A Table Comparing Tenures of Prime Ministers With Those of Doctor Whos

Tenure	Doctor Who	Prime Minister
November 1963 to October 1964	William Hartnell	Alec Douglas-Home
October 1964 to October 1966		Harold Wilson
October 1966 to June 1969	Patrick Troughton
January 1970 to June 1970	Jon Pertwee
June 1970 to March 1974		Edward Heath
March to June 1974		Harold Wilson
June 1974 to April 1976	Tom Baker
April 1976 to May 1979		James Callaghan
May 1979 to March 1981		Margaret Thatcher
March 1981 to March 1984	Peter Davison
March 1984 to December 1986	Colin Baker
September 1987 to November 1989	Sylvester McCoy
January 1990 to November 1990	Sylvester McCoy (series off-air, technically still incumbent)
November 1990 to April 1996		John Major
May 1996	Paul McGann
May 1996 to May 1997	Paul McGann (series off-air, technically still incumbent)
May 1997 to March 2005		Tony Blair
March to June 2005	Christopher Eccleston
June 2005 to June 2007	David Tennant
June 2007 to January 2010		Gordon Brown
January 2010 to May 2010	Matt Smith
May 2010 to December 2013		David Cameron
January 2014 to July 2016	Peter Capaldi
July 2016 to December 2017		Theresa May

Now That's What I Call One Song to the Tune of Another

Here’s one of the great baffling questions of radio comedy: Why has there never been an I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue compilation release, made up purely of the very best examples of One Song to the Tune of Another?

Just to prove such a release would work, I have come up with my own tracklist for it, consisting of my favourite examples from the show:

Star Wars on the BBC

It is time, once again, for me to plug the name of a popular franchise into the BBC Genome and see what comes up. This time: Star Wars!

Broken Gamebooks #5: Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is probably the greatest single achievement of the Fighting Fantasy range, if not the choose-your-own-adventure genre as a whole. Aimed at an older audience than the main FF range, the four books add up to one massive story with over 2,000 references all told, and are best remembered for some horribly gruesome death scenes, Goya-inspired illustrations and (as befitted the target audience) being really very difficult indeed. But what we’re here for is to discuss the logistical errors in them.

The second book, Khare – Cityport of Traps, has no major errors that I can see – certainly nothing that would render the game (unintentionally) unwinnable. The other three, however...

Long Reads

Bit stuck for things to blog about at the moment, I’m afraid. (There’s a couple of Doctor Who pieces I’d quite like to write, but I want to wait until some of the Series 10 reviews have been bumped off the front page first.) So, to fill time: as the blog is now seven months old and has over 50 posts to its name, I’ve picked out all the long read (or long-ish read, at any rate) articles that I think are particularly good and stuck them in one place for the interested.

The Fighting Fantasy Collection Audit

(NB: Welcome to the new Ludicrously Niche schedule… he said, to both the regular readers. Now the Doctor Who reviews are finished, plan is for a new article every weekend for as long as I can keep it up.)

The 25^th May, 2017 was a stupendous moment for my adventure gamebook collecting, for it was the day I found the only Fighting Fantasy book I’d never read (or, at least, the only book in the main series), number #56 Knights of Doom, in my local second-hand bookshop for the princely sum of 50p. Which was at least £30 less than any online seller was asking for it. (To boot, they also had an original copy of the final book in the original series, Curse of the Mummy, which I only owned as its Wizard Books reprint.)

Now I own every FF gamebook, I thought I’d audit my collection, and in doing so provide a blog post that was literally of interest to me and me alone.

Doctor Who: "The Doctor Falls" Review

“The Doctor Falls” is Peter Capaldi’s third and final series finale, and Steven Moffat’s sixth and also final, although there’s still Christmas to go. Perhaps appropriately, this episode sums up how I feel about their tenures as a whole. The best of it belongs with Vincent van Gogh’s battle with mental illness, whilst the worst of it belongs with the revelation that Davros actually had eyes all along.

Have I Got Radio Times Listings for You

Way back in the 1990s, the producers of TV programmes used to get to write their own synopsises for episodes that would be used in the Radio Times. This was particularly interesting when it came to comedies. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, writers of Red Dwarf, liked to slip in extra jokes: here’s a good one from the original broadcast of “White Hole”, and one from “Better than Life” that subsequently ended up adapted for use in an episode the following year. David Renwick, writer of One Foot in the Grave, deliberately submitted highly misleading descriptions; the ‘unlikely love affair’ described in the synopsis for the first showing of “The Exterminating Angel”, is in fact Margaret trying to set up Mr Swainey on a date, whilst Victor ‘taking to the road’ refers to his new job as a chauffeur.

Whilst having a good laugh at some of these, I thought: What about non-scripted comedy shows – more specifically, panel shows? Did the producers of those ever think to muck about with their listings in such a way? So I trawled through the BBC Genome for every mention of Have I Got News for You it had, and here’s what I found.