Flight Through Entirety: The First Ten Years

The Pilot

Monday 26 May 2014 — Episode Zero: A Little Queer

— Hello, and we are coming at you live through your earholes. This is the first podcast for Flight Through Entirety, where we’re going to be going through the entire duration of Doctor Who season by season. And as this is the first podcast, this is Episode Zero. My name’s Brendan and I will be one of your presenters.

— Hello, I’m Nathan.

— And I’m Richard, breaking the binary duality.

The first episode of Flight Through Entirety is unleashed upon an unsuspecting public on 26 May 2014. Elsewhere in the world, there’s a coup in Thailand and a presidential election in Egypt, Narendra Modi is sworn in as the fifteenth Prime Minister of India, and Pfizer announces that it won’t go ahead with its proposed purchase of AstraZeneca. None of these events appear to be causally related.

That first episode is just under 51 minutes long. Its focus is on the untransmitted pilot episode of Doctor Who, but we also discuss An Adventure in Space and Time, which we would go on to discuss in more detail eight and a half years later.

And the podcast arrives more-or-less fully formed. The sound quality isn’t quite there yet, and as you can see the introduction is not quite what we eventually settle on. But Brendan is genial and well-informed, Richard is already bringing the obscure cultural references, and although I might not actually say the word tiresome, it can often be inferred from my tone of voice.

As you can see from our first introduction, Brendan’s original idea had been to go through all of Doctor Who season by season. We joked at the time that if it took us 50 minutes to talk about the 25-minute pilot episode, our Season 1 episode would end up being 35 hours long.

And so Episode Zero was out there in the world. And none of us had any idea what would happen next.

– See? Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge, rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.

– Life’s like that. Best thing is just to get on with it.

Robert’s Walnut and Chocolate Question Mark Podcake

Sunday 20 July 2014

At first we thought that the podcast needed a gimmick, and because he’s brilliant, Brendan decided that the gimmick would be cake. Someone (not me) would bake a cake for each recording and then we would mention it on air. While eating it, obviously.

Flight Through Entirety’s last official baked confection was the Alien Quarry Samples which accompanied Episode 30: Evil Buddhists in May 2015, just after the podcast’s first anniversary.

However, the gimmick is still commemorated by the existence on the webisite of a collection of nine recipes called The Food Machine, and by our cake in bio on X (Nathan, James, Todd, Richard, Peter, Simon and Brendan fly through the entire history of Doctor Who — sometimes with guests, sometimes with cake.)

When I mentioned to my friend Robert — whose cake is commemorated in the date and title of this milestone — that Flight Through Entirety’s tenth anniversary was coming up, he said that I had to do something to commemorate the anniversary, and that I had to make sure that it featured his cake.

So I did.

The Entirety of Season 3 in One Day

Sunday 10 August 2014

Also, there was that time we recorded our entire coverage of Doctor Who Season 3 in one day. That’s four episodes of FTE, covering 45 episodes of Doctor Who, for a total duration of over 4 hours and 20 minutes.

Highlights include a whole episode on the rightly-esteemed Dalek epic The Daleks’ Master Plan and my first proper podcast rant on the somewhat more controversial story The Massacre. What is less widely known is that Richard had to start a new job the next day, and that we stopped so that he could cook an entire roast dinner between our third and fourth episodes.

(I claim at the start of Episode 9 that it’s one o’clock in the morning as we record, but I’m almost certainly just trying to be funny.)

That morning, on the way to the recording, I had stopped off to get a coffee at the appropriately named Varga Bar. My post on Facebook gave friend-of-the-podcast Simon Moore the chance to air a pent-up complaint.

Our revenge for Simon’s impertinence was swift and terrible. Three minutes into our final episode of the day, Brendan says that fan-favourite The Gunfighters is just all “tropes tropes tropes tropes tropes”, and that ends up being the name we give to Episode 9

Less swift but even more terrible was the second act of our revenge, which would befall Simon in 2019. More of which later.

Enter Todd Beilby

Monday 5 January 2015 — Episode 20: How Can You Snog a Monoid?

For the first twenty episodes, it’s just Brendan, Richard and me, but in Episode 20 Todd Beilby joins us for the first time, as the compere of the first of our retrospective episodes. In this episode, Todd’s questions end up being the perfect stimulus for our discussion of the new things we’ve learned as we podcasted through Doctor Who’s first six seasons in just over six months.

(Helping Todd devise these questions was Peter Griffiths, who was then living in the UK. He will enter our story again in Episode 138: Eat a Kronkburger.)

Of course, Todd soon became a regular host in Season 8, and would basically alternate with Richard throughout the run of the Classic Series.

There are eighteen Flight Through Entirety retrospectives, and in each of them we get the chance to think back on an era or a season (or the entirety of the Classic Series). We re-tell old jokes, re-make old observations, pick up on ideas we’ve missed and summarise the lessons we’ve learned. And in each of them, Todd is there, asking us who we would snog, marry or avoid.

Bondfinger Launches

Saturday 1 August 2015

It’s impossible to stop at one podcast, of course, and so just over a year after the launch of Flight Through Entirety, Bondfinger is born. It’s an obvious choice, really: a long-running British pop-cultural phenomenon, helmed by a series of different actors, and reflecting the obsessions, concerns and anxieties of both British and global audiences.

More importantly, it’s a franchise that Richard is intimately familiar with. Most of what he ends up saying about the films is stuff he just knows; the research he does is among books that he has on his shelves.

Most of the episodes were recorded at Richard’s place. He would cook us dinner, we would drink champagne, play with the cat, talk about work, and then watch a silly film and laugh at it and take it seriously. Happy times.

The last Bondfinger, for now, is Episode 60: Bullseye!, in which we watch a “pinched loaf of pure Rogertainment” — the eponymous 1990s comedy starring Roger Moore and Michael Caine. But we’ve never done a commentary on No Time to Die (2021), and there’s always another Bond film some time in the future. So perhaps we’ll be back.

In the meantime, Bondfinger has two spiritual successors. The first of these is Startling Barbara Bain, our commentary podcast on the lavish 1970s science fiction series Space: 1999. And you’ll be reading about the second one any moment now.

Man-Eater of Surrey Green

Sunday 6 September 2015 — Episode 43: Sexiest Exposition Trope

Both Richard and Brendan are massive fans of The Avengers, which is one of the great jewels not only of 1960s British television but of television generally. And so, inevitably, when Flight Through Entirety went off format for the first time, that was the show we talked about. Every Doctor Who fan of a certain age knows that the 1976 story The Seeds of Doom was inspired by a 1966 episode of The Avengers called Man-Eater of Surrey Green, and so that’s the episode we talked about the week after our discussion of The Seeds of Doom.

It’s a fun and informative episode of FTE, and so, inevitably, we went on to watch further episodes of The Avengers and The New Avengers on Bondfinger.

And so, inevitably (again), eight and a half years later Richard and Brendan would team up with friend-of-the-podcast Steven B to create The Three-Handed Game — a commentary podcast in which three devoted and terrifyingly well-informed fans get together to discuss triptychs of carefully chosen episodes of The Avengers from across the entire history of the series.

Meeting Steven B

Saturday 21 November 2015

Soon after we got started, I remember consulting the podcast analytics for our cumulative listen count and discovering that we had had 75 listens. That must even include people we don’t even know, I thought. Never for a moment, though, did I imagine we would ever meet any of them.

By 2015, we were chatting with a few people online through Twitter and Facebook — friendly and likeable people who we kind enough to tell us how much they were enjoying the podcast. One of them was Steven.

The actual message itself is lost, but one day Steven asked us if we were planning to go to the Doctor Who Festival in Sydney at the end of November. And if we were, would we like to meet up in person.

Of course we were going, and of course we would like to meet up. But what on earth would someone who listened to our podcast be like in person?

Turns out, a charming, attractive and devastatingly intelligent young man. We all hit it off at once; it was a red letter day. And we’ve met and spoken so many times since then. Now, years later, he’s one of our dearest friends.

Steven is Steven B, of course, who has appeared on eight episodes of Flight Through Entirety, and who created his own brilliant Doctor Who podcast with his friends Dan and Col. And, as you just read, he can now be regularly heard with Brendan and Richard on the Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game, an idea he first suggested to us back in August 2015.

Theme Arrangement by Cameron Lam

Saturday 2 April 2016 — Episode 68: Giant Squashy Bottoms

Since Episode Zero, The Flight Through Entirety theme has always been Three Guitars Mood 2 by Nelson & Raymond/The Arthur Nelson Group (AKA John Smith and the Common Men, of course). It’s the track that Susan is listening to on the radio in the first episode of Doctor Who, so using it as the theme was an idea so brilliant that Kyle and Erik from Doctor Who: The Writer’s Room came up with it independently nearly eighteen months earlier, something that still mildly surprises me every time I listen to an episode.

But the Doctor Who theme has changed and evolved through the years, and so has the theme to Flight Through Entirety. At first some swoops and whooshes needed to be added during the Troughton Era, then the sting appeared near the beginning of the Pertwee Era, but these fell well within the scope of Brendan’s considerable editing talents.

But in Season 18 Peter Howell completely reinvents the Doctor Who theme for the 1980s, and so Flight Through Entirety needed to do the same. It was time for us to seek the help of a talented and attractive young Australian composer. Who else could it have been but Cameron Lam?

Cameron has now created six different arrangements of the Flight Through Entirety theme. For the Classic Series, a Peter Howell–inspired version for Seasons 18 to 22, a beautiful but only briefly used Dominic Glynn–inspired version for Season 23, and a Keff McCulloch–inspired version for Seasons 24 to 26, featuring the Three Guitars Mood 2 version of the middle eight. For the New Series, a version for the Christopher Eccleston/David Tennant Era featuring Jane Aubourg on strings, a version for the Matt Smith Era, and a version for the Capaldi era which is a considerable improvement on Murray Gold’s angry-bees-in-a-theremin version of the Doctor Who theme.

Cameron always says that he enjoys creating new versions of the theme. “Do Three Guitars Mood 2 in the style of this era’s version of the Doctor Who theme” is a ridiculous brief, given how unlike the two pieces of music are in style and structure, but in each new version Cameron has produced something immediately identifiable, clever and beautiful.

Cameron has gone on to compose the themes for Untitled Star Trek Project and 500 Year Diary. It has been credibly estimated that by 2045 he will be employed full-time as Composer in Residence to the Flight Through Entirety Podcasting Consortium.

Phones and Doors

Sunday 5 June 2016 — Episode 76: K9 and Commentary

Time for FTE to go off format again, with a few new firsts. It’s our first spinoff — K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend, first broadcast around Christmas 1981, about a week before Peter Davison’s first appearance as the Doctor in Castrovalva. Secondly, it’s our first FTE commentary. And thirdly, it’s also Todd’s first podcast commentary.

Todd has arrived for the recording armed with an insightful complaint about the script for A Girl’s Best Friend: that the writer, Terence Dudley, appears to have an obsession with phones and doors. But he is unfamilar with the new microphone setup required by the commentary, and so he booms in a far louder and scratchier voice than everybody else.

Hilariously, this works. Throughout our conversation about this ridiculous episode, Todd can be heard repeatedly bellowing Door! and Phone! with terrifying frequency. His observation becomes a useful critical tool for analysing Four to Doomsday just two episodes later, and it is even referred to in the most recent episode of 500 Year Diary nearly eight years after that.

Bidmead Fatwa

Sunday 12 June 2016 — Episode 77: I Know Very Little about Telebiogenesis

Incidentally, Episode 77 of Flight Through Entirety is the first one that I edited myself. I can’t remember exactly how or when Brendan asked me, but I think he was a bit overloaded and needed someone to help out. He gave me a month to do my first episode and graciously allowed me to send him several drafts for feedback. And it went well. For the rest of the Classic Series run, I would go from editing every third episode to every second episode, and then one (short) season where I edited all the episodes to give time for Brendan to complete the difficult post-production work on Episode 112, of which more later.

(Pro tip: you can easily tell who edited an episode: it’s always the editor who writes and reads out the closing credits.)

But that’s not why we’re here.

Here’s how Episode 77 starts:

– Oh, Nathan, you’ve been looking forward to this so much.

— It’s really terrible

[laughter]

– It’s, um, like I haven’t really been looking forward to the 80s, which is why the most recent Doctor Who story I’ve seen is Castrovalva, I haven’t been looking ahead. I have to steel myself to get to Four to Doomsday. And you know, I’ve had a pretty high opinion of Chris Bidmead. I think, you know, Logopolis, while sort of flawed and plotless is a great culmination of a really great season.

– Plotless, it’s my life.

– But this is the first story of a new Doctor. It’s really important. And it’s the first new Doctor for seven years, it’s really crucial that this comes off. And he just comes up with something flawed and plotless again.

All very reasonable, you would think. The sort of top-quality criticism you’ve come to expect from the internet’s only cake-based Doctor Who podcast.

But then friend of the podcast Steven B at-mentioned Christopher H Bidmead on Twitter while approvingly quoting our publicity tweet for the episode. And Bidmead listened, with horrifying results. Steven’s tweet no longer survives, but here’s the rest of the exchange.

So that’s how Christopher H Bidmead became patron saint of the podcast. And when we quote his description, we do abridge it to remove any perceived padding, thus:

Episode Zero Drops off the Feed

Sunday 29 January 2017 — Episode 100: Even Better with Your Face

This is the day that Episode Zero disappeared from the podcast feed, becoming completely unavailable on anyone’s podcatcher of choice. But none of us even noticed.

It was a few weeks later that people started complaining. Every time we released a new episode, the earliest available episode would disappear from the feed. For a podcast whose premise was a flight through the entirety of Doctor Who, this was a Very Bad Thing.

Here’s how it happened. Flight Through Entirety was hosted on Squarespace, which was a regular advertiser on the podcasts I was listening to at the time, and which made it dead easy to create a podcast. But the podcast feed it created was limited to 100 episodes. I contacted Squarespace support to find out if anything could be done, and when they said no, I decided to turn flightthroughentirety.com into a self-hosted WordPress site.

It didn’t take too long to make the change. And no-one would even have noticed it, except that I didn’t yet understand how podcast episode IDs worked, and so a lot of people found their podcatcher full of old episodes of FTE that were now marked as new.

Not a particularly fascinating milestone, I admit, unless you’re me. But since then, I’ve reimplemented the FTE website twice, once using a tool called Jekyll, and once using Eleventy. And now that FTE has turned into a podcast network, I have six Eleventy sites that host podcasts: FTE, Untitled Star Trek Project, Startling Barbara Bain, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, Maximum Power, and Bondfinger.

I have always been interested in the web, learning, tinkering, putting up toy websites: my website the Randomiser is two of our picks of the week in Episode Zero of FTE. But now, ten years later, I know so much more about developing for the web, and I’m still learning all the time. It’s a source of fun, creativity, joy and frustration that I never expected when we started all this ten years ago.

Time Inc.

Tuesday 30 May 2017 — Episode 112: Time Inc.

This is Flight Through Entirety’s most impressive creative achievement. An audio drama production of Eric Saward’s unused script for Episode 14 of The Trial of a Time Lord.

We had a copy of the very script Eric Saward took with him as he flounced out of the Doctor Who production office in 1986, and we had Dominic Glynn’s permission to use his incidental music from the real Episodes 13 and 14. And we had the perfect cast of shameless theatrical nerds.

The result is really great, and it’s all down to Brendan’s direction. He was every bit as serious and competent as you might expect. He organised several recording sessions. He set up microphone stands and prepared copies of the scripts. He coached us as we performed, and he was patient as we struggled with Saward’s weird and inhuman dialogue.

And to make it work, he spent months in post-production. I took over editing duties on Flight Through Entirety for a few weeks while he worked on the episode — processing the audio we had recorded, adding foley and sound effects and laying in incidental music.

I think it’s the best episode we have ever done; and it’s also the best production that that script could have ever hoped for. And it serves as final definitive proof that Pip and Jane are better at Doctor Who than Eric Saward.

End of an Era

Sunday 10 December 2017 — Episode 131: Thank You Very Much for Listening, and Good Night

This is our longest episode by far, at over 2¾ hours. Here’s why. The podcast Brendan conceived is over; when it comes back in nine months’ time, it will be trying to be the same in many ways, but it won’t ever quite be this again.

And so it’s time to say goodbye. Todd is doing his traditional job as host, but he has twenty-six seasons to cover, and there’s far too much material to get through. By the end, we’re exhausted, and even though we know we’ll all be back for the New Series, Brendan will be taking a break, it won’t ever quite be this again, and everything’s gotta end sometime or nothing would ever get started. Which is why by the end of the episode, both Brendan and I are in tears.

When I listen to this episode a couple of months after recording, just before uploading it, I’m staying by myself in Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples. I cry again.

New Beginning

Sunday 26 August 2018 — Episode 132: Fear of a Welsh Planet

Of course, after all that, the four of us are back, same as ever, just nine months later. I’m reading the intro. Same software, different case.

Enter James Sellwood

Sunday 2 September 2018 — Episode 133: Literally Mooning the Audience

Brendan intended to take a bit of a break from Flight Through Entirety after handing the podcast over: he is only in three episodes of our coverage of Series 1. And so this week, Flight Through Entirety gets its first new host since Todd Beilby — James Sellwood. By this point, James has already done a few dozen episodes of Bondfinger, and he has made his FTE début as the Master in our lavish production of Time Inc.

Two more new hosts will join the show in the next few months, to bring the total to seven. Peter Griffiths will make his début in our episode on The Long Game (Episode 138: Eat a Kronkburger), and will start making regular appearances from then on. And just months after that, Simon Moore will join us for his first episode, (Episode 151: Tropes, for Want of a Better Word), in which, as part of a long game of our own, we trick him into saying the word trope and then name the episode after it.

James is not the most voluble of the FTE hosts, but he is one of the most valuable. It’s James who writes the schedules, contacts the guests, deals with last-minute changes of plans and smooths over every difficulty. And as always, competence is its own punishment: James now plays the same role in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power.

But that’s not all.

Like the FTE theme, the FTE logo changes to reflect what’s happening in Doctor Who. During the Classic Series, Brendan created seven different logos, including a beautiful logo used only once, for our sixties Dalek movies episode, and he worked alongside graphic designer Anthony Wells on an eighth logo for the McCoy era. When we moved over to the new series, I created a logo for the RTD era and one for the first year of the Matt Smith era.

But by then, James had already inveigled his way into the process. He started by combining my logos with different backgrounds to create different podcast artwork for each season. After that, he moved on to creating background artwork for the website. By Series 6, he was creating logos, podcast artwork and website backgrounds, an arrangement that continues to the present day. His attention to detail borders on obsessive, as you will already know if you noticed the individual logos, podcast artwork and website backgrounds he created for every episode of Series 7A, and the beautiful artwork he created for our 50th anniversary week in 2022.

(That last paragraph was exhausting, but I also have to mention his beautiful logos for 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire and Maximum Power.)

Welcome Aboard, Max

Sunday 16 September 2018 — Episode 135: Men in Massive Suits

Just two episodes later, another first. In our Aliens of London episode, we are joined by our first guest, friend-of-the-podcast Max Jelbart. Aliens of London was the first episode of Doctor Who he ever watched, back in 2005 when he was seven. After his début this week and the following week, he has been back to join us for four more episodes, most recently our Last Christmas episode (Episode 266: The Tangerine in the Window).

Since Max joined us in September 2018, we have been joined by no less than thirty other guests. I can’t mention one without mentioning them all. Some of them are people we already knew, or at least people known to one or two of us, and some of them were people James contacted online, out of the blue. Some are actors and writers, and some are people who’ve worked in telly. Some of them have become friends, even very close friends. Some have been back a bunch of times, and some have only joined us once. But they all love Doctor Who, and they all gave up their time to come and chat with us about it. So thank you to all of them.

Nathan and Calvin Get Married

Sunday 23 September 2018 — Episode 136: Less Bum Shots

In late 2017, Australians were given the chance to vote in a non-compulsory non-binding postal survey about whether same-sex marriages should be permitted in Australia. The result of the survey was published on 15 November 2017, while I was on holidays on my own in Amsterdam; it was 61.6% in favour. Same-sex marriage became legal in Australia on 9 December 2017.

I left Europe and met up with Calvin again in Cambodia on 27 December. We had never really talked about getting married — it seemed an odd thing to do fifteen years into a relationship — but I think I was the one who brought it up first, and by the time the holiday finished Calvin was already devising fiercely detailed plans.

We got married nine months later. During the reception, while I was making my speech, I think, the WordPress site quietly released Episode 136: Less Bum Shots, which was our discussion of the Series 1 episode World War Three. (Yes, an omen. Shut up.) I dedicated the episode to Calvin.

My speech was the only speech at the reception: it went for about two minutes, and finished with the words, “Thank you very much for listening and good night.”

Another thing happened at the wedding, a thing that I was only vaguely aware of at the time. Jodie Whittaker’s first season as the Doctor was due to start in just two weeks, on 7 October. I think it was James’s husband Jason who suggested that we should do a reaction podcast for the episodes of this historic new era.

Episode 1 of Jodie into Terror dropped on 11 October 2018, and we ended up doing doing a podcast episode for each of her 31 episodes, remaining positive — or at least funny — for the entirety of the four years.

Love & Monsters

Sunday 19 May 2019 — Episode 157: LINDA for Short

The first rule of Flight Through Entirety is that we talk about Doctor Who. We don’t talk about the podcast or the podcasting process, and we don’t focus too heavily on our own personal lives.

But since Love & Monsters throws out a lot of the established rules of Doctor Who, for our Love & Monsters episode, we decided to throw out the rules as well. It’s a Doctor Who-lite episode about the first Doctor-lite episode.

For about an hour at the start of the episode, it’s 50-year-old me, 35-year-old Brendan and 20-year-old Max Jelbart, born at roughly 15-year intervals, with fan histories that intersected weirdly in so many ways over so many years. It’s three intertwined stories about how our love for Doctor Who has changed and enriched our lives.

After that, we talk about the Doctor Who episode Love & Monsters — a brilliant script, unjustly maligned by people who are bad at appreciating good television. Fight me.

Interlude: Untitled Star Trek Project Starts

Thursday 4 November 2021

People contact us out of the blue sometimes. It’s nice. At FTE, we’re mostly just sitting on a couch blathering about Doctor Who, which is pretty much what we were planning to do anyway, but sometimes people thank us for doing that — making them laugh or keeping them company or helping them get to sleep.

Joe Ford got in touch with me in October 2020, just to say hi and thank you for the podcast, and since then we have been in contact basically every day. Just over a year ago, we met in person for the first time, and I stayed with him for nearly two weeks — eating, podcasting, watching telly, sightseeing, hanging out. He is not the only friend I’ve made through the podcast, but he’s the closest friend I’ve made that way, and one of my closest friends ever.

Ahem. Back to business. I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation when Doctor Who went off the air in the late 80s, and Joe discovered Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when he was thirteen. So soon after we started talking, we realised we had yet another unhealthy shared obsession — a thing for which, in my experience, the only remedy is starting a podcast.

Untitled Star Trek Project has been running for 110 episodes. In duration, that’s a bit less than half the total length of Flight Through Entirety. I think it’s really fun and funny, it’s easy to make and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve done with it.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire Starts

Sunday 26 November 2023

On 25 October 2022, Jodie into Terror became the first of our podcasts to conclusively end. We had enjoyed doing a Doctor Who flashcast, and there was no doubt that we would continue doing one after the end of the Whittaker Era. But we needed to retire the name Jodie into Terror (an utterly brilliant name only made possible by the complex and mysterious forces of coincidence).

Listeners will already know that the first Russell T Davies Era is my favourite era of Doctor Who. The new flashcast — The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire — was named after my expectation that the second Russell T Davies Era would be great as well. And today, on our tenth anniversary, one day after the first broadcast of 73 Yards, I’m still confident that it was the right call.

500 Year Diary Starts

Sunday 14 April 2024 — Episode 281: Entering a New Phase

When Flight Through Entirety starts, the Doctor Who episodes we’re discussing are over 50 years old; by Episode 280, we’re discussing an episode that’s exactly eight years old. We’re starting to catch up with the present day.

But Flight Through Entirety is about Doctor Who episodes we’ve known and thought about for decades, episodes that we can place in the context of their time, their place in the show, the zeitgeist and our lives. And our flashcasts Jodie into Terror and The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire have already given us the chance to broadcast our knee-jerk reactions to the most recent episodes of the show. So right now, the only Doctor Who episodes we haven’t podcasted about are Capaldi’s last season and the Christmas Specials on either side of it.

So from 2025, Flight Through Entirety will be taking a bit of a rest, to allow the recent past of Doctor Who to become the more distant past before we start talking about it again.

To fill the gap, we launched 500 Year Diary, a Doctor Who podcast consisting of seasons of episodes that concentrate on a particular theme or idea. Season 1 of 500 Year Diary is called New Beginnings, and in it we discuss a few Doctor Who stories that served as soft relaunches for the show, as well as the actual launches of a couple of Doctor Who spinoffs. Season 2, The Second Coming, will be released early in 2025.

Because Flight Through Entirety and 500 Year Diary are so similar in tone and ethos, we decided to launch Season 1, Episode 1 of 500 Year Diary as Episode 281 of Flight Through Entirety as well. But now our bi-generated spinoff podcast has launched and headed off into the universe. Next stop, everywhere.

The Tenth Anniversary

Sunday 26 May 2024

— Well, it will just go on and on and on and on, because it’s part of our television, isn’t it? Why should it stop? There’s no evidence. Everybody’s been very successful at it.

Today is our tenth anniversary. In the last ten years, we have covered twenty-six seasons of Classic Doctor Who, the TV Movie, nine seasons of the new series, a number of Christmas specials and the run of specials in 2009. That’s 282 episodes, 18.41 gigabytes of MP3 files and a total duration of 11 days 12 hours 25 minutes and 48.199 seconds.

But that’s all the time we have for now. We’ll be back in just two months for Christmas in July and The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

Thank you very much for listening, and goodnight.