The Doomwood Curse

Back in the olden days, when Doctor Who was off the air, and Russell T Davies made TV shows that seemed to set out to annoy the people that weren't watching them, it carried on, as books and later as audio recordings. The books seemed to work very hard at becoming incomprehensible as fast as they possibly could, but some of the recordings were rather good. Made by Big Finish, they feature 'real' TV Doctors, often with 'real' TV companions supporting them.
At their best the Big Finish audio stories can be very good indeed. The one in which the Tardis arrives on the doomed world of Mondas just as desperate measures become essential remains the greatest Cyberman story yet told in any medium. At their worst the writers start to become obsessed with companions having only a single story hook, which has to be brought out every time. There was one girl slotted into the space between two Peter Davison stories who could be relied on to have a fight with the Doctor every adventure, and wonder if she should leave the Tardis and settle down where ever they happened to be this time. And in the end she did of course.
The revelations though have been that Colin Baker would have made a pretty damn good Doctor given decent scripts, and even more surprisingly, that Bonnie Langford could have made a good companion. Really.
As well as better special effects, the audio adventures do allow a modicum of time travel adventures rather more easily than can TV. For some years India Fisher played Charlie Pollard been a companion to Paul McGann. Eventually the relationship became a bit tired and McGann went off to do a different style of story, leaving Charlie to a happy ending. Except a few stories later Charlie pops up as a companion to Colin Baker, knowing rather more about the Tardis and the Doctor than he really expects, not letting on half of what she knows for fear that it might alter the Doctor's history and prevent her Doctor from ever coming to be. It makes a different and really rather jolly dynamic.

This story's pretty much a romp. There's a bit of pretext for a highwayman melodrama, but it doesn't really matter. Bodices are ripped, horses are chased, lost siblings are discovered through matching birthmarks. All very silly and a welcome sign that Big Finish aren't taking themselves too seriously.

Congratulations Gary & Sue

Another wedding. That's two this year. They seemed to dry up for a few years, but now they're happening again. This time two members of the Dive Club coming round for a second time. Just to make this one a bit different Gary, who maintains that he is more Scottish than it sounds, asks that guests should come in highland dress, so it's down to the hire shop for kilt and everything.

And it really does come with everything, though it seems that I managed to drop the bow tie out of the top of the suit carrier while trying to bring it back to the office. Which I only realised with 30 minutes to go before the taxi turned up and no time to whiz into town to buy one.

The ceremony is out of town at a golf course, and it a good one. Not noticeably religious, but you don't expect that in a golf course, indeed it might be rule. After that a good meal and then Scottish dancing. Dancing is not something that comes naturally to me, but there is something splendid about a good ceilidh is that no-one has a clue what they should be doing, and there's normally someone in the next group heading left when it should be right more often than you do. Much more fun than a disco, when everybody else seems to know what they're doing and you don't.



Who should be there with the band, but my old friend John Batchelor. John used to work for us, where he developed whole heaps of the dominant work management system, before being forced into redundancy at about the same time I was. It made some kind of sense for me, though I didn't know it at the time - I was an OK Cobol programmer in a company that didn't want the bother of doing it's own programming any more. John was a guru. He understood how the whole thing fitted together, which given that we relied utterly on the few people who understood everything to inform the plebs, should have meant the bosses fighting to keep him.

But no. John's here with the band, trying to steer the people to the right when they need steering and stepping in to complete a set when someone disappears to the bar instead of coming back in a circle. Great guy. Doing a useful job supporting the band there, but should be doing so much more.

I'm going to bed...

...please God don't let me wake up to a surprise.

It's almost 3 in the morning. It looks like Obama has managed to pull it off. There was this horrible idea that people wouldn't vote for a black man, despite telling pollsters that they would. But unless McCain manages something unprecedented, like taking California, there's no possible way he can win.

Got round to it at last

Pictures now uploaded. More of them can be found on http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickpheas