Octannual Update

Happy Spring Equinox!

Spring is officially here, the long slow climb out of winter is behind us - and it’s almost time for the paperback release of Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who. This will be out on April 9th, a few days after two long lost episodes of Daleks’ Master Plan arrive on the BBC iPlayer.

It arrives as the series is in a much more uncertain place than when the book was written. I originally pitched it in the early days of the Disney deal, when there was hope that Doctor Who would become a global brand. Alas, the series has proved to be much too weird and British for that, and as a result the book is still only available in the UK. And yet, unexpectedly but pleasingly, the book is now being translated into… Chinese! I had no idea that there was a Chinese Who scene, I would love to know more about that.

A new paperback edition gives me a chance to fix errors or make changes. This meant that I spent ages agonising about whether I should change Ncuti Gatwa’s dates from “2024 - ?” to “2024-2025”, given what has happened after the hardback came out. In the end I left the question mark, due to an unshakeable hunch, based on nothing factual, that we would see him again at Christmas. And if I’m wrong, at least a question mark is pleasingly on-brand.

If you are after a signed copy of the paperback, you can now pre-order one from Resident Records - who ship worldwide. You can order those here.

I hope you all managed to catch the Doctor on their recent club tour of the UK fronting an indie rock band - it was truly excellent. Judging by the length of their hair, I think this was between series 8 and 9, from their perspective.

Before the paperback arrives, I still have a couple more Lynchian events to do. I’ll be at Laugharne in South Wales on Saturday - that’s sold out - and at the Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival in Birmingham on 18 April. Tickets for that are here.

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FILM CLUBS AND FESTIVALS

The guest curator of this year’s Bridport ‘From Page to Screen’ Film Festival is Chris Chibnall - and I’ll be interviewing him about his film choices on 22 April. Tickets and more details can be found here. There’s a lot of good stuff in the festival, including screenings of Airplane and 2001, but the highlight is surely the gala night screening of Casino Royale with long-term Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade plus composer David Arnold.

The East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club (ESP-FC) has gone into reverse hibernation and shut up shop for the summer, but other strange film clubs are emerging. The Sheffield Psyko Dalek Film Club opens a week on Sunday with a screening of Betrand Mandico’s excellent After Blue. Details and tickets here.

There’s some very committed aesthetic choices in that poster, I suspect those nights could be quite something. Enjoy!

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ELSEWHERE

Great news for Blakeans - James Murray White’s film Finding Blake, about finding and marking Blake’s grave, is now up on YouTube. More details about that are here.

Here’s a couple of very special things coming from a similar DIY analogue attitude - we’ll see more of this, I think, as people increasingly want more than what the digital world offers. On the left, Ben Wheatley’s microbudget reality-shattering sci-fi film Bulk is now available on Blu Ray and 4K. For all that it sold out the BFI IMAX, it’s still more like a punk fanzine than it is a Hollywood movie. Unexpect the Expected!

And on the right, the overdue but very welcome 2025 edition of the Mycelium Parish News has arrived. This is a catalogue of that year’s books, podcasts, fanzines, mailing lists, events etc, that come from alternative or Discordian- adjacent creators. There’s a micro-essay from me in there also. Vital communal stuff for all left cold by tech-bro culture. You can find it here.

Until next time!
jhx