28 May 2014

The First Five Decades



The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is upon us, and it's a good one for anyone who likes numbers. Thousands of fans have scored every story from 1 to 10, and all these have been averaged and totted up to find people's favourite - favourite story ever, favourite Doctor, favourite season, you name it. And there's even the prospect of comparing the results to the last time the poll was done, five years ago! (with a whole load of new stories since)

You can find out more about the issue, with a wonderful fold out cover, here. But I thought, since I entered myself, a short summary of what I voted for as my favourites. I rarely sit down and work out my favourite Doctor or story (there's 241 of them) - and my tastes are no doubt only controversial for how average they are - but it's a good game of numbers. (And maybe I've boosted the Slitheen ones up the chart ever so slightly!)

10s went to: (deep breath) The Tomb of the Cybermen, Inferno, The Green Death, The Time Warrior, Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons, The Brain of Morbius, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, City of Death, Earthshock, The Caves of Androzani, Remembrance of the Daleks, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, The Girl in the Fireplace, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, Human Nature / The Family of Blood, Blink, Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, Midnight, Turn Left, The Waters of Mars, The Eleventh Hour, The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, Vincent and the Doctor, The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, The Doctor’s Wife, Asylum of the Daleks.

9s went to: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Time Meddler, The Mind Robber, The War Games, Spearhead From Space, Pyramids of Mars, The Curse of Fenric, Dalek,
Father’s Day, Tooth and Claw, School Reunion, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, Smith and Jones,
Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, The Unicorn and the Wasp, The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End, Amy’s Choice, The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, The Girl Who Waited,The God Complex, The Angels Take Manhattan, The Snowmen, The Name of the Doctor



There's a list of top 50 stories to watch right there.

(2s and 1s went to: Planet of Giants, The Space Museum, The Krotons, The Time Monster, Timelash, Time and the Rani; Underworld, Meglos, Time-Flight, Terminus, The Twin Dilemma.)


Per Doctor, it works out that Christopher Eccleston's stories work out the most favourable (my first Doctor, even though I put Matt Smith on the poll), followed by David Tennant and then Matt Smith. Out of the older stories - lower on average no doubt due to ropiness, but they're not that much lower - it goes, surprisingly, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker (!), William Hartnell, Paul McGann (his one story), then Colin Baker.

That's stories, not the actors, of course. I tried to keep a wide distribution (or else I'd give them all 9s), and stories I haven't seen (seen, not just heard) are omitted. (This means in DWM, the lesser known 60s stories are voted for by less people... but then most are never going to be front runners, and 'less people' still equates to over a thousand!)

Don't ask me to pick a favourite out of that lot!

14 May 2014

'Murder Must Advertise' by Dorothy L Sayers

A short review of this classic 30s mystery - and the first Sir Peter Wimsey book I've read. Dorothy L Sayers's books regularly show up on lists of the best detective fiction (the Crime Writers Association put her up with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Agatha Christie, or Raymond Chandler). But like the rest, there's no clear consensus on her best novel. The Nine Tailors (on my reading list) and Gaudy Night and Strong Poison (two with Harriet Vane assisting Wimsey) are often cited, along with this one.


Set in an advertising agency, Peter Wimsey goes undercover in order to investigate a suspicious death and a drugs plot. Dorothy L Sayers has had considerable knowledge working as a copywriter - and it shows. The atmosphere in the opening chapters (and all the way through the book actually) conjures up a lively workplace of people - most of them thinking up the advertising slogans and campaigns in order to flog unnecessary stuff to the public. She captures the madness of the job with a satirical eye, and it gives the book an edge. The characters are reasonable, and there's lots and lots of them. A pleasing range in female characters, and of men too, but often the workers are interchangeable, and it's hard to pick out somebody in particular as a suspect - nor, do I suspect, does the author want to either.

I've heard that, like this one, Sayers's books focus more on the background and characters than constructing a clever, potentially dry murder mystery. Actually, the crime is quite well thought out, but there's not enough of it to cover 100 thousand words. That's not to say it's boring or that it drags along: there's plenty of ingenious chapters and set-pieces (workplace arguments, some skulking around town, some slight but colourful party scenes, a lengthy cricket match near the end that might confuse people who didn't know the rules).

It might be the first book of hers I've read, but I'm not a stranger to Wimsey - there was a short section with him written by another author in an anthology (to which she also contributed), and I've listened to one of the (3 hour odd) radio adaptations, of her first book 'Whose Body?'. That one was mad - a rambling mystery with little twist in the murderer's identity. The blurb on my edition of Murder Must Advertise says that 'five people will die' - and bar the first murder before the book begins, all of these happen in the last third of the book, and most are forgettable. By the climax, the whole thing is downplayed, with most of Wimsey's conclusions explained beforehand. I was surprised by the 'drug plot' - it sounds a lazy enemy to be up against (police unable to catch them, members potentially everywhere), but it's handled with enough detail to be plausible.

I found the book a great read, with a great setting and plenty of interesting diversions too. So it surprised me to read that the author herself didn't think much of it, that it was apparently written in haste to satisfy her publishers, before she could work on her next book with her preferred setting, the chuch bell-ringing of The Nine Tailors. Will that book hold up against the hype?