Tag: John Freeman

Christmas Comes Early – Santa\’s Bringing Me 19 Issues of Spaceship Away

I joined the Spaceship Away group over on John Freeman\’s excellent Down the Tubes forum a while back in preparation for my first subscription/purchase of Spaceship Away. I\’ve been following the magazine very closely since the early days (still have some of the fliers that they sent me) and have always intended to subscribe, but a seemingly endless parade of Real Life crap and tragedies over the past few years has always diverted me at crucial moments.

Well, this morning, I said, \”To hell with it\”, bit the bullet, and ponied up for the entire run of Spaceship Away. This was the fourth and final part of a humongous early Christmas present to myself (nobody else buys me any pressies, do they? Boo, hoo, hoo!), which started off with sending off for the entire run from #1 to the present (Vol 2 #4) of Dangerous Ink, catching up with the last couple of issues of Andersonic (I have an otherwise complete run), catching up with the six back issues of Crikey! that I was missing plus placing a sub for the next six issues, and, finally, that enormous run of Spaceship Away from #1 up to the yet-to-be-released #21.

My credit card/wallet is a lot emptier now, but what\’s money for, if not to spend on stuff like this, eh? I now have all this incredible reading material plus, lots of lovely food and booze to tide me over Christmas. And, on top of that, I\’ll have everything I need to take part in John\’s discussions over in the Spaceship Away group on Down the Tubes. I just can\’t wait for these goodies to arrive. At the moment, I\’m a real happy bunny. 🙂

John Freeman on the Doctor Who: Delta and the Bannermen DVD

I\’ve always been a huge fan of the classic Doctor Who series, but I\’m one of those die-hards who would prefer to think that the old series actually ended when Peter Davison left the show, and who considers the entire Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras, with the exception of a handful of stories, to be a complete abomination. Most of that entire period of Doctor Who\’s history is such a dire and diabolical embarrassment that it should be erased from living memory. Why oh why can\’t crap like this be among the fabled \”missing episodes\”, rather than all of those missing gems from the Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell eras?

Now you certainly won\’t catch me buying any DVDs (with the exception of five or six stories) from this sad period of Doctor Who, but I have to admit that I\’ve just spent a pretty enjoyable evening with a mate, perusing the extra features on his latest Doctor Who DVD acquisition, Delta and the Bannermen. A Sylvester McCoy story it might be, but I have to admit that the extras on the DVD aren\’t half bad, my favourite among these extras being a piece covering the Doctor Who comic strips of the 1980s.

And you\’ll never guess who pops up in the middle of that one. Yes, our very own John Freeman of Downthetubes.net, giving it the old yakkity-yak about his time on Doctor Who Magazine, and the comic strips therein. It\’s nice to see and hear John in living, breathing action for the first time (well, the first time I\’ve seen him), and in the best feature on the entire DVD, no less.

Needless to say (so why am I saying it?), I watched all the features, but didn\’t even bother putting on the main story. Why ruin a perfectly good evening? 🙂