Some blatant fanzine plugging:

The latest issue of The Tides of Time, number 41, was published by The Oxford Doctor Who Society in June 2018. It's printed in colour throughout its 80 pages and is edited by James Ashworth, who is studying biology at Worcester College, and society veteran, its historian Matthew Kilburn.

Copies of the print edition can be ordered within the UK for £3.50 via PayPal. Contact us for information about overseas orders.

A PDF of the issue (compact, just over 5Mb in size) can be downloaded from this link.

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A public service announcement for followers of Doctor Who non-fiction and broadcasting history: the much-anticipated biography JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson has changed publishers. It will no longer be published by Fantom, but by Miwk. Fantom are in the process of refunding all pre-orders made through them, and pre-ordering is underway from Miwk; the book will be published in May this year, rather than April. Miwk have also set up a Facebook page for the book.

To show signs of being likeable in Attack of the Cybermen is to risk being turned into a Cyberman. The affable sewer workers encountered in the first scene take their places quickly in conversion cabinets. The Doctor is distant and abrasive and Peri complaining and stupid by turns. I'm not sure whether the fact the only character I warmed to in part one of the story was the Cyberleader proves or undermines my first sentence.

Part two is potentially more interesting: there is a clash in design between a mid-1980s Top of the Pops style and a fragile gothic from which could have driven the episode had it been more carefully expressed. As it is one is left with a sense of futility - Bates and Stratton and Griffiths, weighed down by heavy dialogue, fail to take the Cybermen time vessel; the Doctor fails to do very much except get stuck in a room, be slow on the uptake and fail to understand Lytton's plan; the Halley's Comet subplot is sidelined; the Cryons talk slowly and flatly; every piece of exposition seems to be repeated at least twice.

Perhaps these reactions are too obviously shaped by over a quarter-century of recriminations concerning falling ratings, disputed authorship, the alleged unrealistic and outdated aspirations of the producer. For a generation, the merit of the 1985 season of Doctor Who is entangled with the cancellation crisis which emerged in the last week of February, attended by a sense of relentless inevitability.

I spent this evening (with some usual suspects) seeing Colin Baker essay Detective Chief Inspector Morse in Alma Cullen's Colin Dexter-authorised play The House of Ghosts at the New Theatre (which some of those on my flist will remember as the Apollo) in Oxford. Alma Cullen is an experienced television Morse hand and delivers a play (it's not an adaptation of a Dexter story) with beats familiar to television viewers: the Oxford setting, connections with university academics, former students returning to the university, all of whom are Morse's college contemporaries, and who are connected to the murder. As for Morse's latest romantic interest...

The staging was straightforward but effectively suggested theatre, chapel, college room and office. Be careful where you look, if you go, if you don't like torches being shone in your eyes, effective though it was.

Colin Baker's Morse (the term 'Inspector Morse' was absent from the programme and publicity, presumably it's a trademark of the ITV series) was at first less of a presence than one imagines John Thaw's would have been. One is not comparing like with like, of course. Colin Baker brings in some Thawesque mannerisms but as the play unfolds proves very good at depicting a Morse unhappily triangulated between competing loyalties, his devotion to solving puzzles, and his own tenuous sense of self-worth. Deliberately and curiously nostalgic - set in 1987, most of the actors playing fortysomethings seemed to be much older, reminiscent of the 1970 version of The Railway Children - I think most of the audience agreed that it was worthy of the Barrington Pheloung theme music at the end.