Doctor Who 303: Gridlock

Gridlock owed something to The Happiness Patrol with its absurdly exaggerated satire of modern day culture, and populated by characters rather irrationally accepting their downtrodden lot in life. I didn’t like David Tennant’s overacting when doing ‘angry’, and the completely unsubtle ‘say no to drugs’ message. The Star Wars-influenced CGI was however impressive and I liked Ardal O’Hanlon's loveable rogue Brannigan. I was thrilled at the two ‘gifts’ for classic series fans - namely the entirely accurate descriptions of Gallifrey and of course the Macra! These were both presented so as avoid confusing newer viewers (something that the JNT era often got wrong back in the day). There's an almost tear-jerking moment when the sunlight streams down on the motorway, and then the Doctor's final confession to Martha really gave things an added emotional kick - not unlike the end of The End of the World.

Doctor Who 302: The Shakespeare Code

The Shakespeare Code does for its eponymous famous writer what The Unquiet Dead did for Charles Dickens. The episode seems to be a rather blatant attempt to woo Harry Potter fans – including name-checking JK herself! The scientific rationalization for the witches and the black magic worked rather well, and I was delighted to see Enlightenment's Eternals included in the back-story. I was also impressed at just how literate the script was, including many Shakespeare references that will have sailed over the heads of some of the episode's viewers. Dean Lennox Kelly delivers a great performance as a young Shakespeare, but did the witches have to be so clichéd? The Globe theatre and its surrounds were astonishingly good and really made this episode. I'm impressed too that Doctor Who can still do quieter, dialogue-heavy stories like this in amongst all the loud action-filled episodes. Simply delightful.

TSV 45 - the Key to Time issue

TSV 45 (September 1995) has recently been added to the online archive. This issue was the last of 1995, so an entire year's worth of issues have been digitally republished in just four months. Which doesn't seem right somehow given how long it took to assemble these issues the first time around - and this particular issue had challenges all of its own.

As I noted in my blog entry about the making of TSV 44, I had arranged with the local video distributors to get review copies of the videos. As a result, the lead focus of each issue would now be a major review of each of the new video titles. The six Key to Time stories were all released individually over three months in mid-1995, so I hit on the idea of doing an issue themed around Season 16, with a major review of each of the stories. I contacted a number of reliable TSV regular contributors and signed them up to each write one of the reviews. Some of these articles turned up promptly, others took a worryingly long time after the deadline to arrive. The problem with this was that unlike most TSV pieces which, if they arrived late, could simply be included in the following issue, the six reviews needed to be collected in this one themed issue. Nick Withers came to my rescue, stepping in to write a review of The Power of Kroll at very short notice. I don't recall now if that was down to a reviewer failing to deliver or simply that I was unable to sign anyone up to tackle this most unloved of the Season 16 stories.

Alistair Hughes designed a brilliant Key to Time front cover as an interlocking jigsaw. The individual jigsaw elements were also used to illustrate each of the six reviews, and other rather wonderful Key to Time themed artwork was provided by Peter Adamson, Paul Potiki and Chris Girdler among others.

Peter Adamson and Andrew Cook contributed a neat Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 comic strip story, Sums Over Histories that although featuring the Season 17 line-up was still a reasonably close connection to the issue's theme.

For a bit of diversity, I also had an article by Kate Orman about the writing of Set Piece. The article's title, But the Details Aren't Important, apparently comes from Chris Girdler's review of the novel in TSV 43. Kate's article is essential reading for anyone interested in her New Adventures novels, and I love such background pieces. It's a shame that Kate didn't contribute any further articles to TSV after this one, but she simply lacked the time to do so, given that each of her novels seemed to overlap the next with alarming frequency. Such is the price of success!

Meanwhile, things started to get a bit messy for the club in the latter half of 1995. The so-called 'Management Team' set up to run the club earlier in the year was already becoming a bit unstuck. Bill Geradts, who had been running the Auckland Chapter video days and monthly meetings disliked the Team's intervention and decided that he'd had enough of running events for the club. Bill went off in his own direction, setting up what would become his hugely successful Armageddon pulp culture expos.

Things were also rather turbulent for me personally at this time. I was working part-time as an after-school tutor to high school students, which left me with most of my days free to run the club and edit TSV. As ideal as that might sound I was, as you might imagine, rather strapped for cash and at one point had to take a temporary loan from the club just to get my car repaired. My life and bank balance took a considerable turn for the better when in September 1995 I gained a full-time job working at the main branch of Whitcoulls in Queen Street. This new job - combined with my tutition work which I was still committed to until the end of the school year - meant that both my days and evenings were booked up. I desperately needed help to get the incomplete TSV 45 finished. A weekend working bee was convened at Nicholas Withers' place, working in the same church hall that we would later use for the TV Movie and Tom Baker events.

At this point I should explain that up until this issue, each page of TSV had been pasted up from columns of typed, or latterly computer-printed text. I had an Amiga computer, a rudimentary word processor (Word Perfect) and an elderly dot matrix printer which produced a fairly legible font. Aligning, cutting and pasting columns of text on to A4-sized pages was messy and time-consuming. A couple of readers volunteered to come along to help out with the layout, but frequent mistakes were made with the paste-up meaning that some pages had to be redone from scratch. Tensions rose, arguments broke out among the helpers and for a time it looked as if the issue would never be finished.

Thankfully Nick came to the rescue, taking me aside and basically saying, "look, there's another way of doing TSV that will take a fraction of the time and effort and the end result will look much better." Nick selected some of the items for this issue - including the six story reviews and the Kate Orman article - and recreated them on his PC in Microsoft Publisher (a rather nifty desktop publishing application), and printed them out on his inkjet printer. I was enormously impressed with the results. Nick and I resolved then and there that from the following issue we would give TSV a complete make-over and do all of the layout using Publisher.

If you have a printed copy of TSV 45 and TSV 46, compare the two and I'm certain you'll be able to see the jump in quality.

Next up, 1996; the year everything changed...

Meanwile, read TSV 45 here.

Fellow TSV 45 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Doctor Who 301: Smith and Jones

Smith and Jones is a non-stop incident-packed opening episode, and by far the best opening episode of ‘New Doctor Who’ yet. Freema Agyeman is simply wonderful, delivering a perfectly pitched performance. When the Doctor mentions Rose, my reaction was "Rose who?" I’m pleased to see David Tennant playing the Doctor more restrained and much less hyperactive than we’ve seen previously. The shoe sequence was thankfully his one moment of over-the-top acting in the whole episode. The Judoon have a very credible motivation; it’s great to see aliens that are not 'evil' and bent on destruction or invasion. I’d like to see them return. It would have been interesting if the sonic screwdriver had stayed destroyed, at least for a few episodes. My favourite moments were the Doctor popping back into Martha's time line, and mouthing the "bigger on the inside" line as Martha views the inside of the TARDIS. I can't wait to see more!

TSV 44

TSV 44, which was first published twelve years ago, in June 1995, has now been added to the online archive, closing the gap to just 20 issues from here until the earliest of the issues still in print.

The cover features a rather splendid piece of artwork by Alistair Hughes and marks the beginning of a long run of issues with Alistair's work gracing the front cover. Over a ten year period he drew 24 out of 26 covers, as well as numerous back cover and internal illustrations.

Alistair's two pieces of artwork for this issue depict The Android Invasion and Carnival of Monsters, as these were the two that most recently released on video at the time that this issue was published. Both pieces of art were submitted as potential front covers, and I remember spending some time deciding which one to use on the front and which to use elsewhere in the issue. So in an alternate reality, here's how the cover appears...


I had just established a liasion with the local video distributor (at the time Polygram, and later Roadshow), and reasoning that many fans would be rediscovering these stories afresh through the videos I started themeing each issue's content around the most recent releases, with long reviews of each story, cover artwork and the behind-the-scenes Story Files (which are not at present included in the online archive).

Graham Howard reviewed The Android Invasion and I reviewed Carnival of Monsters. I was particularly pleased with my review at the time, and was delighted when parts of both mine and Graham's reviews were quoted in The Television Companion book by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker. The text of this book (first published by the BBC and now by Telos) was adapted for the BBC's online episode guide, so our comments now appear on the official BBC website - see here and here.

In addition to the aforementioned Story Files, there's a couple of other notable items omitted from this online issue. My own article, Restoring the Past, on the missing episode finds, had dated so badly that it doesn't seem worth reproducing. The first part of the survey results, which reported readers' views regarding TSV and the club also seems rather irrelevant now. The latter half of the results, which tabulated readers views on the TV series and books has been included however as this provides a fascinating snapshot of what was popular in 1995. I'm fairly sure that Sylvester McCoy would no longer rank fourth out of the first seven Doctors, and I'm even more certain that Ace would no longer win out over Sarah in the favourite companion stakes. The last question in the survey asks whether the series would ever return. Of course mere months after this survey was conducted the Paul McGann TV movie went into production and then ten years later the series returned in a rather enduring form. So the 53% who voted 'yes' were eventually proved to be on the money - even if they had a bit of a wait ahead of them!

By early 1995 the dust had settled on The Dark Dimension. Jon Preddle wrote a rather thorough article documenting everything that was known at the time about this troubled cancelled story. A couple of years later The Nth Doctor was published, which included a fairly detailed plot synopsis, but this aside it's worth pointing out that Jon's article still holds up well over a decade later.

Another of Jon's articles this issue was The Doctor's Wife, which chronicled some of the many rumours and hoaxes surrounding the series. I wince at some of the rumours reported here, simply because I naively reported these as fact in early issues of TSV. The Cybermen and the Ice Warriors were due to appear in Paradise Towers and Dragonfire respectively, if the news pages of TSV issue 2 was to be believed. In my defence the information came from an overseas fanzine which seemed at the time to be a fairly credible source.

Alden Bates, the IT mastermind behind the TSV online archive, was faced with a dilemma when it came to reproducing his article about the Master from this issue. The problem he faced is that when he wrote the original piece, the character had at the time only just made his debut in the New Adventures; in the intervening 12 years there have been numerous (and sometimes contradictory) appearances by the Master in novels, Big Finish audios and of course the TV Movie. Alden decided to let the original article stand as it originally appeared, appended by a footnote , which I think was the only sensible approach to take.

Alden also demonstrates the advantages of online publication over the printed medium with his rather neat application appended to the end of Morgan Davie's Doctor Who Story Generator. Have a play and see what you come up with. Alden also provides a new series version of the generator on his own blog.

Read TSV 44 here.

Fellow TSV 44 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol. I first discovered them in 2005 after hearing the single-tinglingly beautiful Run on the end of the Doctor Who Confidential for The Parting of the Ways. I couldn't get the song out of my head so I found out the artist, bought the album (Final Straw), played it incessantly on my iPod for a few weeks. Loved it to bits. Bought Eyes Open, the new album, as soon as it was released. Loved it equally. Adored the track Chasing Cars long before Gray's Anatomy (a show I've never watched) propelled Snow Patrol into a whole new level of public awareness and appreciation. Right, that just about brings us up to date on my love affair with Snow Patrol's music.

Last night Rochelle and I - along with a few thousand others - saw Snow Patrol perform live at the Trusts Stadium in West Auckland. We've got a couple of their concerts on DVD so I had some idea what to expect, but I was blown away by the sheer energy of the performance and the infectious charisma of lead singer and all round nice guy Gary Lightbody. On How To Be Dead Gary stopped singing abruptly and the audience carried on without him. But this wasn't one of those moments when the crowd is expected to sing along - when the song ended, Gary admitted sheepishly that he was enjoying himself so much that his mind had suddently blanked on the words. And he really looked like he was having fun, bantering along with the audience, grinning uncontrollably whilst singing and bounding all over the stage.

There were a few sing-alongs - notably the final refrain of Run:

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

...which (as usual for a Snow Patrol gig) the crowd sang unaccompanied.

We were reasonably close to the stage - there were perhaps 10-12 rows standing in front of us - including a delightfully enthusiastic guy standing in front of me, who was a mine of information about the band. It was possible to work out from the reactions of those around me who favoured Final Straw, who favoured Eyes Open and those like myself and the guy in front of me who knew and loved both equally. Both albums were well represented in the set, so no-one would have gone away disappointed.

My one gripe about the U2 concert of a few months ago was what a bad choice Kanye West was as the opening act as his musical style was a poor match for the main act. No such problem this time around though as both New Zealand support acts were well suited to Snow Patrol's alternative rock styling. The two support acts were mysteriously listed on the pre-publicity as 'Support Act 1 & 2', and until they came on we had no idea who would be playing. The first act was NZ band Tourist and the second - to raptuous applause and utter disbelief from the crowd was another NZ act, Evermore, who have recently found deserved intertional recognition. Evermore's set in particular was so extraordinary that they threatened to eclipse the main act. I've been to concerts were the support act was received at lot of 'scarcastic' applause at the end of their set simply because the audience is relieved that they're finished and the long-awaited main act will be on soon, but the thunderous cheering from the crowd at Evermore's departure was genuine and heartfelt.

A brilliant night out. My ears are still ringing.

TSV 43

TSV 43 was the second of four issues produced in 1995, coming out in March of that year, and has just been republished online.

The lead feature was a transcript of a roundtable discussion organised by David Bishop, with Paul Cornell, Andy Lane and Steven Moffat. Oddly enough, although the average TSV reader would have instantly recognised Cornell and Lane's names as regular and popular New & Missing Adventures authors, they would probably not have been familiar with Moffat, whose biggest claim to fame at the time was creating and writing Press Gang, a UK TV series which has never screened in New Zealand, to the best of my knowledge. Nowadays, Moffat is one of the leading lights of the new series, having written the episodes The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace - all of which in my view will long be remembered as among the very best episodes the new series of Doctor Who has produced. The Four Writers, One Discussion interview is very candid and really rather funny in places.

The Seeds of Doom - An Appreciation was written by a UK reader, Guy Blythman, who contributed several pieces to TSV. This article garnered some controversy in the form of a long reply refuting some of Blythman's views in the following issue from Phillip J Gray and a subsequent response from Blythman in TSV 45. The article itself saw the beginning of TSV's long-standing policy of letting the latest video releases determine some of the issue's content (The Seeds of Doom was new out on VHS in New Zealand at the time).

The Enigma Magnet, written by Peter Adamson and drawn by Paul Potiki, marks the beginning of a run of 13 comic strip stories over the next 17 issues. Many of these strips were either written or drawn (sometimes both!) by the talented Peter Adamson.

Peter also contributed the front cover illustration of a Krynoid, which was indentended to be printed in green. The printers withdrew the spot-colour service about the time that the issue was due to be printed, which was a shame. I've recreated the cover in Photoshop to show how it was intended to appear.

The back cover was drawn by Alistair Hughes, marking his return to TSV after a absence of several years whilst he was living in Scotland. I adore this piece of artwork and immediately started encouarging him to draw more for TSV. From the following issue he would become the 'resident' front cover artist, providing the covers for all but two issues from TSV 44 through to TSV 69.

My own major contribution to this issue was an article about the making of the 30 Years in the TARDIS documentary and its subsequent extended video release. I heard secondhand from one of the UK readers a while later that a copy of my article had found its way into Kevin Davies' hands and he apparently was very impressed with what I'd written. Coming from the documentary's producer/director that was high praise, and that really made my day, as you can imagine! But the story doesn't end there - a couple of years ago, I got an email from Jeremy Bentham, publisher of the highly-respected InVision magazine. Jeremy had also seen my article and wanted my permission to reprint it in the final issue of InVision. I of course said yes. There's few greater compliments in my view than having your work sought out like this.

Read TSV 43 here.