Driving With The Doctor
In which I spend several hours listening to a Time Lord, write about runways, and welcome the arrival of some recently published words.
I spent a large proportion of this week a little to the north in the metroplex of Dallas / Fort Worth where I was running a Content Discovery workshop for a consulting business client. It was an excellent few days with an engaged and enthusiastic client and a team that was open to new ideas and sharing their own thoughts on how they wanted to unlock the potential of their organization's forty-year archive of content.
A trip to Dallas means a three hour slog up I35 in each direction, plus with a few days of driving around town from hotel to offices and out to find food meant I had some solid in-car listening time available. Normally I’d use such an extended time behind the wheel to catch up on various podcasts. But not this week. This week I decided to take an audible spin in the Tardis with the good old Doctor.
Not too long ago a friend pointed out that an eight-hour compilation of various BBC radio Doctor Who programs was now available on Audible, and could be obtained for just a single Audible Credit token. Gill’s the one who normally gets to cash in those credits as she is much more of a consumer of audio books than I, but I wasn’t going to let that opportunity pass even if at the time I didn’t know when I’d get around to listening to the collection.
This week provided that opportunity, and what an eclectic set of Who stories it turned out to be.
The collection opened with two full cast audio adventures featuring Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor, along with the much-missed Elizabeth Sladen playing everyone’s favorite companion Sarah Jane Smith, and the indomitable Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. As I’m right in the middle of the Pertwee era Who on my lunch-time rewatch sessions, these were a great continuation of my current Who mind-set.
I also have a certain fondness for the first of the two, Paradise of Death, as I still own the cassette tape version that was released in 1993. It’s probably my most listened to audio Who story over the last 30 years and inevitably carries a high degree of nostalgic resonance for me. I know I’ve heard the second story featuring this cast, The Ghosts of N-Space, before but it never really captured my imagination.
Sarah Jane was also featured in the two Fourth Doctor stories that followed, along with Tom Baker voicing his iconic version of the time lord. Instead of a full cast audio, the first story, Doctor Who and the Pescatons, was more like Baker narrating a short story (It was originally released as a vinyl LP in 1976), with occasional dialog by Sladen as Sarah Jane. As such it felt a little flat after the previous two audio-dramas but was still a grand adventure.
This was followed by a Baker/Sladen outing that was originally broadcast as part of the BBC radio series for school Exploration Earth. It was broadcast in 1976 and has the distinction of being the franchise’s first audio adventure. The story is pretty basic and wrapped a fairly standard evil alien plot around a bunch of educational information on the geologiocal formation of this very planet.
Perhaps the part of this collection I was most looking forward to listening to was Whatever Happened To … Susan? I hadn’t come across this before and the promise of the title that it would investigate the fate of the first Doctor’s granddaughter and companion was intriguing. I’m not actually sure what we got here. Firstly it didn’t include any of the original cast to provide the voices, so it felt off-model through-out, and its tone was a strange mix of mocking affection for the series, along with outright snark, and an undertone of dark satire peppered with many continuity and factual errors that at the time of its production in 1994 would have been obvious, although I doubt the producers actually cared. I’m not sure what audience this was aimed at.
The collection was rounded out with a return to a full cast audio adventure, in fact the first one recorded and broadcast by the BBC in 1985, Slipback, which featured Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as his companion, Peri. Another in a long line of birth-of-the-universe science-fiction stories, it has a distinct charm of its own.
Although these stories were first produced over an extended time period between 1976 and 1996 and featured three different incarnations of the Doctor, they all used the same version of the theme tune. And that repeated exposure just served to reinforce that the 9th version of the theme as used from 1980 to 1985 remains my favorite version. (Probably because it was during the 80s that I went from being just a regular viewer of Doctor Who to being a full blown Whovian.)
Other Stuff
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Brabazon Bits
I spent some time this week writing about the design and construction of this impressive piece of tarmac. (The giant 8,000 foot runway built between 1946 and 1948 to accommodate the Brabazon test flights).
The sheer numbers involved are staggering but I think my favorite factoid was finding out that it shares the same foundational material as the Bristol Basin in New York City
- both were built on hardcore made up of recycled rubble from WW2 bomb sites in and around Gillian’s home city of Bristol.
Word Slinging
Just after last week’s newsletter was posted a box appeared by the front door that contained several copies of The Man Who Laughed. It’s always a good day when the contributor’s copy of a new book containing some of your words arrives.
Early this week before I headed out on the road I recieved a note that my recent piece for the Reworked website about the need for taxonomy for your internal content was picked as one of the top Intranet industry related articles from the last four weeks. That was a nice way to start the week
Pages and Screens
Book Read in 2023 - “Philip K. Dick: A comics biography” by Laurent Queyssi & Mauro Marchesi.
Although I’ve read, and enjoyed, several of science-fiction master Philip K. Dick’s seminal works, I never really knew much about him as an individual.
In the afterword the author describes Dick as “a good man with great empathy, but also his share of darkness.” Which is far from how he is portrayed in the work as he comes across as a highly unpleasant, paranoid individual who was out of touch with reality, and clearly driven by some personal demons.
In the end I’m not sure what the creative team were trying to achieve with this biography, but if this an accurate portrayal of the writer, I’d rather have been left in ignorance.
Podcast Procrastinations
The Before They Were Beatles podcast - A quick reminder that Episode 25 of The Before They Were Beatles podcast is now live and available on your podcast platform of choice.
Entitled “Beginnings and Endings” it covers the events of September through to December 1962 as we complete our journey as The Beatles return to the recording studio, make their TV debut, and say goodbye to Hamburg.
And talking of Before They Were Beatles, just a reminder that if you’d like to keep up with the progress of the work on the 20th Anniversary edition of the Before They Were Beatles book you can sign up for a subscription to the dedicated Substack monthly newsletter HERE. -
The July issue was recently published and introduced us to the young John Lennon - If you want to find out more, now is a great time to subscribe.
Weekly Web Round-Up
We are still adding new items to our FOREST COMICS & BOOKS store on eBay - - each week. So don’t forget to click on by and check it out. - This week we’ve added a selection of Saint and Doctor Who paperbacks, along with some hardcover editions of the John Gardner written James Bond continuation novels.
It you enjoy original comics art and would like to pick up a few items from my collection (like this Justice League page) there are some now up for sale through the kind folks at Heritage Auctions.
You can check them out right here
Batman On The Cover - The journey through Batman’s comics publishing history continues this week with comics cover dated April, 1968 published in Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, and Norway. All were standard reprints from original US covers so nothing really stood out this week.
Where on the Web is Alan?
You can now find links to all the places you can find me online, websites, newsletters, social media and more in a single LINKS page on my personal website.
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See you next time
Alan J. Porter