of them singing into camera in a white void (insert Whole Again reference here). New Year was roughly the same but with pastel colours and bits of line drawing. Run for Cover was living rooms and couches and streets and alleyways just as this is beaches and deserts. Soul Sound was a plushly furnished flat in a state of recursive occlusion.

The problem, I suppose, is that which afflicts many amazing songs, that the video rarely lives up to them.  The intention was perhaps that the whole thing look like it'd been shot on an iPhone with an Instagram filter switched on, in which case it succeeds at that, and there is a sense that anything "flashier" than this would be wrong too.  Does it succeed in selling the song?  Not as well as the lyric video but the song sells itself anyway pretty much.  I expect there's more to it than what's actually on the surface in terms of creative choices.  In this, the comments underneath the YouTube upload are instructive and surprisingly rational particularly this from MarkehJLL:

"Guys, they're three women in their late 20's who are trying to make a comeback under a completely different name from the one that they're famous for. I doubt their record label was willing to pay for a full-on expensive music video. I personally prefer this to some music video shot in a studio because it seems more authentic, just like their music."

It's shot and directed by photographer KT Auleta which would to some extent explain the aesthetic too.  Plus it's the exact opposite of this, and that has to be a good thing.

Updated Later. Here's something which might explain something about this video. There are surface similarities with the promo for the Sugababes's single About a Girl:



Apart from the leathery fashions, it looks like the desert scenes were shot in the same location and there's a car. But to an extent it's almost as though the director of the Flatline video set out to create almost anti-matter version of this, with deliberately verite shooting and editing, no obviously choreographed dance numbers, sort of thrown together rather than slickly directed and where the About a Girl has guns and violence, Flatline has a marching band. Just make things even more interesting, the wikipedia notices this:

""About a Girl" is the first single to feature vocals by band member Jade Ewen, following the departure of Keisha Buchanan in September 2009."

In other words, is there some subliminal symbolism at work here. Is Flatline, the The Shining of pop videos?

Updated Even Later.  PopJustice has posted their verdict:

"Mutya Keisha Siobhan’s ‘Flatline’ is a sad song about the end of a relationship wrapped up in a pretty melody. Siobhan’s first verse is about a drunken argument and the chorus is about a relationship dying, before Mutya sings about the fact that even crying through all the pain won’t make it right during the second verse.

"All this makes the sun-dappled, Instagram-filtered, beach-modelling, arm-waggling, high-fashion video – which ‘premiered’ at midnight last night/this morning/whatever – pretty baffling, the whole thing screaming ‘WE’RE NOT MOODY AND ALOOF ANYMORE YOU GUYS’ while losing a bit of what makes them special."

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Books Anonymous but self explanatory, Christie in a Year is attempting to read the whole of Agatha's canon before next January. In April, they covered The Murder of Roger Ackroyd:

"First and foremost, rereading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd does not make it easier. Many years ago I did not grasp the subtlety the authoress had shown in giving clues inside the clues between the lines. As a teenager neither could I relate the significance of the mongoose family quote in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book nor understand the reason George Eliot’s autobiographical novel The Mill On The Floss is mentioned. I did remember some details although they were rather confusing to my young mind at that time. I therefore set myself a task to find the layered meaning behind phrases or sentences that seems odd or out of place. Perhaps in some incoherent paragraphs that may shed lights towards whodunit."

Casablanca Wars.

Film This is really rather brilliant. Kitbashed notices that Star Wars is heavily influenced by Casablanca:

"Moreover much of Han Solo’s character, who isn’t in this for your revolution, comes straight out of Rick Blaine as played by Humphrey Bogart, who sticks his neck out for nobody. Much in the way that Han Solo is ready to take off with his reward as the rebel alliance launches their desperate attack on the looming Deathstar. Prior to owning the Café Américain, Rick smuggled guns, and was well paid, just as Solo smuggles whatever it is he dumps at the first sign of imperial trouble. He even adopted Rick’s use of the word ‘kid’. While the characters are hardly carbon copies of one another, Harrison Ford brings much of the same cool demeanor and cynicism to Han Solo. And in the end, both Han and Rick turn out to have a heart of gold."

Not just Star Wars. As The Raider.net notices, George Lucas made it part of the Indiana Jones mix too.

R101.

Aviation By its nature there has been plenty of scrutiny in regards to the R101 disaster with thousands of sources online. The references on the Wikipedia page are a good place to start, which uncludes a link to the official report into the disaster.

The Airship Heritage Trust has a technical explanation for what happened.

In 2009, the original hangars created to house the R101 were put up for sale.

YouTube's BFI channel has a short silent film about the airship's London visit:



There's also this amateur documentary about the sequence of events:



And perhaps most poignantly, a memorial service held in 2010 on the 80th anniversary of the crash.



That anniversary was also marked by an exhibition.

Have you been watching the World Athletics Championship in Moscow?

Sport Have you been watching the World Athletics Championship in Moscow? I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't. As far as I can see barely anyone is. Of course, my window onto "everyone" is my twitter timeline, but that always seems to be a good gage as to what people in general, albeit the kinds of people I'm interested in are interested in. When Paxman's beard happened, that was a focal point, that was talked about. During the athletics, barely anyone has said a thing about anything.

The mood was set on the opening day of competition when the BBC failed to run the opening ceremony. Now, having seen the thing with its coloured balls covered in chemical formulae and a giant inflatable Battleship Potemkin, I can see why. They probably saw the rehearsal and balked at running it instead of the muppet gameshow they'd spent the past week trailing. But it's non-appearance barely registered a murmur amongst a Twitterati who were more interested in talking about other things. Even my own early protest provoked little reaction.

It's been the same since. While I haven't missed a minute of the action, my eye has been glancing a Tweetdeck and the reaction has been the exact opposite of the Olympics despite the blanket coverage. Arguably both Mo Farah and Christine Ohoragu offered even more epic, more exciting performances than last year but no one with my limited online sphere was watching, even taking into account the people in work and fighting to get home from work, that sort of thing.

Why would this be? The timings? Do people lose interest if something isn't in prime time in the UK? Have they been watching but not tweeting about the thing? Is this an early protest because Russia? Fatigue?  A sense of well, we did the Olympics so we've sort of done sport for now?  Photos of our champions have appeared on newspaper front covers so clearly someone's taking an interest, I just think it's interesting that it hasn't provoked the same reaction amongst the people who tend to get excited about this.  Well?

He's back and it's about thirty-three pounds.

Audio If today's post about Doctor Who's Storm Warning has peaked your interest, you might like to know that both of the Eighth Doctor's classic first two seasons have now been heavily discounted by Big Finish permanently to £2.99 each for download. Here's a list for convenience:

Season One:

Storm Warning
Sword of Orion
The Stones of Blood
Minuet in Hell

Season Two:

Invaders from Mars
The Chimes of Midnight
Seasons of Fear
Embrace The Darkness
The Time of the Daleks
Neverland

Season Three

Zagreus

... and then we're back up to full price again, barring the odd sale.  But £33 pounds for the above still ranks as a massive bargain, especially since many of us bought them for £13.99 each originally.

If you need some convincing, most of them were authored by writers who would go on to work on the new series, and there are some stone cold classics in there (The Chimes of Midnight, especially).

Warning.  I introduced these to a friend a couple of years ago and she became addicted to Big Finish, I think.  They can do that to you.

Watching and listening to all of televised Doctor Who in order: The Fourth Doctor.

WHO 50: 2001: Storm Warning.

Audio Here we are then. This is it. The moment I became a Doctor Who fan again.

There’d been plenty of building up, the visit to the exhibition in Llangollen, watching old episodes recorded from UK Gold by my Auntie, starting to buy Doctor Who Magazine, reading the odd novel, listening to the odd audio, but Storm Warning was the moment when all of this switched from passing interest to an obsession which would eventually lead me to writing all of this in the anniversary year.

But curiously, it happened earlier than the commercial release of the story.

On the cover of Doctor Who Magazine 300 was a special cover disc containing a new Big Finish story, Last of the Titans starring Sylv and a preview version of Storm Warning.

I was already excited having followed the period leading up to the release in the magazine but not really knowing what to expect.

But I was torn. Did I want to listen to this knowing I’d probably buy the commercial disc anyway? Didn’t I just want to hear the whole thing in one go?

That lasted about three seconds once I had the thing in my hands.

I was at home alone that day, I remember. Sunny day, the flat was bathed in light through all the windows, in my imagination, like the opening moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We didn’t have a cd player in the living room, so I carried one in from the balcony, and sat it on the floor.

CD in. Pressed play.

The sound of the TARDIS then brilliantly Paul McGann right up front, no beating around the bush, holding him back during some scene setting elsewhere as is so often the case with classic Who. Paul McGann is the Doctor and here he is in the TARDIS.

“TARDIS manual, TARDIS manual, TARDIS manual. Not here are you?”

He’s in the library looking for a book and dives straight into reading through the various books he finds and he’s already fantastic, writer Alan Barnes’s script already smirking away as it references Byron (which was a touchstone for describing the incarnation when the TV movie was first broadcast) and the night when all those horror stories were apparently created (a story which would later be told in prequel).

The approach is an exact opposite of what you might expect for introducing a new Doctor, where the companion’s always up front as the viewpoint character. Except this isn’t a new Doctor. He’s already been knocking about in the franchise for four or five years in comics and novels. Fans know who he is. Sort of.

But I didn’t. Not really. I read some of the comics. Might I have read the odd book, but he was still a bit of a stranger.

Yet, here he was, burning as bright as the sun, if someone’s able to burn bright in audio.

So the episode continues, through an encounter with monsters from the time vortex, to the introduction of the story’s scenario the maiden voyage of the airship R101 (accompanied by Alistair Lock’s bombast soundtrack), the first visit with the story’s supporting characters, the Captain and crew of the ship including Tamworth played by Blake’s 7’s Gareth Thomas along with some suspicion that there’s more to this journey than meets the ears and then by track three we’re back with the Doctor again.

Structurally, it’s a straight down the line bit of classic Who. It’s not attempting to do anything that extraordinarily different, no great paradigm shift.

Not that I knew that then. Everything, everything, seemed fresh, new and well, new. Even by track three, it felt like after over a decade, despite all the Big Finish releases in the mean time, it felt like Doctor Who was back.

The Doctor manages to escape. All the while he’s talking variously to the TARDIS, the Vortisaurs but mainly himself, though in that way in which its obvious he’s really talking to us, and Barnes’s writing is essentially reintroducing this Doctor to us, as though during these opening scenes we’re the companion.

Then moments later she’s there.

It’s Charley, Charlotte Elspeth Pollard, working that other great audio device of writing in her diary, or memoirs.

It’s India Fisher, long before Masterchef made her voice synonymous with other things, giving a remarkably assured performance, the writing again already sketching in all we need to know about her.

Edwardian adventuress who’s so adventuress she’s unafraid to pretend to be a boy in order work on this airship.

It’s one of the best companion introductions ever and arguably an influence of The Snowmen's Clara’s later, with its dual identities.

At the time, I’m not sure I knew she was going to be the companion, but I remember thinking at the time I hoped she would be. It’s still one of the best introduction the franchise has ever seen and for one of the franchise’s best companion. She’s still my favourite.

More plot with the crew of the R101, which I wonder how many listeners really paid attention to first time around, the Doctor lands, investigates the area, decides on a plan, Charley’s unmasked and …

… then I became a Doctor Who fan.

The Doctor’s expostulating, Charley’s running away, they bump into each other … and …

… then I became a Doctor Who fan.

It’s the meet cute. Charley running, the Doctor notices she’s in trouble, they hide, her pursuer disappears and then they make the introductions. The Doctor’s all “I’ve met Lenin”, Charley’s all “I do declare, you many just be the oddest man I’ve ever met” and there’s instant chemistry, the Doctor says “I’m the Doctor by the way”, Charley says, “I’m Charlotte, Charlotte Pollard, Charley to my friends.”, the Doctor replies, “Charley it is then” before continuing, “I tell you, I tell you what, shall we explore?”

And my fate was sealed.

It’s difficult to exactly say why. But there was something about their chemistry, the way it was written, the whole sense of the screwball comedy dialogue which I hadn’t really heard before in the show in quite that way, a little bit in the Tom Baker era especially when written by Douglas Adams.

Something about that the instant friendship, a wish perhaps that such things were as easy in real life. That you could meet someone who’d instant get you and you’d be friends within moments. The ease of the performances. But otherwise I don’t know. It was just sort of all there, the whole of everything, in just a few lines of dialogue.

I knew, at least, I wanted to listen to these characters in the ensuing adventures, handily trailed on the disc once the episode had ended.

Luckily, once I bought Storm Warning, it fulfilled its promise (the roaring scene!) (the intrigue) and I didn’t look back, much.

Looking back, I think I was potentially mostly a fan of these audios firstly but thanks to the brevity of the series leading to starvation, Doctor Who Magazine, cheap VHS copies of the classic series at Music Zone and car boot sales and all the other sources that suddenly present themselves when you do become obsessive about something which you’d thought previously to be relatively rare, I began the plunge into the bottomless expanse of adventures.

Storm Warning, and that moment in Storm Warning aren’t everything. There’s something about the random nature of the stories, the potential for anything to happen, the writing, the wit when Who’s at its most wittiest, the fact that it is one character without a finite number of stories authored by hundreds of writers all with their own interpretation.  Plus the sense of community which surrounds it, the in-jokes, the fact that you’re not so much a fan of Doctor Who, you live it, and in that it's collectively sustained.

In other words, what Capaldi said.

Perhaps if the show itself hadn’t returned in 2005 I might have moved on to something else by now, put away childish things. But it continues and I’m here with it. For now, still.

“This way, do you think?”