The Ood Cast

So, we’ve been recording again…

Our collective new year’s resolution is to get back on the ball properly – as everyone seems to have noticed that life etc. got very much in the way towards the end of last year and we’re now several steps behind where we should (and would like) to be.

SO, here’s an update.

We have recorded the shows for Closing Time and The Wedding of River Song. These are currently at the stage of being edited, and will be released as soon as we can humanly (or Oodly, if you prefer) make it.

We will then, for it will be our 50th show (!) be releasing a “Best of…” podcast. So please do let us know what your favourite song or sketch is, and if you’re able to record a little audio introduction for it, please do – we’d love our listeners to be involved in this. You can leave a comment below or email your choices and any audio files to oodcast@me.com.

After that, our Christmas special review extravaganza WILL be ready to unleash. So we’ll do that.

We are still planning to release the Ood Cast Live as a podcast – although it’s more likely to be a studio-recorded version, as we had various technical issues with the original… Despite that, here’s a small extract to say sorry for all the delays.

During the scribbling process for the Ood Cast Live, I became rather stuck with a particular episode: The Doctor’s Wife (by Neil Gaiman). So in an effort to try to get round it, I wrote a poem. Which ended up in the final script as our version of the episode - and was read beautifully on the night by Laura.  Here it is:

The Doctor’s Wife

On one day only, although
I couldn’t tell its day from night,
my soul left you.
My life was stolen
like you had stolen me –
My love, my constant,
my thief.

When we reunited,
it was without sense
or grammar or control.
I knew I missed you,
but not how to tell you
we had always been together.

I started with goodbyes –
first meeting nerves I suppose,
but I could feel your thoughts
rushing like a thousand streams
crossing their currents,
my beautiful idiot.

On one day only, although
I couldn’t tell its day from night,
I met you, touched your face,
spoke your strange, strange words.
My big complicated sadness
did not last.

I wrote a poem for Chris and Loz’s wedding yesterday, and was really thrilled that they liked it enough to print it in the order of service. I posted it over on my own blog earlier, but here it is for the large majority who’ve never been over there!  The reaction was wonderful, so I hope you all like it too!

I Cannot Count The Ways
(for Chris and Laura)

I could have stopped to make a bouquet
from bluebells and tulips
every day when they were in season,
roses and jasmine when they died.
I might have adorned your neck
with daisies and buttercups,
and filled the air around you
with meadow breezes.
I could have walked to green spaces
to show you Starlings,
diving and spiralling just for us.
I could have lain with you on a hilltop
and named every one of the stars
as reasons to just look at you
(and then I would want re-enact that Doctor Who trailer
and talk about where we would go, just you and I).
I could have picked sunflowers and sweet peas
to give me an excuse
to touch your hair.
I could call you in
just to feel my heart miss that beat
when you walk into a room.
I could record a podcast to spread my words
virally across the world,
just so they knew my joy.
I could fill your world with the rhythm
of Shakespeare’s sonnets,
serenade you with a mariachi band,
or steal in your window to leave
a box of chocolates.
I could have taken hours of our lives
to explain how my heart fills
and my fingertips ache
for your skin,
how my lungs swell with music
when you meet my eyes
and your voice
sparkles in the air.
I cannot count the ways I could shout my love.

And now we are here,
standing together to make
a public statement
in an architectural megaphone.
Signing our names together,
and becoming the whole
we are meant to be.
I do not need to count the ways,
I want to live just one.

OK, so we have a lovely summer ahead of us now, with no Who, no Ood Cast, and only 3 episodes of Sherlock to wait for… Oh and that Torchwood thing, too.

But, as the sunny days start to distract us Oods, the blog seems to fall back into my care while the others are all off being busy with plays and weddings and that.  But I have plans…

I’ll try and keep the discerning visitors to the site busy with some brand new entries for the Ood Cast Guide (if anyone has requests for things I haven’t already written, drop us a line), and also with a bit of a special Haiku challenge. 

You might remember that in the episodes where we reviewed Series 6 part 1 (that’s what the DVD is called, so I’m sticking to that), I tried to sum up the episodes with Haikus.  Well, starting this summer, I’ll be having a go at trying to sum up every story from 1963 to 2011…

It is almost certainly a crazy thing to try and do, but it’ll be fun, and hey I have a head start, having already written the last 6. And hopefully I’ll start to uncover bits and pieces I’ve missed or forgotten over the years along the way…

By the end of it (which I imagine will be well after the summer break has finished) I’ll have written over 200 of the things.  And will probably need a darkened room to lie down in for a bit.

The intention will be to write a season of Who each week (which to start with will mean roughly one a day), but that may change as we go along.  For now, though – Season One will be up and about for you to read at the end of this week.

We’ll record our Christmas episode after we’ve seen what Mr Moffat has in store for us on Christmas Day but until then we had the privilege of being asked to join in the festive fun over at The Doctor Who Podcast. We wrote and appeared in a sketch with them and you can listen to that (along with a few other surprises) by clicking on the following link:

The Doctor Who Podcast Christmas Special

Please go over and have a listen and maybe subscribe to their podcast (if you don’t already)? Trev, James and Tom run an amazing show full of cracking interviews, reviews and discussions about everything Doctor Who. They deserve your time.

You’ll also hear a Christmas duet between Laura & Tom which is, in our humble opinion, one of the best songs we’ve ever done. Tom is an incredibly accomplished blues singer and Laura, as we all know, isn’t exactly a slouch in the vocal performance department either.

So as an extra treat, it’s our pleasure to provide a complete version of the song for download. The track should slot comfortably into the rest of The Ood Cast album as track 19. Merry Christmas.

Listen here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download here:
19 Bigger on the Inside - 6.09 MB

(The track is also available on our Downloads page)

As a bit of a festive thank you to everyone who has downloaded the latest show, I’m going to reveal a little about our recent technical troubles…  Well, briefly.  We (well, Andy) had huge problems getting some of the material off the memory stick it was saved on, and although we rescued most of the material recorded for this show, there’s still something missing.

I need to explain a little.  Annette Badland played Margaret Slitheen in Boom Town… but I remembered her from my childhood, as Charlotte in the BBC series Bergerac alongside the ever-brilliant John Nettles.  If you want to know more, have a look here .

So, using that link, and to shamelessly fulfil a childhood dream of playing the hard-nosed sleuth Jim Bergerac (it was one of my reserve playground games when there was no one around to play Doctor Who with…) I wrote the sketch below…  As there’s not much point re-recording it, here’s the script so you guys can see what you would have heard.  Oh, and to help you with the beginning, and for some of you to reminisce, you’ll find the Bergerac theme tune here…

Good Cop, Bad Slitheen

Bergerac theme tune plays
SFX: Car pulls up

JIM:
What time is it?  Oh hell…

SFX: Running footsteps.  SFX: Office noises (typewriters, phones etc)

BARNEY:
Where is he?  Have you seen him, Terry?

TERRY:
Not this morning, no…

SFX: Door opens

BARNEY:
Ah, at last!

JIM:
Morning Barney.

BARNEY:
Where have you been?

JIM:
Oh you know…

BARNEY:
No, I don’t.

JIM:
Never mind then.  Morning Terry.

TERRY:
Morning Jim.

JIM:
Morning Charlotte.  (Silence) Morning Charlotte…

SFX: farting noise.

CHARLOTTE:
Sorry about that.  Morning, Jim.

SFX: Slitheen screams

For anyone interested, here’s the poem I wrote about that speech in “Rose”, and performed (if performed is the right word) on Series 3 episood 5…

That’s Who I Am

Did we do it right?

Here’s a question. Whose were those faces in the mind-bending battle in The Brain of Morbius? Were they the Doctor’s, Morbius’, or some red herring thingy that either the Doctor or Morbius or both were introducing into that battle of Time Lorderyness?*

Anyway… I really like the Beginnings boxset** and felt like writing a blog about it. Just because I love it so. I think it’s a treasure trove of truly awesome telly, and that everyone should see it.   

But first a bit of background. I was always of the school of thought that suggests black & white Doctor Who is not all that rewarding to watch. It’s black and white for goodness sake. And doesn’t have a stereo option. There’re no effects beyond wibbly split-screen or positive-negative gun-rays. The music was played in live and, when a scene ends, often stops wherever it’s got to. Time itself sloooowwwws down meaning that each twenty five minute episode actually takes a day or so to sit through. Spaceships clearly started life as Fairy liquid bottles*** and the sink plungers really were sink plungers. But what do I know? I used to assume that Masque of Mandragora was dull and tedious, and Carnival of Monsters was a daft run-around. Having found myself to be quite wrong about both of these I decided to have a go at watching the Beginning boxset. At the time I had just finished some studying that had eaten up loads of my spare time and left me wanting to chill out with some decent telly for a weekend. Hmmm, reading back this paragraph makes me wonder quite why I bought the boxset. I think it’s because there was nothing else that I wanted in HMV that day, and … it was on offer at a frankly staggering knockdown price. I think I just thought, yeh, let’s just try…

So what did I make of it all…? Well, my preconceptions were dashed.

I’d seen An Unearthly Child before but, blow me down with a feather, it’s good. It’s actually bullet proof in all regards, and still achieves the staggering feat of shifting without effort from a tale that could have been something like Cathy Come Home into something utterly extraordinary. Ordinary folk finding themselves hurtling through the space-time vortex with aliens in a police box! The suddenness and panic in the TARDIS scene and the first dematerialisation will always be an utterly breathtaking sequence. The only comparison I can think of is the equally wonderful opening episode of Life on Mars.

Then we go to the meet the cave folks, and while it might drag here and there it’s still a striking, memorable adventure. Politics, battle of wills,  survival, fear and hope. It’s memorable rather than dull. Here’s one thing I definitely picked up – it doesn’t feel safe. Doctor Who’s opening adventures each exude a sense of ‘maybe they won’t get out of this alive – the scenario is so far removed from everyday life that it actually wouldn’t surprise me. The Doctor can’t be trusted – look, he nearly killed a caveman. There is no safety net here. Yikes.’

Amazing. Next! Now before you all say ‘what do you mean you’d never seen The Daleks before??’ let me just say I’m actually glad I hadn’t seen The Daleks before. It was a revelation to my now rather set-in-my-ways view of telly. It’s very long, but it’s never dull. It’s a superb piece of writing, production and acting. Oh, and a shout out for Tristram Carey’s music – it’s incredibly evocative, and it sounds like he used some bits from the Torchwood theme. No. Hold on. That’ll be other way round won’t it. The alien planet scenes are superb, it just seems so… alien. And I had to remind myself that nothing like this had been seen on Saturday teatime telly before. Epic, scary, and pretty thought provoking. I’m not really a fan of the daleks, but in this one they are totally dalek-y.

Edge of Destruction is the first of Who’s occasional ‘woah, what’s going on?’ stories. It’s unsettling and weird, and leaves you thinking it through – and the revelation at the end takes the viewer even further into the realm of wondering ‘who are these strange alien people, what is their ship capable of, and are our heroes (Ian and Barbara) ever going to be safe with them?’

All through these adventures I got reminded of the initial coldness of the ninth Doctor as the first Doctor mellows in the companionship of Ian and Barbara. I wonder if he and Susan used to get into such scrapes before An Unearthly Child and had the Doctor always been such a selfish maverick up till then? We meet him on the run, a scared man ‘cut off from his own people’ and terrified of losing Susan, which makes me wonder how much truth there is in his later protestations that he ran away from Gallifrey because he was bored. Fascinating questions, which the series has never explored.

Doctor Who began with such fearlessness in its story lines and characterisations and in the sheer scope of what it set out to achieve that this was a golden era of ‘Anywhere in time and space, where d’ya wanna start’? I wish we could see Marco Polo…

Awesome.

*Answering ‘Members of the production team’ doesn’t count.

**Note to self: work on one’s links.

***Other detergents were available. Actually, I don’t know if there were other detergent brands in the 1960s?

So, Love & Monsters.  I said I’d go back to it, and after putting it off for several weeks, I have.  It’s an episode that I loved and hated in equal measure when I first saw it… so what would I think this time round?

I will be entirely open about my initial issue with it: Marc Warren.  I can’t stand him.  He was OK in Hustle, although then he was playing an over-confident, self absorbed crook and was surrounded by seriously good actors.  Here, presumably, he’s meant to be likeable.  But I’m afraid that if you want a likeable character, you shouldn’t cast a man with a ridiculously smug face.

But looking past that, there are plenty of things I like about the episode.  For instance, I love the way that Elton’s life has been framed by encounters with the Doctor (the ending, when he finally finds out what the Doctor’s connection to the death of his mother is particularly good… very poignant) – and the way they used flashbacks to show his part in unbelievable events (the spaceship crashing into Big Ben, the Auton invasion from Rose).  It’s something that came up very obviously in the latest series – why doesn’t anyone remember any of these things?  Well, here’s a group that do, and let it all bind them together.

Having duly noted RTD’s slight obsession with referencing his own show by having human characters obsessed with the Doctor and tracking him down, I have to say that every time there’s been this kind of meta-textual plot, it’s been from a separate angle.  And in this case, the L.I.N.D.A angle on the story is pretty endearing, and the characters are likeable.  They’re a little like an enlightened resistance. That have a bash at playing ELO songs to make them happy.

Peter Kay is pretty good as Victor Kennedy, precisely the right mixture of camp and creepy.  But not as the monster.  Don’t get me wrong here, I love the concept of the Abzorbaloff – it’s the kind of great idea that could only have come from a Blue Peter viewer.  I’m just not keen on the way they realised it on screen.  The idea might be funny (a green slobbering blobby thing trundling after Elton while threatening him in a digitally-treated mancunian accent), but it was those last couple of scenes that spoiled it for me completely.  It’s a completely underwhelming resolution to the mystery that’s been set up.  Having said that, I like the fact that it’s not the Doctor that defeats Abzorbaloff, but the people he’s eaten that do.

But my main gripe is with the comedy.  Comedy and Doctor Who can go well really well together, but there’s a certain pitch you need to hit, and certain performers it works with.  The scenes in Partners In Crime where Donna finally finds the Doctor are brilliantly performed, but there was an obvious comedic spark between David Tennant and Catherine Tate.  The scenes in the warehouse in Love & Monsters, with the Benny Hill style chase involving Rose, the Doctor and the Hoix, are awful (in my opinion) – it works in Scooby Doo, but not really here…   I’m just not convinced Billie Piper is suited to funny things.

But contrast that with the “bit of a love life” line at the end… and the almost-sweary line Abzorbaloff dies with (which, admittedly, made me laugh again).  My problem isn’t the slapstick or the ruder references, but that it never found a balance between the two, and they just can’t sit together.

My view of Love & Monsters then, is the same as when I first saw it.  I like it a lot, but the ending – with the comical Northern green blob and the pavement love – kind of ruins it.

This post was supposed to be sticking up for a Who that I wasn’t at all sure about the first time round, or have acquired a reputation for being a bit, well, rubbish.  But having got hold of Silver Nemesis over the weekend, I’m on a bit of a 7^th Doctor fest, so I’ll write about “Love & Monsters” next time.

So this one is about a story that I hadn’t seen since 1989.  One that used to make me cringe and bristle with irritation.  Not because I didn’t like it, but because it was the end.  I mean, of course, Survival.

A bit like Bjork, it’s a curiously beguiling little package, this.  Mysterious disappearances in Perivale, an abundance of stray cats (that can only snarl at people under remote control), a mouthy Scottish chap giving self defence classes, Cheetah People, and the Master…  It’s all rather spooky.

I remember feeling really rather uneasy about it when I saw it – but watching it again, I’m not sure why.  Maybe because it was pretty sinister.  It certainly wasn’t about the special effects particularly: although the Cheetah People’s costumes were alright, actually.  And the cats eyes effect on the humans – Midge and Ace particularly – were really good touches.  The robotic cat is a little obvious, though, and I can’t imagine even a 10 year-old me not noticing that.

The Doctor in this is an altogether darker being too – which I suppose is well known as the way the character was going.  Much more brooding that the clown-like Doctor that had graced our screens in season 24 (“Delta and the Bannermen”, anyone?).  Ace is great in it, confused to be back in her old haunt, and the story makes good use of her youth and energy.  She gets to do a lot of running in this – and its proper running, not the totter-away-from-the-strange-latex-shape-as-fast-as-my-high-heels-will-let-me kind of running that Tegan seemed particularly suited to.  There’s more development here for her too, even at the end of the series, with the bond she makes with Karra.  It all holds up pretty well after so long.

And I love the last speech.  It’s a bit obviously dubbed over after the shoot, and Sylv delivers it a little fast for my liking, but it’s lovely.  And a bit sad.  The last two seasons of the classic Who are still wonderful to me.  I know the shortcomings, and the failures of it, but I love the ambition, the restoration of the mystery when the character had started to become either a grumpy, grumpy sod or a fool.  And best of all, it is fun to watch.

But the extras on the DVD are brilliant too.  For a start, the continuity announcements from the original broadcast are on there, which helped me recreate an evening as a 10 year-old (Doctor Who at 7.35 followed by Bergerac at 8 – marvellous…).  Then on disc 2 there is a documentary about Ace (the first companion I followed from start to finish) and “Endgame” – a longer documentary about the cancellation of the series and what was planned for season 27 (The Ice Warriors would have been back!  Ace would have been trained as a Time Lord!)…

It all fills me with nostalgic intrigue – and a bit of regret at not having read more of the Virgin New Adventures when I had the chance…

I hated my memories of Survival.  But I’m glad I returned to it 20 years later – it’s not half bad, and certainly an exception to the reputation of 80s Who.  If Hale and Pace couldn’t spoil it, then it had to be quite good, after all.