I like that.

Yeah, I think you don't need to worry about some of these things so much.

Um- Also on his video blog, he was talking about his love of crossovers, which I, I share.

And he said one of the things that he liked about crossovers as a child, and I thought this was a wonderful analogy, was that it makes... done well, they make both of those worlds, all of those worlds seem bigger.

'Cause he said that's how the real world works.

The real world, you look out your window, you see someone walking past, and they've got their own life, and they've got their own story, and that's sort of what crossovers can produce as well.

You don't need to worry about, necessarily about multiverses and all the rest of it, explaining it away.

We live as royals, do we not, my dear?" I mean, he, he taps into that domesticity in a really appealing way.

How do we think Andy Lane handles the book in general, prose-wise, in terms of his sort of character work? We've mentioned the reef stuff's quite good, the humour, and the general Torchwood atmosphere.

I think...

As we've said, given the monstrous limitations there must have been on writing this, he does an incredibly good job.

And I think there's probably a lot of...

I think the bits that feel true are probably often down to really good guesses and inference based on what he's been given rather than any evidence that that's what the character should be or where they're going.

There's a point quite late on in the book... that i texted you about when i reached it where you do suspect the entire thing has been one shaggy dog story to get to a particular line which is that these tape were these so alien tapeworms have been living inside these people's bodies eating up all their food and making them go crazy with hunger and when tortured find one of these for the first time isolate it they call it ringo because it's got rings and therefore they named the others john paul george and stewart not pete odd and so then they extract paul and they have paul in the hub and they said okay keep feeding him nutrients now he's out the body so we can watch him develop owen as mentioned goes off gets drunk does things comes back in yanta goes there's been a problem paul has mutated into the next stage of his life cycle so he can now fly and he's got these huge membranous wings and owen says bloody hell it's paul mccartney with wings and the reader would be forgiven for slamming the book shut yeah writing a letter of complaint and saying, Mr.

Lane, is this why you have had me here for 250 pages to make that?

And yeah, overall, pulls all the pieces together, if just a little too slowly.

If we hold that for a moment,

well, you know, as I was just alluding to earlier, you know, grew up in a military family, both my granddad in the military.

So, yeah, that was absolutely the path I was on.

You know, my favorite film is Top Gun.

So, you know, the RAF, I actually was watching Top Gun Maverick on the plane as I was flying back last night.

But, you know, that was that was it for me.

It was absolutely was that was the path.

You have to have it as a skill, as part of your armory.

Yeah, and that, do you know what's quite difficult about that? And I think it's something that makes me appreciate his performance a wee bit more, but it's like that constant sort of sense of like, he's a bit of a messer, you know, and it's like walking a line of sort of relatable kind of sci-fi action kind of character but also funny at the same time it could tip so far into annoying so easily so easily could tip into annoying you're like you're on a tight rope there and it never does and he like he gets upset at the right times he switches at the right times and it's always believable i think it's yeah i think he writes them incredibly well I think

with both Tom Baker and Douglas Adams, you only need to be aware of how hard it is to emulate what they do, to look at the number of people who've tried to emulate what they do, and it has been really annoying.

So, you know, the number of fans who've dressed up as the fourth Doctor and tried to do all the funny bits at a convention, so you're like, ah, blah, blah, blah.

all the rest of it it's like you know British 70s version of Deadpool cosplayers I guess and I said before we came on this that the world doesn't need another geek trying to pastiche the style of Douglas Adams because there's always a little bit something of the Christmas review at the University Science Fiction Society about it all and And I think what's really clever in the pro style here, and I was really grateful for this, first of all, reading James Goss's City of Death, is that he's writing a comic sci-fi piece in the vein of Douglas Adams, but he's not trying to ape the style of Douglas Adams.

So he doesn't have interjecting with random, you know... deviations about oh well did you actually know that the people of Zanzar Zagul are the people who invented the podcast as a way of disposing of superfluous ideas that previously went to waste instead his style is a good match for Douglas Adams' source material because he does also deal with tend to write in that manner of an omniscient narrator who will drop in jokes but not in the same way and you mentioned it Joe I think that kind of reaches its zenith with his novelisation of The Giggle where the fact that it's not actually an omniscient narrator it's someone you should be paying attention to talking to you becomes sort of the big twist but you sort of see that starting to come in here so I think they're just a good match and I think he is clever because what he's I think also recognises about the source material is that it's at least in the Doctor Who stuff that Douglas Adams wrote, it's comic, but it's not comedic.

So it's meant to be funny.

It's meant to make you laugh.

And

of doctor who comics and i think it's all idw and titan like it is a vast library of stories

yeah there's a huge amount of these things so when titan so idw had largely had an ongoing doctor who range and they'd do some you know series to the side of it like the star trek crossover and others when titan took it over they and i think at the time it felt more ambitious And it felt a bit more structured and a bit more deliberate.

So it was 2014.

So it was very much off the back of the success of the 50th anniversary.

And they launched with, and it was, it was during the period between the interregnum between the time of doctor and deep breath.

Um, So they launched it with two ongoing series, one focused on The Tenth Doctor and one focused on The Eleventh Doctor.

So by ongoing series, you should explain for people who don't follow American comic books, we mean that's one that doesn't have a set number of issues that it's going to run for.

i can just go with the flow of this that's the premise of this story is that it's a very malleable story being made up by somebody well but what's clever we'll get to the twist now

I mean, I think the idea for the character is brilliant.

Yeah, no, he's great.

He's endured for a reason.

How long? Well, first one was, I'm pretty sure, it was 77 or 78.

Because I've got a feeling, I said 78, I've got a feeling it might actually have been 77.

Because one of the odd things about why 2000 AD started was because Star Wars had come out in the US.

Yeah, 1977.

Is this what you were saying earlier about booking, you know, a great booking?

Like Peanuts, Peanuts comics.

Yeah.

The old pro- you know, sort of old school.

It wasn't a newspaper, but old school serialized, you know, newspaper comic strips.

Um, but, you know, there was such a, a ...

Gary Russell did that very well because there was, you know, there was a, there'd be a great image in each one, and there'd be a strong idea and something you could take away.

Oh, that image of the, the cyber-manified Eighth Doctor in one of them, oh, that lived in my head for years afterwards.

Come on.