Episode 187 · Silence in the Library · Sunday 3 May 2020
This week, Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by renowned Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, but we spend most of our time lurking among the bookshelves frightened by our own shadows. And despite the customary non-stop chattering, it’s all about Silence in the Library.
Notes and links
Fans of the Vashta Nerada will also enjoy the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? in which the gang are confronted by a terrifying skeleton in a space suit, characteristically called the Spooky Space Kook.
The Library of Babel (1948) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he imagines a library the size of the universe, which contains every book ever written, in a series of hexagonal rooms lined with shelves full of 410-page books containing every possible combination of letters. It’s a weird and interesting thought experiement. You can find a copy of the story itself here. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explores the idea further in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996).
Johnny’s magnum opus is his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
Episode 186 · The Unicorn and the Wasp · Sunday 26 April 2020
This week, Peter’s having a quiet drink, Brendan’s spending a suspicious amount of time in the toilet, Max has gone for a walk in the woods with Sacha Dhawan, and Nathan is looking at dirty postcards and reminiscing about the days when he still used to get out of this chair. Plus, Agatha Christie’s here for cocktails. So be sure to watch out for The Unicorn and the Wasp.
Notes and links
Nathan has dim memories of three Agatha Christie miniseries, adapted for TV by Sarah Phelps, who is writing a second series of RTD’s A Very English Scandal in 2021. These adaptations were And Then There Were None (2015), Witness for the Prosecution (2016) and Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
The Doctor reminisces about rescuing Charlemagne from an insane computer, a scenario taken directly from a Doctor Who story on the BBC website: The Lonely Computer, by Peter’s old friend Rupert Laight.
This Guardian article from 1999 theorises that Agatha Christie disappeared to get back at her cheating husband, and that her amnesia was feigned to conceal this fact. Nathan learned this story, like everything else he knows, from a tweet. (You can see his reply here).
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll write a whole bunch of Doctor Who episodes that you really enjoy and then behave so poorly in public that you have no choice but to cancel us.
Episode 185 · The Doctor’s Daughter · Sunday 19 April 2020
This week, we basically stand around gloomily watching a fish drown until Todd cheers us up with some surprisingly athletic backflips. It’s The Doctor’s Daughter.
Notes and links
During the recording of our episode on 42 last year (Episode 170: I Believe Beryl Reid as a Freighter Captain), Brendan and Todd enter an unholy pact to reunite on this week’s episode to redeem The Doctor’s Daughter. With the most terrible consequences.
A few days before we recorded this episode, Chris Chibnall was interviewed in the Radio Times, saying that he would love one day to bring back some of the show’s earlier companions, like Amy, Rory, Ace and Tegan.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll give you three delightfully unexpected weeks of work, during which you’ll mostly be required to flail around in mud.
This Soldier, This Soldier, This Soldier, This Soldier
Episode 184 · The Poison Sky · Sunday 12 April 2020
This week, Nathan is crushing on that nice Colonel, James is crushing on a cloned replica of himself, and Peter is crushing on that nice young man who runs the local startup cult academy. And all the time, Adam Richard is roaming this suburban street with an axe, looking for cars to attack. It’s the end of the world, as usual: it’s The Poison Sky.
Notes and links
Adam’s TV show Outland (2012) screened on ABC-TV and told the story of five queer science-fiction fans thrown together after the breakup of their local fan group. Adam was co-creator, co-writer and one of the stars of the show. Outland was must-see TV for another small group of queer science fiction fans who would one day grow up to create the podcast Flight Through Entirety.
In March 2020, Catherine Tate returned to Big Finish with Jacqueline King in the Kidnapped! box set, in which Donna teams up with an old school friend to fight aliens in the Doctor’s absence.
Freeman Agyeman has just made her Big Finish début, but not in a Doctor Who story: instead, she’s joining Eve Myles in Torchwood: Dissected, released in February 2020.
As we said last week, Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Peter ponders the similarities between Luke Rattigan and convicted fraud Martin Shkreli, who is literally one of the world’s most appalling people.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch Up the Women, a BBC4 sitcom created by Jessica Hynes, starring Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and the Rattigan Academy’s very own Ryan Sampson.
Adam
Adam recommends The Stranger, Netflix’s answer to Broadchurch, produced by Nicola Shindler’s Red Production Company (Years and Years, Cucumber, Queer as Folk).
Peter
Hoping for the Rutans to make a return to Doctor Who, Peter suggests that you should watch Horror of Fang Rock, which we covered in the our delightfully named Episode 50, The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive.
And he’s particularly keen for you to watch Netflix’s Elite, a Spanish teen drama in which attractive young people have sex and occasionally murder someone.
Nathan
Nathan finds depressing parallels between life in 2020 and life in 2060 as depicted in Avenue 5, a new HBO science-fiction comedy series by Armando Ianucci (The Thick of It).
Episode 183 · The Sontaran Stratagem · Sunday 5 April 2020
This week, we’re joined again by Adam Richard for a discussion about RTD’s early-season two-parters, sidelining the main characters, the military, cloning, Sontarans, and the perils of spending too much time with our families. It all smells very much like The Sontaran Stratagem.
Notes and links
Martha is now engaged to the impressively handsome Thomas Milligan from Last of the Time Lords, who is played by Tom Ellis, who can now been seen in the titular role in Netflix’s supernatural police procedural Lucifer.
Sergeant Benton’s pretty new replacement in this version of UNIT, Ross Jenkins, is played by Christian Cooke, who was recently one of the suspects in the BBC adaption of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
Take a drink, dear listener. In her TARDIS Eruditorum article on The Time Warrior, El Sandifer explains that Bob Holmes did not create the Sontarans as a second-tier race of Doctor Who monsters; what he created there instead was the character of Linx.
If you’re young enough, you might not know that Christopher Ryan — who plays General Staal in this story — first became famous as Mike the Cool Person in the Thatcher-era BBC comedy series The Young Ones. He went on to play Jennifer Saunders’s long-suffering ex-husband Marshall in Absolutely Fabulous.
Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Peter is still, unaccountably, nowhere to be found. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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.
Episode 183: Crossed That off the Whiteboard
· Recorded on Saturday 8 February 2020 · Download (47.2 MB)
Episode 182 · Planet of the Ood · Sunday 29 March 2020
This week, James is admiring Mr Halpern’s hardware, Richard’s showing a PowerPoint presentation to some very important clients, Todd’s trying desperately not to fall over this railing, and Nathan’s ranting incessantly about Marx while seriously regretting his lunch order. Welcome to the Planet of the Ood.
Notes and links
Keith Temple was well-known for a BBC TV Movie called Angel Cake (2006), in which the Virgin Mary appears in some rock buns baked by Sarah Lancashire, to miraculous effect. You can read an interview with both of them about the production here.
Temple has also written a number of books, including It’s Behind You, in which a washed-up soap actor starts to receive death threats in the post while she’s doing panto, with hilarious results.
Episode 181 · The Fires of Pompeii · Sunday 22 March 2020
This week, while Nathan’s lying on the couch hungover, James is in an ecstatic vaporous trance, and Brendan’s admiring his latest avant-garde objet d’art, we are unexpectedly joined by friend-of-the-podcast, Erik Stadnik, who we hope will (eventually) find it in his heart to save us from the latest impending apocalypse, The Fires of Pompeii.
Notes and links
Strap yourself in. There’s a lot this week.
The Doctor’s previous and completely contradictory visit to Pompeii is chronicled in the first Big Finish audio starring Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford, called The Fires of Vulcan.
Roman historian Mary Beard defines the Dormouse Test like this: "[In a modern recreation of ancient Rome,] how long is it before the characters adopt an uncomfortably horizontal position in front of tables, usually festooned with grapes, and one says to another: ‘Can I pass you a dormouse?’”
This article appeared just days before our recording: the remains of one victim found in Herculaneum revealed that their owner’s brain turned to glass in the heat of the eruption.
David Whitaker was, in many ways, the creative genius who gave us Doctor Who, and in his very early novelisation, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, he not only gives his take on how history works, he also explains the morality of the Doctor’s historical adventures. A must-read.
Caroline Simcox finds a new way to approach historical Doctor Who adventures in Big Finish’s The Council of Nicaea. Son of the Dragon, by Steve Lyons, covers similar territory.
Tat Wood’s About Time 9 is the (sort of) definitive guide to Series 4 and the 2009 specials. No sign of About Time 10 yet, but we’re desperately hoping it will arrive before 2021.
Episode 180 · Partners in Crime · Sunday 15 March 2020
We’re back for a new year, a new companion and an exciting new series of the Biggest Thing on TV These Days. But first, we have a simple and effective new weight-loss programme to explode. It’s Partners in Crime.
Notes and links
So, if you want to find out more about how this era of the show from Russell T Davies himself, you must take a look at The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter, which contains his candid real-time account of how this final RTD series developed. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
In The Writer’s Tale, Russell says that the Adipose were inspired by the horrific puppet creatures that pursue a Vauxhall Corsa in this appalling advertisement.
Whereas Nathan had always assumed that they had been inspired by the horrible food creatures that featured in an ad campaign for Wrigley’s chewing gum. (Which would have had to travel back in time five or so years for that to be possible.)
The Supernanny was a British reality TV show in which Jo Frost would turn up at your home and explain to you exactly how terrible your parenting was. It had been running on Channel 4 since 2004.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby and James is @ohjamessellwood. Peter continues to deprive himself of the world’s biggest source of cat pictures and targeted harassment, so Twitter fans will just have to do without him. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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’re planning to continue releasing episodes of sixties spy-fi nonsense despite the delayed release of No Time to Die.
Episode 180: For Exactly the Same Reason
· Recorded on Saturday 1 February 2020 · Download (55.0 MB)
Mrs Golightly’s Happy Travelling University and Commentary
Episode 179 · Voyage of the Damned · Wednesday 25 December 2019
In our highest-rated episode since 1979, Nathan, James, Todd and Richard celebrate Christmas aboard the Titanic with champagne, buffalo wings and Kylie Minogue. It looks like it’s going to be a successful maiden voyage — after all, the episode is called Voyage of the Damned.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
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’ve just released a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, in which we comment on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which shares a surprising amount of DNA with You Only Live Twice.
Episode 179: Mrs Golightly’s Happy Travelling University and Commentary
· Recorded on Sunday 8 December 2019 · Download (75.0 MB)
Episode 178 · Time Crash · Sunday 22 December 2019
Our farewell last week was so heartbreaking that we decided to sneak in one last episode before Christmas. So, here are Terry Wogan and John Barrowman to introduce a heartwarming episode of Flight Through Entirety, in which Nathan and James are joined by Steven B and Dan from New to Who to discuss the 2007 Children in Need special, Time Crash.
Steven and Dan are two of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories which might be of interest to New Series fans. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast, and you should immediately subscribe to the podcast in your podcatcher of choice.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
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’ve already recorded a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, which should turn up in your feed any day now.
Episode 178: Remember Who We Were
· Recorded on Tuesday 10 December 2019 · Download (24.3 MB)
