Today, We Have Mostly Been Giggling...

Today, We Have Mostly Been Giggling...

A very late and very short blog post today, as we've spent most of the afternoon and evening working on material for Episode 24 of 'Round The Archives'.

Warren has joined us for a recording session entirely devoted to 'Juliet Bravo' which kicked off with a look at 'Shot Gun', the very first episode. This is a pretty grim affair that gave us a lot to talk about. In fact the raw file runs to about 49 minutes, which oddly is almost the same running time as the episode itself.

Maybe we'd have saved some time if we'd just recorded a DVD commentary instead, but we actually followed the approach we'd used for 'The Gentle Touch' by writing lots of notes as we went along and then trying to remember exactly what the disjointed words were actually referring to.

After a visit to the fish-and-chip shop (Warren had a Jumbo Sausage according to the witnesses) we quickly followed through with 'Teamwork' from the start of Season 4.

As we seemed to be on a roll, we also recorded a quick sketch where Inspector Lisa is holding me for suggesting Naughty Things On Podcasts, though whether she can make this stand up in court remains to be seen.

This sketch led to some serious giggling (even more than the articles themselves) and will need a decent bit of editing. But I think the full version deserves to be the bonus track after the end credits.
So, all in all, lots of good work achieved today, which puts us in a decent position to get Episode 24 out on schedule.

So many thanks to Warren - we always rely on his support...

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

Doctor Who And The Ghostly Leg

Doctor Who And The Ghostly Leg

It might not always be apparent, but we do try and plan ahead for 'Round The Archives' as much as possible and even with things done at short notice (hello there article on 'Roberts Robots') we do at least a basic amount of research before committing anything to the digital recorder.

The sheer amount of material we get through means that we can't write down every word we're going to say, but we've usually got some notes knocking about that we can refer to.

So, I guess you could say that we take a sort of Patrick Troughton approach - we vaguely know what we're going to talk about, but the fiddly detail might change from take to take. If ever did more than one take, that is...

But with doing a video virtually every night, the format has to be even looser and we often come out with things that take us both by surprise. Watching them back, Lisa is very good at reacting when I do something daft and/or unexpected.

I think our chat about 'The Deadly Assassin' and 'The Face Of Evil' is a good example of this. If you'd asked me ten minutes before we started, I wouldn't have put any money on mentioning the miniature train that used to run in Poole Park and it's only now that I wish I'd linked it with the similar one at Longleat.

Mary Whitehouse famously complained about the drowning sequence at the end of Part Three, but I do wonder if the staff of Longleat had to contend with any kids attempting a reconstruction of the end of Part Two stuff during the summer of 1977...

The fact that the Master's TARDIS is disguised as a grandfather clock suspiciously like the one used by The Burbles in 'Vision On' had never crossed my mind either.

However, I must confess that I had been meaning to talk about the Hicnhcliffe Body-Part Trilogy for some time, and I think I first made that joke on Twitter and/or Facebook a couple of years ago.
With 'The Hand Of Fear' being quickly followed by 'The Face Of Evil', it's no stretch of the imagination to suggest 'The Ghostly Leg' as the obvious next step, if you'll pardon the expression. I don't know why this one has stuck in my memory, but this generally rather forgotten character from 'Buster and Monster Fun' comic can be seen here.

Martin Holmes has also just suggested 'The Elbow Of Terror', which has conjured up an image of Jack Douglas with his unruly pint of bitter in 'Carry On Abroad', for which I can only offer my sincere apologies...

Wahey! Geroff!!!

(And I didn't know I was even going to do that in this piece when I started writing it!)

Our natter about 'The Deadly Assassin' and 'The Face Of Evil' can be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

The History Of Science

The History Of Science

Rewatching some of 'The Masque Of Mandragora' this week has reminded me of just how fascinating the history of astronomy is.

In recent years, when 'Doctor Who' has done history, it's tended to go for a type of story that might be described as Celebrity Historical, with Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria and a whole bunch of famous writers such as Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens and the grandaddy of them all, William Shakespeare.

Now, the Doctor claims he's already met Shakespeare some time before the events of 'Planet Of Evil' and then there's the Hamlet handwriting scene in 'City Of Death'. Also in this latter story, the Doctor never quite gets to meet Leonardo da Vinci, having also missed him in 'Masque'.

All of which is something of a shame, as it the fact that we never get to see the Doctor's encounter with Newton, mentioned in 'The Pirate Planet'.

For a series which was originally themed around the twin subjects of Science and History, it's acutally quite rare for us to get stories which touch on Historical Science, with Stephenson in 'The Mark Of The Rani' being one of the few stand-out characters in this area. Sadly, 'Mark' gets bogged down with the Master and the Rani vying for the limelight, so younger viewers get little clue as to who this bloke actually is. And we never see hide nor hair of the Industrial Revolutionaries who have been invited along for the ride.

As a kid, I read quite a few books on astronomy and the early sections were often keen to illustrate how today's scientists really are standing on the shoulders of giants.

'The Masque Of Mandragora' is set in that fascinating period when astrology is slowly evolving into astronomy, in the same way that alchemy begat modern chemistry. There are a whole host of natural philosophers (the word 'scientist' would not be coined for quite some time) that would be wonderful subjects for a 'Doctor Who' story.

Indeed, if you take a look at what some people write about both before and after the 15th century, you cannot help but think that they once took a trip in the TARDIS.

Franciscan friar Roger Bacon lived in Oxford in the 13th century, yet somehow manages to think about such vehicles as cars and flying-machines. He did appear in the Fourth Doctor book 'Asylum' by Peter Darville-Evans and I couldn't resist writing a 'Toby & Lucie' script that went by the shameless name of 'Bring Home Bacon', but it's long overdue for him to make an appearance on the telly.

Another suggestion for Chris Chibnall is to centre a story around Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe.

They feature in the third episode of Carl Sagan's marvellous series 'Cosmos' ('Harmony Of The Worlds') and score highly for being important figures in the discovery of the motion of the planets. Even better, Kepler looks a little like Anthony Ainley's version of the Master and Brahe has a gold nose and seems to be played by Stephen Fry with a stick-on beard.

Kepler even writes what might be considered and early work of science fiction ('Somnium'  = 'The Dream') where he describes a trip to the moon that involves daemons...

So, let's have a Celebrity Scientist Historical at some point in the future...

But remember never to look at the sun through a telescope, of course!

Our nattering about 'The Masque Of Mandragora' and 'The Hand Of Fear' can be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

"Guy Fawkes MAY (OR MAY NOT) HAVE BEEN Doctor Who!!!"

"Guy Fawkes MAY (OR MAY NOT) HAVE BEEN Doctor Who!!!"

I know it's not the catchiest of headlines, but that's honestly what I thought when the parade of faces flashed part during the Mind-Bending contest in 'The Brain Of Morbius' Part Four.

With Season 12 having used up most of the Monsters Who Came Back For More, Robert Holmes is now free to do what all good 'Doctor Who' writers should do - Simply Make Stuff Up.

Aged 7, one could say that I still had the stabilizers on my Fandom Bicycle, but I was already keen to discard them in the nearest metaphorical hedge. I'd never seen a copy of 'The Making Of Doctor Who', but I was already reading Target Books and a trip to the Longleat Exhibition had secured me a poster magazine, so my collection of stuff had at least begun.

Obviously, I remembered Jon Pertwee and I knew there were some earlier Doctors, but if you'd asked me quickly, I'm not sure I'd have been too sure on exactly how many.

In short then, I knew the show had a long history, but anything earlier than about 1973 really was prehistoric.

But all kids like anything to do with dinosaurs and the sudden implied suggestion that there may have been loads of unknown Doctors fired my imagination like nobody's business.

And I distinctly recall being surprised that one of the faces looked like a drawing of Guy Fawkes that I must have seen in a school book. To me, this simply confirmed Tom Baker's line in 'Pyramids Of Mars' about being over 700 years old.

Now I know it's not a popular explanation in some corners of fandom these days, but remember that at this point the Twelve Regenerations Thing had never been mentioned. Sadly, it's too late to ask Bob Holmes whether he was suggesting that Tom Baker's Doctor was the penultimate one. And by 'The Caves Of Androzani' it's definitely not on Bob's radar.

Probably, if you'd raised the subject,  Bob would simply have chuckled to himself at the suggestion that anyone would do anything as daft as try and join the dots between two stories shown a whole 11 months apart - a lifetime in television terms!

The aim in this period is to make each story as exciting as possible, upping the jeopardy but with little thought as to what this means for the past or future. The production team are aware that there are fans, but that's as far as the relationship goes. Except, possibly for an in-joke aimed at Jeremy Bentham with the naming of a certain Panopticon.

There will be a new console room along shortly, underlining that there are great chunks of the Doctor's past previous hidden from the audience. And I was intrigued at the mention of the mysterious companion 'Tilly' in 'The Android Invasion'. Oddly, she never seemed to get a mention in any of the lists of companions that I read...

I like walking through the dark when it comes to the facts of 'Doctor Who' - it's mysterious!

Our chat about 'The Android Invasion', 'The Brain Of Morbius' and 'The Seeds Of Doom' can be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

"Space Atmosphere!"

"Space Atmosphere!"

It's very hard to pin down the scripts Louis Marks wrote for 'Doctor Who', simply because there are such big gaps between most of them. It's only with Seasons 13 and 14 that he becomes a semi-regular member of the writing, but clearly his success with 'Planet Of Evil' is what gains him the rapid invite to come back and do 'The Masque Of Mandragora'.

People don't tend to talk about 'Planet Of Evil' very much and although Season 13 is very strong overall, that's no reason to forget these four epsiodes of pure Space Atmosphere as Lisa called it in our recent video.

Now, I'm not going to quibble about the more eccentric bits of science on display here, as I can still remember the effect this story had on me the first time around. One of the reasons why 'Doctor Who' exists is obviously to scare kids and this production achieved this aim very efficiently indeed.

With David Maloney building on what he'd done with 'Genesis Of The Daleks', the lights are turned down even lower and unknown (and therefore scary) forces lurk in the shadows. The jungle, especially on film, pushes the series into new and ambitious territory when it comes to building a convincing alien world.

The Anti-Matter Monster (even today we don't have a more specific name for it, which shows the value of not explaining everything) was weird and worrying. Presented on screen with an imaginative mix of costuming and effects, the sheer mystery of it was hypnotic.

Meanwhile, I could identify with Professor Sorenson, as I was a martyr to bad headaches, but at least my medicine neither smoked nor resembled the dregs of a bottle of Camp Coffee...

As I say in the video, the bit where Sarah emerges from the TARDIS on the Morestran ship sticks in my mind, even if I had rather got the wrong end of the stick. At the time I thought the crew had no need to breathe oxygen, simply because of the way it was shot. David Maloney would probably have called me a Stupid Boy, but there you go...

I can still remember that glorious week when the story got a repeat showing from Monday to Thursday ('The Sontaran Experiment' was on the Friday as a bonus) and a second viewing was still pretty frightening.

The book's cover does an effective job too, even though it seems to imply that Sorenson grows to giant size later on. Oddly, the Doctor's strange manacle-device he uses in the TARDIS doesn't get a mention (being replaced with some common-or-garden chains, I think), but it is a hard thing to describe in detail without asking awkward questions such as exactly why it just happens to be within easy reach and why the Doctor owns it in the first place...

It's a shame that with the departure of Bob Holmes, no-one managed to get another story out of Louis Marks, although he was a busy man, of course. But his eight episodes of mid-70s 'Doctor Who' are still ones I am always look forward to rewatching.

Strong stuff all round and just what I was after on a Saturday night.

Our video covering 'Planet Of Evil' plus 'Pyramids Of Mars' may be seen here.

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

'Juliet Bravo' incoming

'Juliet Bravo' incoming

With the release of Episode 23 of 'Round The Archives' yesterday, it was no longer a secret that we're going to take a look at 'Juliet Bravo' in Episode 24.

This announcement has already caused a small flurry of interest and we've started a not-very-scientific poll on Twitter ('THE CHANGING FACE OF JULIET BRAVO') to see if people prefer the First Juliet Bravo (Stephanie Turner) over the Second Juliet Bravo (Anna Carteret).

For some, this has been an impossible choice, as they're splendid Ma'ams, both of 'em! This is clearly a series that is fondly remembered and it's been amusing and flattering to receive a number of pieces of artwork from Martin Holmes and Dominator Rago with 'Juliet Bravo' / 'Round The Archives' crossovers.

We always do a bit of digging on YouTube to look for bits of continuity or other odds and ends in case anything rare or interesting pops up. One thing that we could hardly ignore was the precise and perfect sketch done for 'Alexei Sayle's Stuff' which featured a fake episode ('Shock Tactics' by S.J. Price) which is abssolutely spot on in its camerawork and central performances.

This piece of genius may be seen here...

Although we'll be concentrating in the article on the episodes 'Shot Gun' (from 1980) and 'Teamwork' (from 1983) it never hurts to watch a few other ones if you've got the time, so this afternoon we bunged on 'The Intruder', from 1982.

We went for this one mainly because it features a certain Colin Baker as Frankie Miller, being generally dodgy and supping some good proper ale.

Sadly, the DVDs are pretty expensive, but the good news is that the UKTV Drama Channel are in the middle of a run (although the episodes are somewhat edited) and 'The Intruder' is scheduled for Thursday / Friday of this week.

So we won't go into the details of the plot here except to say that the episode starts off fairly low-key with two kids nicking from the local sweet shop, but builds to a robbery that involves the use of gelignite.

People might assume that 'Juliet Bravo' is a safe sort of show, not dealing with anything too nasty, but there's some dark stuff from the very first episode.

So, we're very much looking forward to covering this series as a follow-up to our article on 'The Gentle Touch'.

But we won't be doing any 'Juliet Bravo' cosplay any time soon, before anyone asks!

(By Andrew Trowbridge)

(With thanks to Dominator Rago and Martin Holmes)