Monday 1 January 2007

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane

We bring our first season to a close with the new beginning of Doctor Who’s most successful spinoff, in which a beloved TV heroine from our childhood was given one last chance (or twenty-seven last chances) to save the world.

Kelsey Hooper is played by fifteen-year-old Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, who had been in Stars in Their Eyes Kids at the age of nine. You can see her in action here.

Nathan mentions a couple of children’s TV shows which are formal influences on The Sarah Jane Adventures, including Chocky (1984) and Children of the Stones.

Adam alludes to a theory by friend-of-the-podcast Gary Russell, which he outlined in a tweet in 2022: the third bedroom was actually locked, bolted and then the door bricked over, making it airtight. Behind it was Kelsey. “I wonder whatever happened to her?” SJ would ask - and Luke and Maria would look at each other knowingly… and say nothing. It was “the pact”.

Wētā Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand, were the design studio for the gorgeous miniatures in Thunderbirds Are Go (2015) (among countless other things).

Flight Through Entirety did its first commentary on the first Doctor Who spinoff K9 and Company (Episode 76: K9 and Commentary), in which Todd first notes writer Terence Dudley’s relentless obsession with phones and doors.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Adam is @adamrichard. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll be weirdly cold to you for no reason the first time we meet in person.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio; after that, we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday. In it, we talk about Steven Moffat’s return to the show in Boom. We’ll be doing weekly episodes until the end of Season 1 of the new era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 3 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 3, they conclude their Reach for the Stars triptych, with a Cathy Gale episode called The White Dwarf.

In news just to hand, Brendan and Bjay have just dropped another episode of The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they played Cat Quest, a cheerful and cartoony action RPG featuring an alarming number of cat-based puns.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched one of Nathan’s all-time favourites, a relaxed and genuiunely funny episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Disaster.

Sunday 22 October 2006

Torchwood: Everything Changes

It’s 2006, which is just the time to launch a gritty and adult Doctor Who spinoff — Torchwood, a show with an immortal lead character which is basically about the finality of death. But has Torchwood learned anything from its parent show’s many, many launches and re-launches?

James compares Torchwood to the Virgin New Adventures, a series of original Doctor Who novels launched in 1991, after the cancellation in 1989 and once the full set of novelisations had been all but completed. Like Torchwood, the VNAs initially featured lots of sex and swearing, before settling down a bit and discovering that there were other ways of being adult.

Joseph Campbell was a writer and narratologist who codified the main features of what he called the Hero’s Journey, a narrative framework which is exemplified (he believed) in heroic myths across a range of cultures. He’s a big source of inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars films.

One we missed: India Varma played Tala Durith in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), blowing herself up (inevitably) in her third episode. (Spoilers, sorry.)

Cucumber was a 2015 drama by Russell T Davies about a gay man in his forties who discovers, after the breakup of his long-term relationship, what gay life is like for young people in their twenties. Its sixth episode focuses on the brutal murder of one of the main characters.

Flight Through Entirety hasn’t covered any Torchwood at all, but for a fresh take on this episode, take a look at this review by friend-of-the-podcast Michael O Sullivan. His blog, Angst and Death and Random Shoes, will be covering as much of the show as he can tolerate watching.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood and Todd is @toddbeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break into your house and use your flatbed scanner to create PDF copies of the complete works of Herman Melville.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The latest episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire is probably out by now, or if you’re a particularly keen 500 Year Diary listener, it will be out in just a couple of hours. In it, we talk about the two new episodes released on 11 May — Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be covering the whole of the new series, releasing an episode a couple of days after each new Doctor Who episode comes out. Like and subscribe.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we marvelled at the superb Roxann Dawson, as B’Elanna went for another round of overwrought self-examination in Voyager’s Barge of the Dead.

Sunday 25 December 2005

The Christmas Invasion

Just nine months after Doctor Who’s twenty-first century iteration burst triumphantly onto our screens, we all get together with Steven B to watch as the BBC’s flagship drama introduces its exciting new lead to nearly 10 million viewers on Christmas Day on BBC One. It ends up going pretty well.

We were all more or less certain that David Tennant would get the Doctor Who gig on the strength of his charismatic performance in Russell T Davies’s Casanova (2005). It’s worth a look — it definitely feels like an audition piece for Doctor Who.

Christopher Eccleston’s audition piece for Doctor Who was probably not his performance as cat theatre proprietor Dougal Siepp, which you can get a sense of here (if you can tolerate a terrible racial stereotype played by Steve Pemberton). In fact, Eccleston’s real audition piece is role as Steve Baxter in RTD’s The Second Coming (2003), where he plays a 40-year-old man working in a video shop who discovers that he is (really) the Second Coming of Christ.

Here’s the Dead Ringers sketch Christmas at Doctor Who’s (2005).

If you’re not sure what we mean by the Doctor Who theme’s “middle eight”, here’s the description from the TARDIS Fandom site. And here’s what it sounds like in Murray’s first version of the Doctor Who theme.

On 2 May 1982, during the Falklands War, the Argentinian cruiser ARA General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine outside a declared exclusion zone and while Peru was trying to negotiate peace between the two sides. 323 people died.

Flight Through Entirety’s commentary on The Christmas Invasion was Episode 147: The Commentary Invasion.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Steven B is @steedstylin, and Brendan is @brandybongos. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into your house and leave fruit in your bed.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over a week, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We just released Episode 5, in which you can hear us talking about the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we cheered on Star Trek: The Next Generation as it took its first confident steps into its imperial phase, with The Survivors.

Saturday 2 January 1971

Terror of the Autons

It feels like only a year ago that Doctor Who underwent a strange and cataclysmic soft reboot, and it looks like it’s happening again this week. Or is it?

Paul Cornell’s negative review of Terror of the Autons was originally published in DWB Issue 112, way back in April 1993. Here it is republished in the old Usenet forum rec.arts.drwho (or at least the version of it to be found on Google Groups right now).

Jeremy Bentham (yes, a relation) was the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society back in the 70s. To us, he was more famous for contributing a section to Peter Haining’s 1983 coffee-table book Doctor Who: A Celebration, a section which briefly covered every Doctor Who story up to the final story of Season 20, The King’s Demons. We mentioned it last week; it wasn’t just a source of information about the history of the show, but a massive influence on received fan wisdom for years afterwards.

There exists a three-minute training video from 1972 in which Doctor Who producer Barry Letts talks about how CSO works. It can be found on the Carnival of Monsters DVD release and on the more recent Doctor Who: The Collection Season 10 blu-ray box set.

According to this story’s TARDIS Fandom page, stuntman Terry Walsh was actually hit by one of the cars during the scene in the quarry, but he just got up and continued with the scene, so it made it into the finished episode. Barry Letts’s recollection is somewhat different, however.

And inevitably, we end up talking about the eccentric way the Pertwee Era was shown in Australia in the late 1970s, so you might want to jog your memory by re-reading the shownotes for last week.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Terror of the Autons in Episode 23: Increasingly Baroque and Stupid.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll put on big plastic masks and leap out at you from behind a fixture the next time you’re test-driving couches at IKEA.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over two weeks, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week, Brendan and his friend Bjay returned to the mic for another episode of their gaming podcast, The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they enjoyed There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, a surreal and metatextual point-and-click adventure with a surprising amount of heart.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We should have Episode 5 to you in about a week, so you can prepare by watching the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we cheered ourselves up by watching a scary episode of Strange New Worlds called All Those Who Wander.

Saturday 3 January 1970

Spearhead from Space

In the first week of the 1970s, Doctor Who is back, with a new Doctor, a new alien threat, new companions and a new earthbound premise. So what makes it the same show?

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is well known for regularly going into a coma to heal himself. He does that in this story, in The Dæmons, in Planet of the Daleks, in The Monster of Peladon and in Planet of the Spiders. (I’ve probably left some out.) This phenomenon is so well known that is has a name — the Pertwee death pose — characterised by Pertwee lying flat on his back with one knee bent. Flight Through Entirety named its Jon Pertwee retrospective after this — Episode 31: One Knee up for Pertwee.

When Peter and Simon refer to “625-line Pertwees”, what they mean is the episodes that still existed in their original PAL format, as opposed to episodes that only existed as film transfers. The 625-line Pertwees were the only episodes repeated by ABC-TV in Australia in the late 70s, which meant, roughly speaking, that we would go from Spearhead from Space straight to Day of the Daleks, and then to Seasons 10 and 11, skipping Planet of the Daleks and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, each of which had one episode that only existed as a film transfer. You can find an account of the history of Doctor Who repeats in Australia on this page from BroaDWcast, and you can find details of the state of our collection of colour Pertwee episodes on this page from The Destruction of Time.

Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the Season 8 story Colony in Space was called Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974). Colony in Space was Jo Grant’s fourth story on TV, but the novelisation describes her arrival at UNIT and her boredom in the job until she is whisked away by the Doctor to an alien planet. It’s not until the following year that we get the novelisation of Jo’s actual first story in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

The sting is the screaming sound that leads into the music of the closing credits of the Classic Series, starting with The Ambassadors of Death, two stories after this. (It can now be heard at the beginning of the opening credits as well.)

Startling Barbara Bain is our commentary podcast on Space: 1999, a lavishly expensive British TV show from the mid-70s shot entirely on 35mm film, with lots of visual effects done in-camera (including the famous model sequences).

ADR is part of the post-production process: actors are brought into a recording studio to record dialogue for scenes that have already been shot.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Spearhead from Space in Episode 21: They’ve Cancelled My Show.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we will bring this dirty old box into your clean house.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 2 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 2, they continue their Reach for the Stars theme, with a Tara King episode called Invasion of the Earthmen.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched what Nathan believes to be the worst ever episode of Star Trek: Voyager — Course: Oblivion. You won’t believe how shrill his ranting gets.

Saturday 5 November 1966

The Power of the Daleks

A big week for beginnings this week, with a new Doctor, a new origin story for the Daleks, and a whole new approach to defeating the bad guys. Oh, and a new podcast to discuss them all on. So let’s welcome Patrick Troughton to the studio floor, as we discuss The Power of the Daleks.

The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.

Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at times.

The Omnirumour was a series of rumours arising during 2013 that as many as 90 missing Doctor Who episodes had been found and were ready for return to the BBC Archives, possibly as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This didn’t happen, obviously, but we did at least get nine episodes: five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of The Web of Fear.

Let’s continue the tradition: here is Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on this story, which (inevitably) discusses the importance of mercury to the new Doctor’s character.

Nathan and Brendan refer to Kieran Hodgson’s Bad Doctor Who Impressions version of The Daleks, which is something you should go and watch immediately.

James very thoughtfully plugs Brendan and Richard’s new podcast about The Avengers, called The Three-Handed Game, in which they are joined by old friend of the podcast Steven B to discuss episodes from different eras in the history of the show.

At the end of the episode, Simon recounts the story of the gradual revelation of The Power of the Daleks throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. Among the things he mentions are Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (also 1983), The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2nd edition, 1976), an edition of DreamWatch Bulletin (possibly issue 121 in December 1993) announcing the upcoming publication of the telesnaps in Doctor Who Magazine, and the discovery of some clips from this story in an Australian TV Show called Perspective: C for Computer.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Power of the Daleks in Episode 11: Bum Wetting.

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll write next week’s shownotes in a completely incomprehensible acrostic code.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back a couple of days after the screening of the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Ncuti Gatwa Era on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we said farewell to Star Trek: Enterprise by watching that universally acknowledged Star Trek war crime, These Are the Voyages….