I'm no longer the editor of The Tides of Time, magazine of the Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society, having left it to younger hands in the shape of recent graduate jamesashworth98, but have contributed to this latest issue, 104 pages on everything from Revolution of the Daleks to Gangsters via Time Lord Victorious. Details of the issue's contents can be found here. The society is collecting orders through this form - please complete if you are interested.

Registering here the outpouring of memorializing I've mainly joined in with elsewhere. Terrance Dicks was a great storyteller, a wry colluder with the childhood imagination, a subtle improver of memories of lost television. He was also acutely aware of structure, genre and his and his work's place in time, and of his work as collaborative act, whether with cast and crew or with publishers, and of course with the audience. The way in which Doctor Who is written and written about still owes a huge amount to him - and how many remember fondly his children's creations such as T R Bear, his many other series (I remember his 1981 novel Cry Vampire which includes a defence of children watching horror as well as Doctor Who) and his stewardship in the 1980s of the BBC Sunday afternoon classic serials? I look forward to him receiving due appreciation in the press in the coming days - I gather Toby Hadoke is already hard at work - and I remember well the experienced writer talking through one gauche undergraduate's attempt to invite him to Oxford over the phone. He did visit, though I continued to make faux pas with him over the next two and a bit decades. He was good and generous company, however.

Russell T Davies's talk to Worcester College, Oxford and (by invitation of the provost) the Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society was enjoyable. I wasn't in the target audience, of course - there was a lot of talk about how to get into television and how Russell failed to get into the BBC training course three times, ending up by going in as a 'worker' through an ordinary job application and not as management. There was a definite sense of how glad he was to leave Doctor Who and that he spent a long time picking up the threads of his life that he'd dropped to make the series. Nevertheless, despite the attempted interventions of Jonathan Bate, the provost of Worcester - who four years ago encouraged him to persevere with A Midsummer Night's Dream for BBC One when the budget and logistics were collapsing - to take him away, Russell talked to people and posed for photographs for three quarters of an hour. The talk - excluding the Q&A - should appear at the Worcester College website soon if it hasn't already.

I've blogged an article originally published in The Tides of Time on that publication's website. Empty Pockets, Empty Shelves is a short look at how the character of the Twelfth Doctor was represented in motifs destroyed or dispersed at the arrival of the Thirteenth Doctor and how these absences help define the Doctor as now portrayed by Jodie Whittaker.

I mentioned issue 40 of Tides of Time, the Oxford University Doctor Who fanzine, in an earlier post. It's now free to download from http://tidesoftime.wordpress.com .

Thoughts from the Oxford Doctor Who Society on the most recent series, condensed from several weeks of discussion on Facebook Messenger, are now available in one document downloadable from The Tides of Time blog.

No essay from me this week, but negatives first. There aren't many of them, and are largely personal in that there's always an awkwardness to me in the Doctor revelling in pop culture or being a rock musician, and yet here I can see it was the right choice. I'm not sure where the Doctor's audience in 1138 went either...

Otherwise, superlatives. Steven Moffat and company projected their most coherent vision of the Doctor Who universe so far; though I did find myself wondering if the Shadow Architect's hairdresser (probably a Judoon, come to think of it) had been killed in action since The Stolen Earth. The Maldovarium is a sorrier place for the loss of Dorium. Clara's confidence as schoolteacher and UNIT's contact radiated and Jenna Coleman's authority in the part was more than a match for Michelle Gomez's calculating tricksiness. The traps within traps were sprung and the Daleks depicted as more detached from human or Gallifreyan values while justifying their fond parent's description of them as children. Barry Norman's comparison of fifty years ago, that they are devices through which children imagine killing grown-ups, was made plain here; as was the realisation most fans have had at some time, that the Daleks are tanks (and I'll link to John Wilson's article on the subject as soon as I've identified the relevant issue of Tides of Time - [ETA it's issue 23, but I can't manage the link at present - search for "Tides 23" at tidesoftime.wordpress.com for the pdf]). Taking up the convincingly-performed but sidestepped 'Do I have the right?' speech from Genesis of the Daleks is a dangerous exercise and we'll only find how well it works next week. Otherwise, a sense of the programme trying something new and Peter Capaldi's most moving and enthralling performance in the role.

Also posted at The Event Library

The Oxford Doctor Who Society fanzine The Tides of Time's summer 2012 edition is now online. More details here.

Another dip into the Oxford Doctor Who Society back catalogue:

Tides of Time, issue 28 - blog post introducing it, and link to the PDF.

I've not much to add to what I wrote about this story back in 2008 when a smaller number of people marathoned the season compared with those who did so today. I came in during part eight, in time to see the breathtaking erasure of Peri and her replacement with a humanised and feminised Kiv. Nicola Bryant's performances in these scenes are among her best, though Peri's apparent fate is too bleak for that of a Doctor Who companion. Not even Russell T Davies went as far as to erase an entire personality, and John Nathan-Turner was probably right to reverse Peri's death in dialogue, though the electronic pink heart in which she and Yrcanos are enveloped in part fourteen is far, far too much. The Vervoid story won much more attention this time, though as the almost-banned cover of DWM 323 had been mentioned (by me in one of my more ribald moments) the humour assumed a bluer hue than I previously remembered.

The case remains, for me, that the most interesting character in (Terror of) The Vervoids/The Ultimate Foe/parts nine to twelve is Ruth Baxter, and she remains in her coffin and is used for shock value only. There is a glimmer of how the sixth Doctor might have developed, liberated from Eric Saward's script-editing as he now was, but Pip and Jane Baker largely deliver a Doctor reacting to public criticism - "More a sort of clown, actually." Mel asks the Doctor whether all Time Lords speak in such an antediluvian manner, which either exposes Pip and Jane's failure to recognise how cumbersome and antiquated their own writing style was, or admits their inability or unwillingness to do anything about it.