Where has the magic of Doctor Who gone? It’s the first time we’ve been back to Gallifrey since the last time, Todd is cross, and Mary Whitehouse is furious. It’s time for The Deadly Assassin!
Buy the story!
The Deadly Assassin was released on DVD in 2009. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
It’s impossible to understand the negative fanboy reception of this story without reading Jan Vincent-Rudski’s review of this story. There’s a video version of this review on YouTube.
You can find Jan Vincent-Rudski’s review in License Denied, edited by Paul Cornell, which is well worth a look. It includes Gareth Roberts’s defence of the Graham Williams Era, which Nathan thinks is utterly brilliant, of course.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) tells the story of someone brainwashed into committing a terrible political assassination. Which really has nothing to do with The Deadly Assassin.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll stick you in a Doctor Who story with no companion apart from a talking cabbage perched on your shoulder. Which would just serve you right.
Bondfinger
We recorded our commentary podcast episode for Goldfinger mere moments ago, so keep an eye out for its release in the next week or so on Bondfinger. We have already done two commentaries: From Russia With Love (1963), and Dr. No (1962). You can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s time to bid a fond farewell to Lis Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and what better way to do that than blowing her up, hypnotising her, sticking her in an exploding nuclear reactor and dangling her over the edge of a precipice in The Hand of Fear? Till we meet again, Sarah.
Buy the story!
The Hand of Fear was released on DVD way back in 2006. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
Fans of Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s tendency to run out of ideas will enjoy K9 and the Time Trap, one of four K9 adventure books written by Dave Martin and published in 1980.
Florana is the beautiful planet that Pertwee persuaded Sarah to visit on holiday at the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
Outland (2012) is a six-part ABC comedy series written by John Richards and Adam Richard, about a group of gay SF fans, full to the brim of hilarious Doctor Who references. John Richards is also one of the hosts of the Splendid Chaps podcast, which reflected on the history of Doctor Who in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary.
The Flight Through Entirety vanity James Bond project continues with Bondfinger, our commentary podcast on the James Bond films. We have already done two commentaries: From Russia With Love (1963), and Dr. No (1962), with more on the way. You can keep up with all the Bondfinger news — including an upcoming commentary on Goldfinger early next month — on Twitter and Facebook.
Well, Todd’s enthusiastic, Brendan’s cheerful and Nathan just wishes there was a Sontaran involved. We’re off to the Duchy of San Martino in Wales, where clichéd but gorgeously-designed things are afoot in The Masque of Mandragora.
Watch the show
The Masque of Mandragora was released on DVD in 2010. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
Famously, the location work for this story was done in Portmeirion in Wales, which is a tourist thing built last century in the style of an Italian village. It’s probably most famous as the location of Patrick McGoohan’s cult classic The Prisoner (1967). Which is really, really worth watching. You can book your stay in one of Portmeirion’s self-catering villas here, but watch out for bouncing weather ballons.
The BBC Television Shakespeare ran from 1978 to 1984 and included adaptations of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Yes, even Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It was almost completely studio-bound, with sets much like those created by Barry Newbery for Masque. The Wikipedia article is exhaustingly detailed.
Quentin Crisp was a famous twentieth-century English homosexualist and author, made famous by (among other things) his portrayal by Doctor Who’s very own John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant (1975), a TV movie adaptation of his biography, produced by Verity Lambert. Fancy!
If you’re enjoying your flight, why not check out Bondfinger, our commentary podcast on the James Bond films? There are two commentaries so far: From Russia With Love (1963), and Dr. No (1962), with more on the way. You can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
Brendan, Richard and Nathan enjoy the rare treat of watching a really great episode of 60s television: it’s one of Robert Banks Stewart’s sources for The Seeds of Doom: a 1966 episode of The Avengers called Man-Eater of Surrey Green.
Watch the show
You can watch Man-Eater of Surrey Greenin its entirety here. (But is has since been taken down due to a copyright claim.)
Notes and links
If you want to find out all there is to know about The Avengers, take a look here at Avengers Forever.
Future Steed sidekick Linda Thorson appears as a Cardassian in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Chase, which is otherwise pretty terrible, to be honest.
Joanna Lumley (eventually) played the Doctor in Steven Moffat’s The Curse of Fatal Death, a Comic Relief special broadcast in 1999.
In the Thin Man films, including Thin Man (1934) and its five sequels, a detective and his wife, played by William Powell and Myrna Loy, have a lovely time solving mysteries together. It’s terribly good, apparently.
We’ll be back next week with The Masque of Mandragora.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll take a break from podcasting about your favourite TV show to discuss something you’ve never actually heard of.
It’s time to put down those bonsai pruners and catch the first helicopter to Antarctica, as we discuss the final story of Season 13, that florid, fecund, flexuous and frutescent classic, The Seeds of Doom.
Buy the story!
The Seeds of Doom was released on DVD in 2010 and 2011. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
The Seeds of Doom came 20th out of 241 stories in Doctor Who Magazine’s The First Fifty Years Poll in 2013. You can see the full list of results here.
Fans of people slowly being taken over by plants will enjoy the film Creepshow (1982), in which Stephen King himself is taken over by some lush, aggressive vegetation.
The Italian Job (1969) stars Michael Caine, Noël Coward and Benny Hill. It looks amazing. And our very own Harrison Chase, Tony Beckley, shows his extensive range by playing a character called Camp Freddie.
Here’s our usual list of films plundered in the making of this story: Ice Station Zebra (1968), an espionage thriller set on a base in the Arctic, Day of the Triffids (1963), in which giant plant monsters take over the world after most of humanity is blinded, and the brilliant Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World (1963) in which a plant Frankenstein’s monster thing attacks yet another base in the Arctic.
Can we possibly have failed to mention H P Lovecraft before? The Hinchcliffe Era is massively indebted to his SF/Horror stories, in which the universe is haunted by ancient evil gods from beyond the dawn of time. You can get a free ebook of all of his fiction here.
Picks of the week
Brendan
Brendan’s pick is Refuge (2015), a short film set on an alien planet, shot entirely in moonlight. You can watch it here, but be careful: it’s a bit scary.
Next week, we’re taking a break from our usual schedule to watch one of the inspirations for The Seeds of Doom: the Avengers episode The Man-Eater of Surrey Green. Your homework is to watch it in preparation. You can find the entire episode here. (Actually, you can’t: it was taken down due to a copyright claim.)
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll forget to pay you for your lovely painting of the Fritillaria meleagris that we’re storing in the boot of our Daimler.
Next weekend: Istanbul
Keep an eye our for the next episode of Bondfinger, which will be released next weekend, and which features Brendan, Richard and James talking about From Russia With Love (1963). You can hear our first episode here. And you can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
This week, we’re off to the planet Karn for wine, cheese and cyanide with Dr Mehendri Solon and his pet brain-in-a-jar Morbius. And Sarah Jane Smith has never had so much fun!
Buy the story!
The Brain of Morbius was released on DVD in 2008. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
As usual, the first thing we do with a Hinchcliffe story is to work out which classic horror films it’s, er, paying homage to. This time, it’s the films of James Whale — Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). James Whale’s own story is told in Gods and Monsters (1998), where he is played by Doctor Who’s very own Sir Ian McKellen. (He did a voiceover in The Snowmen. That totally counts.)
Fans of the hilarious way Nathan continually mixes up the names of Doctor Who stories will enjoy how, in his incisive analysis of this season’s terrible flaws, he manages to refer to The Android Invasion as Invasion of the Dinosaurs. And Brendan will try and muscle in on the action later on by calling The Seeds of DoomThe Seeds of Death. Aren’t we silly?
For once, Elizabeth Sandifer is not actually responsible for the rule Nathan quotes about canon: it’s part of this brilliant anti-canon rant on the sadly defunct Teatime Brutality blog.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll come round to your house and challenge you to a mind-bending contest. We have all the apparatus here, after all.
The Death of Dr. No
If you’ve been affected by issues raised in this podcast, please contact our new project Bondfinger, which currently just consists of a single a commentary track on Dr. No (1962), with more to come early in September. You can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
Harry and Benton are back, but no one cares, as robot replicas of Brendan, Nathan and Richard trudge through Terry Nation’s penultimate Doctor Who story, The Android Invasion.
Buy the story!
The Android Invasion was released on DVD in 2012. In the UK and Australia, it was released as part of the UNIT Files box set, along with Invasion of the Dinosaurs (Amazon UK). It was released on its own in the US (Amazon US).
Notes and links
We’re going to put you through a whole lot of terrible vintage televsion in this episode’s shownotes, so are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Nathan’s phrase “robot replica” was shamelessly lifted from an episode of Steven Moffat’s Press Gang called UnXpected, in which the eponymous gang encounter the fictional hero of a terrible, terrible 70s science fiction TV series. Which is probably just a coincidence.
Such fans will also enjoy The Avengers episode The Hour that Never Was, not because of robot replicas, because there aren’t any, but because it’s just superb.
And such fans will be completely overwhelmed by these Six Million Dollar Man episodes: Steve Austin fights a robot replica of someone else in Day of the Robot, and there’s a robot woman with a Sarah-from-the-Part-2-cliffhanger face in the Bionic Woman crossover Kill Oscar.
Fans of robot replicas of English villages will enjoy the Danger Man episode Colony Three.
No one at all will enjoy Terry Nation’s first Avengers episode Invasion of the Earthmen, which was described by the Avengers Forever website as “one of the worst classics Avengers episodes of all time”.
This week we discuss Pyramids of Mars, a classic Hinchcliffe story that comes in the top ten in every reputable fan poll. Naturally enough, Nathan doesn’t like it.
Buy the story!
Pyramids of Mars was released on DVD way back in 2004. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Links and notes
Well, it’s a Hinchcliffe/Holmes story, so let’s get the sources out of the way: The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers is a rollicking adventure about an impeding German invasion, and The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a beloved children’s book about why doctors cannot be trusted.
Michael Bilton’s Collins the manservant impobably survives the conflagration in Part 4, and goes on many years later to do for Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To The Manor Born (1979).
Fans of both friction and lubrication will enjoy, among other things, the Journal of Tribology.
Follow us!
Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard’s Twitter account has been locked in a pyramid for millenia with only robots, forcefields and deadly missiles for company. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.
In a strange universe, in the distant future, the President, Vice-President and Treasurer of the Prentis Hancock Appreciation Society, Brendan, Richard and Nathan, meet to discuss shower curtains, detergent bottles and undeserved survival in Planet of Evil.
Buy the stories!
Planet of Evil was released on DVD in 2007/2008. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
In Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), the members of a scientific expedition are studied and psychologically traumatised by the sentient ocean of an alien planet.
Ponti is played by Louis Mahoney, who also appears in Frontier in Space and Blink, but perhaps he is most famous as a doctor in the Fawlty Towers episode, The Germans.
Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard’s Twitter account has fallen into a black pond full of antimatter. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.
This week, we’re high in the misty Highlands, out by the purple islands, being attacked by Zygons, Scotland the Brave!
Buy the stories!
Terror of the Zygons was finally released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Terrance Dicks’s novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, was re-released to celebrate the 50th anniversary, and so it’s still actually in print. Hooray! (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll send Angus Ferguson McRanald round to your house to play the bagpipes and drastically lower your property prices.
And coming on 1 August…
Check out our new project: Bondfinger. You can keep up with all the news on Twitter and Facebook. One week to go!
As our flight through Tom Baker’s first season comes to an end, we pull on a latex mask, strap on some bombs, fill our pockets with gold dust and drop down into Wookey Hole to discuss Revenge of the Cybermen.
Buy the stories!
Revenge of the Cybermen was released on DVD in 2010. It can be bought by itself in the US (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia it was released in a box set along with Silver Nemesis (Amazon UK).
Links and notes
In Unnatural Selection, a Season 2 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dr Pulaski (Diana Muldaur) is cured of some terrible aging makeup by a quick trip through the matter transporters. Coincidence? Probably.
The 1970s Japanese TV Series Saiyūki was dubbed into English by the BBC and broadcast under the title Monkey in the UK and Australia, with David Collings (Vorus) as the eponymous Monkey God. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation often ran it in the traditional 6.30 PM weekday timeslot that rightfully belonged to Doctor Who.
Brendan’s mysterious claim that Kellman was a collector of James Bond memorabilia will become clear if you just check out this page here.
Cottage Under Siege was a brilliant Doctor Who fanzine from the wilderness years, edited by Neil Corry and Gareth Roberts. There were three issues, published in 1993 and 1994. I’d love to see it again. Anyone?
The Doctor Who Monster Book, by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in 1975. It was Nathan’s first introduction to Doctor Who, so we have that to thank it for. It is, sadly, currently out of print.
Harry Sullivan’s War, by Ian Marter, was a spy thriller published by Target Books in 1986, in the same month as Marter’s death. It’s out of print too, but if you’re keen you can almost certainly get hold of a second-hand copy through Amazon.
Brendan
I, Davros is a series of four Big Finish audios chronicling Davros’s life from his teens up until the events of Genesis of the Daleks.
Follow us!
Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard did have a Twitter account once, but he spoke to it in ALGOL that one time and it exploded. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.
Our weekly flight through Tom Baker’s first season continues with an episode made entirely of thirty foot thick reinforced concrete. That’s right, it’s time for that 1975 classic, Genesis of the Daleks!
Buy the story!
Genesis of the Daleks was released on DVD way back in 2006. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Links and notes
Commedia dell’arte is a genre of theatrical comedy featuring an array of various stock characters. It dates from 16th century Italy, but is based on a tradition that goes all the way back to Greek New Comedy from the end of the fourth century BC. So does that make Davros just the latest iteration of Pantalone?
Severin is the hero of Venus in Furs (1870), a novella written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave his name to something called masochism. Probably best not to look that word up on Google.
Sadly, I’m unable to locate the Parliamentary speech made by a Conservative MP in the 1990s, in which he quoted Davros’s virus speech from Part 5 of this story. Fact fans will be able to corroborate its historicity, however, by referring to Miles and Wood’s About Time volume 4. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
This week, Flight Through Entirety is on location in Dartmoor, testing our resistance to fear, burning, pressure, fluid deprivation and immersion in liquids, as we discuss the third story of Tom Baker’s first season, The Sontaran Experiment.
Buy the story!
The Sontaran Experiment was released on DVD in 2006/2007. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Links and notes
Fans of posh white people living in orbital space stations will enjoy The Ark in Space, of course, and also Elysium (2013), which makes reasonably good use of Jodie Foster, whatever Brendan says.
Dr Josef Mengele worked as an SS Officer in Auschwitz and performed brutal and sadistic experiments on some of the prisoners, as well as assigning many to the gas chambers.
Todd has given that helmic regulator quite a twist, I’m afraid, and we’ve found ourselves in the year 16,087, on a space station being menaced by bubble wrap and fibreglass ants. And still it’s one of the best Doctor Who stories to date. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Ark in Space.
Buy the story!
The Ark in Space Special Edition was released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
The novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, written by Ian Marter himself, was re-released to celebrate Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Links and notes
Fans of this story and of Revelation of the Daleks will enjoy a delicious serving of Soylent Green (1973). (Spoilers: It’s people.)
Sorry, dear listeners, we don’t have any pictures of Ian Marter being giantly muscular. And don’t think I didn’t spend time looking.
J. V. McConnell, (1962) “Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians”, Journal of Neuropsychiatry 3 suppl 1 542-548. (See, we can be academically rigorous if we put our minds to it.)
I’m not sure that Ridley Scott has ever actually admitted to ripping off this story in his film Alien (1979), but that hasn’t stopped people from speculatingaboutthepossibility.
We haven’t yet managed to upload Todd’s interview with Lis Sladen, but we promise we’re working on it. Keep an eye out for an announcement in the shownotes over the next few episodes. In the meantime, you can enjoy Lis Sladen’s second appearance in this 1972 episode of Z Cars, directed by The Underwater Menace’s Julia Smith.
Follow us!
Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard adores all of you and can’t wait to chat to each and every one of you in person. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.
We have a new Doctor, and a new release schedule. In the first weekly episode of Flight Through Entirety, Brendan, Nathan, Richard and Todd, the sort of girls who give motorcars pet names, discuss Tom Baker’s first ever Doctor Who story, Robot. Please do not resist. We do not wish to cause you unnecessary pain.
If, like me, you’re disappointed that Miss Bassey won’t be singing the theme to the next Bond film, SPECTRE, you can console yourself by remembering the valiant It’s Got To Be Bassey campaign. Bless you, boys.
Some moments in this story are reminiscent of Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s second-season Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny, which exists on YouTube in its, er, entirety.
In yet another Very Special Episode, Todd joins Brendan, Richard and Nathan for a retrospective of the Pertwee Era. Liz, Jo or Sarah? Peladon, Spiridon or Exxilon? And, the most important question of all, which 70s sitcom would have been most improved if they’d only had the foresight to cast our very own Richard Stone?
Linx
We mention, with frank admiration, two novels by David McIntee: a Virgin Missing Adventure, The Dark Path, featuring the Second Doctor, Jamie, Victoria and the Master, as well as a BBC Past Doctor Adventure, The Face of the Enemy, in which, while the Doctor and Jo are visiting Peladon, the UNIT team join up with Barbara and Ian to fight the Master.
Mark Gatiss reads the novelisation of Planet of the Daleks. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
Birds of Prey (2002) was a short-lived American TV series in which three female superheroes join with Batman’s butler to fight metahuman crime in New Gotham City. Which sounds fantastic, but isn’t, apparently.
There’s no need for you to watch Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal in Love Story (1970) now that Richard has given away the ending.
The Queen Spider pays a pivotal role in the appalling 2002 South Park episode Red Hot Catholic Love. She sounds like Eric Cartman doing an impression of the Great One: take a look.
Geoffrey Beevers reads the novelisation of Colony in Space, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
Fans of the very worst things imaginable will enjoy the robot dog from Battlestar Galactica (1978), which is, alarmingly, played by a chimp in a suit. You can read the appalling history of this character here.
In an alternately languid and lachrymose episode of Flight Through Entirety, Brendan, Richard and Nathan spend a hilarious 30 minutes moaning about The Monster of Peladon, before farewelling Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in Planet of the Spiders. Tears, Sarah Jane? Of course they are!
Buy the stories!
If, after everything we’ve just said, you want to revisit The Monster of Peladon, you’ll be delighted to learn that it was released as part of the box set Peladon Tales in the UK and Australia, and on its own in the US. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Planet of the Spiders was released on DVD in 2011. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Gareth Hunt played Mike Gambit in The New Avengers in 1976–1977, while the role of Steed was played by Patrick Macnee in a corset.
Jon Pertwee’s final memoir I am the Doctor! was published postumously in 1996. It’s out of print, but still available for fabulous amounts of money. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Whodunnit? was a 1970s panel game show thing, which ran on for six seasons on ITV. A murder mystery was acted out, and the celebrity panellists would have to work the identity of the murderer. Jon Pertwee took over from Edward Woodward as compere at the start of the second season. You can get a taste of it from this clip on YouTube. The first five seasons have also been released on DVD.
In the 1990s, BBC Radio released two new audio stories, written by Barry Letts and starring Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nick Courtney. There were The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space, both of which are available on iTunes.
Richard
In 1971, ITC released Jason King, starring Planet of Fire’s Peter Wyngarde as the dashing and indescribably ugly Jason. Buy it on DVD! (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or I’ll come round to your house and draw a picture of a little girl on one of the pages of your favourite Ladybird book.
So, we’ve changed the desktop theme, and we’re ready to start on the delightful Jon Pertwee’s final year on Doctor Who, as we discuss the first three stories of Season 11: The Time Warrior, Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Death to the Daleks. Oh, beshrew me, but I grow fond of this fellow!
Buy the stories!
The Time Warrior was released on DVD in 2007/2008, including an option to watch a version of the story with acceptable special effects. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Invasion of the Dinosaurs, sadly, has no such option. It was released as part of the UNIT Files box set in 2012. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
And finally, Death to the Daleks was released on DVD in 2012. So there’s that. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
The Time Warrior
Mark Gatiss and Katy Manning are among the contributors to the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Aquarius, which discusses the wave of interest in the occult which washed over British popular culture in the 1970s. Or if that’s no longer available, fans of the 1970s might enjoy Cilla Black singing Aquarius instead.
I searched and searched for the interview with Peter Cushing posted on our Facebook page by friend-of-the-podcast John Edwards Davies. But I couldn’t find it. In the meantime, here’s Peter Cushing being interviewed about the Hammer Horror films by Terry Wogan in 1988.
Moonbase 3 was a BBC science-fiction series designed to be Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts’s escape route from Doctor Who. Dr Elizabeth Sandifer is less than impressed with it.
I wish I could find John Molyneux’s video of dinosaurs snogging to the tune of Je t’aime, but just I can’t. I remember seeing it in the 90s, and it was superb. Anyone who knows where it is, please, please, let me know the URL and I promise I’ll post it.
The novelisation of this story is called The Dinosaur Invasion, and it’s brilliant. It was originally released in 1976 with a fab pop-art cover by Chris Achilleos, and then it was re-released in 1978 with a more conventional cover by Jeff Cummins. You can compare the two here. The audiobook is read by Martin Jarvis, and it’s great as well. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
Death to the Daleks
We discussed Erich Von Däniken’s crazy Chariots of the Gods? a few episodes back. This story, with its tales of Exxilon astronauts building pyramids in Peru, is not the last time that this book will be relevant.
Fans of romping adventure romps will enjoy She, by H. Rider Haggard, first published in 1886. Fans of Ursula Andress will enjoy the film version starring Ursula Andress, first released in 1965.
In a heartbreaking series finale, Brendan, Todd and Nathan say goodbye to Katy Manning, as we discuss naked aliens, two-syllable names, dog-headed maggots and patronising the Welsh. That’s right: it’s Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death. Goodbye, Jo. You were fantastic.
Buy the stories!
Planet of the Daleks was released in 2009/2010 as part of the Dalek War box set. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
The Green Death: Special Edition was released on DVD in (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Planet of the Daleks
Mark Gatiss gets to read his very favourite Target novelisation, Terrance Dicks’s Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. Which is nice. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
David Graham was once of the original Daleks way back in 1964. In 2015, at the age of 88, he reprises his role as Lady Penelope’s chauffer Parker in Thunderbirds Are Go. You can see the trailer for it here.
Brendan mentions a very rude re-edit of Jon Pertwee reading the Planet of the Daleks novelisation. It’s by the Doctor Who Breastoration Team, so you’ve been warned.
And here’s a comparison of the 1976 cover of Terrance Dicks’s novelisation and Clayton Hickman’s loving tribute to it for the 2009 DVD release.
The Green Death
Rachael Carson’s 1962 novel Silent Spring talks about the damage caused to the environment by the use of pesticides. We talked about it when we discussed Planet of the Giants, oh, so long ago. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Todd picked the Sarah Jane Adventures season 4 serial The Death of the Doctor. It’s a DVD extra on The Green Death: Special Edition, so you might already have a copy without even realising it!
Brendan
The Big Finish Companion Chronicle Find and Replace, features Katy Manning playing both a future Jo Grant and the inimitable Iris Wildthyme.
Nathan
In 2015, Russell T Davies had three linked shows on Channel 4 in the UK: Cucumber, Banana and Tofu. Cucumber follows the story of Henry Best, a 46-year-old gay man living in Manchester, Banana is an anthology show, mostly featuring younger queer characters from Cucumber, and Tofu consists of actors from the other two shows and ordinary people discussing issues of sex and sexuality.
It’s the Doctor’s tenth birthday, but we get the presents, as we discuss non-existent Time Lord heroes, the inestimable Cheryl Hall, and large and savage reptiles in The Three Doctors, Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space. Thank you Miss Grant, we’ll let you know!
Buy the stories!
The Three Doctors was released as a Special Edition in 2012 — by itself in the US (Amazon US), and as part of the Revisitations 3 box set in the UK and Australia (Amazon UK).
Similarly, Carnival of Monsters was released in 2012 — by itself in the US (Amazon US), and as part of the Revisitations 2 box set in the UK and Australia (Amazon UK).
Frontier in Space was released in 2009/2010 as part of the Dalek War box set. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
The Three Doctors
Guy Crayford, from The Android Invasion, is famous for never looking under his eyepatch to discover that his eye isn’t actually missing. Is he as careless about his personal appearance as Omega is?
The Gell Guards look like a slightly more cuddly version of Sigmund the Sea Monster, a horrifying Saturday morning TV show from the 70s by the equally horrifying Sid and Marty Krofft.
Fans of inexplicable time paradoxes that drive Todd crazy will enjoy the first Big Finish Paul McGann audio Storm Warning, which features the real-life doomed airship R101, and its only survivor, India Fisher’s Charley Pollard.
