By Roy Mathur, on 2023-05-02 at 01:02:07-01:57:24 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show, Listen
I'm sorry I'm running so very very late, but I am taping now. The delays were due to a combination of tiredness and aches and pains. If you want to fire up my enthusiasm in future, a decent piece of correspondence, a rating, a review, or, dare I say it, a very small financial incentive (GBP 4.00 via Ko-fi) would do nicely.
And bugger it, clips are back. A short clip of DW audio has been part of the revisit show since 2014, so I'm reversing my decision to remove them from the pod. If the BBC don't like it, they can complain to me personally. They haven't complained in 9 years and have even retweeted me, so they can't say they weren't aware of what I was doing. Of course, that doesn't mean I can't still be screwed by YouTube's demented algorithm if I decide to start uploading to that platform again.
I said in one of the previous main pods that I had purchased The Doctor Who Programme Guide: Fourth Edition by Jean-Marc Lofficier, to go along with the previously acquired Handbook: The Unofficial Guide to the Production of Doctor Who. I also said I was hoping it would make my job easier. It only somewhat did. Previous notes---sourced from Wikipedia, tardis.fandom.com, etc. seem more detailed. This is because they've had more years to accrue information than the older publications. However, it is nice to have some recognised reference books on my library shelves.
I've swapped back to the Shure SM7B tonight because less editing, even it is more difficult editing, is still much less editing than with the audio recorded with the Shure SM58. The Shure SM7B also sounds marginally better; fuller and more sophisticated, and less spitty than the Shure SM58. This is not an advertisement for Shure Incorporated. I started off with an iPhone 4S, then a Behringer XM8500. Use what you have, but always keep the raw audio in case you get better at editing in future.
Fifth Doctor: Peter Davison
Companion(s): Adric: Matthew Waterhouse, Nyssa: Sarah Sutton, Tegan: Janet Fielding
Notable Cast: Richard Mace: Michael Robbins; prolific comedic actor, whose best known role was, at least to me, Arthur Rudge, in On the Buses.
Director: Peter Moffatt
Writer: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Locations: On location at Black Park, Buckinghamshire in 1981; also used in Full Circle (1980). Ealing Film Studios and BBC Television Centre, Shepherd's Bush in 1981.
Broadcast: Season 19, serial 4, story 119, following Kinda covered in 477, 4 x c. 25 minute episodes, and first broadcast 15--23 February 1982.
Media: Target novelisation by Eric Saward (1982), VHS with Black Orchid (1994), DVD (2004), special edition (2013), The Collection Season 19 Blu-ray (2018), and the music was released at least three times as part of soundtrack albums by Paddy Kingsland and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
With a few exceptions, I like the whole of the top ten for that day. The Jam was at number one with A Town Called Malice, The Stranglers at number two with Golden Brown, Softcell at number three with Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, OMD, was at four with Maid of Orleans, Kraftwerk at five with The Model, Tight Fit at six with The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and at nine was Meat Loaf's Dead Ringer for Love. Blimey.
The family of a rural manor house, witness a comet overhead, and then are attacked by a gaudy bejewelled robotic creature.
The TARDIS arrives at a rural location; Heathrow 300 years too early for Tegan's flight. The team are accosted by hostile natives, but are taken to the refuge of a nearby barn by actor and highwayman Richard Mace who is hiding there. He tells them about the comet.
They find out that the comet was a spacehsip flown by Terileptil prison escapees. They are controlling the minds of the locals from their base hidden beneath the manor house, hence the hostile reception. Their plan is to use rats as a vector for a plague deadlier than the Black Death that will kill all humans and allow them to take Earth as their own.
The Doctor uses the TARDIS viewscreen to track them to London, slightly north of the Thames. They arrive at a bakery. In the ensuing fight, the aliens are burnt to death in a massive fire when a gun overloads. Before leaving the Doctor offers Richard a place in the TARDIS, but he decides to stay. We see a sign for Pudding Lane engulfed in flames, indicating that the Doctor has indirectly caused the Great Fire of London.
Adric whines as he gets a well-deserved telling off in the TARDIS after the trouble he caused with the mind controlled robot tank on Deva Loka. Later in the the story, he is beaten up by an android.
Tegan is traumatised from her possession by the Mara on Deva Loka, a situation not made better by the Doctor's continuing failure to get her home.
The companions efficiently tackle a hostile natives, while the Doctor double maces another in the guts.
Gentleman highwayman Richard Mace has a wonderfully phlegmy and rich voice.
The android henchmen of the Terileptils have bejewelled hands made from cricket gloves.
The Doctor picks a lock with his sonic screwdriver, but the device is later lasered by the head alien.
The Doctor says, "Why are Earth people so parochial?" He's right, we are.
Nyssa faffs about tidying the TARDIS instead of immediately constructing an android destroying vibration weapon as instructed.
The creature design was very good for the variegated colored reptilian Terileptils. I thought their death scene rather traumatic and ghastly as they blistered and bubbled in the flames.
Richard Mace would have been a fascinating companion.
The Doctor shrugs off causing the Great Fire of London, saying that it was meant to happen. What an arrogant git! He burnt down my city!
I have visited Pudding Lane a few times. Come out of Monument Tube, and it's between Eastcheap and Monument Street. It's an exceedingly boring place with nothing much to see other than the side walls of offices.
After nine sodding years of Doctor Who'ing it up in my podcast, you'd have thought I'd have something to show for it, wouldn't you?
Please support this show. There are many ways to do it that I'll tell about you in a second, lest I summon the spirit of Robert Delgado's Master to punish the ungenerous.