Review: Doctor Who: Talkback, Volume Three: The Eighties edited by Stephen James Walker

Speaking of Doctor Who (though not the 1980s), I have a review up of a Short Trip, "How to Win Planets and Influence People" by James Goss, starring Rufus Hound as the Meddling Monk.

Trade paperback, 201 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 1979-2007)
Acquired November 2016
Read December 2016

Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume Three: The Eighties
edited by Stephen James Walker

Like in volume two, the strength of volume three is probably in its in-depth conversations with Doctor Who's script editors. Though there's no interview with Christopher Hamilton Bidmead (responsible for my favorite season of classic Doctor Who) or Eric Saward (probably the show's most controversial script editor, who quit mid-season in 1986, taking the script for the finale to The Trial of a Time Lord with him), the book does does cover Antony Root (1982) and Andrew Cartmel (1987-89). Root is a figure I can't recall ever reading a single word about before; he was an interim script editor who only did part of a season. He's one of the few 1970s-80s Doctor Who script editors to not actually write for the programme, and here he says he views it as a script editor's job to edit, not write, providing a nice little window in Season Nineteen. The interview with Andrew Cartmel is excellent: it's almost thirty pages long, and it covers every story Cartmel edited, from Time and the Rani to Survival, in exhaustive detail. Cartmel shows the intelligence and insight that made the period he presided over one of Doctor Who's best, as he recruited new writers and pushed them to their limits, giving us classics like Remembrance of the Daleks and The Curse of Fenric. (I was amused by the number of things Cartmel said made his era strong that he totally disregarded when recreating it for the Big Finish "Lost Stories" two decades later.)

Other highlights include a baffling Tom Baker interview, a long interview with director and writer Terence Dudley, an interview with Peter Davison from early in his time in the role, an interview with Nicola Bryant that focuses on her pre-Who life in detail I'd never seen before (she got into drama school by turning even her self into a performance, figuring out what kind of women the school tended to admit!), and a number of features about the special effects of the late 1980s stories. Often, the best pieces are the ones right from the time of production or shortly thereafter, before years of retrospective fandom and memory solidify these times into postdetermined fact: 1983's Peter Davison is a different person from 2016's, but of course Doctor Who Magazine these days can only talk to the latter.

Lowlights include some of the fans writing up these interviews, inexperienced writers who mistake banal detail for interesting scene-setting, or their personal neuroses and/or social insights for  something I care about; the Tom Baker interview was particularly bad in this regard. Just give me what the man said-- your triumph at scoring imaginary points against the Australian Broadcasting Company rep is not worth noting!

Review: Doctor Who: Talkback, Volume Two: The Seventies edited by Stephen James Walker

Trade paperback, 225 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1977-2006)
Acquired August 2008
Read November 2016

Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume Two: The Seventies
edited by Stephen James Walker

There are definitely interviews here with some old standbys: Terrance Dicks (script editor, 1968-74), Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who, 1970-74), Barry Letts (producer, 1970-74), Tom Baker (Doctor Who, 1974-81), and Philip Hinchcliffe (producer, 1974-77). Each interview, however, manages to be informative and interesting: I enjoyed reading about Pertwee's appearance on This Is Your Life, for example, and the Tom Baker one is somehow able to have anecdotes I hadn't heard before.

But it's also good to hear from folks who weren't/aren't often interviewed, especially the trio of late 1970s script editors: Robert Holmes (1974-78), Anthony Read (1978-79), and Douglas Adams (1979-80). Holmes has gone on to be quite lauded as both a script editor and a writer, but he died in 1986, meaning few interviews with him exist. Anthony Read I can't recall ever reading anything about at all before. And obviously Douglas Adams is quite famous, but this interview was done back in 1978, before any story he'd script-edited had even gone out, and before Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had gone further than a few episodes on the radio. All three provide great insight into the day-to-day script-writing of their era, which tended to lurch from crisis to crisis but produce excellence regardless. (Holmes, especially, was always rewriting failed scripts and producing greatness as a result.)

I was also surprisingly interested by the interviews with Pennant Roberts (who directed several serials from 1977 to 1985) and Peter Logan (visual effects on various serials from 1977 to 1982). Roberts's provides a detailed look into the making of The Sun Makers and The Pirate Planet in particular, explaining how he makes the production choices he makes, while Logan's is a detailed dissection of the effects of Destiny of the Daleks. One learns where to find a Plutonian dystopia in Bristol, why the flying spanner in Pirate Planet looks rubbish but couldn't look otherwise, and how Dalek props were loaned out to basically anyone between episodes and ended up in terrible shape as a result. The Roberts interview, especially, is a candid look into the decisions that result in what you see on screen. I don't rate Roberts very highly as a director, but he was clearly a thoughtful guy.

A solid collection of interesting anecdotes. Who knew that Jon Pertwee encouraged the creation of a rival Doctor Who fan club because he felt the official one too focused on Patrick Troughton? Or that Tom Baker personally paid for the postage of the Doctor Who Fan Club when the BBC refused to do so anymore!

Review: Doctor Who: Talkback, Volume One: The Sixties edited by Stephen James Walker

Trade paperback, 197 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1978-2006)
Acquired September 2016
Read October 2016

Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties
edited by Stephen James Walker

I've been reading Doctor Who Magazine's six "In Their Own Words" specials, which interweave quotes from DWM interviews to create a history of Doctor Who from 1963 to 2009. I've been supplementing them with Talkback, which prints interviews in their entirety, mostly sourced from fanzines (though some are from DWM, making for some redundancies). The interviews focus on production personnel, with only a couple performers getting looks in. If you like reading about the minutiae of producing a television programme, especially the very "primitive" ways it was done in the 1960s, then this book is for you.

Highlights include the interviews with the two set designers of the first couple seasons, Raymond Cusick (who designed the Daleks) and Barry Newberry (who designed most of the historicals, including the lush Marco Polo and the excellent The Aztecs), make-up designer Sylvia James, Anneke Wills (who played Polly and lived a fascinating post-Who life), director Morris Barry (who did The Dominators but knew it was crap except for the bitchy Dominators themselves), and Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin (the script editors and producers who got rid of the time/space travel element of the show in 1969, and whose reasons for doing so make for interesting reading). Sometimes it can be a bit dry and hard going (Walker and the various other interviewers are no Benjamin Cook when it comes to writing up interviews in a lively fashion), but it's packed with facts and anecdotes you'll struggle to find anywhere else.