Episode 157 · Love & Monsters · Sunday 19 May 2019
So we’d all meet up, every week, and we’d talk about the Doctor for a bit. But after a while, Bridget started cooking. Next thing you know, Mister Skinner started his readings, because he was writing his own novel. As time went on, we got to know each other better and better. Then it turned out that Bridget could play the piano, and I confessed my love of ELO. Next thing you know —
In this week’s Doctor Who–lite episode of Flight Through Entirety, Nathan, Brendan and Max Jelbart reminisce about our own experiences as members of LINDA, before tackling one of Doctor Who’s stranger, darker and madder episodes: Love & Monsters.
Notes and links
Watch Peter Capaldi writhe in embarrassment as Graham Norton confronts him with the evidence of his horrifically geeky past. Sigh. We don’t deserve him.
Capaldi also sends some fan art to Doctor Who comic artist Rachael Stott, who takes to Twitter to squee to the heavens, as well she might.
Nathan mentions his favourite Doctor Who commentary, in which RTD, Steven Moffat and David Tennant geek out about Forest of the Dead. I’m sure you’ll be able to find it lying around somewhere.
David Tennant takes a week off gurning to create one of the best episodes ever of Doctor Who Confidential — Do you remember the first time? — in which he interviews members of the cast and crew about their earliest experiences of Doctor Who. You can probably find a cut-down version of this on the Series 3 box set: it originally aired alongside fan favourite Blink.
As a child, Brendan read and re-read Cornell, Day and Topping’s Discontinuity Guide, which now forms part of the old BBC Cult Doctor Who website.
As a child, Max read and re-read Russell T Davies’s The Writer’s Tale, which inspired him to study screenwriting at university.
Way back in 2006, Brendan created two videos to play at the Doctor Who Club of Australia’s fan events celebrating Series 2. You can find them here and here. You can subscribe to Brendan’s YouTube channel here.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a bit less generous and affectionate in its depiction of fans. Exhibit A: the Pakleds, and Exhibit B: Reg Barclay (who everyone secretly loves).
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. We’re now out of James Bond films to comment on, we’re planning to keep going with other stuff: in fact, there’s every chance of a new episode some time next week.
Episode 157: LINDA for Short
· Recorded on Saturday 9 February 2019 · Download (83.1 MB)
In this week’s earnest Radio National podcast episode, Nathan, Peter and Todd discuss religion, the concept of Satan, the nature of human evil, and a proposed Marxist reading of the plight of the Ood. Plus, an episode of a children’s science fiction series called The Satan Pit.
Notes and links
We mention a lot of tropes from the Hinchcliffe Era of Doctor Who, and so to brush up on this, you will probably want to listen to New to Who’s recent Hinchcliffe overview.
Further Hinchcliffe tropes are discussed in our episode on Pyramids of Mars, which also features a star turn from Gabriel Woolf as the Devil. Take a listen: it’s Episode 39: He’s Always a Villain.
And still more Hinchcliffe shenanigans abound in our Hand of Fear episode, which is called — fairly appropriately — Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.
And I found the video of that Very Special Episode of The Weakest Link which screened just before the début of Series 3 and starred David Tennant, John Barrowman, Camille Coduri, Noel Clarke and a bunch of guest stars from Series 2. You must watch this.
Peter recommends a satirical science fiction series on YouTube Premium — Weird City.
Nathan
And finally, Nathan recommends the Netflix series Russian Doll, which stars and was co-created by Natasha Lyonne from Orange is the New Black.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter is too busy fomenting war against God to read any of your tweets. 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.
Episode 155 · The Impossible Planet · Sunday 5 May 2019
This week, we’re orbiting around a black hole talking about flat-pack furniture and making lewd comments about security guards, while all around us the kitchen staff are gearing up for a massive attack on God himself. I suppose that’s why they call it The Impossible Planet.
Notes and links
You can find James Moran, the writer of The Fires of Pompeii on Twitter at @JamesMoran. He seems nice.
Tat Wood’s About Time 7 discusses all of the stories of Series 1 and 2 of Doctor Who, and has many negative things to say about this story. On the other hand, if you read it, you can safely skip about 30 episodes of Flight Through Entirety, including this one. So there’s that.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter is strictly only available in meatspace. 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.
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 hire Gabriel Woolf to broadcast terrifying threats into your room of an evening when you’re just trying to get on with your work.
Episode 154 · The Idiot’s Lantern · Sunday 28 April 2019
It’s Coronation Day, and so Nathan, James and Richard have invited TV’s Adam Richard over to join us on the sofa, so that we can watch the festivities in comfort while Maureen Lipman slowly pulls our faces off. God save the Queen, everyone — it’s The Idiot’s Lantern.
Notes and links
Maureen Lipman is perhaps most famous for her play Re-Joyce!, in which she plays Joyce Grenfell, a famous writer and performer in British film and television in the middle of the twentieth century. You can see Lipman playing Greenfell here.
Muffin the Mule was broadcast live by the BBC from Alexandra Palace from 1946 to 1952. It looks miserable.
Nathan and Adam both have fond memories of Maureen Lipman’s ITV sitcom Agony, which ran for three seasons 1979 to 1981. Nathan has since found the box set on Amazon (US) (UK). The BBC brought the show back in 1995 as Agony Again.
James likes to imagine a sentient version of Billie Piper’s Day and Night chasing people to their doom in an earlier version of this episode’s script. And why not?
Jackie O and Kyle Sandilands are fairly regrettable morning DJs at Sydney radio station KIIS 1065. Probably best not to follow the link, really.
In a deleted scene from this episode, which will be included in a future Blu-ray box set, Adam mentions Outland, a sitcom about gay Doctor Who fans, which Adam co-created and starred in. We all loved it to death — we felt very represented. Plus it was really funny.
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 sneak into your how and upgrade all your phone apps so that you will no longer be able to find the Facebook angry react button.
Episode 153 · The Age of Steel · Sunday 21 April 2019
This week, we’re all marching into Battersea Power Station to be sawn into pieces and to have our firmware upgraded. Which is just business as usual for Britain in The Age of Steel.
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 sneak into your how and upgrade all your phone apps so that you will no longer be able to find the Facebook angry react button.
Picks of the week
Brendan
Fans of the Cybermen — and that’s everyone, isn’t it? — will also enjoy the Big Finish range Cyberman, which consists of a rapidly-multiplying series of box sets, as usual.
Richard
Richard recommends Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series, which consists of four books set in Oxford in the 2060s, where historians travel back in time to research the past.
Nathan
Nathan recommends Netflix original series Sex Education, starring Gillian Anderson: a high-school comedy-drama about sex and relationships. Really funny and warm and clever, and surprisingly sex-positive.
Episode 152 · Rise of the Cybermen · Sunday 14 April 2019
This week, Nathan and Richard argue fruitlessly about which one of them Brendan likes the most, before heading off to one of those parties where the champagne is warm, the canapés are disappointing, and the guests are being casually slaughtered by art deco cyborgs. It’s time for the Rise of the Cybermen.
Notes and links
Richard mentions Sir Carol Reed, who was a English film director in the mid-twentieth century, most famous for his adaptations of Graham Greene novels, who co-directed the film that won the 1946 Best Documentary Oscar, The True Glory (1945).
We talk about this story’s debt to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2003), which is partly set in a parallel universe where rich people fly around in zeppelins. It’s brilliant. Pullman himself writes the foreward to RTD’s book The Writer’s Tale: he’s an excellent sport, and talks about how much he enjoyed being ripped off by Davies throughout this season. The first part of Pullman’s sequel trilogy, La Belle Sauvage was released in 2017.
Here’s El Sandifer’s take on Doctor Who’s previous attempt at a parallel universe: “It’s possibly the most cynical piece of padding we’ve seen yet in Doctor Who — an excuse to interrupt one story by telling the exact same story in the middle.”
This story is indebted to Marc Platt’s Big Finish audio Spare Parts, which must be one of the best Cyberman stories ever and one of the best things Big Finish has ever done.
Fans of parallel universes with find a lovely one towards the end of Star Trek: Discovery Series 1. Well worth watching.
Episode 151 · The Girl in the Fireplace · Sunday 7 April 2019
This week, we’re mostly hiding behind the curtain and under the bed, watching French aristocrats getting attacked by clockwork robots. Which is fun, but not quite in the way you might expect. Also, we’re joined by friend-of-the-podcast Simon Moore, the culmination of a nearly five-year masterplan to trick him into saying the word trope. It’s The Girl in the Fireplace.
Notes and link
You can find our anxious fanboy discussion about the Doctor and Rose’s kiss in The Parting of the Ways in Flight Through Entirety Episode 144, Fostering Tagging.
James has the very good taste to mention Matthew Waterhouse’s autobiography, Blue Box Boy, which is intelligent, moving and quite revealing. Worth a read.
The slightly upsetting scene where the Doctor meets a very young Clara was the prequel episode to The Bells of Saint John. You can watch it here.
This episode’s podcast commentary with Steven Moffat and Noel Clarke can be found on the BBC website, but it’s only available if you’re in the UK, you have Flash installed and you’re signed in at the BBC website. I don’t know, maybe if I rummage around for a bit, I might find a copy lying around somewhere.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, and on Apple Podcasts. We just released a new episode yesterday, in which we watch and comment on an episode of The Avengers called The Girl from Auntie, starring our very own Sir Bernard Cribbins and the World Ecology Bureau’s very own Amelia Ducat.
Episode 151: Tropes, for Want of a Better Word
· Recorded on Saturday 26 January 2019 · Download (58.1 MB)
Episode 150 · School Reunion · Sunday 31 March 2019
This week, Nathan, James and New to Who’s Steven B spend most of the time trying to make Todd cry; the rest of the time, we’re trying to avoid bats in the Deffry Vale High School computer room and listening carefully while Sarah Jane Smith explains the moral of the story. It’s School Reunion.
Steven B is one of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories and introduces the Classic series to new fans. More about that later. Meanwhile, you can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.
Episode 149 · Tooth and Claw · Sunday 24 March 2019
This week, Nathan and James head off to Scotland with special guest star Lizbeth Myles. We basically spend the entire episode larking about while all around us the bodies pile up and Her Majesty gets increasingly exasperated. It’s (nature red in) Tooth and Claw.
Notes and links
Here is David Tennant’s awestruck account of the distractingly impressive Josh the Werewolf. “I mean, it would have taken your eye out”, he says.
You can find out all you would ever want to know about Tooth and Claw in the seventh volume of Tat Wood’s increasingly complete and impressive unauthorised guide to Doctor Who, About Time.
Liz’s Twelfth Doctor audio story has now been released by Big Finish. It’s the first Twelfth Doctor adventure in the Short Trips series, and it’s called The Astrea Conspiracy. You know what to do. (Buy it, obviously.)
And finally, here’s a Wikipedia article about James’s great-great-great-great-aunt or something, Emily Sellwood, who married Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She looks just like him.
This week, for the first time in ages, Todd, Nathan, James and Richard arrive on an exotic yet strangely familiar alien planet, where they meet some old friends and a terrifying new enemy. Oh, okay, it’s cats. Welcome to 2006, and welcome to New Earth.
Notes and links
Listeners alarmed by Richard’s reference to the Big Chief 12-inch dolly of Billie Piper will only be more alarmed when they check it out on the Big Chief website.
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 adopt an irritating Estuary accent and wander around your workplace complaining about the lack of retail facilities.
Jodie into Terror
If, for some reason, you want to hear our increasingly lukewarm takes on Doctor Who’s eleventh season, check out Jodie into Terror, our 2018 Doctor Who flashcast. at jodieintoterror.com, @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, and on Apple Podcasts.
Bondfinger
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find it at bondfinger.com, and on Twitter at @bondfingercast.
Episode 148: Already Completely Abominable
· Recorded on Saturday 5 January 2019 · Download (44.0 MB)
