Damaris Hayman, the White Witch of Devil's End

 I was sorry to see the obituary of Damaris Hayman, who has died at the age of 91, in the Guardian today.  It was written by Toby Hadoke, so mentioned her appearance as Miss Hawthorne, the white witch of Devil's End in The Daemons, one of the most fun Doctor Who stories from the Jon Pertwee era:

In later years, she also starred in a series of short stories on DVD about the character, collected as The Daemons of Devil's End.

There was a lot more to her career than that, of course - from British films of the 1950s right through to TV comedy in the 1980s.  Here she is looking glamorous with Les Dawson:

Whovian Day

 Of course, this was the one day of my holiday when it rained all day!

The plan was to go into the city for the day, ending up at UNIT HQ in South Moulton Street for Doctor Who: Time Fracture, so I spent the day cosplaying the 13th Doctor.  (This was why I had my hair cut!).

It's fortunate that the coat is functional, and at least shower-proof, though I did get a bit damp.

We were going to start off at the Museum of London, but we couldn't get a time-slot early enough in the day so we moved straight on to a spending spree at Forbidden Planet.

I regret nothing.

We had lunch at Ippudo, which serves Japanese food.  I had the best noodle soup I had ever tasted, with some good green tea.  I would definitely go back again.

Then, despite the rain, we wandered round Soho for a bit, looking for the locations of AZ Fell & Co., Aziraphale's bookshop from Good Omens.  My Young Man also pointed out the place where the exhibition had taken place when the series first came out.  He went to it, and took a lot of photos of the costumes, and the Bentley parked outside.

I've written some fan fiction on AO3 in which Crowley wakes up in Aziraphale's bookshop, recovering from being drugged, which includes memory loss - so he escapes from this weird angel who he thinks has captured him, and gets as far as the hut in Soho Square Gardens before he passes out.  So I had to go and see the hut:

The story is called Confused Serpent, and I'm Eigon on AO3.

We were booked into Mr Foggs' Society of Exploration in the afternoon, for cocktails.  As part of the track and trace system, we had our temperatures taken at the door, the first time I've had that done in the pandemic.

Downstairs, the bar was warm and cosy - we were seated in the 'railway carriage' at one end.  With some advice from the waiter, the Young Man chose a Guano Point, described in the menu as "short, warming and rich" and made with 12 year old Dewar's whisky.  I chose the Spicy Rupee, described as "spicy, aromatic, exotic" and made with vodka and elderflower.  Both of them were absolutely delicious, and well worth the rather high prices.  We rather liked the music there, too - quite mellow swing.

We hadn't quite managed to leave enough time for another meal, so we got a sandwich to eat on the go again, but arrived at UNIT HQ early enough to have a lemonade in The Lucky Bar just round the corner.  Each table had a D10 in a tray, and if you rolled a 7 you didn't have to pay for your drinks!

Then we headed into Time Fracture, ready to save the Universe!

It wasn't quite as easy as it had been in The War of the Worlds to maintain social distancing - this wasn't one linear story we were following.  We all started and finished in the same place, but between that there was a lot of mixing of groups as different people followed alternative paths through the storyline.

We started in the UNIT lab, and I even got to type on one of the consoles as we tried to work out why strange things were happening all round the world.

Then we went through the Time Fracture itself, to the Court of Queen Elizabeth I, and an alien market place, an intergalactic space liner (with two very good alien cabaret singers) which was diverted to Gallifrey, and finally to Gallifrey itself, where we became part of the Prydonian Chapter!

At one point the actors leading us from place to place made very sure that no-one would be badly affected by strobe lighting before we headed into a dark tunnel full of shop dummies.

We met Davros!  And the Young Man had to negotiate with him for assistance!

There was a Sister, and a Brother, of Karn, and an alien auction, and a Kerblam stall.  We were told to look for Brian the Ood, who we saw in the distance but never got to meet.  We ran down corridors.  There were Cybermen and Daleks and Weeping Angels and an early version of Torchwood - and at the end of it all, we saved the Universe!  (and we got a Tshirt and a poster!).

It was all a huge amount of fun!

Earl Cameron, Actor

I just heard that Earl Cameron has died, at the age of 102. He came to the UK from Bermuda as a sailor, at the beginning of the Second World War, and quickly became involved with the London stage. He went on to have a film and TV career which included Doctor Who. In The Tenth Planet he was the first black actor on film or TV to play an astronaut.

He also read Brer Rabbit stories for Jackanory, and appeared in Thunderball with Sean Connery, which gives an idea of the range of parts he played.
The Earl Cameron Theatre in Hamilton, Bermuda, is named after him.

Shadow of the Past - Big Finish

Dr Liz Shaw has always been one of the lesser known Companions of the Doctor, spending a season with the Third Doctor and then disappearing as Jo Grant is introduced.
I rather liked her - sensible, scientific, and taking no nonsense from the Doctor.
Sadly, Caroline Johns (who played Liz Shaw) didn't do much for Big Finish - but I've just finished listening to Shadow of the Past, and if it was all to this standard then what she did do was very good.
The story is part of the Companion Chronicles, and it's a two hander, with Caroline Johns as Liz Shaw and Lex Shrapnel as the young UNIT soldier who accompanies her.
She's been called in, as an older woman, to the opening of a UNIT vault that was sealed in the 1970s, which leads to her telling the story of the crashed space ship in the vault to the young soldier accompanying her.
The story is by Simon Guerrier, and nicely catches the tone of the Third Doctor's UNIT days, and he's placed it between Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death - so the Doctor's relationship with the Brigadier is quite strained at this point (after the Brig blew up the Silurian caves).
I shall be getting more Big Finish stories with Liz Shaw, I think.

The Green Death on Location

I've been watching the 1973 Doctor Who story The Green Death - The One With The Maggots. It's also the one with a very strong environmental message which still looks very topical today.
They did quite a lot of location shooting for the story in South Wales, at a pit head and a disused video tape factory (which became the headquarters of Global Chemicals), and a big slag heap which they covered with giant maggots.
It was a very industrial landscape in those days, but the time of the National Coal Board was coming to an end.
One of the extras on the boxed set was a report from Wales Today, in which Jon Pertwee returned to the area to open a new visitor centre for a nature park. The slag heap had been landscaped, the pit was long gone, and there was a lake.
I looked it up and was pleased to see that Parc Cwm Darran is still there, somewhere near Caerphilly. There's a camp site and various outdoor activities, and they drained the lake in 2006 to turn it into a wetland area for birds.

Great Cross-Over

I'd forgotten I had this picture, copied from somewhere on Facebook, I think.
I thought it would be a nice thing to share now, in memory of Stan Lee - here being enthusiastic about Doctor Who, with Matt Smith.

Excelsior!
Geronimo!

Rosa - Doctor Who

I no longer have a working TV - when the local area went digital I decided not to bother, because I only really watched Doctor Who.
So an added bonus of being in a hotel on Sunday evening was the working TV in the room, and the ability to watch Doctor Who!
I'm really glad that the episode I managed to watch was Rosa, and not Arachnids in the UK.

Now I've seen the new Doctor in action, I like her a lot, and I also like the new Companions, especially Graham. I was completely unaware of Bradley Walsh before he was cast in Doctor Who (not being a watcher of game shows) so I had no preconceptions about him. The fact that he was a retired bus driver worked really well in this story. And Vinette Robinson was brilliant as Rosa Parks.

From what I've seen so far, it seems that Chris Chibnall really is taking the show back to basics - bigger Tardis Team and more historical episodes, just like 1963 but with better production values!

Earl Cameron, actor

BBC Two have shared a short video of the actor Earl Cameron speaking about his life. He's just over 100 years old, and in 1951 he was the first black man to star in a post-war British film (Paul Robeson, Elisabeth Welch and Nina Mae McKinney had all starred in the 1930s). The film was Pool of London, and he played a sailor who got involved with a local white girl.

He also played the astronaut in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Tenth Planet. It had always impressed me that a black actor had been chosen to play the astronaut, and I never imagined he was still alive now.
He's had a varied career on stage, film and TV, appearing in Tarzan and Bond films, and many British TV series.

Buses and Daleks in London

I'm fairly easy to please, so a long bus ride sitting on the top of a double decker right at the front was an ideal way to start the day.
We went from Woolwich to Greenwich to start with, and met a chap on the market who turns London landmarks into Daleks in his art - it's very cleverly done, and he also takes stalls at Comic Cons around the country. I took his card - but now I've lost it.
Anyway, we went on from there (the bus stop is by a building that claims to be the oldest in Greenwich - now a takeaway), roughly following the river through Deptford, Canada Water, and Bermondsey (I caught a glimpse of a plaque marking medieval Bermondsey Abbey). Then the Young Man told me to turn to look, and I could see the end of Tower Bridge at the end of the road as the bus turned away from it down Tower Bridge Road and then onto the New Kent Road. I'd heard of the Old Kent Road, but never thought that there must be a New one to go with it. That took us to Elephant and Castle, and then to Waterloo, where we got off.
I had expressed my desire to buy a pith helmet, for Steampunk costuming purposes. My original one was quite cheap, and the webbing inside had broken so it came down over my eyes. The Young Man knew just the place for me to find one - an army surplus shop along The Cut near Waterloo.
The shop is so crammed full of stuff that we had to climb over a pile of rucksacks just to get in. The chap behind the counter produced two different styles of pith helmet instantly, though, together with a tiny mirror so I could see how I looked in them. I chose the one with the more pointed brim - dressed up with a flowing silk scarf it will be just the thing for my Victorian adventuress.
Feeling in the need for sustenance, we had a look at the local cafes, and decided on noodles for lunch. We ate at Culture Grub, a Chinese café that served green tea in glasses. The noodles were very good.
Then the Young Man took me off the main road and down a back street - to the very spot where some of the outdoor filming for Remembrance of the Daleks (Ace's first full story as Sylvester McCoy's Companion) was done. Coal Hill School, the main location for the story, was somewhere else, but Daleks were blown up right where we were! This Doctor Who story was written by Ben Aaronovitch, who also wrote the Rivers of London series we had been visiting locations from earlier in the week.
Then we set off for a little retail therapy in the afternoon, finally getting the bus to Trafalgar Square to get the train back to Woolwich from Charing Cross Station.

The Daemons of Devils End

The Daemons is probably the most fondly remembered of the UNIT stories of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who. Let's face it, it had everything - UNIT (and that classic line "Chap with wings, five rounds rapid"), the Master, and the most English of English villages, with church, village green and pub, and morris dancers for May Day. Plus, of course, archaeology, black magic and the Daemon of the title. Every member of the regular cast had a chance to shine.
And there was also the white witch of the village, Miss Hawthorne, played by the wonderful Damaris Hayman.

Thanks to Reeltime, a small company which made Doctor Who videos during the time that the series was not on the BBC, we can now find out what happened to Miss Olive Hawthorne in a DVD set called The Daemons of Devil's End.
The project started in 2010, with Damaris Hayman already in her eighties, and was only finished recently, with the addition of dramatization of some of the scenes from the stories Damaris narrates. The project was first thought of as a "talking heads" sort of production, like the Alan Bennett monologues, since the actress can't do too much running around at her age! It was also the first time she had ever used an autocue, but she takes to it like the true professional she is.

So there are six linked short stories telling important episodes from Miss Hawthorne's life - she knows she is close to death, and is telling her tale to a spirit she has summoned, because of her concern about who will be the protector of Devil's End when she is gone. We start with her childhood, when she gets her Grimoire and her vocation in life (based on a memory from Damaris's own childhood), and how she got her cat - the apple thief in that story, a good looking lad with very pale hair, is Sophie Aldred's son. There's a doomed love affair, a rival witch, the aftermath of the Daemons story, and finally a very satisfying conclusion.
Bonus features have the making of the series, interviews, and a music video for the title music of the series.

The second and third discs have documentaries, starting with the 1992 Return to Devil's End, which brought many members of the original cast and crew back to Aldbourne in Wiltshire, where the original story was filmed. They even track down the morris dancing team, and speak to some of the dancers who took part in the filming. There's also footage of a question and answer session at one of the conventions that was held in the village.

I really enjoyed this DVD set, and it's a great addition to my classic Doctor Who collection. There's also a paperback, made to look as much like the old Target paperbacks as possible, which expands on the six episodes of Miss Hawthorne's story, with a few extra features like photos from the filming of the original story. I actually bought that first, by mistake, but I'm glad I did.

Merry Christmas

New Doctor, New Costume

Jodie Whitaker's costume as the Doctor has only just been announced, and already there is fan art!
This is by ZestyDoesThings, seen on Twitter:

New Doctor!

I've just seen the news on Twitter, and it's very exciting! Jodie Whittaker will be the next Doctor!
I haven't seen Broadchurch, but she had a leading role in that series.
Colin Baker tweeted "Change, my dear, and not a moment too soon!"

RIP John Hurt

A wonderful actor - he'll be fondly remembered as the War Doctor, The Naked Civil Servant, The Elephant Man, and many more. He was the voice of Aragorn in the 1970s Lord of the Rings cartoon, and driven mad by the Crystal Skulls in that Indiana Jones film no-one talks about.
On Twitter, all sorts of people are saying what a wonderful person he was off-screen as well.

Doctor Who and the Peterloo Massacre

Just out from Big Finish is a 5th Doctor story by Paul Magrs, set in Manchester in 1819, the time of the Peterloo Massacre.
This is part of my local history - I'm from Manchester, and I remember being taken to see the plaque commemorating the 15 dead of the massacre (and the 600+ injured), at St Peter's Field when I was a child.
Historical stories are so often set around London, but other cities have interesting histories too, and this was an important event in working class history and Manchester's history. The peaceful crowd of around 80,000 had gathered to hear speeches against the Corn Laws - they wanted cheaper bread, and they also wanted to be able to vote. Manchester was growing rapidly with industrialisation, any yet had no MP. There were only two MPs for the whole of Lancashire, and only (male) property owners could vote.
After the reading of the Riot Act (which nobody heard) the local Yeomanry charged into the crowd on horseback, sabres drawn - and later cannons were used against the unarmed crowd. The regular Hussars, also in attendance, were horrified by the actions of the Yeomanry, and some officers tried to restrain the Yeomanry, while the way to Peter Street was blocked by infantry with bayonets, so the crowd could not escape - an early version of "kettling".
This was also one of the first mass meetings that journalists attended, and the Doctor has a great rant at Thomas Tyler, the journalist from London, urging him to tell the truth about what he has seen.
Peter Davison is in great form in this retelling of the story of the Massacre, and so are Tegan (snarling about the injustice of it all) and Nyssa (befriending a maidservant who is involved with the Radicals). Of course, they cannot stop the massacre from happening - it's a fixed point in time ("You always say that," grumbles Tegan) but they can do something to help, out of the historical spotlight.
The other actors, playing the historical characters, have properly Northern accents - there's a little extra at the end where they talk about the story and the director says he didn't want actors with RP accents pretending to be Northern.
"I was surprised there were no aliens in this one," Peter Davison says, at the end.
"Except you and Nyssa," Janet Fielding says.
"Oh, good point."

Mancunicon Saturday

On Friday morning, we went in search of the free bus service that serves the town centre, but it was a bit of a long way to walk to the bus stop by Oxford Road railway station (the first railway station in the world!) with my Young Man still needing his crutch, so for the rest of the weekend we got taxis either way instead. I could definitely get used to helpful staff phoning for a cab which arrives within five minutes every time I want one!

I wanted to see the A Feminist Fantasy Canon panel, which included one of the guests of honour, Aliette de Bodard. The consensus was that we don't actually want a fixed canon of women fantasy writers, because that would be bound to exclude other writers, but we do want the existance of women SF and fantasy writers to be acknowledged, instead of being discovered anew every generation with astonishment, as if women had never written SF or fantasy before (except for Ursula le Guin!).
At the moment I'm following the re-read of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books on Tor.com - she was writing historical fantasy in the 1970s which was influential, but overlooked now. One edition of her books has an introduction by Lin Carter, who did a huge amount of work to get fantasy books published, and he was astonished that the first four authors he had published were women, and that they were better than any of the men's work he had looked at! Another of those authors was Joy Chant, whose Red Moon and Black Mountain deserves to be far better known.

Lunch was down on the ground floor, with more helpful staff behind the counter - we had a burger and potato wedges, and drinks from the American Craft Beer stand which the hotel had laid on specially for the Con. I never usually drink lager, but the Amber Lager I had was really very nice (and now I've forgotten the brewers!). Outside the windows, the rain was blowing sideways, which really made me feel I was back home!

Later, the Young Man went to the Tribute to Tanith Lee, another great fantasy writer, while I went to the Kaffeeklatch with Charles Stross.
This was very exciting. I first became aware of Charles Stross when he won a Hugo for Equoid - and thought that I probably wouldn't like to read it because it was described as horror. Then I saw him at EasterCon last year, sharing a stage with Jim Butcher - and they were both very funny together. So I tried one of the Laundry Files series, and was instantly hooked. For me, horror is a lot easier to read when it's also very funny. The other people in the room with Charlie were far better versed in his work than I was - now I need to look out for the Merchant Princes series, too.
He is immensely busy at the moment, with five books on the go at different stages (on another panel the following day he said he managed to watch about two new films a decade, prompting the response "That's why you meet your deadlines!"). He also gleefully described the way he's going to blow up Leeds (with added dragons and elves) in his next Laundry Files book, and make Bob (main character in the Laundry Files) go on TV to be interviewed/grilled by Jeremy Paxman at the beginning of the following book about elvish immigration policy!

Later, we went to the talk by Lilian Edwards entitled Privacy and Identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which she said was her Daredevil talk, with a bit of Captain America. She works in the area of privacy laws, and casually mentioned being quoted in New Scientist, and attending a House of Lords committee - but she's also a great Daredevil fan (and a fan of the present trend for male heroes to take their tops off for the delectation and delight of middle aged women!). The talk also went off into the areas of real names on Facebook - and the good reasons some people have for using a pseudonym, illustrated with the way Matt Murdock's life was ruined by him being outed as Daredevil.

We were going to the Little-Known British SF TV shows of the 1950s to 1970s talk - but it was in Room 6 and there was no way we were going to squeeze in, so we went up to the Presidential Suite for the Elsewhen Press book launch. We didn't stay too long, because the Young Man needed to sit, and all the chairs were taken, but several of the authors appearing in the new anthology read from their work, with the backdrop of sunset over Manchester from a great height.

We finished the evening off with An Adventure in Time and Space: 53 Years in 53 Rels - a play dashing through the entire history of Doctor Who, with a small cast who all played several parts (and were all holding their scripts, which didn't detract from the fun at all), with minimal costume changes (Adric had his gold star of mathematical excellence; Davros sat in a chair holding his arm at an odd angle etc.) with Daleks and dinosaurs being represented by toys being waved in the air from the side of the stage. It was very funny.
There was a running gag about girl companions leaving to get married ("Yay! Feminism!"), topped off by Missy snogging the Doctor near the end ("Yay! Feminism!"), and the chap playing the War Doctor did a very good John Hurt impression. He also played the Fourth Doctor. Oh, and Leela had a Scandinavian accent for some reason.

Doctor Who Unbound from Big Finish

Some time ago, I heard about a CD put out by Big Finish in which the Doctor has regenerated into female form, and is hiding out from the Time Lords by working at a supermarket and going down the pub.
I've finally got round to ordering it from Big Finish. It's called Exile, by Nicholas Briggs, in the Doctor Who Unbound series, and stars Arabella Weir as the Doctor. A bonus is the fact that David Tennant plays Time Lord 2 (and I wouldn't have known - he sounds very different from his usual voice).
Well, I'm glad I listened to it, but there was rather too much drinking to excess and throwing up afterwards for my taste. It was very much played for laughs (as with the Time Lords arriving in the year 2000 dressed like something out of Starsky and Hutch).

While I was looking at the Doctor Who Unbound series, I noticed Sympathy for the Devil, by Jonathan Clements, and decided to order that as well.
This was very impressive! The Doctor this time is David Warner, who plays it much in the style of Patrick Troughton. He has been exiled to Earth by the Time Lords - but instead of arriving in the 1970s and joining UNIT, he arrives in 1997. So this is an alternate time line where UNIT had to deal with all sorts of alien threats without the Doctor's help.
The Doctor arrives in Hong Kong, on the eve of the handover to Chinese control, and finds the retired Brigadier running a pub on the waterfront. And then an invisible plane crashes on the hillside.
Again, there's the bonus of David Tennant, playing Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood - this time with a broad Scottish accent, and an antagonistic attitude towards the Brig.
It's got Buddhist monks, and an old enemy, and I enjoyed it immensely!

Poor Sarah Jane!

I was lucky enough to find a whole lot of Doctor Who DVDs in a charity shop in Hereford the other day, so I've been watching a few which I'm sure I never saw first time round. One of them was Planet of Evil, in which a scientist tries to take anti-matter crystals from a remote planet, which starts killing the members of the expedition (or at least, the Creature of the Id a la Forbidden Planet does). The dark red jungle set was actually very impressive, but the story was a bit forgettable.
Then there was the Masque of Mandragora, with gorgeous Italian Renaissance costumes - Sarah Jane gets a lovely ball gown for the Masque itself (after nearly being sacrificed to a pagan god in the catacombs under the city).
But in both of those stories, apart from a few female extras in the masque scenes, Sarah Jane is the only woman there, and certainly the only woman with a speaking role. There's a black man on the crew of the space ship in Planet of Evil - and he doesn't die first! - but no other women at all.

Colony in Space

Ah, the glory days of Jon Pertwee - in this case, the first time Jo Grant steps inside the Tardis, and onto the surface of an alien world - or a china clay quarry in Cornwall.
This story of the evil Interplanetary Mining Company against poor colonists actually seems quite up to date, though I doubt that today's fracking companies would try to scare people off by using projections of giant lizards!
It was nice to see several women among the colonists, too, who even had speaking parts, though one of them died horribly early on, and another just vanished as the men started shooting at each other. Only Gail Tilsley from Coronation Street remained to man the radio.
Meanwhile, the "Primitives" didn't seem to have any women at all, and nobody among the colonists or the miners seemed to consider that they might just possibly have the prior claim to their own planet.
And then the Master comes along, disguised as the Adjudicator between the miners and the colonists - though what he really wants is to get his hands on a Doomsday Weapon hidden in the Primitives' city. And he wants to share ruling the universe with the Doctor.
My favourite lines of the story are between the Master and the Doctor:
"My credentials are immaculate."
"Forged, of course."
"Of course - but immaculate."
In the documentary accompanying the story, they said that they considered casting a woman as the member of the mining ship crew who is frightening and murdering colonists - but the Powers that Be at the BBC vetoed the idea, saying that they thought it was "kinky" to have a woman doing that sort of thing.

Happy Birthday Sarah Jane Smith

Still my favourite Companion - and who I want to be when I grow up!