"Hoo-ray, it's Saturday, School's out so watch out."

TV  As ever this isn't a review but gosh darn let's talk about tonight's Doctor Who which was one for the ages and may end up in the small list of episodes which define an era even though the title character is hardly in it.  But unlike other "double banking" episodes in which the leads were off making more Doctor Who elsewhere, judging by when 73 Yards was filmed, first in the production order, it seems to have been because Tcuti was still working on Sex Education and this is what was referred to in earlier interviews when Millie talking about starting work before her co-star joined her.  If this was her first episode, the actress was phenomenal and like previous actresses in the main role will have a huge future once she's finished with us.

The pre-publicity suggested this was going to be an old fashioned piece of Welsh folk horror and certainly began like that but in a very meta manner was also The Second Coming's way of showing us the budget they now have available.  Whereas even during the Chibnall era, the whole thing would have been filmed in the White Cross Inn, what with hiring only Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên (Sian) Phillips DBE as the supposed Miss Hawthorne figure, it quickly expanded to become a Turn Left style alt-history in which we saw a possible future for our newest heroine battling some Saxonite megalomaniac whilst offering one of the most detailed explorations of a companion's potential dating history outside of the Virgin New Adventures.

But why am I here tonight?  Because some fans have been reacting very strangely even negatively to this episode and the show in general and it seems to stem from how many things are a being kept a mystery.  With RTD2 having decided that the Whoniverse contains magic and that there's some flexibility when it comes to Clarke's 3rd Law, some viewers seem to be taking the transition very badly.  The writer understands that like fairy stories you don't have to explain everything and it leaning into that.  Cinderella doesn't go into great length to describe the origins of the fairy god mother so we don't really need to know why there are suddenly goblins and a realm where the likes of Maestro are chilling waiting to manifest.

But we can't help ourselves.  Why 73 yards?  Assuming Ruby's still twenty at the start of the shenanigans, perhaps the 73 yards represent the 73 years older this future echo of Ruby is when she dies.  Although she appears older after the first 40 year time jump, we're not told her age when she dies and there could still have been a significant gap between seeing the TARDIS for the last time and what looks like the palliative care ward.  Why do the people who talk to the older version of her react the way they do?  Perhaps they're hexed in such a way as they can't then return to Ruby and tell her the truth, the twist at the end, if you will.  They're not entirely sure why they find her so repugnant, but like me and Mark Rylance, they simply just do.

There's also the interesting stuff is in the meeting between Ruby and Kate (which has now presumably been wiped away so it looks like they'll be meeting for the first time again by season's end).  The head of UNIT makes the distinction between the extra-terrestrial and supernatural.  But then she says "I think this timeline might be suspended along your event" which suggests that she's fully aware that the current reality isn't the "correct" one.  Notice Ruby's puzzlement.  But is the event she's discussing the one from that episode or her whole existence from the moment of her birth?  Will that future episode have Kate describing the events of this episode as part of some elaborate multi-dimensional shenanigans?  What is it with all the snow?

A couple of the professional reviews have also noticed that it's the second week in a row that the inciting incident is the Doctor standing on something which makes him look immensely clumsy but given that this sort of thing has happened throughout the history of the programme as a trigger for a storyline from Skaro to Androzani Major to Lakertya.  But with Ruby's butterfly crushing too, the chances of the production team not noticing this are slim and for all we know it's all part of a grander plan.  At this point you could say that about anything which is happening in most of these episodes.  Why is Rosie Banks from Brookside in every episode?  Is she the Rani?  Susan?  Even if she's either or neither, what about Molly Hennings from Christmas at the Holly Day Inn?  We've only a few more weeks before it starts to unravel.

As you can see, and as Kate says in her meeting with Ruby, "That's what we do, all of us, we see something inexplicable and invent the rules to make it work."  Or as Eighth says in the TV Movie with the Pertwee logo, "I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there."  We're desperate to fill in these gaps, in many ways the show has often taught us that everything will be explained later.  But that's, so far, antithetical to what the show is now.  It's taking River's reaction to the Doctor when he scoffed at the existence of the Pandorica, that it's just a fairy tale, "Aren't we all" and running with it.  The magic storybook elements of early Moffat without the need to produce some technological, xeno-anthropolical handwaving to justify things how a Weeping Angel moves or a space whale exists.

I suppose what I'm trying to suggest is that there has be a happy medium between thing excellent and thing rubbish because nothing is explained or I don't understand it.  Perhaps viewers who like the obtuse cinema of the likes of Renais, Godard and Garland will more readily accept ambiguous endings like we saw tonight.  But Doctor Who's a Broadchurch, sorry, broad church of stories, Forrest Gump's proverbial chocolate box and that's why we love it and next week looks like a fun romp through the babblesphere.  Anyway, I'm hooked.  This is as connected as I've been to the television iteration of the series since probably the Matt Smith era and I'm very pleased I've decided to not review it and just sit back and watch.

Shakespeare First Folios: A Checklist

Books  Let's formalise things.  Since it looks like my latest mad project is going to be looking at all the extant First Folios either in person or on a screen, find after the fold a complete list of all the First Folios in existence as per Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West's The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue.  Their version offers a bit more geographical detail but this list has been simplified for ease of use.  After each location you'll see that they're marked depending on whether the linked blog post talks about a Folio I've seen in the real world [IRL], on screen [TV].  I've also linked to a complete digital version [complete] where available and partial [partial] when it's just a page or two or the binding.  It's unlikely I'll be able to tick all of them off (especially if they're in a vault somewhere), but it's a finite goal.

32 Bodleian Library

 

Books  Twelve Books That Changed The World (2006) is a book and four part ITV documentary series in which Melvyn Bragg highlights a series of British volumes which he thinks, have had the most profound effect on humanity.  There are the obvious choices: On The Origin of Species, The King James Bible, Principia Mathematica and the Magna Carta.  The more specific choices: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Married Love, On the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Experimental Researches in Electricity and The Wealth of Nations.  The probably aimed at the channel's core audience: Book of Rules of Association Football.  

Over the years I've been hoarding documentaries about Shakespeare and found this on a DVD-R which I must have recorded off-air at the time.  This would have been in the period when I was recording from a separate Freeview box direct to disc so everything is in the wrong aspect ratio  (which is also why all the screenshots on here look a bit weird).  It opens with a trailer for GMTV followed by an advert for digital switchover to offer some historic context and includes weather forecast which probably also captures perfectly what life was like in the UK in 2006:

The grand finale is the First Folio.  There's not much you can do with ten minutes of screen time, so Melvyn offers a brief outline of how the book was published, a mix of scenes from the plays (mainly sourced from the BBC Shakespeare although there's a bit of Branagh and Kurosawa sprinkled in) and contributions from Yale University's Professor Harold Bloom and the then Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library Dr. Gail Paster who aid Melvyn in collectively offering a general sense of the historical importance of the Folio in the development of the English language.  There's also a nice moment when some international acting students translate the text into their own language.

There are actually three different Folios in the programme (four if you count a facsimile used when Melvyn's quoting from the preface).  Dr Paster has one of the Folger copies on the desk beside her, but its in profile and there's not enough visual information to work out which one.  There's a single shot of the contents page of a folio which isn't the one seen elsewhere (we'll get to that).  Despite having an unfolded crease down the middle I've not been able to identify from Rasmussen and West's catalogue The Shakespeare First Folios which copy this is from.  The third is the one which is the reason why we're here.

A slow vertical pan reveal Melvyn sat behind a table covered in a black cloth with the First Folio before him.  Although it might have been obvious to some of you which of the Oxbridges this is, I was sent off on a tangent by the book which uses images from the Cambridge owned editions.  Did I phone the rare books section at Cambridge University to see if the numbers connected to the picture credit meant anything?  I may have.  Did they?  No, no they didn't.  Not that it mattered.  I soon realised the shields on the chairs were from Oxford which led to the Bodleian which has large sections of its rare books collection digitised and available to view online.

The Bodleian Library has two Folios of which this is probably the more photogenic.  The other, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.7 is the original deposit copy sent by the Folio's printmaker William Jaggard to the library.  There's much to be said about how it was sold off as worthless to a local bookseller when the Third Folio was published in 1664 and only returned to Oxford in the early 1900s after they outbid the Folger library.  That copy doesn't appear on screen because as you can see from the digital scan it was not taken care of to say the least with whole chunks of the pages torn out.  The section listing its condition in Rasmussen and West's catalogue stretches to three and a half pages.

The digital scan of the copy which does appear, Bodleian Library Arch. G c.8 also has had a difficult life but at least the relevant pages are intact and for the most part looks very impressive on the table in front of Melvyn.  I was ultimately able to confirm which copy it was because a shot of title page include a partial glimpse of the opposite side where the "To the Reader" unusually appears has been pasted in from another source, a Fourth Folio edition if the pencil note underneath is to be believed.  The title pages from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet which are shown also match this copy, the latter notably because of a burn mark at the top of the page.

The history of this folio is pretty straightforward.  The provenance begins with eighteenth-century literary scholar Edmond Malone (there's a Reynolds portrait of him on his Wikipedia page), a man after my own heart who devoted part of his life to trying to deducing the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays.  This was published in the complete works edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steenvens in 1778, an order which is still largely followed.  Malone later fell out with Steevens, notably when he published his own complete works which he said would be "more scientifically and methodically edited than the Johnson–Steevens edition was ever likely to become."

As part of his research Malone collected many books including the Folio, although it's not known where he procured it in 1780.  He treated it as a working copy and/or scrap book and there are notes about the nature of the play strewn throughout, various engravings of luminaries like the Earl of Pembroke pasted in and a facsimile of Shakespeare's signature.  How much of this was Malone or the previous owner isn't clear although its pretty startling to see a Folio treated in this way.  On one page Malone has even included in what's supposed to be an engraving of Shakespeare taken from the Steevens' complete works with a note underneath explaining that it's not actually the playwright, but James I.

On his death, he left a lengthy instruction to his brother Richard, Lord Sunderlin, that the lot be given to Trinity College Dublin.  But Richard was an Oxford man, so decided to ignore all that.  He initially loaned the collection to James Boswell The Younger, son of Samuel Johnson's biographer who was working on the second edition of the Johnson/Steeven complete works.  After Boswell died, Richard finally deposited the Elizabethan books including the First Folio to the Bodleian in 1821 and auctioned off the rest.  It's been there ever since, appearing in two Shakespeare exhibitions in 1916 and 1964.

But what about the contents page?  Although the Bodleian edition is in pretty good order, the box at the bottom of the page contains a note from Malone in which he noticed how Troilus and Cressida seems have have been a late addition, which is a bit too much detail for a fifteen minute segment about the book late night on an ITV Sunday.  Two Oxford Colleges, Queens and Wadham both have their own copies but the entries in The Shakespeare First Folio don't mention the crease you can see above and best will in the world I'm not going through the rest of the book trying to match it.  Perhaps it was filmed as a pick-up when the crew visited the Folger library?

Further appearances:

This copy also appeared in the 2002 series Great Britons in which the BBC tasked the public to vote on who they believed to be the best people in British history.  After an initial vote, the top ten nominees each received a presenter led documentary in which an advocate, in Shakespeare's case Fiona Shaw, offered an argument as to why their candidate was the best.  32 Bodleian Library appears in two shots, the title page with the tell tale pasted in "To The Reader".

The other shot is of the cover, during a crossfade from the bust in Holy Trinity Church.  In the end, Shakespeare was fifth behind Churchill, Brunel, Princess Diana and Darwin but ahead of Newton, Elizabeth, Lennon, Nelson and Cromwell.  

The Downside of Disney+

TV  There we have it.  Until about an hour ago, the co-production deal with Disney+ in the making of Doctor Who seemed to be all upside.  Larger budgets, a series every year for at least another four years and the possibility of it finally becoming a global franchise which is famous enough to have its own proper Lego that isn't just adding a fan-made mini-figure to the pirate set (or whatever).  There even seemed to be some agreement on the scheduling with the past four episodes premiering globally at the whims of the BBC One scheduling.  Well, it couldn't last.

Doctor Who is set to make an explosive return on 11 May.

The TARDIS will make its global premiere around the Whoniverse and for those in the UK, for the first time ever, the Doctor will land with two episodes premiering on BBC iPlayer at 00:00  on Saturday, before arriving on BBC One later that day right before the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final.

At the same time, those outside of the UK can watch the Doctor and Ruby on their epic adventures as the TARDIS is set to land on Disney+ where available.

Viewers in the UK will now be able to watch whenever and wherever they choose, with the option to watch from midnight on BBC iPlayer or tune in at primetime on Saturday nights on BBC One.

As though in the year of our lord Rassilon 2024, fans are going to wait until tea time to watch brand new Doctor Who episodes which have been in circulation for eighteen or nineteen hours.  Instead we're now all going to be watching our favourite programme at midnight every Friday night into Saturday morning when some of us will be tired as fuck and have work the following day.  It's either that or living through a digital iteration of the No Hiding Place episode of The Likely Lads week after sorry week unable to use social media or visit our favour news websites for fear of spoilers.

This will, of course, be part of the co-production agreement that going into the main series, Disney+ (the richer of the co-production partners) didn't want the global launch of these episodes to be at the whims of the BBC One scheduling which in fairness rarely follows a strict timing on a Saturday night any more so that everyone in the world can watch the episodes at the same time, 7pm ET as it's described in the press release, which means it'll be on a Friday evening in some parts of the world and in the middle of the night in others.  In Australia it'll be first thing in the morning.

I'm trying not to feel too cross about this and at least Russell T Davies will be able to spin a page of his Production Notes in the party circular offering us a metaphoric hug.  Plus it means that fans outside of the UK will see it at the same time as us after decades of it largely emerging there on whatever channel, at whatever time, days, months or even years after its original transmission.  Although you could argue that's been the case in the UK for a range of shows although that was usually in the era before everything which happens being talked about everywhere all at once.

It's just that Doctor Who's been one of the last remaining communal viewings amongst genre fans in the UK.  We'd watch the episode and then visit our social media of choice to talk about what we've just seen albeit with the understanding that some fans won't have been able to see it on TX and stinting our claps unless its something so big (ahem) that it would be impossible not to avoid it anyway.  Perhaps that'll still be the same now.  We'll just be doing at at one in the morning and hope that people have various words muted (as I did with Game of Thrones for many years).  Hey ho.

David Bordwell RIP.

Obituaries  There are only a few figures in life that have been as important to be as film theorist and historian David Bordwell, who left us on the 1st March.  I really began taking film serious in the mid-90s, but it wasn't until the mid-00s when I was exposed to his work through my MA course that I really understood how films were structured, how they worked as an art form.  Unlike other writers, he and his wife Kristen Thompson had the ability to make even the most esoteric concepts accessible and if you're at all interested in film, I'd point you towards any edition of Film Art (earlier editions are much cheaper and just as valid) and their blog.

On that blog, Kristen writes movingly about his final days.  The last thing he watched was a couple of episodes of The West Wing:

"He wanted to die at home rather than spending his last days at a hospice facility, and he did. I was with him. It was brief, and I don’t think he suffered. It happened within a few months of the fiftieth anniversary of when we moved in together in the summer of 1974. He was as wonderful a spouse as he was a scholar and a friend."

The post includes an obituary from the university he worked with quotes from Damien Chazelle and David Koepp.  If there's any justice, he'll be included in the Oscar obituary reel.

The Eighth Doctor (Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide To The Whoniverse)

Books  The cornerstone of BBC Books's 60th anniversary efforts, Whotopia is part of the legacy of Doctor Who reference books taking the effort right up to The Power of the Doctor, on this occasion resolutely sticking to the fiction rather than production.  Perhaps sensing that having a printed book containing this information is a bit old fashioned when WOTAN's successor is out there (not to mention every episode on the iPlayer), the authors, Jonathan Morris, Simon Guerrier and Una McCormack's twist is to have many of the mentioned individuals provide first person testimony for themselves in character, "incoming messages" mixing new material and dialogue straight from the show.  

As with so many of these projects its obviously an act of love and joy for this silly old series and that's reflected in the quarter page entry for Eighth, half a page if you include the publicity shot for Night of the Doctor.  This being an official publication, it's only allowed to reference the top and tail of his story so we find him wistfully reflecting on his regeneration and how alive he feels, not that there isn't an Easter egg for us long terms fans, "I think that's what's different about me.  The joy of life" (unless it's entirely co-incidental).  The business ends rather sharply but sweetly and feels entirely in character, which is why I'm "reviewing" it here and trying to think of a ...

Placement: Let's sneak it in after The Eight Doctors.  Perhaps he's chatting with Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.

Romola On Walking.

People  From The Guardian this week on the occasion of her appearing in Nachtland at the Young Vic.  It's about a decision to sell or burn a Hitler painting or as the interviewer points out, what Channel 4 did a couple of years ago.  On a lighter note:

"I go on very long walks, sometimes a whole day on my own. I walk around London, I walk around the Downs, I’ll sometimes just walk for miles in the countryside. Last year, I went to Paris and did a two-day walk. I just find it very soothing. Also, particularly as I get older, I’m feeling more communist!"

 

What's happened to the Doctor Who Annual?

Books  In the past week I've finally managed to get my hands on a copy of this year's Doctor Who Annual thanks to Blackwells.  It's fair to say I was whelmed.  Again.  Now I'm obviously not the target audience for these volumes, anyone over the age of ten probably isn't, but compared to the editions of even yesterday it feels threadbare, particularly in the area of original fiction.  

Amid the factual pieces and games there's a charming single story which allows veteran writer Steve Cole to tick the fourteenth Doctor off his list, one of the rare few.  A version of the Doctor with David Tennant's face has a rematch with the Sycorax, so there are plenty of callbacks to The Christmas Invasion.  

It's marked as "A Brand New Adventure" which it would have been on the day of publication, 7 September 2023.  But some kids opening and reading it on Christmas Day might have been a bit disappointed they also received the anthology, Ten Days of Christmas, which also features the same story, topping and tailing a series of Tenth Doctor stories and listed on the cover as an "exclusive" which was published a month after this.

It's not quite the same.  Whereas the whole story is as prose in the anthology, the annual offers a comic strip adaptation of the second half.  It's drawn by Doctor Who Adventures vet John Ross with his bold, brash, colourful style.  Nevertheless it is a pre-print of material which was due to be published again month later and could potentially have led to some parents paying twice for the same thing.  How did we get to this point?

Some history.  As probably everyone reading this will know, Doctor Who Annuals have been in publication since the mid-60s and this isn't the first occasion material has been reprinted.  Elements of annuals reappeared in omnibus form.  The first spin-off fiction I came across was at Speke Library, who had a copy of the Adventures in Time and Space anthology which collected material representing most of the previous annuals.  But it was a separate publication to the annual publications.

When the show returned, the 2006 annual included material written by the new showrunner and stories by all of the writers from the first series, all of whom had previous contributed to spin-off ventures so knew what was required.  Steven Moffat would later adapt his story What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow into the best Doctor Who story ever made that isn't Caves of Androzani, Blink.

The annual was a massive success for Panini, also publishers of Doctor Who Magazine and so the license was obviously handed over to someone else, namely the BBC Children's Books imprint of Penguin who've been producing it to this day.  The 2007 annual was a more simplistic affair with the flavour of the Doctor Who Adventures magazine in publication at the time, to the point of including a reprint of a strip from issue 2.

Russell T Davies was quite cross about this and rightly so.  Unfortunately I've been unable to trace the source for his annoyance, be it in a Doctor Who Magazine interview, Production Notes or The Writer's Tale.  I'm sure I haven't hallucinated it.  Either way he said that he'd make sure that it wouldn't happen again and it didn't.

Up until the 2020 edition, even after he'd left the show, every annual included some kind of original Doctor Who story, comics or prose or both varying in length and complexity.  Paul Lang, the senior designer of  Doctor Who Adventures, continued the tradition of publication even after it ended publication by essentially creating a new hardbacked edition of it each year which continued right through to the Thirteenth Doctor's first year.

But in the Doctor Who Annual 2020, something changed.  Published in 2019 (so pre-pandemic), this had a rather perfunctory episode guide (mixed with some puzzles) bracketed by two lengthy prose stories, nicely illustrated by George Ermos and Lauren Wills.  But the reader might be forgiven for finding them familiar - they were both reprints from books originally published in 2018, an excerpt from David Solomons'  The Secret in Vault 13 and The Rhino of Twenty-Three Strand Street from David Rudden's anthology Twelve Angels Weeping.

At the time this seemed like a rip-off.  Avid fans who read every new book as they're published will have seen these before and although the pictures are rather lovely, there'll be some kids or their parents who will have paid £7.99 for second hand material and what amounted to adverts for other books and even if they wouldn't have otherwise noticed, the adverts for those publications at the end of each story would have indicated such.  

After years and years of brilliant or at least unusual Christmas treats going into 2020, buyers of the annuals were handed something which had been re-gifted, shameless reprints from earlier sources and that's continued.  To be fair the Amazon and Good Reads pages for the book suggest that people were happy enough with their purchase with a fair few five-stars around.  But actual reviews often note that these stories are reprints and isn't it a shame?

The 2021 annual was a slight improvement.  The synopses within the episode guide are written as first person diary entries by the Doctor and the fam and at the end there's a section which ties in to the next year's Time Lord Victorious event, with River Song in her Melody Malone alter ego introducing the various characters and races who'd be appearing.  This is all new material even if it isn't a story exactly, more like another advert for all the other product.

But then the only fiction in the 2022 is a four page retelling in photo comic format of the first episode of the Daleks! animated story which was the Doctor Who YouTube channel's contribution to Time Lord Victorious, ending on a cliffhanger and a suggesting that readers should go there to see the conclusion.  Another reprint of existing material in a slightly different form.  Screenshotting the thing and adding speech bubbles is a technical and design achievement, but what's it for?

Fair play to the Official 60th Anniversary Annual 2023, which includes a blisteringly fun (almost) complete history of the Doctor written from the thirteenth Doctor's POV, wittily recapping some of the show's madness over the years, suggesting that Sixy did indeed regenerate after falling off his exercise bike and under the subheading "the wilderness years" noting in the wake of Seventh:

"everything went a bit quiet for a while.  There are no visual records of any of my adventures for a long time - although there are written archives."

There certainly are kids, a whole era of adventures, "Too Broad and Deep for the Small Screen" and in some case too pornographic, but I digress.  

Except the centrepiece of the book, at a moment which should be celebrating Jodie Whittaker's final year in the role and looking ahead to the future of the series, is "Clara Oswald and the Enchanted Forest" by Jasbinder Bilan featuring a character which hadn't been in the show for over five years which at the end we discover is pre-print from the Origin Stories anthology.

Which means since the comic strips in the 2019 edition, the hasn't been any original fiction exclusive to the Doctor Who Annual and in some cases, it's entirely possible that someone could receive books containing the same stories on Christmas Day which I'm sorry to say is a rip-off by the publisher, Penguin Random House UK, that otherwise has a sparkling track record in new Doctor Who fiction, from their new TARGET novelisations to the aforementioned anthologies.  Serious, they're otherwise brilliant.

What editorial decisions have led to this shift?  If it's budgetary, it's hard to see why they can't justify commissioning a writer or two to create new stories on top of the sterling design work, for what is sure to be one of their biggest sellers of the year at £9.99 a pop even if the paper and printing does cost more these days.  If it's because of a crush on deadlines, plan earlier.  If it's creative, a way of offering a shop window for other publications which might not have the same cache, well, that's just cynical.

There's a possibility that someone reading this, assuming they've come this far will know the answer to this and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation and honestly, I wrote most of this as a way of finding that out.  If, as ever, that I'm entirely off-base I'll be happy to edit this or even take it down.  I've tried desperately not to criticise individuals but the whole annual as published entity and everything which leads to it being like this.

Why does this matter?  Apart from diminishing the legacy of the annuals and making them something less than (especially now Panini's separate "Storybooks" or "Brilliant Books" don't exist any more), I'm just thinking about what it will be like for some parents and kids each Christmas.  Annuals used to be special events and at a cost of £9.99 this year, it feels like Penguin, outside of the editorial matter, are taking advantage of readers by not giving them value for money and instead offering up something they might already own.

Review 2023: A Review of 2023: December.

01    Snow

02    "Isaac Newton had Indian heritage and the Doctor is gay and fancies him."

03    "just had the weirdest experience"

04    Plagiarism and You(Tube)

05    Wild Kiwis Born Near New Zealand’s Capital for the First Time in More Than 150 Years

06    Hillsborough law: government leaves victims’ families disappointed again

07    Taylor Swift named Time's Person of the Year 2023

08    Woman Who Threw Food at Chipotle Employee Sentenced to Work Fast-Food Job

09    Bigeneration!

10    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 75

11    Paris's Ritz hotel finds €750,000 ring in vacuum cleaner bag

12    Tree up!

13    E3 down.

14    Alex Batty: Teen from Oldham missing for six years found in France

15    Full footage of BBC presenter swearing at camera released

16    Olly Alexander will represent the United Kingdom at Eurovision 2024

17    "sorry if this is a silly question, but i've only seen pay phones in movies. did pay phones actually exist everywhere irl or is it used to create drama in films? why aren't there any?"

18    How Michelle Mone tried to silence the New European

19    Lord of the Rings fan fiction writer sued for publishing own sequel

20    Why was Trump removed from Colorado ballot and what does it mean?

21    Pictures from the Winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge

22    Last Christmas scores Christmas number one, beating Sam Ryder and Mariah Carey

23    Banksy: Man arrested over removal of road sign art in Peckham

24    Christmas Eve 2023 in London

25    Tcuti Gatwa is the Doctor

26    Cromer Boxing Day dip 'one of the best ever'

27    WH Smith’s ‘WHS’ rebrand criticised for similarity to NHS logo

28    The Blackpool Tower was not on fire

29    Tank outside Wickes as man fumes over 'poor quality' kitchen

30    Paula Abdul Sues American Idol Producer Nigel Lythgoe Over Sexual Assault Claims

31    The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

Review 2023: A Review of 2023: November.

01    The Whoniverse launches.  It does not include the first four episodes

02    The final song from The Beatles released

03    ‘You are our enemies’: Noel Edmonds in spat with council after move to New Zealand

04    Refund calls as smoke 'blocks' Edgbaston fireworks display

05    The best Doctor Who montage video of all time

06    The Randomiser

07    Antidepressants or Tolkien?

08    Carol Vorderman leaves BBC radio show so she can keep criticising Tory government

09    The SAG-AFTRA Strike Is Officially Over!

10    Chester Picturehouse opens

11    Armistice Day

12    The Marvels tops the box office chart across the world

13    Suella Braverman gone, David Cameron back

14    Puking bird wins New Zealand bird competition after John Oliver campaign

15   The Supreme Court rules Rwanda policy as unlawful

16    New Indo-European Language Discovered

17    OpenAI Ousts CEO Sam Altman

18    Moldovan president's dog bites hand of visiting Austrian president

19    Third session of negotiations on an international plastics treaty advance in Nairobi

20    Why a single 'Inverted Jenny' stamp sold for $2 million at auction

21    OpenAI rehires CEO Sam Altman

22    Ian Levine banned from Gallifrey Base

23    Happy 60th birthday to Doctor Who

24    The Doctor reads a CBeebies Bedtime Story

25    Doctor Who's The Star Beast broadcast

26    'Bring back Bob!": Angry villagers 'boycotting' Waitrose after Popular Car Park Attendant suspended

27    1985

28    Penny Lane street sign back in Liverpool 47 years after drunken theft

29    Elon Musk to Advertisers Who Left X: “Go Fuck Yourself”

30    Statement from President Biden on the Passing of Henry Kissinger

Review 2023: A Review of 2023: October

01    More than 100 dolphins found dead in Brazilian Amazon amid rapidly rising water temperatures

02    15 minutes cities

03    Meat Tax

04    HS2 cancelled by our transphobic prime minister

05    How a group of 8 Republicans had enough power to get rid of Speaker McCarthy

06    Buses return to public control in Liverpool City Region

07    RIP Terrance Davies

08    Hamas attacks Israel

09    I read the absolute worst article I've ever seen in any magazine.

10    BBC announces 60 Years of Doctor Who will drop on BBC iPlayer on 1st November *

11    Female frogs fake their own death to avoid unwanted attention from males: Study

12    Jada Pinkett Smith announces she and Will Smith separated in 2016

13    World Egg Day

14    Australia votes 'No' in a referendum on Aboriginal rights

15    * which may not include the first four episodes

16    Independent Expert Panel recommends suspending Peter Bone MP for bullying and sexual misconduct

17    Richard Curtis is schooled by his daughter on the deficiencies of his films.

18    Tumbleweeds

19    Sidney Powell: Trump ex-lawyer pleads guilty in Georgia election case

20    NASA shares never-before-seen images of Jupiter's lava-covered moon, Io

21    The London Metro Quiz

22    INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY.

23    I attended a recording of this episode ofYou're Dead To Me at the Shakespeare North Playhouse.

24    Over 60 Chaucer manuscripts available online

25    ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

26    The Last Beatles Song.

27    1989 (Taylor's Version) released.

28    Gaza

29    RIP Matthew Perry

30    Chicxulub impact winter sustained by fine silicate dust

31    "Nature’s way of dealing with old people."

Review 2023: A Review of 2023: September

01    Pakistani wedding guests turn to fistfights as 'uncle' didn't receive enough mutton in his biryani

02    Burning Man Shut Down Due to Heavy Rain, Stranding Attendees

03    RAAC

04    Hello!

05    ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’? No signs of that, no?”

06    David Harewood says portrait stands for ‘resilience of my people’ after Leeds unveiling (more background)

07    Danny  Masterson

08    Moroccan Earthquake

09    Ecuador presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio assassinated at campaign event

10    Drew Barrymore temporarily destroys her career

11    Is there life on K2-18b?

12    ITV picks up Oscars broadcast rights for UK as Sky backs away

13    Doctor Who Magazine has a new editor, Jason Quinn

14    GURWM gone wrong.  Camelia cut her bangs.  Again.

15    Libya flood: Drone images show extent of Derna destruction

16    Russell Brand

17    Lauren Boebert

18    This potentially landmark moment in broadcasting is announced

19    People born by egg or sperm donor in UK will be able to find out biological origins

20    Rishi Sunak breaks the ministerial code

21    The Devil steps down from running hell

    

22    COVID jab.

23    Doctor Who 60th Anniversary trailer released.  Meep.

24    NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

25    Trowbridge builder's 'gargoyle' stunt in planning row hits headlines

26    The US writer's strike ends

27    Could space-based solar farms soon be a reality?

28    Sycamore Gap felled

29    Letterboxd sold

30    Man breaks record of eating hottest chilli pepper at fastest speed

Exit Strategy (The War Doctor Begins: Enemy Mine)

Audio  As the title suggests, The War Doctor Begins is Big Finish's prequel to their earlier The War Doctor series with Jonathan Carney in as the younger John Hurt.  The Eighth Doctor appears in the final episode.  I'm a stranger in a strange narrative here, turning up for the finale of a series which has spanned across six boxed sets.  There's just enough exposition to explain the story; War's former companion Case has been captured by the Dalek Strategist and become an experimental hybrid agent and whatever atrocities she commits, the War Doctor's determined to save her.  The Eighth Doctor is key to his plans.  It's impossible to talk about this without spoilers so there'll be spoilers ahead.

Enemy Mine

Eighth appears in the final episode of the three, Exit Strategy.  War's tried everything he can to get through to Case but the Dalek hold on her is too strong.  His former incarnation first appears in a flashback as he considers the person he used to be, helping a medic in the middle of warzone who himself has been injured.  It's from the period when Eighth was travelling with Bliss which is interesting considering in Previously, Next Time (from the Cass box), he'd forgotten who she was and now he's able to recall her existence enough for her to appear silently, bringing help from the TARDIS.  On hearing that I feared I'd bought this whole boxset for little more than a cameo.  No.

Later in the story, Eighth appears again and this is where it becomes complicated and I give away the twist.  When he first appears its with his catchphrase, "I'm the Doctor just not the one ..." but is interrupted when he realises he's stepped into the middle of a horrific situation with Case on edge and the medic he treated earlier also in the Dalek's thrall.  He doesn't know how he got there but immediately steps into action, the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism to use the Dalek's own strategies against them, saving Case in the process.  He interacts with the War Doctor on occasion but as expected, apparently for continuity sake, doesn't really know who he is.

But it's only in the final moments we discover the gift and curse at the heart of this adventure.  The Eighth Doctor is effectively an AI, injected by the War Doctor into Case's matrices to dislodge the Dalek influence but unlike the simulation in which she survives and becomes the Eighth Doctor's new companion, in the "real world" it's caused her to tumble towards death and War has her on unending life support with the digital version of his earlier self giving her a tour of the universe in her dreams.  In a final poignant exchange, we discover this Eighth is self-aware, knows why he exists and agrees to take care of Case for the time she has left.

Here's the clever bit.  The reason Eighth began with his catchphrase is because he's been snatched from War's memories at the moment when he was still at his purest, in the opening moments of Night of the Doctor before Cass took against him and events conspired to turn him into the warrior.  It's an acknowledgement of how much he's changed or had to change in order to fight in the war and to present him with the goal of ending the war so that he can get back to being the person he once was, something which as we've already seen won't happen until this incarnation is much older or without the help of some future selves.

Placement: The flashback should perhaps go between The Time War boxes, the first and second but because the virtual Eighth Doctor's at the forefront, "Alternative Eighth Doctors" it is.

Review 2023: A Review of 2023: August.

01    Trump indicted again

02    Whipsnade Zoo sees birth of endangered red panda twins

03    Greenpeace Protesters Scale U.K. Prime Minister’s Roof

04    Heatwave sees hundreds fall ill at World Scout Jamboree in South Korea

05    Greta Gerwig becomes the first solo female director to earn $1B at the box office for a single film

06    England reached the final of the Netball World Cup

07    I finally visited Milton Keynes

08    Electoral Commission subject to cyber-attack

09    Northern Ireland Police data breach

10    Wilko enters administration

11    Lizzo

12    2-1

13    Belgian university launches Taylor Swift-inspired literature course

14    Record Labels File $412 Million Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Internet Archive

15    BBC sells Maida Vale studios to partnership including Hans Zimmer

16    3-1

17    Sir Michael Parkinson: Chat show host dies aged 88

18    World Athletics Championship begin in Budapest

19    Blocked

20    The Lionesses lose 1-0 against Spain in the World Cup.  KJT wins Gold.

21    Noel Edmunds

22    Pakistan: Drone shows children trapped in cable car dangling over river canyon

23    India lands on the moon

24    John Eliot Gardiner pulls out of BBC Proms after punching singer

25    Mugshot

26    Dorries

27    Team GB & NI End World Championships in Budapest with a ten medal haul

28    Literal brain worm

29    North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service Incident Summary Day Shift 29th August 2023

30    Super Blue Moon

31    Thousands of pupils may have to start term online as over 100 schools affected by crumble-risk concrete

Predictions 2023.

That Day We reach the time when I assess how well I predicted the ups and downs of the year and look forward to the next. Here we go again:

The Sugababes release an album of new material.

No, no they didn't.  But they did release a brand new single in September which was launch on The Graham Norton Show (see above) and reached a pretty respectable 14 in the pop charts.  No marks on the technicality that the LP isn't out yet.

More Doctor Who episodes found.

No.  Although some episodes went missing again instead.  No marks.

General election called, Tories lose power.

Ack, no.  Please for the love of Hera, next year.  No marks.

Spider-Man film starring Andrew Garfield announced.

Not at all and nothing on the horizon.  We're getting Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter films instead.  No marks.

New old Shakespeare play canonised.

What does this really mean in the context of anything?  Perhaps its that a play is added to the menagerie by the main academic publishers, which looked like it could be Arden of Faversham but then in 2022, Arden hedged their bets and added it to their "Early Modern Drama" line rather than Shakespeare despite some persuasive arguments in the introduction.   No marks.

0/5.  So let's do the fifty year old version of me a favour and choose some items which can't fail. Surely, this time? 

The Sugababes release an whole album of brand new material.

General election called, Tories lose power.

Overhaul of Disney "content" for better or worse.

Trump jailed.

X (formerly known as Twitter) sold again.

A couple of repeats, some open enough to any kind of change, one which is pure wishful thinking (you can guess which).

Happy New Year!