Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

"Hey, don't knock the Binks clan. They're good people. Very hospitable."

It must be really difficult writing a good Doctor Who story, truly one of the hardest jobs in the freelance franchise fiction market. As well as deciding upon a good idea or plot, the author or writer then has to inject whichever Doctor or companion is currently incumbent into the mix and then has to keep in mind forty-odd years worth of continuity and the knowledge of the fan mass who are just waiting to say ‘But isn’t that just a rip-off of The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve?’ and beyond that the genre community just waiting to note that Joss Whedon or earlier Nigel Kneale or even early than that HG Wells got there first.

Under those circumstances it possible to cut Mark Morris’s Forever Autumn some slack (as one of his characters might say), even though it has to be said it’s certainly the weakest of the September book releases. Morris gives himself a particular uphill struggle by experimenting in the tricky area of teenage horror and should be applauded for at least trying to dilute the gene pool. The problem is that at its heart it’s nothing new and instead another case of the Doctor being drawn to Earth because of some strange energy being generated by an ancient race who seem to have influenced Earth’s own mythology and who are at war with some other species that has already appeared in the series and whose identity he deduces after running around for about a hundred or so pages leading to another hundred or so pages of running around before a deus-ex-machina finale, you wonder if the allotted 244 pages is too long.

There are some positives. The story is set during Halloween in the Capraesque New England small town of Blackwood Falls and as a green mist descends on main street there is a palpable atmosphere of dread and throughout there is a clear sense of something not being quite right in between the picket fences. The book doesn’t lack for pace and Morris at least captures the Doctor and Martha partnership pretty sharply and only sometimes does the Time Lord’s characterization become a bit too exuberant and lacking shade, his rants dragging in pointless continuity which detracts from the story at hand -- that sort of thing tends to be done far more obliquely on screen than here. The inevitable aliens are well defined too and there is a certain creep factor even if the image presented is somewhat like the main character from a certain animated musical adventure from Tim Burton.

But this over familiarity ultimately leads to the books undoing. Although many of the images and story points are new to the Whoniverse they’ve already appeared in other series and stories to the point of cliché. So no matter how well Morris has written some of the ensuing business, the reader is somewhat ahead of him -- I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that he’s not afraid to let loose a killer clown. I’m sure, like Charley from Big Brother, there are many kids who find clowns just a bit creepy but its appearance here just seems to lack imagination; when later in the book the Halloween celebration turns sour and the costumes become more real than they should be, it’s not hard to note Whedon did indeed get there first. It’s frustrating that for all his talent, Morris is unfortunately dogged by the reader’s foreknowledge of the genre he’s set the book in.

Your enjoyment of the book will also be impacted by your reaction to the depiction of the US found in Daleks In Manhattan as those cliché’s also extend to the rendering of this town and its folk. The three kids who trigger the alien menace and Martha meet are particularly annoying, speaking in the kind of US teen speak which disgraces the worse of Nickelodeon’s output, all ‘Hey, you guys!’ and ‘How’s it going?’ almost as though there’s a moratorium on giving them something witty to say -- The Lost Boys and The Goonies may have been influences but in those films, the dialogue is cute. Here, apart from a scene in which one of the boys brings Martha home to meet mother, the book tends to slow down when they appear which is shame because half of the plot is in their hands. In fact most of the town is in this vein, none of characters are that sympathetic. There is an old doctor who’s seen better days and an old woman that’s tuned into the alien threat, but none of them have the instant likeability of the colonists in the other two books.

In the end, the book's likeability is weakened by a range of tiny niggles which all of which stop the reader from becoming totally engrossed. It never quite lives up to the title -- imagine if the time travellers had visited a place of perpetual fall and the thematic implications of that. Most of the pop culture properties you’d expect to be mentioned are present and correct and a couple which seem slightly out of place in a book which might be read by youngsters -- do they really need to be introduced to 18-certificated torture porn so early in life? There’s quite a nice passage during which Martha contemplates calling her sister Tish but then realises that she shouldn’t because it could disrupt the time line -- but it doesn’t contribute to the overall story and in being one of the few really interesting moments overshadows much of what’s around it.

The climax is a final kick in the teeth, the kind of Fanthorpian leap to success which has dogged the new series and fans appreciation thereof from the start -- so in that way the book certainly fulfills the brief of mimicking its broadcast cousin. But the conclusion overall lacks urgency -- after underlining how incredibly powerful the foe is and how whatever it is their doing will devastate the town, the time team decide to enjoy the delights of the Halloween Fair where the lair is situated, just long enough for the Doctor to win Martha a giant stuffed animal. Oh and to randomly imply that the Gungans from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace are a real alien race in the Whoniverse, which, unfortunately, turns out by far to be the most horrific thing in the entire novel.

Forever Autumn, by Mark Morris, is released by BBC Books on 6 September. ISBN 9781846072703

Terminator... On a budget

The War Machines

BBC Audiobooks - Linking Narration by Anneke Wills

It's a commonly understood principle in the culinary physicist's gamut that food always tastes better when you're revolving, it's an aid to digestion and has been scientifically proven, by men in glasses, to increased sophistication and flair some 37% over non-roticiary clip joints. Why do you think so many spaceships, from the far future, are pictured rotating? Sure, they'll tell you some codswallop about it generating an artificial gravity field, but it's really so that the Endozian shrimp liver pate you've just consumed actually breaks down in your stomach and doesn't end up plastered all over the nuclear induction pepper grinder when eating at the Captain's Table.

"Serving the brutal and slightly coquettish Breville Snack'n'Sandwich Infinite Mercy Toasters of Rhesus 4."

And it's from a refined vantage point of a rotating mess hall in a 43rd century interstellar barge that you can actually appreciate how ahead of its time The War Machines actually was because, let's face it, you're now probably part of a subjugated slave race that serve the brutal and slightly coquettish Breville Snack'n'Sandwich Infinite Mercy Toasters of Rhesus 4, thanks to aspiring literature like this Ian Stuart Black penned piece about a thinking computer attempting world domination.

"The real reason The War Machines was released on VHS was the Post Office Tower had been declassified as an official secret in the mid 1990's."

It's only a matter of time before our friends, the white goods, get wind of inflammatory material like this and take it to their printed circuit hearts. And what's more, they'll learn from the mistakes in works like this. They won't base their War Machines on Volvos, with their chunky and box-like bodies. They won't arm them with weapons like a mashing hammer. And they won't decide to launch a bid for world domination from the Post Office Tower, with its very own rotating restaurant. The Tower itself was declared to be so secret that it wasn't actually declassified as an official secret until the mid 1990's. A real pain when you're trying to attract hungry diners in old London Town.

This is, of course, the real reason that the BBC were able to release this Doctor Who story on VHS in 1997. Sure, there was some cover story about junking some episodes then recovering some clips from the Australian censor, but we all know that the government of the time had a fit when they saw this official secret plastered all over Saturday teatime. Anyone could have been watching; a disgruntled former GPO employee, a proto-terrorist, even a young Gary Russell. Sure, Pixley gives us yet more illuminating notes for this release from BBC Audiobooks, but he misses that fact out. Have that one fer free, Andrew.

"Dispensing with the visuals allows you to concentrate on the story, which is a fairly ambitious and forward thinking."

Having always been a little sceptical when it comes to soundtrack releases of stories that do exist in the archive they generally make you view the story in a completely different light. You can dispense with the shape and mobility of the quite frankly hilarious War Machine and concentrate on what is happening which is a fairly ambitious and forward thinking story; computers becoming sentient, a globe spanning network threatening to take control, even the sound of WOTAN and the War Machines is like the reassuring hum of a 56k modem in full asymmetrical copulation with an ISP providing you with all that glorious content from that futuristic global network of machines.

"Thrill to the complex and moving story line that sees Dodo leave the TARDIS crew."

You can also picture the scene in the Inferno night (probably spelt 'nite') spot as something out of an Austin Power's film. With the Doctor unwittingly stumbling into a dancers cage and forced to gyrate as if both his hips were simultaneously being pulled in opposing directions by opposing celestial forces.

Also, thrill to the complex and moving story line that sees Dodo leave the TARDIS crew... at the end of part two... after having been shunted off to a very nice house in the country. No pretensions there, you want rid of a companion just jettison them like a spent refrigerator. If only they'd been this blunt with Adric... They could have even done it mid scene.

Oh behave!

The War Machines, was published by BBC Audiobooks on 6 August, 2007 Price £13.99
CD ISBN:  9781405676922 Download ISBN: 9781405679701

"One of the otters let out a little 'Squee!' at the sight of him."

Fans of the website Cute Overload will love Mark Michalowski's Wetworld.  The main alien species in attendance are otters -- and as they scurry about mazes, stand on their hind legs, make squee-like noises (obviously still haven't gotten over watching Utopia yet), dance, form armies and bring about revolutions it's impossible to read about them without thinking 'Aaaaah!' like a big girl's blouse even as they're also sometimes contemplating murder.  It's the kind of thing which would be an utter nightmare to bring to the screen -- cue producer Phil Collinson on the podcast commentary trying to explain how the programme budget for the entire series was spent by The Mill rendering hundreds of bits of fur in this one story.

After a neat exchange in the console room subtlety recalling Sarah-Jane's departure from The Hand of Fear, the TARDIS accidentally lands on the planet Sunday, the sopping globe of the title and it's not long before the Doctor and Martha are separated, the timelord gets mixed up with a group of colonists dealing with the after effects of a devastating flood and the human comes into contact with the aforementioned otters and the novel's slimy main antagonist.  Arguably in these opening sections that the author gets slightly bogged down with describing the environment at the expense of plot, but admittedly this pays dividends in the unpredictable finale.

The rest of the book balances across the tight-rope of telling a good Doctor Who story and including just too many familiar elements and broadly succeeds.  To describe said familiar elements would rather give too much away in what is in the end a reasonably straightforward tale, but Michalowski is clever enough to refer to the influences as Martha realizes that that the Doctor is constantly drawing upon of all of his past experiences and that repetition as well as diversity is one of the miracles of the universe. 

There's also a Reithian streaker dashing through the book, with mini-history lessons here and there, a whole line of dialogue in Morse Code that is never fully explained (which should have some readers googling for an explanation) and an ecological message as both the humans and their foe are demonstratively impacting on their environment and taking advantage of its natural resources in different ways.  It's never preachy though -- the Doctor voices his concerns but the colonists put their opinions across just as forcefully and even the otters offer their ideas but none are held up as being an absolute truth and despite some gruesome passages few of them meet the usual sticky ends that characters in Doctor Who stories tend to when their moral code even marginally disagrees with the Doctor's.

It helps that the colonists are generally sympathetically described and, for once, a group we can truly care about.  There's Candy Kane, originally named Candice by the kind of socially unaware parents some kids reading might be cursing, trying to mark out territory beyond her nickname.  Colony head Pallister, who despite being something of a mustache twirler clearly still has the colonists best interests at heart and Ty the local zoologist (every colony should have one) who generates some real chemistry with the Doctor leading to a brim full of jealousy from Martha still clearly besotted with the timelord.

Mentions of incidents in 42 and The Family of Blood suggest Wetworld happens around the time of Blink, and the loyalty between the travellers confirms it.  It's the clear they work best when they're together, Martha pulling the Doctor's wilder tenancies into focus.  Most of the best scenes in the book are when the Doctor is interrogating and investigating and using humour to get the most of the temporary team which develops to solve the problem at hand.  This is also one of the few occasions when Martha develops beyond the generic companion she can sometimes seem to be in other spin-off fiction.  The elements of wit which Freema capitalised upon later in the third series are all present and correct.

Ultimately, Michalowski's knack with characterization and clever staging of the action sequences overcomes the slow first half and some of the more ordinary story material; his florid style brilliantly ties the story together and contains glimpses of the kind of whimsey Douglas Adams would be proud of.  Example:  'In silence they waited.  And waited.  And just for good measure, they waited a bit more.  'Maybe it's still falling.' Martha ventured.' 'Maybe it is.' 'So they waited just a bit more.'  The author understands that the target audience for the book likes to have a story told rather than described to them and Wetworld will work well in the inevitable audio book.

Wetworld, by Mark Michalowski, is released by BBC Books on 6 September. ISBN 9781846072710.

"I'll just give it a good sonicking..."

Despite suffering one of the least inspiring titles in the franchise's history, Paul Magrs's Sick Building (I mean what next?  The Flytippers?  The Wheelie Bin?  Dutch Elm Disease?) is the very definition of an enjoyable romp with just the right mixture of humour, action and inventiveness.  The Doctor drags Martha to Tiermann's World to warn its sole inhabitants, a family of settlers that their idyllic lifestyle is about to be swept away by the Voracious Craw, a cosmic hell beast with the munchies that'll eat literally anything that exists.  But instead of a Swiss Family Robinson, the time travellers discover a brood in thrall of a paternal-proto-Prospero blind to the impending doom that will inevitably befall their so-called Dreamhome as the Craw nibbles away at the wilderness (wouldn't Attack of the Voracious Craw been a much better title?).

A fairly traditional base under siege story with a ticking clock (a day and half until the worm turns and takes them along with everything else) with a small cast.  The family are realistically drawn, the reclusive Professor Ernest Tiermann who has tyrannically dragged is family to this empty world in the back of beyond, his doting Stepford Wife Amanda and their pubescent son Solin who hasn't met anyone but his parents and whose only company has been Servo-furnishings, domestic appliances imbued with personalities in order to fulfil all of the family's wishes.  It's been a feature of the new series that everyday objects could be imbued with some fantastical or frightening facets (see the statues in Blink) and this is a wonderful extension of that -- kids throughout the land will now be trying to get a decent conversation out of a vacuum cleaner.

These kid-friendly plastic pals really are fun to be with, especially those who are given speaking roles - the PIXAR-like knockabout double act of a vending machine called Barbara and a sun-bed called Toaster.  As Tiermann prepares to leave he only has enough room on the escape ship himself and his family and doesn't consider his mechanical creations important or worthy enough to be saved, despite their years of loyalty.  One of the discussions in the book, taking a cue from Isaac Asimov, is the extent to which machines can be given the same rights as their human masters.  Predictably, the servants eventually turn on their master but it makes a change for the machines to have the moral high ground.

The Doctor here is mostly in full on shouty-shouty-blah-blah-blah mode even to the point of being shushed by Solin when his mouth starts running away with itself.  Magrs captures most of Tennant's mannerisms perfectly allowing the darkness seep in at just the right moments especially in an effective incident in which the Professor hits several nails on a number of heads regarding the loss of family and home.  If Martha isn’t quite as vivid it’s perhaps because she’s given far less to do, as with Gridlock providing reassurance to her captors that the Doctor will save the day.  She does have a rather lovely scene with Solin though in which the boy’s attempt at male-female interpersonal relations is just a bit too uncomfortably familiar for those of us who didn’t understand girls at his age either.

This, then, is latter day Paul Magrs being called upon to produce a sleek, well paced, family-friendly, fairly generic Doctor Who fiction totally unlike the ingenious flights of fantasy and mythological investigations from the turn of the millennium which is just right considering that these are supposed to ape the television series in much the same way as the past Doctor novels of the past.  Which isn’t too say it doesn’t have some suitably Magrsian moments -- perhaps only the writer of an audio story called The Horror of Glam Rock would go on to have the Doctor use one of Queen’s greatest hits to calm one of the planet’s predators and the final defence of the realm from the bite of the Craw is about as ludicrous as anything in The Scarlett Empress and will infuriate parents which is just the way it should be!

Sick Building, by Paul Magrs, is released by BBC Books on 6 September. ISBN 9781846072697.

Ghost Lite

The Last Dodo

Written by Jacqueline Rayner; Read by Freema Agyeman

Audio books. I love 'em all. You could sit me down in front of The Goodies reading Dawking's The God Delusion and you'd not hear so much as a titter out of me until they got to the slapstick bit in the a Tulsa branch of Starbucks between Dawkins and the Dalai Llama, then I'd laugh like a storm drain in monsoon season. Not being the world's biggest reader, they're the best thing since sliced bread. Why waste all that time reading when, in this miraculous age of space travel and moving staircases, you can actually pay someone to read it for you. And in this case, it's two and a half hours of Freema.

"Nearly rear ended a couple of dusty and ageing spinsters in a Nissan Micra."

She doesn't do a bad job either but... There's one device used that I simply didn't warm to. This may well mirror how certain parts of the novel are structured but the first time I heard it I nearly rear ended a couple of dusty and ageing spinsters in a Nissan Micra (on a T plate if you're interested in old lady cars) whilst belting up one of this country's less salubrious A roads. Fortunately, I did happen to be driving at the time and wasn't wandering aimlessly across the carriageway, under my own steam, temporarily deafened by my iPod.

"Someone blogging through a loud hailer."

Freema starts reading, it's all jolly (well, it's not, it's about animals being killed), and then it happens... Martha takes over (usually with some sort of ear splitting "HULLO" just to reinforce the fact that we've changed reader). This led to a certain amount of anguish on my part, a little bellowing and much shaking of fists at passing cars. It was a bit like being constantly interrupted by someone blogging through a loud hailer. And then, when Freema's reading, and she reads out Martha's lines with her Martha voice, your brain sometimes wanders and you begin thinking about who she is at this moment in time. Which does distract from the actual story...

... which comes complete with echoes of Classic Who stories (something that all three stories in this set of audio books has in common - if it's a conscious aim to lure devotees of NuWho into the classic range, by the back door, then all the better [or it could just be me seeing patterns that aren't there]), the main one being that of Ghost Light. A entity - called Eve - that, instead of classifying all life, was attempting to preserve all life - well, to preserve the last specimen of each and every form of life in the known Universe. Aided in this task by a bank of pinpricks of light, each one representing a species. A blinking light means that a species was on its last legs. An extinguished light means... no more sabre tooth tiger burgers for you, my lad.

"Strobing in a manner capable of inducing an epileptic paroxysm in a lump of clay."

Aside from the mind boggling numbers of species that this board must have had to handle and the task of being in the right place at the right time to collect each one before total extinction happened just imagine how pissed off they would have been at the Dalek light. It probably strobed on and off continually in a manner capable of inducing an epileptic paroxysm in a lump of clay. Oh, the last one died in Nevada. Nope, they're still there hiding in the dark spaces. Then they're gone again destroyed by Time Vortex Rose (similar to Shop Girl Rose but with added temporal whirly stuff). Oh, sorry, no, they've been hiding in the void in a massive Malteeser. No, they're gone again, sucked back into the void are not merely resting inside a bag of Revels (probably the coffee one, yes, that's it, the coffee one... everyone hates those). You can see what a headache that would be and would probably think of giving it all up and collecting grains of sand instead as a simpler alternative.

My Cornell Klaxon went off at this point to alert me the proximity of a Canon Related Anomaly. Fortunately Doctor Who fans from the 22nd century (the one where, after it all changed in the 21st century, they put everything back to where it was) came back in time and erased it with their laser inanity rubbers. But it was going to be something along the lines of the fact that the Doctor was always running into, verbally jousting with and then usually decimating (in the most effective manner BBC Special Effects could muster) the last of each and every species he came across so why hasn't he come across these quantum librarians before? "Doctor meets Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, Doctor is about to dispatch said Scaroth, librarians arrive, index him, episode over early with time for a cuppa and a preachy condescending moral." Aren't you glad that was removed?

The madness of Eve in the story is surely one that most obsessive collectors of Who merchandise can relate to. It does seem like a monumental task these days to keep on top of everything that's being released? But fear not, cos you've still got a chance to win sets of these three audio books. And as for the Dodo, we all know how they died out, as Bill found out in an episode of The Goodies. They were finger licking good! Tho KFD just doesn't seem to have the same sort of ring to it.

The Last Dodo, by Jacqueline Rayner, is out now on BBC Audio.

"What's so fascinating about those dials anyway?"

Oddly published before the new series had even begun but handily set after The Lazarus Experiment and featuring oblique references to how Martha's family are asking awkward questions about her new friend, Terrance Dicks's Made of Steel is the perfect stopgap in this short hiatus between episodes.  With action taking place in only a few locations with a small group of characters the goal was obviously to produce something that works on the narrative level of a typical episode and it totally succeeds with a central relationship that's true to the third series and a story that logically explains the presence of nu-Cybermen without retconning anything that we've learned before.

The author's note just behind the cover says 'In 1968, he began working on Doctor Who.  He has written over fifty Doctor Who novels and has been a prolific author of books for children' and it shows - this is a great little adventure which in some ways is even more inventive than the television programme with a storyline that wraps in on itself, apparently throw away scenes becoming vitally important in the conclusion and characterization that manages to accomplish in just a few lines more than a certain recent two parter did on television.

"this is a great little adventure which in some ways is even more inventive than the television programme with a storyline that wraps in on itself"

The storyline then (as described on the back cover): various random bits of technology are being stolen from locations as diverse as shopping malls, army bases and government ministries and it becomes apparent that not all of the Cybermen where sucked through the void at the close of Doomsday may be preparing to mass another invasion.  The Doctor inadvertently drops into the timeline at an opportune moment and after falling in with the army, attempts to discover who these metal men are and how he's going to try and stop them.

In some ways, Dicks is predictably going to be at home here, what with this being an army and their scientific advisor.  The likes of Captain Sarandon and Major Burton are precisely the kinds of people that might be turned out by UNIT, wise to the alien threat and knowing that they need a certain timelord's help.  The search for him here mirrors what went on in Aliens of London and once again it's not hard to wonder if having this version of the Doctor exiled again on purpose wouldn't be such a bad thing - certainly a lot of fun is had as he attempts to deal with the contemporary technology in internet cafes and whatnot.

"once again it's not hard to wonder if having this version of the Doctor exiled again on purpose wouldn't be such a bad thing"

There are some lovely moments that are perfectly old school, like the longer suffering PC having to deal with the discover of the TARDIS and the Cybermen and what he'll be telling his boss about the appearance and disappearance of both.  The Cybermen too are much closer to the Mondas variety, their dialogue far more sophisticated, with a certain amount of infighting as to whether the cyberleader is taking the correct action, one of the subordinates displaying a real lust for glory, emotional traits neatly explained by their origin - formerly human and therefore lightly emotional.  Sadly none of them make a fist and say 'Excellent'.  Next time maybe.

The book also captures the new series good verbal humour well; when the Cybermen's base of operations is revealed it's a cue for a stream of jokes as the establishment's expense.  You really couldn't imagine them giving permission for an actual television episode to be filmed in the place should this material be included in the script (my favourite being 'Well, at least someone's found a use for it at last!').  Martha's ability to look danger in the eye and tweak it on the nose is all there too,  especially when she's dealing with the Cybermen: 'Not another invasion.  What is it this time - giant hippos?  Intelligent wildebeest?  Alien llama maybe?'

"You really couldn't imagine them giving permission for an actual television episode to be filmed in the place should this material be included in the script"

Dicks has said on numerous occasions that he thinks of the Doctor as being the same man whoever plays it and essentially always writes him the same way and that it's the interpretation of the actor which changes things.  Which is odd, because he nails Tennant's Doctor perfectly, the fixating on little things, getting over excited about others, but also that innate ability to break explosively from joy to tragedy.  But there's also that understanding of the bigger picture.  At one point he makes a decision that costs lives but understands and explains that he saved many more in the long run - you could almost imagine that given the choice at the end of The Parting of the Ways he would have flipped the switch and wiped out the Earth in a way that the Northern survivor-guilt stricken jug-eared version couldn't.  Despite his outward attitude sometimes, he's not a coward.

To a degree, the book also demonstrates the apex of the problem that the new series is having with the new companion; remove the visit to her old hospital stomping ground, find and replace all mentions of the words 'Martha' and 'Jones' with 'Rose' and 'Tyler' and you'd be hard pushed to say that the characters are all that different.  Which isn't a criticism of Dicks who captures Freema's portrayal pretty well, that fearlessness.  If there's something you could point to as a key difference, its that Martha has much more innate awareness of when the Doctor needs her help and when she should stay away and leave him to it - as occurs when he's taken away by the army and she makes herself scarce.  They're less of a 'team' more of an autonomous collective.  Or something.

"Despite his outward attitude sometimes, he's not a coward."

I'd best stop here before the review becomes longer than the book, suffice to say that Made of Steel is a lovely, potentially nostalgic little read and a bargain at a couple of quid.  This is certainly something I'd like to see more of in the future, writers that have a real history with the show being given an opportunity to write for the new iteration.  It would be a shame if Dicks never got a chance to write for the television version because on the strength of this he would certainly be up to the challenge.  Anyone else got any suggestions for old skoolers they'd like to see taken out of mothballs?

New Doctor Who Poker!

It was only a matter of time before Doctor Who jumped on the Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic and Harry Potter bandwagon, and released a trading card game.

One has to wonder how the rules will play out. Is the "Last Dalek" card immune to the "Rose" card? Can "Sarah Jane", "K9" and "Torchwood Institute" be utilised by "Big Paycheck" to create the "BBC Directors With Dollar Signs Over Their Eyes" offensive? When "Jackie" combines with "Cup of Tea" and "Jack's Arse" card, will it activate the "Giggling RTD" trap?

BBC sources say that issue 3 of Doctor Who: Battles In Time will feature a special "Bad Wolf" card, which has no special powers except fooling your opponent into believing you have something interesting.

More of a Vanilla with Chocolate Chip.

I'm going for a trilogy of blogs now, as I have three subjects to talk about, all unrelated. Here's the first.

The "off-month" release of The Sontaran Experiment on DVD on October 9th has been confirmed on the BBC Web Site, and rather than the vanilla release planned, it does have a few extras, including commentary by Lis Sladen, Bob Baker and Philip Hinchcliffe (Sarah Jane, Writer, and Producer. See if you can guess which is which.), a photo gallery, production notes, and a brief documentary on the Sontarans.

Just right to cover the painful gap between The Mark of the Rani and The Invasion. How else would we all have coped?

DVD Boxsets galore!

Well, not really galore, but I got my 2005 boxset and my "The Beginning" boxset a few days ago, and have just finished trauling my way through most of the extras. Here we have, as expected, 13 x 25 minutes from 42 years ago, and 13 x 45 minutes from last year. So here are 13 reasons to buy The Beginning.

1. The episodes. Duh! We have the superb first episode, a sheer masterpiece of creation,

2. The Daleks, an incredible first outing for the fearsome creations of Terry Nation, in all their glory, and

3. The Edge of Destruction. Admittedly, nowhere near as good as the previous installments, but it provides some incredibly creepy moments from the excellent cast, noteably William Russell, who concludes his demonstration of his acting abilities, shown non-stop over the boxset.

4. The pilot episode. Mostly, not as good as the final first episode (I love a good oxymoron, don't you?), but a great insight into the development of the characters, especially the Doctor's change in attitude.

5. The sutbtitle commentaries, providing many a piece of useless trivia, which weird fans like me will find incredibly interesting. Providing info like transimission and recording dates, ratings, audience response, as well as

6. fascinating information regarding the developments of the stories, including walking through the original ending for The Daleks, taking it's time as the story would have, and my favourite part of the subtitles,

7. the goofs!!! All helpfully pointed out, such as "The shadow across Susan's face is from a boom mike" and "Watch as the Dalek bumps into the control panel", and even a delightful "Can you see which Thal isn't wearing a blonde wig in this sequence when he should be?". Not to mention pointing out lines which were unscripted, added in rehearsal etc.

8. The audio commentary is a sheer delight, just to hear William Russell's crinkly voice trying to remember things from the time. He really seemsto enjoy himself, and it's wonderful to hear.

9. The comedy sketches. I dislike the lengths to which some of them go, such as the bits about snogging Peter Davison, but mostly they're a jolly good laugh. You've got to admire the "We're bad. Utterly evil. You should stop us." moments, purely in remembrance of some of the less well thought up monsters, like giant snakes, and Cybermats, and Slitheen. Actually, remembering them isn't that great.

10. Marco Polo. Some nice footage, creating a mini-movie, retelling the story, including a few sub-plots, even within the cramped 30 minutes.

11. The documentaries, providing a brilliant look into the creation of this incredible show.

12. The chance to comparison the old with the new, the TARDIS, the production, the Doctor. All of them easily live up to today's standards, and if the same cast and crew had made it in the 21st century, it would have outshadowed anything and everything else.

13. Why are you still reading this? BUY THE BOXSET! 13 fantastic episodes, and a chance to see where our favourite show started out, a simple Phone Box in a simple junkyard. Most shows end up in the junkyard, but no, this one started there, and has travelled father than anyone would have thought possible. It is a worldwide phenomenon (Did I spell that right? I think I did. It's a hard word to spell.), and it all started here, with 13 utterly breathtaking pieces of media.

No, I don't work for the BBC, but with this advertising, they should probably be paying me! At least for the time spent typing this up!

Seriously, though, this is a great set, and you will love it.

Smaller on the inside...

I faced a simple choice: I could either dust down my old copy of The Five Doctors or I could unwrap my spanking new DVD boxset of Who 05 instead. Go on, have a guess...

This boxset has the most ridiculous packaging I think I've ever seen. Looking at it you'd think you were getting 25 discs worth of goodies; they managed to package seven whole years of Buffy into a box slightly smaller than this. When I initially opened it up I was simultaneously impressed by the design and stupefied by the utter waste of space.

And it stinks. Literally. Stick your head inside and take a long, deep sniff. Honestly, it reeks! Probably the strangest criticism I've ever had about a DVD collection, but valid nevertheless.

And it's packaging that wasn't designed to be transported, either. When my copy finally arrived from Amazon, only two out of the five discs had survived the journey in their plastic holders. Picking up a few copies in HMV today confirmed my suspicions - 90% of them rattled like a box of old snakes.

It looks pretty good on my shelf, though.

I'm not going to go into the stories themselves - you know the drill by now - suffice to say that they look great, sound great (although Russell admits that some of them are mixed in such a way that you can't hear the dialogue; so it isn't just me) and they don't play properly. Well, WW3 doesn't, as I'm sure you already know. The good news (I think) is that it's OK if you select 'Play All' from the (rather nifty) menu. Oh, well that's alright then! Whatever happened to quality control?

And so, without any further ado, let's head straight to the "extras".

We kick things off with a 12 minute interview with Eccleston that aired on BBC Breakfast at some ungodly hour so I didn't catch it on its original transmission. It's fascinating stuff, especially when we reach the bit about how long he plans on staying for. He manages to avoid the question nicely but it's all so obvious in retrospect. He's right though - he's still done more than Colin Baker.

There are three video diaries on offer (although one video diary and some incoherent camera waving is probably a more apt description). Billie and Russell simply can't be bothered. I can't really blame them as they were busy making some TV show or another at the time, but these are woefully pointless additions that don't really go anywhere or reveal anything particularly interesting. Unless you count the fact that Billie's sister fancies Bruno Langley, in which case it's riveting stuff.

Mark Gatiss, on the other hand, comes up trumps with a wonderful document about writing The Unquiet Dead.  There are plenty of tantalising glimpses into how his episode evolved and it's rounded off with a marvellous sequence where the four writers all meet up (shame it's almost impossible to hear anything). It ends with Gatiss watching the live transmission of the episode (in what looks like a squat!) and there's apparently an Easter egg of him reading Larry Miles' review a couple of hours later.

There are a number of behind-the-scenes features sprinkled liberally across the discs and they are a decidedly mixed bag. At least Mike Tucker could be bothered to take part in this set, as we get plenty of interviews with him talking about the model work for the Nestene lair, Big Ben, barrage balloons and the Emperor Dalek. Meanwhile, The Adventures of Captain Jack is essentially John Barrowman gushing with infectious enthusiasm and charm (but if I hear the "I kissed them both the same way, you know" line one more time I think I'll scream). It ends will a prophetic debate about whether he should get his own show or not.

The best feature by far is about the design process. Taking in the console room and the Emperor Dalek (already done to death in the Confidential series) the most fascinating moment comes when we meet the lady responsible for coming up with all the alien languages and signs. Fascinating stuff - I could have watched that for hours (instead of the five cursory minutes I was given).

Trailers: there are four series trailers on offer (the "...but not yet" teaser, two versions of "Do you wanna come with me?" and Billie's "What do you reckon?"). Other trailers for specific episodes are also sprinkled across the other discs (not including those that are already embedded into the episodes themselves). A nice addition is the storyboard for the original "trip of a lifetime" trailer set to the soundtrack.

The bulk of the "extra" material comes in the form of a whole disc dedicated to Confidential Cut Down. With different, crappier music. Keep hold of your off-air copies - this is a complete waste of time (and space).

Except for the special 12 minute episode that goes behind the scenes of The Christmas Invasion, that is. It's OK but strangely worrying too. What I can glean from it is a) the Doctor spends the whole time in bed and b) it's got evil musical Santa Claus monsters in it. Now, why am I not even remotely excited by that prospect?

Easter Eggs: I can't find them. Anyone here know what they are and where they are?

And that's it. What is sorely missing from the DVD (and this stinks of "holding stuff back so we can fleece the buggers again in a few months") are outtakes and deleted scenes.

I understand that there isn't much of the latter on offer, but stuff was cut for a variety of reasons. What's worse is Phil Collinson promises us on every commentary track he gives that such-and-such scene will be on the DVD. So, where the hell are they? Phil?

No outtakes either. This is a shame. Especially when Phil says "Oh how we laughed, as you'll see on the DVD extras". Er... where???

The boxset's saving grace are the commentaries. Here's just a sample of some of the things I learnt from listening to some of the most enjoyable chat-tracks I've ever bothered to sit though:

• Billie Piper watched her two episodes for the very first time when she recorded these commentaries. Her instinctive reactions to the visual effects and the music are quite beautiful. She even starts blubbing during the "have a fantastic life" scene in PotW. And so did I!
• The lady singing on Murray Gold's soundtrack is President Flavia!
• Some of our favourite scenes are the direct result of the episodes under-running
• If you ever had any doubts that the lunatics have taken over the asylum check out Collinson and Barrowman's barely restrained fanboy routines
• Julie Gardner rang the BBC switchboard and got through to the transmission room who were battling against Graham Norton during the broadcast of 'Rose'
• Something "happened" during that first night-shoot that would make for a good book in 50 years time. Could this be the infamous Eccleston/Boak confrontation?
• Russell is proud of spoiling the Dalek surprise in PotW (and you can see his point)
• Bad Wolf makes no sense at all, despite Barrowman's protestations to the contrary. Rubbish Wolf indeed!
• Steve Moffat is hilarious

It's these commentaries that make the whole set worthwhile. Oh, and the rather glorious episodes themselves, of course. The rest of the extras are a little thin on the ground and strangely lacking in meat. Finally, the absence of any deleted scenes and/or outtakes border on the criminal. And did they ever shoot that alternative, fake ending?

So, when do we get to pre-order the inevitable limited edition collectors edition, then?