Alden Bates' Weblog

Weeee!

There are two reasons I've been quiet recently: I've been catching up on DVDs madly, and I've also been getting the "Doctor Who and Shada" novelisation ready to go online. Shada was never completed by the BBC*, nor was it published in book form by Target**, which lead Paul Scoones to write it in 1989. Although it's been reprinted a few times, now it's online as an ebook. Hopefully this should make the many people who've asked about it very happy. :)

As well as the book's text, there's a number of extras, including extensive author's notes, a comparison of material with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and a behind the scenes article. Also the Making of Shada article in TSV 26 has been revisited and rewritten. Kudos to Paul for assembling an amazingly detailed amount of information for this story!

* Although Big Finish recorded it as an audio play with the eighth Doctor recently.
** Target novelised most of the original Doctor Who series, bar the five stories which the NZDWFC subsequently novelised.

I have to say, Prime TV's billboards promoting the new series of Doctor Who:

They are things of beauty.

With four episodes of series 2 left to go, here's how I rank the stories shown so far:

1. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
2. The Idiot's Lantern
3. The Girl in the Fireplace
4. School Reunion
5. The Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel
6. New Earth
7. Tooth and Claw

... although that list is somewhat deceptive since I'd rate New Earth 6/10 and Tooth and Claw only 1/10, so there should really be a big gap in there. The series seems to be improving as it goes on, but then three of the remaining four episodes are written by my least-favourite writer, so it may be downhill from here... Incidentally, can some one please let Mr Davies know that "story arc" does not mean "name checking something in every episode"?

I'm finding that the one thing that is really annoying me this series is David Tennant as the Doctor. More specifically, every time he goes into "AWWWWWWW, you HUMANS! You're BRILLIANT, you are. Giveus a hug!" mode, I want to hit him. But the rest of the time he's all right.

When TSV 37 first popped through my mail box back in 1994, it gave me a huge surprise to find that a picture I'd drawn of a Dalek had ended up on the front cover (I'd drawn it to accompany a story I'd written for the issue called The Last Words). I was also proud of my picture of the secondary TARDIS console which is to date the only piece of artwork I'd done for TSV that I was completely happy with.

In fact, that issue's artwork was generally well praised in the next issue's letters column. I like Chris Girdler's illustration for the New Adventure Shadowmind. Illustrations for the novels (outside of the covers of the books) seem to be rare, which is a shame because I like seeing how other people have visualised the characters and events.

I also got a cartoon published called Good Omens which suggested we should watch out for things like flying pigs and hell freezing over to signal that the BBC was bringing Doctor Who back. Sadly, Russell T. Davies has somewhat taken the wind out of that by actually making new episodes. I intend to write him a letter of complaint.

There's also a couple of piece resulting from Jon Preddle's trip to the UK: an interview with Gary Russell and some behind the scenes for the 30 Years in the TARDIS documentary (he stumbled on the filming!).

There's lots of other cool stuff too, like another installment of Beyond the Book covering three of the New Adventures, and Graham Howard on Witch Mark, so go read! :)

On a somewhat lighter note, I love this cartoon. :)

Google launched Google Trends today, allowing you to see the popularity of particular searches over time. If there are relevant news items it displays a position on the graph, as you can see on their results for V for Vendetta.

Unfortunately in the case of "Doctor Who", there aren't any, and for Doctor Who they don't match up well with what's going on in the graph. I've therefore taken the liberty of marking on the graph below the screening dates of Series 1 to make it more obvious what's happening where:

The first pre-series spike is, of course, the leaking of Rose onto the Internet. There's another high peak when the episode actually airs, then it tapers off a bit with spikes when Dalek, Father's Day and The Empty Child, and the last three stories screen. Later in the year there's a spike in November (for the Red Nose day special) and one in December for The Christmas Invasion. The graph ends in April short of the New Earth screening, but you can see it's leading up to another spike there. I'm interested to see if it matches the Rose spike. :)

And, coincidentally, the new Full Frontal Nerdity is Doctor Who related!

In the latest TV Guide (NZ edition), there's a letter praising Prime for playing the first series of Doctor Who, mentioning the 'lost' 108 episode of the show, and also name checking the URL for the NZDWFC site! Though Prime noted that "The next series has not started playing in Britain yet", this was only true for about two or three days after the issue of TV Guide was published...

It's nice that the site got a bit of free promotion there. Thank you, William Horner!

Tonight I got Time/Space Visualiser issue 36 online. A celebration of the show's thirtieth anniversary, the issue included a story guide and a history of Doctor Who related events covering the time the show had been off the air. In an article somewhat topical to now (with the release of "The Beginning" as a box set) titled An Unearthly Pilot Episode, Jon Preddle examined the differences between An Unearthly Child and the version as originally filmed.

On the book front, there are more reviews for the New Adventures from Deceit through to The Left-Handed Hummingbird, and a major article on the creation of Timeframe written by David Howe.

As Paul points out, TSV 36 is the halfway mark in archiving issues online, at least until issue 73 comes out later this month!

I've basically got the whole of the NZDWFC site converted to XHTML! The only thing left is the Editor's Log which is still using the default Wordpress template - I still need to find out how templates work in Wordpress...

So last night I got TSV 35 online - you may note the new format for the index page (you can view either a segregated mode or a straight print listing). Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

As usual, there's some pretty cool stuff: a feature on the Titan Script Books, a piece by Kate Orman on the writing of The Left-Handed Hummingbird, the welcome return of Tardis Tales after a couple of issues absence, and the launch of a new regular column titled Beyond the Book, which delved into the background of some of the New Adventures. In TSV 35, Beyond the Book examines Lucifer Rising and White Darkness.

There's also yet another opinion piece suggesting Doctor Who should rest in peace as a series. He he he :)

So, now I have issue 35 online, I can look at going back and turning the earlier issues into XML and cleaning them up some so they all look spiffy! That should keep me out of mischief. :)