2) [Doctor Who] Managra, by Stephen Marley

djm4 recommended this Doctor Who Missing Adventure a while back, describing it as "bonkers, but in a very good way". Indeed. Great fun as Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith rush around a future landscape including reincarnations of Cardinal Richelieu, Casanova, Byron, another Byron, Mary Shelley, and various popes and poets. I think I just about understood what was going on, but it hardly matters.

Bought this in London last week. Excellent value - six Hartnell epsiodes of classic story, plus various mini-documentaries, including a short silent film shot by Carole Ann Ford on her last day as Susan (featuring William Hartnell with no wig and looking ten years younger).

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is good - in fact, the first three episodes are excellent, with the Dalek coming out of the river at the end of episode one, and episode three a real high point, with the scenes of the Daleks in London, wandering past Westminster, congregating in Trafalgar Square, and patrolling the Albert Memorial (having obviously somehow got up the steps) particularly effective. That is also the episode where Susan tells David of her feeling of dislocation: "I never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to. I’ve never had any real identity." And the incidental music is great - I hadn't heard of the composer Francis Chagrin before but he was apparently a well known film composer; shall look out for his other work. There is a real feeling of occupied Europe resisting the Nazis (and I write this in a village which experienced that directly rather than just in the cinema).

It is a bit let down by episode four, with no Doctor in sight and the rather rubber-suited Slyther, and the Daleks' actual plan when revealed stretches our suspension of disbelief. But the pace is kept up (especially by Jacqueline Hill as Barbara).

And finally the departure of Susan. Beautifully done, the first time that a member of the regular cast had left the show. "Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine," says the Doctor, promising to return, but we know he never will.

I will delete this journal later today, in protest at LiveJournal's stupid policies about user icons, which effectively make breast-feeding too obscene to be depicted here. I don't ever intend to use an icon of a baby being breastfed myself, but I think LiveJournal's policy against it is unreasonable and am joining the protest.