This week, Nathan and James are joined by Steven B from New to Who, and spend a couple of hours running up staircases in Cardiff, desperately trying to avoid a shrieking pedal bin with memory banks stuffed with exabytes of hardcore pornography. It’s your favourite episode of the season — Dalek.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law Beryl Vertue was Terry Nation’s agent when he wrote The Daleks, which means that she was responsible for the deal that gave him the ownership of the the Daleks. She had moved on to bigger and better things by 1967.
Steven B mentions a couple of characters similar to Van Statten, including Frederick in John Fowles’s The Collector, and the Collector in Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman’s BBC Doctor Who novel Unnatural History.
Dalek writer Rob Shearman has written an number of Big Finish audios, famous for their grotesque black humour. These include Jubilee, which this story is partly based on, and which we discuss in our Colin Baker Big Finish episode. We also mention The Holy Terror, starring Colin Baker’s Doctor and featuring a shape-shifting alien penguin.
Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke have also written a series of books called Running Through Corridors, in which they watch their way through Classic Doctor Who and say lots of lovely things about it. (If they can.)
In the episode of The Goodies called Sex and Violence, Mary Whitehouse analog Desirée Carthorse (perennial fan favourite Beryl Reid) commissions the goodies to make a sex education film called How to Make Babies by Doing Dirty Things. (Did you know that The Goodies has finally been released on shiny plastic disks? Amazing.)
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 136 · World War Three · Sunday 23 September 2018
This week, James is cleaning the kitchen, Max is standing up and making a difference, and Nathan is hiding in the cupboard under a pile of official documents with only the port decanter for company. The Slitheen are still on the rampage, and only a plucky leftist parliamentarian can stop them. It’s World War Three.
Notes and links
The Slitheen’s relatives the Blathereen appear in The Gift, the final story of Season 3 of The Sarah Jane Adventures. They’ve been painted red, and are voiced by Miriam Margolyes and Simon Callow, delightfully.
Nathan claims that the CGI Slitheen never appear again, and that’s not quite right. One is used in Boom Town, to create the effect of Blon shedding her Margaret costume. But, in any case, they never get to go for a run again. (And I’m not rewatching Revenge of the Slitheen or The Lost Boy to find out if that’s true.)
Fans of the password buffalo will enjoy the Big Finish audio Vampire of the Mind, in which Colin Baker’s Doctor faces off against the Master, played by Alex Macqueen.
In 2017, Russell T Davies and James Goss published an anthology of poetry about Doctor Who called Now We Are Six Hundred: A Collection of Time Lord Verse, illustrated by Davies himself. If you’re upset by what happens to Harriet Jones in The Stolen Earth, it’s definitedly worth a look.
James was right: here’s an article about Newsnight’s revelation in 2007 that British nuclear weapons were protected by bike locks.
And, of course, you’re almost certainly going to want to watch Dimensions in Time again.
Picks of the Week
Max
A Very English Scandal is a three-part TV mini-series by Russell T Davies, released earlier this year on the BBC. In it, the leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant) puts out a hit on his former lover Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) to keep him quiet about their relationship. It’s brilliant. And it actually happened.
Doctor Who was broadcast on Twitch earlier this year, and as a result, the phrase London, 1965 became an instant meme on Twitter. It is also the opening caption of the first episode of A Very English Scandal.
Max also plugs Paddington 2, also with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, as well as Scottish actor Peter Capaldi.
Nathan recommends NBC’s philosophical afterlife sitcom The Good Place, by Brooklyn Nine-Nine creator Michael Shur. Its third season starts in the US this week.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Max Jelbart is @max_jelbart. 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. You can also find intermittently amusing and incredibly accurate facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
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 make our next episode title a silly double entendre to conceal the fact that it contains a serious discussion of twenty-first-century geopolitics.
Episode 135 · Aliens of London · Sunday 16 September 2018
This week, Nathan and James are joined by friend-of-the-podcast Max Jelbart to discuss perennial fan favourite and stone-cold classic Aliens of London. Spoiler alert: we all like it.
Notes and links
Doctor Who’s last soap-genre mashup was not an unqualified success — it was the thirtieth anniversary special that none of us had been dreaming of, as the Doctor and his friends collide with the cast of EastEnders in 1993’s Dimensions in Time.
Not for the last time, one of us mentions The Writer’s Tale, Russell T Davies’s account of his last few years as Doctor Who showrunner. It’s very candid and informative — an absolute must-read.
A massive supernatural event is also covered by the world’s media in RTD’s brilliant miniseries The Second Coming (2003), starring Christopher Eccleston and Lesley Sharp (Midnight).
RTD returned to commenting on the lives of gay men in Cucumber (2015) — this time looking at the differences between gay men in their forties and younger queer people in their twenties. It’s brilliant, but utterly harrowing.
Before the Weeping Angels, before the Silence, before the Monks, Steven Moffat brought us the Tersurons, unseen aliens who communicated by “precisely modulated gastric emissions”, and who were the butt of a number of jokes in Moffat’s first ever Doctor Who story, The Curse of Fatal Death.
After the untimely death of Lis Sladen, RTD and Phil Ford created Wizards vs Aliens, to take the place of The Sarah Jane Adventures in the BBC children’s television schedules. Among the cast were Annette Badland, Gwendoline Christie and TV’s Brian Blessed. It’s usually good, and sometimes actually great.
Follow us!
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Max Jelbart is @max_jelbart. 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. You can also find intermittently amusing and incredibly accurate facts about Doctor Who at @FTEwhofacts.
Episode 134 · The Unquiet Dead · Sunday 9 September 2018
This week, our flight takes us to nineteenth-century Cardiff, where Nathan is worried about the stiffs, Todd is shocked by all this talk about the butcher’s boy, and James is teaching Charles Dickens to enjoy life again mere months before he dies of a stroke. Turns out that we’re all just The Unquiet Dead.
Notes and links
Todd mentions Mark Gatiss’s Big Finish story Phantasmagoria (1999), starring Peter Davison and Mark Strickson, which he manages to get Charles Dickens to name-check in this episode.
Simon Callow’s willy can be seen in the film adaptation of E M Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), which also features an important cameo from Rupert Graves’s willy. Worth a look. (Not just for the willies. Honestly, grow up.)
Episode 133 · The End of the World · Sunday 2 September 2018
This week’s episode of Flight Through Entirety contains over 200 special effects shots and was recorded in a delightful civic temple somewhere in Cardiff. It’s not quite the new normal, but we’re definitely on our way there. Welcome to The End of the World.
Notes and links
(Whatever happened to the Buy the story section? I used to love that.)
Russell T Davies’s historical miniseries Casanova starred David Tennant as a mouthy romantic lead, and meant that we were all fairly certain that he would be the new Doctor when Eccleston’s departure was announced.
Another hint came from Tennant’s appearance in The Quatermass Experiment (2015), which was a live-to-air remake of Nigel Neale’s 1953 TV series.
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 replace our moisturiser with acid, sneak up behind you in the bathroom and scare the crap out of you when you’re trying to shave.
– I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?
– Rose.
– Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!
The wilderness years are finally over, and we’re back at last with an entirely new series of Flight Through Entirety, in a reassuringly familiar format.
This week, Nathan’s new job is giving him airs and graces, Brendan is carrying a whole bunch of Semtex for some reason, Richard finds a strange man in his room, and Todd’s skin has a strange and unconvincing glossy sheen. Welcome to a whole new era of Doctor Who — it’s Rose.
Buy the story!
This has always been our favourite part of the shownotes, but now that we’ve reached the Twenty-First Century, it’s no longer needed, so it’s appearing here for the last time.
From now on, Doctor Who is available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming literally everywhere, and was released on all of these media very soon after broadcast. So you probably own it already. In several digital formats.
Notes and links
In 2003, the future of Doctor Who looked very much like Paul Cornell’s Scream of the Shalka, starring Richard E Grant as the Doctor, which was a web series available (alas no longer) on the BBC website. You can see the trailer here). It was released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
The scripts for all of Series 1, including an introduction and a copy of the pitch document, were released as a book back in 2005. It’s definitely worth your time.
Fans of undistinguished pop starlet Billie Piper will definitely enjoy her 2000 hit, from the fondly remembered album Walk of Life. You can find the music video on YouTube, or you could always ask Todd to lend you his CD.
Rose was novelised by Russell T Davies earlier this year, and was released in a range of Target novelisations from the New Series. They’re all pretty good.
Damaged Goods is Russell T Davies’s brilliant but deeply upsetting contribution to the Virgin New Adventures range, first published in 1996. Unavoidably, a Big Finish adaptation also exists.
In this impressive tweet, Doctor Who showrunners Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat scowl menacingly at Michael Grade, who cancelled Doctor Who after a rough night in 1985. (Not pictured, Chris Chibnall.)
Fans of knowing all kinds of crucial nonsense about the production of Doctor Who (and that’s all of you, admit it) will enjoy Doctor Who: The Complete History, a blisteringly comprehensive history of everything it’s possible to know about the entire programme.
Episode 131 · The Classic Series Retrospective · Sunday 10 December 2017
We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?
Brendan, Richard, Nathan and Todd fly backwards in time through the entirety of the Classic Series. Who are our heroes and villains? What stories should you watch, avoid, or remake on a film budget? And what, finally, have we learned about Doctor Who, and about each other?
Thank you very much for listening. And no, you have something in your eye.
All you do is talk and talk and talk
In fact, this isn’t quite our last flirtation with the Classic Series. We still have three commentary podcasts to record: Enlightenment, with Peter Davison, Revelation of the Daleks, with Colin Baker, and a Sylvester McCoy story that our listeners are still voting on. It’s not too late to cast your vote, just head over to our shownotes for Episode 129 and make your views known.
Notes and links
The Nth Doctor, by Jean-Marc Lofficier, discusses in depth the unmade film scripts that preceded The TV Movie.
Episode 130 · The TV Movie · Sunday 26 November 2017
This week, we’re celebrating the end of another tiresome millennium: Brendan’s dressed as Madam Butterfly, Nathan’s mooching about in the morgue as usual, Todd’s going on about his boots for some reason, and Richard has made a terrible mess in the Console Room. It’s the 1996 TV Movie!
Well, that’s democracy for you
There’s still plenty of time for you to vote for a story for us to cover in our upcoming Sylvester McCoy commentary podcast episode. No rush though. You can probably afford to worry about it later.
Buy the story!
This one’s quite complicated. The TV Movie was one of the first stories to get a DVD release, way back in 2001, in the UK only. It finally got a Special Edition release in 2010/2011 (Amazon US) (Amazon UK). This release was also part of the Revisitations 1 Box Set, along with The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani, only available in Australia and the UK (Amazon UK). An upscaled Blu-ray version was released in 2016 in the UK only (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
We don’t plan to cover fan favourite Dimensions in Time, which was a one-off Doctor Who/EastEnders crossover broadcast on BBC1 in November 1993, as part of Children in Need. However, Brendan says you’ll enjoy this version, which includes production notes by Andrew Orton.
Friend-of-the-podcast Gary Russell wrote the novelisation of this story, published in 1996, written before Gary got to see the actual episode and available in bookshops before the audience had either. It is now, sadly, out of print. You can read some of Gary’s thoughts about the novelisation 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 relaunch the podcast as an ill-fated series of remakes of previous episodes featuring American actors in major roles and including a number of inept Star-Trek-inspired continuity errors.
Episode 129 · The Sylvester McCoy Retrospective · Sunday 19 November 2017
– My lady, who is that little man?
– Oh, glorious evil. It is he?
We’ve reached the end of another era. Three years at the tail end of the Classic Series, reviled by some, forgotten by others, and not watched at all by a sizeable proportion of the audience. But all four of us love literally every single aspect of it without exception. (Quiet, Todd!)
There’s always a choice
And now it’s time for you to vote for a Sylvester McCoy story for an upcoming commentary podcast episode. Vote wisely!
Nathan mentions The Stranger, a video series created in the 1990s by BBV, starring Colin and Nicola as more quiet and sombre versions of their Doctor Who characters. You can watch the first episode, Summoned by Shadows, on YouTube.
Big Finish has released a series of Lost Stories audios based on the production team’s sketchy preliminary ideasforSeason27. And no, we’re not doing an episode on it.
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 send Nathan over to your place to go on and on about that one time that Sylvester played the spoons on his chest. Just like he did to the Rani, you know.
Bondfinger
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve already recorded our final commentary for the Pierce Brosnan era, so we’ll be releasing it in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, our three previousBrosnancommentaries are still available, and so are ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton films.
There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace, we’ve got work to do!
This week, all four of us assemble on Horsenden Hill to light a fire, muck about, and discuss the last story of the 26-year run of the Classic Series. It’s Survival.
Fans of the music of Dominic Glynn will also enjoy FTE’s multi-award winning radio drama Time Inc.
The Planet of the Cheetah People (Cheetos in the constellation of Acinonyx) operates like a single biological entity. The Gaia Hypothesis postulates that the Earth operates in the same way.
For the second time, Nathan’s pick is the New to Who podcast, which covers those Doctor Who stories which you might actually want to watch, particularly if you’re a fan of the New Series.
Brendan
Dominic Glynn has recently released an EP called The Happiness Patrol Remixes, with new versions of the superb incidental music he composed for that story
Todd
Fans of both unnecessarily long films and TV’s Sylvester McCoy will want to rush out and buy the Blu-ray box set of The Hobbit Motion Picture Trilogy. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
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 secretly cancel your favourite TV show so that you don’t realise for a couple of years that it’s over forever and is never ever coming back.
Bondfinger
Over on Bondfinger, we’ve resumed our long-delayed flight through the Pierce Brosnan Era, which is nice, with the release of our latest commentary on The World Is Not Enough.
Our commentaries on the firsttwo Pierce Brosnan films are still available, and so are ourcommentaries on the Timothy Dalton films.
