@ScaryB   These are really good points (and isn’t it fun to use the word “slapgate”?). However, I also agree with @Nick that I didn’t see Clara as being upset about the danger they were in, more angry about the conclusion the Doctor had drawn. “Is this what we’ve learned?”

@midnyt  I think that in the previous episode it was deliberately est…[Read more]

@Nick and @JanetteB

It seems to be based on genuine Victorian marriages, where the class problem meant that a legal marriage was concealed as a master/servant relationship.The poor bloody woman had to be a servant in her own house.

Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the play that dealt with such a real-life marriage, but it does make me…[Read more]

@Nick I agree Re the relationship between Jenny and Vastra. It is very much determined by Victorian class attitudes. It is not a relationship of equals, hardly surprising perhaps when one considers that one partner is a lizard who remembers when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The clear inequality is leavend a little by Jenny’s self assertiveness. As…[Read more]

@Nick. You posted while I was deliberating over my post and I didn’t notice that you had beaten me to it. Sorry.

Cheers

Janette

Well, I valiantly watched the original in all its wobbly glory – then rewatched with the Special Edition.

@Phaseshift – Anat’s the leader, yeah, but I did wonder about her passing the newspaper to Shura. Was it that she wanted to keep her eyes on the Doctor, or was it that she can’t read? I can certainly imagine Daleks only allowing humans to…[Read more]

Agree that Jo could be mind bogglingly naive at times (and that includes watching at the time) but she was feisty as well and the combination of the two could make her quite heroic.  The context here of course is that she thinks the guerrilas are the bad guys, and why wouldn’t she from the experience she’s had so far?  Also, although she’s the D…[Read more]

@Nick – Louis Marks had the Israeli Army in mind when writing the guerrillas and so he chose Jewish names.

@nick

By the way, (off the point) do any of you think modern UNIT works well ?

I’m always a little ambivalent about UNIT to be honest. I love some of the characters like the Brig and Benton and I can understand the desire to reference them in the modern show. At certain points it can be helpful if there is an organisation who knows what and w…[Read more]

@JimTheFish

This is definitely one of the stories where he sometimes seems to have a bit of the Dame Margaret Rutherfords about him.

I love this phrase, and, with your permission, may use it in the future. 😀

On Louis Marx, he was actually a real person. He was a history academic who moved into TV part time. I’ve heard Terrance Dicks talk a…[Read more]

Brilliant @wolfweed. I didn’t even have a chance to do something myself as I’ve been more than a bit busy recently.

No objections to the choice @craig. I think the original is the right one for the headliner. There was a lively discussion on the validity (or not) of updating old material with, amongst others @nick, so this could be an opportunity…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip @blenkinsopthebrave @janetteB @nick

Thanks – keep the suggestions coming. I’m actually in the mood for any Pertwee story since I haven’t watched any since Terror of the Autons last year, and before that it was March 2013 I had a bit of a review.

While I really like Inferno myself, I have one slight concern about it, which may m…[Read more]

@Nick

Sorry to hear you’ve been ill. 🙁

The CGI was very subtle. The major addition was indeed the scene at the very end, where it had been universally agreed at the time that the lack of Daleks detracted from the drama.

When I say ‘universally agreed’, I mean that the director, actors and producers are on record as saying they bitterly wished…[Read more]

@Nick From memory the daleks weren’t CGI’d in. There was also a description of how it was done. They weren’t adding inconsistent effects. I did not realise until someway through that I was watching a re-vamped version. The changes were mostly very minor and in keeping with the original. Admittedly it had been years since watching the original. The…[Read more]