This week, Thatcherism, marshmallows and contractual obligation collide as we fulfil a promise made late in 2017 to record a commentary on one of Doctor Who’s angriest and most revolutionary stories, The Happiness Patrol.
Buy the story!
The Happiness Patrol was released on DVD in 2012. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), while in the UK and Australia, it was inexplicably released as part of the Ace Adventures box set, along with Dragonfire (Amazon UK).
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.
It’s Christmas in July, and an amnesiac Todd is cosplaying as Colin Baker while his missing son Brendan is slaving away in a workhouse somewhere. Meanwhile, Richard is frocked up and ready to take over the British Empire, as usual, while Nathan is wearing a brass N95 mask and a gorilla suit and dreaming of summer days spent frolicking in the forests of the planet Tara. Pass us the eggnog, someone: it’s time to meet The Next Doctor.
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 upstage you at your next family Christmas by pretending to be a much more bombastic and somewhat less annoying version of you.
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’ve finished our Honor Blackman tribute season, and before embarking on our impending Kate O’Marathon, we recently spent a lovely 50 minutes admiring Joanna Lumley as Purdey in an episode of The New Avengers.
This week, we look back on Series 4 and consider some of the unanswered questions from the last thirteen weeks of Flight Through Entirety. Is Series 4 the best ever series of New Who? Sylvia Noble: threat or menace? What is the best story of the season, and why is it Midnight? And, as always, who or what should we snog, marry and avoid?
Notes and links
James mentions Donna’s solo return to the world of Doctor Who in the Big Finish box set Kidnapped!, which also stars Jacqueline King. Big Finish has also released an adventure with the Doctor and Donna that features Sir Bernard Cribbins as Wilf: it’s called No Place.
TV’s Sylvia Noble, Jacqueline King, stars as the Good Witch of the North in the Big Finish adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which also stars the extremely pretty and excitingly named Dan Bottomley as the Scarecrow. No relation.
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 again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called ColonelRodriguez.
This week, all four of us gather in the Console Room to tow the podcast home after a particularly trying week. It’s time for our journey to end, in — er — Journey’s End.
Notes and links
Perennial FTE punching bag Dodo Chaplet contracts syphilis — or at least an alien sex virus — in Daniel O’Mahony’s Virgin Missing Adventure The Man in the Velvet Mask.
During the Doctor’s year off in 2009, the 456 arrive on Earth to kidnap millions of children and are thwarted by Torchwood, without the assistance of Martha or Mickey. Despite this, Children of Earth is just about the best thing produced in Doctor Who’s modern era. If you haven’t seen it, you definitely should.
After the traditional transporter accident, Troi finds herself with two Will Rikers in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Second Chances, and somehow fails to take the obvious course of action.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, which is episodes 5 and 6 of Series 3 of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and which includes the last scenes David Tennant filmed at the Doctor before his final regular episodes were broadcast at the end of 2009. It features the Trickster and Nigel Havers, only one of whom is trying to marry Sarah.
Peter
Peter recommends War of the Worlds, a Fox co-production from 2019, which features Ty Tennant, the son of Georgia and David Tennant, previously seen in his grandfather’s Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
Todd
Todd wants to take us a bit highbrow this week, with the sensational Netflix series, Tiger King, which for many of us was the way we celebrated the beginning of our endless COVID lockdown. Very much worth a look.
Nathan
Taking the opportunity to retreat into his own childhood, Nathan suggests that you read Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, which range from charming and whimsical to elegiac and character-driven. Recommended.
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 rudely push your ex-girlfriend across the room in an unsubtle attempt to hit on your ex-boyfriend. You really have quite the complicated love life, don’t you?
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 again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called Colonel Rodriguez.
This week, Nathan, James, Todd and Peter sit in our separate homes, longing for an invasion where the aliens order us all to congregate in the street together. Which is what happens, of course, in The Stolen Earth.
Notes and links
We’ve mentioned this over and over again, but for an account of how this season and its finale came to be, there’s no better place to go than Russell T Davies and Ben Cook’s The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter. It’s illustrated with cartoons by RTD himself, including his original conception of the Shadow Proclamation, and his headcanon explanation of Harriet Jones’s daring escape from the Daleks. An absolute must-read.
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 again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called Colonel Rodriguez.
This week, we’re joined by TV’s Joe Lidster, to discuss one of our favourite Doctor Who episodes while the world around us devolves into fascism and the universe collapses into nothingness. I guess that’s what happens when you fail to Turn Left.
Notes and links
We spend a lot of time talking about Years and Years, which is Russell’s latest iteration of the story of society’s impeding collapse, and which we first mentioned way back in Episode 159. If you haven’t seen it, you must. If you’re worried that it’s too bleak, it is, but it’s funny and heartwarming as well.
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 commemorate Honor Blackman by talking all the way through her appearance alongside Roger Moore in an episode of The Saint called The Arrow of God.
Remember tourism? Sure, you would always end up on a crappy bus full of middle-class English holidaymakers who wanted to kill you, and there was always the imminent threat of alien attack, but at least it got you out of the house. Which is why this week we decided to catch up with Doctor Who YouTuberJosh Snares for a weekend getaway on the planet Midnight.
Notes and links
Russell T Davies’s script for Midnight is no longer available on thewriterstale.com, but it can still be found here. (It doesn’t have a title yet, and it’s still called Episode 8.)
In her essay on Fury from the Deep, El Sandifer explains that in a trad base-under-siege story, characterisation tends to focus on the competence of the characters rather than on anything more human and interesting.
The Midnight Entity™ (sigh) reminds James and Brendan of the creature from The Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. (Which starred William Shatner, excitingly.)
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 commemorate Honor Blackman by talking all the way through her appearance alongside Roger Moore in an episode of The Saint called The Arrow of God.
This week, we’re joined again by rockstar Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, for just under an hour of conversation and fruitless dieting in a VR environment. It’s the start — and the end — of a beautiful friendship, in Forest of the Dead.
Carole Lombard and Clark Gable do a number of films together, but their big romcom is called No Man of Her Own (1932).
Just by sheer coincidence, Kenny Phillips meets an Irish girl, who he falls in love with, loses and then nearly meets again in two episodes of Press Gang, Season 2’s Love and the Junior Gazette and Season 3’s Chance is a Fine Thing.
Miss Evangelista’s exciting new look owes more than a little to Picasso’s Weeping Woman series. One of the series, belonging to the National Gallery of Victoria, was stolen in 1986.
Picks of the week
Johnny
For some mysterious reason, Johnny wants you to read the Wikipedia entry on Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. I suppose the reason will somehow become clear to you as you read it.
Peter
Peter wants you to rewatch The Tomb of the Cybermen to see a prototype of Mr Lux in the character of Betty Kaftan. He also wants you to watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Relics to see the prototype of someone saved in a transporter buffer for many years. And finally, he wants you read the New Series Target Novelisations Rose by Russell T Davies and The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat, two writers whose relationship is characterised by warmth and cameraderie. (In fact, by the most amazing coincidence, the most recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine has them interviewing each other, and the warmth of their relationship is very much evident there.)
As usual, Nathan suggests that you read the TARDIS Eruditorum entry on this story, which is actually a 100,000-word history of the first 50 years of Doctor Who. It’s an amazing piece of work.
Johnny’s magnum opus is 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. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
This week, Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by renowned Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, but we spend most of our time lurking among the bookshelves frightened by our own shadows. And despite the customary non-stop chattering, it’s all about Silence in the Library.
Notes and links
Fans of the Vashta Nerada will also enjoy the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? in which the gang are confronted by a terrifying skeleton in a space suit, characteristically called the Spooky Space Kook.
The Library of Babel (1948) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he imagines a library the size of the universe, which contains every book ever written, in a series of hexagonal rooms lined with shelves full of 410-page books containing every possible combination of letters. It’s a weird and interesting thought experiement. You can find a copy of the story itself here. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explores the idea further in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996).
Johnny’s magnum opus is 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. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
This week, Peter’s having a quiet drink, Brendan’s spending a suspicious amount of time in the toilet, Max has gone for a walk in the woods with Sacha Dhawan, and Nathan is looking at dirty postcards and reminiscing about the days when he still used to get out of this chair. Plus, Agatha Christie’s here for cocktails. So be sure to watch out for The Unicorn and the Wasp.
Notes and links
Nathan has dim memories of three Agatha Christie miniseries, adapted for TV by Sarah Phelps, who is writing a second series of RTD’s A Very English Scandal in 2021. These adaptations were And Then There Were None (2015), Witness for the Prosecution (2016) and Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
The Doctor reminisces about rescuing Charlemagne from an insane computer, a scenario taken directly from a Doctor Who story on the BBC website: The Lonely Computer, by Peter’s old friend Rupert Laight.
This Guardian article from 1999 theorises that Agatha Christie disappeared to get back at her cheating husband, and that her amnesia was feigned to conceal this fact. Nathan learned this story, like everything else he knows, from a tweet. (You can see his reply 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 write a whole bunch of Doctor Who episodes that you really enjoy and then behave so poorly in public that you have no choice but to cancel us.
This week, we basically stand around gloomily watching a fish drown until Todd cheers us up with some surprisingly athletic backflips. It’s The Doctor’s Daughter.
Notes and links
During the recording of our episode on 42 last year (Episode 170: I Believe Beryl Reid as a Freighter Captain), Brendan and Todd enter an unholy pact to reunite on this week’s episode to redeem The Doctor’s Daughter. With the most terrible consequences.
A few days before we recorded this episode, Chris Chibnall was interviewed in the Radio Times, saying that he would love one day to bring back some of the show’s earlier companions, like Amy, Rory, Ace and Tegan.
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 give you three delightfully unexpected weeks of work, during which you’ll mostly be required to flail around in mud.
This week, Nathan is crushing on that nice Colonel, James is crushing on a cloned replica of himself, and Peter is crushing on that nice young man who runs the local startup cult academy. And all the time, Adam Richard is roaming this suburban street with an axe, looking for cars to attack. It’s the end of the world, as usual: it’s The Poison Sky.
Notes and links
Adam’s TV show Outland (2012) screened on ABC-TV and told the story of five queer science-fiction fans thrown together after the breakup of their local fan group. Adam was co-creator, co-writer and one of the stars of the show. Outland was must-see TV for another small group of queer science fiction fans who would one day grow up to create the podcast Flight Through Entirety.
In March 2020, Catherine Tate returned to Big Finish with Jacqueline King in the Kidnapped! box set, in which Donna teams up with an old school friend to fight aliens in the Doctor’s absence.
Freeman Agyeman has just made her Big Finish début, but not in a Doctor Who story: instead, she’s joining Eve Myles in Torchwood: Dissected, released in February 2020.
As we said last week, Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Peter ponders the similarities between Luke Rattigan and convicted fraud Martin Shkreli, who is literally one of the world’s most appalling people.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch Up the Women, a BBC4 sitcom created by Jessica Hynes, starring Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and the Rattigan Academy’s very own Ryan Sampson.
Adam
Adam recommends The Stranger, Netflix’s answer to Broadchurch, produced by Nicola Shindler’s Red Production Company (Years and Years, Cucumber, Queer as Folk).
Peter
Hoping for the Rutans to make a return to Doctor Who, Peter suggests that you should watch Horror of Fang Rock, which we covered in the our delightfully named Episode 50, The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive.
And he’s particularly keen for you to watch Netflix’s Elite, a Spanish teen drama in which attractive young people have sex and occasionally murder someone.
Nathan
Nathan finds depressing parallels between life in 2020 and life in 2060 as depicted in Avenue 5, a new HBO science-fiction comedy series by Armando Ianucci (The Thick of It).
This week, we’re joined again by Adam Richard for a discussion about RTD’s early-season two-parters, sidelining the main characters, the military, cloning, Sontarans, and the perils of spending too much time with our families. It all smells very much like The Sontaran Stratagem.
Notes and links
Martha is now engaged to the impressively handsome Thomas Milligan from Last of the Time Lords, who is played by Tom Ellis, who can now been seen in the titular role in Netflix’s supernatural police procedural Lucifer.
Sergeant Benton’s pretty new replacement in this version of UNIT, Ross Jenkins, is played by Christian Cooke, who was recently one of the suspects in the BBC adaption of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
Take a drink, dear listener. In her TARDIS Eruditorum article on The Time Warrior, El Sandifer explains that Bob Holmes did not create the Sontarans as a second-tier race of Doctor Who monsters; what he created there instead was the character of Linx.
If you’re young enough, you might not know that Christopher Ryan — who plays General Staal in this story — first became famous as Mike the Cool Person in the Thatcher-era BBC comedy series The Young Ones. He went on to play Jennifer Saunders’s long-suffering ex-husband Marshall in Absolutely Fabulous.
Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Peter is still, unaccountably, nowhere to be found. 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.
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 week, James is admiring Mr Halpern’s hardware, Richard’s showing a PowerPoint presentation to some very important clients, Todd’s trying desperately not to fall over this railing, and Nathan’s ranting incessantly about Marx while seriously regretting his lunch order. Welcome to the Planet of the Ood.
Notes and links
Keith Temple was well-known for a BBC TV Movie called Angel Cake (2006), in which the Virgin Mary appears in some rock buns baked by Sarah Lancashire, to miraculous effect. You can read an interview with both of them about the production here.
Temple has also written a number of books, including It’s Behind You, in which a washed-up soap actor starts to receive death threats in the post while she’s doing panto, with hilarious results.
This week, while Nathan’s lying on the couch hungover, James is in an ecstatic vaporous trance, and Brendan’s admiring his latest avant-garde objet d’art, we are unexpectedly joined by friend-of-the-podcast, Erik Stadnik, who we hope will (eventually) find it in his heart to save us from the latest impending apocalypse, The Fires of Pompeii.
Notes and links
Strap yourself in. There’s a lot this week.
The Doctor’s previous and completely contradictory visit to Pompeii is chronicled in the first Big Finish audio starring Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford, called The Fires of Vulcan.
Roman historian Mary Beard defines the Dormouse Test like this: "[In a modern recreation of ancient Rome,] how long is it before the characters adopt an uncomfortably horizontal position in front of tables, usually festooned with grapes, and one says to another: ‘Can I pass you a dormouse?’”
This article appeared just days before our recording: the remains of one victim found in Herculaneum revealed that their owner’s brain turned to glass in the heat of the eruption.
David Whitaker was, in many ways, the creative genius who gave us Doctor Who, and in his very early novelisation, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, he not only gives his take on how history works, he also explains the morality of the Doctor’s historical adventures. A must-read.
Caroline Simcox finds a new way to approach historical Doctor Who adventures in Big Finish’s The Council of Nicaea. Son of the Dragon, by Steve Lyons, covers similar territory.
Tat Wood’s About Time 9 is the (sort of) definitive guide to Series 4 and the 2009 specials. No sign of About Time 10 yet, but we’re desperately hoping it will arrive before 2021.
We’re back for a new year, a new companion and an exciting new series of the Biggest Thing on TV These Days. But first, we have a simple and effective new weight-loss programme to explode. It’s Partners in Crime.
Notes and links
So, if you want to find out more about how this era of the show from Russell T Davies himself, you must take a look at The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter, which contains his candid real-time account of how this final RTD series developed. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
In The Writer’s Tale, Russell says that the Adipose were inspired by the horrific puppet creatures that pursue a Vauxhall Corsa in this appalling advertisement.
Whereas Nathan had always assumed that they had been inspired by the horrible food creatures that featured in an ad campaign for Wrigley’s chewing gum. (Which would have had to travel back in time five or so years for that to be possible.)
The Supernanny was a British reality TV show in which Jo Frost would turn up at your home and explain to you exactly how terrible your parenting was. It had been running on Channel 4 since 2004.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby and James is @ohjamessellwood. Peter continues to deprive himself of the world’s biggest source of cat pictures and targeted harassment, so Twitter fans will just have to do without him. 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.
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’re planning to continue releasing episodes of sixties spy-fi nonsense despite the delayed release of No Time to Die.
In our highest-rated episode since 1979, Nathan, James, Todd and Richard celebrate Christmas aboard the Titanic with champagne, buffalo wings and Kylie Minogue. It looks like it’s going to be a successful maiden voyage — after all, the episode is called Voyage of the Damned.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
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’ve just released a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, in which we comment on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which shares a surprising amount of DNA with You Only Live Twice.
Our farewell last week was so heartbreaking that we decided to sneak in one last episode before Christmas. So, here are Terry Wogan and John Barrowman to introduce a heartwarming episode of Flight Through Entirety, in which Nathan and James are joined by Steven B and Dan from New to Who to discuss the 2007 Children in Need special, Time Crash.
Steven and Dan are two of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories which might be of interest to New Series fans. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast, and you should immediately subscribe to the podcast in your podcatcher of choice.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
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’ve already recorded a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger, which should turn up in your feed any day now.
We’ve survived our first year of post–Camille Coduri Doctor Who, and our only full year in the company of the charming and charismatic Freema Agyeman. So, what did we all think?
Notes and links
The Angry Black Woman stereotype combines sexism and racism, and seems designed to discourage black women from speaking out. You can find out more about it in this article from the BBC; this article from Forbes discusses ways of combating it.
As we’ve said before, Derek Jacobi had previously played a weird robot version of the Master in Scream of the Shalka, a Doctor Who story written by Paul Cornell and released by the BBC as a Flash animation in 2003. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU).
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby and Richard is @RichardLStone. Peter doesn’t know what Twitter is and just wishes you would all stop asking him about it. 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 Series 11 of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re planning to return in the New Year with our ill-considered hot takes on Series 12.
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’re planning to release a Very Special Christmas Bondfinger this year, so make sure you keep updating the podcast feed every few minutes between now and the end of December.
It’s the last episode of Series 3, so we’re walking the Earth and telling anyone who’ll stand still for long enough about our favourite television show in the whole world. It’s Last of the Time Lords.
This week, Todd wants you to go back and watch Tom Baker and Louise Jameson in The Invasion of Time, which we discussed in Episode 55: Timothy Dalton’s Pyjamas.
James
Quite rightly, James recommends Life on Mars, in which John Simm plays a present-day police officer who finds himself stranded back in 1973.
And Richard recommends John Lanchester’s article in The London Review of Books, Good New Idea, in which he makes an argument for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income.