I'd already read probably the best Jamie / Zoe novel, Doctor Who - The Invasion, by Ian Marter, and also the worst, Doctor Who and the Dominators, also oddly enough by Ian Marter. Four of the other six are fairly standard efforts by Terrance Dicks, but the other two present points of interest.

( 35) Doctor Who - The Wheel in Space, by Terrance Dicks )
( 36) Doctor Who - The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling )
( 37) Doctor Who and the Krotons, by Terrance Dicks )
( 38) Doctor Who - The Seeds of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 39) Doctor Who - The Space Pirates, by Terrance Dicks )
( 40) Doctor Who and the War Games, by Malcolm Hulke )

So, that's it for the Second Doctor novelisations. I finished up my read-through of the First Doctor novels by regretting that almost nobody manages to capture Hartnell's performance on the printed page. Troughton (who perhaps put less of his own personality into the part than any other Doctor before Davison) is easier to pin down, the visual aspects of his performance more easily described. Of the other regulars, I felt that Victoria gains most, and Zoe loses most, on the printed page. Perhaps it is easier to inject some gravitas into the rather two-dimensional Victoria than to convey how stunningly cute Wendy Padbury is as Zoe.

The best of the Second Doctor novelisations are John Peel's Doctor Who - The Power of the Daleks, Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, Peter Ling's Doctor Who - The Mind Robber and Ian Marter's Doctor Who - The Invasion, with honourable mentions to Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, the other three early Season 5 books, and Doctor Who and the War Games. None is quite as good as the best of the First Doctor novelisations, though.

Since I am reading these on my commute and am taking a long weekend chez scattyme in France, it'll be a while before I do the next lot.

Just because I'm reading the novels doesn't mean I am neglecting my duties to the original classic television series (though I imagine I will finish the novels first). But I realise I've fallen behind a bit in recording my reactions to them since the start of last month.

( The Brain of Morbius: Fourth Doctor and Sarah reprise Frankenstein )
( The Pirate Planet: Fourth Doctor, Romana I and K-9 do battle with Douglas Adams )
( Warrior's Gate: Fourth Doctor, Romana II, K-9 and Adric at the junction of the universes )
( Arc of Infinity: Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa meet the future Sixth Doctor and Omega )
( The Two Doctors: Sixth Doctor and Peri meet Second Doctor and Jamie and do battle with the Sontarans )
( Time and the Rani: newly regenerated Seventh Doctor and Mel deal with renegade Time Lady )

So, in summary, The Brain of Morbius and Warrior's Gate are real classics, and The Two Doctors held up better than I had expected; skip the rest.

These five Who books are all from 1967-68 stories, but from different ends of the chronology of publication. The first of these was in fact the very last of the official novelisations produced by Target/Virgin, in 1993; the other four were among the first five Second Doctor books, published between 1974 and 1978 by Target. Having been underwhelmed by my last clutch of Who books reviewed, I'm happy to report that all of these are good stuff.

( 27) Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel )
( 28) Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 29) Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, by Terrance Dicks )
( 30) Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors, by Brian Hayles )
( 31) Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks )

So that's it for the Jamie/Victoria combination. While Victoria, apart from in Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, is the screamiest girl companion since Susan, the affectionate interactions between the Tardis crew are almost (but not quite) as entertaining on the page as on the screen.

All five of these books are medium good, and four of them are important as the perspective through which fans of my age first encountered the Second Doctor. The best of them is certainly Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, which wraps up one line of continuity (the Yeti and Travers) while setting up another (the Brigadier and UNIT). But all are worth adding to the serious Who fan's library. (The same can't be said for the other two novels of this run, alas.)

Five novelisations of Second Doctor stories, all originally broadcast in 1967. None of them specially good, and a couple which are pretty dire, but all very quick reading for my commute.

( 22) Doctor Who - The Highlanders, by Gerry Davis )
( 23) Doctor Who - The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson )
( 24) Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 25) Doctor Who - The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black )
( 26) Doctor Who - The Faceless Ones, by Terrance Dicks )

In summary, your life will not be incomplete for lack of having read any of these! These are the five books featuring Ben, Polly and Jamie in the regular cast; it is remarkable how much more interesting Polly is as a character than the other two. Shame she didn't stay longer.

20) Doctor Who - The Power of the Daleks, by John Peel

John Peel continues his run of excellent Who books with this, the first story of Patrick Troughton's incarnation of Doctor Who. It is a favourite of mine anyway - I cannot understand why fannish opinion generally prefers the later Evil of the Daleks - but Peel, equipped with David Whitaker's original scripts (retrieved, apparently, from his ex-wife's attic) and benefiting from some editorial decision to give him 250 rather than 125 pages to tell the story, has done an excellent job.

On reflection, it's also because this is a relatively unusual Dalek story, presenting them not as a rival galactic empire to us humans but as in some way a dark reflection of our own desires about ourselves. The only other televised story that comes close to doing that is Robert Shearman's Ninth Doctor story.

Anyway, Peel turns a good TV story (as far as we can judge, since it is one of the lost ones) into a good novel. An encouraging start to my reading up on the Second Doctor.

Having mostly enjoyed the first set of these, I can say that the second set is of the same order of quality.

( Mother Russia: Steven tells a story of the First Doctor in Napoleonic times )

( Helicon Prime: Jamie and the Second Doctor on holiday, solve a mystery )

( Old Soldiers: Brigadier recounts a German adventure with the Third Doctor )

( The Catalyst: Leela and the Fourth Doctor in Edwardian times )

So, try the first of these, and if you like it, experiment with the rest; good performances from the key actors, not so sure about the story in some cases.

Via a kind person in a friends-locked entry where he says very flattering things about me: Before You Know It: free downloads for first steps in dozens of languages. We've been playing with this at home for the last few days (me on Russian, F on French) and enjoying it. Takes a while to download and set up but great fun.

Patrick Troughton, the day before he died. Haven't yet watched all of this, but it seems both fun and poignant.

manjushra and nickbarnes exchange mathematical poetical riddles. (Answers here.)

2) Doctor Who - Fury from the Deep, by Victor Pemberton

Ian alerted me to this novelisation (published in 1986, of a 1968 story) as being possibly one of the better ones of the later Target run, and I got it off eBay pretty easily. I admit I (and even more so my wife) had found the original story a bit lacking; since then, however, I've seen the few surviving clips on the "Lost In Time" DVD and it really does look much better than it sounded. Also, in the context of a Doctor Who which was moving more to contemporary England as a setting, it makes more sense; it is a successful (and maybe in some ways better) prototype for some of the Pertwee stories. (Drilling-awakes-ancient-enemy of course goes back to Lovecraft and before, but reappears in Who in Inferno and The Power of Kroll at least.)

Anyway, the book is OK, and as you can see has prompted me to re-evaluate the original story, but it is not a great work of literature. As with too many of the Target novelisations, it is mostly narrated as if the author were simply writing down what is visible on the TV screen, and Pemberton's occasional excursions into tight third are actually jarring and often unsuccessful. The Doctor and companions get apparently killed so often that it loses dramatic impact (and this occasionally calls forth thunderously bad prose, citing for instance pp 129-130). On the other hand, the book does make more sense than the original story and fills in some of the plot gaps and backgrounds to the characters, and Victoria's decision to depart is decently foreshadowed. And the monster, as so often, is more convincing on the printed page. So I don't regret buying it.
------------------

I had originally planned to do an overall piece on the first two Doctor Whos, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, shortly after I finished getting through all their stories in the summer. But that was a point when energy levels were generally a bit low, and anyway it actually makes more sense to consider them together with Jon Pertwee. Tom Baker's is the first Doctor I can remember watching consistently first time round, so my experience of all of the earlier three was formed first by the Target novelisations, then by Doctor Who magazine (and the Making of Doctor Who and the Jean-Marc Lofficier volumes), then by occasional viewing of surviving series, and only very lately, in the last year or so, by going through them systematically. And in fact the first three made similar numbers of stories (29, 21, 24) and episodes (134, 119, 128), all well behind T Baker but unmatched by any other subsequent Doctor (Davison ties with Troughton for number of stories but is way behind on episodes), so we are comparing like with like to a greater extent than is possible with any other grouping of three Doctors.

( William Hartnell: First Doctor, 1963-1966 )

( Patrick Troughton: Second Doctor, 1966-1969 )

( Jon Pertwee: Third Doctor, 1970-1974 )

I think it will be a while before I do another post like this!

12) Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book - Volume One: The Sixties, ed. Stephen James Walker

150 pages of interviews with people who had been involved with the making of Doctor Who in the 1960s. Some are more enlightening than others - the most interesting (slightly to my surprise) are the reflections of designers Barry Newbery, Raymond Cusick and John Wood. I wished others had been a bit more probing, especially since, sadly, many of the interviewees are no longer available. Only two actors are included - Anneke Wills and Peter Purves. Most of Dennis Spooner's anecdotes are disproved by the footnotes. A useful resource for fans of this period of Doctor Who, but not really a casual read for people not already familiar with the subject matter.

I've been listening to a few of the BBC cds of stories which are also available on video. Why? Because I have more time for audio than video in my day, and I wanted to see if it made much difference to my enjoyment of the stories. Maybe it's just the way I watch these things, but I found for two out of three of the stories I found my experience of them enhanced in some way.

( The Tenth Planet )

( The Gunfighters )

( The Dominators )

1) ( Did William Hartnell cause disruption on the set of The Seeds of Death? )

2) ( Child who won a Doctor Who competition in 1976 is now a Tory candidate??? )

I have now seen all of the Second Doctor televised stories (or listened to the surviving audios), shortly after finishing the First Doctor. Two long posts (or perhaps one even longer one) now brewing about their respective performances; but I am glad I ended my exploration of the Troughton era on a fairly high note.

( explanation )

( geopolitics )

In summary, one of the good ones from Troughton's last season.

The Wheel In Space was the last episode in Patrick Troughton's second season as the Doctor, introducing Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and with the Cybermen back again. It has a mixed reputation among fans (and I have to admit that the astronomy is drastically inaccurate, and the plot, as so often with Cyberman stories, makes no sense at all), but I really liked it. In particular, I loved the atmosphere and appeaarance of the Wheel itself, a space station with a multi-national crew including psycho boss, sensible woman who is really keeping it all going, and the other various roles - including Zoe herself, brought up to be logical and knowledgeable, but with the Doctor and Jamie opening her mind to other possibilities. (The crew also includes one of Doctor Who's rare overtly Irish characters, Sean Flannigan, played by James Mellor, who also plays a non-Irish alien leader in the first episode of The Mutants; while we're on the subject, the mysterious but vital substance bernalium is named after Irish-born scientist J.D. Bernal.) To describe this as a mere remake of The Moonbase does not do it justice at all; it is what The Moonbase should have been.

And Zoe! Certainly now my favourite pre-Sarah Jane Smith companion. Her first exchange with Jamie is quite hilarious. Since four of the six episodes are missing, I listened to the CDs with linking narration by Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe; she does it fine, though I was not as impressed with the scripting as I have been for some of the others. (The two surviving episodes are on the Lost In Time DVD set.)

The Krotons was shown to us uncomprehending fans in 1981 as part of the Five Faces of Doctor Who season, along with An Unearthly Child, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis, one for each Doctor to date. The choice was dictated by the fact that it was then the only surviving four-part Troughton story (Tomb of the Cybermen has since been recovered, thank goodness). Unfortunately, in a season which had palpable hits like The Invasion, The War Games and The Mind Robber, this is one of the misses (see The Dominators and The Space Pirates); which is quite surprising when you consider that the writer was Robert Holmes and the director David Maloney - the same team that was later to produce The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Oh well, one of those occasions aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, or in this case Homeri. It's difficult to say quite why it doesn't work; the dodgy production values don't help, especially the egg-box monsters with comically spinning heads (apparently, in a Spinal Tap moment, their costumes were made a size too small); but perhaps it fails most notably on the grounds where The Wheel In Space succeeds, that the Gond society just isn't very believable and they look like actors stuck in a futuristic set. There is, however, an amusing Zoe costume malfunction at the start of episode 4 (at about 0:40 in).

That leaves me only The Seeds of Death to go of the entire black and white era. But we're going on holiday next week, so it will be a while before I finish watching it and write it up. (Non-Who fans on the f-list breathe a sigh of relief at this news.)

tijsmans was asking what classic Who he should watch to get up to speed (or, as he put it, to become "a legitimate Who fanboy"). He already has Genesis of the daleks and The Deadly Assassin; my other recommendations to him were as follows.

( recommendations )

Discussion welcome!

Well, this brings me to the end of the First Doctor stories, and almost to the end of the Second Doctor (just The Wheel In Space and The Seeds of Death to go; and strictly I saw The Seeds of Death some years ago). Will do a full retrospective some time soon (probably when I am on holiday). For now, notes on these three:

( An Unearthly Child )
( The Underwater Menace )
( The Faceless Ones )

Anyway, An Unearthly Child is a must-see; the two early Troughton stories are not.

So, on an afternoon when I am being bumped around by a peculiarly named small airline, wondering if I will reach my destination, I happen to be listening to The Faceless Ones, a 1967 Doctor Who story about people disappearing from aeroplanes owned by a peculiarly named small airline.

I just thought you should know.

Big Finish's series of audio plays featuring the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Doctor Whos have been a roaring success. Unfortunately they cannot do the same for the first four Doctors, with the actors who played 1-3 having shuffled off this mortal coil and #4, the glorious Tom Baker, being famously unwilling to reprise the role. So what they have done is to get four actors who played companions of the first four doctors tell the story of a "missing adventure", with one guest star in each case providing the voice of the chief villain. It's a grand idea, and I liked all of these, though each had small problems which one can overlook.

( Frostfire: Vicki, reminiscing in Carthage, tells the story of her meeting with Jane Austen and the Phoenix )

( Fear of the Daleks: Zoe relates her strange dreams )

( The Blue Tooth: Liz Shaw and the Cybermen )

( The Beautiful People: Romana and the health club )

But anyway, in all cases the fun outweighs the annoyances, and they are all worth adding to your library.

Just in case you are interested: I'm mirroring all my Old Skool Doctor Who reviews to mavic_chen:

First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Eighth Doctor

But NB nothing will appear there that hasn't already appeared here first.

Some time I shall think about how to systematise my reviews of the spinoff novels and audios as well.

Sarah Jane/Rose fanvid, by lisamw. Lovely.

daniel_saunders has been listening to The Space Pirates, and likes it more than I did.

This was a fortuitously good paired viewing of Doctor Who stories, the first being the 1968 Second Doctor story with Jamie and Zoe, shown between The Dominators and The Invasion, and the second a Fourth Doctor story without companions, which I remember vividly from its original broadcast in 1976.

( The Mind Robber )

( The Deadly Assassin )

Anyway, these are both essential viewing for the Who fan, and I think The Deadly Assassin keeps its place at the top of my personal list of Greatest Ever old Who stories, despite its lack of gender balance.

I know you have all been dying to watch my seminar yesterday about the Northern Ireland elections last week. Apparently it is now online here. I haven't yet watched it so I have no idea how embarrassing it is (or not). (Edited to add: Needs to be illustrated with the Powerpoint.)

I misjudged the time of driving back down to Dublin airport so missed my flight, and had to get the first one back this morning. However, this did have the unexpected benefit of an evening chez wwhyte, watching our selection of classic Who episodes: he chose The Ambassadors of Death #1 and The Deadly Assassin #1, I picked The Mind Robber #1 and The Dalek Invasion of Earth #3. I had earlier raided his stash of Target novelisations, for reasons which will become clear in due course.

And eventually caught the early plane this morning without incident, and now going home on the train.
------------------

3) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1966-1969, by Tat Wood and Laurence Miles (.co.uk, .com)

I read the first in this series last month: a wonderful cornucopia of facts and analysis of the early years of everyone's favourite Time Lord. I think the second volume, dealing with the last two William Hartnell stories and the Patrick Troughton era, actually exceeds the high standard set by the first volume. Again, we have the exhaustive picking apart of each story looking for its sources of inspiration, broken up by substantive essays on more-or-less relevant topics - the one near the end, "Does Plot Matter", has considerable analytical depth and genre-wide interest - I hope someone (like perhaps Strange Horizons?) might consider approaching the authors to put it on-line for general information.

Lots of things I loved about this book. The vicious wit with which the authors savage any aspects of their favourite series that they disapprove of. (The chapter on every single story has a section devoted to Things That Don't Make Sense. Sometimes these sections are long, and sometimes they are longer.) Wood and Miles seem to particularly enjoy being able to argue at forty years' distance with Innes Lloyd, who was producer of the programme for much of this time, on the grounds that he betrayed the original Verity Lambert concept. Lloyd has been dead since 1991 and so can't argue back. But the tone is witty rather than polemical and myself I think a more balanced view of Lloyd's achievements emerges from these pages despite the authors' efforts.

Two minor mysteries that had troubled me in the last few months are explained: i) Colin Baker's narration of The Macra Terror is terrible not because Colin Baker is reading it but because John Nathan Turner wrote it; ii) Ian Marter's novelisation of The Enemy of the World is incomprehensible because the publisher slashed large chunks out of it to bring it down to the right page count. There is learned discussion of i) whose accent is the worst in the entire history of Doctor Who, ii) whether or not anyone in the TARDIS (Doctor excepted) ever had sex, and iii) the possible alchemical significance of mercury in the works of David Whitaker. There is constant mockery of Victoria. And there is a very thoughtful piece on why The Power of the Daleks is such a good story. I read it all except the chapter on The Mind Robber, because the authors insist very strongly that you should see it in all its glory first.

(One small nit-pick - The Third Man is set in Vienna, not Berlin, which was divided into four parts, not three. But this is tangential to its likely influence on The Invasion.)

I cannot imagine that future volumes in this series can possibly be as good as this one - but I shall buy them anyway.

Two audios and a DVD edited release this time, none of them therefore available as they were when first broadcast (in 1965, 1966 and 1983 respectively).

( The Myth Makers )

( The Massacre )

( The Five Doctors )

I have now Run Out of classic Doctor Who to listen to as I commute to and from work. Luckily there are still plenty of Big Finish audios out there, and also I hope to do some shopping in London next week...

( The Smugglers )

( The Highlanders )

( The Macra Terror )

( The Enemy of the World )

In conclusion: All of these are fun, none of them is outstanding, none of them is embarrassing either (apart from my reservations about the narration for The Macra Terror).

1) The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks (.co.uk, .com)

This was the first of the BBC's series of Eighth Doctor books (the book-of-the-TV-film apparently being in a different category). I had read one of these before and was not madly impressed. Here, however, we are on comfortable ground; Terrance Dicks' record of writing more Doctor Who novels and novelisations than anyone else is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon.

Though it really ought to be called Doctor Who and the Heroic RetCons. Dicks uses the opportunity of creating a new fictional environment for the Eighth Doctor to try and iron out some of the grosser continuity problems left by both the Eighth Doctor TV film, and the Trial of a Time Lord (and also a wee bit of clearing up from The Five Doctors, which I think I must try and watch again soon). Sensibly, rather than pull all eight Doctors together (he had after all written The Five Doctors and was script editor for the programme at the time of The Three Doctors) he has the Eighth Doctor dropping in on his predecessors at various points of the programme's established timeline.

The most effective piece of writing in the book is a description of the Third Doctor chasing the Master across southern England after his escape from prison in The Sea Devils. The least convincing bit is actually the characterisation of the Eighth Doctor himself. Lance Parkin got this rather better in his Dying Days, the last of the Virgin New Adventures, the last before Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levene cruelly had the franchise removed from them; in Terrance Dicks's hands, he comes across as rather like the Third Doctor, but a little less arrogant. On a tangent, I was interested that Dicks chose to place the Fourth Doctor encounter with the Eighth in the world of his vampire story, State of Decay, and its novel sequel.

Anyway, the fun bits outnumber the embarrassing bits, just about. Certainly worth reading for a sense of where the BBC thought the Eight Doctor might lead them, and also for the heroic retconning. I still feel no desire whatever to catch up with the Trial of a Time Lord season.

Two more classic Doctor Who series watched/listened to recently, the first featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki having a holiday during the reign of the emperor Nero, and the second plunging the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe into a well-intentioned attempt to do high Space Opera. All four episodes of The Romans are still available; only #2 of six of The Space Pirates survived the purges, though the full soundtrack with linking narration by Fraser Hines is available.

The Romans has a considerable, and surprisingly effective, comedy element, carried almost entirely by Hartnell's Doctor. On a whim, he decides to leave their holiday villa and go to Rome (taking Vicki with him) pretending to be a murdered musician, and succeeds in fending off Nero's jealous attempots to have him killed. There is a much less funny sub-plot involving Ian and Barbara, kidnapped by slavers, who also end up in Rome - Ian as a gladiator, Barbara as palace slave, pursued by the lustful Emperor - before making their escape. (Somewhere there must be a definitive list of the characters who have lusted after Barbara: Ganatus in a very gentlemanly way in The Daleks, the much nastier Vasor in The Keys of Marinus, the equally nasty El Akir in The Crusade, and now Nero.) The Ian/Barbara chemistry is very sweet - they have a nice joke between them about looking in the fridge. The script rather neatly resists bringing the travellers together, so that neither the Doctor and Vicki nor Ian and Barbara ever discovers what the other pair of characters is up to in Rome. Hartnell is simply superb, utterly watchable, imperious, funny, devious. It's a shame that Maureen O'Brien can't quite rise to the challenge of being his straight man, but this was only her second story, so I suppose one must make allowances.

The Space Pirates features the TARDIS crew getting caught up in a conflict between pirates and law enforcement in outer space. My biggest problem with it was the accents of two of the key supporting characters: General Nikolai Hermack, played by plummy-voiced Jack May, later briefly famous as Garkbit the waiter in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and less briefly as Nelson Gabriel in The Archers, who can't quite decide if he is doing his usual toff or something slightly more foreign; and even worse, Gordon Gostelow's veteran miner Milo Clancey, whose voice wanders all over the southern and western United States with hints of Irish and Antipodean as well. Especially when you have to experience five of the six episodes on audio, and #3 is of particularly bad quality, it is a real distraction from your enjoyment. Having said that, it's not as bad a story as some people say, though it is rather unusual - the Doctor and his friends are more acted upon than acting, and spend a lot of time trapped or locked up while the story continues around them. To judge from the surviving episode, it looked like a half-decent effort, though my long-buried physicist instincts slightly rebelled at the immense violations of celestial mechanics committed by the writer.

Neither of these is essential Who, but both had their good points. The Romans is worth getting for amusement, The Space Pirates only for completists I think.

( why I am writing this now )

( The Abominable Snowmen )

( The Web of Fear )

( Downtime )

Summary: Get "The Web of Fear" - essential listening for the Who fan. And if you like it, get "The Abominable Snowmen" as well.

Via calapine, a large number of Doctors Who from 1985.