About Time 2
The About Time series are reference works providing a story-by-story guide to Dr Who. Where these differ from the half dozen or so other story-by-story guides I have on my bookshelves, is that they seek explicitly to analyse the Dr Who stories in the wider context of the culture, specifically the media culture, of the time. They started out with the later Doctors (3, 4 and 5, IIRC) and then skipped back. This is the first of the "sixties" books I have read and the first which I have found more irritating than enjoyable.
I was interested to learn that both parrot_knight and daniel_saunders keep notes of the inaccuracies that appear in the About Time books. For once I was grateful that my mind does not retain facts in the same way since I have enjoyed these books but, given their nature, inaccuracies would be extremely galling. However, possibly because of this, I became increasingly aware, as I read About Time 2 of the way in which Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood make unsupported assertions. For instance, "What nobody who wasn't there in 1969 can really grasp is the degree to which waiting was part of the space experience in the Apollo years.". Now Lawrence Miles is, I believe, younger than I am, so he certainly doesn't remember anything about the space experience in 1969. I've no idea how old Tat Wood is. Does this sentence mean "Tat remembers 1969 and Lawrence doesn't and Lawrence can't grasp the degree to which...."? I have a vague memory that Tat Wood is an academic of some description specialising in popular culture. So its possible he has a paper "Differing generational expectations about the rapidity of events in space as depicted in visual media" sitting in his filing cabinet somewhere. While I can see it would have been inappropriate to mention this as an inline citation - would a bibliography really have hurt the book?
Lawrence Miles has a bit of a reputation for quitting projects. I have a feeling that he has an extremely good instinct for when a project is getting stale and beginning to recycle ideas and insufficient cynicism to stay with it anyway either for the money for out of any sense of duty to the readers. On the whole I admire this. Interestingly Tat Wood is going it alone for About Time 6 and I do wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with this book was a feeling that on the larger scale Miles and Wood had said what they wanted to about the classic series and were beginning to recycle their argument. Certainly some of the formula seemed to wearing a bit thin. The "What nobody who wasn't there can appreciate..." line quoted above appears as a recurring motif thoughout.
As well as the story by story breakdowns Miles and Wood accompany each section with an essay. Usually these essays are entertaining continuity games of the "how to we fit all the dalek stories together" variety. This sort of thing is obviously a rather specialised sport but Miles and Wood probably have their market pretty well pegged here. At any rate I personally quite like reading this kind of speculation. However early in this volume we have "Why was a McCrimmon Fighting for the Pretender?" which verges on the incoherent. I think they were really writing about what happened to Jamie McCrimmon after he was returned to his own time zone though it was difficult to tell. The next one, "How Many Atlantises Are There?" wasn't much better although it did at least make sense, but suffered from too many asides which were not, in my opinion, interesting enough to justify their inclusion. I was amused by the final essay "Did Doctor Who end in 1969?" which reminded me powerfully of a spoof article I wrote during the "JNT MUST DIE" days of 1980s Who fandom in which I suggested that Doctor had essentially been on a downhill spiral since the second episode which introduced the Daleks and forever changed the direction of the show from Sydney Newman's "educational science and history" vision to the "monster of the week" style which Miles and Wood so complain of in this volume. In fact you can't help get the feeling from this that they don't really much like the Doctor Who of the Troughtan era and perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that rather sours it. The best essay in the volume is "Was Yeti-in-a-Loo the Worst Idea Ever?" in which they more or less argue that the entire premise of the Pertwee years was misguided. I'm not entirely sure I agreed with it but it was argued with eloquent passion.
An alternative explanation for my dissatisfaction lies outside of the book itself. When I read the books about later Dr Who I remembered watching the episodes at the time, and I remember the surrounding Basil Brush, Star Wars, Buck Rogers milieu. I wasn't watching between 1966 and 1969 and I read this book without nostalgia tinged glasses.
I was interested to learn that both parrot_knight and daniel_saunders keep notes of the inaccuracies that appear in the About Time books. For once I was grateful that my mind does not retain facts in the same way since I have enjoyed these books but, given their nature, inaccuracies would be extremely galling. However, possibly because of this, I became increasingly aware, as I read About Time 2 of the way in which Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood make unsupported assertions. For instance, "What nobody who wasn't there in 1969 can really grasp is the degree to which waiting was part of the space experience in the Apollo years.". Now Lawrence Miles is, I believe, younger than I am, so he certainly doesn't remember anything about the space experience in 1969. I've no idea how old Tat Wood is. Does this sentence mean "Tat remembers 1969 and Lawrence doesn't and Lawrence can't grasp the degree to which...."? I have a vague memory that Tat Wood is an academic of some description specialising in popular culture. So its possible he has a paper "Differing generational expectations about the rapidity of events in space as depicted in visual media" sitting in his filing cabinet somewhere. While I can see it would have been inappropriate to mention this as an inline citation - would a bibliography really have hurt the book?
Lawrence Miles has a bit of a reputation for quitting projects. I have a feeling that he has an extremely good instinct for when a project is getting stale and beginning to recycle ideas and insufficient cynicism to stay with it anyway either for the money for out of any sense of duty to the readers. On the whole I admire this. Interestingly Tat Wood is going it alone for About Time 6 and I do wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with this book was a feeling that on the larger scale Miles and Wood had said what they wanted to about the classic series and were beginning to recycle their argument. Certainly some of the formula seemed to wearing a bit thin. The "What nobody who wasn't there can appreciate..." line quoted above appears as a recurring motif thoughout.
As well as the story by story breakdowns Miles and Wood accompany each section with an essay. Usually these essays are entertaining continuity games of the "how to we fit all the dalek stories together" variety. This sort of thing is obviously a rather specialised sport but Miles and Wood probably have their market pretty well pegged here. At any rate I personally quite like reading this kind of speculation. However early in this volume we have "Why was a McCrimmon Fighting for the Pretender?" which verges on the incoherent. I think they were really writing about what happened to Jamie McCrimmon after he was returned to his own time zone though it was difficult to tell. The next one, "How Many Atlantises Are There?" wasn't much better although it did at least make sense, but suffered from too many asides which were not, in my opinion, interesting enough to justify their inclusion. I was amused by the final essay "Did Doctor Who end in 1969?" which reminded me powerfully of a spoof article I wrote during the "JNT MUST DIE" days of 1980s Who fandom in which I suggested that Doctor had essentially been on a downhill spiral since the second episode which introduced the Daleks and forever changed the direction of the show from Sydney Newman's "educational science and history" vision to the "monster of the week" style which Miles and Wood so complain of in this volume. In fact you can't help get the feeling from this that they don't really much like the Doctor Who of the Troughtan era and perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that rather sours it. The best essay in the volume is "Was Yeti-in-a-Loo the Worst Idea Ever?" in which they more or less argue that the entire premise of the Pertwee years was misguided. I'm not entirely sure I agreed with it but it was argued with eloquent passion.
An alternative explanation for my dissatisfaction lies outside of the book itself. When I read the books about later Dr Who I remembered watching the episodes at the time, and I remember the surrounding Basil Brush, Star Wars, Buck Rogers milieu. I wasn't watching between 1966 and 1969 and I read this book without nostalgia tinged glasses.