To celebrate Doctor Who’s fiftieth and fifty-ninth anniversaries, Brendan, Nathan, Richard and Todd are reunited at last for the first of two panels discussing The Day of the Doctor. We squealed, we laughed, we wept, we injured Brendan, and we spent quite a bit of time fangirling about Ingrid Oliver. Happy birthday, everyone!
Notes and links
First off, a special anniversary mention of El Sandifer, whose essay on The Day of the Doctor discusses its role on healing the breach between the Classic and New Series of Doctor Who.
Two Doctor Who novelisations alluded to this week: firstly, again, Steven Moffat’s novelisation of The Day of the Doctor (2018), and Russell T Davies’s novelistaion of Rose (also 2018), which depicts the Last Great Time War in weird and unfilmable ways.
As a man dedicated to recycling, Moffat has used the resolution of The Day of the Doctor in a Children in Need special in 2007 called Time Crash. We discussed it (of course) in Episode 178, Remember Who We Were.
Nathan’s vague memory of a French ambassador visiting a 65-year-old Queen Elizabeth I and remarking on the poor state of her teeth is largely correct. You can read about this meeting here.
This is Ingrid Oliver’s first appearance on the show as Dr Petronella Osgood, and so we spend a lot of time talking about how great she is. Richard mentions her role as Penthesilea in ElvenQuest, a Radio 4 comedy series starring Stephen Mangan, as well as her roles in another Radio 4 comedy series, The Penny Dreadfuls Present…. Brendan mentions her appearance as Osgood in The Lonely Assassins, a videogame featuring the Weeping Angels, first released in 2021 and available on just about every platform imaginable. And, for our viewers who are in the UK or who know how to operate a VPN, you can see a brief excerpt from the episode of Watson & Oliver where Ingrid learns that she’s been shortlisted to play the next James Bond.
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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.
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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. This week’s episode: Chris Boucher’s Weapon, starring The Talons of Weng-Chiang’s John Bennett in a largely non-racist role.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: Discovery.
Episode 248: The Glue That Holds Everything Together
· Recorded on Sunday 24 July 2022 · Duration 1:11:11
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A wise man once said, “You can do loads in twelve minutes. Suck a mint, buy a sledge, have a fast bath.” Tonight, Brendan, Nathan, James and canonical friend-of-the-podcast Conrad Westmaas find out just what Paul McGann can do in just seven minutes and nine seconds. Turns out, quite a lot. It’s The Night of the Doctor.
Watch the story!
The Night of the Doctor was originally released on BBC iPlayer on 14 November 2013. It is included as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Day of the Doctor, which means you probably have it on a shelf somewhere. Failing that, it is also available on YouTube.
Notes and links
The second, completely unmemorable prequel to The Day of the Doctor is called The Last Day, and can also be found on YouTube. It’s included here merely for the sake of completeness: you don’t have to go and watch it or anything.
There will be a lot of talk this week about Steven Moffat’s novelisation of The Day of the Doctor (2018), so let’s start by admitting that Nathan gives the wrong chronological order here. From our point of view, it goes Tennant, Smith, Hurt, but from the Doctor’s point of view it goes Hurt, Tennant, Smith. Which is just the sort of nonsense that you either love/hate about Moffat.
For Conrad — and for the rest of us too, really — this episode is the sequel to The Brain of Morbius, which we discussed way back in Episode 41: Philip Madoc in Fishnets.
For fans of a certain age, Paul McGann will always be I in Withnail & I (1987), alongside titular Doctor Who villain Richard E Grant. Every weekend was very much like that film in the late 80s and early 90s, apparently.
River Song snogs Colin Baker’s Doctor (spoilers!) in a Big Finish story called World Enough and Time, part of The Diary of River Song, Series 2. Brendan says that it’s proper romantic.
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 subject you to a proper legitimate actor tantrum when you tell us we have to wear that gorgeous hat that you spent so much time creating.
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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.
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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. This week’s episode: Chris Boucher’s Weapon, starring The Talons of Weng-Chiang’s John Bennett in a largely non-racist role.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: Discovery.
Episode 247: Not Like These Two
· Recorded on Saturday 23 July 2022 · Duration 0:45:57
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When a spatio-temporal hyperlink connects 1963, 2013 and 2022, we find ourselves joined by Greg Miller for a conversation about our little fanboy hearts, the anniversary special An Adventure in Space and Time, and the brave, clever and difficult people who created the show that brought us all together.
Notes and links
Coronation Street got here first, with its dramatisation of the creation of the show — The Road to Coronation Street (2010), featuring our very own Celia Imrie and Shaun Dooley, as well as real-life Doctor Who villain Steven Berkoff.
As is now well known, the first Doctor Who novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1965) invents a different meet-cute for the Doctor and its narrator Ian Chesterton: Ian meets the Doctor, Barbara and Susan after being involved in a car crash on Barnes Common, which is the location of the first scene of An Adventure in Space and Time.
The TV interview we mention with Bill Hartnell in 1967 can be found on YouTube, and as a special feature on the DVD release of The Tenth Planet. The story of the rediscovery of this interview can be found in this article in The Guardian from 2013.
Australian journalist Annabel Crabb created a four-part documentary called Ms Represented (2021) about the ugly truth of how female politicians have been treated in the Australian Parliament.
Here is the incredible story of Underground (1958), a live television drama in which the main actor died during broadcast, and which was partly saved by the intervention of Verity Lambert.
And finally, William Russell played an RAF pilot in The Man Who Never Was (1956), and was the lead in the television series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957) alongside Ronald Leigh-Hunt from The Seeds of Death and Revenge of the Cybermen.
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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.
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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. In today’s episode we will be discussing Series B, Episode 3, Weapon, by Doctor Who’s very own Chris Boucher.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: The Original Series.
Episode 246: On the Set of The Reign of Terror
· Recorded on Sunday 10 July 2022 · Duration 1:07:23
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Matt Smith’s last full season as the Doctor is a game of two halves — two costumes, two console rooms, two title sequences (or six, whatever) and two sets of companions over two consecutive years. And we’re in two minds about it. Welcome to the Series 7 retrospective.
Downtime (1995) was an officially licensed Doctor Who fan film written by Marc Platt (Ghost Light) and featuring Nick Courtney, Lis Sladen, Deborah Watling and various other Doctor Who guest stars. Plus some Yeti.
Here’s Brendan standing alongside a portrait of what seems to be his Spanish monk great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc.)-grandfather in the National Art Museum of Catalonia.
John and Gillian were child companions of the First and Second Doctors in many, many Doctor Who comics. They don’t get space syphilis, but evil fictional versions of them do turn up in the Virgin New Adventure Conundrum.
Alex Kingston has continued to play River Song for Big Finish opposite a range of different Doctors and at least one Master in The Diary of River Song.
And last of all, in 2012, the BBC released a sort of animated version of an unfilmed scene written by Chris Chibnall, which would have seen the Doctor tell Brian Williams about the fate of his son and daughter-in-law. It’s called PS.
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 releasesed our final episode this week — a long conversation over champagne about The Power of the Doctor.
We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power: this week it continues its interview with Michael E Briant, who directed five episodes of Blakes 7 Season A, as well as Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Death to the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death. Our Season B coverage will start next week.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched an episode of Series 4 of Star Trek: Discovery called The Examples.
Episode 245: Everyone’s So Damn Special
· Recorded on Sunday 17 July 2022 · Duration 1:26:38
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This week, we’re spending a relaxing afternoon on sunny Trenzalore, chatting with friends, visiting people we’ve lost, solving a mystery, bringing up an age-old question, and generally getting everything neatly squared away before the fireworks start this November. It’s The Name of the Doctor.
Earlier this year, Nathan appeared on a podcast called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor, and in every episode they theorise about where you might find Clara in this Doctor Who story. You can hear Nathan’s theory about Clara’s role in The Claws of Axos here.
Here’s El Sandifer’s essay on The Name of the Doctor, and this is how she describes Richard E Grant as the Great Intelligence: “But Grant is putting no effort into the part, playing him as a cliched bit of leering smugness. Which is, of course, exactly what the part calls for – a big name actor basically phoning it in.”
And finally: Nathan has a habit of making fun of Chris Chibnall’s minimalist approach to publicising Doctor Who by repeatedly posting a screencap of Art Malik from the exciting trailer at the end of The Woman Who Fell to Earth. You can see him in action here.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor this week.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is back to kick off its Season B coverage today with the first part of a two-part interview with Michael E Briant, who directed five episodes of Blakes 7 Season A, as well as Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Death to the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched Darmok, which is one of the best episodes in Star Trek’s absurdly long history.
Episode 244: Full of the Doctor
· Recorded on Sunday 26 June 2022 · Duration 1:03:46
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In a far-off galaxy in a distant future, a band of misfit soldiers in a comical castle await the arrival of an enemy long thought dead — thousands upon thousands of killer Cybermen. Angie and Archie don’t seem particularly impressed, though, and neither do Nathan, Richard, James and Peter. It’s Nightmare in Silver.
Notes and links
Richard is reminded of the Hammer film Vampire Circus (1972), which features Lalla Ward, Adrienne Corri and Laurence Payne, which means that we can now regard The Leisure Hive as its canonical sequel. He also mentions the 1988 film Waxwork, which features genre stalwarts David Warner and John Rhys-Davies.
Neil Gaiman handles childhood fears so beautifully in The Graveyard Book (2008) that Nathan and Richard recommend that you go and read it at once. It’s the story of Nobody Owens, who lives in a graveyard and is raised by ghosts after his family is murdered. Beautiful, funny and haunting.
And some film trivia that you can use to surprise and delight your remaining friends: as Richard says, Mel Brooks was one of the producers (uncredited) of Star Trek’s David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, The Fly.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor on 25 October, we hope.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose Series B social media campaign has begun in earnest. Expect something very special very soon.
This week we’re joined by Steven from New to Who to discuss one of the great loves of our lives — Dame Diana Rigg, whose astonishing performance makes The Crimson Horror one of the best episodes of the era.
Notes and links
So, Diana Rigg. As we all know, her breakout role was as Mrs Peel in The Avengers from 1966 to 1968. And so this is not her first appearance on Flight Through Entirety. Before discussing The Seeds of Doom, Brendan, Nathan and Richard discussed the Avengers episode that undoubtedly inspired it: The Man Eater of Surrey Green (see Episode 43: Sexiest Exposition Trope). Since then, on Bondfinger, we’ve discussed several more episodes of The Avengers that she starred in, as well as the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which also starred the recently-cancelled George Lazenby as Bond.
Richard’s Pick of the Week: the “almost unwatchable” German Super 8 films starring Diana Rigg — Der goldene Schlüssel (1966), minikillers (1969) and Diadem (1969). They’re all available on YouTube, but we would completely understand if you decided not to follow the links.
Mark Gatiss named Mr Sweet after his friend Matthew Sweet, the author of Inventing the Victorians (2001), which attempts to demythologise the culture of the Victorian era: turns out, they were just as much fun as we are, apparently. Sweet is also known for his probing interviews of Doctor Who actors which can be found as extras on many DVD and Blu-ray releases.
We occasionally mention or allude to The League of Gentlemen, a sketch comedy series set in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, which ran for three seasons, a movie and a return season 15 years later. It doesn’t totally hold up now, for many reasons, but it’s certainly a useful text when it comes to understanding Mark Gatiss’s interests as a writer.
Mrs Gillyflower’s revival meeting reminds Nathan of Mrs Melrose Ape, the lady preacher from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which we know that Mark Gatiss is aware of, because he plays a small role in Stephen Fry’s film adaptation of the novel, Bright Young Things (2003).
And finally, as a well-known Sherlockian, Gatiss ties this episode into the Holmes canon: in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, Watson briefly refers to his notes on “the repulsive story of the red leech”.
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. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast and check out the episodes wherever podcasts can be found.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor a couple of days after 23 October, turns out.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning to your podcatcher with a second series (a Series B, if you will) even more action-packed and breathtaking than the first.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we welcomed the USS Voyager’s long-awaited return home in Endgame.
Episode 242: Strax is Tara King
· Recorded on Sunday 25 September 2022 · Duration 0:57:42
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This week, Nathan, Simon, Peter and their new friend Mathew find ourselves wandering some space corridors in search of some kind of button that will bust us out of this time loop. Are we on board the USS Voyager during one of its less successful high-concept episodes? Or do we find out — to our horror — that we’re on a Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS?
Notes and links
We don’t mention him by name, but the writer of this episode is Steve Thompson, who also wrote The Curse of the Black Spot (about which, more here) and Time Heist (co-written by Steven Moffat).
The eponymous Law of Conservation of Detail can be found explained on the TV Tropes wiki. In short, only detail relevant to the story will be included in an episode, particularly a constrained 42-minute television episode. Its corollary is that any detail included in an episode should be expected to be relevant to the story.
Simon alludes to the film 127 Hours (2010), in which a young American man’s arm is trapped under a boulder in a canyoneering accident and so he decides after five days to break the bones and then cut it off in order to free himself. Somewhat surprisingly, Simon significantly underestimates the number of hours it would take someone to make that decision.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time later this month.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon, with a Very Special Episode That I Absolutely Can’t Tell You About.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. No new episode this week, but we recommend the episodes in our back catalogue where we talk about Enterprise. There’s usually some good ranting to be had.
Episode 241: The Law of Conservation of Detail
· Recorded on Sunday 19 June 2022 · Duration 0:50:40
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This week, Dougray Scott, Jessica Raine and two scary skeleton creatures are all so unspeakably horny that all Nathan, Corey, Si and Pete can do is Hide.
Notes and links
Jessica Raine, who plays Emma in Hide will go on to play Doctor Who’s first producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama about the origins of Doctor Who which is released a few months after this episode. But more about that later, perhaps. (Spoilers!)
Sound Effects No. 13: Death & Horror was an album produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1977 and used continuously in TV and stage productions ever since. Mary Whitehouse complained vociferously about its release, because of course she did.
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) also features time-travelling astronauts with a ghostly influence on the past. It’s hard to imagine that it makes that much more sense than Hide though, isn’t it?
I considered writing about the racist lyrics of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, but after a second’s reflection, I’ve decided to just let you Google them for yourself. But really, don’t.
The Stone Tape (1972) was a made-for-TV movie written by Quatermass’s Nigel Kneale and featuring Jane Asher and Doctor Who’s very own Ian Cuthbertson. Like Hide, it features researchers spending the night in a house haunted by a spectral woman, but Neil Cross would like to make it very clear that for copyright purposes, it is in every way a legally distinct entity from Hide.
And finally, Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? was an episode of a comedy radio programme called Whatever Happened To…?, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1994 — featuring Jane Asher (again) as Susan Foreman. It was released as a special feature on the DVD of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Actually, there is one more thing. The story from The Sarah Jane Adventures that we talk about in the tag is called Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?. It’s amazing. Go and watch it immediately.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Pete is @Prof_Quiteamess, and Si is @Si_Hart. Despite what he said on the podcast, Corey does have a Twitter account, at @CoreyMcCor. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time in October, we expect.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon, with a Very Special Episode That I Absolutely Can’t Tell You About.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we went back or forward in time to the first series of Star Trek: Discovery and watched Vaulting Ambition.
Episode 240: Ghost Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 12 June 2022 · Duration 0:43:58
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This week, we’re joined aboard a Soviet submarine by Mark McManus, Jack Shanahan and a low-effort lizard alien, who proceeds to run around the boat in the nude murdering members of the crew. But we’re all too interested in Jenna Coleman, David Warner, some guys from Game of Thrones and a discarded fibreglass suit of armour to notice.
Notes and links
The tale of Steven Berkoff’s wilful destruction of the climactic scenes of The Power of Three is told in its entirety in Episode 234: Stop Watching a Kids’ Show.
Those of you lucky enough not to remember 1983 might need to be told about The Hunt for Red October (1990), a film set on board a Russian submarine captained by a typically Scottish-sounding Sean Connery. Mark Gatiss is definitely looking over his shoulder at that film while he’s writing this episode.
Nathan refers to the most recent episode of Bondfinger, where we comment on am episode of The Saint which contains scenes of French people speaking to one another in English with a French accent. (Which is just the sort of thing they probably do all the time just to prank us.)
Here’s El Sandifer’s brutal assessment of the Ice Warriors: “…if we’re being honest, the fact that they are literally green reptile monsters from Mars has to mark the point where the show has simply given up on monsters and concluded that the audience will accept anything.”
Spencer Wilding played Skaldak in this story and was the Wooden King in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and the Minotaur in The God Complex. He also played Darth Vader in Rogue One. Fans of hefty lads will enjoy his Instagram. I certainly did.
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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time in October, we expect.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon.
The Doctor has a very limited first date repetoire: watching the destruction of Earth with weird aliens, visiting a far-future traffic jam full of weird aliens, seeing an entire marketing department being slaughtered by weird aliens, and stopping a gentle space whale from being endlessly tortured by English people. And his first date with Clara is no exception: hiring a space moped from a weird alien called Dor’een and visiting The Rings of Akhaten.
Notes and links
It’s in her essay on The Bells of Saint John that El Sandifer says that the second part of Series 7 “is an extended exercise in not fucking up too badly that is, in everyone’s eyes, undermined by fucking up at least once, though opinions differ on precisely where.”
The Rings of Akhaten came ninth last in Doctor Who Magazine’s First Fifty Years poll in 2014. (Yes, that’s number 233, as Peter happened to remember with perfect accuracy.) You can find the rest of the results here. Time and the Rani came third last, so, you know.
Emilia Jones, who played Merry in this episode, is 20 years old now, of course. In 2021, she starred in a film called CODA, in which she played Marlee Matlin’s daughter. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022.
Yes, a before-they-were-famous Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson did feature in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Tsunkatse, in which he is beaten up by Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine. Here is Johnson admitting to this on Twitter (complete with video evidence), and here is Jeri Ryan’s reply.
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’ll be recording our final episode in just a few weeks from now.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we found ourselves enjoying an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called State of Flux.
Episode 238: There’s an Apostrophe
· Recorded on Sunday 29 May 2022 · Duration 0:59:20
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It’s 2013 and Doctor Who is back for its anniversary season — with a new companion, a new outfit for the Doctor, and a lethal and potentially world-ending new threat from the Internet, more than a decade before the invention of Web3. Keep a close eye on your apes, everyone: it’s The Bells of Saint John.
Notes and links
Celia Imrie is known and loved by all of us here at FTE from her role in Absolutely Fabulous as Jennifer Saunders’s rival in PR, Claudia Bing from Bing, Bing, Bing & Bing. Here’s an in-depth interview with her, about her career both as an actress and a writer, which published in The Scotsman in 2016.
Danny Hargreaves was Doctor Who’s extremely photogenic special effects supervisor, who was always a very welcome addition to any episode of Doctor Who Confidential.
And, finally, it’s time that we sat down and had a serious, proper talk about Doctor Who production codes. From the very beginning of the show in 1963, every story was referred to internally by its production code, which was initially a single capital letter from A to Z, then a double letter (AA to ZZ), then a triple letter (AAA to ZZZ) and then finally an initial number followed by a letter (4A to 4Z and so on). And so An Unearthly Child was A and Ghost Light was 7Q. Back in the day, certain of us knew the production codes for every story — sadly, in these hectic modern times, we have better things to do. You can find out all about the ins and outs of production codes here.
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’ll be recording our final episode some time in October.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, whose coverage of Series B will be starting any second now.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In the most recent episode, they are surprised to find themselves fighting to the death over a beautiful woman, in Amok Time.
Episode 237: A Proud Bear Holding a Bag of Chips Getting to Be Celia Imrie
· Recorded on Sunday 29 May 2022 · Duration 0:47:52
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Christmas, 1892: The Doctor has retired from saving the universe after a disastrous mid-series finale earlier in the year. He is cheered up somewhat by his encounter with a feisty young barmaid, who is intrigued enough to follow the Doctor home, only to learn a valuable and ultimately fatal lesson about the importance of railings. Richard E Grant is here too, as usual, delivering his lines through heroically clenched teeth. It’s The Snowmen.
Notes and Links
We refer to Clara several times as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a quirky female character whose main purpose in the narrative is to pull the male hero out of an emotional funk. The phrase itself was coined by a critic called Nathan Rabin, who has since said that he regretted ever coming up with the term.
Saul Metzstein, who directed this episode and several other successful Doctor Who episodes in Series 7, would go on to work as second unit director on the disastrous 2017 flop The Snowman, now best known for its terrible marketing campaign and for the fact that its protagonist was a character called Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender).
By 2013, Richard E Grant had twice played non-canon Doctors: He was the Ninth Doctor of Paul Cornell’s animated webcast Scream of the Shalka, which launched a whole new version of Doctor Who in 2003 in a parallel universe nearly adjacent to this one. He also played the Tenth Doctor (aka the Quite Handsome Doctor) in Steven Moffat’s first ever Doctor Who story The Curse of Fatal Death, broadcast as part of Red Nose Day in 1999. You can watch it here, and you should.
And our last trope for the day is fridging, which means killing a female character solely for the effect it has on the male hero. I can’t think how this one came up.
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’ll be recording our final episode some time in October.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning later this year with its coverage of Series B.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we head back to the 1990s to see how Chief O’Brien is getting on, in The Wounded.
Episode 236: Good Smugness
· Recorded on Sunday 24 April 2022 · Duration 1:02:35
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"Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends.”
Amelia Williams
Many of us grow up: we live in a real world of marriages and families, jobs and mortgages. But some of us can never bring ourselves to leave our imaginary friend behind. Can you imagine the leaden apprehension when we learn that the choice has been taken from us forever? Kevin Burnard joins us for The Angels Take Manhattan.
Notes and Links
It doesn’t take us long to mention that the Doctor is carrying the Target novelisation of this story around in his jacket. (“How does anything get there? I’ve given up asking.”) Steven Moffat’s one Target novelisation is his brilliant version of The Day of the Doctor. Worth a read.
Nathan has checked, and upsettingly there isn’t a chapter in the Doctor’s Melody Malone book called Escape to Danger, which sets it apart from a large number of Doctor Who novelisations.
Simon compares the experience of watching this story to the experience of watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale All Good Things…. Of course, if you want to listen to Nathan and Joe Ford’s experience of watching All Good Things…, take a listen to their commentary in Untitled Star Trek Project, episode 18.
The Doctor’s plan to nip back in time to get the ceramicist to paint the word yowza on a Qin Dynasty vase was apparently inspired by Professor Chronotis, who pulls a similar trick between paragraphs in Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
And Rory gets to say a final farewell to his father Brian in a scene released by the BBC in 2012. You can find it here.
Kevin Burnard has been spending less time working on the Twelfth Doctor Fan Audios than before, but he still loves them enough to plug them here. His Untitled Faction Paradox Project is still incoming.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we sat staring in horror at an Animated Series episode called The Time Trap.
Episode 235: River Knows All the Space Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 24 April 2022 · Duration 1:01:34
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This week, we have half an hour of fun character-based nonsense followed by a fairly disastrous five-minute Doctor Who episode. But we’re all too busy reminiscing about the end of an era to notice. Adam Richard joins us for The Power of Three.
Notes and Links
This week’s real-life villain Steven Berkoff had worked with director Douglas Mackinnon before on a film called The Flying Scotsman (2006), which stars breakout Doctor Who star Jonny Lee Miller as someone who wins a world title in cycling while riding a heavily-modified washing machine or something.
Douglas Mackinnon is delightfully oblique in his description of Steven Berkoff’s on-set behaviour during The Power of Three in this interview in Starburst magazine.
As is now generally well-known, a sixteen-year-old Chris Chibnall appeared on Open Air in 1986 to criticise The Trial of a Time Lord in the presence of writers Pip and Jane Baker. Worth a watch.
And finally, in the tag, we all discuss this French & Saunders sketch, in which Dame Helen Mirren delivers an unforgettable acting masterclass. Delightfully, it has been memorialised forever on Dame Helen’s very own website.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched a classic episode of the original series called The Doomsday Machine.
Episode 234: Stop Watching a Kids’ Show
· Recorded on Sunday 20 March 2022 · Duration 0:45:00
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This week, we’re in the Wild West for some down-home, old-fashioned, country-style moral philosophy. The burning question: is it permissible to let that well-spoken middle-aged country doctor get killed just because he sawed up a bunch of people and turned them into psychopathic gun-wielding maniacs? Steven B joins us to discuss a well-shot, well-acted, well-written and thought-provoking episode: A Town Called Mercy.
Notes and Links
The Trolley Problem is a well-known thought experiment which interrogates whether we think that the greatest good for the greatest number is a reliable way to determine the correct course of action, a moral position called utilitarianism. It’s illustrated in this video here.
We hear Kahler-Jex narrating the making of the Gunslinger, in the aptly titled prequel minisode The Making of the Gunslinger.
Dante’s Divine Comedy depicts Purgatory as an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, which the souls of the saved must climb in order to be cleansed in preparation for their ascension into heaven.
Steven feels like this episode doesn’t quite have the ability to bring together all of its moral issues into a coherent whole. He is reminded of T S Eliot’s essay Hamlet and His Problems (1921), in which Eliot complains that Shakespeare is unable to create an “objective correlative”, a means of successfully expressing Hamlet’s emotions through the depiction of a concrete series of events on stage.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
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 watched the justly-overlooked Star Trek: The Next Generation classic Power Play.
Episode 233: A Mild-Mannered Josef Mengele
· Recorded on Sunday 20 March 2022 · Duration 0:54:52
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This week, there’s a massive Silurian spaceship pre-crashing in the direction of Planet Earth, and the whole gang is on board for the ride. Brendan’s on the lookout for discarded teeth, Nathan’s holed up in an escape pod watching reruns of Mitchell and Webb, James’s progress is being hindered by the unfeasibly large amounts of vegetable matter in his pants, and Fiona is doing a terrific job of keeping her feisty new companions under control. Somehow, life finds a way, in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.
Notes and Links
Nathan clearly thinks that the US is in Europe, since we were last there in Daleks in Manhattan and will be there again in The Angels Take Manhattan (not to mention The Chase, some of which is even set in Africa). Understandably enough, he has also forgotten The Abominable Snowmen.
Before David Bradley took on the role of the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time, the First Doctor was played by Richard Hurndall, who played Nebrox in a gloriously terrible episode of Blakes 7 called Assassin. (Yes, I know, every episode of Blakes 7 is gloriously terrible.)
As James rightly points out, the velociraptors in this episode had previously featured in Primeval, which was a family-friendly Sunday night science fiction series which mostly involved dinosaurs attacking Dougie Henshall. A fun show, which kind of outstayed its welcome a bit.
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’ll be releasing our Legend of the Sea Devils episode in a few days’ time.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
We’ve been off the air for a few months now, but apparently all it takes to bring us all back together is a few thousand Daleks desperate to find out who’s been playing them Bizet’s Carmen from deep inside their terrifyingly impregnable prison. Unfortunately none of us can muster much interest in any of that: instead, we’re worrying about the state of Amy and Rory’s marriage and wondering why on earth the new girl has turned up a year early. It’s Asylum of the Daleks.
Notes and Links
As is now well recorded, the B-Ark was a giant spaceship built by the people of the planet Golgafrincham, so that they could launch into space an entirely useless third of their population, including the telephone sanitisers and advertising account executives. You can learn more about the wisdom of the people of Golgafrincham in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Oswin is an old Anglo-Saxon name meaning “friend of God”. An Oswine was king of Northumbria in the Seventh Century; his predecessor was King Osric. Ingrid Oliver’s Doctor Who character, first introduced in Day of the Doctor, is called Osgood, and Richard is correct that the Os- element means God in both names.
Richard also mentions Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1946), particularly as an inspiration for the strange vision Amy has of Daleks as people as she succumbs to the Asylum planet’s Dalekifying influence.
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’ll be releasing our Legend of the Sea Devils episode mere days after its first broadcast this Easter.
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 can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
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.
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.
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.
Episode 230: Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World
· Recorded on Sunday 12 December 2021 · Duration 1:04:23
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We’ve reached the end of an ambitious and controversial series of Doctor Who, and so we’ve all gathered at Demons’ Run to find the answers to some pressing questions. What were the high points and low points of the series? Amy’s pregnancy arc — tasteless or distateful? Who was our favourite guest star? And, finally, what is the First Question, and who will eventually answer it? It’s our Series 6 Retrospective.
Richard says that he things that the science-fiction ideas which Steven Moffat introduces in this season are ideas from the so-called Golden Era of literary Science fiction, and he names two possible inspirations: Hugo Gernsback, who founded Amazing Stories and who gave his name to the Hugo Awards, and Ray Bradbury.
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. Keep an eye out in the coming days for our Christmas Special, in which we return to our roots for a roundtable discussion of the latest Bond film, No Time to Die.
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 watched an episode of Deep Space Nine’s final series: Take Me Out to the Holosuite.
Episode 229: Playthings of Steven
· Recorded on Sunday 28 November 2021 · Duration 1:03:49
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