About Time

[Jason Thompson]

has anyone else read these books by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood? What do you think of them?

I find them largely entertaining and informative. The reviews of the stories are as in-depth as you'll ever find, and the essays that accompany them range from pointless fan retcon such as arguing over the number of hearts the Doctor has and what the TARDIS can and can't translate (but importantly all these pieces are kept to a tone that indicates the authors aren't taking it too seriously) to pieces that put the show in context by explaining things like why the Radio Times is such a big player in Doctor Who's history and indeed in the country in general.

Clearly a lot of work has gone into these. In each volume there is a section that explains the after the authors did a comprehnsive volume covering every episode of Buffy they found themselves with no desire to see another episode ever again, so they've ploughed deep into Doctor Who to provide the same reference material for a how that ran almost four times longer on screen and continued well past that, presumably with the knowledge that they are unlikely to want to revisit the show again afterwards. Was the result worth it?

Well, yes, but...

Despite the excellent depth of many of the articles, the simple, niggling factual errors began to really bug me. I'm not talking about obscure factoids that they might be expected to get wrong because public or fan wisdom has perpetuated an urban myth either. These are simple nuts and bolts errors. Examples include:

They insist the Cybercontroller is the only Cyberman who speaks English in Tomb Of The Cybermen, despite at least one other Cyberman also clearly speaking, and at one point the Controller has a conversation (admittedly limited to the other one responding 'yes' twice) with a Cyberman.

They insist on referring to someone called 'Anne Chaplette' in The Massacre, despite the audio clearly having the character name pronounced 'shap-lay' which, in French, would be spelled Chaplet.

They tell us that the opening shot of The Tenth Planet depicts a Gemini launch, which it does not (whilst finding out exactly what it is may be hard, and I only found out by chance when I caught a program about the Bluestreak missile, in these days of the internet pictures of Gemini launches are not hard to find, and clearly do not match what is on screen).

They comment about a working time machine being left behind in Waterfield's shop in The Evil Of The Daleks, depsite the fact that it quite clearly disappears as Waterfield transports the drugged Doctor and Jamie to 1866, in the only episode left that we can still actually watch! In the same entry, they make a big thing about Waterfield's desire to keep the shutters closed to keep out light not making sense, and speculate about light interfering with the Dalek equipment or something, despite the dialogue offering a perfectly sensible explanation: he wants to shut out the noise from the street (since the sound of cars is probably disturbing to a man from 1866).

There are many more which I cannot recall off the top of my head. They are especially prevalent in volume 2, during the reading of which I recall being annoyed to find at least one such mistake every time I sat down to read part of it.


Is it silly to be bothered by such fundamental mistakes that, in some cases, suggest the authors claiming to be doing an in-depth study may not have actually watched the episodes they are reviewing lately?

[Dr Crewe]

ive got the first one ,1963-66 but they seem to be difficult to get hold off -even some specialist shops dont have them! Yeah ,they do seem to have that `slap dash` written manner about them!