sir_guinglain

The draft text of the project I labelled here "shirefolk" has been published online; actually twice in twenty-four hours as the editor had misremembered my surname. Anyway, it can be read here, under 'Chippenham - March 2024 draft'.

I am now indeed down with CovId-19...

Slightly stretched ramblings about a Doctor Who guest star, for The Tides of Time.

"To ensure their safe return, some monasteries put their volumes under anathemata, threatening unfaithful borrowers with excommunication." -- Andrew Pettigree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library (London: Profile Books, 2021), p 40

Chapter Five of Doctor Who: Flux, Survivors of the Flux, returns to the frenetic jumping between settings seen in chapters one and three. A greater sense of urgency is balanced by disconcerting shifts in relative time. Yaz, Dan and Jericho have to cover more ground across more time than anyone else. The Doctor’s experience en route to and at Division is brief, but Bel’s journey takes very little time. Swarm and Azure require minimal screen time to achieve their goal, revealed as reaching Division by means of a psychotemporal bridge tethered to the Doctor. It’s only the humans who have to take the slow path. The Grand Serpent might take over sixty years to see his plan come to fruition, but Kate suspects he’s taken several short cuts.

Read more of my thoughts on this episode at The Event Library...

After a very long night last night I'm not able to sleep tonight, so have finished watching Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass on Netflix. I'm not sure whether it was the towering work of art its admirers have hailed, but I don't think it was the damp squib its detractors have pointed to either. I could sense that it was full of references to other works even if I didn't know the works themselves, as it had the taste of something cooked from cherished ingredients, but suspect it displayed its citations with flair. Its low-key blend of horror strands and likeable performances was winning, dialogue varying the kitchen sink with the prophetic to the deadpan realisation of self-delusion. Satire's claws are out too, for church and congregation and for capitalism and its critics alike and they are cold; though I fear cat-lovers might be the most distressed.

So, Bad Wolf Productions will be taking over Doctor Who once Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker leave... and not only does this mean the return of Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter in some executive capacity, but the beadline news is that Russell T Davies is returning as Doctor Who showrunner. This part of the news was completely unexpected to me, though I had wondered whether Bad Wolf might take over Who following the completion of His Dark Materials, series three of which is now in production.

Jackie Lane has died aged seventy-nine. She played Dodo Chaplet, travelling companion to William Hartnell's Doctor in Doctor Who, between Bell of Doom, the fourth and final part of the story the scripts and Doctor Who Magazine call The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve but which BBC Studios call The Massacre (26 February 1966) and The War Machines episode 2 (2 July 1966). Her character was created by a producer and story editor - John Wiles and Donald Tosh - who were exiting Doctor Who after their plans for the series were frustrated by the established character of the programme and the expectations of their managers. Dodo was written out as soon as was practical, unceremoniously being dropped by the new producer and story editor - Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis - less than half-way through The War Machines after Dodo was taken over by the supercomputer WOTAN and deprogrammed by the Doctor. Despite ever-shifting ideas about who Dodo was and how she should behave, Jackie Lane invested Dodo with humour, morality and bravery, and while she had little public interaction with Doctor Who fandom, only I think making one convention appearance, her contribution to the programme gained respect over the years as her episodes were released on video, DVD and audio. She was a point of brightness in a difficult time for the programme. Later in her career she was Tom Baker's voice agent, managing his successful career in advertising voiceovers.

Did I like Dodo? It's difficult to say, because I've only known the character as a mystery to be pieced together, not properly introduced in the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who, the first place I met her. Jackie Lane's biography was confused too, as nwhyte explored many years ago now. The character is overshadowed by the drama behind the scenes, at least for me. Yet she successfully renews the Doctor's compassion, damaged by the experience of The Daleks' Master Plan and exposed by his apparent indifference to the fate of the Huguenots of Paris in The Massacre, and renewed the 'space waif' granddaughter model of companion while reaching out to the contemporary model which would be better-realised later in 1966 in Anneke Wills's Polly. Jackie Lane made Dodo enthusiastic and innocent and helped bring back a sense of joy to the series. I wish we could see all her episodes, but we have some record of all her Doctor Who performances and that is very rare for mid-1960s BBC television popular drama.

Back at the end of May, the locked down and locked out Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society published a double issue, 45&46, of our fanzine, The Tides of Time. We didn't expect printing it would be possible, so it was released online as a pdf. With matters being a bit more flexible in the present state of Covid-19 affairs in England, we have now been able to print the issue, with corrections from the pdf, and copies can be ordered on eBay from the page linked below. This is the first issue to be perfect bound, with 172 colour pages including a card cover.

Tides of Time 45&46 on eBay

Thoughts over here on the first issue of Lytton, the limited comic series about the mercenary created by Eric Saward for Doctor Who in the mid-1980s, written by Saward himself and drawn by Barry Renshaw, published by Manchester-based Cutaway Comics.