On Monday I used the Colorsoft to listen to the last few episodes of Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully, The Complete Series 1 and 2, *** a Radio 4 science fiction comedy written by Eddie Robson, and script-edited by Arthur Matthews. The first series got it off to a good start, with tv legends Peter Davison and Jan Francis playing the parents of village rebel leader Katherine Parkinson. Season two loses something with the departure of Julian Rhind-Tutt as the alien leader, but there were still some very funny episodes.
On Tuesday I finished a French-language album by Jean-Michael Charlier and Albert Uderzo, L’Ecole des aigles, *** first in a series of Biggles-esque fighter pilot comics. When I receive my small ALCS payment each year (make sure you sign up, if you’re a writer), I like to treat myself. Last year it was a little couch for my office, and this year I bought a full set of Tanguy et Laverdure omnibuses on eBay, having never read one before. Not sure what got into me! But this one got the series off to a good start, even if the lettering was a bit hard to read at times.
On Wednesday I finished another album in French, Je n’oublie rien!, **** the first in a series of spin-offs about Thorgal’s frenemy, Kriss de Valnor. It’s pretty miserable stuff, as we see the tribulations that led to her violent life of crime, but it’s a gripping story and the art by G. De Vita always looks good. Y. Sente provides the scenario. I recently discovered that Izneo, the French answer to Comixology, is still going, and still available in the UK, despite having closed its English-language website. And what’s more, the range of albums contained in their subscription has massively increased, and now includes loads of my favourites, like Thorgal, Lucky Luke and Michel Vaillant. I'm in heaven!
On Thursday I read The Finger, ** a short set of inconsequential stories by William Burroughs from the turquoise Penguin Moderns series, about junkies, thieves and paedophiles. I went to Goodreads to give it two stars and realised that I had already done so, back in 2018. I’ve now gone through the box set and turned around all those I’ve already read, so this disaster never happens again.
On Friday it was back to the Kindle Colorsoft to listen to Counter-Measures, Series 3, **** which sadly is the last series of this Doctor Who spin-off available on Audible, and frustratingly ends on a cliffhanger, but it was all very well done. The writers of this series are Matt Fitton, John Dorney, Justin Richards and Ken Bentley. I particularly liked “The Concrete Cage”, set in an apparently haunted tower block, and “Unto the Breach”, which sends some of the team off to East Germany for a Cold War adventure. A rather fun thing I did while listening to some of this set was download a bunch of photographs of the cast, from Doctor Who and elsewhere, upload them as a “Counter-Measures” collection to Amazon Photos, and then set it as my television’s screensaver to play while the audiobook was playing. It was very satisfying when the voices happened to line up with the photos.
On Saturday I finished off a novel, Doctor Who: Jubilee by Robert Shearman. ***** Every single one of the original Doctor Who television stories has now become both a novel and an audiobook, so BBC Books have begun to cast the net wider. This book is a novelisation of an acclaimed Big Finish story, originally released on CD and then adapted as the tv episode “Rose” – which Robert Shearman also adapted as a novel. This version sees the sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe arrive in 2003, in an England about to celebrate the 100th jubilee of the Doctor and Evelyn defeating the Daleks, an adventure that they don’t (at first) remember. The English have kept one Dalek alive, and have used leftover Dalek technology to build an empire. I thought it was terrific, an interesting critique of the Doctor’s usual approach – to land somewhere, cause social upheaval for a day or two, then move on – and also a warning about turning dangerous stuff into jokes, lest you forget how dangerous they actually are. I hope BBC Books commission more Big Finish adaptations, because it works wonderfully well: it has the heft of a classic story but not the overfamiliarity.
On Sunday (today) I finished a silver Penguin Mini Modern, Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler, **** an enjoyable bit of hard-boiled crime fiction about the murder of a pornographer. That makes it 277 days of finishing a book or an audiobook every day…
