The Doctors Are In.

In which I revisit The Doctor’s early travels, and ponder how they’ve changed over 60 years. We also mark a podcasting anniversary, and pick up a few bottles of vino.

Along with a stack of new book purchases, lots of research notes, and some great memories, one of the other things I bought back from our recent UK trip was a friendly crop of germs that turned into a mild chest infection. Over the last few weeks I’ve been running a little below par, and when my energy levels have been low, instead of catching up on the new shows I had lined up on various streaming services, I decided I needed comfort TV. Something familiar. And when you are feeling under the weather, who better to call on than The Doctor?

Why The Doctor? Well, it’s all the fault of fellow pulp writer/editor Jim Beard who back in January started The Doctor’s Beard Podcast. It turns out that Jim had never watched Doctor Who and set out to work his way through the show starting at the beginning. I’ve been enjoying his weekly voyages of discovery and dropped him a note early on to let him know that in some ways I was a bit jealous that he was getting to experience everything Who related with fresh eyes.

Being flaked out on the sofa at odd points over the last few weeks, it seemed like a good idea to maybe join Jim, and rediscover some of those old stories of memory for myself. Back pre-COVID Gill and I had actually started a rewatch, but it sort of got left behind mid-way through William Hartnell’s second season. Rather than start again at the very beginning, that’s where I picked things up this time around. Over the last few weeks I’ve therefore completed all the available Hartnell First Doctor stories and started to wade into the Patrick Troughton Second Doctor stories.

The one thing that struck me watching these early adventures in comparison to the more recent series is the sense of wonder. Every adventure bought something new for both the audience and the occupants of the Tardis. That may seem obvious as it was the early days and everything was new, but when you think about it Doctor Who should be a show about exploration, and that is something I think its lost, especially in recent years when it has become more about introspection and examining its own mythology rather than experiencing other cultures.

As much as I understand the shift with the revitalized Who to the largely standalone fifty minute style stories favored today, on the whole I think I prefer the traditional twenty-five minutes per episode serialized story arcs. In these early stages it was interesting to see experimentation with different story lengths and ideas from a ‘bottle set’ single episode of The Edge of Destruction to the multi-episode galactic scope chase stories like The Chase, or even the musical narration of The Gunfighters before settling into the standard four to six part storylines. 

I have a particular fondness for the historical dramas of this period of Who too before they started to introduce sci-fi elements into every story. While I enjoy the silliness and wild inaccuracies of the aforementioned Gunfighters, the one that has always stayed with me, and is perhaps the first Who story I have clear memories of watching as a child, is The Aztecs which raised some interesting questions around both morality and religion, but also on the way that we project our own moral code onto others. I feel it’s rare that modern Doctor Who addresses these sorts of questions (with the possible exception of the recent Thirteenth Doctor’s Rosa episode.)

As I write this I just finished watching the Second Doctor story Web of Fear, another one that I recall having a big impact on me at the time it originally aired, a classic example of how Who could make the familiar (in this case the London Underground) terrifying. I believe the last time that happened with contemporary Who was with the introduction of the Weeping Angels, which has since been devalued by their over-use.  Which sort of brings me back to the sense of wonder and exploration. Much of modern Who seems to be retreads and reuse of existing material and ideas. Here’s hoping that the return of the production team that revitalized the series back in 2005 will once more make a trip in the Tardis and trip into the unknown.

Other Stuff

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Brabazon Bits

Most of the work on the Brabazon project this week has consisted of transcribing our scribbled pencil notes from the recent archive visits into something more legible. I did also manage to squeeze in a review and edits on the first three chapters to add in a few new items, plus added various footnotes. 

Pages and Screens

Books Read in 2023 - “The First Kingdom” by Max Adams.

In 410 the island province of Britannia rejected Roman authority, and two hundred years later central imperial control had been replaced by around twenty separate regional kingdoms. Tradition and later medieval monastic historians tell us that the vacuum left by the departing legions was filled by invading Saxons who drove the ancient Britons west into what is now Wales, while dividing the country between them, throwing it into a “dark ages” of pagan feudalism until the arrival of Christianity.

In this heavily researched volume, Adams proposes that modern archeology doesn’t support the traditional view, and that “the peoples of Britannia were not passive victims of Imperial collapse,” but through combinations of economic shifts from a coin-based economy to a render-based one, cultural influences of generational immigration rather than sudden invasion, and radical new political changes based on a shift from central imposed oversight to local collaborative practices, they were in fact “collectively engineering a social revolution.”

It’s a dense read at times with an occasional overwhelming litany of names, needs a good understanding of British geography, as well as familiarity of the broader strokes of British history, but overall is a thought-provoking and insightful examination of the assumptions underlying what little we know of these “lost” centuries in the nation’s story.

Podcast Procrastinations

Before They Were Beatles podcast  

This week marks the second anniversary of  my Beatles podcast, and its been a good week. Over the last weekend downloads for BeforeThey Were Beatles passed the 40,000 downloads mark, and are currently trending at around 1,000 downloads a week. Plis it looks like we have around 800 new listeners this month who have started the journey by listening to Episode 1.

They may have a little while to go to catch up as Episode 22 went live today. In the latest episode we cover June, July, and August 1962 as The Beatles make their first visit to Studio Two at Abbey Road, continue to expand their gig schedule, make their final line-up change, and attract the attention of a local TV station.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Podcast

The live Bond Trivia  we recorded last week is now available to “enjoy” on You Tube. If you want to see how we all fared, and which team won, you can catch up with the proceedings HERE.

The Longbox Crusade

The LBC crew keep inviting me back to chat about various pop-culture related shows. This week I returned to Gotham City to discuss Chapter 12 of the 1943 Batman movie serial. Not sure when that will be posted, but I’ll let you know here when it goes live.

Weekly Web Round-Up

Batman On The Cover  - This week we move into November 1967 with the covers from Australia, Brazil, and Denmark but all were reprints of existing US covers so something really stood out.

Another online property I haven’t mentioned yet is our occasional wine blog on Instgram. I Like The Label is a fun space for us to share our enjoyment of wine. We aren’t wine experts  - in fact the exact opposite - we just know what we like, and also enjoy trying out new wines using the highly scientific method of picking out bottles based on label design (hence the title of the Instagram feed). An approach illustrated by this week’s post with the results of our latest trip to the wine racks at our local grocery store.

Thanks for joining me for this week’s Rambles. As always don’t forget to sign up for a FREE subscription so you don’t miss future updates.

See you next time

Alan J. Porter