OVERVIEW
Do you know your Sontarans from your Silurians? What are the 40 best ways to defeat a Dalek? What are the galactic coordinates of Gallifrey?
Test your knowledge of the last Time Lord and the worlds he's visited in Who-ology, an unforgettable journey through 50 years of DOCTOR WHO.
Packed with facts, figures and stories from the show's entire run, this unique tour of space and time takes you from Totters Lane to Trenzalore, taking in guides to UNIT call signs, details of the inner workings of sonic screwdrivers, and a reliability chart covering every element of the TARDIS.
With tables, charts and illustrations dotted throughout, as well as fascinating lists and exhaustive detail, you won't believe the wonders that await. Are you ready? Then read on, you clever boy. And remember.
Published by Ebury Publishing as BBC BOOKS.
COMMENT
Call an Ambulance! My brain is officially frazzled, lacking the ability to absorb any more information as it spirals uncontrollably out of control.
And it’s all with thanks to BBC BOOKS’ Police Box design wrapped, DOCTOR WHO – THE OFFICIAL MISCELLANY compiled by Cavan Scott & Mark Wright.
Should it include a ‘health warning’ sticker on the cover? Certainly. Your life will never be the same again.
Irrelevant and irreverent in glorious & simultaneous measure that is, literally, regrettably for the post-lunch washing-up of crockery & utensils as it slowly plays host to colonies of bacterial mould as it remains unattended for days, literarily addictive. Ideally, the publishers should have designed into the publication ‘pace-pages’ (never heard of them? Me neither…) that stop you firmly in your reading tracks, with a gentle reminder that “Please, feed the cat” or “Homework to complete” or “Go to Work and earn money”.
How does knowing that Daleks have screeched their infamous battle-cry 496 times across the series, or that Matthew Waterhouse is the youngest actor to play an original TARDIS companion, or that the Third Doctor’s ‘flying car’ was actually called ‘Alien’ help you improve your daily life? It doesn’t but DOCTOR WHO fans are, in Freudian psychology terminology, ‘anally retentive’, scrabbling for every nuance of information whether factual or incredulously creative, and DOCTOR WHO – THE OFFICIAL MISCELLANY will sate that feral appetite.
Impressively, the publication painstakingly charts and abstracts anomalous information from across the 50-year history of the series (and even the major ‘players’ behind the genesis of the series) though the bias is marginally slanted toward the NEW SERIES (to, I assume, meet the expectations of the current purchasing demographic).
Usefully, now that SERIES 7 has completed its televised run, the highlight of this officially sanction tome is four-page assessment – or, quite frankly, demystification – of who and how is River Song (and all of her ‘incarnations’), and such is the detail either the authors have brains the size of a planet and offspring of Douglas Adams or the pause button on their remote control is worn through as they assimilate the exponential strands of the character’s life/lives together into one cohesive lineation. Impressive work, and, as this is an ‘official’ publication it would seem that, perhaps, the ‘timeline’ has been combed through by the series’ Executive Producer (and, effectively, River Song’s ‘parent), Steven Moffat.
Mild omission: page 216 – the ‘stealth’ Cyberman was featured in ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN.
Mild omission: page 319-325 – No mention of ‘music hall’ songs from THE TALONS OF WENG-CHIANG or the Cambridge ‘street-singers’ from SHADA.
Categorised into effective eight chapters and with an extensive Appendix, DOCTOR WHO – THE OFFICIAL MISCELLANY is like a printed Sonic Screwdriver; multi-functional, credible and essential, and it certainly supersedes the BBC BOOKS 1997 ‘official’ publication, DOCTOR WHO – THE BOOK OF LISTS (Justin Richards & Andrew Martin).
Furthermore, DOCTOR WHO – THE OFFICIAL MISCELLANY would be an ideal as an entertaining ‘random choice’ App that selects innocuous and divergent facts & trivia to entertain and beguile.
