May is Macra Madness Month (Shabcast 5)

Fraternal May Day greetings to all workers by hand or by brain, all socialists, and all anarchists.  Have a good one, comrades.  And implacable hatred, opposition and ill-will to all capitalists and their class allies.  Boo, hiss, etc. 

This month, both the Pex Lives Podcast and the Shabogan Graffiti Podcast are covering the classic 60s Doctor Who adventure 'The Macra Terror' by Ian Stuart Black, sadly junked long ago, and represented nowadays only by a soundtrack and a reconstruction. 

Shabcast 5 (download or listen here) sees me joined by my longstanding online buddy, actor Elliot Chapman, who also happens to have recently been cast as the new Ben Jackson by Big Finish.  The Early Adventures will be available soon, and will feature Elliot alongside Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines.

Elliot is so smart and erudite that he seems to be on some kind of mission to singlehandedly disprove the old stereotype about actors being thick.  And he likes my blog, which proves he's clever.  Our chat was fantastic fun, and I've had to edit it down savagely to make the episode anything approaching a reasonable length... but this means I've got loads of good offcuts, which may appear in later Shabcasts as something in the manner of 'deleted scenes'.

This Shabcast is possibly the most shabgraffy Shabcast yet, i.e. lots of Doctor Who and lots of politics... as well as unrestrained ramblings from both of us about stuff as diverse as complicity, conspiracy, CRPGs, The Prisoner (of course), Herbert Marcuse, Universal horror films, Abbott and Costello, Marshall Berman, the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Should keep you nice and distracted as you toil in the pits.



Shabcast 6 (which will be along later this month) will be Phil Sandifer and myself continuing our discussion about the fascists and the Hugo awards.

Also look out for our forthcoming commentary tracks for 'The Three Doctors'.

Shabcast 7 is already recorded and waiting for its June release.  That's going to be a special one.

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Here's my previous writing about 'The Macra Terror', a story I appear to be slightly obsessed with:
  
Skulltopus 3: Yes We Have No Macra

Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

Happy Workers

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Also, here are links to all my previous audio stuff:

Shabcast 4 (Second part of my interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 3 (the emergency anti-fascist Hugo-awards edition with Andrew Hickey and Phil Sandifer)
Shabcast 2 (First part of interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 1 (Interview with Phil Sandifer)

'Mind Robber' commentaries (I join Phil)
'The Rescue' commentaries (I join Phil)
These are best listened to while watching the stories, as long as you've seen them once before.  If you're very familiar with the stories, you can listen to them on their own.

Pex Lives Frankenstein podcast (I join Kevin and James, and Gene Mayes)
Pex Lives TV Movie podcast (Myself and Josh join Kevin and James)