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@nick  Yes, he’s bright and, though he’s not a physicist exactly, he is like me interested in physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology, albeit much better qualified to follow the maths.

@whisht  I’ve never held with the notion of living fast and dying young. On the whole I have always maintained it is better to live slow and retain at least some of one’s looks and faculties.  In vindication of this philosophy,  I recently encountered someone I had not seen for more than thirty years and his reaction may have gone to my head a little- though the lighting was subdued and wine had been taken, so perhaps I should not read too much into it 😉

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Since we have been tangentially discussing Einsteins General and Special theories of Relativity on the World Enough and Time thread, I thought the following might offer an interesting sidelight.  It was formulated by my brother some years ago while observing an Air India flight.  I hope that he would not object to my offering it here for your consideration.

One of the persistent problems with Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity has been the impossibility of reconciling them with Quantum Theory, and even more so with modern developments such as String Theory.

A recent development, known as Poor Relativity, leads to a tentative bridging of this gap.

Poor Relativity postulates that your mass increases not only as a function of the speed of your travel and the distance of your destination, but also the extensiveness and degree of your relatedness with a set of points, known as ‘relations’, at your destination, and finally with their properties of extensiveness. Those ‘relations’ having the least extensive properties are known as ‘poor relations’, and cause the greatest increase in mass for a given travel speed and distance.

The reason for this increase in mass is to be found in the time relationship between the traveller and the destination particles. The traveller, as occupying a 4 dimensional space, can be said to occupy a series of non-finite 3-dimensional sections, or instants, or ‘nows’, which he can be considered to be carrying with him. It is the cumulation of these ‘nows’, or ‘presents’, which cause the increase in mass, as anyone who has paid excess baggage can attest.  Put very briefly, the traveller’s ‘presents’ are the ‘poor relations’ future.

What Einstein failed to consider were the consequences of space-time dilation applied to the accumulation of ‘presents’ in his  unmodified theory. Unrestricted dilation, applied to the curvilinear, 3-dimensionsl ‘presents’ would result in the detachment of successive ‘paper-thin’ 2-dimensional surface layers from them, leading to the total disaggregation of the ‘present’. The applications of String Theory in overcoming this theoretical defect are obvious and trivial 

 

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@pedant

And we haven’t even considered spaghettification…

Yes, I did wonder why there was no mention of spaghettification.  How close to the event horizon does one need to be before that becomes a factor?

Maybe the ship was originally shorter and fatter 😕

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@thane15 – Puro

Bill shouldn’t  be aware of the 5 years passing?

She most certainly would experience every minute of the time passing on Level 1056 while she waited for the Doctor,  just as people on earth would experience the 100 years or so which elapsed while the astronauts travelling close to the speed of sound would experience and age only a few years.  It’s all relative in space and time, as the TARDIS knows. I think that the Doctor said it had been ten minutes before they left Level zero to descend to the bottom of the ship which, allowing for the time taken to descend, including the increasing rate of time passing on  the levels between as they descended, and assuming that my arithmetic is approximately correct, means that for Bill  four years or more had passed between the time she first came fully to consciousness in the hospital and the arrival of the Doctor.

I meant to note, but forgot, that time dilation, or rather a time differential, also featured in The Eaters of Light, though with a different cause.

 

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@thane15

It has taken a while, and I’m not sure that anything I have to say at this late stage can add much to the discussion, but I have now had time to view the episode twice and at least to skim through the comments so far; so, in answer to your call-out above, what did I make of it?

I’m not sure that I would go as far as Dan Martin in rating it better than Heaven Sent, but it is certainly among the very best.  Despite so much having to be compressed into 45 minutes it never felt particularly rushed and the pacing was, I thought, perfectly judged.

The long pan along the ship from the rear to the front, with glimpses through the windows of townscapes and landscapes established the scale of the setting before we were into the action, with Missy, let loose to act The Doctor, camping it up outrageously; a burlesque overture which made the sudden shock of the shooting of Bill which followed all the more shocking.  Even the latter was teased out, with the reaction of the Doctor as he turned slowly, so that it was not entirely clear what exactly had happened until the camera panned down from Bill’s stunned face to the gaping hole in her torso. This was echoed at the end of the episode in the very effective slow reveal of the cyberman emerging from darkness, and the shock of discovering that the cyberman was Bill. And then there was her devastating ‘I waited for you’  which instantly recalled Amy in The Girl Who Waited.

The disorientation of Bill as she returned to consciousness in an environment which contrasted surreally with the flight deck (?) at the front of the ship was also very well conveyed, to the extent that I shared it.  Everything in the latter setting seemed slightly off, and not just because of the contrast with what one might have expected in a colony space ship. The inadequate lighting and the shadows, plus the empty, dusty-looking corridors all contributed to that sense of disconnection,  followed by the robotic intonation of ‘pain, pain’ which led Bill to that sinister ward* lined by masked and gowned figures and the nurse from Hell  Some of the angles seemed slightly odd, also, like a 1930s expressionist movie.  It is hardly surprising that she latched onto Mr Razor and his cosy if disorderly lair, however unnerving his eccentricity might seem at first.  Like @CathAnnabel, my first reaction was ‘Fagin!’ as represented in various films; but then the Master has always tended to have a taste for the dramatic, not to say the melodramatic at times. The passage of time for Bill was also conveyed quite subtly, not only by reference to the readings on the clocks, but by her changes in clothing and her gradual adjustment to her circumstances.

The evolution or development of the Mondasian cybermen over time was also well conveyed. The sinister figures who came to collect Bill for ‘repair’ could have been gowned surgeons or theatre nurses with rather more extensive masks than usual, but for the synthetic voices operated by keyboard, but then later we saw the ward full of slightly more advanced convertees; and when Bill tried to open the window on the ward and the alarm sounded, all the heads turned in unison, in much the same way the cyberised skeletons in the W3 vault in Dark Water turned – which was a bit of a give-away. Then we saw the introduction of the caps which would make them impervious to pain, and finally the fully developed version.  Interesting that Bill could have been the very first full cyberman of this type.

Given the title of the episode and the synopsis in the Radio Times which mentioned ‘black hole’, it didn’t take genius on my part to work out that time dilation was likely to feature largely, so that element was no surprise.  Like @wolfweed and others, though, I spotted the figures on the clocks which suggested that time on level zero of the ship was going backwards and have been trying to make sense of it.  Disregarding that factor for the moment, though, the time elapsed between the first sight we had of the clocks and the second was 387 days on level 1056, give or take a few minutes and seconds, ( @wolfweed , I’m not sure how you arrived at the figure of 68 days, unless there is some factor that my arithmetic has failed to take into account) so the ratio of time on level zero to that on level 1056, according to my calculations, was approximately 1:151049. Assuming that time was going in the normal direction on both decks, this means that the time on Level zero should have advanced about 3.79 seconds, and the clock on level zero should therefore have read 2 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes and 20 seconds, so it could simply have been an error.  If the loss of 17 seconds was deliberate, then perhaps the presence on the ship of two Masters was having a distorting effect.

I’m not going to speculate on where all this is leading, and for once I have been avoiding spoilers, so I await next Saturday with eagerness mixed with sadness that it will be Capaldis penultimate appearance as the Doctor.

 

* Like a semi-derelict ‘Nightingale’ ward in a late 19th century hospital, similar to that which was my second experience of hospital in 1954, although that was a lot brighter and more cheerful, if only the nurses hadn’t insisted on keeping the windows wide open in late October.

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There is a great deal of catching up for me to do and it is probably a bit late in the day for me to be commenting on this thread, but I got to watch World Enough and Time only yesterday evening and need to collect my thoughts and, for preference, read the comments on that before contributing my ha’p’orth, so I may as well start here.

Given the Doctor’s extended and temporally convoluted life spans he can perhaps be forgiven a certain chronological inexactitude, and the anachronisms did not detract significantly from my enjoyment of the episode.  This is the whoniverse, anyway, so we should not expect things to be exactly as they are in our own, more mundane world.

Having said that, I’m going to don my archaeologist/historian’s hat and talk about the anachronisms, so feel free to skip the next bit.

It is interesting that the Doctor – or the Tardis – chose to describe the inhabitants of North East Scotland in the early second century as Picts, because the first recorded use of that name is around two centuries later and was, in any case, applied to them by Greek and Roman writers, probably from the Latin picti, painted people.  I note that neither Kar and her followers nor the survivors of the Ninth Legion used that name, and Kar and co. would have been more likely to identify themselves by one of the regional tribal names –  rendered by writers of the Classical world as Caledonii, Taexali or Vacomagi.

@wolfweed has noted the resemblance of the ‘Pictish’ cairn to the Mound of the Hostages at Tara in Ireland, which it more closely resembles than the equivalent in Scotland, but these are all Neolithic passage graves, constructed between 3000 and 2500 years before the second century AD and more than a millennium and a half out of use by that time.  The standing stone near the entrance of the cairn was decorated with spiral patterns, which is consistent with a Neolithic date, but the Pictish symbol stones are dated no earlier than the sixth century, so long after the disappearance of the Ninth Legion from the record.  No one, as far as I know, has yet found a depiction of the Tardis on any of them, but who nose what may be revealed by excavation in the future 🙂

As usual, there were a lot of details to savour and, like @wolfweed , I very much liked the nod to Irish and Scottish folklore regarding the inhabitants of the ancient mounds – the aes sidhe (old Irish) or daoine sith (Scots); the ‘Good People’ or ‘Fair Folk’, never to be referred to directly by name, since it was unwise to draw their attention.  Time was different in the realm beneath the mounds, as mortals who strayed or were lured into it found to their cost. The subdued light in which much of the episode was filmed contributed much to that sense of eeriness and otherness.

At the centre of the story was not just a monster, and not just an alternative solution to a mystery but, once again, the resolution of conflict.  As @soundworld said, Kar’s speech about the Romans and their rapacious ways was in part a paraphrase of the speech which Tacitus put into the mouth of Calgarus, the leader of the Caledonian federation, before the battle of Mons Graupius.  What Calgarus said on that occasion, if anything, was probably very different, but it is interesting that a Roman historian could empathise sufficiently to imagine such a speech.  Once Kar has had her say, though the survivors of two hostile peoples, brought face to face and enabled to understand one another’s speech, are here brought to a sense of their common responsibility for their predicament and of the need to face and defeat the common threat summoned in response to their war.  And once again the Doctor has an opportunity to denounce those who see war as a sane, mature and effective means of resolving conflict –  just as, in different circumstances, he did in the Zygon Inversion. It is significant, I think, that the surviving protagonists here were all teenagers who had to be exhorted, like Bonnie the Zygon,  to ‘grow up’

In Kill the Moon and, more recently, in Thin Ice, the Doctor placed the burden of decision on his human companion, but it seems he isn’t always consistent in these matters and here, as @blenkinsopthebrave observed, he takes the opposite stance, and it had to be pointed out to him that it is not for him to decide who takes on the burden of holding the light-eaters at bay. It is the erstwhile foes who, having ‘grown up’, who can and must determine to take on the task together.

 

 

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.@Blenkinsopthebrave  @thane15 (puro)  @jimthefish  @nick

Thanks for the good wishes.  It was a rather disconcerting attack of tachycardia – for no apparent reason my heart rate went through the roof and stayed in the stratosphere for the better part of an hour, which to say the least felt weird. After things had settled down again the medics decided that my resting heart rate was too high, hence the beta blockers, but it seems that there is no major reason for concern or further intervention.

@lisa

I’m a huge fan of gardening, too! Weeding & pruning  can be a very effective hypertensive ‘medication’.

That might account for the fact that I have never suffered from hypertension 🙂   But it’s true that gardening can help counteract stress.

@missy

A comfort to hear that the NHS is still functioning well

My admiration for the NHS in this case is due rather to how relatively efficiently, in this region at least, they appear to be coping  in the face of the Tory onslaught over the past 7 years – major, expensive and worrying reorganisation for largely ideological reasons, funding which in real terms has fallen far behind what is needed and is well below that of other western European countries,  plus understaffing which is partly the result of policy decisions and partly loss through burnout, not to mention the staff – medical and otherwise – recruited from EU countries who are now considering other options. The service is currently under severe stress and nearer breaking point than I ever remember it.

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The best laid plans ….

This afternoon I had intended to spend two or three hours gardening before perhaps posting a comment on The Empress of Mars.  Instead there was an interlude involving an ambulance and several hours in A & E at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. All I did was call 111 for some advice and they promptly summoned the emergency services 😕

Panic over, and I am none the worse, except that I now have to take beta blockers; but maybe this will enable me from now on to face life with zen-like calm – which, come to think of it, could be a blessing in the present climate.

Anyway, all hail the NHS!  The ambulance arrived just over 10 minutes after having been summoned, the paramedics were delightful, as was everyone I saw in A & E, even though they were clearly being run off their feet.  The doctor I saw was also utterly charming as well as helpful and informative  – and he was, incidentally, German – no thanks to Brexit.  On the other hand, the TV in the waiting area where I was parked until the results of the blood tests came through was tuned to the BBC 24 hour news channel, and I learned in the interim that Jeremy-the-well-known-spoonerism has been retained as Minister in charge of the Health Service, which was not reassuring, even though the duration of his reign there could be brief.

 

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@thane15

I meant to send you my thoughts on the R & J question yesterday but other matters intervened. I have now sent a PM with some suggestions, for whatever they are worth and assuming that it is not now too late for them to be of use.

@missy

As I wrote on Friday, Boris Johnson would jump at the chance to be PM and would probably be first to put his name forward if it came to another leadership contest, but his would be about the most unsafe pair of hands imaginable to take charge in the current circumstances and to steer the looming Brexit negotiations . Interesting, indeed, but only in the sense of the proverbial Chinese curse.

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@pedant

I was putting myself in the hubristic head of May.

Yeeeuch!  Brain  bleach, stat!

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@pedant

watch out for another hubristic snap election when the Universities are on break.

But if the students are registered in the constituency where the university is situated they have the option of a postal vote, even if they are elsewhere at the time. I hope that I am not too optimistic in thinking that, given the motivation and a targeted campaign using social media, it shouldn’t be to difficult to persuade them to use that option, especially now that it has been demonstrated so clearly that their vote can make a difference.

The first time I was eligible to vote was in the 1964 election, and I discovered that I had the option of voting in either Edinburgh or Norfolk – or both, since my parents had registered me as resident at their address, and my landlady had, without my knowledge, registered me as resident at the student flat where I was living at the time of the election. Being an upright citizen of impeccable morals and integrity, I used only my postal vote 😉

 

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@nick

Who could replace May?  If the choices on offer following Cameron’s resignation are anything to go by, it’s a very shallow pool from which to choose. I haven’t made a study of the Tory party, but while I suppose that it is always possible there is a light somewhere under a bushel in the lower ranks and back benches, I rather doubt it.  BoJo would jump at the chance, of course, but would they ever be mad enough to give him that chance?

I agree that it must have seemed a safe bet to call a snap election, even so near the start of the Brexit negotiations, but then then to launch a presidential style campaign centred on the personality of someone who has no discernible personality?  I doubt that they will be asking Lynton Crosby to manage any future campaign of theirs.  Meanwhile Corbyn and the Labour party conducted something like an updated version of a traditional stump campaign, to great effect.  Someone at Conservative Party HQ should have googled ‘Gladstone’  and ‘Midlothian Campaign”

I’m entirely with you on the subject of PR and of the need to invest much more in development in regions outside the bubble of London and the south east, most particularly in the midlands and northern regions which were devastated in the 1980s when the major industries were in terminal decline or being closed down deliberately, without any serious plan to stimulate new and alternative areas of growth in the local economy.

I’m at least half with you, also, when it comes to regional devolution, though not too sure about the ‘how’ of it. It should be noted that proposals to create a unitary authority in East Anglia – basically Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire – did not get very far, even though this area corresponds more or less to an Anglo-Saxon kingdom and, subsequently, to a distinct region of the Danelaw.  Relations between Norfolk and Suffolk are perhaps a little warmer than those between Lancashire and Yorkshire, but Cambridgeshire is out in the fens and they have webbed feet in those parts 🙂

 

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond we have Trump: the Opera   https://youtu.be/Hz7SfkhJe74

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@thane15  et al

An interesting night!  I’d been feeling a bit under the weather since the weekend and, although much better yesterday, was feeling a bit dozy and exhausted by the time the polls closed at 10 pm, so was intending to stay up only long enough to see the exit poll results and perhaps half an hour of the initial discussion and speculation on BBC.  On seeing the exit polls, however, I poured myself a glass of wine and settled down for a longer stint – long enough at any rate too see that the early results were broadly consistent, though I had to admit defeat and stagger to bed around 1.30 am.

Yes, Labour took Ipswich from Ben Gummer with a 10% increase in vote share.  Clive Lewis romped home in Norwich South with 61% of the vote on a 69% turnout, but that was pretty much predicted by local polling in the last week of the campaign.  They weren’t leaving anything to chance though, and when I went to the polling station around mid-day I saw groups of earnest young people clutching clip boards and bundles of Labour leaflets on almost every street, getting out the vote.  In Norwich North the Tories held on, but with a significantly reduced majority.  Interesting that the polls which came closest to predicting the actual result nationwide were those which adopted an unorthodox methodology and did not weight the results on the assumption of a low turn-out among younger voters.  In fact, according to some accounts I have read, the turn out of young voters was something like 72% which, if correct, is higher than the turn-out overall (68.74%).

So May and her shower will stagger on for now, with her shortcomings and hollowness now fully exposed to all, propped up by the DUP – the last people I would chose as bedfellows even if I were (Heaven forfend) a Tory.  It will be interesting to see to what extent, if at all, the political climate in Westminster will shift, now that the widespread appeal of a more traditionally left wing manifesto has been demonstrated.

The most immediate worry is, of course, the Brexit negotiations. The EU are ready, with their negotiating platform fully prepared, whilst our government’s position is now even weaker and more shambolic than before.  Some commenters seem to be of the opinion that, Article 50 or no Article 50, the whole thing will have to be shelved for now, or even that it is now dead in the water, but I can foresee May being completely pig-headed and stubborn over the issue, if only to appease ‘the Bastards’, and landing us with the worst possible outcome.

One of the interesting things shown by the results is that the increase – or lack of increase – in the Labour share of the vote in constituencies held or targeted by Labour correlates broadly with the strength of the Remain vote there.

 

 

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@missy   Moffat would have to have been very precocious indeed to have written An Unearthly Child, since he was only two years old when it was broadcast in November 1963 🙂  You appear to be confusing that, the first ever Hartnell episode, with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.   Apologies for being pedantic, but I wouldn’t want @abaath to be confused.

And I add my welcome to you, @abaath.  Happy viewing, of both ‘old’ Doctor Who and the modern series !

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@miapatrick

Likewise, congratulations!  A drink is most definitely in order, so have one of your choice (virtually speaking) on me.

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@ichabod

‘Timescape’ is one of those novels which has stuck with me, too; much exposition and not a word wasted.  Those in the doomed present who send the messages back to their counterparts in the past cannot avert their own fate but, though they will never know it, they succeed in creating an alternative future for those who receive the message – a fork in time.  It isn’t even as if the meaning of the message, repeatedly sent but arriving each time in somewhat garbled and incomplete form, is really understood; it is the fact that the message was sent and received at all which diverts the course of history. Because a student, looking for an issue of an obscure scientific journal containing a paper on the phenomenon of the messages, happens to be in a certain book depository in Dallas at a certain time on a certain date in November 1963.  An example of the butterfly effect perhaps, as in A Sound of Thunder.

 

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@steffstaff @pedant @bendubz11

What I found anomalous about the Pope Benedict IX as female diversion was the portrait.  The style of the painting bore no resemblance to any depiction which might have dated from the 11th century, but that is not in itself a problem, since there are plenty of representations of historical persons painted long after their lifetime, even if this particular example looked like a photograph manipulated not very expertly to look like a painting. What struck me was the fact that the portrait was not only clearly of a woman, but that she was not dressed in Papal robes.  There are a number of real-life accounts of women living successfully as men without detection, and in the story of Pope Joan, if my memory serves me, she was only discovered to be female after she became pregnant and produced a child.

In the real world – or at least the one we consider ‘real’ – it is very hard to imagine that the Vatican would preserve such an image of so scandalous a person, even at the entrance to a library of dangerous and heretical texts; but this wasn’t the real world, it was a simulation.  So consider this: if you were an alien bent on conquering the earth and running a series of simulations to discover how best to do it, it wouldn’t be particularly useful to run the same scenario  hundreds or thousands, let alone millions of times, because the result would always tend to be the same; you would want to tweak things a bit in the various iterations, whether in minute or major details, likely or unlikely, in order to see which scenario produced the optimal conditions for your purpose.  Such tweaking could well utilise apocryphal stories, urban myths and common misperceptions in order to try to produce the desired frame of mind in the population. Once the optimal conditions were discovered in this process of experimentation, you could then do a bit of tweaking in real time, via the press, social media or a little pressure on some of the movers and shakers, to produce that frame of mind.

Or the whole thing could, indeed, just be Moffat being a tease.

 

 

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@miapatrick

The Master seems a little like Spike in Buffy in a way: evil plan, evil plan, evil plain, wait, I don’t actually want to live in a hell dimension, quick side switch. I’m sure I remember a pre gap episode where he suddenly switches.

The point at which the Master switches is usually the point where he* realises that there is a massive flaw in the evil plan which will cause the whole enterprise to blow up in his* face unless he collaborates with the Doctor.

 

*substitute ‘she’ and ‘her’ for ‘he’ and ‘his’ as appropriate.

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@thane15

I’m pretty sure Prof Cox is a Who fan!

As you may recall, he did make a very brief appearance in The Power of Three 🙂

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@thane15

philosophers or social morays

Why do I get this mental picture of a tangle of eels gossiping over morning coffee and cake, while a group of bearded, himation-clad gents look on disapprovingly 🙂   Vanitas and Veritas: illusion and truth – or vice versa

The mention of the confession dial by @alexwho reminded me of the reference to the Doctor’s rejection of Pope Benedict IX’s offer to confess him – his flippant response being that it would take too long, though presumably he had in mind also that he would eventually, at the end of his lives, undergo an equivalent period of self reflection in his own confession dial. This was presumably before his ordeal shown in Heaven Sent, so it is understandable that he was unimpressed by a renewal of the offer by the Cardinal.

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Having shown that he and his c0-writers can do old-style Doctor Who in fine style, and in the process provided ample scope for Bill to establish herself in relation to  Doctor, and for Capalidi’s Doctor to establish himself as more grounded than we have seen so far – in a literal as well as metaphorical sense, we are now presented with the opportunity to dive into something a bit more substantial, with layers complex and convoluted enough to match a reasonably challenging archaeological stratigraphic section.  Yum 🙂

‘Only in Darkness are we revealed’  as Nardole says to the Doctor, quoting River, and the Doctor is indeed in darkness now.  There were several more direct and indirect references to darkness throughout the episode, and I hardly think that was just coincidental.

The idea that the universe and all in could be a computer simulation is a concept familiar to me, but what the words ‘Test of Shadows’ evoked instantly was Plato’s cave allegory.  The prisoners in the cave are so constrained that they can only see the shadows cast by a fire behind them onto the wall facing them. Knowing nothing else, they take this shadow play to be reality.  A prisoner who is freed from constraint may turn to look at the fire and will at first be blinded by the light, before his eyes adjust and he sees the fire for what it is, and in seeing it comes to understand that the shadows cast by it are illusions.  Going from the cave into the world outside he will again be blinded by the light (blindness, again), but when his eyes have again adjusted, will be able to see the sun and all it illuminates, and so realise the true Form of reality.

So maybe the Doctor’s blindness is not just a challenge for him to overcome, but a means on the path to greater understanding and wisdom – though I can’t see him ever becoming the Philosopher King.

@bendubz11  @thane15  (puro)

Nardole having River’s diary in his possession to give to the Doctor bothered me, also.  Tennant Doctor left it in the Library because *spoilers* – I went back and watched the ending of Forest of the Dead to check that my memory was accurate.  The only explanation I can think of is that River had learned from the Doctor how and where she was going to die and be ‘saved’, so that when the time came she could give Nardole instructions to retrieve the diary, and at the same time give him her bracelet as a means of transport to the Library.

 

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@missy

we watched a film/series a few years ago (can’t remember what) where a women barged into a house accompanied by several uniformed men. She told the occupants not to worry ‘the dogs’ would clear things up, it was time  they got an outing- or words to that affect.

Was it by any chance this you were thinking of?

KATE: All these muscles, and they still don’t know how to knock. Sorry about the raucous entrance. Spike in Artron energy reading at this address. In the light of the last twenty four hours, we had to check it out, and the dogs do love a run out. Hello. Kate Stewart, head of scientific research at UNIT.

From The Power of Three, in Amy’s and Rory’s house, where the Doctor has constructed a gizmo to try and analyse the mysterious black cubes and a squad from Unit burst in.

 

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@missrori  (and others)

The Doctor is blind, but I have wondered whether he was telling Nardole the whole truth, given the signs of their somewhat edgy relationship.  Although I didn’t spell it out in my post on Saturday evening, my assumption has been that he had reverted to wearing the sonic glasses because he could use them to help overcome his blindness, either because the glasses could process and transmit images directly to the visual centres of his brain, or because, given that they were *sonic* glasses, he could use them for echo location – like a bats or a dolphin.  But maybe (probably) I’m wrong about that.  It certainly looks as if the intention is to present us with a Doctor who is being progressively disarmed and handicapped, and it will be interesting to see where this theme, if it is a theme, is leading.

Significantly, though, even when deprived of the use of the sonic screwdriver, without access to the Tardis, and blinded to boot, he managed to make a joke of his predicament. As Nardole said and we were shown, he doesn’t like people to feel sorry for him or to think of him as needing help – a lingering flicker of Time Lord pride surfacing, perhaps.

 

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Among all the other incidental details which appealed to me was the Doctor, as he lectured on the dangers to life in the vacuum of space instead of crop rotation, drawing a series of curving lines on the star chart on the chalk board, seemingly random until the camera pulled back to reveal the join-the-stars image of a skull. Such are the details which, for me, enrich the larger theme and picture.

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Zombie space suits, nail-biting tension and snappy, sparking dialogue, supported by excellent production values: old style Who done to near perfection, and it just keeps getting better, quite apart from the fact that this episode was uncannily topical, as if Mathieson and Moffat had used the Tardis to take a sneak preview of the date of transmission.  It is almost worth venturing BTL on the Guardian blog to witness the spectacle of  right wing trolls blowing a gasket  😈  The double meaning of ‘suits’ in the context was scarcely subtle, but effective I thought.

Once again there was a wealth of incidental details to take in and savour, but among them I noted the sly  Star Trek references – the final frontier which is final because it wants to kill you, and the doors which are expected to go shk-shk but don’t.   Nardole, given more prominence, hints at a shady past; but then how else would he have become involved with Hydroflax and River.

And the Doctor now has a another use for his shades. It is all building very nicely towards the finale, and we are not quite half way there yet.

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Post script to a completely irrelevant footnote.  On reflection I think that the weasel in Pop Goes the Weasel might be Cockney rhyming slang: weasel and stoat = coat, which would better fit the once common practice among the perennially cash-strapped of pawning their Sunday-best clothes on a Monday and redeeming them the following weekend after payday. It would also fit the London references in the rhyme – the City Road and the Eagle (a pub/music hall on the City Road).

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@blenkinsopthebrave

I wonder if we really need a sequel, if you know what I mean.

My first reaction also.  The original set the standard by which I judge all subsequent SF films and it isn’t often that sequels live up to the original.  On the other hand @craig is right: with the people involved it is unlikely to be a complete dud, and judging by the trailer they have captured at least something of the look and tone of the original.

 

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@arch

Im still pretty convinced, that whatevers in the vault is a child,

This would certainly fit with what we saw, or rather heard. Fur Elise is a relatively simple piece for a child to master and, when interest is sparked in the prospect of a new story involving children being eaten, we get the jaunty ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. *   Some children are little ghouls when it comes to such tales, so long as the tales have a fantastical setting and the goodies survive.  I also like your idea that the child in question might be the offspring of River and the Doctor, and the promise was made to River. Bearing in mind the River’s experiences as a child with Time Lord abilities, she might have had good reason to be concerned for its safety.  Fifty plus years is a long childhood, but perhaps time in the vault passes at a different rate – cf. The Girl Who Waited.

It would also fit all the references to the Doctor in the role of parent or grandparent, and not just of Susan. The fact that he refers to Bill and her housemates as children, when in fact they are young adults, reinforces the sense that he is seeing himself in that role.

@rorysmith @whisht @tardigrade

Equally I’m drawn to the theory that the occupant of the vault might be a future Doctor, so why not combine the two notions. The person in the vault is the child of the Doctor and River, and the Doctor will regenerate by merging with that child. Moffat and Capaldi have, after all, hinted strongly that this will be a regeneration like none before 😉

* No small mammals of the mustelid persuasion were harmed in the making of this nursery rhyme. The weasel which was pawned (popped) is thought to have been a nickname for craftsman’s tool – possibly a tailors iron.

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@thane15

Very good.  If you like intriguing, suspenseful and well constructed  police procedurals with unexpected, sometimes shocking twists. then I would thoroughly recommend it.  Mercurio takes some liberties as regards actual police procedure and strict plausibility, but the interrogations scenes, which are said to conform to strict procedure, are among the highlights.

Each season starts with an apparently new story which turns out to contain threads of unfinished business carried over from the last so, although it isn’t essential, it helps a little to see them in strict order. The identity of the protected witness and its significance, when revealed, won’t mean anything to someone who hasn’t seen the first series, for example.

The third season was good, although let down a bit by the way the final episode ended, and the fourth season which has just finished here maintained the standard and was riveting enough to make it easy for most viewers to overlook the plot holes.

 

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@mirime

Didn’t the landlord say something to the Doctor along the lines of ‘you’re old, you have less energy so you won’t last long’, the implication being it wasn’t an instant death.

Yes. The implication was that the life-energy of the people taken into the woodwork was absorbed very slowly; hence it was necessary to find a new set of tenants only once every twenty years.

@redlemons

a bunch of bugs make them part of the house. Really?

It is best not to think too much about the mechanics of how aliens do whatever it is they do in the Whoniverse.

For what the observation is worth, the bugs in question were alien woodlice and, and were in fact modelled on terrestrial woodlice, aka pillbugs because they can roll themselves into a tight ball, but larger in size than the common species, and with glowing antennae to indicate their alien origin. Terrestrial woodlice live on and in decaying wood, so why not alien woodlice that can live in the woodwork of a house?  As a bonus, because they are alien, they can absorb and channel the life energy of human beings to sustain another human being whom they have transformed into a dryad.  If you accept the premise of alien woodlice, then it doesn’t require a great deal more effort to suspend disbelief as regards their alien powers.

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@whisht

Obviously nods towards First Doctor and Susan again (leaving one’s charge behind…).

And not just Susan, if you think of all the others who have travelled with him and whom he has left behind, whether freely or reluctantly or unwillingly, to continue on their own way without him.  Maybe I am reading too much into the Doctor’s subdued reaction to the lines I quoted in my post yesterday evening, but I got the impression that they struck home.

Maybe it is no more than a nod to the fans, but I do get the feeling that there is a consistent theme developing here coupled with the idea highlighted in the second line which I quoted: the notion of protecting someone at any cost, even if it meant in effect imprisoning them. Which leads us back to the vault.  It has seemed to me all along that the Doctor is at least as concerned about a threat from outside to whoever is in there as he is to any threat the occupant may pose to the world outside – if, indeed the latter is a concern at all.  In The Pilot, when the smart fuel/Heather creature invaded the basement his first thought was that it might be a threat to the vault, and was relieved when he realised that it was only interested in Bill.

I doubt very much that the occupant is the Doctor’s mother, though. If she was the woman who covered her face in The End of Time, she perished in the fall of Gallifrey in one timeline, and was saved with the rest of the population in the other, but why would she need to be protected by shutting her up in a vault?  The same applies to Susan so I would be equally surprised if it is her (sorry to disagree, @countscarlioni ). Given the pointers in this episode, I get the sense that we are being directed – or misdirected – to conclude that it is Missy, but it seems a bit obvious for Moffat and if that does turn out to be the solution, I hope that it comes with a really clever twist, or I shall feel a trifle let down.

Whatever he, she or it is, Nardole appears to disapprove of the Doctor fraternising 🙂

 

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After this I feel that I will need to inspect the woodlice in my garden very carefully, to see if any of them have glowing tips to their antennae.  Perhaps I should be reassured by the fact that other inhabitants of the garden include woodlouse spiders (Dysdera Crocata) so named because they specialise in eating woodlice, but the spiders look fairly alien themselves, with chestnut red head, thorax and legs and relatively large,silvery grey abdomen.

There wasn’t anything very complicated about this episode, but in the tradition of gothic, creepy old house tales it was very effectively done at all levels and with, once again, plenty of detail to savour; and David Suchet was wonderful as the landlord, both sinister and in the end pitiable once we understood the back story.  A couple of his lines in particular struck me as being clearly charged with resonance for the Doctor, and Capaldi conveyed a reaction to their significance with a minimal freezing and shift of expression.

‘It’s a heart-breaking experience to leave one’s charge behind, all alone in the big wide world’  and

‘If you could save the one who brought you into the world, wouldn’t you?!’

If it is Missy in the vault, it could be said that the Doctor is keeping her safe in there from the many forces that are no doubt out to get her, and at the same time keeping the world safe from her.

 

 

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@thane15

Let’s play the damn parts! That’s fun.

It is! We read a great deal of Shakespeare in Eng. Lit. when I was at school, possibly because the head of the English Department was a fan. When I look back it sometimes feels as if we did little else, though that was not really the case.  We did read them as plays, different members of the class reading the different parts, interrupted by occasional breaks to discuss the meaning of different passages or words. Sometimes we would each be given a particular speech to study and learn and act before the class, and it was indeed great fun. I don’t recall anyone ever suggesting that we should watch any filmed versions though, and in retrospect I’m glad of that. At the time it would, I think, have been limited in any case to Laurence Olivier in Henry V or Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, or Laurence Olivier in Richard III. I saw him in Othello and live, on stage,  he was mesmerising, but he doesn’t seem to have been able to dial down his Shakespearean performances for film, and when I did eventually get to see the films in question my chief impression was how ‘stagey’ and mannered his performances were.

@janetteb

I dismissed Romeo as “just a typical immature nineteen year old”. The tutor cleared her throat and reminded me that everyone else in the room was nineteen

Even when I was eighteen my opinion of Romeo was that he was an immature nineteen year old, but at the time I did have the reputation of being a tiny bit weird 😉

Between the end of the GCE ‘A’ level exams and the end of the school year there was an interval of three or four weeks, and it was the tradition at my school for those who had just taken the exams and had nothing else to occupy them to produce a play for the entertainment of members of the school, their parents, friends, and anyone else who cared to turn up for the performances.  We, in my year, did Romeo and Juliet.  The play was ch0sen by the Head of English and, although it wouldn’t have been our choice, we hadn’t the heart to argue as she was due to retire at the end of the term.  We did it on an open stage – as in 16th/early 17th century theatre – with stylised sets and minimal scene changes, and once, prior to the performance when a group of us were discussing it with one of the teachers, someone said that they would have preferred more naturalistic sets. I countered that this was a very trivial objection, given that the plot of the play contained several highly unrealistic elements and centred on a couple of besotted teenagers. I was rebuked by the teacher for my cynicism and told to concentrate on the poetry.

It’s been a funny old day. I’ve been trying to work but kept going back to the local news sites, in a scab-picking way, to check up on the County Council election results as they came in. Not much cheer there. UKIP were totally wiped out, but apart from one division they lost to the Lib Dems and another one lost to Labour, the only beneficiaries were the Tories who now have overall control of the Council, even though Labour gained three seats and the Lib Dems one seat overall.

My predictions for Norwich were correct, however and the city is now a solid block of Labour red, the party having gained three divisions from the Greens and one from the Tories.

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@ichabod  @janetteb @nick  @redlemons

Companion seems to me the most exact term for those who travel with the Doctor because to me it denotes above all a close relationship based on something shared: companion, from the Latin roots cum (with) panis (bread), so someone with whom you break bread; hence a companion on the road, a companion in adversity, a companion in arms etc. The exact nature of the relationship beyond that element of sharing depends on context, but as @janetteb has said, it doesn’t necessarily imply inequality. In Series 9, for example, the Doctor and Clara could reasonably be described as companions on near equal terms, even if the Doctor did feel he had a duty of care.  Secondary connotations burdened with innuendo are not what would spring immediately to my mind, but perhaps I’m just incurably naive

@nick

Back then, even mid-30s would have been considered Old to be an unmarried women.

Given that the slaughter of the Great War had resulted in a generation in which women outnumbered men to a significant degree throughout Britain and much of Western Europe, it wouldn’t have been particularly unusual in the late 1930s, even in a small village, for there to be several unmarried women in their mid to late thirties and forties, or women who had been widowed very young and never remarried, and such women did sometimes end up sharing a house for economic reasons or for companionship in the straightforward sense, so that would not in itself necessarily have given rise to gossip  – even though small villages are notoriously gossipy places.

 

 

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@ichabod

urchins with a business sense

A very apt definition of a mudlark 😀   though I have to admit that as regard the business sense the moniker doesn’t really suit me

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@missy

I’m pretty sure that I didn’t reply to your comments on technology. I can usually sort out problems with my computer, but setting up a WiFi connection between my new printer and the computer probably marks the limit of my current technical expertise so I’m not the best person to give advice on matters of that sort. I don’t even have a smart phone or a tablet, because they seem at the moment superfluous to my needs – why complicate life unnecessarily 😉

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@pedant

I wonder what he is teaching – pretty sure it’s not PPE.

Life, the Universe and Everything, of course, from an entirely unorthodox perspective 🙂 (and I’ll bet that the answer isn’t 42)

The Doctor says, ‘I am your teacher’, and I see him in his relationship with Bill as mentor and guide; not fatherly, grandfatherly or avuncular, but a teacher who has found a particularly promising and rewarding pupil and has seized the opportunity to foster that potential. The fact that the pupil has ended up as his companion in adventure was obviously not his intention, though it is clearly to the benefit of both.

@countscarlioni

Well spotted, the Coalbrookdale painting. I begin to wonder whether there is anything at all in the background detail of these episodes which is without significance.  Nevertheless, the painting romanticises the industrial revolution. The landscape is picturesque in the sense it was used at the beginning of the 19th century, and even the rusting, discarded castings in the foreground add pictorial texture.  The foundry in question was, I believe, nicknamed Bedlam, and early 19th century written accounts of the industrial West Midlands describe dreary, hellish landscapes, with everything from the buildings to the grass blackened by soot and pollution, the sky veiled by smoke and the smoke illuminated at night by the glare from furnaces and forges.  The name The Black Country was well earned.

@ichabod

It’s delightful; it’s also, for yrs truly the OverThinker, a bit — thin?

Really?  The narratives in the three episodes so far have lacked the complexity of the preceding series, I agree, so in that sense there is less on which to exercise the mental muscles; but all three, and this one not the least, have considerable substance and texture, so I can’t, myself, see them as in any way ‘thin’ or of little more than comic book depth. In their own way I have found them very satisfying.  The plots of the stories have certainly been comparatively straightforward and very much old-style Doctor Who, but they have been well constructed, well written and entertaining, whilst addressed a few moral and ethical issues along the way. Above all, they have provided an excellent vehicle for presenting us with a Doctor who, at least fifty years post-Clara, seems much more at ease with himself, even stable – insofar as that is an adjective which could ever be applied to him; they have also introducing us to Bill and established her character effectively, and with great economy have shown the development of a thoroughly convincing relationship between the two of them.  This focus on character so far has, to my mind, been well judged, and I suspect promises to be the prelude to something more meaty.

 

 

 

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@missy

No, you don’t have to pay the license fee for every TV in the house. One license covers the entire household, whether they have only one TV set or one in every room in the building. It also covers the use of computers to view BBC programmes on iPlayer, so even if you don’t have a TV set at all, and watch all TV programmes on a computer, you still, technically need a license.

I don’t know whether or not they still use detector vans to catch license dodgers, or whether they now have more efficient means of finding them.

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@thane15

Bless your sharp trained ears, puro.  I had nearly got to the point of wondering whether I was suffering from aural hallucinations. The only other thing I could think of, after all other possibilities had been ruled out, was that there might have been a very tiny glitch in the cable transmission which had slurred the sound of Bill.

@tardigrade

I take your point about priming, but I certainly wasn’t primed to hear ‘River’ the first time. In fact it startled me into backing and replaying that bit immediately, to check if I had misheard.  As I have said, even after I had viewed the same sequence on iPlayer where the ‘Bill’ was quite distinct, and when everybody else assured me that they had heard nothing but ‘Bill’, it still sounded to me much more like ‘River’ on the recording with, as puro says above,  a rhotic ri rather than a voiced bi-labial stop.

 

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@wolfweed

As I commented earlier, it seems very appropriate that the Doctor would choose Struwelpeter as bed-time reading for Kitty’s little band of urchins, and if not that, but for the matter of copyright, I suspect that it would have been something pleasantly disgusting from Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.

It seems to me that the attraction to the macabre, gruesome and safely frightening which attracted me to this kind of thing as a child is not very different from that which has always drawn even young children to Doctor Who – just so long as there was a sofa to hand to protect them.

Is anyone here acquainted with Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, from which I used to recite with great relish when small ?

 

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@whisht

Now you’ve made me blush (insert appropriate emoji), and no need for the ‘sorry’; I have no difficulty whatsoever in accepting that everyone heard ‘Bill’ – and so did I, quite clearly, when I watched that sequence on iPlayer. But I must have watched that particular bit on my recording more than half a dozen times now, and try as I may to hear ‘Bill’, I still hear ‘River’, and I can’t see how, even on a standard, fairly crap TV sound system, I could confuse the bi-labial stop B with the rhotic R, or a single syllable name with a two syllable name.

Sudden thought 💡  Perhaps I’m living in an alternative, very slightly different universe from all the rest of you lovely people; or perhaps we are all of us in different universes, and the internet and world wide web enable not only near-instant communication round the globe but, all unsuspected, between universes via ultra dimensional worm holes, and so I saw a fractionally different episode.  How’s that for bonkers 🙂

It would be interesting to know if they did in fact seriously consider the Doctor calling Bill River in a distracted moment – after all, he has been travelling with Bill for a very short time,whereas in a timey-wimey way he had known River for centuries, and he wouldn’t think of Clara because she is no more than a Clara-shaped hole in his conscious memory, and there was nothing here to prompt the surviving subliminal awareness.

@craig

Sadly, street urchins, with or without smart phones, are in rather short supply in this neighbourhood, but perhaps I could look out for one when next I go into the city centre 🙂   Some of my relatives have smart phones, and if one of them had been to hand I could have availed myself of their services, but even the closest, geographically speaking, is 50 miles away, and most of them a good deal further, and the next scheduled visit is still more than six weeks away.

 

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@craig

I wish that I could follow your suggestion, but I can’t think of a means of doing so, unless someone more technically competent can suggest a way.  My only computer is a fairly massive all-in-one desk-top almost as big and heavy as my flat screen TV set, and is in my study on the opposite side of my flat to the living room containing the TV and TiVo box.  In any case, I don’t think I have the necessary leads since so far I have never had a use for the microphone function of the computer.  I don’t have a smart phone, either, so can’t video it (which I know makes me a technological dinosaur, but so far I have never felt that access to the myriad apps on a smart phone would do very much to enhance my quality of life or my ability to communicate with family and friends, and my ancient Nokia dumb-phone suffices for the few occasions when I really need a mobile).

So I’m sorry, but unless there is anyone out there who can corroborate what I saw and heard, people will for the time being have to take my word for it or else conclude that I have lost my marbles.

@pedant

Yes I’m in BBC East region. I watched and recorded the episode in real time via cable (Virgin Media), but would that make any difference?

 

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@pedant @thane15

Strange, because I assure you that I am not delusional and nor is my hearing impaired.  On Sunday morning I did begin to wonder whether I was mistaken, and since I happened to be at my desk I watched again on iPlayer via my computer and on that, yes, he unmistakeably says ‘Bill … Miss Potts’, which led me at once to go back and re-check the recording I made of the broadcast as I watched it on air on Saturday, not once but twice, and it confirmed that I hadn’t misheard. In my recording he equally clearly says ‘River … Miss Potts’,  Even the tone of voice in ‘River’ is different from his ‘Bill’ on iPlayer. Following @tardigrades suggestion I went back again to my recording so that I could watch Capaldi closely and, although I am not an expert lip-reader, even his lip movements were consistent with the two syllables of River and couldn’t be read as ‘Bill’.

I can only assume that what was broadcast in my region of England was a version containing an overlooked slip in editing and not the ‘official’ edition seen elsewhere.  For the record, I have just been back and watched it yet again with subtitles on, and the subtitles do read ‘Bill … Miss Potts’, so there is no doubt about what was intended.

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@tardigrade

You are right. If, in the version you saw, you could clearly lip-read ‘Bill’, then they are certainly different takes.  I have just checked (by fast-forwarding through the UK broadcast version which I recorded), and in that Capaldi is three quarter turned to camera, and one can equally clearly lip read ‘River …’ – two syllables.  Pearl might not have noticed because, as I wrote, it was said in unstressed tone.

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@ichabod

Yes, the design of the diving suits is quite elegant – for a diving suit of that type – but, as I said,  it is a bit advanced for the period – much closer to the kind that was developed towards the end of the 19th century.*

@janetteb

I don’t know if Bill’s clothes were right for the exact year, but if the details were a year or so out then that is excused as she found the outfit in the Tardis so near enough…

The pelisse (coat) and hat looked to me to be pretty much spot on for 1814. It is difficult to be sure about the dress, because we didn’t see it without the pelisse, but the impression I got is that it was closer to the loose, flowing ‘Classical Greek’ style introduced after the French Revolution and fashionable at the beginning of the 19th century – think the portrait of Madame Recamier by David.  By 1814 in England women’s gowns were more structured, and underpinned by corsetry. So Bill’s dress would not have been in the current mode, but wouldn’t have looked totally out of place.

@thane15 (puro)

Regional accents in Britain, their origins and social significance is a fascinating subject, and one on which I am happy to enlarge , to the extent of my limited knowledge, but I think it is a topic better suited to the pub, so I’ll take it there.

 

* In Winchester Cathedral there is a small bronze statue of a diver in a very similar type of suit, on a plinth with an inscription commemorating the diver who worked on underpinning the foundations of the Cathedral during the first decade or so of the 20th century.  The water table on the site is quite high – as those of us who worked on the excavation of the site of the Saxon Minster which predated the Norman cathedral were only too aware – and the Normans built the foundations of their new cathedral on a raft of huge oak timbers which, by the end of the 19th century, had decayed to a point where there was serious subsidence and a risk that the building might collapse.

 

 

 

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@pedant  @thane15 (puro)

Looking back to what I wrote yesterday, I’m not sure that my explanation was entirely clear. Whether the Doctor said ‘River’ or ‘Bill’ seems to depend on which version you saw.

In the BBC 1 broadcast on Saturday evening, which I watched while simultaneously recording, it was quite clearly ‘River … Miss Potts … ; the ‘River’ in an unstressed, almost conversational tone, the ‘Miss Potts’ sharper and more urgent.  In the iPlayer version, on the other hand, he says ‘Bill … Miss Potts …, both ‘Bill’ and ‘Miss Potts’ in an equally urgent tone.  The two versions are either showing different takes of the same sequence, or in one of them ‘River’, or ‘Bill’ has been over-dubbed. One suggests absent-minded reversion on the part of the Doctor, the other absent-mindedness on the part of Capaldi, but I suspect that the I-Player version is what was intended.

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@janetteb

The woman in the print on the wall to the right of the fireplace is also Emma Hamilton. It’s from one of the portraits of her by Romney. She must have had more portraits painted of her than any woman in history.

Did he met her at some point, even enjoy a brief dalliance with her ? – it would have been in character for the tenth Doctor, although I doubt she would have held his interest for long. I think it was Madame Vigee Lebrun, who also painted her, who commented that she wasn’t very intelligent.

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@toinfinityandbepond

I would certainly be prepared to stump up a good deal more than that for the license fee.  The problem is that if a household owns a TV set or sets the license fee has to be paid, whatever their financial circumstances and whether or not anyone in the household watches BBC programmes, and there are a good many vociferous people of doubtful judgement who claim not to watch BBC programmes at all, and who resent what they consider a tax to support a service they do not value.

The revenue from the license fee is, of course, supplemented by the revenue from BBC programmes sold overseas, which is why such programmes as Doctor Who are a  valuable property, but the BBC should never, in my opinion, become a wholly commercial enterprise. The ‘suits’ and bean counters have acquired too much influence as it is.

I suspect that many of those same people who resent the licence fee are nevertheless willing and able to find the means to fork out for a Sky or Virgin Media subscription, which is something like £50 a month for even the basic entertainment package, and a lot more for access to the sports channels or the various movie packages. The basic package would give you access to several hundred channels, and of those the majority which are worth watching are available anyway on the free-to-air digital service. Sky does have a monopoly on HBO productions which are shown on Sky Atlantic, but the subscription is scarcely worth it for that alone, or for Sky Arts, which can in any case be accessed elsewhere. It isn’t even as if the programmes on those channels are free of commercials.  If the main attraction is the premium movie channels, it would probably be cheaper simply to buy the DVDs, so it really comes down to the sports channels, since Sky has collared the rights to show Premier League football matches and Test Cricket.  Anyway, a significant share of Sky is owned by the evil empire of Murdoch, who been trying for many years  to acquire a majority share – and Rupert Murdoch regards the BBC as a rival to be exterminated. How many people on this forum can visualise Murdoch as the evil twin of Davros?.

Sorry, got a bit carried away there, but it’s something I feel very strongly about.

 

 

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@missy

Do you still need a licence?

Yes we do. Currently it is £145.50 a year, which in my view is stonkingly good value for the range of services and the variety of programmes the BBC provides.

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