Episode 230
Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World
Saturday 25 December 2021
When loveable middle-class white lady Sue Brockman (Claire Skinner) loses her husband Pete (Hugh Dennis) after his plane goes missing over the English Channel, she decides to withhold that information from her children (Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez), because she is afraid it might ruin their Christmas (which it totally would). But her world is soon turned upside-down by a mysterious stranger (a very young Prince Philip in his first television role), who beguiles the children with hot and cold running lemonade before whisking them off to an extraterrestrial forest which is about to have massive vats of acid dumped on it. Meanwhile, surprisingly, obnoxiously messianic lion Aslan (Liam Neeson) is nowhere to be found. Mark McManus and Pete Lambert guest star. It’s The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.
Notes and Links
Here’s The Young Ones parodying The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Claire Skinner also started in the Outnumbered Christmas Special The Broken Santa in 2011, which was watched by 8.47 million people. (This episode of Doctor Who was watched by 10.77 million viewers. So take that, Claire.)
Bill Bailey, who plays Droxil in this episode, admits publicly that he is a massive Doctor Who fan, which we think is terribly brave. Here he is playing the Doctor Who theme reimagined as Belgian jazz. You really need to watch it.
Arabella Weir starred as the Doctor in a Big Finish audio story called Exile, part of its Doctor Who Unbound series. Pete was not impressed.
Wizards vs Aliens was created by Russell T Davies and Phil Ford in 2012, in a way to replace The Sarah Jane Adventures after the death of Lis Sladen. Its second episode, Grazlax Attacks, was a hilarious rip-off of Gremlins (1984).
And finally, the prequel scene to this episode was included in the DVD and Blu-ray releases of Doctor Who Series 7 in both the US and UK.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Pete is @Prof_Quiteamess, and Mark is @QuarkMcMalus. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Pete and Mark are frequent contributors to the Trap One Podcast, and can both be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast, Maximum Power.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll come over to your house again and be so quirky and zany that your children will end up loving us much more than they love you.
And more
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We will be releasing our take on the New Year’s Day Special Eve of the Daleks sometime very early in January.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We just released a new episode a couple of days ago, a spoilerrific roundtable discussion of the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has finished its coverage of Series A of Blakes 7, and which will be returning to discuss Series B early in the new year.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we had a great time watching an episode of the hilarious Star Trek cartoon series Lower Decks — I, Excretus.