Fear of a Welsh Planet

[00:36]

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back at last to Flight Through Entirety, the only Doctor Who podcast who actually did order the champagne, and we're drinking it now.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Todd.

I'm Brendan.

And I'm here too.

So we've been off the air for nearly 10 years now, so we're all well rested and raring to commit some fairly major acts of domestic terrorism at tea time on BBC one.

That's right.

It's the 1st episode of the new series, Rose.

What I did, did you?

Oh, absolutely.

I always rise to the occasion.

Yeah, there's not a major department store in London still standing as we speak.

I'm still in shock from this story, and I'm talking about seeing it in 2000.

When did we say it's 6 five?

[01:37]

Yeah, 2005, yeah. in Australia.

Well, it's a very long time.

Very long time ago.

I was just sitting here relieved thinking, oh, at least this will be a really short run for FTE because it's only been going a short time.

It hasn't, has it?

No.

We're actually up to where Liz, is Liz is almost about to take a stuff down and tell him where to put his aspidistra, isn't she?

In real time, yeah, in real time.

That's right.

Yeah it's terrifying.

Just as well that everyone agrees that the show is entirely lovely and that there's no controversy with any production staff for the entire 13 years run.

So it'll be very smooth.

It has been very, very peaceful, but that's mostly because all the people involved are still alive.

And we can't bitch about them behind their backs.

Can we talk about the new series?

Can we?

I think we can.

Yeah.

So I remember, and my Doctor of the Complete History is telling me that the new series was announced.

I'm plumbing for 2003.

[02:40]

Yeah, that would be my guess as well.

Wednesday, September 24th.

2003.

2003.

Where were you sitting, Todd?

It wasn't comfortable.

My memory cheats.

I thought it was 2004, but yeah.

I was sitting at work.

I remember absolutely being naughty looking at the interweb in 2003, which you had to do through your workstation, so everyone knew what you were doing, but nobody actually was that skilled to be able to see what you were doing.

And it came up.

Eccles cakes was going to be the new doctor.

And I thought, that'll be a really lovely one off special or maybe a cup of yes.

Yeah, it's hard to believe that it was going to kind of last as long as it did. didn't quite believe it. was just a thing.

I think I was in denial because it had been off the air and we had the audio series with Big Finish was sort of what I assumed that we would have forever.

And, well, actually my 1st reaction was, well, that's it.

[03:41]

We're stuffed because I was organising another Doctor Who convention.

And so it was going to be the last one of the team of the conventions that I'd been running for like, you know, 7 or 8 years, and we were trying to get Peter Davidson, and we had India Fisher, who was the Doctor Who girl in terms of audios, and we were trying to promote her.

And I think we had Louise Jemison, and then we pulled out, and then Louise pulled out.

Barbara Joss pulled herself.

And I think Fraser came on board so we had a black and white companion, an audio companion, and then this was announced and I went, well, that's it.

We're just...

Who's gonna care?

Yeah, we're just stuffed.

I didn't use that word.

We're not going to get anybody because everybody would want somebody from the new series.

No, no, I remember that.

And I flashing forward because I may not be here to discuss this.

I remember, do you remember, Todd, you tried to get Annette Badland?

Well, she actually contacted us.

Oh, right.

And what she wanted as a guest star was more than what we'd ever paid for doctors.

[04:45]

I'm not free.

Which was, you know, which fair enough, you know, it's a new time, a new century, you know, and I fully expected that, but it sort of sort of made me go, okay, we're entering a brand new sort of era of things here, like in terms of conventions and stuff and it's not going to be nice little intimate things anymore.

It's going to change forever.

Try her now, see how much she is.

I think she's got a soap at the moment.

I think she's on our telly all the time, if unless I'm much mistaken.

She's been in EastEnders.

He's an EastEnders?

Yes, I think so.

No, she wasn't the first.

And Bonnie.

Bonnie.

But recently.

So that was mine, that was mine initial thing.

Well that's it.

Yeah, wow.

Did we hear rumours about it beforehand?

Um, there had been rumours since 2000, and it was always Russell's name attached to it.

And Russell was talking to the BBC from 1999 after the success of Queer as folk.

But the thing was, Russell thought the BBC weren't serious about it, which for some people led to a knock-on effect of, oh, I thought Russell T. Davies really wanted to do Doctor Who, but he doesn't seem to.

[05:54]

He's not returning calls to set the other, there was also the problem that the rights still rested with BBC films.

After the telly movie.

And so there was a complicated right situation there.

Mark Gators and Gareth Roberts had pitched a 21 half hour episode series made up of seven, three-part stories with their dream casting was Derek Jacobeers, the doctor, that was written about in Dwim a couple of years ago.

And the one thing I really remember was sort of 2 or 3 stories in the episode Cliffhanger would be UFO lands, a Dalek slides out, companion turns around.

What is it, doctor?

And the doctor says, I've no idea.

Yeah.

But that was their idea of the time war.

He'd forgotten it.

Yeah, instead they were.

That would have been a zinger, wouldn't it?

They were constantly after Russell, but Jane Tranter, who became a champion of the series, when she finally cornered Russell and got him to agree to a meeting, suddenly went off on maternity leave.

[06:56]

So this is in 2002.

So it doesn't come up until 2003.

In terms of what I remember from the time, I remember the announcement because I was so excited for a little thing, which was going to be the continuation of Doctor Who called Scream of the Sharka.

So Scream of the Shalaka was announced around, I think, June or July, and then the very next month, it gets gazumped by Doctor Who is coming back to television.

But screen... isn't that a cartoon thing?

Yeah, yeah, we've done...

Richard D. Grant.

Richard D. Grant, in Stephen Moth, Inverness Cape.

Yes.

And massive blue mobile phone. which he does everything.

And a fantastic companion.

Yeah, Oscar winner, Sophie Okanido.

Who is Liz 10, isn't she?

Exactly.

The Beast Below, and of course, Derek Jacobi playing the master, which is something I'm surprised they never thought to do again.

[07:57]

Yeah, yeah.

It really is very good except for the fact that it's not.

Yeah, and except for except for the fact that Richard E. Grant has no idea what Doctor Who is.

He saw a Dalek once during a charity special.

But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to play a poor doctor, and this is probably where we lead into Eccles.

Not being a non-wi can actually help.

An actor should come to a part.

Freshly.

Yes.

Um, I saw the news on uh, Doctor Who news.com, as is now, Outpost Gallifray back then, and they had to shut down the forum for a day, just because people got so, yeah, so excited and so angry.

Like it must be 25 minute episodes.

No, it must not be 25 minute episodes and J.

Sean Lyon stepping in and saying, guys, we literally know nothing.

Because at this point, the BBC didn't even know how many episodes they were going to make.

Initially they offered Russell 6.

Russell counted with eight.

Julie Gardner is then the one who came in and said, actually, here's the sums for 13.

[08:57]

Bless Julie.

Oh my goodness.

Going to be the patron saint of the podcast over the next 4 years, I think.

Can I can I give my stupid fanboy reaction, though, my stupid, angry fanboy reaction or something?

So a year after the initial announcement on October 18 in 2004?

They released the logo.

Yeah.

My cat was doing it for several years beforehand on the side.

Friend of the podcast.

I mean that in a nice publishable way.

Yes.

Friend of the podcast, Blaine Cochlan of JCBC films, actually sent me a picture of it because he was living back in the UK by that point.

He's like, isn't this amazing?

And I don't know what it was.

It was a couple of days after my birthday and I remember I was at work and I was still working at KFC, so maybe I was annoyed about that, but I hated it.

I said it looked amateurish and cheap.

I hated the font.

I hated the background.

I said it was a ripoff and fast.scape.

Yes, the typeface.

Sorry, darling.

No, I just do that to him.

[09:59]

By the time it rocked around, I quite liked it, but I was just really, really abstreperous on that day and I just remember that.

No one liked it.

Except for me.

Because it was new and shiny.

We thought it was unworthy of the diamond logo, frankly. was not impressed.

You didn't like it?

No.

No.

I can't say anything more that. didn't like it.

In retrospect, I think it is amazingly good. sensational in red perspective.

And it captures that London thing, which we're going to come back to over and over again during Russell's era because Dr. just like a taxi sign.

Exactly.

It does actually.

And the way that he's dressed.

No, it really does.

He is a delivery man.

He's delivering us hope.

Oh, that's so beautiful.

That's awful.

And chips.

So I worried that if it was 45 minute episodes that the doctor would be presented with things that were quite easy to solve, you know what I mean?

And over the years the doctors got better at solving things, you know, normally it used to take him 6 episodes and, you know, per twe sort of slowed down at the beginning, it would take him 7 episodes to solve something.

[11:03]

And then eventually Sylvester Coy came along and he would just solve something in 3 episodes.

He was a genius.

But now we'd have a doctor who would solve things in 45 minutes.

But I think in retrospect, it's the only possible choice that they could have made.

You can't do that kind of thing where most people are tuning in on a Saturday night to watch a quarter of a story.

But that's the point.

This would not have been this way if it wasn't Russell.

This is more a Russell T. Davies piece of writing than it is a Doctor Who piece of writing.

It is absolutely his way of approaching the world in his writing.

Just happens to be that he's entirely sued, in who he is.

Well, he's not pitching it to fans.

He's not, and in order to make a show a success, you should not be pitching to a small group of people, you are writing for yourself and you're writing for general public and television's moved on by 2004.

And if we'd had 25 minute episodes, we would have had one series and that's that's it.

And I remember at the time going, oh, 45 minute episodes, I'm not going to get enough character, sort of development, and, and, you know, I do think there are some pacing issues at various times, but it's the right decision and it's television now.

[12:09]

Yeah.

And as for character development, I mean, you get more character stuff in a 45 minute Doctor Who episode these days than you did in sort of entire early seasons, to be honest.

Or there's a different approach to character development where it grows out of the actors' performances and very subtle things in the old series, but the new series is much more explicit and much more deliberate about it, I think.

I guess what I mean by character development is that the supporting characters or the guest stars, you real, like, I mean, you know who Harrison Chase and Scorbia, you get to know the villains or have a real understanding.

Well, they'd be just throw away every week and you don't really connect.

Yeah, we don't get Greg and Petra back.

Do you know what I mean?

Who we get to know over the course of nearly 2 months.

So how was that going to pan out, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One person who was a big proponent of the 45 minute structure, and I can't remember when she said it, so I might be getting ahead of myself, take a drink, dear listener.

Um, But Janet Fielding.

Janet Fielding said the 45 minute structure was great because she said, you know, back when we were doing it in 25, It takes about 10 minutes for the audience to settle into the program.

[13:16]

And so then you've only got 15 minutes of plot and exploration, whereas with 45 minutes, 10 minutes to settle into the program, and then you've got 35 minutes to develop story in the characters.

So she's like, even though the whole story takes less time.

There's more time of the audience actually being engaged with the idea after the setup.

And, you know, then she complained about Billy Piper's hair for 10 minutes, but...

What was she sticking her salary heart in for?

Nothing to do with it.

I really do think if you look at so many classic Doctor Who stories now, like if you sat down and you actually scripted them as a modern day television event, like a 6 episode story and look at the per tweeze, it would be completely differently structured and you'd write it, and I reckon that, you know, a 6 episode story would be maybe, you know, 50 to 60 minutes, you would actually get it down to that long.

It's just a different television's changed and the way stories are changed and the way television is produced and shot and audiences, attention spans, may I say it, or the way we look at things now is all different.

[14:17]

Yeah.

I mean, Stephen Moffatt makes the point, I think, correctly that old Doctor Who does consist of lots of people sort of standing urgently in corridors for long periods of time or...

My dinner with Andre action figure set is testing it on my dusted bookshelves to just how gripping this concept could be.

Bugger off.

That is the history of small rep theatre.

People standing about saying horrible things have just happened over there behind the Arras.

Yeah, but now we can afford to kind of be a visual spectacle in a way that Doctor Who did aim for and certainly hit, you know.

Yeah, and Marco Polo.

I'm so grateful we got in touch with that Queensland fan and got to catch up with that at Christmas.

Didn't that blow you size?

sideways?

Yeah, no, I really enjoyed that.

Yeah, I just couldn't believe the scene with Meca Godzilla, you know?

It totally wasn't in the script.

Yeah, yeah. what happened to the audio recording of that sequence either.

So did we get casting straight away when they announced it?

[15:17]

I think Eccles was right up at the front and that's what got the momentum, wasn't it?

Because Jane Tranter didn't push the button till they got Eccles.

Yeah, and Eccles himself actually contacted Russell.

So the, yeah, the announcement came and I think casting came about a month later, but Eccleston contacted Russell because they worked together before on the 2nd coming. which is a drama where Christopher Eccleston plays Jesus.

We'll actually talk about that in our Aliens of London episode because it shares a lot of elements with the 2nd coming, in fact.

But the thing is, what Christopher Eccleston says is he had seen a little bit of Doctor Who in the 70s growing up, he would later say in interviews, you know, you either watched Doctor Who or you went and played sport, and I was usually playing sport, but I did see some of it.

But what he found was, everyone's so posh.

There's no one like me on this show.

But then he thought, this guy's always moving.

He's never at home.

And he sent an email to Russell saying that because immediately the character fired his imagination, like how sad is his character, how lonely is this character?

[16:20]

What's the dramatic potential?

And then as a PS he put, by the way, Russell, I might be interested in this role.

Wow.

Only to find that Russell had already shortlisted him and completely unknown to him, he had been shortlisted for the telemovie.

Oh, okay.

He was never contacted, but he had been short-lived.

Also, was Peter Capaldi.

John Sessions.

I think that was short.

Yes.

Rick Mile, was it?

Rick Mile?

So Hugh Grant was the 1st offer for the role because the BBC could pretty much only put half the money in.

So they needed international pre-sales and possibly co-production money from elsewhere, which they eventually got from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were a full co-producer for the 1st series.

Uh, and possibly the 2nd but not beyond that.

But Hugh Grant turned it down.

He didn't want to be tied to a series and he has said in recent years that he massively regrets it and it would have been fantastic.

Have you seen that meme?

What would it have been like had Hugh Grant taken on this role?

[17:22]

Not planets have a Sussex.

Have you seen those little gifts?

They're really telling.

It's the 2nd season of Cat Weasel without the jokes.

You humans, all you do is sit at Herman, drink beluga caviare.

The accent meaning of work.

I'm doing it now.

I don't know whether the series Bible, which has been published, you know, Russell's original pitch document for the 1st series.

Rose meets the doctor.

Well, with Mugsy and Judy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lola, Lola, and...

Yeah it's so TV comic.

I was hoping for that as a reboot, frankly.

But he does say that he doesn't want the doctor to be the neutered public schoolboy that he so often was in the past.

I've never known public schoolboys to be neuted anymore.

No, but I think that that's Hugh Grant's family motto, I think.

New to public school.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, but perhaps perhaps they'd already decided to go into a sort of more working class direction with Eccleston in a way that they kind of sort of kind of not really touch on with McCoy, who at least doesn't have an RP accent.

[18:30]

But he just has a whole lot of rollickings, doesn't he?

Yeah, but I mean, even the fact that Northern accent needs to be lampshaded in this episode with lots of planets having north.

How do we feel about that?

I thought it was brilliant?

Because it's taking the fact that people are going to say, oh, he doesn't sound like a proper Doctor Who.

And it's providing an explanation while kind of saying the explanation doesn't matter.

Yeah, we don't care.

You know, for the people who need to understand why there's a certain voice and we'll get a scene like this cut from the Christmas invasion.

They need some kind of explanation for the people who are living in the North and, you know, constantly been told, oh, if you want to be actors, you have to learn to speak RP.

And Colin said at the casting of Christopher Eccleston, I hope he gets to keep the accent because I wasn't allowed because he's he's from Manchester.

Now, he didn't mean in Doctor Who.

He meant generally when he came down in the 70s and became an actor, he was told, you have to get rid of the Mancunian accent.

[19:31]

Tom had to get rid of the Liverpool accent.

He did that at a very early age.

So, yeah.

And Liz to a certain extent as well.

Although with Lisladen, it does creep through sometimes.

She was actually a bit naughty.

Barry Letts didn't want her to murder that cup of tea because it was cruel and it would encourage aberrant behaviour.

But no, she was throwing things like gear off.

And they almost cut them because Terence Styx doesn't like colonialism, except when it's done by the British Empire.

See, I knew nothing about Christopher Eccleston. didn't even know who he was.

You seen him in films, though.

No, well, no.

I knew there, is he in 28 days?

That's the only thing I'd ever seen him in.

And like I couldn't even remember him from that.

So for me, I'm the same.

So for me, it was just a new person coming in playing the doctor, which I kind of liked that I didn't know anything about him.

So I was completely fine with whatever they went with.

Doctor Who was coming back for a year or 2 or whatever.

On the topic of conventions, which you mentioned earlier, Todd.

I was running the day events at the time, the mini conventions.

And so we decided it was a wonderful idea.

[20:32]

If we had a day looking at the work of Christopher Eccleston and Billy Piper.

Yeah.

How'd that go?

So Eccleston had done an episode of the League of Gentlemen, which we couldn't show in mixed company because it's the League of Gentlemen.

So we showed the 2nd coming.

Oh, that's a good choice.

But in terms of Billy, Billy was very new to acting at this point, she'd done the Canterbury Tales, but hadn't been released in Australia yet, because it was on the strength of the Canterbury Tale, she gets cast here.

So we played a Victoria Wood, as seen on TV special, where Billy's in it for 30 seconds.

You could have played one of her music videos.

Actually, I think we did play because we want to in Honey to the Bee and then I was told to stop.

And not day day and night.

The day.

That's all I can sing.

I still got those CDs.

I actually like that song.

I love her music.

Yes, dear listeners, I have CDs.

They are physical objects.

No I've never heard of them.

So what do we think of Billy?

I do remember at the time there was this sort of negative fan reaction because she...

[21:34]

I'm sorry, I mean, before the viewing. yeah.

Oh, well, it was spectacularly implosive. wasn't it much like everything that was coming out?

I think the interesting thing about this period of Doctor Who is that it is entirely interweb with fandom and that the voice of the fan is absolutely entrenched in and interwoven with what we're seeing on screen and wasn't like that before.

We were just saying that nothing was new.

The casting of regional...

Well, we've seen all this in 87.

I think, though, that this season is unique.

This series is unique because it's more or less in the can before there's any fan reaction.

And it is very, very conscious of not putting off new viewers.

You know, it doesn't want to be too science fiction-y.

And it really...

Well, it wasn't.

Until...

Well, not even in the castle.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I sort of pretend that didn't happen.

I agree with you, Nathan.

And that's why Christopher Eckeston's interpretation, the doctor, is unique because it's the only one in the history of the show, where his entire performance.

[22:43]

There is no feedback from the public.

Oh, he, you know, even William Hart, or initially, yes, he's doing what he's doing, but then, you know, he'd be, he'd have to be talking to his grandchildren getting, you know, and other people saying things, you know, whereas here it's unique.

Christopher has to make decisions based on what he's seeing in daily rushes and that sort of thing, on the performance.

And I think you can see that as he goes through in terms of the comic perhaps aspects of it or how intense he is.

And it's completely unique.

Every other doctor that comes after him measures themselves against him and they do more than one season, so they get to have time to reflect and change things.

I think Capaldi's a great example of that, actually.

Yes, perhaps anyone else.

In terms of Billy, the papers were talking about it being Billy Piper before Russell T. Davis and Julie Gardner spoke to Billy Piper.

Because she was a very successful pop star, who never had a big scandal the way a lot of successful pop stars do at the time she had a successful marriage to a very successful person, now that broke down over the course of this filming, partially due to them being separated and apart from each other.

[23:53]

But, you know, also that commented in later years that it was something with a sort of finite lifespan on it.

And so this successful pop star then moves into acting.

And she's got all the tabloids behind her.

And I just think that's interesting that they were saying that she was the new Doctor Who companion before the production team had even spoken to her.

And also auditioned, of course, as we know, now was Georgia Moffat.

The daughter of Peter Davidson.

And she was apparently very successful.

And I...

Stephen Woffett, the daughter of Peter Davidson and Stephen.

That's right I also recall...

She was the Pierce Brosnan.

I also recall, and I don't know if she was joking or not, but India Fisher said she put her name in.

I don't know if she got an audition.

I can't remember.

Main thing I remember about India Fisher is she wanted us to find a surfer husband and she kept screaming at us.

It's all very well.

You gaze liking me, but for God's sake, I'm in Sydney and I need a surfer husband.

[24:54]

I need service.

Kenneth Williams used to say.

I was really excited by Billy Piper's casting.

Me too.

Like, there were aspects of fandom that were not. and very vocal about it.

How can a pop star possibly do this, but I kind of looked at it like, you know, if you're doing pop videos, you are acting like in those.

And, you know, and I just kind of put it down to things like, you know, when you see comics, comedians often make really good dramatic actors.

And I just kind of went, you know, there's nothing to say that she's not going to, you know, excel and of course, she's fantastic.

She knocks it out of the park.

How did we, how did, how did Russell Knight?

That was the thing.

But wasn't she repositioning herself as an actor because after her pop career had sort of fizzled, then didn't she go away and do courses and stuff and and dust was coming back reinventing her career as an actress?

Yes, absolutely.

And what's interesting is around the same time, Britney Spears attempted to do the same thing.

How did that go?

Well, she's got residency at Vegas.

[25:55]

So, you know, she went back to the singing and that was fine.

But Billy was very savvy in that the roles she pursued.

Now, okay, this is a leading role, but the series is not called Rose.

The series is called Doctor Who.

Now, arguably with the new series, they do make it into co-leads.

But unlike a lot of American singers who try and get into acting and they're like, I'm going to headline my own movie straight off the bat, Billy Piper was prepared for, no, I'll take smaller roles and I'll take supporting roles.

I'll do the Canterbury Tales.

Oh my god, I've got Doctor Who.

Billy Piper didn't seem to push herself out there as, no, no, no, I must be front and centre.

So I think what you're saying, Todd is right.

She learned her craft and that's possibly why she was more successful than other singers turned actors.

Yeah.

And she's British.

It's a different ethos because the acting industry is different there.

[26:56]

So, we've talked about the lead up to the show, but can we talk about the show itself?

We better start talking about that.

Yeah.

So I think the 1st most striking thing about it is how much it borrows per to his iconography.

So the opening titles are a version of Pertu, his original opening titles with a red sort of swirly thing and the use of Futura, the font.

Yeah.

And what he does, what Russell does, is creates a large regular cast.

And that's always a problem with Doctor Who, particularly, I think, in a modern TV environment that you essentially have 2 leads and everyone else is new every week.

You just have a guest cast.

And I think that's hard to do.

And I don't think it happens all that much in TV.

And so Russell creates a sort of extended cast of characters.

So can we talk about them?

Jackie and Mickey.

Yeah.

So Jackie.

Todd.

Camille Cudry is just the B's knee.

[27:58]

I will have to say that she is my favourite character in those 1st 2 years of the show.

Yeah, I just adore her and the way she pictures all the jokes throughout the episode, but she cares for her daughter.

I believe they've, I haven't read it yet.

The new novelisation makes Jackie a bit more bit cheaper, perhaps, and not as good relationship with Rose.

I don't know.

But I love the fact that in this, she's not unlikeable.

And she's so warm and but she's so real.

She's just, I just love her.

I love. can't say, you know.

She strikes me as someone who would never have been in Doctor Who before, like someone's mom.

Do you know what I mean?

Doctor Who's previous attempts to do this, give us Meg Sealia, I think.

You know?

so true.

Yeah.

So, you know, like a sort of normal working class person.

Make it all sick. generally where we've gone with mother characters.

And I guess the setting as well is where we last left off proper Doctor Who was survival, where we're in a council estate in London.

And so we're in contemporary London and we have this character who could easily have been sort of from EastEnders or something with great comic timing.

[29:07]

And she's also someone who would never have watched Doctor Who in a 1000000 years.

And so when she talks about what's going on, she talks like one of the not we, she talks like a person at home who's just watching this with all her talk of planet Earth and spacemen and stuff like that.

She doesn't use the vocabulary.

She does represent everybody else's mum, doesn't she, though?

Yeah, it's mum.

This is really made about Russell as a young person as a lady person.

Yeah, well, Russell and Rose share the same 1st name just about. don't they?

I think that's deliberate.

And he'd used the name tile before.

Vince, who was basically wrestling, queer as folk, his last name's Tyler.

There are Tyler characters in Damaged Goods.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob and Rose.

Yeah.

I think the only show he made that didn't have a Tyler was mine or mine, which had a character called.

Oh, okay.

Well, you see, like Rose is very definitely Russell, in the very 1st kind of Doctor Who annual or whatever the equivalent to that was that year, Rose's birthday is given as 27th of April, which is the same day as Russell's, and mine, as it happens.

[30:14]

If you want to take a look at my Amazon wish list.

So she's very definitely him in the show, I think.

And I think that when he was a kid and he was watching Doctor Who, he always imagined he was Joe or he was Sarah.

No, exactly.

People often ask me why I cosplay as Doctor Who girls sometimes to the point that one of the actresses I cosplayed at thought I was taking the Mick out of her.

But it's more that.

Yeah.

Who?

Oh, no, I won't say.

I won't say because and yeah, it's a short list.

I've only done like 3 or four.

Eileen Wayne.

I was just going to say exactly.

The greatest piece of miscasting is not bringing Eileen way back.

I'm thinking that I'll get Brendan to tell me off mic and then I'll sneak into the show.

I'll tell you now.

It was Daphne Ashbrook.

And you know, I think we've said that on the podcast before.

I think it's because of a different mentality.

And you were doing it in a wheelchair.

I mean, it was really offensive.

So many levels. calling everyone Julian.

[31:17]

As a kid, I realise often you're not looking to be the doctor.

You don't want to be the doctor because you can't imagine being the doctor because the doctor's this alien, but you can imagine being the human.

Nice people want to be the companions and the rest of us want to be the doctors.

I always did doctor.

Companion who?

No idea.

No, I want to be I want always wanted to be a companion, but I had the ability to regenerate.

Oh, so you're river song.

Well we're getting ahead of ourselves.

You're Romana.

You're Romana, darling.

Romana, darling.

Ramana, darling.

I suppose it's a bit like the Rick and Morty fans who think they're Rick.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're not.

They're Jerry.

They're Jerry.

Camille gives the show what it needs.

And it's something we talked about with the early Tom Baker era because you've just had the unit era.

So every time you go back to Earth, you don't have to introduce a whole bunch of new characters.

You introduce half a new cast because you've got the unit people.

Whereas I think we particularly talked about it in hand of fear.

[32:20]

The doctor and Sarah come back to earth and it doesn't feel real because we've got nothing to latch onto.

Well, it is the hand of fear though.

It is also there, Bob Baker and Dave Martin.

Why didn't they bring them back for the new series?

They were both alive when it started.

Any thoughts on that, Todd?

No comment.

But yeah, having Jackie and Mickey, it gives us that grounding and it gives us that basis and and it gives us the alternative rose could be living.

Because when we introduce companions in the old series, Very often, the alternative to being with the doctor is being killed.

You know, the doctor saves something.

Whereas Rose's alternative here isn't dying.

It's just living a boring mundane life.

And it raises the question, is that better?

Is that worse than the threat of death?

I think, too, that there is a sense here.

And the idea that the companion's an audience surrogate or an audience identification figure isn't necessarily right.

[33:24]

But here it's the story where the doctor could land and take any one of the members of the audience off with him.

You know, she's from our world.

She lives a fairly ordering woman.

Could have been Camille.

Liner notes, pert we, and a penny.

Really?

If you want old home values.

And while we're on the regular cast, what about Mickey?

Mugsy.

Well, okay.

So I really loathed him in this episode when I 1st saw it.

I loathed his acting.

Richard's nodding his head, okay?

And I hated the performance, the character was just set up to be this horrible cypher that you just...

You just thought he was a buffoon.

And the fact that Rose couldn't even tell the difference between a plastic replica and the real thing in the car, just sort of, I think, undermined the character.

That's my opinion.

No, I think there's a lot to be said for that.

And I think it's, for me, it's, I feel it's a misstep or mistake.

Having watched this only a few days ago.

[34:26]

You know, there's there's a bit of the Mickey that we know at the beginning, but you don't know him at the beginning.

Like there's just a little bit there.

You don't get enough of a sense of him before they turn him into...

Just the way he goes, don't go rose the way he acts, that sort of thing.

It still annoys me.

But what I gathered out of this particular doing. was actually how fantastic he is as evil Mickey, knowing the Mickey that he becomes.

And that performance with all the plastic and everything right, he is absolutely nailing it at that point.

Simon Cowell, really.

But I really, really enjoyed that this time.

But I do think there are problems with his character through this, that just set him up for failure and not really liking it.

He's so emasculated, which I think is the unfair thing.

Peter, well, Davidson would say, what's then for the boys?

Yeah, and just, you know, the fact that he is so, I don't know, weak and sort of like scared and it's like really like, and so they have to do a lot of, I don't know, rewriting or backpedalling or in future episodes to try and get that character back.

[35:32]

And for me, it takes quite quite a few episodes.

Even later in the season when he's talking about that Delaney girl, like he's still like a whingeing whining thing at points.

It's like, come on, come on.

I want more because he is a good actor and by the end, you know.

You're wanting him to be there, you know?

I have to say that I think there probably is a deliberate arc in this 1st recording block because...

Is it, though?

Because Todd, weren't you saying that he wasn't going to be in subsequent episodes?

Always going to be in the 1st three, apparently.

First three.

The 1st 3 recorded.

So this aliens of London and World War three. that right, Brendan?

That's correct.

So the last we were officially going to see of him was when the doctor and Rose go off at the end of World War 3 and he's left sitting on the bins, looking up at the sky, waiting for her to come.

It's all about the bin.

But he's better in those episodes.

Oh, yes, they do stuff with his character where you kind of think, okay, you know, this is better.

Don't want to jump ahead because you'll discuss that later on.

But maybe it's the director.

I think it's partly the director and I think there's a reason Keith Bowick doesn't come back after these episodes.

[36:36]

He does he does direct very broadly, and, you know, we do have that ridiculous Mickey Auton makeup job that Rose seems not to notice, you know, and...

Possibly not, but it's difficult to find stuff up about this time because it's only now 13 years later that the production team and actors are talking about the difficulties they faced on the job because it was so tumultuous.

In terms of Noll, his star was on the rise because he was in RV to St.

Pet, and his scenes for Rose were mostly recorded in 5 days, they had to fly him back from Thailand, where our Vita's own pet was being shot, shoot for 5 days, and then the Monday after that.

So he shot Monday to Friday, the Monday after that, he actually had the funeral of Pat Roach, who was an actor in Alvita's own pet, who had passed away suddenly during the shoot.

So I don't know if that feeds into Noll's performance at all, because he is so much better in the next time he appears, and then he keeps getting better throughout.

[37:39]

But I think it's also the fact that no one really knew what they were doing.

There's a great interview with Phil Collinson, who explains that 2 weeks into the shoot.

There were 3 weeks behind.

Yeah. in terms of what they were meant to be shooting, and that's where Susie Liggett came on board as a production unit manager who later became producer.

So yeah, it was it was a tumultuous production, but I think you can, as broad as Mickey has played in this story, You can begin to see the seed of the braver character he will become.

Something I still find is very odd is there's an implication that he soils himself in the nestine lair.

Yeah, which because when Rose finds him, he says, and she says, oh, you're stinking.

And originally I thought, oh, that's the bin.

But at the end of the episode where they're stumbling out, he's kind of walking bow-legged.

I think, yeah.

He's like RuPrech the Monkey Boy at that point.

It's really unfortunate And I do think I do want to blame Keith Boke.

I just do that?

I think he's not a very good one. you were the only one?

[38:42]

No, I don't think I was.

And we'll get more of that later because some of the very earlier scenes shot where in like World War 3 and they're astonishingly poor.

But they do walk back from that stuff almost immediately.

So the bright saturated colours in roses flat.

All of that sort of hyper real kind of children's TV look that he brings to it.

Now, there are things about it that I like enormously, things like the montage at the very beginning, you know, the way that we get the story of Rose's life to hold in a way that would just never, ever have been possible in the original show.

And even, you know, people complained about the bin and the burping bin and stuff like that.

But I think that's tremendously good.

And, you know, it...

Yep.

I don't think it's necessarily well realised, but I think it's a really good idea.

And I certainly remember walking down the street for weeks afterwards feeling tentative about touching the tops of any bins.

And I certainly knew that there were 10 year olds that were feeling the same way.

Dear listener, can you feel the grimace on Todd's face at this point?

[39:46]

was Russell's idea?

In is just pathetic.

I'm sorry.

But it's that kind of thing.

You know, it's the same thing.

And I think Russell is doing it quite deliberately and he will do it with the farting aliens as well.

Don't get me started. is that he's doing stuff that hasn't been on Doctor Who before, and he's doing things that don't sit well with finally ending up as TARDIS Wikia pages.

Do you know what I mean?

There was a whole heap of people who didn't like the last Jedi because it contradicted some of their favourite Wookipedia articles.

And I think that Russell, by doing that sort of stuff and the burp joke, which occurs no less than 3 times in Return of the Jedi, is a sort of signify that this is not just for people who have all of Peter Haning's, you know, coffee table books on their shelves, but it is for the kids at home and for the adults as well.

And it's a sign that we're not going to be taking this show that seriously.

Regarding the bin.

I do wonder if that was a little bit of a tribute to the Dear Departed Craig Hinton's novel, Synthespians, which was a BBC book which preceded the new series, which dealt with a TV broadcaster in Deep Space, but all the actors are autons.

[41:02]

But also various other plastic things come to life, including in a deleted scene, a murderous thallus, shall we say?

And, you know, Rose gets that line later, you know, the phone lines, this, that, the breast implants.

I have to say that when I learned that the 1st episode was going to be about autons and that they were shooting in a street outside a bridal shop and I sort of suddenly realised they'd be autons in bridal gowns.

I was so incredibly excited because they're all wearing sort of really terrible 70s clothes in spearhead from space.

But having them in sort of active wear and bridal outfits.

And in fact, if you read the script, the scriptbook for season one is published.

And Russell writes the autons and they're not directed this way at all, of course, because Keith.

He writes the autons as being very elegant and well dressed and that that's how they carry themselves.

Yeah, one thing Russell was particularly on happy with was the sort of very, very jerky robotic motion because he didn't want people to think they were robots.

[42:10]

He wanted people to think they were solid plastic and to move sort of slowly in the way the original series Autons did.

But, you know, I'm not going to harp on it, Keith, because of that because that is the 1st thought you would go to, that these are robots, you know.

And at this point, communication was difficult.

It is how the original autons move.

Maybe Keith is more of an underfan than anyone had realised.

But they're not actually called autons, are they, at any point?

They only mentioned is the nesting consciousness.

They're credited as autons.

I think it's autons created by Robert Holmes in the closing credit.

But yeah, I suppose I suppose they didn't want to introduce too many space work.

Space Words.

Like, we've already got Sonic Screwdriver, TARDIS, nestine, um, anti-flashing, time war, proclamation, shadow proclamation.

It's one of the biggest strengths of this script is that he's not giving us like the 1996 telly movie in the 1st minute, you know, Time Lords Master, Skyro, Daleks, regeneration, you know, it's not a list of things like that.

[43:13]

And it's, as I've said before, it's not aimed at the fans.

You know, you want the general public to come in.

And I just think that's the right approach.

It's funny you should say that, though, because Lorraine Hegasy and Jane Tranter, who were the BBC controllers, who were really behind this project.

When Russell turned in the 1st script, one of them said, where's the master?

and one of them said, where's the Daleks?

You know, we need a big draw.

And it was actually Julie Gardner who went into bat and said, no, he's the last of the time lords now, so we don't have to explain Gallifrey or anything like that.

He's the last of his kind, so there's no danger of people running around in silly hats.

And as for Daleks, they're going to be halfway through to get bums on seats again.

And everyone was happy.

Something I didn't mention earlier is that Michael Grade almost killed it again.

Really?

What?

So he just does that in his sleep at this point.

It's a reflex.

He stumps his toe and cancels...

No, that makes that internet pick of scowling rustle and scowling Steve, Michael Gray did a book signing all the more relevant, doesn't it?

[44:17]

So while it was in pre-production, Michael Grade had been reappointed as BBC one controller.

And Valiard.

And so he appointed a new director general, Mark Thompson.

Now, 1st of all, Michael Grade had been asked, you know, what do you think about Doctor Who coming back because, of course, you cancelled it in the 80s and his response was very diplomatic in that, you know, pretty much I trust the people working at the BBC.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be in charge here.

I am not directly responsible for commissioning programs.

Doctor Who can come back so long as I don't have to watch it.

However, that wasn't very supportive.

No, no.

However, he did appoint a new director general, Mark Thompson.

And Mark Thompson was concerned, is there actually audience demand for Doctor Who?

And the production team had commissioned a single report about audience demand with a very low appreciation for whether Doctor Who should come back.

Not people saying it shouldn't.

They don't really care.

So what Jane Trant did when he asked, is there any audience report, she said, no, we haven't done one.

[45:24]

And Julie Gardiner then said, and you know, we've sunk so much money into this that if we give it up, we're going to lose twice as much as if we carry on.

I love these women.

Yeah, me too.

Reading, you know, reading this, Doctor Who, the complete history, which gives, I'm not sponsored, which gives a great rundown.

There are so many women involved in bringing back Doctor Who.

It feels like, in terms of the production side, the only men involved are Russell T. Davies and Mal Young, and latterly Phil Collinson, and you've got Julie Gardin, you've got Lorraine Heggesi, you've got Jane Tranter, and you have other senior women at the BBC as well, who are all involved in bringing it back, and it seems to be half they want to bring back Doctor Who, and half they want to with Russell T. Davies.

And those 2 desires seem intertwined.

And, you know, Russell then has this five-year journey of bringing Doctor Who back to the screen.

What I adore about this, as opposed to the 1996 telly movie, which gets it so wrong, is the fact that obviously we come in with Rose's eyes, and the doctors introduced several minutes into the actual sequence.

[46:33]

And you've had the opening credits where there's a police box and you see a little, the 1st time you see the doctor then in the background after that explosion, you see a little bit of a police box.

Then the doctor goes away and comes back again and they have that the 2nd time and then they have their walk and then you see the police box in full and he goes to the police box with the key, right?

She walks away and you hear a noise and then it's gone.

Then he's away again and she does her investigation.

So you know a bit more about the doctor.

So you're learning a little bit more about the doctor, like these little titbits.

You're not trying to overwhelm the audience.

And then, um, Plastic Mickey goes insane, and then you've got the full police box.

He goes in, right?

And as a classic series fan, like you're wanting her to go in to see what it is.

She goes in and you don't see it and you're going, 0 my goodness.

Oh my goodness, you don't see inside and like, you know, I assume for a new audience, it's like, well, what is this?

And she goes around it and then you go in and see it, right?

And the whole thing, like, and that's 27 minutes into the episode.

Which is, you know, it's not like...

[47:35]

That's right.

What the hell is this?

And I just think that's absolutely brilliant.

But then it moves and he talks about being alien and TARDIS.

You just get a little bit of information. don't get overload dump.

And it's moved to a different location, but you still don't see it appear, right?

Yeah.

And then at the end, of course, they get out of the exploding nesting area.

Do we see it land then, I can't remember.

We see it land for the 1st time, but she still hasn't seen it take off or land.

And at the end of the episode, obviously, you know, he disappears and she sees it disappear and reappear.

And it just struck me like how many Doctor Who companions in the history of the show.

They meet the doctor, right?

And then they go into the TARDIS, but have they actually seen the TARDIS appear or disappear?

At this point, they're always inside the Tartars.

They don't actually see that dematerialisation.

And to me, it's often the last thing they see in their time with the doctor is actually, they finally see the demotrial centre, the TARDIS, at the end of their run, never.

[48:37]

And I only just thought about this, like when I was watching it.

I'm going, how many actually see that?

They just meet the doctor and do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah, they only finally see it disappear when it leaves without me.

When they're gone.

I just got chills like thinking about that.

God that's brilliant.

Yeah.

I mean, they obviously are some that have, but also, as you say, because Rose is now seeing it for the 1st time, we're seeing it as well, because we do see it leave the nestine thing.

But as well explosions are going on.

Mike Tucker is back doing models by the way.

But because there's explosions going on, it's not until Rose watches it go and the doctor goes off for a few seconds and has 57 box sets at big finish.

Is that coming soon?

That's coming soon.

He's only said it once.

Let's not startle him.

But yeah, Rose then sees it come back at the same time, we do, and then we find out it travels in time.

That gorgeous last line.

But it's just brilliant.

[49:40]

I think it's just brilliant how these little bits all the way through enough for classic series fans to be going, ooh, but the public not to be overwhelmed.

And I just think it gets so right in this, you know?

I also think it gets Rosa's arc right in a way that the tele movie doesn't.

So we get to see how it might have played out if she decided not to go with a doctor because for a 2nd she doesn't.

And then she's instantly so dejected, like really sells it completely and she's going back to her life of looking after her mother and looking after Mickey and just sort of generally being underappreciated and things like that.

And then she gets this spectacular 2nd chance.

And it's, it's wonderful.

Yes, yeah.

It really is.

Now, Richard, something you said earlier before we started recording.

This story is kind of remixed elements of what we've seen before.

So why do you think it works in a way that the telly movie, which was also remixed elements, doesn't?

Okay, apart from the fact that you can't just make a millange or a trifle, a mere foolish thing of rebooted elements.

[50:45]

I think it just works because it has a linear plot.

It has consistency.

It has expert.

I think this should be the top of the list, expert characterisation and casting.

And it's interesting that the tenure of this of us today is maybe the direction isn't that great.

I thought it was really pacy and surprising and fun and terrific.

And reminded me actually of Sylvester's motorcycle stunts in his last stories because it felt that sort of thing but done with, you can see the evident cash.

It feels incredibly nostalgic, but oddly enough for a time, maybe only 7 years before it was broadcast.

It feels like it's nostalgic for the early Blair years, that where we are politically, and you know, because this is my shtick with FTE.

But politically, we're already looking back, not just as the show, to the lovely golden times of when, you know, the country was blacked out and people were only working 3 day weeks, but still, it wasn't at almost so much better with Hovah's bread ads and all the rest of it.

[51:48]

But there's also just for that recent hope and maybe it's not too late and maybe we just need to look at who we are and what we do so well.

And I think really the impetus for the show and why it picked up.

The timing was perfect.

People were wanting.

Well, just feeling that we still have a little bit of hope and we still have some impetus and things can be done, but it's still in the way that Britain is even at its most forward thinking.

It's still conservative in that it always looks to the past.

It is that London thing.

It's so London, this 1st episode.

You've got the London eye, you've got London buses.

You've got Westminster Bridge and...

It was.

Well, it was the original title, Fear of a Welsh planet, wasn't it?

But it's also, it's also running, queer as folk, which Marigold also did the music for, has so much running, like, and there's a theme to it.

You know, whenever the characters are running from place to place.

There's a theme to it.

And it's the 1st word that the doctor says.

And they spend the entire episode running and there's something so breathless and exciting and they're running through recognisable places.

[52:56]

They're not running through a sleepy English village.

They're not running down a cardboard corridor.

They're running down Westminster Bridge with London landmarks in the background.

London will become such a part of it.

It is something, you know, Britain is the most hip and interesting place in the world as far as Doctor Who is concerned or London itself is.

And I think that that's, you know, a historical attitude that they're looking back onto.

I think they were very much seeing that Britain had not gone in the way they'd hoped, and Gordon Brown casting his very thin and pallid shadow.

No one had confidence in him, and yet, looking back now, he looked actually like a man with, if not vision, he certainly was sturdy.

He was the John Major of his times and offered more, but this was not a Britain that would have talked about Brexit.

No.

No.

This is not a story that would have talked about throwing everything away.

This was a story about, what have we done in the past that was at its best and how we can use that to move on?

It's also extraordinary, how this revival led to other revivals or talk of other revivals.

[54:02]

So it did lead to a revival of the Tomorrow people as an American co-production.

It almost led to a revival of sapphire and steel.

That was pitched.

And this is still in development.

There is a revival of the Avengers in development that's been talked about since 2005 from the director of Iron Man 3, which is a very, very stylish and very avengers-ish movie.

Unset in the 60s.

Well, you would want to hope so.

But what is very interesting is that the time tunnel opening sequence, of course, is terribly nostalgic for Doctor Who in the 70s, the other idea was an Avengers style opening sequence with symbols and faces and what have you.

But somewhere out there, there's sort of an intermediate phase of the time tunnel with Eccleston's face in it.

The footage has never been released.

Love to see that.

Is it gurney?

It was created.

I don't know.

It's never been.

And that's the thing.

This episode is shrouded still in so much mystery because we don't have the deleted scenes.

[55:07]

They've never appeared on any DVD or Blu-ray edition. despite the fact they do exist.

And also, Eccleston, you know, has recently commented about directors right from the beginning not taking care of their supporting artistes.

Crashing sofas.

Yeah, well, that's my theory, right?

There was as part of the Henrix explosion, Hendrix.

No, that's a gin.

There was as part of the Henriks explosion, a burning sofa that was meant to fall onto the street and it was shot, and the official line is that the visual effects supervisor Dave Houghton wasn't happy with it, and so they composited in an explosion later.

But to me, it's like, that still doesn't explain why you get rid of the debris crashing down.

And I just wonder if, from Eccleston's perspective, there wasn't due care taken in a dangerous stunt against extras.

And if Bowick kind of went, oh, you know, we're behind schedule, we're just going to get on with it.

That could have easily, um, annoyed Eccleston, who, He takes pride in whether you're the extra or whether you're the star, you're important to this production and, you know, he attributes that to his working class roots.

[56:20]

Now, I don't know if that's true.

That's me reading between the lines.

That's my thing, what I do.

But the fact that this year of Doctor Who is still shrouded in so much secrecy, it kind of mirrors what we're getting now in that Chris Chibnall and his team are being very careful to release very little information about their production.

And Russell T. Davis was a master at releasing information.

But it'd take you a few minutes to realise actually you didn't really know much at all.

It was a great little piece that I think Dan Hogarth put together or just episodes completely tied together with taxis standing on streets and people with outside supermarkets and bin liners and such like.

Yeah.

I remember the 1st picture of Christopher Eccleston that escaped from the set was from the end of World War 3 when he's walking down a street and judging from the position and whatnot.

It's the bit where he's telling Rose that Harriet Jones will bring in a golden age for Britain.

[57:21]

Because there was a photo of Penelope Wilton like shouting to people.

And Eccleston just wandering through the background, his mouth open.

But for ages, aside from the official publicity, that was the only shot we have him in action.

And people kept compositing it onto DVD covers.

I was astounded at one of those corner window TVI interviews that was loudly touted as, you know, the costume being revealed.

No, it's not.

He's just on his civvies.

He's just walking off the street.

A scarf.

Where's the stick of salary?

And the jaw-droppingness that is that the?

No, is that the costume?

No, no.

So how they reveal these things is very important.

It was done poorly and I. I'm saying it's not a costume.

It's not a costume.

It's not what the 80s became, you know, he could be wearing it anywhere, which is exactly right.

So this production just ticks so many boxes correctly.

You know, um, and it feeds old series fans, it feeds those people who aren't slightly familiar with the show back in the 70s like with the autumns, they may remember it.

It's ticking for new people to come in, making it very easy.

[58:22]

There's just so many different areas that they are managing to hit.

And it also, you know, sends up the fans with the whole, you know, one of your nutters has arrived.

Oh, it's a she, you know, a little not, you know, not to us, where it's a fun thing that if you know Doctor Who fandom, you know.

Yeah, it's little things like that, which are little icing on the cake, I think, in terms of for some of it.

Yeah, and with Clive sort of being a bit comedic and a bit fanish, when Rose leaves him in the original script anyway.

She doesn't just go straight back out to Mickey.

We actually see her walk out of the shed and Carolyn's there, um, wheeling along a load of bricks because Clive never does anything around the house.

And they just have this moment where Rose says, I'm sorry, and Carolyn says, yeah, I know.

But the thing, but the thing with Clive is, and with the whole script, as much as there is comedy and action and that sort of thing, there is one other element in this, in the fact that Clive dies, and Russell manages to introduce the fact that there is danger and there is death there, and it's something that is real, and there are consequences.

[59:53]

Well, dear listener, we're getting ready to run very, very slowly into the Tartar so that Christopher Eccleston can whisk us away to the Ear 5.5/apple/26.

So do come back next week for the end of the world.

In the meantime, you can find us at FlightthroughEntirety.com, where you'll find over 130 episodes covering our flight through the entirety of the classic series.

We're also flying through entirety on Facebook and Apple Podcasts, and at FTE podcast on Twitter.

Over on Bondfinger, you can find our commentary podcasts on literally 100s of James Bond films.

That's bondfinger.com, bondfinger on Facebook and iTunes and at bondfingercast on Twitter.

Including the 57 versions of Casino Royale.

Yeah and counting.

So until next time, may you have an astonishingly successful night next Saturday and wake up on Sunday morning to discover that you're now the biggest thing on television.

In a red hoodie. yes.

Thank you very much for listening and good night.

See you soon.

Bye.

[1:00:56]

That was Flight through Entirety, starring Todd Bealby, Nathan Bottomley, Richard Stone, and Gay Games grappling champion, Brendan Jones.

He got the bronze.

Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb, Strings performance by Jane Orberg.

This episode, Fear of a Welsh Planet, was recorded on the 27th of May 2018 and released on the 26th of August.

Here at FDE.

We'd like to congratulate friend of the podcast, Pete McTie, for his gig as a writer on series 11 of Doctor Who, and to tell him that we look forward to seeing a remake of the massacre in the near future.

Um, Rick Mile, was it Rick Mile?

But Hugh Jack, not Hugh Jack.

Huge.

Huge Grant.

Hugh Grant was offered.

Huge grant.

That's right, was offered the role and turned it down and has said in...

Dishwasher?

No, that's the dog.

Um, Pincho.

Okay.

Look, it's fine.

The memory of Pink Chong.

We get we get police cars and helicopters, it might.

[1:01:56]

Um, drugging.

So what were we were with?

Huge ground.

We will start with you, guys.

Just give it a say.

It's all you darling.

So yep.

I need to go to the toilet.

We'll do it.

Yeah, do it now.

I'll leave it on, leave it on.

In fact, take it in.

Can't be any worse.

Great.

Any noise did you now hear on this podcast are not me, people.

Tag.

Well, none of us had even thought about that, so well done.

Yeah, I think that's a title.

Yeah.

God It was so mature.

I'm 35 in October.

Same age as some.

Me.

Barbara.

As as Jackie Hill.

Jackie Hill.

Oh, she was actually...

Did did you see those photos of Jackie Hiller?

[1:02:58]

Yes.

Oh, I put one through Colorised Bot.

It did a very good job.

There's a Twitter account, colorised bot, and it uses algorithm.

Still rude.

It uses algorithms.

It colourizes the entire the entire lower area.

For short, short.

Colonic colourisation.

Tag.

Actually...

When are we doing the old podcast?

That's redo.

When are we doing that?

When are we doing the massacre too?

Huguenot boogaloo.

Huganoo boogaloo.

You can do boogaloo.