5) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1985-1989

This is the last (so far) of the About Time series of guides to Doctor Who, covering not only all the Seventh Doctor series and all but the first of the Sixth Doctor stories, but also the 1999 TV movie, the misconceived 1993 Dimensions in Time piece, The Curse of Fatal Death and the two Peter Cushing movies. Tat Wood is the main credited author (Lawrence Miles being absent this time, but with "additional material" by Lars Pearson and a defence of The Two Doctors by Robert Shearman).

As in previous volumes, Wood's sarcastic yet affectionate humour makes it a good read, even though it's the period of the programme's history I probably know least well. There are some brilliantly sardonic one-liners which I was regrettably unable to refrain from reading aloud to anyone who would listen. The explanatory essays are as good as ever. Slightly disappointed with the editing - there seem to be a lot more typoes than usual, and some other structural glitches as well. But any serious fan needs to get this.

1) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1970-1974, by Laurence Miles and Tat Wood

Though third in chronological sequence, this was the first of the About Time series published, covering precisely the years of Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor, and almost as precisely the years of Barry Letts as producer and Terrance Dicks as script editor. It's a huge change of setting for the show with almost two thirds of the 24 stories - including the whole of the first Pertwee season - set on contemporary Earth with the UNIT team. (Compare precisely one contemporary adventure, plus some odd bits and pieces [including the first ever episode], of the 29 Hartnell stories, and a fairly steady rate of 10-20% for the remainder of the classic series; compare, of course, also 100% of the eighth Doctor's on-screen adventures, and a third of the stories since the 2005 revival.)

Miles and Wood have done a very good job of identifying the roots of each story, literary, political and televisual. It's not yet at the levels of genius that their Volume 2 reached, but there are some glorious moments, including the frightening similarities between Jon Pertwee, Jimmy Saville and Bruce Forsythe. They have also yet to give in to the unfortunate enthusiasm for endnotes which is one of the few really annoying things about later volumes. (The five fairly restrained end-notes here concern Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley, Sooty and Sweep, the aforementioned Bruce Forsythe, and Catweazle.) There are the usual discursive essays, of which the two best are probably on the importance of the incidental music and on the implied history of UK politics in Doctor Who.

Anyway, I've ordered the more cerebral-looking Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, which Amazon seems to think will be available this coming week, but it has a tough act to follow.

I loved the first two books in this series, but felt it would be difficult for the same quality to be kept up for all volumes. This one, covering six of the seven Tom Baker years as Doctor Who, is, frankly, squashed, with fewer than nine pages on average for each story covered, compared to eleven-ish per story for the first two volumes. (Though in pages per episode broadcast it comes out better, at 2.2 which is the same as Vol 1 and a shade more than Vol 2.)

I can forgive it. What's been cut is the back-stage gossip about the relations between and among the production team and the cast, with enough left in to make it very annoying that you don't get more; but I felt that the book is as good as the others in the series at looking at the roots of the stories covered, and impassioned in its assessment of the dramatic impact of the programme as broadcast.

Also, it is my favourite period of Doctor Who. This is when I was watching it most assiduously when first broadcast (the second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen was shown on my eighth birthday), and also, frankly, I think it includes a disproportionate number of the truly great stories of Old Who. The Doctor Who Dynamic Ratings Site agrees, with five of its top six Old Who stories dating from this era (The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death, Pyramids of Mars and The Deadly Assassin, with The Robots of Death, The Seeds of Doom and The Ark in Space not far behind).

Miles and Wood explain really well how it was that Hinchcliffe and Holmes made it so good, and how and why Williams simply wasn't able to deliver the same product (and Tom Baker is fingered as a major culprit in that process). There are also the usual enlightening essays about bits of Who-lore, BBC procedures and British culture of the day (of which the best is surely the piece on Top of the Pops). So, while I didn't learn as much from this book as I did from Volume 1 or 2, I did enjoy wallowing in nostalgia as I read it.

5) The Making of Doctor Who, by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks

Way way back in the mists of childhood, wwhyte and I got hold of the second edition of this book, which was tremendously informative about Doctor Who up to, I think, The Hand of Fear, but was particularly important for me as it was the first book I had read which was about sf; it was possible, I realised, to think and write more deeply about sf as well as just reading it.

This is the first edition, which states on the first page, "Doctor Who has now been running over eight years, which makes it one of the most successful shows on British television." I think I got it at WorldCon. It is very much aimed at a younger audience; quite a long chapter, for instance, on how a television programme is actually made, what the director does, etc. ( sample )

One section which was completely changed in the second edition was the re-telling of the Doctor's televised adventures as a continuous narrative, presented as memoranda from the files of the Time Lords and of UNIT. (The second edition simply presented each story separately in a list, as all serious Doctor Who reference books have done since.) This section is preceded by the indictment and initial defence for the Doctor at the end of The War Games, revealing also the Doctor's "real name".

( click here to discover the Doctor's real name )

Anyway, certainly superseded in usefulness by pretty much every work of reference on Doctor Who published since, but very nice to have.

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.

8) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, by Tat Wood and Laurence Miles (.co.uk, .com)

This series of books about Doctor Who had previously been recommended to me by loveandgarbage here, scarlettina here, and strictlytrue here. A good call. The authors state firmly that they have provided "the most comprehensive, wide-ranging and at times almost shockingly detailed handbook to Doctor Who that you might ever conceivably need" and though it is a pretty large claim, I think they have succeeded. As well as description of each story, evaluation of how well it succeeded, and variably straight-faced attempts to reconcile continuity issues, there is some very good analysis of just how Doctor Who fitted into the BBC and British culture in general, and what its influences, both inward and outward, were. I should have spotted some of this - for instance, the foreshadowing of things later used in Blake's Seven in The Keys of Marinus; or the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on The Daleks. I especially liked the embedding of long essays on specific broader topics in boxes inside the story-by-story narrative. This is a difficult trick to pull off, but they've done it well, including topics like the true history of the Daleks (twice), unpacking the classical roots of The Myth Makers, and explaining Z Cars.

Compared with the last two books I read about Doctor Who, I felt this volume was much less superficial than Kim Newman's, and made fewer grandiose promises but delivered on more of them than John Chapman's. My one regret is that, following leads from Newman and Chapman, I bought both the DVD of The Web Planet and the CD of The Celestial Toymaker while in London, only to discover that Wood and Miles have a very low opinion of both stories.Grr, when I think what else I could have got... I am about half a dozen stories behind in my Doctor Who reviews anyway, so it will be a little while before I publish my own views here.

BTW, my new userpic, for Doctor Who books, was drawn for me yesterday as a "welcome home" present by young F, aged seven and a half. I may not wander to quite such exotic places as the Doctor, but I do travel quite a bit.

7) The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker

This has been bedtime reading for a week or so (since I came back from London, I guess), getting through a season or so every evening. Of course, it is all on-line on the BBC website, but it's nice to hold the dead tree version in one's hands as well.

Good and comprehensive basic stuff, though I think I am now ready to move on to some more in-depth examination of the history of the series. I also think that I will buy the DVD of The Aztecs and the audio of The Daleks Master Plan, watch/listen, and decide that I have seen enough Hartnell (having also got through the first episode, The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Crusade, The Chase, and The Massacre in the last year) - I hear that The Web Planet is not in fact very good, though also available on DVD.

Then, on to Troughton, and this book makes a strong argument in favour of Season Five as a Great Season Of Doctor Who - including the likes of The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Abominable Snowmen, The Ice Warriors, The Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep. Must see how many of those are available in different formats. There doesn't seem to be a convenient point of reference for that information.

7) The Discontinuity Guide: The Definitive Guide to the Worlds and Times of Doctor Who, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping

Yeah, yeah, I know that almost all of the text is also available on-line. But there's nothing like dead trees (especially if you are in the middle of a long plane flight). This is a great compilation of odd facts about the series, including most particularly an attempt to introduce consistency to such matters as the Doctor's age, his academic qualifications, the histories of the Cybermen and of the Daleks, and Mars. Interesting to see the foreshadowing of two of the Ninth Doctor's more memorable lines - "Hairdryer!" ("The Web Planet") and "Run!" (Second Doctor, passim). And there's a certain amount of "Yeah, that was my favourite bit".

Speaking of favourite bits, I asked my co-panellists at P-Con what their favourite bits of Doctor Who were, both old series and new. Colin Greenland voted for an end-of-episode shot of a Dalek emerging into view (which I reckon was the end of episode 1 of "The Chase"; Juliet McKenna for the Doctor and Jo down the mine in "The Green Death"; and Paul Cornell for the start of life on earth in "City of Death". From the new series Colin voted for "Are you my mummy?", surely one of the most impressive Who moments ever, and Juliet confessed to liking the Dalek in chains.

Part of my agenda of course is to improve my knowledge of the best stories, especially those that were first broadcast outside the time period when I was watching most closely (late Third Doctor to early Sixth, then Ninth and Tenth). Apart from Season 7, the other entire season that drew the praise of the Discontinuity Guide's authors was the very last of the old run, Season 26 with Sylvester McCoy ("Battlefield", "Ghost Light", "The Curse of Fenric" and "Survival"). Other stories to look out for which I hadn't previously had flagged up to me include particularly the First Doctor's "The Massacre", but also a bunch of others from the end of Troughton's second season.

I've made efforts in this direction before, but found this book much more helpful. (I should start reading this blog as well I suspect.)