"Doctor Who" or "The Doctor" ???

The author Paul Cornell put the cat amongst the pigeons last weekend on Twitter. He suggested that the name of the lead character in TV's longest running science fiction series is called 'Doctor Who'. I didn't see the original piece but I did the see the aftermath. 

Here's my four-penneth and I think it goes something to clarifying Cornell's original suggestion. 

Yes, he is called 'the Doctor'. This is what he refers to himself as and what characters within the narrative of the series call him.

However, outside the show - in the real world that us mortals inhabit - he is often referred to as 'Doctor Who' (or sometimes in print, abbreviated to 'Dr. Who' - see World Distributors, TVComic etc...) In the real world, it's done to differentiate between the character of our favourite Time Lord and medical professionals in general. For example, the question "Have you seen the new Doctor?" could refer to the start of a discussion on Peter Capaldi's first appearance as the lead character in the BBCtv series or to the new GP who's just started working at the local practice. It's more clearer what is being talked about if the term "Doctor Who" is used for the former and "the Doctor" is used for the latter - especially when engaging in conversation with non-fans. 

There's exceptions to every rule of course. It wouldn't be reality if there weren't. Back in the early days of the series, 'the Doctor' was referred to in script directions as 'Doctor Who'. This was allegedly to differentiate the character from any actual doctor that appeared in the script. It also ended up being used on the lead actor's credit in the closing titles. As such, new members of the production team - step forward Mr. Gerry Davies - were easily confused. The climax of episode one and the start of episode two of The War Machines in 1966 sees characters on screen refer to William Hartnell's character as 'Doctor Who'. There's also the Doctor signing a document a few stories later as 'Dr. W' and using the pseudonym 'Dr. von Wer' (German for 'Dr. Who'). I'm sure there were letters to Junior Points of View and the production office about this... After all, Twitter hadn't been invented then...

To conclude, as far as I am concerned, it's okay to call him 'Doctor Who' (or 'Dr. Who') outside the context of the series narrative. But woe to any professional scribe who writes dialogue within one of their televised scripts, published novels or audio plays that calls him that... without very good reason! When the phrase "Doctor who?" pops up in dialogue in the show, the lead character will always give the speaker a funny look. It's because he doesn't like it one bit...

Here's a rare issue of Whovians In Love that sums up the passion of fan opinion...

Target - The Series It Once Was!

After completing his third series of 'Doctor Who' in 1977, producer Philip Hinchcliffe was asked by his bosses to swap producer roles with Graham Williams. Williams had been developing a new police series entitled 'Hackett' that would be the BBC's answer to ITV's 'The Sweeney'.

The series – under Hinchcliffe – evolved into 'Target' starring 70s medallion man Patrick Mower as Det.Sup. Steve Hackett – lead copper of a team dedicated to bringing down untouchable criminals in Southampton (!). His co-stars were Brendan Price as Bonny, Vivien Heilborn as Louise and Philip Madoc as his boss, Det.Chief.Sup.Tate.

The series was grim. It was widely criticised for its violence and although it went to a second series, the final episodes were noticeably toned down.

As part of its special event 'Philip Hinchcliffe in Conversation', QUAD in Derby will be screening the third episode of the first run. Entitled 'Big Elephant', it sees Hackett and his team searching for a merchant seaman who is unaware that hash he has stolen is actually a quarter of a million pounds worth of heroin. 

The episode has many connections with 'Doctor Who' and the following list of ten is by no means exhaustive.

- 'Big Elephant' is written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin – known to the 'Doctor Who' production office as the Bristol Boys, they were 'discovered by the series' script editor – Terrance Dicks – in the early seventies when he commissioned them to pen 'The Claws of Axos' for Jon Pertwee's Doctor. They went on to script three of 'Target's first series and the opener for the second.

- Like the Bristol Boys, director Douglas Camfield cut his teeth on 'Doctor Who'. Having worked as a Floor Manager on the very first episode, he had graduated to a full-blown director by the show's second year. He directed more episodes of the original series than any other including the whole of the mammoth 12-part 'Daleks' Master Plan' and the 8-part 'The Invasion' which featured the debut of UNIT.

- Joanne – the heroin addict – is played by Katy Manning – famous for her role as the loveable and loyal Jo Grant during the bulk of Jon Pertwee's time on the series. It's a massive departure for Manning and a strong performance and characterisation that the actress is still proud of today.

- Series regulars Philip Madoc and Brendan Price are both no strangers to 'Doctor Who'. By the time of 'Target', the acclaimed Welsh actor Philip Madoc had amassed three major guest starring roles in the show and would go on to make another in 1978. He also pops up in the second 'Doctor Who' movie as a typically shady character. One of Brendan Price's earliest TV roles was the previous year in 'Doctor Who's 'The Face of Evil' where he played Tomas – a close friend of future companion, Leela.

- Playing the main villain – Cetti - in 'Big Elephant' is Walter Randall. Randall was one of Douglas Camfield's repertory company of actors who pop up in many of his TV productions. Randall is particularly familiar to Who fans as the equally sadistic El Akir in 'The Crusades' and as the hapless technician who is the first to turn into a Primord in 'Inferno'. Both of these performances were under Camfield's direction.

- Driving the London taxi in the later half of the episode is Derek Martin – who was months away from his ground-breaking role in GF Newman's 'Law & Order'. He appears in many 'Doctor Who' stories from the first ten years of the show usually as part of the Havoc stunt team. He's the first soldier to spot the Yeti when they attack the army in Covent Garden's market in 'The Web of Fear'. He later achieved more widespread fame as taxi driver (coincidence?) Charlie Slater in 'EastEnders'

- The theme and incidental music for 'Target' are by Dudley Simpson. Simpson had first worked on 'Doctor Who' in 1964 as composer for 'Planet of Giants' – the last episode of which was also Douglas Camfield's directorial debut. For 'Target's theme music, he provides a strident brass-led action piece that accompanies.........

- …....Sid Sutton's title sequence which uses rota scoping animation of two men in pursuit over a warehouse roof. The simplified effect is familiar to anyone who remembers a certain ground-breaking Jackson Five music video from around the same period. Sutton would go on to create the title sequences for Tom Baker's final season in the role of the Doctor as well as modified ones for Peter Davison and Colin Baker.

- Fred Hamilton was 'Target's film cameraman. Hamilton worked on the 'Doctor Who' series on-and-off for many years and it was he who was responsible for the camera work on 'Spearhead from Space' – the only adventure to be shot entirely on film.

- The designer of 'Big Elephant' was John Hurst. He had already performed the same job on 'Planet of the Daleks' for Jon Pertwee's 'Doctor Who' and would go on to design 'The Caves of Androzani' for Douglas Camfield's former colleague and protégée Graeme Harper in 1984. He would also become a mainstay of 'Target's BBC descendants 'Shoestring' and 'Bergerac'.

Watching 'Target' again, one is struck by the dialogue which is gritty to the point that it becomes almost parody. 'Big Elephant' seems to use every conceivable slang term for 'cannabis' and 'heroin' that was available in the late seventies. 

By way of a teaser, I've picked out 25 (yes, 25!) choices moments of dialogue:

“We've got one. He's a real scrunter!”

“We've gotta score tonight, Des. We got to!”

“Right Louise, get ya knickers on!”

“Part-time whore bag are ya?”

“Pathetic little cow!”

"Bastard!"

“It's brown sugar!”

“He's walking about with half a million quids worth of big elephant in his pocket.” (See what they did there.)

“Right. Round the back!”

“Haven't got any Charlie have you?”

“Yer a bloody junkie, aren't ya?”

“Bonnie. Round the back!”

“What you doing here? You a queen?” “No, but there's a couple in there if you're lookin'”

“You know the longest time I've spent with a woman is seven and a half minutes!”

“Some pig called Cetti! I want you to help me stick him.”

“I'm clean, man!”

“I would nae have a drink with you, you bastard!”

“This job is worth fifty quid. It's hash. Lebanese.”

“Does anybody want to buy some pot?”

“He's a muff artist!”

“Well, ya daft cow. Do you want some or what?”

“Frank. Harry. Round the back!”

“This is my patch!”

“Gerroff me, ya square-headed bastards!”

“Shit!”

Target – Big Elephant

TX – 23.09.1977

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin

Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe

Directed by Douglas Camfield

Starring Patrick Mower, Brendan Price, Vivien Heilborn and Philip Madoc

with Ken Hutchison, Katy Manning, Walter Randall, Alan Rebbeck, Hugh Fraser.

Full IMDB listing here.

Philip Hinchcliffe In Conversation – Derby QUAD – Friday 5 December 2014 – 7.30pm – Details here.


STOP PRESS: (4/12/2014) Due to unforseen clearance issues involving the whole 'Target' TV series which didn't come to light until late in the day, QUAD are now unable to screen 'Big Elephant'. It will be replaced in the schedule by an episode of the Philip Hinchcliffe-produced 'Private Schulz' which starred Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson. 

Doctor Who and the Zarbi - in colour!

The original scan
of the article

Photographs from the early days of 'Doctor Who' hold a special visual record of the era. Often it is because some of the many episodes produced during the 1960s are no longer in existence having been wiped or destroyed by a BBC too impoverished at the time to be able to store or keep them for posterity. The rise of home video and the internet now means that these errant TV programmes are now more sorely missed than ever before.

But for the case of the episodes that DO exist, old photographs can offer up a different perspective on the murky black and white recording of the actual shows themselves. They can reveal the detail of William Hartnell's wig and the sticky tape holding together the Cybermen's invasion force. Colour photographs can also supply us with the richness of the cloth used to clothe the actors in such productions as 'Marco Polo' and 'The Crusades'.

It's widely been known in 'Doctor Who' circles that colour photos existed from 'The Web Planet' - the only serial to feature the fondly remembered Zarbi and Menoptera. They were published by the Australian Woman's Weekly in 1965 and showed not just the eponymous monsters but also their creator - writer and former journalist for the magazine Bill Strutton. 

There has been much debate as to whether these stills were actually colour and had not been "colorised"  most recently on Roobarb's forum. Reasonably high quality scans of the page featuring the photographs appear on the 'AWW' archive website but these are quite yellowy and betray the age of the magazine itself. The photos also suffer from the poor printing of the period. These factors coupled with the fact that the Zarbi, the Menoptera and the planet Vortis weren't exactly the most colourful subjects for a colour camera have added to the opinion that the images may have been post-coloured monochrome images. 

Before and after comparison

I've had a close look at these pictures. I've zoomed into them and studied every mark on them - far too much some might say to remain sane. I did originally think they were coloured - abeit lightly - and that they originated on black and white film. 

However, I've now run them through some colour correction processes in Photoshop and have revised my opinion of them. They are real colour images. 

The yellowy-orange pall is consistent with photos taken in a television studio at the time. There's similar colour photos with the same 'tint' from other stories of the period. The colours are consistent throughout the images.

I've taken the liberty and attempted to restore the images to their 'original' colour and also to remove as much as possible the yellowy TV studio lighting. This I believe has left us with a more 'true' colour of the subjects. I don't profess to be an expert of this sort of restoration but I think I've made them look a bit more like proper photos rather than poorly printed pictures from a 50 year old magazine.

Sadly, the colours reveal very little... The Zarbi are black and the fur trims on the Menoptera appear to be white - or at least a very pale yellow. The only real revelation from this little project is the astounding fact that one of Vortis's moons is pink...... ish!

Click for larger image

The Official Public Sector Technobabble Generator

Anyone who knows me will know that I have two major bees-in-my-bonnet. One is so-called 'Plain English' - the sort that sucks the life out of sentences by simplifying them to the point they become meaningless. 

The other is, oddly enough, 'Corporate Jargon'. In particular the sort of professional jargon that only workers in specific industries - like marketing and the public sector - use but allow to spill over into the public domain. Ugly terms like 'Sustainability' and 'Legacy Projects' will be familiar to fans of the BBC comedy 'Twenty-Twelve' - terms that are rendered meaningless by the fact that the folk who use them can't even agree on what they mean...

The following is my own little contribution to the area. I created it a few years ago whilst I was working for an unnamed city council - though you can possibly guess which one from some of the options below. 

I hope it provides you with at least a few minutes of unbridled pleasure.

Me? I'm off to work further on my "Sustainable Inner-city Re-alignment Initiative."

Click for larger view

The Complete History of Dr. Who - part three

by our Sun TV Reporter

There was an attempt by Stephen Spielburg to make a big Hollywood movie about Doctor Who in the mid-nineties with the lead being played by Paul Nicholas but this was too expensive to make and was made into a series of new adventure books instead that were so adult and clever, they were unreadable and were eventually published by Poundland.

It wasn’t until 2004 that Doctor Who returned to BBC television screens when popular Coromation Street creator - Hustler T. Davis was hired to write it all. Originally, Davis made it as a queer folk programme but BBC bosses told him to ban it and he made it into a Saturday night game show instead. The new Doctor was played by ex-crack actor, Christopher Ecclestone and his companion was played by former S Club 7 pop singer Billy J. Piper. They lived as a married couple with Piper’s mother and her black teenage friend on a London council estate in Cardiff and had great success battling Slimey Veens from the planet Rastafairius and plastic Ortons disguised as waxwork David Beckhams. It was a huge success but after Ecclestone was cited as the other woman in his co-star’s divorce to Captain America star Chris Evans, he was sacked for being too northern. 

He was quickly replaced by top actor David Tennants who had previously been a casanova with many women in Blackpool. He had also appeared in a couple of Doctor Who audio plays that nobody bought any more because the TV series was too popular again.

His first stories debuted at Easter in a special movie episode entitled “The Boxing Day Invasion” and went on to even bigger success with stories that featured him meeting one of the last surviving Doctor Who companion Elizabeth Sladden played by Sara Jan Smit and her robot bitch.

Billy J. Piper eventually left to join independent television's successful night time chat lines on ITV2 as a prostitute whilst the series itself welcomed its first African companion, Freda Agamemon. She played Marfa as a much darker character to the ones viewers were used to.

The series had now become so successful that two spin-offs span off from the series .Touchwood featured John Barrowlad as Captain Jack Sparrow – a gay, homosexual pirate from the year one million who sets up a top secret organisation in Swansea to battle alien sex whilst Elizabeth Sladden appeared in a children’s version that didn’t.

Meanwhile, the Doctor had teamed up with comedian Catherine Bate – one half of the comedy duo French and Catherine but David Tennants had now now become too famous and well-liked. He had to leave. Getting rid of him was a difficult task and it took four special episodes to get the job done.

The eleventh Doctor Who would be played by a much younger actor called Matt Smith. He was a former sports reporter with ITV Sports and was the youngest ever child actor since the last one to play the time lord.

Matt Smith – who was the twin son of Munsters' star Fred Gwynne – remained with the series as it hit the big time throughout the world. For the show's 50^th birthday, he appeared in person with the previous Doctor Who in a 3D special episode entitled 'The Day of Doctor Who and the Daleks'. The movie length feature was broadcast throughout the known world and was watched by every living person on the planet. Twice. Making it the most watched single thing ever in the history of all creation – though since Norris McWhirter is now dead, this cannot be verified for the next Guinness Book of Records.

When Matt Smith became too young to play the oldest Doctor, he was replaced by former sad fan Peter Garribaldi who was old enough to remember Matt Smith before he was born. When he was told about getting the role, Peter was working at 10 Downing Street as a press officer and swore a lot down the phone at producer Stephen Moffatt. They laughed about it afterwards. A bit.

The new Doctor – together with his newish companion Clara Oswald Mosley – returns in a new series of adventures later this month when the new series will be available to the public via a series of downloads courtesy of BBC Miami.

Questions are still being asked in Parliament but these tend to be ones about whether the new Master should wear a hoodie.

Check out the links on the right for the previous two parts of this exhausting history.

Tonight's Episode - "Top Ten TV Titles"

What is it with writers and producers today? 

What ever happened to the wonderfully evocative and sometime lurid titles of TV episodes we used to have? 

The eagerness with which we waited on any Quinn Martin detective show for that rich baritone announcer to reveal “Tonight's Episode” and win the bet as to whether it contained either the word 'murder' or 'death' somewhere in it.

These days, episode titles seem somewhat repetitive and hum drum. There was a phase - not so long ago - when all episode titles seemed to consist of a single word – usually something like 'Gambit' or 'Survival' or 'Flashpoint'. These days though the cliches come thick and fast. Often episode titles are simply a pointer – a two to three word precis of the gist of the plot. 'Daleks in Manhattan' is probably the worst offender of recent years.

In the interest of piquing curiosity in the subject, I present my own Top Ten Episode Titles in No Particular Order.

1. Public Eye - You Think It'll Be Marvellous – But It's Always a Rabbit (1965 – 1.10). The sixties/seventies private eye series that starred the late Alfred Burke always gave good titles. Often they were quotes from dialogue in the ever quirky scripts. 

2. Callan: Nice People Die At Home (1969 – 2.14) Nice and grim as one would expect from Callan.

3. Star Trek: For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (1969 – 3.08) Another dialogue quote from a series that also enjoyed quoting the classics and quite elegantly pretentious.

4. Doctor Who: The Death of Doctor Who (1965 – 2.34) A good lurid title from Terry Nation which is almost designed to piss off the nerd. Needless to say, the TV programme referred to in the title is still going strong after fifty or so years...

5. Space 1999: The Rules of Luton (1976 – 2.07) Amuses me every time I see this episode title. The story goes that the American producer saw the name 'Luton' on a road sign on the way to the studio and decided it would make a good name for a planet of intelligent trees. 

6. Cannon: Bad Cats and Sudden Death (1972 – 2.01) It's for titles like these that the Quinn Martin announcer's voice was purposely trained.

7. The Streets of San Francisco: A Trout in the Milk (1973 – 1.13) You really want to see this episode.

8. Hawaii Five-0: Three Dead Cows at Makapuu part one (1970 – 2.23) You probably don't want to see this episode.

9. Mannix: Skid Marks on a Dry Run (1967 – 1.2) Heh. Heh. It says 'Skid Marks'.

10. The Saint: The Effete Angler (1962 – 1.09) Fishing for trouble!

And while we are at it... here's a spelling error from 'Galactica 1980'.

A Game for 2-4 Players Based on the Successful TV Series

Board games based on TV shows were a part of everyone 70s kid's childhood. Some were good, some were desperate. And by that I mean that playing them required a degree in quantum physics to understand the rules of a game that had as much to do with the TV show they were based on as they did to a cantaloupe.

I had several of these games. Mostly they were Christmas presents and invariably they were based on a love for the TV series or a particularly convincing TV ad.

There were two based on 'Doctor Who' – one was a really disappointing board and dice game in which you had to visit four planets and do something heroic to save the galaxy. It did have a nice perfunctory TARDIS shaped shaker for the dice though. The version I had also came with a giant sticker of Tom Baker on the box – evidently he hadn't been cast as the Doctor or given his permission for his image to be used when the game was first released. You do have to admire the gall of Denys Fisher.

There was also War of the Daleks. This was a rather more elaborate affair with little silver and gold plastic Daleks on a raised box-like board that spun round and knocked playing counters over. Clumsy Daleks were the scourge of the universe in 1977. I still have one of the Daleks but not the game itself. I turned it into a key chain in the 80s. Poor thing!

The board game based on the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson show 'Space: 1999' was another kettle of fish. Evidently, the creators of the game jumped in to licence their product very early on and had little more than script notes for the first episode to go on – or so it seemed. A large circular grid-like playing board on which conical playing pieces doubled for Eagle spacecraft saw players battle through radiation fields to get nuclear charges (small pegs that looked like rejects from an old Mastermind set) back to Moonbase Alpha. In fact, the only connection with John Koenig and his lunar heroes was the exciting cover art and the odd name in the instruction booklet. Disappointing in all aspects and dull beyond compare.

I also had a game based on the old ITV sitcom 'On The Buses'. This was actually quite fun. Little red buses trundled around a playing board picking up vac-formed plastic passengers avoiding the dreaded 'Blakey' card – which featured a lovely and threatening piece of artwork of the character played by Stephen Lewis in the series. When the card was played, you couldn't help but let out a “Heeehhh! I've got you Butler!!”.

Board games aren't what they used to be and the nation's charity shops contain too few of the nostalgic best. Ebay is now their rest home where prices (and postage) pay for their retirement from service. 

Of course, some board games never even made it into production...

The Complete History of Dr.Who - part two

by our Sun TV reporter

In an attempt to get more realism into the series, one of Dr.Who’s companions was a junkie called Katie who, in a very nototious episode, tackled a Dalek in the nude! The scene caused much controversy and questions were asked in Parliament.

When John Pertbum left to become Wurzel Gummidge and form his own pop group called The Wurzels, producer John Nathan Turner hand-picked Tom Baker for the part after seeing him in a famous 70s horror film called 'George and the Dragon' in which he played an evil railway station manager who turned into a begonia. The idea provided the inspiration for one of his early classic stories...The Pyramids on Mars.

Things now looked rosy for Dr.Who but soon Mary Whitehouse was on the war path - complaining about the show’s nudity and bad language. BBC bosses were furious and told the producer to turn the series into a sitcom.Tom Baker eventually married his then companion, Mary Tamm - the famous film actress wife of Jon Voight in the movie 'The Oddessaphile' Unfortunately, word got out to the press that he was also having an affair with Leela Ward; another of his companions in Paris. She became pregnant during the filming of 'The Destiny of Dr.Who and the Daleks' and had to go. Tom Baker finally turned to alcohol and became so drunk, he was told to leave, with the producers threatening to replace him with a WOMAN!

After filming his last story, 'Logopopolis' and after a massive 14,000 episodes in the role (making him the longest Dr.Who in the world), Baker left, dying a year or so later, drunk and penniless in a basement flat in Chiswick, South London.

The show went on with child actor Peter Davidson assuming the role of Dr.Who, now played as a cricketing country vet of the 1940s. It was at this point that Dr.Who became huge in America with millions of fans spending lots of money on merchandise and non-recyclable pin badges. To celebrate this, the BBC got together all of the old Doctors and made a special ninety minute film called“The Five Dr.Whos”. Richard Harris replaced the late William Hartnell who was dead whilst the late Tom Baker was played by a waxwork, shape-changing robot called K-9.

Eventually Peter Davidson grew too old to play the youngest Dr.Who and was replaced the overhearing actor Colin Farrell who was once famous for playing JR in the British version of Dallas which was about trucks.. Wanting to make himself stand out, he played the new Dr.Who as a tasteless figure who wore loud clothes and shouted and spat at people. Controversy once again raised its ugly head when scenes of Colin eating a live rat were accidentally broadcast during episode three of “The Two Dr.Whos”. Questions were asked in Parliament and, as such, the series was axed.

After fire-bombing the BBC, a team of SAS lesbian fans took Nicholas Witchell and Sue Lawley hostage in the BBC newsroom, in an attempt to gain a reprive for the show. The BBC bought the show back but it was now on trial; quite literally! Colin was found guilty and sent to prison whilst the little Scottish actor Sylvester McStallone took over the main role of Dr.Who again. McStallone decided to play the character as a darker person and wore special boot-polish make-up to make him appear even blacker.

But the series was now too bad to be allowed to continue and the BBC killed it off. Nobody noticed when it stopped being shown opposite EasteNders one stormy night in December 1989.

There was an attempt by Stephen Spielberg to make a big Hollywood movie about it in the mid-nineties with the lead being played by The McGann Brothers - a popular singing quartet from Liverpool  But this was too expensive to make and was eventually adapted into a series of new adventure books instead that were so adult and clever, they were unreadable and were eventually published by Poundland.

to be continued

The Man from THE SECOND HAND BOOKSHOP

Back in the 70s I used to frequent second hand bookshops. Indeed, there used to be a few in Derby where you could take your old paperbacks and exchange them for either a bit a cash or something new to get your teeth into. Certain books became very familiar in these places. Not necessarily because they were crap and unwanted but simply because there were dozens of them. The novels based on 'The Man from UNCLE regularly cropped up.

I have to say I ended up with a near complete set over the space of a few months simply by keeping my eyes open and having 10p or so spare in my pocket. To be honest, the novels themselves were often unreadable drivel based losely on the successful TV series. At the time, it wasn't a crime to produce merchandise that had little relevance to the brand it was part of. You only have to look at the Doctor Who annuals that World Distributors inflicted on kids each Christmas. But the best thing about the books were their often lurid titles - "The Stone Cold Dead in the Market Affair" is a classic.

Anyhow, this is a roundabout way of saying I was inspired to create some more 'Doctor Who' merchandise that has never been released. Last year I posted three covers for paperback books based on "The Men from UNIT" that bore more than a passing resemblance to those UNCLE novels. They were quite popular with my Facebook book friends and that nice Mark Gatiss fellow even tweeted me to say that he thought he had a set of them somewhere.

I've managed to dig around my loft and having failed to find anything of interest, I've knocked this complete set up just so I can say I now have the complete set. (You can click on the image to enlarge it) Sad to day that I failed to obtain the complete set of 'Man from UNCLE' books back in the 70s and I now only have one. I still haven't made it past the first chapter.



But I'm sure these little gems would be read and dog-eared by the end of the week.

First post...

This is the first bit of writing for my new blog. You don't need to read this as I'm only testing it and getting to know how it all works and shit. If you have read this far, you probably have time on your hands unlike me who never seems to have enough. I honestly don't know why I've typed this much already as it's only just a short bit of writing to see how this thing works as this is my first blog as such. Well, I tried one whilst I was at university but got bored with it as it seemed to be just blogging for the sake of it. I think I made about four posts and gave up. It's still online somewhere - can't remember where or even what I called it. The weather's nice today isn't it? Makes a change. Maybe I should stop writing now as I can't think of anything other than small talk. You still reading this? Then get a life mate.... 

Just going to post an image to see how that works.

Oooo! It does work. Now what.... Maybe I'll come back to this later and explain what I intend to do with this blog when I've thought more about it. I'm so rash. Maybe I won't come back. If I don't, it's been nice chatting to you (though I seem to have been the one doing all the chatting). Otherwise, catch you later.