A Proud Bear Holding a Bag of Chips Getting to Be Celia Imrie
Episode 237 · The Bells of Saint John · Sunday 4 September 2022
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 · Download (47.5 MB)
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 · Download (61.8 MB)
Episode 235 · The Angels Take Manhattan · Sunday 8 May 2022
"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 · Download (59.4 MB)
Episode 234 · The Power of Three · Sunday 1 May 2022
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 · Download (43.5 MB)
Episode 233 · A Town Called Mercy · Sunday 24 April 2022
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 · Download (53.2 MB)
Episode 232 · Dinosaurs on a Spaceship · Sunday 17 April 2022
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.
Episode 231 · Asylum of the Daleks · Sunday 10 April 2022
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.
Episode 230 · The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe · Saturday 25 December 2021
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 · Download (62.6 MB)
Episode 229 · Series 6 Retrospective · Sunday 19 December 2021
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 · Download (62.1 MB)
Episode 228 · The Wedding of River Song · Sunday 12 December 2021
This week, the Doctor and River Song get married in an episode that completely rewrites itself before our very eyes, and the eyepatch anecdote makes its triumphant return to the show. You are all cordially invited to The Wedding of River Song.
Notes and links
Richard identifies some possible inspirations for this episode, including Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell and The Master and Margarita (1967) by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov.
Nathan mentions Steven Moffat’s adaptation of Dracula (2020), in which two of the three episodes use the same narrative framing technique he uses in this episode, where the events of the episode start to impinge on the story being told in flashback at the start of the episode.
Steven B calls The Doctor’s Wife a “nerd-baiting title” in our episode on that story, called, appropriately Nerd-Baiting Title. Nathan levels the same accusation against the title of this story.
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’ve completed our coverage of Flux, so you can go back and relieve the highs and lows of the most recent series of Doctor Who with us.
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 discussing the Series A finale this week, and which will be back next week with a Series A retrospective.
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 our first episode of Enterprise, with predictably horrifying results.
Episode 228: The Magic Mavic Chen Principle
· Recorded on Sunday 24 October 2021 · Download (57.2 MB)
