Dashing through the snow, in a one-shark open sleigh, past some pants we go, laughing all the way. (Ha-ha-ha.) Max and Peter sing, making spirits bright, and James and Nathan do their thing in Sardicktown tonight!
Notes and links
A Christmas Carol is the story where Michael Pickwoad takes over from Ed Thomas as Doctor Who’s Production Designer. Here’s an intervew with him from Doctor Who Magazine, which includes a photograph of the painting Max mentions, “The Birth of Sardicktown”.
To help the UK get through the Christmas lockdown of 2010, Steven Moffat, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill live-tweeted this episode at the hashtag #HalfwayOutOfTheDark. In this tweet, Steven Moffat describes Karen and Arthur’s reaction to being sidelined in this episode, and in this tweet he mentions the line that he regrets cutting at the end of the episode.
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 an unexpected development, yesterday we released a commentary on an episode of Batman starring Joan Collins. Which is a sentence that none of us ever expected to see in the shownotes.
Episode 215: Kazran Scroogedick
· Recorded on Monday 21 June 2021 · Duration 1:03:44
· Download
· Open in new window
In the last episode of this series of Flight Through Entirety, we fly through the first year of Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor, snogging, marrying and avoiding things, and responding to some of our listeners’ most pressing questions. More New Paradigm Daleks? Fewer Silurians? More Richard Curtis episodes? More series of Doctor Who just as good as this one?
Among the Steven Moffat comedies we mention this week are Joking Apart and our favourite teen drama of all time, Press Gang. We recommend watching all of Press Gang repeatedly, for the rest of your life, but you can safely drop out of Joking Apart at the end of Series 1.
Naturally, Big Finish have already released one box set featuring Arthur Darvill as the Lone Centurion, Volume 1, with Volume 2 scheduled for release in 2022. I’m still holding out for the Amelia Rumsford box sets myself. Don’t say it.
Peter and Nathan both think that in this era River Song plays a similar role to the Brigadier in the Classic Series. Of course, the first person to make this point on FTE was friend-of-the-podcast Johnny Spandrell in our Forest of the Dead episode, aptly named Our New Brigadier.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 214: A Brilliant Whole
· Recorded on Sunday 6 June 2021 · Duration 1:10:18
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we celebrate the triumphant return of the entire universe with a quick snog in the bushes after Amy’s wedding, followed by a discussion of the final episode of Series 5, The Big Bang.
Notes and links
Here’s the tweet that started it all, a question from Nick H asking us what the hell this two-part story is all about.
According to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Total Perspective Vortex annihilates your brain by showing you exactly how insignificant you are on a universal scale. It derives its image of the universe from the extrapolated matter analysis of one small piece of fairy cake.
Erik and Adam discuss Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation not in an episode of Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room (sorry, Kyle), but in an episode of The Real McCoy podcast. In this episode, they mention several things that Cornell does in the novel which later turn up as features of the Moffat Era.
In 2011, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, beating Vincent and the Doctor, A Christmas Carol and Rachel Bloom’s music video F*ck me Ray Bradbury.
And here’s the Twitter account of Liam McNicholas, who has been creating beautiful artwork to accompany our flight through the successive episodes of Series 5. By the time you read this, you’ll be able to see the complete set.
Picks of the week
We’ve all got some lovely TV shows for you to watch this week.
Todd
Todd wants you to experience the lavish off-screen wedding enjoyed by Leela and Andred some time after the end of Part 6 of The Invasion of Time. Or you could listen to us discussing it in Episode 55: Timothy Dalton’s Pyjamas, the FTE episode that mentioned word peril for the first time.
Brendan
Brendan is watching Butterflies (1978), starring Wendy Craig and our very own Geoffrey Palmer, in which the lovely middle-class Ria distracts herself from her low-level dissatisfactions with her family life by regularly meeting and chatting with another man. It’s very gentle, but also rather sweet and sad.
Richard
Richard is watching The Right Stuff (2020), which is a Disney+ series about the early days of the space race. (He also seems to have his eye on Nathan’s Season 8 box set.)
Nathan
Nathan recommends Love, Victor (2020), also on Disney+ in Australia, at least, in which a high school student in Atlanta struggles with the possibility that he might be gay. It’s sweet and funny and sad, with a lovely cast and a lot of heart. Series 2 is being released next 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.
Episode 213: The Todd Experience
· Recorded on Sunday 16 May 2021 · Duration 1:18:26
· Download
· Open in new window
There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
This week, we’re back in time having a jolly adventure when suddenly a thousand alien invasions happen at once and then the universe abruptly ends. It’s The Pandorica Opens.
Notes and links
Nathan references two very Whoniverse–centred books whose authors probably wince every time Steven Moffat gleefully smashes their carefully crafted fan theories. They are Lance Parkin’s AHistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe, and 80s Cyberleader David Banks’s titular (or eponymous?) Cybermen, a laborious attempt to sort out the history of the Cybermen, which Steven Moffat rendered completely obsolete with a single line of dialogue in World Enough and 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. This weekend, we released our fiftieth episode, in which we talked all over an episode of The New Avengers in which Dr Judson killed Lord Ravensworth with a maze in order to do something that I have completely forgotten what it was.
Episode 212: Space Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 9 May 2021 · Duration 0:57:30
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we’re joined by Jack Shanahan and Joe Ford to dicuss an episode where we discover that not only is the Doctor good at saving the world, he’s a useful striker, a reliable employee and a skilled matchmaker. And someone who looks good in a skimpy towel. It’s The Lodger.
Notes and links
Daisy Haggard created, co-wrote and starred in Back to Life (2019), a BBC comedy series about a woman who returns home to live with her parents after 17 years in jail. It features a hilarious comedy turn from our very own Jo Martin.
Spaced (1999) was a comedy series starring amd written by our own Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg and directed by Edgar Wright. It was very clever and trope-aware, and if you can find it, we’re certain that you will enjoy it.
This story’s Emergency Crash Hologram is a loving tribute to or a blatant ripoff of Star Trek: Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram, wonderfully played by TV’s Robert Picardo and — delightfully — also known as the Doctor.
Jack and Joe host a Doctor Who podcast called The Nimon Be Praised!, which you can follow on Twitter at @NimonPodcast, and which features the two of them discussing every Doctor Who-related topic you could possibly imagine and occasionally praising the Nimon.
Joe is also the writer of Doc Oho Reviews, which contains reviews of all your favourite genre shows, including Doctor Who, of course, but also Buffy, Star Trek, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica and more.
And you can also hear Joe on A Hamster with a Blunt Penknife, a podcast where he teams up with other witty and attractive people, including our hosts and guests, to watch and comment on their favourite Doctor Who stories. There’s a lot there to listen to, so you’d better get started right away.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 211: Relatable
· Recorded on Sunday 14 March 2021 · Duration 1:01:24
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, James, Nathan and Richard are joined by friend-of-the podcast Fiona Tomney for a few days mooning around in the south of France, staring into the gaping maw of isolation and depression and trying to prevent Vincent from inadvertently destroying some very pretty paintings. It’s Vincent and the Doctor.
Here’s the article Nathan mentioned about the awfulness of Curtis’s Love Actually (2003), a film in which Prime Minister Hugh Grant risks causing a diplomatic incident in order to get a girlfriend.
James mentions Curtis’s About Time (2013), in which Domnhall Gleeson discovers that he can travel backwards and forwards in his own lifespan in order to get a girlfriend.
And our last Curtis film for the time being — The Tall Guy (1989), in which Jeff Goldblum keeps going to the hospital and getting a series of increasingly unnecessary vaccinations in order to get a girlfriend.
Spike Milligan is the author and illustrator of A Book of Milliganimals (1968), in which he asks the important question “Can a parrot/eat a carrot/standing on his head?” His motivation for writing this book remains a mystery.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 210: Balancing the Darkness
· Recorded on Sunday 14 February 2021 · Duration 0:53:25
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, our hopes and dreams crumble to dust in the face of centrist realpolitik and an inability to imagine a true, multracial utopia. And, of course, we’re also talking with Erik Stadnik about a Doctor Who episode called Cold Blood.
Notes and links
Brendan mentions an eerie parallel with on one the cheesiest moments ever committed to film: the last scene of the original Planet of the Apes series, from Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Which says a lot, really.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd wants you all to go away and watch Warriors of the Deep, which we discussed way back in Episode 92, Is Icthar Okdel?. So we’ll be checking in to make sure you’ve done that.
Brendan likes an anti-Valentine’s Day playlist by Steps called Heartbreak in This City. I cannot work out the subtext of this recommendation.
Nathan
And finally, Nathan has two podcasts to recomment. Pilot Club, with Billy and Drew, who watch the first episode of basically every new TV programme on offer, mostly so that you don’t have to. And A Hamster with a Blunt Penknife, in which friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford chats with a series of increasingly interesting guests while they watch that guest’s chosen story of Doctor Who. Like Sir Robert, it’s a hoot.
Erik is @sjcAustenite on Twitter, and appears by arrangement with an impressive number of podcasts, including The Writer’s Room, which discusses the writers of Doctor Who and The Outer Limits, So Much Stuff to Sing, about the American Musical, and The Real McCoy, which is about all the serials and books which make up the Sylvester McCoy era.
This week we’re joined by Erik Stadnik for a whole day of taping cameras to things while we wait for something — oh, okay, the Silurians — to emerge from The Hungry Earth.
Notes and links
Nathan incorrectly says that the Silurians in Doctor Who and the Silurians were voiced by Peter Hawkins (which was a good guess), but — delightfully — they were actually voiced by Peter Halliday (Packer!).
The novelisation of Doctor Who and the Silurians was re-released in 2011, and is still fairly easy to get hold of. Very highly recommended. It’s called Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.
The Silurians from Doctor Who and the Silurians inspired the concept and the design of the Voth from the Star Trek: Voyager episode Distant Origin. Did the Voth go on to inspire the Silurians from this story?
Erik is @sjcAustenite on Twitter, and appears by arrangement with an impressive number of podcasts, including The Writer’s Room, which discusses the writers of Doctor Who and The Outer Limits, So Much Stuff to Sing, about the American Musical, and The Real McCoy, which is about all the serials and books which make up the Sylvester McCoy era.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 208: Don’t Kill the Lizard Lady
· Recorded on Sunday 21 February 2021 · Duration 0:46:23
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we’re joined by Johnny Spandrell for an hour of love, self-loathing and psychic pollen from the candle meadows of Karass don Slava, as we discuss Amy’s Choice.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s first attempt at self-loathing sex comedy was Joking Apart (1993–1995), in which he rummages through the ruins of an old long-term relationship. It’s funny in places, and deeply problematic in others, in a way that many Doctor Who fans will find disturbingly familiar.
Toby Jones’s father was Freddie Jones, who started his career in amateur dramatics and was always in work from the 1960s onwards. He appeared opposite David Tennant in Casanova (2005).
Toby Jones plays Truman Capote in the 2006 film Infamous. Richard also mentions another film featuring Truman Capote, this time played by Capote himself. It’s The Capote Tapes, a documentary that featured as part of this year’s Mardi Gras Film Festival in Sydney.
Simon Nye’s script for this episode can be found on this page of the BBC website, along with a whole heap of scripts from nearly every season of the new series of Doctor Who.
Johnny is now well-known for his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. He can be found on Twitter at @JohnnySpandrell.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 207: A Man Who Sees His Own Shadows
· Recorded on Saturday 27 February 2021 · Duration 0:53:13
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, James is getting excited about being accepted into a new finishing school, Todd is being complacent about the size of his torch, Nathan is huddling in a corner repeatedly saying the word fish, and friend-of-the-podcast Karen Carpenter is lying in the courtyard and rehydrating. It’s The Vampires of Venice.
Notes and links
While we were preparing this episode for release, we were saddened to learn of the death of Helen McCrory, who played Rosanna Calvierri in The Vampires of Venice, and who died of cancer just a few days ago at the age of 52. Her husband, Damian Lewis, posted a beautiful tribute to her on Twitter.
Rather than having to contend with literally millions of tourists, the production team decided to recreate Venice in the tiny Croatian town of Trogir.
The Doctor might have tried to be a bit more careful defusing that weather control thing in the final act — the Campanile di San Marco collapsed in 1902 and had to be rebuilt.
And, finally, here’s Helen McCrory herself, describing her role in the 2000 production of Anna Karenina in The Guardian.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 206: Those Facepalming Moments
· Recorded on Saturday 27 February 2021 · Duration 0:46:03
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, Nathan, James, Peter and Simon are all huddling terrified in a dark forest, waiting for the image of an angel to materialise and kill us all — but not before we finish our discussion of Flesh and Stone.
Notes and links
Peter mentions writing for Doctor Who Magazine, in particular “The First Fifty Years Poll”, published in Issue 474, July 2014. You can find the results helpfully listed here.
Simon and Peter have a shared history with Remember Me, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Beverly is horrified to find that her friends and fellow crewmembers are disappearing around her and no one even remembers them. Recommended, if you like that sort of thing.
As James points out, the forest scenes in this episode were shot in Puzzlewood, which is part of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, and which the rest of us pretend to have heard of.
Picks of the week
James
As always, James has some Big Finish audios for us to listen to. The Fifth Doctor meets Michelangelo, the Weeping Angels and Sacha Dhawan in Fallen Angels, which is part of the first volume of the Classic Doctors New Monsters series, released in July 2015. He also recommends the many, many box sets that make up Big Finish series The Diary of River Song.
Peter
Peter suggests that you watch Netflix’s Bridgerton, featuring the magnificent Adjoa Andoh (Martha’s mother from Doctor Who) and the decorative Jonathan Bailey (Psy from Time Heist). But you’ve watched it already, haven’t you?
Simon
Simon recommends The Time Traveller’s Wife, both in book form and as a film starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams and released in 2009. You will find the premise eerily familiar, sweetie.
Nathan
Predictably, Nathan recommends Russell T Davies’s latest drama series It’s a Sin, which tells the story of a small group of friends living in London during the AIDS crisis. He thinks it’s lovely.
James also mentions the Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin, which are contemporaneous accounts of gay life in San Francisco, starting in 1978 and going all the way through to 2014.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley and James is @ohjamessellwood. Peter and Simon are both currently depriving themselves of dog ratings by not going on Twitter at all. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 205: Spatial Relationships
· Recorded on Saturday 6 February 2021 · Duration 0:54:46
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we spend 45 minutes climbing a staircase in search of 2007’s most celebrated Doctor Who monster. Peter’s dreaming about the Aplan, James is wishing he hadn’t worn these heels, Nathan is wondering if he left the mortars in the nave or the vestry, and Simon is admiring the low lighting and the sombre vaulted ceilings. It turns out our dreams no longer need us, so this must be The Time of Angels.
Notes and links
Peter suggests that River might not be popular among Doctor Who fans who are “very gun”. To find out what he means by this, pop along and take a look at Nathan’s essay on Guns and Frocks.
Nathan mentions Erik Stadnik’s recently expressed sentiment about the constrained universe of RTD’s Doctor Who. You can find this on a recent episode of Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room, a podcast he does with Kyle Anderson, which is now tackling the RTD era, after dealing comprehensively with the Classic Series, The Outer Limits and Sapphire and Steel. A must-listen.
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley and James is @ohjamessellwood. Peter and Simon are both currently limiting their daily exposure to members of the far right by not going on Twitter at all. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 use the hallucinogenic lipstick to make you believe that you’re on the planet Refusis, under attack by a hundred Dodo Chaplets.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 204: Implacable and Completely Incomprehensible
· Recorded on Saturday 6 February 2021 · Duration 0:59:02
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we’re hunkering down in the Cabinet War Rooms with Col Sillitto from New to Who, surrounded by increasing numbers of suspicious-looking miniature tanks. Nathan is finding the Prime Minister increasingly intolerable, James is gagging for a cup of tea, Richard is admiring the Group Captain’s Spitfire, and Col is reminiscing about that night behind the post office with Dorabella. Little do we know how close we all are to the ultimate Victory of the Daleks.
Notes and links
Richard mentions Alan Turing, that unsung and horribly mistreated hero of World War II, who has just been commemorated with the issue of a delightfully nerdy new £50 note.
We’ve mentioned it before on the podcast, but here it is again: Charles Chilton’s Journey into Space, a popular BBC radio drama of the 1950s, which tells the story of a British rocket trip to the moon.
Richard’s picks of the week
Richard has chosen two BBC radio sitcoms featuring Doctor Who alumni and set in Britain during World War II.
The first of these is Hut 33, featuring Alex MacQueen and Olivia Colman. It’s set at Bletchley Park, presumably in the hut one over from the one where Alan Turing was doing his life-saving codebreaking work.
And the second is Dot, starring Fenella Woolgar and set among the girls working in the Cabinet War Rooms.
You can find Col on New to Who podcast, which is on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast. He would also like you to check out a new Doctor Who commentary podcast by friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford — A Hamster with a Blunt Penknife. And so would we.
This week, Nathan, Brendan, Steven from New to Who and Kevin Burnard join Amy and the Doctor as they head off to a version of Britain in the distant future which is exactly like the Britain that they just left — crumbling, nostalgic and in deep denial about the giant alien whale in the basement. Or as we like to call him, The Beast Below.
Notes and links
The Minisode that precedes The Beast Below is called Meanwhile in the TARDIS. It’s one of the special features on the Series 5 box set.
Fans of giant space whales will also enjoy The Song of Megaptera, a Big Finish audio starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and part of their Lost Stories range.
Sophie Okonedo had previously starred as Alison in Paul Cornell’s Scream of the Shalka. A webcast released on the BBC website in November and Decemeber 2003, it featured Doctor Who guest artist Richard E Grant as a pre-Eccleston version of the Ninth Doctor. It was released on DVD in 2016, and has never been covered on Flight Through Entirety. My bad.
Nathan mentions Ursula LeGuin’s beautiful and heartbreaking short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which the citizens of the kingdom of Omelas are faced with a more profound and lyrical choice than the one facing the subjects on board Starship UK.
We’re back. It’s the first episode of a whole new era, and Matt Smith has 20 minutes to save the world and an hour to convince the audience that there’s life after David Tennant. Pull up a fire engine and delete your browser history — it’s time for The Eleventh Hour.
Notes and links
Richard mentions Pretend It’s a City, a seven-part documentary series in which Franz Lebowitz discusses her most bracing opinions with Martin Scorsese.
Perhaps the Atraxi come from Atraxi 3, a planet first mentioned in Kate Orman and Jon Blum’s novel Vampire Science. It’s also inhabited by a a race of giant mosquitos.
Nathan mentions Neil Gaiman’s short story The Problem of Susan, which uses the character of Susan Pevensie to discuss C S Lewis’s problem with adult female sexuality in his Narnia books. Sandifer uses this short story in her analysis of why the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan fails as a character in the early years of Doctor Who.
Lynda Day is the main character of Steven Moffat’s brilliant (and occasionally problematic) children’s series Press Gang. Brilliant played by Julia Sowalha, Lynda will be eerily familiar to anyone who has watched this era of Doctor Who.
Olivia Colman talks about first becoming really famous in the first episode of David Tennant’s excellent podcast David Tennant Does a Podcast with….
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter remains steadfastly unavailable online. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 201: Tiggers Don’t Like Bacon
· Recorded on Sunday 24 January 2021 · Duration 1:05:01
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we answer the most important questions about the latest leg of our flight — the Russell T Davies Era. What happened to Nerys during the Year of Hell? Which monsters would we most like to party with? Who is the best guest character, and why is it Ida Scott? And, finally, is this the best era in the show’s history?
Notes and links
Thank you to Pete Lambert, Steven Alexander, Bob Gilbey, Joe Ford, Simon Hart and Nathan Bottomley for supplying us with questions to answer on Twitter, and to Colin Neal for his contribution to our final round of Snog Marry Avoid.
Nathan would like to clarify here that the Astrid he’s referring to is not Kylie Minogue’s Astrid Peth but Astrid Ferrier from The Enemy of the World, who seems to be a source of fascination for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor.
You can listen to the Forest of the Dead commentary that Nathan mentions here: it features David Tennant, Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. And you need to hear it.
Miranda Raison’s companion character in the Big Finish audios is called Constance Clarke, who is a Wren working at Bletchley Park during World War II.
Project: WHO? is a 2005 radio documentary about the process of bringing Doctor Who back to television in 2005, featuring all of the production crew and actors that we would grow to know and love over the next five years. It’s still available as an audiobook. (Audible US) (Audible UK) (Audible AU).
To celebrate the end of the production of RTD’s Doctor Who, the cast and crew shot a lovely video in which they lipsync to The Proclaimers’ “I would walk five hundred miles”. They’re all in it, and it’s absolutely adorable. (I still cry. I just checked.)
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd @toddbeilby, and Peter has wisely elected to avoid being available online. 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 do such a great job of bringing back your favourite TV show that your life will be irrevocably changed for the better. Pretty intimidating threat, right?
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 200: Technical Virtuosity
· Recorded on Sunday 27 December 2020 · Duration 1:32:08
· Download
· Open in new window
This week, we’ve hastily convened an emergency meeting in our darkest conference room: Todd’s itching to try out his new glove, Nathan has some serious objections to make, James is here mostly for the exposition and Peter is hunched over the desk doing his best Dalek Caan impersonation. It’s the end of the David Tennant era — The End of Time, Part Two.
Notes and links
For the last time ever, the best source for background information about the development of this script is Russell T Davies’s The Writer’s Tale, particularly Chapters 23 and 24. That’s also where you’ll find the scripts to some of the deleted scenes where John Simm was playing against himself, scenes which were very kindly pointed out to us by friend-of-the-podcast Scriptscribbles.
Our new trope for 2021 is the Florana speech — which is the speech where the Doctor lists a whole bunch of possible magnificent destinations in order to entice someone to travel with him. The locus classicus for this is Pertwee and Sarah at the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs; Nathan’s personal favourite can be found at the beginning of The Day of the Doctor.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd has been enjoying Marie-Claire’s World, a YouTube channel where a new series fan is watching her way through the entirety of the Classic Series and recording her reactions. She’s very positive about it.
Honourable mentions also go to SeskaSays and Medusa Cascade, who are doing pretty much the same thing.
James
James’s pick is returning favourite W1A, also chosen by Simon in Episode 172. It’s a sitcom set inside the BBC itself, starring Doctor Who royalty Jessica Hynes and Hugh Bonneville, and narrated by David Tennant.
Peter
Peter wants us to take a look as some of the news coverage of Donald Trump’s childish and mendacious post-election tantrum, so that we can properly appreciate what Joe Biden and the American voting public will deliver us from on 20 January. Not long now.
Nathan
Nathan has been watching The Boys, a violent and hilarious satire of comic-book superheroes and American capitalism, brought to you by those cuddly Marxist hippies at Amazon Prime.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Todd is @toddbeilby, and if you see Peter around anywhere, tell him how keen you are to follow him when he finally gets round to creating a Twitter account. 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 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 plan to release an episode on Revolution of the Daleks very soon after its broadcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 199: A Great Release of Tension
· Recorded on Sunday 13 December 2020 · Duration 1:02:08
· Download
· Open in new window
This Christmas, everyone’s incredibly hungry, but we’re not allowed to start on dinner until the Doctor’s embarrassing relatives arrive. It’s the episode with the most oxymoronic title in the entire series — The End of Time, Part One.
Notes and links
Prisoner — or Prisoner: Cell Block H — was a classic Australian soap opera before such things even existed. In this clip, the Freak introduces herself to fan favourite Doreen Burns in a particularly memorable way.
V was an American mini-series from the mid-80s, in which rat-eating lizard people invaded America in a way that we can only describe as extremely prophetic. You can see the scene that Todd mentions here.
Nathan prepared for this episode by live-tweeting both parts of The End of Time, using the hashtag #FinalDaysOfPlanetEarth.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Todd @toddbeilby, and if you see Peter around anywhere, tell him how keen you are to follow him when he finally gets round to creating a Twitter account. 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 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 plan to release an episode on Revolution of the Daleks 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. In our most recent episode, we watched the 1998 film version of The Avengers, so you don’t have to.
Episode 198: Do Something Big
· Recorded on Sunday 13 December 2020 · Duration 0:54:42
· Download
· Open in new window
This month, Brendan’s got his hand stuck up a robot, and Nathan is preparing a roast dinner made entirely of carrots and prions, when they are unexpectedly joined by those travellers in space and time known only as Pete Lambert and Conrad Westmaas. The conversation soon turns to accents, zombies and specious moral dilemmas: this is, after all, The Waters of Mars.
And finally, for those of you with pure hearts or strong stomachs, here’s David Tennant in 2008, accepting his award for Outstanding Drama Performance and announcing his resignation from Doctor Who.
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. Our recent tribute to Kate O’Mara, the Kate O’Marathon, was interrupted by the death of Diana Rigg, whose tribute may in turn be interrupted by a tribute to the late Sean Connery. 2020 hasn’t really worked out all that well, has it?
Episode 197: Fix or Flux
· Recorded on Sunday 11 October 2020 · Duration 1:15:07
· Download
· Open in new window
It’s Easter 2009, and here we are, huddling in a bus with Michelle Ryan and friend-of-the-podcast Simon Moore on the desert planet San Helios, with the sun in our eyes, hope in our hearts and a hundred billion dead people in our hair. It’s the first special episode of David Tennant’s final year: welcome to the Planet of the Dead.
Notes and links
Planet of the Dead was in some ways inspired by Gareth Roberts’s first Virgin New Adventure novel The Highest Science, which was first published in February 1993.
Transport nerds like James will be keen to learn more about the route followed by the 200 bus in our own non-Doctor Who universe.
Although Big Finish is yet to release its series of box sets starring Noma Dumezmeni as Erisa Magambo, Michelle Ryan’s Lady Christina is now an official Big Finish property, with a box set of her own released in August 2018.
The best source of background information about the 2009 specials is of course Russell T Davies’s own account of their production, The Writer’s Tale. The section on this episode is particuarly harrowing.
And finally, the banterous relationship between the Doctor and Lady Christina is inspired by a similar relationship between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963).
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 are all still shaken by the death of Dame Diana Rigg, and will soon be releasing the first of a series of commentaries in which we go on and on about how much we loved her.
Episode 196: Big Finish, Call Me Now
· Recorded on Friday 4 September 2020 · Duration 1:03:28
· Download
· Open in new window
