The Ood Cast

So, where was I…?  Oh yeah – somewhere, the 8th Doctor regenerated – as I said before, possibly during (or as a consequence of) the events of the Time War. But as we have no proof, however vague, let’s assume he was just bored to death by the advent of Big Brother in his absence from the screen and had to regenerate. Perhaps a foolish mistake for an experienced Time Traveller, but maybe a small gesture towards the dungheap of Reality TV… We’ll never know for sure. But just when Star Trek fans had started to think they could claim the longest-running series title… here’s the Oodcast Guide to what happened next: Doctors 9, 10 and 11.

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Ninth Doctor

Emerging from the swirling mists of time and onto a North London housing estate to pick up a cockney sparra and whisk her off around the universe, the Ninth incarnation of the Doctor looked for all the world like he’d just wandered out of the bookies after he backed a winner at 100/1 odds. His northern accent did nothing to move away from the stereotype. He was also hairless – a new image for the TARDIS’ designated driver.

In terms of companion, there was the cockney shop-girl, the unemployed Coronation Street actor/dull milksop character… oh, and the omnisexual, immortal cabaret performer.

But this ninth chap was energetic, fun-loving and naturally rather nosey – and although intelligent, quick-witted and very knowledgeable when it came to technological workings, he preferred to stick with the sonic screwdriver and a well-chosen pun in the face of danger. A little like the fourth Doctor, he was often jolly and cheerful when in company or confronting trouble, but melancholy and serious when alone.

During his time, he beat back a fresh invasion attempt by shop window dummies, discovered and then half-defeated the last remaining Dalek, Victorian ghosts, Rose’s should-be-dead dad and a Reaper who wants to make him dead again, children in gas masks, the bloke from Spaced and his hungry ceiling, and (if you were in any doubt as to whether it had anything for the kids) the green aliens distinguishable from other green aliens because they make that funny farting noise a lot… the Slitheen…

A brave and loyal friend, particularly to Rose, he regenerated having kissed her – not as a punishment, but because in doing so, he inhaled the Time Vortex’s energy – and re-emerged younger, skinnier, and in his Sunday best…

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Tenth Doctor

The Doctor’s ninth regeneration was a traumatic one, with the poor lamb needing a sleep once it was complete. And while he slept, the world nearly fell to an invasion by the family from the children’s classic Funny Bones. Happily, he woke up in time to beat the Big Skeleton using just a sword and a Satsuma.

And so began the era of the heartthrob Doctor. Good looking, eccentrically suave, sometimes cheeky and with a good mopey face when required, this Doctor was a sort of mixture of the third and fifth incarnations – with the former’s all-action style and enthusiasm for running about; and the youthful wisdom, naivety and touch of sadness like the latter.

Persuading companions to join him was simple (if they were female), and he travelled with the cockney shop girl, a cockney Doctor, and just for a change, a cockney temp… But he also encountered old friends in Sarah and the little tin doggy, was reunited with the Cabaret star and kept a civil face on for the shop-girl’s family and friends.

As for adventures, there were plenty… From cat nurses, werewolves and spiky queens to clockwork Frenchmen, deadly stone angels, interplanetary witches, small girls who could teach animators a thing or two about bringing things to life, northern comedians, robot Santas with Tuba guns, literally huge demons, face-stealing televisions, scarecrows, hungry shadows, fish people (who are all halfway through eating a glass), Aliens hidden under Roman volcanoes, walking diet pills, giant wasps, antsy headmasters and some older foes in a returning Davros, Cybermen, Daleks, Sontarans, Macra and the Master.

He should, of course, be best remembered for meeting the Ood. Without whom we would not have a podcast…

This Doctor’s end was long, drawn out, and I’m not really sure what did for him in the end. Perhaps it was the numbing inevitability. Nope, I remember. He regenerated having absorbed far more radiation than he should have) in order to save Bernard Cribbins so he could carry on with his plan to narrate a new series of the Wombles – at least, that’s what Bernard should be doing. A noble deed either way.

His reluctant firework display over, he went back to his childhood… Isn’t 903 too old for a mid-life crisis?

—-

Eleventh Doctor

Whether you see him as an old head on young shoulders, or simply a bent shoe coincidentally on the same coat hanger as a tweed jacket, the Eleventh incarnation is an exhilarating bundle of energy and floppy fringes. The Time Lord equivalent of Hugh Grant crossed with a Rugrat.

Old school in many ways, he is quick-tempered yet compassionate and bears more than a passing resemblance in manner to the second doctor. He’s the first to deploy sweeping the hair out of his eyes as a method of charming enemies, the second to pull off the bowtie and braces combination (it’s a classy man who can pull off the “Bobby Ball”), and the third to raid a hospital changing room for clothes.

Just a few months in, he’s already faced the threats of Daleks, Silurians, even deadlier deadly stone angels, a space snake with huge teeth, Star Whales, Smilers and gun-toting monarchs, vampirical fish women, a Dream Lord, a pilotless spaceship, a small stone prison and a paradox… Oh, and of course he faced an alien turkey in the crypt of a French church while visiting Vincent Van Gogh.

He also appears to be quite good at football, but I don’t think we need to go into that.

Anyone go to the Doctor Who prom? We didn’t unfortunately but have caught up with it on BBC iPlayer. It was great, eh, and wasn’t Matt Smith brilliant in that sketch?!

I particularly enjoyed Mathew Sweet’s piece in the interval regarding the history of incidental music in Doctor Who. Back in the early 80s I bought the cassette Doctor Who: The Music. In those days this was as near as it got to BBC video releases. . .  Goodness, how things have changed. The cassette consisted of two sides (hang on, remember those? You actually had to turn the tape over halfway to hear the whole thing and spool through using guesswork to get to a particular track. Life was clunky in those days) of Doctor Who incidental music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. To my ears it was the sound of other worlds, strange situations, terrible events, awesome resolutions.

At about the same time some schoolmates started lending me audio copies of actual stories. Anyone else remember that? This was a pre-video age, unless you lived in the posh part of town or went to the grammar school (note for non-UK readers - it really was like that here in the early 80s). Listening to Doctor Who adventures on audio was good and bad. It was bad that you couldn’t see Tom Baker’s grin, or Lalla Ward. It was good that the sense of scale was left unrestrained. When there was incidental music all sorts of visual possibilities appeared before you, all with the most astonishing production values.

So the incidental music was key to the audio experience. Dudley Simpson. Ahhh, Deadly Dudley (as he was quite unaccountably called). His music was part of the soundscape of my teenage years – mock me, I shan’t care … If for some reason you need reminding of the man’s genius, I need only mention this entirely random selection: the original Master theme, the Wirrn theme in The Ark in Space, the jungle scenes and the Sorensen transformation in Planet of Evil, the mummies chasing Ernie Clements in Pyramids of Mars, The Deadly Assassin part three, and all of City of Death. Rather like Matthew Sweet I still hum the City of Death Paris theme, generally whenever I arrive somewhere on holiday (including on the Paris metro, haha), it’s so joyous. Dudley Simpson’s sense of drama and humour and his endless inventiveness with a piano, a cello and some carsprings gave the endless variety of Doctor Who a coherence and identity.

Malcolm Clarke, though. Unsung hero. His Sea Devils music was the first track on Doctor Who: The Music and I played it over and over. It’s amazing and beautiful. Apparently some people don’t like it and I can’t work out why might that be. It’s an astonishing example of a genius at their creative best. A soundscape, which often consists of recognisable tunes but is also often pure sound. That and his Earthshock music, his eerie cybermen theme seemingly emerging out of the sounds of a dripping cave, building in structure until it reaches a corporeal form marching along with the metal meanies themselves.

Try this. Play a Doctor Who DVD and nip to another room and listen to it.

Ever since we recorded the review of The Big Bang, slightly influenced by fermented grape juice, I’ve been thinking about the finale. Not in an obsessive way, you understand… I do have a job, and a small dependant-type person. But it sort of comes with the territory that as my friends know me as a fan, I get into conversations with people who can watch the show with other people talking throughout, or while they nip in and out of the room being busy with real life things.

The thing is, I can’t do that. It annoys me intensely if someone talks through something I’ve been waiting to see, and when Doctor Who is on, the only thing I do is watch it. There isn’t much that can’t wait 45 minutes, after all.

But neither do I sit there and drink in every detail and process every misplaced shoelace or wrongly-positioned object. I get caught up in the story and I’m far from ashamed to admit that.

So when it comes to a Steven Moffatt finale… I got lost in it. I don’t mean that I didn’t understand it, just that I went into the world and didn’t come out again until the end theme music started. Having watched it again, yes, I think it was a bit over-complex and could possibly have been stretched over 3 episodes to make the little arc work (let’s face it, amusing as it was, I’d not miss “The Lodger”). But, frankly, I don’t care.

There were holes in the plot – I know. I see them too. But the Doctor is a Timelord. They’re as real as Daleks… it really doesn’t matter that there’s a couple of confusing paradoxes in there.

There are things unresolved – I know. Have you never watched a Steven Moffatt story before? That’s par for the course… Unresolved probably means it will be part of the next season. This is, after all, the chap who brought us River Song 2 YEARS AGO and we still don’t know who the chuffing whatsit she is.

Inconsistencies and contradictions? Hmm. I don’t know. The Moff seems to write scripts where you’re left thinking these are inconsistent or blatant contradictions, but a while down the line, we’re shown the significance. I don’t really see that grumbling about them is of any use. But then, I grew up in the 80s, so this is Doctor Who’s Golden Age of Hollywood compared with some of my childhood memories of bubble perms and talking green slugs. When things contradicted then, it was because they cut the episode together wrong – like that time when the 3rd, 4th, 5th 6th and 7th Doctors all appeared in Albert Square…

What do you mean, that wasn’t a continuity error?   Well, it was definitely some kind of error…

All in all, I don’t care about the problems. I don’t even care that Amy is a character that seems unnaturally cold and unemotional and that nothing has made me really like her except that she’s funny.

I think the sketch we did in Episood 16 (“Childish Things”) highlighted the one that actually bothered me – that the Pandorica plan hatched by the Big Book of Doctor Who Baddies was absolutely rubbish. But then, so is every evil plan hatched by balding master criminals in every James Bond film, and it’s still very easy to enjoy them without worrying about it. Which is exactly what I did.

My point being that is doesn’t really matter in any significant way…  I know we on the Ood Cast are usually ridiculously enthusiastic about the show, and it doesn’t matter whether the episodes are top-notch or middling rubbish – we still love it.  But being a bit more level-headed about it here – the episodes that people will undoubtedly judge the Moff’s first season on – it did what everyone wanted: it surprised, entertained, scared (the stone dalek was brilliant – finally there seems to be an end to the ridiculous flying swarms of them) and tied a few things up.  Not everything, but that’s a reason to keep watching rather than whine about it, surely?

And apart from anything else…  Egyptian godesses?  Orient Express?  In Space?  Anyone fancy opening a book on whether we’re about to see “Pyramids of Mars II: Mastaba and Commander”?! (*FULL credit and huge thanks to Mr Ian Smith for that title*)

As long as the time tunnels in this one aren’t London Underground tunnels, sounds like it’ll be great!

Oh, and did we mention I predicted the Fez….?  OK, OK, I’ll stop now.

Further to last week’s episode, it’s clear to us that that the following was a major influence on Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor. The bow tie, the crazy face, the way he moves … it’s an eerily accurate prototype for the current iteration of our favourite Time Lord.

Finally got around to editing together the music video for Laura’s song from our episode “Pond Life”. It’s the one set to the tune of Mark Ronson’s version of “Valerie”, retelling the events of “The Beast Below” from Amy’s point of view.

On top of Laura’s amazing vocals, with the visuals it actually makes a really good summary of the whole plot. Like a musical summation.

If you like these, leave a comment (and a suggestion of which of our songs you’d like to see tackled next) and we’ll get going on it.

Hello and welcome to our lovely new website.

Yes, due to Laura inadvertently crashing the old website into Earth during a problematic regeneration, we’ve decided to take the opportunity to redecorate. And with Series 2 of The Ood Cast just days away, we thought we’d spruce up the logo and make a few tweaks to the look and feel of the programme too.

Everyone’s doing it.

Apparently.

These are exciting times. Series 2 of the podcast is going to be something really special. We’re upping our game in anticipation of Steven Moffat’s tenure at the Whoniverses controls. We’ve got loads of ideas for content including sketches, spoofs, games, reviews and even a season of audio adventures. We hope you’ll stick around to ring in a new era of Who with us and while we’re all waiting for Matt Smith to stumble out of those blue double doors for the first time, why not join our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter?

Everyone’s doing it.

Apparently.

We always intended to do this properly, you know. But we slipped. Lives are tricky things, and sometimes things happen that get in the way.

The short of this is that we’re back. Oh, and how!

Do you all have iTunes or a similar pod-catcher?

The reason I’m asking is because we’re going to finally get the podcast up and running.

The plan is simple, and is this:

Starting in the next couple of weeks, we’ll start releasing a series of six episodes: 1 introduction, and then 5 more, covering each of the 2009 Specials that brought the David Tennant “era” to an end.

That will be every week. And then, when the new series arrives, and Matt Smith begins to win everyone over (as we all know he will), we’ll be there every week, sharing our thoughts with everyone who cares to listen.

So please keep an eye out, and then download!

Join us to find out what happens when you shove three Doctor Who devotees in the same room with a new fan who also happens to be a girl. Just how sarcastic can one geeky fool get about the follies of modern Cybermen, and exactly how many wrongs can be done to a good joke?

This is going to be a blast. We haven’t recorded anything yet, but I can feel it…

Come join us.