Big Finish - The Butcher of Brisbane

Back to the main monthly releases and this is number 161 The Butcher of Brisbane by Marc Platt, directed by Ken Bentley. Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and Mark Strickson all return as the Tardis crew and Angus Wright plays Magnus Greel.

Let me get my confession out of the way first. As the co-host of a podcast all about British science-fiction television it is rather shameful to admit that I have never seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It is reputed to be quite possibly the best Fourth Doctor serial ever and one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. And yet I still have not got round to watching it. Maybe that puts me in a unique position to review this story which is a sort of prequel to Weng-Chiang with a rather complicated time structure. This is the Fifth Doctor meeting a man who he first encountered in his Fourth incarnation. However it is a younger Greel who has yet to acquire the time machine which he will use to travel back from the 51st century to Victorian London for the encounter depicted in Weng-Chiang. So the writer has to be careful about how much time Greel has with the Doctor himself in order to not interfere with continuity.

Marc Platt solves this problem by making full use of the Doctor's three companions. The role of a companion has varied over the years. Some have been required to do the action stuff for the Doctor such as Ian, Steven, Jamie and Leela in classic Who and Captain Jack, Micky and Rory in new Who. Other companions are needed to ask the Doctor questions so that he can explain to them and us what is going on. Examples include, well just about all of them apart from Liz Shaw, Romana and K-9. The one standard for all companions is that they must get separated from the Doctor and get into some form of trouble. The neat trick that Platt pulls off in this story is to explore the concept of time travel and have the companions separated by time rather than space. It is an idea that has been explored in recent Doctor Who television stories, in particular with Amy Pond and her dilemmas in The Eleventh Hour and The Girl who Waited. The result is a very interesting story which has Nyssa and Turlough embroiled in political intrigues and espionage.

The Doctor himself has a back-seat role in this one. It's almost like one of the Doctor-light episodes that new Who does once a season. As ever the Big Finish production values are top class and the whole thing cracks along at an enjoyable pace. I particularly liked the music by Fool Circle which reminded me of some of the incidental pieces used in the BBC TV version of The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This maintains the recent high standard of Big Finish stories that I have been listening to. It gets 4 out of 5 Time Cabinets. Now I get a bit of a break before Protect and Survive. Time to catch up on some of the shows I am supposed to be watching for British Invaders.

Two Hearts beat as One

Doctor's log supplemental:
Over on the British Invaders Facebook page I asked for any other examples of Doctor Who having an x-ray. Brad Walker and Tony Bellows pointed out there is a scene in episode two of the Caves of Androzani which shows a scan of the Fifth Doctor's hearts. Towards the end of the episode the Doctor and Peri are trying to escape from a cell which is guarded by a vigilant Android with a big gun. The Doctor gambles (correctly as it turns out) that the Android's scanner will be confused by his abnormal anatomy and won't shoot him. As he steps out of the cell the camera switches to give us the Android's point of view and we see this.

Which looks like something called a false colour Echocardiogram where colours are added to a normal ultrasound scan of the heart to represent the different directions of blood flow. We can see two purple and white heart shaped structures. They are in the right place, and they are the correct size and shape. Technically we should see them beating but we can't have everything. The special effects people on Caves of Androzani get  top marks for their depiction of the Doctor's anatomy in 1984. Sadly this was forgotten by the time of the 1996 big budget movie.

The Man with X-Ray Eyes

Let me take a moment to deal with the vexed subject of Doctor Who, his two hearts and chest x-rays. I assume that people in all professions have difficulties watching representations of their jobs on film or television. That's certainly the case with me and on screen doctors. It is, of course, great fun watching them make schoolboy errors or spouting techno-babble, and there are few things I like more than making a diagnosis before my television counterparts.

There are three basic errors that seem to be almost universal. The first is the inappropriate use of head mirrors which is best dealt with by my American colleague Scott in his blog. The second is wearing stethoscopes back to front which I might blog about another time. And the third is displaying chest x-rays the wrong way round, which will bring us to Doctor Who. First let's look at a normal chest x-ray and the structures visible. Here is a nice labelled example.

The heart is a big solid lump of muscle and does show up with the low dose of x-rays used to image the chest. You will notice that the left lung is shown on the right of the picture and that most of the heart is on the same side. Chest x-rays are always looked at like this so that what you are seeing corresponds with the front of the patient as you look at them. Now the one thing that isn't shown on the above image is the side marker. It is quite important to know that you have the x-ray film the right way round so the radiographers who take the pictures put a radio-opaque label on the film before pressing the magic button. You can see the side marker in this image.

Having a side marker is crucial in diagnosing a rare condition called Dextrocardia where the heart (and possibly other internal organs) are on the opposite side. Here is an x-ray showing Dextrocardia and notice the side marker.

But of course these side markers can cause confusion and when actors are called upon to put a chest x-ray up on a light box they usually assume that right means right and so put the film up with the R marker on the right hand side. The most infamous example is the title sequence for the medical comedy Scrubs.

Apparently so many medics complained about this that eventually Scrubs included a joke about it and had a character correct the error.

So last night I was watching Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV movie. The film starts with Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor being shot and the struggles of the emergency room physicians to save him before he apparently dies only to later regenerate while in the mortuary fridge. Now as we all know Time Lords from Gallifrey have two hearts and lots of other physiological differences from humans. The Doctor's chest x-ray is put up on a light box and the on-screen medics notice that this shows two hearts and put this down to something they call a "double exposure". This is just medical techno-babble that doesn't really mean anything. But let us examine the x-ray as shown in the film.

Here we can see a single heart shadow which is on the right hand side so either the emergency room medics have put the film up the wrong way round or the Doctor has Dextrocardia (I suspect the former). Then there are the two white shadows in the middle of the lung fields that the screen doctors call hearts. They are the wrong shape and in the wrong place. They look more like hilar shadows which would indicate a whole different set of problems for the Doctor.

I posted a brief comment about this on my Facebook page last night and Brian from British Invaders asked if the scene from Spearhead in Space was any better. This was the story which introduced Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor in 1970. Interestingly this also showed the Doctor recovering from his regeneration in a hospital. Once again he has a chest x-ray which is supposed to show his two hearts, this time the screen doctor assumes that someone in the x-ray department is playing a joke on him and goes off to remonstrate with them leaving a nurse (and us) to look at this x-ray.

This looks like an artist's impression of a chest x-ray and the staggering thing about it to medical eyes is that it shows no hearts at all! The two dark circles at the top of the chest cavity are what the Spearhead doctor thinks are hearts but again they are wrongly placed, sized and coloured. They should be white shadows where the x-rays have not penetrated to the photographic film. So the simple answer to Brian's question is that the props department and the actors in Spearhead in Space were no better with x-rays than their technologically advanced, but equally incompetent, successors in the 1996 TV movie.

All they need is to have a real medical doctor on set to put them right about all this stuff. It would only take a few minutes and I could spend the rest of my time blogging about it!

Big Finish - The Juggernauts

Big Finish release number 65 - The Juggernauts with Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor, Bonnie Langford as Mel, and Terry Molloy as Davros. Written by Scott Alan Woodard and directed by Gary Russell. This was one of a bundle of Big Finish CDs that I picked up cheaply on eBay, and yes I did get it signed at Big Finish day.

The Doctor and Mel are separated on a mining colony, there's some strange new machines, and there is Davros. But it's a strange version of Davros who seems to have charmed everyone except for the Doctor.

I love a Davros story. There's something about his repeated battle of wills with the Doctor that is fascinating. All the monsters are great, but for many of them it's just about marching in and destroying everything in their paths. With Davros and the Doctor it's a clash of ideologies, two great minds that are destined to keep encountering each other and fight it out with words as their weapons.

Terry Molloy is fantastic, and Bonnie Langford is very good. I have no previous experience with her character Mel but she was fine here. And there's Colin Baker as the Sixth. So here is the thing, I still have not seen any of the Sixth Doctor stories from the television series. And yes, I am going to have to correct that soon. But I'm really learning to enjoy his character in these Big Finish stories.

Anyway, this is a great story and I haven't even mentioned Nick Briggs as the mechonoid voices. This gets a smooth rolling 4 out of 5 evil, robotic arms. Next up is another Eighth Doctor story: Memory Lane.

The Doctor Who Experience - a review

So the final event for Brian from Canada's trip was a visit to the Doctor Who Experience at the Olympia exhibition centre in London. This is an interactive walk through adventure similar to some of the rides that I remember from Disneyland. After a brief bit of queuing and ticket checking we were ushered into a large room where a video screen showed clips from Doctor Who before splitting down a central "crack in time" to lead us into the next room where more stuff happened, and so on. Matt Smith has filmed some special sequences as the Eleventh Doctor to set up the story of the experience and then there are various lighting, sound, animated monsters and other special effects to give you that full interactive feeling.

It was mostly based on the new Doctor Who and was clearly aimed at families with children of which there were several present. But for a Who fan of any age it was pretty entertaining. At one stage a clever lighting and sound effect reveals the Tardis "materialising" in the corner of the room. Then the door swings open and you walk inside, down a short corridor and into the Tardis control room itself. It's impossible not to find that exciting!

After the interactive experience which lasts about 25 minutes you emerge into the Doctor Who exhibition which includes lots of stuff from the classic series. So there are all the Doctor's costumes, lots of monsters, replicas of previous Tardis control rooms, and various bits of hands-on stuff to keep the children entertained. It was great to see the kids being introduced to some of the older Doctors and learn that the series existed long before they were born. Another form of time travel.

At one point in the exhibition there is a Dalek with the back half removed so that children could step inside it and operate the gun and the manipulator arm. I watched one boy try to operate the controls while his parents took a photo. Then as I walked on past the front of the Dalek he must have pulled a lever and the suction cup suddenly swung and grabbed my elbow. His mother tried to apologise but I told her it was fantastic and how for a spilt-second I had found it genuinely terrifying!

The Doctor Who Experience has finished its run in London and now moves to a permanent home in Cardiff. While it is primarily for families it is a great trip for any Doctor Who fan and I would heartily recommend it.

Big Finish day review

So last weekend Brian from British Invaders and I met up again and travelled to Barking Abbey school for Big Finish day 2. This convention was a co-production between Big Finish and a convention company called Tenth Planet. The impressive guest list for the day was headed by Tom Baker who was right up there on the Brian Blessed scale of eccentricity and anecdote. He started the day off with a panel with Louise Jameson who played the companion Leela to his Doctor in the 1970s. Once again there were plenty of questions but they were mostly just prompts for Tom to tell stories about the fun he had while playing the Doctor, and the enjoyment he was getting out of reprising the role for the new Big Finish stories. I got a chance to ask him about the scariest monster in the series and he launched into a discussion about how many of his fellow actors thought it was him!

Along with Tom Baker and Louise Jameson there were several other big name actors doing panels and signing autographs. From Doctor Who there were Anneke Wills (who played Polly), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Terry Molloy (Davros) and Lisa Bowerman (Bernice Summerfield). Then there was Paul Darrow who played Avon in Blake's 7 and David Warner who has played bad guys in Star Trek, Time Bandits and Tron as well as taking on the role of Steel in the Big Finish Sapphire & Steel stories. Brian had been to a performance of Taming of the Shrew at the RSC during his trip and had fun discussing the theatre with David Warner who had started his career there.

However my own personal highlight was meeting Shane Rimmer who was in Doctor Who with William Hartnell back in the 1960s, appeared in several James Bond films and was in one of our British Invaders gems, Alternative 3. But for me he will always be the voice of Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds. He was there with his wife promoting his autobiography From Thunderbirds to Pterodactyls which I bought. He signed the book and a picture of Scott Tracy for me. He also recorded a voice memo on my phone which you can download and listen to here. It was fantastic to meet him.

After lunch Brian and I joined the only big queue of the day which was to meet Tom Baker and get our Big Finish CD covers signed. Once again he was on great form, it turned out that the reason that the queue was moving slowly was that everyone was getting a Tom story. Brian got a discussion about Canada and also persuaded Tom to record a British Invaders bumper on Brian's pocket audio recorder. Because people find it difficult to spell my first name I had written it on a card for Tom to dedicate his autograph for me, however Tom couldn't read my writing. When I explained that it was a doctor's handwriting he asked if I was a medical doctor. I said that I was but that I was just A doctor while he was THE Doctor. He then started to tell me all about his GP who sounds like he has his hands full with his famous patient, and then after signing my CD he said "Well goodbye, Doctor." Awesome.

Finally, we finished off the day by recording a brief interview with Nick Briggs who is an executive producer, director, writer and actor with Big Finish as well as providing the voices for the Daleks, Cyberman and several other monsters in the new Doctor Who. We'll probably put the interview in an upcoming bonus episode.

Big Finish day was great fun and if you get the chance to go next year you should go for it. Next up is the Doctor Who Experience.

SFX Weekender review

I don't normally got to conventions, but by the end of February I will have been to three cons this month. First up was the SFX weekender held at Pontins holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales. It was weird going back to Pontins which was the scene of a daring escape from my childhood, but that's another story.

SFX is a two day convention organised by the science fiction magazine of the same name. Brian my co-host from British Invaders was over from Canada and went to both days and I joined him for the Saturday. Although it is small in comparison with American conventions this was considerably bigger than the single room Brumcon I went to last year. Thousands of people were there, with many in costumes and several professional models in rather more revealing outfits.

Brian and I went to some of the panels including Q&A sessions with Eve Myles from Torchwood, and the Sixth Doctor Colin Baker. Then while Brian went off to get Baker's autograph I listened to the Judge Dredd creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra answer questions about the comic, and then I queued up to get their signatures on one of my Dredd books.

And like Dave Gibbons at Brumcon who was doing quick head sketches of Rorschach, Carlos was doing Dredd or Johnny Alpha doodles in peoples' books. Here is mine. Gracias, Carlos!

In the afternoon we went to another Q&A with the larger than life Brian Blessed who raised the roof with the power of his voice. There was a moderator on stage to ask questions but he never got a word in as Blessed told anecdote after anecdote for an hour, pausing every now and then to bellow "Gordon's alive!".

Finally in the evening we went to the SFX awards ceremony where author Robert Rankin and his wife gave out various awards for 2011. Obviously several of the award-winners were not there to accept their gongs and several had sent video acceptance speeches. It is worth checking out the videos at the SFX site to watch Neil Gaiman's amusing video about his best writer award for The Doctor's wife. However, Stan "The Man" Lee probably stole the show with his video to accept the "Biggest Disappointment" award for not doing a cameo in the X-Men: First Class movie. It's great, watch it.

On the Sunday Brian set off on the rest of his travels around the UK, while I returned home for work on the Monday. One week later we got back together for Big Finish Day. Review coming up next.

Target Acquired

I'm supposed to have less books now. I have a Kindle and everything, I've had a major de-clutter, so why am I making impulse purchases of second hand paperbacks on eBay?

I do have one shelf of old paperbacks. I have all the Quatermass scripts in their original Penguin releases. I seem to be accumulating a few classic 1970s Panther science fiction books with their great Chris Foss covers, but more about those later.

And now I have these.

Four of the 1970s Target novelisations of some of the Doctor's classic adventures. I'm blaming this entirely on Paul from the TimeVault podcast and Brian from British Invaders.

They do look rather nice on the shelf though.

Day 10 - Which sci-fi universe/reality would you most like to live in?

I don't want to live in most of the science fiction universes I read about. Most of them are full of wars, Tie-fighters, body horror monsters, explosions in space, and robots that rise up to destroy their makers. The obvious problem is that a utopian universe would be lovely, calm and safe but that doesn't exactly make for exciting fiction.

It would be lovely to live in a universe where there really was a time-travelling alien with a sonic screwdriver who was always there to save the Earth. But again I'm looking beyond the British Invaders worlds. So let's look at a society which has perfected medicine, and has eliminated need and scarcity. Everything is available at the drop of a hat, the humanoids in this society don't age, they have drug glands, an inbuilt neural net that connects them to a vast Internet, and they spend their time having terrific parties or pursuing their academic or cultural interests. Iain M Banks' The Culture is the place to be if you want perfect safety and happiness all the time.

Of course, perfect safety and happiness doesn't really drive plots along so Banks skilfully brings The Culture into contact and conflict with other space-going civilisations to generate the tension needed for his stories. They even have a branch of The Culture known as Contact specially for this purpose.

So put me in the Culture universe and I'll be very happy. And I won't feel the need to push the limits like some of the Culture humans do by rock climbing without an AG belt, lava rafting, or swinging about in a decrepit cable car system. Well, not at first at least. I guess happiness and immortality gets boring eventually.

Edged Out

My Lovefilm subscription delivered  another candidate for Bad Movie Bingo. Martin Campbell's big screen version of Edge of Darkness. To be honest I had forgotten this was on my list, I must have added it back when we covered the original BBC mini series from 1985 back in British Invaders 67 and 68. Martin Campbell directed that version as well.

OK, let's get the big issue out of the way first. Mel Gibson is, let's be charitable, a difficult human being with some unpleasant views. It feels uncomfortable to be supporting his career by even renting one of his films, but there is a long line of great art made by people who you wouldn't want to be in the same room as so let's put that to one side and look at the movie.

Gibson plays Tom Craven a Boston detective whose daughter is shot on his front door step and dies in his arms. Everyone assumes that the killer meant to shoot Gibson but his investigations lead him to discover the murky truth about her work, and then Ray Winstone shows up as a government spook to explain what's really happening. A bit like Joe Don Baker in the original Winstone has the louder and showier role although Gibson does get a lot more action scenes than Bob Peck had in the original, guess it's in his contract.

One of the things that was so good about the BBC original was Peck's portrayal of grief and I have to confess that Gibson does pretty well in that respect. They have kept the device of having him hear and see his dead daughter although he sees her as a child instead of the adult he has lost. These flashbacks or visions or whatever are quite moving, and his misery really comes across.

Overall this isn't really a bad movie, and it's a better translation of the original than I expected it to be. It doesn't have time for the slow build of the TV series so certain elements of the story have to be revealed faster, usually as a result of Gibson punching someone or pulling his gun. I came into expecting it to be a bad adaptation of a great BBC series and actually it wasn't all that terrible. I'd still suggest going back to the original but if you can cope with the idea of a Mel Gibson film this one is OK.

3 out of 5 Joe Bob stars for being neither fish not foul, not terribly bad bad or terribly good bad.

Challenged

The British Invaders 30 day challenge is finished. Thank you to everyone who suggested questions, made comments, re-tweeted me, or started their own challenge.

In particular I would like to thank Paul from the excellent Time Vault podcast who has just started a challenge here.

Paul, Karode and Mekster re-tweeted my daily links. Karode and Wolfeeboy have been doing the challenge on their blogs, while over on the British Invaders facebook page Colin, Nick, John and Steve have been doing the challenge there.

Finally, a shout out to my friend Brian in Canada who invited me on to the British Invaders podcast and got me watching and talking about all this great British science fiction television.

Stay tuned for more ramblings and be warned, Fringe is back!

Day 30 - Who would you like to play the 12th Doctor?

It's the last day of the challenge and it's the second great question in Who-dom (you can read my answer to the first question here). So who should play next the next Doctor?

I made a few suggestions for this category in a Twitter poll recently and I could trot those names out here but I suspect the next actor chosen will be largely unknown. Who had heard of Matt Smith before 2009? Even David Tennant was just another jobbing actor when he got the part.

So after 30 days of British Invaders themed questions I am going to indulge myself in a moment of whimsy, a moment of sentiment. I'm going to choose a young chap who is at university and who, as far as I know, has no interest in acting. He does have a certain style however, and would make an interesting occupant of the Tardis.

It will never happen but I think my son Tom would make a great twelfth Doctor.

Day 29 - Favourite alien race or planet

This challenge draws towards its conclusion with a consideration of the various alien races and their planets that have cropped up in British Invaders so far. There are quite a few funny aliens in Hyperdrive and HHGG. I'm watching Space: 1999 at the moment and there's almost a new alien every week, and I haven't even got to their tame Metamorph in season two yet. But clearly the show with widest range to pick from is Doctor Who, and I think it's appropriate to return to the key show in British science fiction TV for the last two days of this challenge.

I started to run through some of my favourite monsters from Doctor Who but all the time a mechanical voice in my head kept repeating Daleks, Daleks, Daleks! Yup, it's the archetypical alien race from the archetypical show. Volumes have been written about them over the years, and about whether or not they make sense. I won't add much to more to the debate other than to say they scared me as a kid in classic Doctor Who and I also like what has been done with them in the new Who (well, for the most part. Let's not think about the Daleks take Manhattan storyline). And when you combine the Daleks with their incredibly creepy creator Davros, things just get worse (or better).

The best alien race on British television are the implacable exterminators from Skaro.

Day 28 - Which missing show would you most like to see restored to the archives?

Now this one is fun. Once again I'm excluding Doctor Who because that has already had its own missing show category. When I first thought about this question I assumed I would be picking Nigel Kneale's The Road which was a ghost story from 1963 with an ingenious twist in the tale of an 18th century village haunted by strange sights and sounds. You can find the script for it on the DVD of The Stone Tape, that's if you can still find a copy of The Stone Tape.

However another idea occurred to me. When I was young I was a huge fan of Isaac Asimov, and of his robot stories in particular. I am pretty sure that The Caves of Steel was my favourite novel as a teenager. I loved the odd couple pairing of a human detective with his robot partner as they try to catch a murderer in an over-crowded city of the future.

While researching shows for us to cover on British Invaders I discovered that there was a BBC adaptation of the novel in 1964 which starred Peter Cushing as the detective Elijah Bailey and John Carson as R. Daneel Olivaw, and it was adapted for TV by none other than Terry Nation. Sadly only one or two clips of the production have survived but wouldn't it be great to be able to watch that show?

Own goal

Bad movie bingo has branched off, and this branch line follows Gerard Butler and curiously enough leads us back to Patrick Stewart. This is The Game of Their Lives a sports biopic about the 1950 USA world cup football team, or soccer as they call it in the film. That's the team that famously, or infamously, beat England 1-0 in the group stages. It was the only match they won but it shook things up a bit as England weren't supposed to get beaten in those days. These days, well we even struggle to overcome the mighty Montenegro (population 600,000 for anyone who's counting).

So we get lots of unknown young actors with brutal haircuts playing keen american soccer players who can't get on with each other, and then they do get on just in time for Gimli the Dwarf, sorry John Rhys Davies, to coach them into giant slayers, while Patrick Stewart reports the whole thing to an uncaring american public. And all set to that oodly-noodly clarinet music that composers seem to reach for whenever a film looks back at some days-gone-by vision of America.

Gerard Butler, who as a Scot must have loved sticking it to the auld enemy, trots out his american accent as the goalie. This was before his mega success in 300 and that DVD cover rather bigs up his role in this movie. He doesn't look like that at any point during the film. And the England flag is another red herring, the three lions are only in this film as the big baddies, captained by Gavin Rossdale as it happens.

Has a football film ever worked? It's easier to think of a good rugby movie than one about the beautiful game. The best I can think of is Bend it like Beckham and you could argue that's not really about football at all. And no, I haven't forgotten Escape to Victory, I'm just trying to.

Anyway, this isn't a bad film, it's just a terminally dull one. Mr Brosnan in Death Train still leads the pack by a long way. Better accents (just), more explosions, and a train!

1 out of 5 Joe Bob stars. Next up, the mark of the wolf!

Day 27 - Best spaceship

Let's assume we can't count the Tardis for this category (maybe if there was a time and space category?). That leaves us with the Heart of Gold from HHGG, HMS Camden Lock from Hyperdrive, Thunderbird 3, the Altares from Day after Tomorrow, Interceptors from UFO, Eagle transporters in Space:1999, Red Dwarf itself or maybe the Bug. All of them are fun and interesting in their own way. But ..

Come on, it has to be the Liberator doesn't it?

It looks cool, it's the fastest thing around, it's got clever alien technology (including the always convenient teleporter), and it's the ship used by a bunch of plucky resistance fighters against an evil empire. The interiors may have been made out of Meccano and that stuff they use for sound-proofing recording studios but it's just a great ship. Who wouldn't want to find an abandoned alien spaceship that lets you be the cockiest pilot in the known universe? I loved the Liberator when I first watched Blake's 7 over 30 years ago. Opinions vary as to how well the show stands up today but they had a great spaceship. At least they did, until they blew it up!

Day 26 - Favourite children/family show

No surprises here. I've ruled out the Gerry Anderson shows as they had their own category. Of all the other shows we have covered on British Invaders there is one that really stands out.

Children of the Stones was a strange and, at times, confusing show which I hadn't seen until we reviewed it in 2008. There's something about the story, the setting amongst the real stone circle at Avebury, the performances and the music that really makes this stand out from the usual children adventure serials that were so popular in the 1970s and 80s. It stands up to re-watching, not least to try and figure out the strange time paradoxes suggested by the ending.

It's got Gareth Thomas, Iain Cuthbertson and the great Freddie Jones in it, which would be a pretty good cast list for any TV show. And that music. A strange discordant mix of music and voice that still haunts me. It's a wonder that they got away with it at the time. It has just been re-released on DVD at a very reasonable price. Definitely worth checking out.

Day 25 - Favourite SF comedy show

The competition is Red Dwarf, Hitch-Hiker's Guide and Hyperdrive. All good shows in their way but none can match the charm of Spaced.

Spaced was the show that spoke to the geek within all of us. It was the show that got it right. And it was a show that I probably wouldn't have spotted if it hadn't been for my kids introducing me to it.

While at heart it was a simple sit-com format of a group of ill-matched people trying to live together it was the knowing nods to all of popular culture that delivered the show's humour and style. I remember the moment when I realised they were doing the final scene from Empire Strikes Back. Fantastic stuff.

Calling it a science fiction show is, of course, a bit of a stretch but I'm going to allow it. Spaced is the best SF comedy show out there.

Day 24 - The scariest or spookiest show

Let's try and narrow this one down. There's a show called Crooked House by Mark Gatiss which contains one really scary moment, but we haven't covered it on British Invaders so I don't want to go in to too much detail just yet.

I considered both Blink and The Stone Tape. I actually watched Blink again last night and it is still a superbly crafted bit of television that manages to be exciting, funny and scary. The Stone Tape may not have aged terribly well but I remember seeing it in the 1970s and being really disturbed by it. All I could really recall about it was a terrible sense of something old and malevolent inhabiting the walls of the building being investigated by the scientists. It's not quite so scary now but at the time it was a pretty good scare.

In the end I have gone for a piece of experimental television that seems to divide people. Either you find it really scary or really dull. Jonathan Miller's film Whistle and I'll come to you is a black and white adaptation of M.R. James' ghost story Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad made for the BBC arts programme Omnibus in 1968.

Michael Hordern plays a rather fusty academic on a walking holiday in Norfolk. He finds an old bone whistle near a graveyard and blows it. After that ... Well, not very much happens, but what does is really rather disturbing. Jonathan Miller changed the tone of James' story and made it a contemplation of loneliness and sexual repression. There is very little dialogue in the film, Hordern's character often communicates by just grunts or whispers or muttered repetitions of other people's statements. The bleak Norfolk coast line looks suitably chilling in black and white and the whole thing has a strange and disturbing dream-like quality.

It really creeped me out when I first saw it and still does. Interestingly it has recently been remade with John Hurt in the main role. The 2010 version is more about bereavement and loss and has some good moments but I still prefer the 1968 version. You can find it on youtube and you can listen to our review of it on British Invaders.

This Pond Life

The sixth season of the new Doctor Who has just finished. So let us consider the problem of the Doctor's current companion Amy Pond as played by Karen Gillan. Her red-haired good looks make her a bit of a fan favourite, especially, you know, for the dads. But is she a good companion?

The original idea of a little girl who has a rift in time lurking in a crack in her bedroom wall was interesting. Her encounter with the raggedy doctor and then the timey-wimey stuff that led her to become the "girl who waited" was also fun and gave us a terrific introduction to Matt Smith's eleventh Doctor.

The thing about being a companion to the Doctor is that it changes the person somehow. It's not always clearly stated but we get the impression that after they leave the Tardis the Doctor's companions go on to do interesting or even great things. We know that Sarah Jane Smith carried on investigating strange events after she parted company with the fourth Doctor. She was still doing so when she encountered the tenth Doctor in School Reunion. Companions from the new series of Who have gone on to work for Torchwood and UNIT. Donna Noble even became a human-Time Lord hybrid for a short while before being reverted to human and having her memory wiped.

When the adult Amy Pond meets the Doctor she is working as a kissogram girl. During her time as a companion she encounters Daleks, Cybermen and the Weeping Angels. She gets married, has a bizarre concealed pregnancy, is replaced by a plastic doppelganger and is then conveniently moved out of the way to allow the Doctor to have another episode of just him and James Corden larking around. And what happens to her after that?

There is always terrific tension in the battle of wills when the Doctor encounters one of his greatest foes, Davros. It is their verbal sparring that really makes these meetings spark. In the Stolen Earth and Journey's End episodes at the end of the fourth season Davros memorably criticises the Doctor who refuses to use weapons himself but who "takes people and turns them into weapons". It was a telling blow and one that the tenth Doctor seemed unable to answer. It could even be seen as a criticism of the new Doctor Who itself. But what would Davros say about Amy Pond's character development? "You take people and turn them into ... perfume models."

That's what Pond has become after leaving the Tardis, a famous perfume model. I know I'm not the first Who fan to point this out but it's not exactly an impressive role-model career path is it? From kissogram to perfume model. Couldn't Steven Moffat have given her a job that reflected what she had been through better than just moving to another job that she got because she looks good?

And while we're on this subject what about her baby? Obviously the identity of who her baby turns out to become is a bit of a large spoiler. And I can understand that the timey-wimey stuff means that she has little control over the sequence of events. But do we really believe that Amy and Rory would just give up in the search for their abducted child? It would seem that the Doctor can distract them with a nice house, an E-Type Jag for Rory and a modelling contract for Amy. "Oh well, this is a very nice lifestyle. We'll give up the search for Melody."


Actually I preferred what they did with Amy in the episode The Girl who Waited. At least the older, samurai sword wielding Amy was cool. I assume Karen Gillan will be back for season seven, maybe Steven Moffat will do something better with her then.