Announcement

This blog is staying where it is.

However, you'll have noticed that the URL has gone back to the old blogspot version.  Shabogangraffiti.com now redirects you to a new venture: eruditorumpress.com.

Eruditorumpress.com is a new group blog.  It's what philipsandiferwriter.com has become.  It's the next phase of Phil Sandifer's bid to take over the internet, and I'm joining in.  It's the latest phase in my bid to ride his coat-tails. 

(Hopefully at some point I'll get shabogangraffiti.com to take you directly to my subpage... or rather, our wonderful techy person Anna will.)

I might continue to update this blog in small ways, but basically I now blog over at eruditorumpress.com... alongside Phil (of course) and the wonderful Jane.  We hope to bring other people in as time goes by.

Also now under the Eruditorum Press umbrella we have the Pex Lives podcast, which has in many ways been the force bringing us all together.  Shabcasts (and, I understand, Holly's City of the Dead podcast) will continue to be hosted by Pex Lives.

It feels right to be pooling resources with such a brilliant gang of people.  Please support the new site.  And thanks to all of you who came here to read my stuff over the years, even though I was just plugging away on my own.

I think it's Kinda funny, I think it's Kinda sad

I just realised I forgot to post a link to the commentary tracks Phil Sandifer and I recorded for 'Kinda' as part of Phil's ongoing series. 

There's a zip file you can download which includes all four episodes, here.

Apologies about the poor quality of the audio in my sections.  I was, for various complicated reasons, temporarily forced to use my laptop's integral mic.  Which is, as you will discover, shit.

In other news, Pex Lives has recently released a special episode - here - in which James Murphy chats Orson with Gene Mayes.  Lots of fun for orsonians like me.  Gene will be my guest for Shabcast 10, out next month.  Here's a link to his new blog, which I heartily recommend.

Holly and James' most recent episode of City of the Dead is here.

And Phil Sandifer has just interviewed Peter Harness, writer of 'Kill the Moon' (which I still haven't seen) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I did see and thought was fantastic.  The interview can be downloaded or listened to here.

Phil and I will be shabcasting again soon, and we'll be back with commentary tracks for 'Vengeance on Varos' before you can say "Zyton-7".

Oh, and you'll have noticed that Shabgraff's URL has changed to www.shabogangraffiti.com.  The old blogspot address will still redirect you, but it's just possible you might need to update your bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.  So get on it.

Policy Announcement

I hate having to delete comments.  You can leave a comment saying I'm wrong, disagreeing with me violently, that's all fine.  But I won't publish comments that contain ableist slurs.  I don't refuse to publish comments lightly, but that'll do it.

This is something the vast majority of my lovely comment-leavers would never do, of course.

News from Elsewhere

Phil Sandifer very kindly asked me to contribute a guest post for his site.  Here it is.  I'm quite proud of it.

It's about Merlin, strangely enough... but me being me, I ramble off topic.

A Present

I created this meme the other day...

...to be used in online debate when someone evades a sincere demand for answers.

Just don't say I never give you anything.

Excuses, excuses...

Things have been weird for me lately.  In a bad way.  Personal stuff.  Worries.  Health issues.  Melancholia.  And other obsessions, plans, dreams... including a recurring one that I really should've abandoned by now...  but haven't.  In short: no time (and not much inclination) to blog.  The promised Skulltopus post on 'Image of the Fendahl' is stalled, swollen to vast and unruly size, stuck at an impasse, erupting out of the Skulltopus category into all sorts of other genres (appropriately enough).  Bear with me, Reading Few.  I will rally.

Shabby Efforts

I'm sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I've missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was 'Night Terrors'.  I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of 'A Christmas Carol', which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith).  I was hoping that I'd either get my mind changed by the catch-up session - i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn't just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel - or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with 'Night Terrors' (see here) put me off the project again.  Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it's actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents.  Dispirited, I quit again.  So, I've not seen anything after 'Night Terrors'.  And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer's analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I'd missed back in the day.  I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them.  Still, I was going through college and university at the time.  I had other things to read.  The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It's the same with Big Finish.  I've heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output - at most.  I guess I just haven't tried hard enough. 

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line... well, I think I've read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that... I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once.  It was called 'The Burning', as I recall.  It's possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast.  I wouldn't be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me.  In this respect, anyway.  But the point I'm limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don't.  I don't know what's so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance.  Never read 'em.  Never will.  I also don't know (not from personal experience anyway) what's so bad about 'The Eight Doctors' by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.

So I was fascinated to learn at Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum that this book sees Dicks

managing to be more prone to waxing poetic about the need for great and noble leaders to rule over the common rabble than ever. The stuff with the Shobogans in the Sixth Doctor segments is absolutely vomit-inducing, with Dicks establishing them as the Gallifreyan working class/criminal underworld (these seem to be the same thing in his mind) who the Doctor enjoys getting drunk with and dispensing favor to. With astonishing creepiness, Dicks ends their plot by saying “even the Shobogans were content with their lot” and leaving it at that, a line that comes horrifyingly close to just saying that the working class are just meant to be poorer than the nobles.

This interests me for obvious reasons.  I have, for one thing, made the Shabogans into the... emblems? motifs? mascots? heroes? ...of this blog.  Also, of course, there are the implications of someone with attitudes like those described above being so central to creating Who over the years.  Of course, it's not news exactly... but it is interesting.

And, as I say, it worries me slightly because I suddenly feel a little self-conscious to realise that I've got a blog called 'Shabogan Graffiti', and yet a fair few of the people reading it are likely to be more familiar with how the Shabogans have been characterised than I am.  Still, it's not as though I'm unused to being surrounded by people who know more than me.

However, I do want to make a few things clear.  It's Shabogans, not Shobogans.  I've checked it on the BBC website.  So there.

And it's pronounced "Shaboogans", just in case anyone was wondering.  George Pravda knew best and must be obeyed in this.  I mean c'mon... his very name means 'truth'.

Oh, and one other thing... they are quite definitely not content with their lot.

I Just Want You to Like Me

Shabgraff now has a Facebook 'fan page', here.  At the moment, the number of 'Likes' it has garnered is 11.  And two of them are me.

Now, I don't have very many regular readers, but I definitely have more than 9.

If you are a regular reader of this blog and have not yet 'Liked' its Facebook 'fan page' then please take a moment to do so.  Apparently when it gets 30 'Likes', I get access to some kind of special information.  The credit card numbers of people who've 'Liked' it or something, I dunno.

Help me out here comrades.  You will be doing wonders for my barely-concealed narcissism fragile self-esteem.

Thanks.