Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who
which is a cracking read, even with a peculiar last minute design blip on the cover (not pictured), Royal Mail having inflicted an impressive gouge on the cover of the lovely hardback edition and there being a few tiny details to quibble over inside.
These are teensy little niggles basically- a minuscule typo in Paul Magrs wonderful freewheeling finale, Tat Wood's curious memory lapse on Monoid voice treatments, me calling Day of the Daleks "THE Day of the Daleks", Dale Smith's terrible double sin of misspelling Jac Rayner's surname as Raynor and calling The Myth Makers "The Mythmakers", that kind of stuff that makes you cross because everything else is so very good, basically.
Even my chapter reads all right- bits are a bit tortuously phrased as I tried to cram in as much as I could into my word count and it ends abruptly simply because to do the next bit of the story properly would have taken far too long again (it would have taken James Chapman's Inside the TARDIS basically), but you know it's okay and I get a couple of pictures too.
Really proud to be part of this line up- David Butler, Jonathan Bignell, Daniel O'Mahony, Matthew Kilburn, Tat Wood, Alec Charles, David Rafer, Fiona Moore and Alan Stevens, Me, Dave Rolinson, Kevin J. Donnelly, Louis Niebur, Andy Murray, Alan McKee, Lance Parkin, Dale Smith, Matt Hills and Paul Magrs, many of them people whose work I'd just read before.
It's almost like finding you've got a short story in a book alongside Terrance Dicks (Doctor Who - Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury, copies still available), or you've been on the proper real radio next to proper real comedy from the olden times- I'm on after Hamish and Dougal, I've gone from interviewing Barry Cryer to being in the same business as him!
It just makes you beam and feel slightly grown up and childish at the same time.
Anyhow, it's a great big fat fanzine for grown ups who can still be childish some of the time, and recommended for everyone who always knew The Unfolding Text was a prime exhibit in the case for TV studies not quite getting it, yet. I think it's also a massive tribute to the Gary Gillatt era DWM which is quoted from extensively and really raised the level of discussion (and fun) in fandom.
I reckon TV Studies has grown up as much as us in the last couple of decades and Doctor Who is finally getting the attention it deserves particularly since Barker and Britton's excellent Reading Between Designs, we can come out from behind the sofa, if we like.
Other academic books about Doctor Who are available.
12 comments:
Would the James Chapman that you mention be the same one that's also a James Bond afficianado? If it is, he came to the museum to do an A-Level study day about Goldfinger for me. Jolly nice chap... and clearly a great big geek.
That'll be him, daddio! I've not read License to Thrill but if it's anything like Inside The TARDIS it'll be an impeccably researched, trustworthy, intelligent one stop guide to the Bond canon that media students can trust as a prime text to set off from and which also manages in to smuggle in a few sly jokes, obscure bits of trivia and give you a list of who James reckons were the most fanciable birds in the series.
Wow, when you say wilfully obscure you're not mucking about, are you?
Hark at me flitting from social networking web 2.0 hotspot to insular blogospherical hamlet like some sort of internet gap year student. I'll be downloading ringtones and wearing raffiawork bracelets next.
'Inside the TARDIS' is, I can confirm, excellent.
As is "Reading Between Designs" for that matter. I can't speak for "Time and Relative Dissertations in Space" since Amazon are still reporting my copy as being shipped sometime in the next millenium.
Amateurs, I mean don't they know there's two "n"s in millennium? Thank goodness they're only in book selling not publishing.
Simon A Forward has a copy by the way and he's miles from anywhere...
PS I note with interest you've expanded the number of Nardinis you're after.
I found the second Nardini as it turns out, selling copies of his CDs direct from his website.
God, how I love the interweb.
I quite like it too. It's warmer than outdoors and has more stuff in it than the house. I think it might catch on.
The spiders are a worry though.
True, but you're forgetting how bad the paper flies were, and they do type quite quickly.
I still say the monkeys were perfectly adequate typists, although - as has rightly been pointed out - entirely the wrong shape for the available storage.
Congratulations. You have just failed your Turing Test and have been designated a non-sentient electronic device. Please queue in an orderly fashion for the removal of your human rights.
That's always happening to me :(
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