#christopher baker

[oldschoolfrp]

Encounter with the wizard's minions (Christopher Baker, aka Fangorn, White Dwarf 2, Aug/Sept 1977)

[tvmigraine]

FORGOTTEN LIVES: Christopher Baker

Before we begin! Remember to get a copy of the Forgotten Lives Omnibus at this link! I believe pre-orders are open until the 1st of September, you may miss your chance to get this book - don't miss out!

It's no secret to any Classic Who fan (or even modern Who) that the BBC failed to maintain classic stories, with a many missing episodes reanimated to fill these spaces and a majority of Who's third season completely lost to time. Of course, without Doctor Who at home, fans had to find other places to have the Doctor's adventures at home. In 1964 we'd see the first Doctor Who novel released, alongside something much more important to today's discussion - the TV Comics.

I originally made the claim that Christopher Baker (1937-2011) had no proper ties to the show, but I was actually wrong about that. While he wasn't tied down by Doctor Who like other Morbius Doctors were, he was a Production Assistant at the BBC during the 70s. He also went on as a director for shows like Emmerdale and Star Cops later in his career during the 80s.

While the Doctor himself is certainly interesting, I think it's more interesting to discuss his companions for this story. Rather than running into a companion surrogate on an adventure, the Doctor travels with his two children - Jilly and Cedric. As one of the few Doctors in this book with a definitive final story, we get to experience the lives of Jilly and Cedric fully as they travel with their father through time and space.

We've never had the opportunity to meet the children of the Doctor before, so this presents a unique chance to learn more about the Doctor without pulling away the curtain. The idea of the Doctor travelling with two of his children may feel familiar to fans of the TV comics, which introduced us to John and Gillian Who, two other grandchildren - the TV Comics were unable to use the television companions for a time, so instead had the 1st and 2nd Doctors travel with two other grandchildren on adventures. Getting to see more of the paternal side of the Doctor was refreshing, a side that I'd argue we haven't seen since Hartnell's care for characters like Susan, Vicki and Dodo. Cedric and Jilly present a fun dynamic with their Doctor, where he can try and raise them to follow some of the lessons he's taught himself while they offer him a relationship he rarely has the luxury for.

There is other notable things about this Doctor that I personally love. Have you ever read a classic sci-fi from 50, 70, 90 years ago only to find it makes some radical prediction of the future that never came true? This story does much the same thing, with the astonishing year where man has managed to make it to Venus being 1975. For a story written as if it came out in the 40s, 1975 helps it both fit with the fiction of the time's improper predictions while also... honestly just being fun.

The design for the Doctor stands out due to his Pilgrim aesthetic, a nice way of making him seem more anachronistic than even some later Doctors after him. It also nicely contrasts with the design for his TARDIS - the metal pillars give it a feeling reminiscent of the 8th Doctor's TARDIS, while the overall design feels like a cathedral. Considering the subject matter of his first story, The Cross of Venus, it feels apt.

I'm going to be more candid than usual, because the Third Doctor has a personal importance to me. I want to be a writer someday and I'd wanted to write for Doctor Who since I was a kid, but I had fallen out of my passion for both since starting uni and struggling with mental health for a while. Last year, before my second year of uni started, I chose to pick up Forgotten Lives 1&2 because the money went to a good cause (please support Alzheimer's Research). All of the stories in these books helped pull my love of Doctor Who back out, even prompting me to bring out all my old DVDs and start collecting again. As much as my renewed love for the show is thanks to Obverse Books and everyone else involved, my love for writing and storytelling was brought about by "The First Englishmen". It's hard for me to properly explain, but it was @pluralzalpha's story that specifically made me write again, telling the first proper story I had since I was in school. So as dopey as it is, I have immense gratitude both to him and everyone else who worked on Forgotten Lives for getting me to create again. And it's why, so long as pre-orders are open, I'll insist anybody with interest should pick up this book. Support the release and raise money to fight Alzheimers.

For more insight into the creative process of every author that worked on Forgotten Lives, you can go to @forgottenlivesobverse and find interviews from everyone involved across the books. If you're looking for insight on how the outfits were designed, you can go to Paul Hanley's Patreon and find what went into designing each Doctor.

Here's what to expect from the Third Doctor's adventures, travelling time and space with his son and daughter. Expect to see a saboteur on Venus and covered up history.

THE CROSS OF VENUS by Andrew Hickey

THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN by Daniel Tessier

RETROGENESIS (Part Three) by Philip Purser-Hallard

SWAN SONG by Andrew Hickey

Our next Doctor will be the Philip Hinchcliffe Doctor, who shows how art can influence the writing. Until then, I wish you all well and don't be scared to create something.

[stradakiev]

Oh you like my hatred for the military industrial complex? Thanks, I got it from doctor who.

[blufruity]

Because I couldn't resist... You get one more! Who doesn't love a self-portrait? What a journey! Thanks for coming along! The background of this piece has a TON of easter eggs from across 60 YEARS of Doctor Who! What can you spot?

[nothingofpracticalgardening]

20 Versions of Sherlock Holmes Ranked from Most to Least Likely to Set a Building on Fire in a Fit of Rage

[thena0315]

[mizgnomer]

"...Is The Doctor" magazine covers from Doctor Who Magazine From 1982 to 2024 Honorable mention: Including Sylvester McCoy's first cover even though it doesn't say he "is The Doctor" - because it seems rude to exclude him from this post:

[hopelesslyprosaic]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back full force into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[weirdlookindog]

Christopher Lee and Anouska Hempel in deleted scene from Scars of Dracula (1970)

[esqueletosgays]

SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)

Director: Robert Hiltzik Cinematography: Benjamin Davis

[typewriter-worries]

It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

[the-dictionary-verified]

The Doctors Ranked by How Easily their Number Fits into their Name

Basically Poetry

David Tennant

W1lliam Hartnell

Peter DaVison

Jod13 Whittaker

You see the vision but it's a bit clunky

Patrick Twoughton

John Perthree

Colin 6aker

Sylves7er McCoy

It's still legible but the methods are getting worse

TOIVI Baker

Really Struggling here

Ma11 Smith

Petwelve Capaldi

Require Explanations and Apologies

p8ul McGann - I just picked a letter at random sorry p8ul

Cnristopner Eccleston - when you think about it what is h but a really tall n?

cIaVid tennant - four and ten? you kinda see it right?

IVcuti GatVVa - three fives? fifteen? hmm? right??

[atarial]

ok now i've got all the doctors done! :D

[pluralzalpha]

Oh my god, I love it! Thank you so much!

Be the change you want to see in the world

Desperately needed someone to draw that scene in The First Englishmen where Jilly teaches cavemen to make tea while using a skull, so I decided to do it lmao

For curious people, I drew a Merc's Rhino skull (reference picture under the cut)

(also pretty sure this is the first FL fanart on this site lmao)

[thealdersgateoffice]

Christopher Chung - aka Roddy Ho - reminiscing on Instagram 🐌🐎

[antiphotogenicfilmographer]

sometimes i ask myself who my favorite doctor is and i start listing them out:

well the 11th doctor was my first, so he has a special place in my heart

but the 12th doctor is poetry in motion

and then 9 is absolutely iconic

15 is really growing on me too

yet all those answers are wrong.

it is and always has been that cunty diva 6 with his cat pin and homicidal tendencies