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Graham Quince and Paul Vought are a pair of independent film makers, or perhaps amateur film makers. They seem to have almost no presence in the Internet Movie Database. But if you look them up in youtube, you’ll find they’ve produced an impressive number of films under various banners – Bikini Zombies from the Moon, an Australian Vampire in London, a set of James Bond Fan Films, and so forth. They’ve also produced between 1995 and 2008, six Doctor Who fan films which break loosely into two trilogies. The Harrold films are the second trilogy.

So what about A.F. Harrold. Well, basically, he’s one of these ginger bastards, who likes to show off with facial hair. Born 1975, to apparently sensible parents, he went on to become a poet, a novelist, a children’s entertainer and many other things in that vein. His biography on bloomsbury notes “He writes and performs for adults and children, in cabaret and in schools, in bars and in basements, in fields and indoors. He was Glastonbury Festival Website’s Poet-In-Residence in 2008, and Poet-In-Residence at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2010. He won the Cheltenham All Stars Slam Championship in 2007 and has had his work on BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and BBC7. He is active in schools work, running workshops and slams and doing performances at ungodly hours of the morning, and has published several collections of poetry. He is the owner of many books, a handful of hats, a few good ideas and one beard.”

I think he may have written that himself.

He’s also got a number of his own youtube videos up, should you go looking for them. I don’t see a lot of acting on his resume, but he’s got an extensive background in performance, and he knows evolved his own style of delivery, which he brings to his version of the Doctor. Bottom line, this is an interesting, and likely quite likeable guy.

I have no idea how he ended up becoming the Doctor in the Vought/Quince productions. Truthfully, I have no idea how he feels about his turn as Doctor Who. Proud? Chagrined? Frustrated? Embarrassed? I emailed him, but I never heard back. So I’m hoping that it’s a fond memory.

His take on the Doctor is interesting, and at first I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. He’s got such a peculiar low key delivery. The only thing I can really compare it to is the sort of calm, unhurried monologue you might find on a cooking show, as they walk you through the recipe. Confident but not arrogant, in control, measured, knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s an almost weightless quality to it.

He conveys no sense of importance or gravity, the Tardis is tumbling out of control, an alien ship is crashlanding on Earth, the fate of the planet is at stake… and to him, it’s basically small talk. Informed and informative, calm, chatty. It’s odd, and kind of interesting. And it makes a sort of sense. I mean for us, the end of the universe is a big deal, for the Doctor… it’s Tuesday.

Of course, we’re used to bombastic over the top Doctors. Starting with Tom Baker, through Colin Baker, and then with Tenant, Smith and Capaldi, each has gone bigger and bigger to the point where Capaldi’s really somewhere between the stratosphere and low earth orbit.

We’ve had only a few relatively low key Doctors, mainly Davison and Ecclestone. Harrold is low key to the point of somnolence. When two of the Doctor’s associates meet up unpleasantly in Flight of the Daleks, he’s almost washed out of the room.

And yet, as a Doctor, he’s entirely competent, he knows what he’s doing, and more importantly, he knows what to do. He’s just not pushy or boisterous about it. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but very careful to not make a big deal out of it or to allow anyone to feel badly about it. He’s never less than unfailingly polite, but he also never shows a drop of fear.

THE REST OF QUINCE AND VOUGHT

https://www.youtube.com/user/shpfilms/videos

A BIT MORE OF A.F. HARROLD

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=A.F.+Harrold

Toyetic – an entertainment property with a built in propensity for being turned into a toy. Publicly originating with, and popularized, by the 90’s animated comic Freakazoid, but apparently orginally attributed to Kenner Toy executive Bernard Loomis, in a conversation with Steven Spielberg about Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Of course, the concept goes way back. The Daleks were an original Toyetic property. No sooner did the Daleks broadcast than two companies were clamouring for the rights to manufacture their own Dalek toys and props. 1960’s England produced a disturbing variety of them, ranging from small inflateables, to soap on a rope, and a variety of toy lines.

One of those Toy Lines – The Louis Marx models, actually made it back into the series itself. Louis Marx toy Daleks were used for crowd scenes in Patrick Troughton’s Evil of the Daleks, and later for Jon Pertwee’s Planet of the Daleks. Louis Marx toy Daleks even made it into some of the effects scenes for Peter Cushing’s Dalek Invasion Earth, 2150.

From our vantage point in time, it’s hard to conceive of the runaway popularity of the Daleks. They weren’t just big – They were HUGE. Between 1963 and 1967, they appeared in 7 different Doctor Who Serials. The Daleks took top billing in the two movies, in 1965 and 1966, even pushing the Doctor entirely off the marquee in the second one. There was a Dalek stage play (without the Doctor). There were novelty radio singles ‘Christmas With a Dalek’ by the Go Go’s (not the same group). Roberta Tovey, who had starred in the Cushing movies, released a single. The Daleks made appearances on other television series. Terry Nation was trying to launch them as their own series. They had their own comic strip without the Doctor in TV Century 21. There were toys, salt and pepper shakers, you name it. They were everywhere, and they were huge.

And of course, when something is that big, I guarantee you two things are going to happen.

1) It’s going to fade, everything fades, and Dalekmania was no exception – it never quite went away, the toys kept on selling. But after 1967, they wouldn’t reappear in the tviseries until 1972. The Daleks, even when they weren’t onscreen, represented the iconic Doctor Who monster.

2) People are going to look at doing it again, catching lightning in the bottle. The BBC was, through the 1960’s and even into the 1970’s, looking for the next Dalek. The thing is, it’s easier said than done.

I heard an old publisher’s joke once. A young Assistant Editor burst into his boss’s office with a brainstorm. “I realized,” the young assistant says, “that 90% of our revenue comes from the 10% of our books that are Bestsellers.”   Dramatic pause.   “Let’s only publish the bestsellers!”

If only…. The truth is that what makes success or failure is often an intangible thing.  Publisher’s can’t tell in advance that something will or won’t be a bestseller, and film makers can’t tell in advance that their movie will or won’t be a blockbuster.  They just try their best.   Almost everyone sets out to make a blockbuster. No one sets out to make a flop. And yet, blockbusters are few and far, and flops are wide and many. Figuring out what will catch on is more art than science.

Still, the BBC had struck gold with the Daleks, and a lot of their other monster – the Cybermen, the Yet, the Ice Warriors, the Sontarans, etc. etc., on some level, were efforts to recapture that magic, that lightning. Of the bunch, for one reason or another, the only ones that came close were the Cybermen. We might explore that.

But for now, what I really want to do is explore one of the failures. A one hit wonder that the BBC had high hopes for. The Quarks. These little fellows:

Emphasis on the word little. Heres’ a picture of them next to regular sized humans.

Now, aren’t they just completely Toyetic!

So what’s the story?

Okay, in season four and five of Doctor Who, just to set the stage, the Daleks had appeared in three serials. The Cybermen had appeared in four. The Yeti and Great Intelligence in two, and the Ice Warriors in one. That’s eleven out of sixteen serials! The Daleks were worn out and had been retired for five years. The Cybermen would make one more appearance in season six and then go into retirement for seven years until Tom Baker’s Revenge of the Cybermen (they largely bypassed Pertwee completely), and although popular, they hadn’t gone over crazy big. The Ice Warriors and the Yeti were fine, but they hadn’t caught fire like the Daleks had, even with two full turns at bat (technically, the Ice Warriors got their second shot in the 6^th Season, they struck out).

So, for the beginning of season six, Patrick Troughton’s final year, the BBC desperately wanted a new ‘Dalek’ – a monster that would be as popular as the Dalek, both to zap a little electricity and life into the show, and create some merchandising opportunities.

So in the spirit of “Let’s only publish bestsellers,” Peter Bryant, the show’s producer, approached Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln in late 1967 about creating a new monster for the show specifically with the intention of making it as popular and marketable as the Daleks.

It was that naked. Not about a cool story, not about a situation or an idea, not even a philosophical rumination like the Cybermen. Nope, it was – “The Daleks were big!  Lets do that again!”

Now, to be fair, Bryant had gone to the right people. Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were hotter than hell. They had done literally two back to back serials in the fifth season – the Abominable Snowmen and Web of Fear, featuring the Yeti and the Great Intelligence. They’d created the character of the Brigadier (although no one realized how popular he would be). They definitely knew their stuff, they worked well, they worked fast.

So Lincoln and Haisman sat down and took a look at the Daleks. As the story goes, they decided that the secret to the Daleks success was they looked alien – not like a man in a suit.

“We wanted the Quarks to be as unlike the human shape as possible, reasoning that was one of the contributory reasons why the Daleks had been so successful,”  Haisman said.

Using that as their touchstone, they created the Quarks.

Uh huh.

Look, if you ask me …. Round head, blocky torso, two arms, two legs… I’m feeling very ‘man-in-suit-ish, if you get my drift. [Technically, there are four arms, on three chest slots – the upper two slots are for ‘fold out’ arms, the third slot is for two more ‘extender’ arms, the upper or lower arms could all be operated, one or two at a time, by the two arms of the suit wearer inside.]

Now, maybe this wasn’t entirely Lincoln and Haisman’s fault, maybe they had something different in mind, and production just went a different way.  That does happen.  Maybe, if so, their ideas were unworkable, you never know.    Lincoln and Haisman also had the idea that different attachments could be added to or removed from the Quark’s arms, making them more appealling toys – I guess they were early Lego. I imagine the boxlike qualities, fed into that.

Whatever their intent, there’s often a compromise or two between what ends up in a drawing or on a written description, and what actually can be done physically. Sometimes a terrific idea just produces a shitty monster (Myrka, from Warriors of the Deep, I’m looking at you).

But there it is. The Quarks look pretty classic ‘person in a robot suit’ if you ask me. If there’s anything distinctive about the Quark’s it’s the childlike crudity of the concept. Honest to god, it looks like a twelve year old decided to make a robot costume out of his mother’s collander, some party horns, shoeboxes and a big grocery box.

That might well have been deliberate. Think about how many kids had run around holding their arms out warbling ‘Exterminate’ as they played Dalek. The designers might well have consciously or unconsciously had in mind the sort of robot a 13 year old might build himself as a halloween costume. Toyetic, right?

In fact the Quarks were deliberately child sized – the Dominators and the civilians towered over them. They moved in endearingly clumsy ways – what you had to do to get around in those awkward costumes. And they had synthesized child voices, they literally sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks with a bit of electronic verve. Go to Youtube, take a listen.

In point of fact – not only were they childlike. They actually were worn by children. The Quark costumes were operated by thirteen year old boys, among them, John Hicks.

“In England at the time, Doctor Who was the in thing,” recalled Hicks, “the ultimate in science fiction. My two school friends, Gary Smith and Freddie Wilson, also played Quarks. During the lunch-breaks we used to play with the television cameras until one day a voice came from nowhere — the control room, I guess — telling us not to move them.’

Hicks’ memory of the costume was a square, black fibreglass box, with a frosted fibreglass globe on his head, which he could hardly see through. That sounds to me like the classic problems – poor visibility, awkward costume, both of which make movement a tricky thing.

In a feature from the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, Hicks recalled in one scene having to lie down on the ground, with a smoke bomb inside his costume, and mime the death throes of a Quark. Which makes me think…. What the hell? They stuck a small pyro-explosive inside a 13 year old boy’s robot costume? Didn’t England have child protection laws back then or what?

I suppose they made sure it was safe. I hope so. But still, what were they thinking? This was a robot suit designed to be worn in the in the production by children? What kind of future did they expect it to have?

In any case, Haisman and Lincoln and Bryant had overshot the mark. They’d overlooked one critical thing about the Daleks:  The Daleks were scary.

Maybe not today. Standards have changed. But back then, the Daleks were scary, in both concept and execution. They were relentless homicidal bastards, they were just out for murder.  They were basically space Nazi’s each with their own tiny panzer tank to live in.  They weren’t neutral, they had a point of view, they had definite opinions, and all of their opinions boiled down to ‘Exterminate!’ Their voices had a hysterical quality, a maniac on the edge of losing it. Their shells, ludicrous and impractical as they might seem, were simply high tech personal tanks, and people from WWII were familiar with tanks.

The other thing was they were kinetic. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth covering again. Most monsters were costumes, and costumes typically were heavy, hot, hard to move in, allowed for very restricted motion and were hard to see out of. So monsters tended to be slow and fumbly. Not so the Daleks, they scooted around, they moved smoothly and quickly. And while they might not have been much for climbing stairs or picking things up, when they swung their eyestalk around to zero in on you, it was clear that they were looking right at you. They didn’t bother swinging a claw – they had guns and they were inclined to just shoot you. In this sense, they were a breath of fresh air, a sort of agile, fast, precise monster people hadn’t really seen any more, and if you were getting used to the slow ploddy guys, these were a shock.

Well, the Quarks weren’t scary. There wasn’t anything about the Quarks that were scary or arresting. They were too Toyetic. Too explicitly child friendly, too child like. Their size, their voices, their awkward bobbing motions… none of it was intimidating. They were the sort of critters a committee of concerned mothers would create, after they’d thrown out the Daleks for being too scary.

I think Haisman and Lincoln understood this – their Quarks weren’t scary. So rather than the Quarks actually being the active forces, they were henchmen for the Dominators. The big guys who were supposed to be really scary.

You can look at the costumes, or the episodes themselves – you can see everything about the Dominators is supposed to be scary. The names themselves – Calling yourself a Dominator? That’s not cuddly. They had these big imposing turtle shell costumes, spiky leggings, they even had mean haircuts and eyebrows. They were jerks all the way through. All this, I think, because the Quarks themselves were so painfully inoffensive and unterrifying.

What’s the deal with the jagged pants?  That doesn’t look friendly at all.

To be fair, Haisman and Lincoln had done the same sort of thing with the their previous creations – the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. There’s the sort of Cute monster, and their Scary patron. But the thing was, the Yeti could be and were scary all by themselves. They’re big, massive, hairy shapes with glowing eyes – that’s good for a few nightmares.

But the point is, that Haisman and Lincoln weren’t just travelling over worn ground. They needed to do the Dominators because the Quarks were so nerf. And they needed to have quarrelling Dominators because…. Quarks? Who cared. The neuter nature of the Quarks forced certain kinds of story decisions, in terms of the creation of the Dominators and their subplots.

But that’s not the end of the story. In fact, that’s where the story goes badly off the rails. The problem now was… They actually needed a story.

They’d gone at it ass backwards. Normally, you start with a story, an idea, and you flesh it out and create the monsters and characters that populate it.

Here they’d deliberately started by creating the Quarks. Then they’d been forced to create the Dominators, because the Quarks needed them. Now they had to come up with a story to wrap things around.

So what did they produce? Well, they decided to grind a few axes, which always works so well, and beat up on hippies and their pacifism. The Dominators and Quarks would come to a world of hippies (1967 television era version hippies) who were all into pacifism and love, and show them the error of their ways, at least until the Doctor could sort it out.

So hey, a generic story, with the advantage of being preachy and condescending. What’s not to love? A lot, apparently. Even with the producers, Bryant and Sherwin, the love was not there.

The story floundered, so much so that it was cut from six episodes to five, with an uncredited rewrite of the fourth and fifth episodes to bring things to a close – much to Haisman and Lincoln’s ire. I can see their point. If you believe in your craft, then having your baby mutilated – even if it’s a mutant deformed half baked baby – is traumatic. Not everyone takes it well.  Haisman and Lincoln were very serious about their craft.

On the other hand, I don’t think that the world is reeling from the tragedy of one missing episode of Dominators floundering about with hapless Quarks while hippies rethink their pacifism and start dressing sensibly. I’m not getting a sense of tragedy and deprivation. More like missing a bullet, actually.

You want to know another difference between the Daleks and the Quarks? The Daleks had good stories. The Daleks, Invasion Earth, Genesis, Remembrance, Ressurection,  Master Plan….   The Daleks had the fortune to have had a full series of ripping stories, including several classics of the entire series. That’s continued into the new series, where the Daleks have had some great innings. They’ve had some stinkers of course, but they’ve had plenty of great stories. The Daleks had the Dominators… Says it all.

Things got nasty when Derrick Sherwin, Doctor Who’s associate producer, and second in command on the show, signed an agreement licensing the Quarks to TV Comics, without consulting or cutting Haisman and Lincoln into the deal. So they weren’t getting paid for their creation by the comics. Meanwhile, Haisman and Lincoln were trying to do their own deals – I think they got toy Quarks in Wheetabix cereal.

There were meetings over who owned the Dominators. They got steadily more acrimonius. At one point, Lincoln and Haisman were threatening to go to court to block the airing of the Dominators. Finally, at a meeting in 1969, senior BBC executives severely reprimanded Derrek Sherwin.

And that was it – Lincoln and Haisman had been working on a third Great Intelligence  & Yeti story – ‘The Laird of McCrimmon.’ But that was over. Neither side wanted anything to do with each other at that point.

The Yeti showed up only twice, in brief cameos in War Games and in the Five Doctors. The Great Intelligence wouldn’t show up until years into the new series. Both showed up in Downtime, of course.

The Quarks had a residual career. They had a small  cameo in the War Games, and then retired from television forever.

They did have a run in TV Comics, which had apparently, bought into that whole “They’re the next Daleks!” shtick. The Quarks appeared in:

“Invasion of the Quarks,” TV Comics 872-876, September, 1968, 10 pages

“The Killer Wasps,” TV Comics 877-880, October, 1968, 8 pages

“Jungle of Doom,” TV Comics 885-889, December, 1968, 8 pages

“Martha the Mechanical Housemade,” TV Comics 894-899, February 1969, 10 pages.

“The Duelists,” TV Comics, 899-962, March 1969, 8 pages.

“Death Race,” TV Comics Annual 1970, October, 1969

If there’s any interest, I can track them down for you and put up links.  But seriously, if you’re that interested, maybe try google.

Anyway….   notice something? The Dominators had aired between August 10, and September 7, 1968. TV Comics had hit the ground running and was really pushing them. In a span of six months following the airdates, they’d had five appearances. Quark stories were coming either back to back, or punctuated by only a month or so. They featured in 27 out of 36 issues of TV Comics during this period. That’s an amazing run.

I think part of it was that Quarks were just easier to draw than Daleks. All those bumps, all those slats and ridges, shudder. In contrast, Quarks were just boxes and globes. And arguably, they probably resonated well (or so it was hoped) with the childish sensibilities of comic book readers. Maybe they just worked better for comics.

But really, the big thing is that they were supposed to be the next big thing. Bryant and Sherwin sold them and pushed them as the next big thing.  Haisman and Lincoln designed them to be the next big thing.  Everyone believed they would be the next big thing.   TV Comics bought into them as the next big thing.

They weren’t. By the Annual, in October, 1969, it was all over. They vanished for almost a decade and made only a couple of sporadic reappearances. The reign of the Quarks was finished, over before it had really begun.

The Quarks in TV Comics came back in July 1978, in a reprint of “The Duelists” when Tom Baker’s character was drawn in over Patrick Troughton, making it a new adventure, for a new Doctor, or something.

Then in May, 1982, Marvel Comics took the Quarks out for a spin in “The Fire Down Below,” which, oddly enough had nothing to do with STD’s. Finally, they showed up in IDW’s ‘Prisoners of Time” 50^th

Anniversary 12 issue spectacular, to annoy the 10^th Doctor. They’ve shown up a few times in fiction, and in fan fiction, fan art and even fan videos. But mostly, they’re faded and gone.

A historical curiousity, and a cautionary tale perhaps of the difficulties of catching lightning in a bottle.

But by golly, they were Toyetic!

I’d like to give a shout out to an Adult Swim animated series called “Rick and Morty” produced by Dan Harmon of Community (Inspector Spacetime) and Justin Roiland.   It’s a pg friendly version of Justin Roiland’s ‘Doc and Mharti’ animated shorts.

Inspired by Doc Brown and Marty McFly in the Back to the Future movies, but also by Doctor Who as well, “Rick and Morty” features Rick, as  Doc Brown/The Doctor (Hartnell/Capaldi editions), a brilliant scientist whose devices allow him to travel through time and space and between dimensions, and his grandson Morty, who accompanies him on his adventures.   Rick’s granddaughter, Summer, also accompanies him on some adventures.

It’s black, funny, brilliant, sweet natured.  And in the absence of a real Doctor Who cartoon… this will do just fine.  It certainly beats the Hanna Barbera Happy Days/Doctor Who rip off from the early 80’s.

Story: Hawkspur (as he will be called), an alien menace in the far future manages to kill the McCoy Doctor, but gets defeated. However, the critter travels back along the Doctor’s timeline into the past. There, it interferes to prevent the fourth Doctor from regenerating, instead, packing him off to a mental institution, safely out of the way. With the fourth Doctor a drugged out has been in a mental institution, Hawkspur then proceeds with its plan for the destruction of the human race.

Meanwhile, the succeeding Doctors are in trouble as their timelines wink out. Sophy Aldred’s character, identified as Dorothy but really Ace, has to figure out what’s going on, The Brigadier gets involved. There’s a lot of jumping in and out of time vortexes, as the Brigadier and Dorothy try to help the fourth Doctor find himself, and travel in and out of time to meet the other Doctors.

Teaser:   BBC Enterprises has the thankless task of selling the BBC’s productions worldwide, selling BBC videos and DVDs, licensing out tosh merchandise, whatever. For BBC Enterprises, Doctor Who is their big cash cow, their gold mine. It’s basically what they’re using to make money hand over fist. But its also cancelled. You can figure, that they’re a bit concerned about that. I mean, hey, huge back catalogue, lots of product. But the world moves on, and sooner or later, without new product, that catalogue is going to start looking tale and old fashioned. But for now, Doctor Who is making them lots of money and they love it.

The clock winds on. 1989 turns to 1990, which turns into 1991. Still nothing on the Doctor Who front, that hiatus just keeps on going. 1992 comes along, and now we are coming up on the thirtieth anniversary. So if for no other reason, excitement starts to mount, there’s a sense of anticipation.

BBC Enterprises, if no one else, sees an opportunity to make some real money. They’re marketing people. This is how it works. You look for occasions, opportunities to cash in, to sell product. Anniversaries are big.

But, it’s also around this time, that Tom Baker starts to feel a little nostalgic. The thing was, he played the Doctor for seven years, and seven years playing a single character… that gets exhausting. There’s a sense of boredom and frustration, there’s a sense of life passing you buy, opportunities coming and going untapped. He’d gotten pretty sick of it. So when he left, he basically wanted out. No coming back for the Five Doctors, no public appearances in the scarves. He wasn’t going to be Adam West, patching up the seams in his old batsuit. No, Baker wanted a clean break from it. To leave it behind.

But now… it’s eleven or twelve years later. He’s feeling a bit nostalgic. He lets it be known to someone, perhaps several someones, that he wouldn’t mind playing the Doctor one more time.

At this point, it’s not exactly clear what happens next or how it comes about.

The key character in this whole drama seems to be the improbably named Adrian Riglesford, who is in various eyes, the hero, the villain, the fool or a minor supporting player in the piece. As to what his exact role is, opinions vary, but I think he was more central than the official histories, what there are, suggest.

Riglesford’s claim to fame is that he wrote the script for Dark Dimensions. He has a smattering of other credits on the internet movie database, nothing to write home about. Mostly, he seems to have been a television and movie writer – doing ghostwriting for Peter Sellers and Brian Blessed, magazine articles, specialty books on Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, etc.. This is a respectable career as media a writer, pays the bills, but it’s also nothing to indicate that this was the guy to write the thirtieth anniversary story.

Did I say respectable career? Maybe not so much. In fact, it turns out that a lot of his media work seems to be sloppy and unsourced, lots of quotes from dead people, lots of errors. Rigelsford’s work was peppered with a lot of unverifiable quotes from ‘final interviews’ with persons since passed on. So he kind of garnered a reputation among the hard core fans as a bit of an idiot, or worse. Here’s a typical gag floating around from the day: Some fan says he was at a seance. Another fan asks, “Was Adrian Rigelsford there conducting interviews for his next book?”

Apparently, he published the last interview with Stanley Kubrick before his death… Except that no record or recording of that interview was found to exist, and it’s now considered to be fraudulent, particularly by Kubrick’s closest associates. There was a lot of this kind of thing.

There was also the matter of theft – apparently, he stole a few photographs from the Daily Mail/Associated Newspapers Archive library and sold them. Fifty six thousand pictures over eight years, to be exact, sold for seventy five thousand pounds. He spent eighteen months in jail over that in 2004. I’m kind of flabbergasted – 56,000 photographs? Even over eight years, how the hell does one manage that? That’s 7000 photographs a year. 600 a month. 20 a day. How the does that happen? Did he show up regularly with a suitcase?

Rigleford,  deservedly, earned the reputation as a fraud artist, a thief, a dubious person all the way around. Which is a shame because it seems unnecessary. He seems to have had a career as a wunderkid. He was knocking out books in his early 20’s. The Dark Dimensions saga takes place when he’s about 23. He was getting professional magazine sales, which is impressive.

I think that in literary terms, Adrian would be what we call an unreliable narrator. But he also seems essential to the story. Anthony Frewin, an associate of Stanley Kubrick, the fellow who blew the lid on his fabricated interview (and my source for the Seance joke), had this to say about him…

“Anyone who has worked in the film industry will instantly recognise the type. They hover around on the margins. The Sammy Glick figure forever on the verge of the Big Break, no more morality than is strictly necessary, constantly hustling, chasing chimeras, talking up deals that evaporate at the 11th hour through no fault of their own. So, in this respect, Rigelsford is part of a great tradition.”

I think that’s probably spot on. I’ve met a few of those myself.

The truth is, that at its basic level, that describes a lot of the film and television industry. It’s almost random. Just atoms in a box, ceaselessly bouncing off each other, ideas, personalities, proposals, notions, every now and then, by sheer fluke, things coalesce and a project gels, and sometimes it breaks apart or disintegrates back to its contituent atoms, but once in a while, when the moon is right, everything lines up all the way to the end and something gets done, and the participants have maybe a better shot at another project. There’s the factory level of course – the money, the television stations and movie companies, the BBC, the established power players… But mostly, its just atoms randomly colliding, searching for the right combinations to amount to something.

What he really was, basically, was a hustler looking to make a connection… which in a sense, describes almost everyone in the business.

…………………

Part Three

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8VEgG62WPU

Part Four

Part Five

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDe_iDKVO5Y

Part Six

Wait for it!

STORY: Captain Lisa Duranne is a spacer just trying to make a living. Hired on by consortium of wealth dilettantes to pilot a spaceship through a solar sail race, she and her passengers, are suddenly boarded by a Sontaran battlecruiser. The Sontarans are searching for a Rutan spy who may have boarded the ship. The Sontarans promise to depart, once they’ve found their spy, but secretly, they intend to leave no one alive. Meanwhile, the Rutan is simply intent on killing anyone in its path, Sontaran and Human. Who will survive?

REVIEW: Let’s back it up a bit. Back in 1983, a fellow named Gary Levy, or Gary Leigh, started publishing his own fanzine. Doctor Who Bulletin. It got popular over the years. For one thing, it was always willing to take the piss on John Nathan Turner, the Showrunner of Doctor Who during those years. It was able to scoop the official sources. It provided an alternative, and at times, angry and controversial alternative to the establishment publications: Doctor Who Magazine as well as the zine of the Official Doctor Who club.

Come 1989, they hit a snag. Doctor Who was over. It didn’t make a lot of sense to keep publishing Doctor Who Bulletin when the show was cancelled. But by that time, the magazine had a dedicated readership. Gary decided to keep the initials and rename it DreamWatch Bulletin. They broadened out into covering all sorts of science fiction, British and American. Again, my ex has a few copies.

I suppose that the end of the show produced a vaccuum in the establishment publications. Doctor Who Magazine fell on hard times given that the show was no longer produced. The Doctor Who Appreciation Society didn’t have much to do. So strategically, it was one of those situations where you grow or you wither, there’s no standing still. Dreamwatch grew, keeping its audience, encroaching on the now bereft readerships of former rivals, and expanding its mandate. Readership kept on going up. In 1994, they went to full newsstand distribution. This seems to have been their high water mark.

Around this time, Dreamwatch was sponsoring or organizing its own science fiction conventions. The conventions were a major step up – a major financial venture, organizing large staffs, hotels, guests, wrangling hundred or thousands of people.

It was also at this time, 1993 or 1994, and through its convention, that they decided to get into actually producing their own Doctor Who adventure, or as close as they could legally come….

… The Sontarans would be just one way of drawing the fans to Shakedown, as the project was christened. The script would be by veteran Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks and the production could also use ‘name’ actors when casting its several human characters. Because these were new roles, actor availability was no longer a problem – if one former Doctor Who star could not make the proposed shooting dates, they could go to another….  (Simon Guerrer’s blog)

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

Simon Werriere’s Blog (it’s a very good blog) (this is a plug)

http://0tralala.blogspot.ca/

http://0tralala.blogspot.ca/2013/11/doctor-who-1994.html

Doctor Who Guide

http://www.drwhoguide.com/shakedown.htm

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakedown:_Return_of_the_Sontarans

IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111148/

HMS Belfast (why not?)

http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/hms-belfast

Reviews

http://www.michaell.org/who/shakedown.html

https://dailypop.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/shakedown-return-of-the-sontarans/

http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv44/rev-shakedown.html

WATCH IT HERE:

STORY: After the eighth Doctor defeats the Cybermen, he’s forced to regenerate into a new incarnation, what will be the ‘Forgotten Doctor’ between eighth and ninth. Stepping out of the Tardis, this new Doctor finds a companion, encounters vampire slugs, visits a false paradise, helps out a friend, discovers a new menace and comes face to face with Torchwood in a series of eight episodes.

Story: Former 2^nd Doctor Companion, Victoria Waterhouse, travels to Tibet, summoned by what she believes is her father. There she meets Professor Travers, secretly the Great Intelligence. Fast forward to London, a decade later, Victoria is the head of New World University, scientology-like cult with a secret agenda. Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier and his daughter are all drawn into a web of intrigue as the Great Intelligence plots world domination….

STORY:    Simon Williams plays a beefy, thuggish, cheerfully evil version of the Master through four episodes.  It’s not more complicated than that…

REVIEW:  There’s this guy, Simon Williams, apparently he got the idea to do a series of fan videos about a Time Lord: The Master.

William’s Master is not a good guy, except by accident. He reminds me most of George McDonald Fraser’s character, Harry Flashman. The Master as played by Williams is a thorough villain, he’d tie girls to railroad tracks on general principle. He’s arrogant, treacherous, deceitful, brilliant, utterly unprincipled, a bit sadistic, fearless and oddly petty. He’s the sort of guy who would find a way to urinate in the punch bowl at a mixer, just to sit back and watch everyone else drink it. At one point in the third story, without any provocation or reason, he destroys RTD2 with his tissue compressor… because its fun. Basically, he’s cheerful evil. He brings an infectious glee to the role. Mind you, his character is constantly doing this ‘evil chuckle,’ which is thoroughly annoying and gets on the nerves. But he’s a watchable bad buy. He needs to lose a little weight, so he doesn’t have the ‘lean and hungry’ quality of Delgado and Ainsley, but he brings a beefy thuggishness to the role which is engaging.

He’s also not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. He’s constantly screwing himself up, his treachery and dishonesty keep coming back to bite him on the ass. In short, he’s only a slight exaggeration of the Delgado and Ainsley Masters, both of whom, despite their ruthlessness, having a decided penchant for shooting themselves in the foot. But their boundless self confidence, their pride and utter certainty that nothing can go wrong prevents them from seeing it. They are their own worst enemies. There’s just no self awareness. It’s this penchant for scheming his way into failure that makes the Williams Master especially fun to watch. It’s just entertaining as hell watching him scramble trying to cope with the messes he gets himself into, happily betraying everyone he meets……………