Radio - live transmission...

I've long been a fan of the DWIN Myth Makers collections and have remarked in the past that they are consistently of a higher quality than the official Big Finish releases, so I was definitely intrigued to see the name of the erstwhile editor of Myth Makers, Richard Salter, on the front cover of Transmissions.

I did wonder whether his editorship of pro writers would match his handling of fanfic authors was just one reason to buy the book, but I needn't have worried, in spite of a slightly rocky start...

Adaptation of Death - Graeme Burk

I came to Transmissions having given up a couple of Who books in a row as lost causes - and then nearly dumped this Short Trips collection within the first three pages as the book gets off to a disappointingly average sort of start.

Middle-aged music references (Cher, for God's sake), plays on words which would look poor in a Clayton Hickman audio (PQ Rowling, author of Harry Potter and the Half Moon Dentist) and future pop culture references that would make Russell T Davies wince ('Apple Coldplay' - what the hell does that even mean, has Apple Martin/Paltrow changed her name or has the band? Is this some descendant named after the band? Did anyone think any of this through at all?).

If the book was entirely along those lines - high school creative writing class, basically - then I decided that maybe it was time to give up on fiction and go and read that history of the last millennium I've had lying in the bookcase for about five years.

Luckily it does improve from this unpromising beginning.

The writing as a whole is variable but Burk certainly seems more comfortable with pastiching action movies in the film scenes than with creating the prose required for the rest of the story. Clumsy metaphors litter the story from the very first paragraph (where someone is 'like Adonis' stunt double on steroids') and jokes which weren't funny first time round get repeated until they've lost whatever small gloss they might once have had (chief amongst these 'jokes' are the names of film actors of the future - Kel-Al Cage, Chris Culkin-Rock, Jude Law the Third. Seriously guys, that wasn't a good joke the first time you made it).

There are some nice lines, to be fair - "whatever the Doctor was, he was too used to the sight of death" sums up the entirety of Journey's End in somewhat less than half a sentence, while 'Poor source material is no defence' initially fooled me into thinking that the story was going to be a meta-textual commentary on something other, only to discover that, sadly, it wasn't anything of the sort.

The basic idea is a good one - aliens with a deep-felt love of the truth come to Earth to prosecute a writer for penning an action movie which fictionalises their race's involvement in fighting off an invasion force. The character of Ekode, the alien most unfairly denigrated by the movie, is an intelligent and thoughtful creation and the aliens themselves are given some interesting characteristics. The narrator talks in bad prose and poor metaphor a lot of the time, but being charitable that might well be intentional.

Unfortunately, this is one of those Big Finish short stories with no ending. Or rather, there is an ending in the book, but it's a hasty tack-on, unlinked to, and unforeshadowed by, anything which has gone before. It reads as though the author got to near the end and realised that he'd written himself into an executed Doctor shaped hole - cue an unlikely twist (thought that seriously over-estimates the cleverness of the 'twist' in question) and wriggle through to the end, the Doctor and your story - sort of, if you squint a bit and stick your fingers in your brain - saved.

Not the worst story ever written in a Who collection (stand up, Joe Lidster - that's one record you're likely to hold for longer than, oh I don't know, Adonis' stunt double on steroids) but a good idea let down by some fairly uninspired writing and a below average resolution more fitting for the pages of sixties' TV Comic is not a great start.

Policy to Invade - Ian Mond

Thankfully the cunning editor has placed the ever reliable Ian Mond at second place in this 17 tale relay and he takes the baton like a pro (no, I've no idea where the sporting metaphor came from either).

In some ways this is Mond's version of Steven Moffat's outstanding Decalog 3 short story 'Continuity Errors', with the Seventh Doctor manipulating events for all he's worth in order to bring matters to his desired end.

The use of the minutiae of office communication is, to my surprise, something I'd never come across in a Who short story before, and each successive memo, report and position paper comes across as entirely believable.

Which makes the entire story sound terribly dry, but the reports are scattered amidst a series of witness statements that effectively build up to the satisfyingly well-considered conclusion which firmly puts the collection back on track.

Only Connect - Andy Lane

It's a nice little story which has its central tenet a theme close to my heart - that real history is composed of the actions of millions of people and that the way they live is as important as the activities of statesmen and generals.

Problem is, it's not a Doctor Who story. A cafe in which assorted time travellers drive taxis incognito in order to find out about their passengers? And the Fourth Doctor is one of those drivers? No, I really don't think so.

It's the pilot story for another collection entirely, levered into a Who collection by search and replacing the main character's name. There's an attempt to make it into a Who story by linking the Doctor's actions to a revelation about Seeds of Doom, but I'd bet an entire pound that the revelation was different in the original story.

Nicely written, but ultimately pointless in a Doctor Who collection and not a little annoying in its disregard for its subject.

Gudok - Mags L Halliday

This is very nearly perfect. Mags Halliday's is the pre-eminent Doctor Who historical writer and while lack of familiarity meant that I found her Faction Paradox novel a trifle hard going at times, 'Gudok' succeeds on every level in conjuring up the Trans-Siberian railway in the early twentieth century. Little touches - 'the little cards in the corridor', the remarkable lack of a piano in the upper class carriage, the bolster being used a barrier on the bed - litter and colour the text, and Halliday really nails the interation between Tegan and Turlough against a backdrop of a train journey through high mountains and a brief, tragic trip on an ice breaker across the world's deepest lake. The solution to the mystery is a little obvious due to the lack of possibilities in the limited space of both train and story, but the chinese whisper nature of the transmission is both satisfying and fitting.

Generation Gap - Lou Anders

This is an odd story altogether and one I'm still not sure if I liked or not. On the one hand, some of the writing is clunky - having established the names of the Doctor and Sarah-Jane in dialogue, the author feels constrained also to clumsily point out their names in the body of the text, for example - and the second person present tense narrative jars at times.

On the other, this narrative approach is at least an attempt at novelty and some of the writing is pleasingly bonkers (the Doctor "relaxing [his] bones" is a stand-out on the bonkers front, I have to say ). There's some good, more straight-forward lines in there too - 'Reverend carries more weight than Professor these days, the reverse of how you feel it should be' - and the resolution is neatly done.

Incidentally, it's a little odd to have two stories in a row which mention Beatles lyrics, but that's either an editorial goof or signifies something in the collection as a whole. We'll have to wait and see.

As I said, it's an odd sort of story, but on balance the interesting outweighs the leaden and that's good enough for me.

Lonely - Richard Wright

This was a little bit of a 'meh' story for me, possibly because it's written entirely as a conversation in an internet chatroom. Competent and capturing the McGann persona reasonably well, it just felt too slight to engage the reader much beyond a quick skim read, and the resolution in which all the characters learn A Valuable Life Lesson too trite to make much of an impact.

Not bad, not great, just meh...

Blue Road Dance - James Milton

Whereas this is bloody good.

Normally I'm not a fan of any imaginary culture which involves mystical dancing (I had it in my head that I'd come across loads of those over the years, but now it comes to it I can't actually think of any) but Milton really makes the concept work by listing the movements of the dancer protagonist like a Who version of Umberto Eco collating mythical animals.

More than I dislike dancing stories though, I love stories in which the Doctor takes on an element of myth, as here. 'Blue Road Dance' is in the tradition of previous favourites like Paul Dale Smith's 'Blossom', a tale in which the presence of the Doctor is subsidiary to the idea of the Doctor, where he serves as an archetype and not entirely a character, and in which the activities of other characters drive the narrative.

This is a beautiful story, with space even for the unexpected - the Doctor's reaction to a girl calling 'grandfather' is wonderful, for example - and an open ending which (unlike, say, The Doctor's Daughter) fully deserves to be left open and entirely works on its own terms.

I seem to recall being impressed by the only other story by James Milton I've ever read - a few years ago in one of the Myth Makers collections also edited by Richard Salter.

Hopefully his next story won't be so long in arriving.

Tweaker - Dan Abnett

Another oddity. It's a decent story, well written by Dan Abnett, especially for anyone who remembers the glorious experience of playing old vinyl.

It is a bit of a shame that the musicians who get mentioned are imaginary and the central recording created by the author - there are, after all, any number of obscure and lost blues records which could have been used instead and thus added another minor layer to the puzzle.

But what made this otherwise pleasant but unremarkable story feel odd to me was the fact that it features the Davison Doctor, when it feels like it should be a job for the McCoy incarnation. Intricate planning in advance, long-term planning and dropping stuff in super-novae spells out the manipulative Doctor of the Cartmell Masterplan for me, not the open face and innocent abroad qualities of Peter Davison.

Still this is exactly the kind of pleasant but not earth-shattering story that any collection needs.

Link - Pete Kempshall

I have been known to moan that the thematic backbone of the Short Trips collections is usually next to non-existent, a convenient hook which is discarded the second it becomes inconvenient, or a linking method where the links are often tenuous to the point of puzzlement. This collection occasionally strays slightly into the latter, but generally it's a well-thought out sets of stories in which the common thread has been maintained throughout, for which the editor is to be congratulated.

'Link' is perhaps the story which best makes use of the idea of transmission, referring to both means by which information is transmitted and the way in which infection is spread. As a story it's more compact and straight-forward than some in the collection but comes with a diverting beginning in which the author neatly tricks the reader into expecting some kind of Starship Troopers style gung-ho special, only to subvert that expectation almost immediately as the narrative pulls back a little.

It's noticeable in fact that there are times when this reads like nothing so much as a Target novel (expressions flash across people's faces, words are emblazoned on signs not written and the like) - but given the audience that's no bad thing, and it ensures that the plot rattles along appropriately.

There's not a lot else to say except that the resolution when it comes is very well constructed and reminiscent of one of the Third Doctor's earlier television adventures.

Certainly a better than average story.

Driftwood - Dale Smith

It's the nature of the beast that most Doctor Who writers are either fans with word processors or essentially hacks for hire, as capable of churning out a Warhammer novel or a bland kids' series about a wacky detective as the latest NSA.

There are exceptions though. Dale Smith for one. 'Driftwood' casts an eye over the early days of Human/Dolphin relations (as seen in his earlier novel, Heritage) and, with customary skill, turns out a story packed with arresting imagery, believable characters and and an intriguing setting.

Uniquely in the collection I had to read this one twice before I figured out what was going on, but that's no bad thing. Perhaps lacking in the poetry of Smith's earlier 'Blossom' or the timey-wimey cleverness of 'Recursion', 'Driftwood' is nevertheless a thoughtful and immaculately written contribution to the world of Who fiction.

Methusalah - George Mann

I'm a sucker for any story which goes cast distances in time or space and makes some attempt to show rather than tell that distance. Sadly, most Who stories post-2005 settle merely for saying 'This is a long time in the future' and leaving it at that. It happened a bit in the pre-1989 years too but, thankfully, prose attempts have been far better.

Lance Parkin's The Infinity Doctors does it best, with its universe a few years before Event Two, where everything once thought important is gone, and a section to the Key to Time lies discarded in the dust of one of the few remaining planets. George Mann goes for a similar approach, with a Universe largely devoid of light and a single dying star burning beneath the starship Methusalah. It's effectively done, as are the scenes with Peri stuck on 10th century Earth with what appears to be a raving madman.

Compact, tidy and straight-forward but with a glimmer here and there of greater ambition, this is a far better story than Mann's disappointing solo entrant in the Telos' Time Hunter series.

Nettles - Kelly Hale

Too often in Who the Doctor is essentially a simple White Hat, coming to the rescue of the beleagured population, overthrowing the dictator, removing the threat. So it always comes as a pleasant change to see a degree of genuine moral ambivalence in a Who story, and Kelly Hale doesn't disappoint in this tale of the Doctor's borderline emotional abuse of a genetic engineer on a planet under occupation. The ending is as unexpected as it is particularly beautifully done, though major kudos should go to whichever of Hale and her editor decided on leaving one small revelation to a flashback in the final story, 'Transmission Ends'.

Larkspur - Mark Stevens

Screw the story, check out the imagery. The Falkland Islands at war, a landscape littered with dead time machines, a name spread across millenia, a TARDIS in need of company. That the story is decent is a bonus when a writer uses as many arresting images as this.

See No Evil - Steve Lyons

I didn't like this story much when it was called The Stealers of Dreams. I like it a bit better now that it's shorter and features Mary Whitehouse, but something new would have been nice. Dreadful last line too.

iNtRUsioNs - Dave Hoskins

So who's Dave Hoskins then? And why doesn't he have an NSA out? I'm exaggerating bit, but this is a truly top drawer story, the best in the collection and one of the best short trip stories I've ever read. The story - of a meme infiltrating the mind of a postal worker obsessing over an unknown woman in the Melbourne Dead Letter Office - is intriguing, imaginative and engaging, and the portrayal of the First Doctor is spot-on, with Hoskins managing in only a few lines to capture the more ruthless and pragmatic portrayal of the the early Hartnell years.

The writing's lovely as well - "The baby's head was soft and Sam was hUngry and at last the liTeS were oN." - good enough to make me shiver uneasily, in any case.

Between this and 'Blue Road Dance', the rest of the stories could be written by Trevor Baxendale and Joe Lidster and you wouldn't feel as though you'd paid too much for the book.

Breadcrumbs - James Moran

This is a bit of a coup I would have thought; getting James Moran - the new blue eyed boy of British serial drama - to pen a story. It's decent enough, opening with a nicely rendered season 17 sketch and containing a neatly ourouboric (is that a word?) plot. Nothing to have you raving, but tidy and, like I said, Moran is a bit of a casting coup.

Transmission Ends - Richard Salter

In one way it's a shame that editor Richard Salter has to tie all of the stories together in his final tale. The need for inclusivity means that a couple of the minor elements he uses from other stories feel shoe-horned in and add little to the otherwise engaging, intriguing and - most of all - damn clever emerging tale. That said, the challenge of finding space for everyone has clearly caused the author to raise his game to a high level and the core idea combines with sharp characterisation (of the young hero in particular) and a tender if bittersweet ending to provide a real sense of developing other areas of the collection. A fitting end to a superior short story collection.

In sum, Transmissions demonstrates that the skills learned in fanzine publication are transferable to professional commissions. Richard Salter has taken the time to mould a collection of short stories into a genuinely coherent whole, putting this book at the top of the pile of straight Short trips collections and approaching the quality of the previously untouchable Life During Wartime and Wildthyme on Top.

Hopefully it won't be too long before we see Salter at the helm of another.

Shining in the Darkness

Shining Darkness is not quite as good as Mark Michalowski's previous NSA Wetworld but it's a close thing - and in any case Shining Darkness is still a good deal better than most of the soul-less and dull NSAs which came before it. Michalowski's prose tends to stay this side of lyrical, but that's clearly deliberate and no bad thing given the target audience. He's also already proven to be one of the NSA writers who can actually do comedy, and this novel is no less likely to raise a smile than his previous offerings.

Actually the humour really shines through with a particular highlight being Donna and Mesanth discussing humans, the solar system and the sun is brilliant - even if "our galaxy is miles away" makes Donna sound a little bit too thick, suggesting that Michalowski may have had the Runaway Bride Donna a little too much in mind (incidentally, I reckon this book should be placed early on in Donna's travels with the Doctor).

Slightly less subtly, the entire section concerning the Jaftee introduction to the Shining Darkess and the alien 'gods' is also very well done - the totally unexpected discovery that they're not stupid savages is funny, and worthy even of the late Douglas Adams (an obvious influence on the passage). Line after line made me laugh out loud ("Darkness, they muttered in awe, that Shone! Cool!", "High Priest of What We Believe Today", "Enchikka, loving the fact that there were lots of capitals", "Sacred Artefacts were just the dog's bollocks" etc.). This style of humour continues into the next section on the planet Junk, where giant gay robots squabble and bitch at one another and our two heroes, whilst the planetary administrator, 77141, comes across like Prosthetic Vogon Jeltz's less successful provincial cousin.

Away from the funny, the author is obviously keen to take a look at bigotry and prejudice and imo he hits a decent balance between making the point too subtle for younger readers and mere didacticism. In the main this involves Donna's changing attitude to robot life, but even here Michalowski manages to combine humour with just a hint of the more subversive: "Let him have his way and before you know it, we'll be on the scrap heap – literally – and these… these appliances,' he spat the word, 'will be doing our jobs for us." one of the giant robots says of what are basically other, smaller and faster robots.

If there's any real negative to the book, it might be that it's slightly too linear in plotting, moving rapidly from point a to point b to point c, with little of the digressions you would expect of a novel aimed at an older readership. That said, that's a criticism you could aim at virtually all of the NSAs and Shining Darkness turns it into virtue by acknowledging that the whole story is an extended chase and packing each location in that chase with interest and imagination. As linear(ish) novels go, this is a good 'un.

Other unconnected thoughts that peppered my brain while reading 'Shining Darkness':

- someone says the horribly bowdlerised word 'heckuva' early on - it's obviously because the BBC think either that all the readers are under 6 and so have to be protected from even the mildest of profanities, or think that all the readership is American and religious and so have to be protected from even the mildest of blasphemies, but either way it doesn't ring true. Luckily Michalowski's a good enough writer that he manages to subvert that by slipping in a joke about a prostitute only a few pages later.

- "a high speed collision between a truck and steel mill' is a brilliant description

- 'Earthers' vs 'humans' - well it made me laugh.

- I assumed in chapter 4 that Khnu em Llodis was to an anagram, cos that's what Who writers do. Twenty minutes with paper and pencil and the best I could come up with was 'uh, kill demons'? Hmm, maybe not...

- the Wirrn get a mention! ISTR that they're making their comeback either in an NSA or a BF audio or something, but I still squeed like the sad old fanboy I am when they appeared (given the setting of the Andromeda Galaxy, a mention of Drathro from the Mysterious Planet would also have been pretty cool)

Finally, I spotted the ending about a page before it was revealed. Which is just about as perfect an ending as you could want...

An excellent contribution to a series of extremely variable quality, Shining Darkness makes Mark Michalowski the first NSA author to turn in two good books. Recommended even if you've been otherwise disappointed with the range.

Underwhelmed

As a Doctor Who obsessed boy there were a handful of Target novels that I adored. They weren't necessarily the best or the cleverest books, nor were they the most fully-realised nor the most fabulously well written. What they had though was a sense of huge scale; an epic feeling caused by massive distances in time and space. Chief amongst these was Doctor Who and the Underworld, a story which was not only set at the very edge of space where galaxies were created, but which featured a planet which had formed around a spaceship. What a great idea*, I thought at the time - I bet the TV version is utterly brilliant!

Foolish, idealistic boy that I was.

And yet, on the basis of the first episode at least, my recent viewing of Underworld wasn't a complete disappointment. It may just be that the CSO had yet to intrude, but I enjoyed episode one immensely.

Possibly a residual fondness for the novel meant that where others saw lack of interest and laziness in the acting performances, I thought the flat, emotionless speech of the crew simply reflected their 100,000 years of tedious life.

There's no need to look for excuses for others positives though - from minor things like MinYANS being pronounced differently from the MinYINS I expected, through the nicely underplayed links between the Time Lords and the Minyans (the fact that the TARDIS is recognised not by some computer analysis or by sight but by the wheezing of its materialisation sound is excellent) to the happiness gun and the regeneration machines.

I particularly liked K9 being used to run the ship (presumably the Minyans use something similar to Time Lord technology, hence the Doctor knows enough detail to hook him up on the spot, otherwise they could do that for every dodgy ship) and the Doctor figuring out the hull was getting thicker, like House diagnosing a disease from a oddly coloured fingernail and fondness for blue cheese.

It's not perfect and it certainly doesn't fulfil the promise of brilliance I expected from the novelisation, but generally at this early stage it doesn't fall down due to script or acting issues. There are some odd directorial decisions, which might explain why the director, Norman Stewart, helmed only one more Who and then asked to be moved back to non-directorial duties. Most glaringly, when the crew force the Doctor at gun point to order K9 to fly into the nebula the Doctor is standing right behind the robot dog and so K9 presumably heard all of the threatening dialogue. All that was needed was to have K9 slightly further away or out of earshot/sight line - presumably it's this kind of elementary mistake that critics of Stewart's direction have in mind.

Still, for all that I'd heard Underworld as 'utterly woeful' it had started pretty well (did I mention the excellent model work?) and I was looking forward to watching episode two.

Fool that I am.

Even allowing for CSO so bad as to distract even me, the second episode is abysmal. Did Tom Baker fall out with someone just before filming started, because his performance is miles worse than in part one? It's still miles better than most of the Trog acting though, but as the story goes nowhere and looks so bad, it doesn't really matter. Twenty two minutes of apparently half-pissed performers droning out the contents of a leaden script, as their heads appear and disappear into the background. Really, who decided that the BBC could do CSO well enough to construct half of the sets out of blue screened photos?

In short, this is an episode of Who where the best thing in it is the guards' hoods.

All the great stuff I remembered from the book - 'the sky is falling', the old guy trying and failing to dig his family out, then his grief turning to suicidal anger -turns out to be awful on screen. The Trog's resignation to their fates is accurately conveyed it's true, but only because resigned Trogs and listless and uninterested actors are harder to differentiate than you'd think.

And so onto episode three, where I found myself pondering on just how bad episode two must be when the inclusion of some lift muzac in episode three marks a major upturn in quality. It's a big enough upturn, in fact, to move Underworld back into the very low reaches of what are the majority of ordinary Who stories.

By this point I was clutching at straws and desperately casting about for something to cling onto - the Gravity Lift music is funny, and there are a handful ok, one decent line: 'the Doctor has saved many fathers'.

Added to these two tiny straws, I'm willing to suggest that the Trog son's performance is really quite good - semi-comic at times and non-realistic, but it at least feels like a deliberate decision to play the part in that manner, which is fair enough imo. I could even point out that the use of CSO means a lot of the shots the director has to use are the same longish shots from either straight ahead or at a slight angle to the action, which is hardly his fault.

So much for the positives. The negatives still do win the day by quite a margin. Chief annoynace for me is the characterisation of the Doctor. First off he seems quite happy to see Alan Lake et al kill any number of guards. Possibly they're only stunned, since the weapons of the P7E crew and the Guards seem to fire the same rays (for obvious reasons) and multiple hits on Herrick don't kill or even wound him particularly badly, but that's never made clear.

Worse though is the Doctor's lack of urgency in getting to the scene of the Trog Dad's execution and then, once there. standing back and preparing to watch the man being executed by way of the world's slowest burning material. Bad enough having no plan whatsoever, but doing nothing and leaving it to the son to save his father and then settling for grabbing a sword and waving it self-importantly around in the aftermath?

Other less jarring minus points are awarded for the other Trogs acting (again) and the laughably bad design of the Seers heads, which have something of the look of a metal Mr Blobby about them I thought. As for the slow and poorly shot 'running' battle through the corridors as the Trogs make their escape - well there's no way to ameliorate the culpability of the director here, sadly. It's just a very poorly realised series of shots.

God, there's another episode to go. In the interests of sanity I'll skim over it quickly. The Orcale features a bit, there's a couple of fission grenades which can't be defused and which the Oracle (fortunately) doesn't recognise, all the Trogs (about 35 of them in total) escape in the Minyans ship and the Doctor - the bloodthirsty git - is delighted to see all the guards and their families getting blown to pieces. It's one of those episodes where the holes in the plot, society and characterisation are so obvious even Russell T Davies would be embarrassed.

Thinking back the other Target novel I really, really loved was The Sun Makers which comes right before this. I still haven't seen that and on the basis of Underworld I'm not sure I should...

* Later nicked by Rusty in The Runaway Bride.

Journey's End - and not a moment too soon frankly

Rather than posting my review to various mailing lists as I sometimes do (generally if I think something is either very funny or likely to make Jonn or Henry hot under the collar), and because I have no will to write anything beyond whatever typo ridden* invective I spewed out as soon as the episode finished, here's a reverse approach - the contents of a post I made to a mailing list as soon as Journey's End finished**. It starts with the post I'm replying to, in order to provide some of that professional looking context...

2008/7/5 Philip wrote>:
>
> There were five minutes in the middle where the story threatened to
> take a not-bollocks turn but didn't, and the final resolution of the
> Rose-Doctor relationship, not we needed another one, was actually
> quite sweet. Bernard Cribbins is always good, and the Daleks
> speaking German was funny.
>
> Otherwise, that was by far the worst season finale yet.
>
>

That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say, even down to the funny German Daleks (also Davros recognising Sarah-Jane).

I find it hard to believe any non-brain damaged adult thought that stuff like the Doctor's soul revealed was anything other than hackneyed, inaccurate and trite.

Unecessarily convoluted to the extent that any kid under 12 must have been scratching his head and anyone over 12 not just wallowing in the bright lights should have been saying 'what a load of cock'; emotionally involving only if you have something wrong with your head and are moved to tears by paintings of sad clowns, full of dull scenes where the Doctor gets to be Jesus instead of God but a Jesus who quits at the drop of a hat and then gets saved by...eh...his hand which apparently has far more gumption the rest of him - and the ending with Donna was both unsatisfying and cowardly (can't kill her off in case she decides she wnts to come back someday) not to mention been done before. Presumably at a later date Donna will be killed while trying to stop the Voord becoming the Cybermen?

Plus the Daleks were utterly wasted (and turned out to be so terrifying that flicking half a dozen silver switches turns them all off); Davros actually called something a 'Reality Bomb' as though he were Ming the Merciless, and instead of being in any way an interesting character he was just Another Mad Guy in a Wheelchair; Dalek Caan's betrayal made no sense and came from nowhere.

And did Davies just forget about the Shadow Proclamation? Or could he simply not be arsed?

Just awful from beginning to end.

Thank God Davies is leaving because he shot whatever writing bolt he had about three and a half years ago. Whatever I thought of the individual episodes, Season 27 was constructed beautifully (I recommend this post by Phil about the Long Game which really nails the elegance of the structural symmetry in that season). Since then less so, and this year not at all. Little or no sense of themes addressed (punished for his hubris? Fuck, no!) just pathetic fanwanky self-reference and Mary-Sue finally getting her man.

* I fixed the typos: I have my pride
** and added a couple of things I thought of as I was fixing them***
*** I should also have added Freema was terrible, Noel was great and Tate, Sladen, Cribbins and Tennant did their very best to overcome Davies' short-comings

The quality you are calling is unreachable

Forty five minutes of sitting round a web cam, waiting to make a phone call to someone in a mobile phone black spot.

I've had Saturday nights like that, but no-one thought to put me on telly.

Massively rushed in parts and yet slow as treacle in other...poorl...tten, ineptl...directed and appa...badly...cted this...nal straw...incompeten...dead eyed pl...and then the woman in the Colin Bake...will to live...arrowman, an actor? You must be k...three chinned Iant...Lis was great as ev...horrib...dialogu...where's Mickey and th...shi...The terrib...cial effe...usty wearing the Emperor...w clothes...usual suspec...shi...shi...shi...shi...shi...

Sorry, I seem to be breaking up.

A Handwave Too Far

I feel dirty today. Dirty and used. On Saturday night, Russell T Davies used me and abused me and lured me into his silken embraces with shiny toys and sugary treats, playing on my well-known fascinations in order to seduce me to his dark, dark side. I was his plaything, to do with as he wished.

And his fiendish plan nearly worked. Oh so nearly...

Turn Left is heroin for fanboys, to juggle the metaphor a bit. Or, if we must stick with the unintentionally dodgy subtext of the first paragraph, a big bag of gobstoppers for the rotting sweet tooth inside us all. It's so slickly done that it's very easy to ignore the fact that it's really the contents of a blender wrapped up in a rainbow coloured blanket, and pretend that it's actually a terribly clever reminder of the Doctor's Godhood and an affirmation that humanity will keep on keeping on, no matter what.

Or is it?

No it's not! It's a big, huge, mental mad rush of sensation and noise and swirly colours and sound and fury and EVERYTHING! Quick, someone get me a bib and keep on spooning the episode mush into my mouth, just in case I stop swallowing the damn stuff whole and start thinking about it instead an...sorry about that. Sugar overload.

It's only after the sugar high has worn off and you're coming down with a bang, that you realise that the whole magnificent edifice is, in fact, made up of nothing at all: the Emperor's New Clothes where even the Emperor and the horse he rode in on has turned out to be made up of smoke and mirrors.

But, crucially, only for fanboys.

Fanboys might wish to complain that it's not even internally consistent with last Christmas ('I'm the man whose going to save your lives, and all six billion people on the planet below' the Doctor says in Voyage of the Damned, but luckily by six billion he meant seven million and by the entire planet, he meant everything south of Northampton and north of the Channel) - or indeed last month (that ATMOS system turned out to be a bit shit and the Sontaran invasion easy to nullify after all, didn't it?).

And they'd be right - apparently if the Doctor dies then aliens will be able to attack Earth with impunity, but fortunately it'll also turn out the Doctor was exaggerating the danger in order to make himself look good, like an IT support guy pretending that rebooting requires a degree and ten years network experience.

But fanboys are basically scum, so we can ignore their doe-eyed bleating and consider what Real People think.

Norms (as the scummy fanboys have been known to call them) are like a different species. A species which matters much, much more.

They matter because they'll only buy the plastic action figures, crappy magazines and plethora of tie-in literature so long as they're enjoying the show (fanboys will, of course, buy it all whilst moaning like old women on HRT about how crap the series is now and how Pertwee dumps on Tennant from a height so great that Tennant would need a hell of a long ladder to even see Ol' Big Nose).

Norms love Turn Left. They don't care about consistent continuity or diegetic integrity or any of the other arty, pseudo-high brow drivel that fanboy scum use to pretend that they're seriously criticising an important narrative text and not slaveringly obsessing over a kids tv programme.

What the norms want is the Cybermen going toe to toe with the Daleks because they remember those two baddies from before and it seems a natural story to do.

They want to see the Master dancing across the room to the Scissors Sisters and the Doctor turning into Dobby the House Elf, because that's the kind of thing you get at the pictures nowadays.

They want cat people in traffic jams, Dalek hybrids who resemble Al Capone with his head stuffed in an octopus, the Doctor nailing every young white female in sight, Big Brother spoofs, blow job jokes, farting Slitheen, Scooby Doo chases and Mavis Riley from Coronation Street getting killed by that guy from The League of Gentlemen (presuming they've heard of that).

They want Gary Russell, not Lawrence Miles.

In light of this week's episode, it's also fair to say that they want It's a Wonderful Doctor Who Life, and going by the trailer for next week they presumably also want a super-hero team up of all the good guys at once! It'd obviously be better if the Doctor Who Fantastic Fifteen was up against all the bad guys put together, in a tag team match up of seventies ITV wrestling type proportions, but if they can't have that then the next best thing is having the Daleks fighting against Sarah-Jane and Martha and Captain Jack and Rose and Ianto and K9 and (for all I know) Morris the bionic gladiator from the Iron Legion comic strip from Doctor Who Weekly in 1979.

Bugger, just outed myself as fanboy scum, haven't I?

I loved Turn Left when I was watching it and will happily watch it again, but really - it's not brilliant or particularly clever, it's got some genuinely dodgy directing and acting in it, it contains the series' worst alien baddie (the plastic time beetle from Toys R Us), it only works because Davies fudges the previous stories he references, it has some odd fancies (labour camps in Britain at the drop of a hat?) and is, when all's said and done, an alternative universe story so although everyone dies, it doesn't matter later - or, more importantly, at the time either.

You can handwave most of this away, but there shouldn't be any need for handwaves in such a simple story and - fun though it was - I'm now thoroughly past the point at which the sheer weight of handwaving required is acceptable.

So I loved it and disliked it at one and the same time - well sue me, I'm fanboy scum, me.

Library Pictures

My son Cameron isn't a huge fan of Steven Moffat, having been scared witless by The Empty Child and pretty freaked by Blink. It's his only failing, bless him, because The Moff is the best Doctor Who script writer since...well, ever really.

That said, I think Silence in the Library was Moffat's most Coupling like plot, to the extent that I was a little distracted by the level of contrivance involved in his manoeuvring the story to the conclusion he wanted. We get two pretty major sf concepts literally stressed to death during the story: the information stations with human faces (that's DEAD human faces, as Donna shouts just in case any viewer hadn't figured that out) and the slightly silly but very effectively done communicators which allow people to speak after they're DEAD (and which appear to provide prove of an afterlife, in passing). And nothing else is mentioned at all about the technological marvels of the 51st century during the other 44 minutes - which is handy as it's a combination of precisely those two concepts (plus a cool skull in a space suit which reminded me irresistibly of Pirates of the Caribbean) which provides all the horror of the cliffhanger. It's well done and genuinely creepy, but the fore-shadowing also felt just a tad heavy-handed and it goes on for faaaaarrrrr too bloody long. As Simon points out in his review it used to be the case that "the sight of a companion's face stuck on a sculpted android would have made for an effective cliffhanger", as opposed to Silence's over-kill combination of what felt like twenty minutes of a skeleton in a suit booming 'Who turned out the lights?' and Donna's face chuntering on interminably like a stuck single. Anyway, why would the Donna face keep repeating the phrase 'Donna Noble has been saved' over and over again? And didn't they say only dead people had their faces stuck on the wall like the new range of products from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation? And why would a swarm of shadows want to hirple about in a spacesuit in the first place?*

Some random cool bits, though - both the name Nashta Verada and (for the first time since the series came back) the nice musical bit which followed the Doctor saying 'Nashta Verada' for the first time.

The shadows as devouring piranha was enough to freak Cameron out and have him go upstairs to play his PS3 instead and the dust motes in sunbeams actually creeped me out a bit too. Less scary was having the shadows as a reasonably chatty negotiator and general good guy 'blob in a suit'.

The 'little shop' joke was funny as was the joke about confusing the escape pod and the loo, and the design inside the Library was lovely (pity the city outside looked like every other alien city in New Who). Tennant did angry well for one of the few times thus far. Alex Kingston was good without being brilliant, which is basically what I expected from her, but River Song** is much less cool than Bernice Summerfield.

Less cool altogether - Miss Evangelista and her bonding with Donna was rushed and felt false, inserted simply to give some pathos to her death two minutes later. Donna doesn't always have to be wandering about looking for lame ducks to be pals with. As elsewhere, there's a purpose to it, since it gives her a reason to help Donna when she's initially lost in her alternative future, but equally it feels just as heavy-handed as the foreshadowing in Silence.

And some more questions which have either just popped into my head or have been inadvertently (yeah, right) nicked from other people's reviews.

• Why does everyone of the 4022*** except Donna come out of the hard drive dressed entirely in black? [it was the fashion 100 years ago amongst bibliophiles?]
• Are all of Dr Song's friends saved by the updated Sonic Screwdriver and then deposited into the hard drive or are they just computer constructs created for her to interact with?
• Why are they all dressed in white?
• Why was Donna's husband using an alias in the library, other than to provide some fake poignancy?
• If the shadows are deadly how come the people who got killed were all in the light?
• Why not just turn on all the lights to get rid of the shadows, since they - initially at least - do appear to be actual shadows rather than aliens who look like shadows
• Why is the Doctor so thick at so many key points (relationship with Dr Song, natured of 'saving') other than plot convenience?
• Why was archaelogist and time-travelling adventuress River Song re-incarnated in the Library as Laura Ashley wearing middle-class mum?
  
• Finally, the Doctor sending Donna away again - there's a future point to that, surely, and it not just another clumsy contrivance, designed to get her into CAL's world?

Looking back at that list, it's hard to believe that I really, really enjoyed this two parter, but I genuinely did. I think it's the best Who episode since Cornell's Human Nature/Family of Blood from last year.

But having started this review by saying that Silence was hampered by Moffat employing Coupling's almost geometrically convenient plotting, I now find myself claiming that Forest in particular is actually almost as full of plot holes as one of Rusty's less well thought out efforts. That can't be right, can it? Steven Moffat can't have turned in something which is shiny and good on first viewing but turns out to be a bit generic and shallow on closer examination, can he? Doctor's daughter, Doctor's wife...it's all going a bit Family Affairs as the Moff gears up to take over - and that can't be his intention, can it?

I'm so confused all of a sudden...

Other reviews of one or other episode which are especially worth reading: Simon, Marie, Rob, Millenium Dome, Mondy, Lawrence and Stuart (with very funny opening paragraphs).

[included from a mailing list post I made prior to watching Forest of the Dead, and included here only to demonstrate my own very minor cleverness: Speculation - given that the Ood said that the Doctor's song was going to send soon, could this be a reference to Dr River Song? Perhaps she dies the first time she meets the Doctor?]

* You know, Simon and Rob have ruined this for me, with their oh so rational reviews picking holes in something I had chosen to believe was perfect. Pair of selfish swine.
** Was I the only one reminded of Firefly's River Tam here?
*** And shades of The 4400there.

Back to the bad old days

I'm not perfect, you know, and sometimes I change my mind about things. Mushrooms, for instance. Thought they tasted strongly of rot and mould as a boy, came to love them like an (edible) son when I grew up. Same goes for mobile phones - I always said they were utterly pointless, but nowadays I generally find my Razr quite useful.

And so it is with Planet of the Ood. When the episode finished I mentioned online that I thought it was a reasonable, if largely uninspired episode. On a second viewing though, I think that it only just clears the pole-in-the-dirt bar which is Gridlock.

It's actually a return to the bad old days of last year. Lazy, lazy plotting combined with a vague, blind man in a blindfold in a room with no windows stab at alien and the Doctor at his most annoyingly hyperactive yet curiously ineffective.

It was like the first part of the Eccleston season all over again, except without the cement of Eccleston's towering performance.

The Ood were cool, mind, which does raise the standard above such previous low-points as last year's Dalek two-parter. And Tate as Donna, even in a bad script, is better than plastic fantastic Martha, but other than that - nah, I have nothing positive to say.

However, I will say that...

• The alien planet was basically a backlot with some snow and a couple of dodgy bits of cgi.
  

• The supporting characters either existed

1. to be pricks and then satisfyingly die (the security team and the unpleasant yuppie business types)
2. to make it look as though the Doctor was doing something, be pricks and then die (that PR woman)
3. to make it look as though there were thematic layers (the Friends of the Ood guy - really, what was the point of him?) and then die or
4. to be pricks and then get turned into an Ood (Captain Darling).

• The biology of the Ood made neither evolutionary nor intuitive sense.

1. They've evolved hands and opposable thumbs (signs of a need to compete for available resources) but also brains on bits of string (a sign of not thinking your alien race through properly)?
2. They live on ice planet zebra, apparently, but have also evolved a species component which is an unprotected giant brain with a mouth on top, i.e. where it's not very easy to feed?
3. If you cut the whole brain in their hand off - 'lobotomise them' according to the dialogue - and then throw those brains in the bin four planetary systems away, it doesn't matter because as soon as you release the giant brain (by flicking a single switch in a shed) everything's OK - and, eh, they're not lobotomised any more?

Or something. Whatever. It doesn't matter - it's only Doctor Who after all.

Not that it really is Doctor Who either. For one episode only (hopefully) it's back to being someone else's show, not the Doctor's. Unlike the Eccleston season though, it's not even the companion's series - in fact, I have no idea who's supposed to he be the hero here. The Ood themselves I suppose. Certainly there was no need for the Doctor to be there. He contributes nothing to the Ood revolt and yet gets told at the end that the wind and the air and the snow and the husky shit will sing of him for ever and ever and ever, amen.

As someone wisely remarked on a mailing list I frequent, hopefully the song the various elements will sing is something along the lines of "thanks for nothing DoctorDonna: you came here, stood about, got locked up, then sodded off having nicked all the glory".

A Tale of Two Novels (a review in two parts)

The Many Hands: Book the First
In which the Doctor runs around a great deal and a soldier is hit by stone chips at a surprising distance

Well I'm exactly 100 pages into Paul Dale Smith's new NSA, The Many Hands and so far it suffers from some of the issues which have affected other books in the range.

Before I go any further I should point out that I think Smith is one of the top 2 or 3 writers to come out of Doctor Who - Heritage is one of my favourite books in the BBC range, his two short stories for the Enlightenment fanzine are up with Magrs and Moffat in terms of quality, and The Albino's Dancer, his Time Hunter novella, is excellent.

As a result The Many Hands is very readable - the characterisation of the two leads rings true, and when the author takes the time there's some really lovely writing in it. But the problem is that there's not a lot of time given over to anything other than moving the story on via one action scene after another.

The story starts in the middle of one such scene, with a stagecoach careening through the Old Town of Edinburgh (or as the Doctor amusingly points out, just 'The Town' at this stage in the city's life) with the Doctor on top battling a dead man and Martha elsewhere running through the
streets to get in front of the coach and stop it, new series style, with yet another handy sonic screwdriver function. From there, the next hundred pages are a series of run/get captured/run/get captured escapades - and it's not even the cliche of a series of set pieces joined together by linking narrative, as each breathless bit of running away blends into the next with barely a space for a linking sentence or two between.

To add to this, even the Doctor/Martha's escapes are simplistic to the point of non-existence. There's rarely a clever escape plan - they simply run away in a manner reminiscent of things of the Pertwee years, or some fortuitous distraction appears to distract their capturers' attention. Again, it's all exciting stuff on one basic level and if that's the audience it's aimed at then The Many Hands works perfectly, but there's little to engage the brain or cause the reader to mentally applaud authorial/Doctoral ingenuity (in which, of course, the books are just mimicking the TV series pretty closely).

It takes all of 100 pages in fact, for something original to occur, with the appearance of the titular hands. That's more than a third of the way through the book.

Smith knows his trade though and he can invest even this kind of thing with a degree of talent lacking in real journeymen writers like Justin Richards or Trevor Baxendale when he takes the time to do so. As it stands the majority of the book would never have held my attention when I was one of the famed intelligent 12 year olds that Who fiction likes to think of as its intended audience, but there are moments when you can see that there is such a book hiding beneath the 100 mile an hour romp.

The problem is that there's no time given over to thought or introspection - nobody except (occasionally) the Doctor and Martha seem to think about anything, with the result that everyone bar the two leads comes across as fairly cardboard. When someone does think about something other than what's going on around them, the results are excellent - Martha's musing that certain characters were exhibiting 'rather more ambition than humans were comfortable with from their corpses' is a great line, as is the Doctor's subtle manner of manipulating the soldier, McAllister. It's just that there's not enough time spent on this kind of thing, as all the available word count is spent on pushing the Doctor round Edinburgh with sundry baddies on his tail.

Perhaps it's a symptom of this that there's at least on key moment in the first part of the book which appears to make no sense. The scene in question, involves a soldier, apparently beyond rifle range of Doctor, taking a potshot at him anyway. The shot only misses by 'a few feet' (making the claim that the shot was a sign of a stupid, inexperienced soldier a bit strange) - and yet another solider manages to get himself hit in the face by splinters from the rock the bullet hits, even though he's also presumably behind or in line with the initial shooter. I might be being dense here, but it seemed a curiously inexplicable incident to me, and all I can think is that the frantic pace of the prose means that little mistakes like that are more likely to slip through unnoticed.

The whole thing is, to be honest, a little odd. Smith is a very good writer and he's a very, very good Who writer. He's shown this repeatedly in the past in other books and stories and he shows it in flashes even here. And if the guidelines for an NSA are the exact same - as is reputedly the case - then why is this book lacking the layers of Heritage, the poetry of 'Blossom' or the razorsharp cleverness of the plotting of 'Recursion'? The Many Hands is an enjoyable if somewhat brainless read and I doubt if Smith is capable of writing something not worth reading, but on the basis of the first 100 pages or so it's simply not in the same class as his earlier work. My nine year old son would probably enjoy it, but my 12 year old daughter who reads Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz and the like would, I suspect, find it a bit frenetic and lacking in depth.

So why is this so? Paul Magrs Sick Building made me laugh a lot, but even I wouldn't claim it inhabited the same universe as Verdigris or even his own Young Adult novels. Wetworld is a contender along with Sick Building for my favourite NSA, but Relative Dementias is the Mark Michalowski novel I'd take to a desert island with me. Steven Cole's Sting of the Zygons is more of a romp than The Many Hands (though The Many Hands is the better written book) but even Cole's most rompy PDA/MAs contain far more considered writing than Sting of the Zygons. And people whose opinion I trust have said similar things about Simon Guerrier and other writers' NSAs in comparison to their earlier work.

And yet all of these books are supposedly written with the same audience in mind and using the same guidelines - is everybody simply turning in lesser books co-incidentally? Or did the earlier books end up skewing far older than the guidelines strictly intended?

The Many Hands: Book the Second
In which a sinister creature is born, an underground street is explored and the Monro family tree turns out more complicated than expected

And now it gets even odder.

Having described the first 100 pages of The Many Hands as one single continuous chase sequence, involving a series of featureless supporting acts following the Doctor and Martha through Edinburgh, I now find myself viewing the remaining 141 pages as anything but.

It's almost like two completely different novels: the first suffering from the usual NSA issues and the second an excellent Gothic horror/cool steampunk (sort of) sf novel.

It really is as abrupt as that - simplistic run around shenanigans with pretty flat characters for the younger kiddies until page 100, atmospheric and creepy grown up novel filled with fully rounded individuals from page 101 onwards.

Suddenly the book is peppered with believable characters acting in an intelligent manner. McAllister, rather than simply reacting to whatever the Doctor does, becomes a far more rounded individual, capable of thinking and acting for himself. The Monro men make a substantive appearance in the story for the first time and add immeasurably to the mix. Even the Doctor stops rushing about and begins to act in a more Doctoral fashion.

The jokes also get better - Martha's confusion about whether Monro's description of himself ("we are the Chair of Anatomy") is the name of his species is both a a great joke at the expense of Russell T Davies' naming conventions for alien races and a subtle and neat plot point, for instance.

The setting too is more interesting after a round century's worth of pages. Previously everything had been set in and around a generic Royal Mile, so blandly described that even I, a lifelong Edinburgh Man, was often confused as to where the TARDIS crew were supposed to be unless a street name was provided. Now the action moves into a well-described Surgeons' Hall, about a blockaded church and down into Mary King's Close, all places filled with oppressive darknesses and creepy and cobweb filled rooms and corridors in which Smith allows his descriptive powers full range. There's no doubting where anyone is at any time by this point in the book and as the actual action (as opposed to the earlier page-filling action) takes place, the book continues to open out, with an intriguing and unusual set of villains and a reasonably well thought out conclusion (the final epilogue chapter though is a real disappointment, returning to the realm of cliche for no obvious reason).

I'm no nearer after reading The Many Hands to figuring out why the NSAs are comparatively unsatisfying when compared to earlier Who ranges. Indeed, I'm more confused if anything than before. The first part of this novel almost exactly exemplifies the definition of traditional tie-in prose - frantic running about, interchangeable supporting characters and little by way of subtlety or cleverness. The second part though is reminiscent of the better type of EDA or even the old TV series - spooky and scary in equal measure with a rich cast of extras and a distinct and lovingly recreated Gothic sensibility.

Why there's such a marked disparity I have no idea, ultimately. But hopefully if Smith does another book in the NSA range (and I hope he does) then it will be more like the later half of this particular work.

Oh, and one unrelated minor thing about the book which bears mentioning. At one point the Doctor explicitly says that the Sonic Screwdriver is not a gun, which apart from anything else demonstrates what a big fibber he is. Given that the new series constantly features David Tennant using the screwdriver exactly like a gun, it does make me wonder if that line was inserted as a request from Cardiff?

A Big Man - Other Views and Reviews

Don't say I don't give you anything.

Below are links to some other recommended reviews of Partners In Crime because - as has been pointed out to me - I do tend only to link to people who agree with me and apparently I'm not always right...

Chewing the Fat: "you couldn't do a plot like this with any kind of seriousness, this was so high in fat and yet entirely weight-free, it's something of a miracle in itself."

Day 2652: DOCTOR WHO: Partners in Crime: "It does make for a good opening to the season: nothing too heavy, plenty to laugh and joke about, but also an interesting idea to make you think."

Partners in Crime: "The good moments only just about mitigate the cobbled together on a napkin at three in the morning after a booze-up plot"

Doctor Who: Partners in Crime: "Oh, oh, oh. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Mainly because of the sheer bliss of having a companion who can act."

Review: Doctor Who 4x1 - Partners in Crime: "Not a huge amount of depth to the plot, but nice."

For a Pound of Flesh: "The script rattled merrily along in a way that is increasingly familiar to fans of Russell T with its vertical chase scenes, its knowing wit, and its unadulterated joie de vivre"

Doctor Who: Partners in Crime: "I liked this. I'm not sure I have a great deal to add beyond that."

Partners in Crime Review: "A great first episode which sets the bar high for following episodes."

Doctor Who: Partners in Crime:"There was nothing great about Partners in Crime, but despite Davies’ recurring toilet obsession, it did better on the not-making-me-want- to-throw-things-at-the-telly scale than any Davies-authored story since The Christmas Invasion"

And as it turns out most people do agree with me!*

I'll probably forget to do this next week, but you never know...

* Rare enough to be worthy of comment

A Big Man

It takes a big man to admit he was wrong, but I'm not going to make Russell T Davies do that.

It's enough for me to know that the reason that Partners in Crime, the opening story in season 30 of Doctor Who, was so good was because Mr Davies finally took the time to read this blog, and then took on board the reasoned and - I hope - constructive criticism of his previous scripts for the series.

No, I'm big enough for both of us and I'm willing to forego an apology just so long as Davies continues to play to his strengths (such as they are). So...

...no more over-reaching himself by trying to make Great Big Points about The Human Condition. That way leads otherwise sane individuals to claim that, unlike every single other episode of Doctor Who ever, the episode in question isn't meant to be taken literally but is instead a metaphor/myth/gunny sack full of fairy dust.

...no more mad obsession with shagging, as though the only possible reaction for anyone meeting anyone else is an immediate desire to root about in his or her pants, regardless of the fact that some people don't actually fancy everybody they meet.

...no more raking out bad fan-fiction he wrote when he was 13 about the Cybermen fighting the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles...Daleks and the Daleks totally winning and then the Howard Jones...David Tennant Doctor losing the love of his life, Russ...eh, Rose.

...no more slightly offensive preference for making every disabled person a bad guy. See also fat people and the ugly. Basically, an ugly fat cripple should be the next Doctor (somebody email Heather Mills McCartney and tell her to start filling her face with deep fried Mars Bars, please. She needs the work nowadays.).

...finally, no more attempts at including proper plots. He always forgets what he's doing half way through, with the result that the finished script makes no sense at all and is useful only as a mental exercise for Simon Bucher-Jones, the world's greatest plot hole fixer*

If he does that, and continues to churn out enjoyable, if daft, scripts with plots so slight that there's no room for messing them up and no sex and romance to clutter proceedings - in short, if he continues to write things like Partners in Crime - then he need never apologise.

Cos doing exactly as you're told by a complete stranger on an obscure and moany weblog means never having to say you're sorry...

* Really, I'm not kidding - some of his solutions for RTD plot holes are just brilliant, and often more enjoyable than the actual story