@ichabod

why the Doctor has retreated into a Silent order of Gramdillion monks

Well, at the beginning of The Bells of St John the Doctor, frustrated in his search for the impossible girl, had retreated to live with a community of medieval monks and was even dressed in a kind of monkish habit. But when he got the telephone call from Clara he…[Read more]

@JimTheFish  @Bluesqueakpip  The surname also derives from the name of a perfectly respectable village in Cheshire, the county which was the home of my mother’s family since time out of mind, and thus not a subject for mockery 😉

My personal favourite of the parodies is Cummerbund Bandersnatch.

@purofilion

You were being ironic, and my tongue was firmly in my cheek 🙂

And yep, the title of the game show episode was Bad Wolf, and the concluding episode which followed was The Parting of the Ways, wherein the ninth Doctor regenerated.  Truth to tell, I found even this satirical take on game shows a trifle wince-inducing.

@Bluesqueakpip   Oops! yes, I was forgetting the butler in Ghostlight, and I did watch it and read the forum discussions.  Maybe my lapse of memory is due to the fact that I was as bemused as everyone else 🙂

On the other hand, recent research on the Neanderthals has revealed a good deal more than was known when Ghostlight first aired.

@purofilion

being Neanderthal, they don’t know what hands are for.

This is straying off topic, I know, but I think that you are being more than a little unfair to H. Neanderthalensis here, puro.  Granted they weren’t particularly pretty to look at, but they were well adapted to their environment (ice age Europe) and, since they produced some pr…[Read more]

@lisa  I have a feeling that the wording of my last post may have misled you.  It is only the first, 1953 Quatermass serial for which episodes are missing.  Quatermass II and Q and the Pit survive in their entirety and are available in digitally remastered form.  The visual quality of QII is not all that great, and I suspect that it is mainly of…[Read more]

@JimTheFish  Apparently I’m supposed to be Spock.  I can only conclude that the whole exercise is flawed!  (and I assure you that I do not have pointy ears and my eyebrows are perfectly normal).

@lisa  I was referring to the original BBC  television dramas – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit, starring Andre Morell as Quatermass (1958/1959), each broadcast weekly in 6 half hour episodes – rather than the films which followed them (and which I have never seen).  Quatermass and the Pit was ‘mus…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip   Re Rock Follies, seconded!  I remember watching Widows and enjoying it, but it is Rock Follies which resonates in my memory, no doubt in part because of the innovative format, but also because of Julie Covington’s performance.

@lisa  Verity Lambert was involved in the last Quatermass serial in 1979 but, for me, that did not have…[Read more]

@purofilion  @Arbutus @Bluesqueakpip

Celts :  I seem to remember puro asking about this a while back, and I meant to respond but got distracted by something or other.  The question requires quite a lengthy answer, so you are forewarned!

I think I know what Russell T Davies was getting at, but he was wrong to state that there is/was no suc…[Read more]

@FatManInABox   Excellent!  Official congratulations on the official confirmation of your Diploma and all good wishes for the future  🙂