( A few thoughts. Not for those who haven't seen it and who are avoiding plot information )

The DVD of The War Games has arrived. I need to go into Oxford to have a working lunch, and catch up with other work. The day is therefore not going to be spent with what already looks like an excellent restoration which really brings out the sense of a videotaped studio drama and what could be achieved by very clever people with no money. The film sequences and soundtrack have been tidied up too. Generally it's good to see Mr Troughton and his colleagues performing in such sharp definition, having been brought up on film recordings.

After Herbie died in 1983, a story that the duck had been nailed to his skateboard for the purposes of the television film was exposed as a canard.

Groan...

( and based on the novel by C.S. Lewis )

( More comments than I had intended )

The Doctor Who Appreciation Society have launched an eBay auction, selling items which belonged to Verity Lambert, the programme's first producer, in order to raise money for Breast Cancer Research. The auction's front page can be found here. At the moment, these are largely items of Doctor Who merchandise sent to Verity as complementary copies. It's intended to add more over the next few days.

Congratulations all: especially to Sir Christopher Lee, of course, and to Mrs Anderson my goddaughter's head teacher, who becomes an OBE; as does Peter Dickinson, author of the Changes trilogy whose television adaptation I watched avidly as a five-year-old.

ETA: Robin Myers, the bibliographic historian, gets an MBE, which is well-deserved.

( Accident, directed by Joseph Losey )

( Possession, by A.S. Byatt )

This Way Up 23 is now online - scroll down the page and the link is somewhere beneath the Aztec-inspired cover design.

This news will please naraht:

Margaret Beckett almost certain to stand for Speaker of the House of Commons.

The article doesn't fill in as much detail as one might wish on the contest to be speaker: Conservative MPs actively pursuing the post include the former cabinet minister Sir George Young, who missed out on the chair last time round, the respected maverick tory backbencher Richard Shepherd - who sometimes seemed to spend as much time in the opposition lobbies as the government ones when Margaret Thatcher was in power - and Sir Patrick Cormack.

A mention here that veteran Doctor Who fanzine editor John Connors has just published issue 23 of This Way Up. More accurately described as a publication in the Doctor Who fanzine tradition than a Doctor Who fanzine in the purest sense, there are articles on mid-1970s children's drama The Feathered Serpent (written by Planet of the Spiders's Tommy, John Kane, and starring Patrick Troughton, latterday Doctors star Diane Keen and Full Circle's Varsh, Richard Willis, who is also interviewed); the first few Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD; the National Theatre version of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse; series one of Being Human; and the only series it looks like we're going to get of Demons, with plausible suggestions about how the format could have been made more workable. Doctor Who content includes a review of Planet of the Dead and the DVDs of Image of the Fendahl and The Deadly Assassin.

I received the magazine through the post, but this is the last edition which will be distributed in print, as John intends to move This Way Up to PDF download only from issue 24. Issue 23 will soon be available from John's Live from Mars website, where issue 22 can currently be found.

( One day I will make a pasta sauce with onions which does not involve reducing the onions to cinders, Watching Newsnight, I wonder whether Ian Richardson ever recorded a talking book of The Prince. )

Not a long post, but there have been a couple of changes in precedence. Gordon Brown's cabinet lists have always placed Alistair Darling second until now, but the newly published list places him fourth. Harriet Harman gets the second place her position as deputy leader of the party customarily entitles her to, but coming in third is the sinister minister himself, Peter Mandelson, now not simply Business Secretary but also Lord President of the Council and First Secretary of State! So effectively Harriet and Peter are now Gordon's joint deputy prime ministers in all but name...

Good to see rail obsessive Andrew Adonis becoming transport secretary.

ETA: As for the old guard, Glenys Kinnock is made minister for Europe, presumably with a peerage (joining that select band of husbands and wives in the Lords); and Caroline Flint, who dropped hints all day yesterday that she would resign at 10pm last night, only to declare that she was not leaving the government and was supporting Gordon Brown, has been sacked.

With Ian Gibson leaving the Commons immediately, there will also be a by-election on the expenses issue in Norwich North, which could prove a useful safety valve, or could keep the whole story going for a few more months.

I have never warmed to James Purnell as a person when seeing him on television, nor am I impressed by his background as John Birt's consultant at the BBC in the 1990s - the sort of job I can't imagine anyone so young with so little experience of the world doing, yet thousands of twentysomethings do this every day - and helping to wreak morale-sapping havoc on an already beleaguered institution. He seems to recognise (whatever the unworldly Matthew d'Ancona thinks on his Spectator blog) that he is not the person to lead the Labour Party at the moment. The resignation of someone without an obvious base of either power or sympathy in the Labour Party is not having anything like a uniform effect, with at least one critic of Brown also attacking Purnell as a careerist. Gordon Brown is nevertheless damaged by this resignation, but it's not in itself a killer blow to his premiership; just another suggestion of encroaching chaos.

This morning on Radio 4, I heard the nineteenth-century followers of Jane Austen referred to as a "fandom" in Book of the Week: Jane's Fame. That the reader was Star Trek: First Contact's Borg Queen, Alice Krige, added a little to the effect. It's probably been some time since 'fandom' left the SF ghetto, but I first encountered it in a list of SF fan jargon and it still surprises me to hear it outside that context.

Meanwhile, The Sun has tagged Gordon Brown's enemies, co-ordinating their activities through an anonymous Hotmail account, as cybermen, though the use of 'delete' suggests that they are of Cybus vintage rather than the 'silver giants' of yore.

They've gone for the unknown:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8073734.stm

Rumoured for a long time, and now official!

A few years ago, I read a newspaper article about Johnston Press which described their business plan as "a National Trust for local newspapers". This was something of an exaggeration at the time, and has been proved to be more so by their recent rounds of cuts.

However, a newspaper in Colorado has recently been donated to its county's local historical society, who plan to run it as a volunteer project. Perhaps this is going to be the only viable future for the small town press.

ETA: More details of the Silverton Standard and its business model here.

I'd never seen Peter Duguid's name connected to the part of the Doctor before, but apparently he was considered for the role before William Hartnell. He was fifteen years younger, too, which leads me to suspect that despite his having appeared in This Sporting Life too - where Verity Lambert is said to have seen Hartnell's performance and thought that elements of it could be brought to the Doctor - Duguid was considered before Lambert joined, when Rex Tucker was producer-designate and thought that the Doctor would be played by a much younger man than Hartnell, under more make-up than Hartnell eventually wore.

Meanwhile, it's been announced that David Tennant will play the Doctor in The Sarah Jane Adventures later this year, not as a cameo, but as a proper supporting character to Sarah and the young leads. This could be an interesting experiment.

( A few thoughts )

There's not very much to say about this film, other than that it clearly takes place in a parallel universe; a 'progressive' pope called Pius XVI has just died, and the name Pius will probably be associated with reaction for some time, I fear... The film has more than its fair share of experts who keep having to ask basic questions, and one wonders why Robert Langdon (a generally good performance from Tom Hanks, though with some odd mannerisms which might be intended to show reserve) doesn't have a guidebook to use as reference as he makes his peregrinations around Roman churches.

Some good special effects, though, in what I'll call the helicopter scene; and there's a moment where one fears the plot is going to turn into Hadrian VII.

200 Golden Moments, if you forgive the somewhat cloying title, is perhaps the happiest publication Doctor Who Magazine has brought out. It's appropriate for a summer special, of course, in a period between the almost relentlessly fluffy Planet of the Dead and the funereal note which will strike from The Waters of Mars until David Tennant transforms into Matt Smith (or not, as RTD has been teasing) at the end of the final special. The format of this special demands that one moment (sometimes two, and four from The Trial of a Time Lord) from each story is selected and a Doctor Who pro-fan writer contributes a reflection on the moment and argues its case - whether it's particularly amusing or chilling or whether it manages to capture something arguably essential about the series.

Such a fundamentally impressionistic exercise is bound to be subjective, but there are some clear missed opportunities to my eyes: The Sensorites is represented by the "It all started out as a mild curiosity in a junk yard" exchange at the very start of the story and not by one of the many moments of uncanny but well-considered alienness that pepper this underrated serial. The War Machines sees episode 3's cliffhanger, with the Doctor confronting the War Machine, compared to a scene in Voyage of the Damned with the phrase "It's the iconic hero shot, the Doctor standing bravely between the world and the monsters, keeping us all safe. And really, isn't that what Doctor Who is all about?" which seems to me to misread the scene and the potency of the combination of the first Doctor's vulnerability and his largely unknown and unknowable genius against a threat which, for once, is nakedly domestic in origins. A really surprising omission, to me, is the ninth Doctor's regeneration scene, which seems essential to the arc of the 2005 series; I wasn't the only viewer to be left wondering how far the Doctor's blaming the regeneration on his absorption of the time vortex was an excuse, and that the real cause was the psychological catharsis the events of The Parting of the Ways had provided for this war-scarred soldier-Doctor. Still, it's impossible for a publication like this to be exhaustive; and Jeremy Bentham's interpretation of the cliffhanger ending of Bad Wolf, that it leaves us frightened on behalf of the Daleks, is worth reading.

There's a lot which is new. Nev Fountain offers a reassessment of Troughton's Doctor's comedy roots in his piece on the Doctor-Zoe-teaching machine scene in The Krotons, for example. There's a lot which is familiar, in a new way: James Moran contributes a few paragraphs on the second 'Golden Moment' in Survival, the final scene with the overdubbed "Worlds out there..." speech as the Doctor and Ace make their way down Horsenden Hill, away from the camera and from the viewers. Moran, like many of us at the time, somehow knew from the grammar of the scene, the way it was edited, that this was the end. As one of the children my sister was babysitting that night said, "I think it's finished"; and as far as a lot of decision-makers at the BBC were concerned, she was right.

Such a publication as this is bound to be uneven in tone and there are some comparable treatments of different stories by different writers which make different points: it could be argued that the discovery of the secondary control room in The Masque of Mandragora and the Doctor's "That's how it all started!" exclamation at the end of The Five Doctors are both cases of the authors of the series seizing control of the audience's memory: as Masque tries to suggest that the Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee Doctors had used the secondary control room, when they had never been seen to do so on screen, Five Doctors asserts that the beginning of Doctor Who was the Doctor's flight from his own people in a TARDIS that doesn't work properly, thereby displacing the programme's original mystery. Yet while Jonathan Blum emphasises how Masque convinces the audience that Doctor Who was 'always like this' when a glance at earlier episodes shows that it wasn't, Graham Kibble-White sees the close of The Five Doctors as a thank you to "those who were there at the beginning", when it's celebrating elements of the format which weren't actually there.

Still, this special edition remains a great achievement for the team at Panini Magazines - an intricate but precise and clear design from Peri Godbold, as usual, and a range of writers many of whom haven't been seen in DWM for a long time - though obviously we will be seeing a lot of one Steven Moffat, who writes on Dragonfire, in the future.

( The 'What Kind of Man/Woman Are You?' Quiz )

( Now cut for spoilers )

Seen through a link at www.politicshome.com - Craig Murray calls for hidden potential in the unwritten constitution to be put to use to end this parliament widely seen as tired and mired, and bring on a general election:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/petition_the_qu.html

Pick a musical artist whose discography you know fairly well. Using only their song titles, try to answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title.

( Answers behind cut )

There is apparently a place for Latin dialogue on prime time Saturday night television - and it is Primeval.

The Boston Globe is probably saved, says Media Guardian.

I was reminded by st_lemur's post that today is the birthday of Pete Seeger. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a very good programme about him last night. It's repeated tomorrow at 1500 BST, but is also available on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k2nkx

Strange though it may seem for me to be posting about football, the rise of Newcastle United in the early 1990s lifted the mood on Tyneside, and their all-but-imminent relegation from the Premier League will depress thousands. The Guardian published an article yesterday on where it all went wrong...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/02/newcastle-united-relegation-ashley-shearer

These are the fruits of more websurfing while I slowly wake up - my decision to stay up for May Morning finally caught up with me last night. Off now, however, to another engagement in my busy social life.

Farewell, U.A. Fanthorpe, immortalizer of a particular dragon.