Eurovision 2025

The Eurovision Singing Competition Caturday is always a highlight of the cat calendar every year (except for the year the mannys forgot to do it). Even as it increasingly becomes serious business for the mannys who sing the songs, we cats watch it for the lols so will always prefurr the colourful, fun, entertaining songs over the heartfelt ballads.

Here are my highlights from this year's entries...

Luxembourg set the bar early (they performed second, which by an old rule of Eurovision meant they were not allowed to win) with their strange visuals, including some giant hands (with giant thumbs) to help the singer out as though she were a cat.

Latvia's six singers had eyes painted on their eyelids, which was... not right.

Dragon doesn't normally show much interest in Eurovision, either sleeping through it or else watching Taskmaster repeats over on a different channel. But for some reason he really enjoyed the Poland entry.

The singer from Greece wore big specs, a bit like these late '70s ones worn by Diane Keen when she was in The Sandbaggers.

My favourite entry this year was the song from Malta, which was very colourful and even featured giant CGI cats in the background. My friend Kitkat was watching Eurovision with us for the first time and she also liked the Malteser.

But don't forget Sweden! They chose to do a comedy song this year, which is quite unusual for them. They did quite well and came fourth. Estonia also did a comedy song and came third. Either of these would have been worthy winners in the eyes of the cats of Europe.

But the voting is done and the winner decided by mannys, who - as always - vote in an way incomprehensible to all right-thinking felines. The two songs they gave the most points to were not ones we rated at all highly, but at least the one that won - from Austria - was the more deserving of those two.

I have heard a persistent rumour that mannys don't always vote for the song they like the best, and sometimes they just vote for the country they like the most. Mannys can be incredibly stupid, so I find this a very plausible theory, but I'm sure it can't really be true.

Except for Cyprus always voting for Greece. That is true. Mew.

Who will get the 12 points? It's not exactly keeping us in suspense.

Happy new year 2025

Here is the winner of the 2024 Calendar Doggy of the Year competition to wish you all a happy new year for 2025.

And a happy new year to you from all of us cats and doggys at home. Here is my new friend Kitkat joining in too.

Happy new year 2024

Here is the winner of the 2023 Calendar Doggy of the Year competition to wish you all a happy new year for 2024.

And a happy new year to you from all of us cats and doggys at home. This includes our new upstairs neighbour, Nadia.

Nadia is a cat, but she is not a long cat. She has moved in with Cthulhu and Dragon on the top shelf.

Happy new year 2023

Here is the winner of the 2022 Calendar Doggy of the Year competition to wish you all a happy new year for 2023.

And a happy new year to you from all of us cats and doggys at home.

Of course the real doggy of the year for 2022 was Wolfgang, our newest friend.

He wishes you all a happy new year awooooo!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Six

After the double disappointment of the spaceship being fake and the lack of any Death-Watch-style showdown, Starcat has given up on this story. Instead, keeping me company for the final part, I have with me my friend Mr Purple Cat (and also Dragon). I warned Mr Purple Cat about the scary dinosaurs in advance, but he said that he wasn't frightened of dinosaurs because he knows they evolved into birdys, and what cat was ever scared of a birdy? He's right! I wish I had known that five episodes ago, mew.

Hah, you don't frighten me now, Mr So-called-tyrannosaurus-rex!

It does frighten the Doctor, though, and when his jeep breaks down he has to try to run away. Luckily for him the tyrannosaurus decides to have a fight with another dinosaur instead of him. This fight is suitably epic, as befits the climactic episode, though it would have been even better if it had taken place in the Death-Watch building.

The Doctor is reduced to being a spectator in his own show, though I don't think he minds that too much. It gives him a chance to run away.

General Finch drives in to capture the Doctor, but then the Brigadier also drives in, just afterwards and from a different direction. Maybe it is their turn to have a climactic fight? Not quite, though they do have a bit of a staredown before Finch gives in and lets the Doctor go with the Brigadier and Benton.

Doctor: "Look, face up to it, Brigadier. General Finch is involved just like Grover."

Brigadier: "Is everybody in this conspiracy?"

Doctor: "Well, Captain Yates certainly is."

Brigadier: "Now that I can't believe."

It's not that surprising that the Brigadier can't believe that Mike Yates would be a baddy, since Yates has been his colleague and friend since all the way back in Terror of the Autons, and Mike's betrayal of his commanding officer is the unkindest cut of his, even more so than of the Doctor or Benton. Also he probably just expects that Yates has been hypno-eyesed again. But the Brigadier is soon faced with the truth when Yates comes in with a gun 

Yates stops the Brigadier from telephoning for help from "International UNIT HQ" so that Whitaker can Get Operation Golden Age Done. The Doctor has deduced what "Whitaker's machine" will do, so he knows what their plan is. He tries to reason with Yates, saying

"There never was a golden age, Mike. It's all an illusion."

and

Doctor: "Look, I understand your ideals. You know in many ways I sympathise with them. But this is not the way to go about it, you know? You've got no right to take away the existence of generations of people."

Yates: "There's no alternative."

Doctor: "Yes, there is. Vote Labour Take the world that you've got and try and make something of it. It's not too late."

Yates gets momentarily distracted, and Benton overpowers him, not waiting to see if Yates had been persuaded by the Doctor.

The Doctor looks disappointed, though from their manner I think the Brigadier and Benton were both furious with Yates and couldn't wait to get their claws on him. Now that he's been captured, that's the last we'll see of him, which is surprising because it means Yates gets no chance at redeeming himself - whether by the standard method of self-sacrifice or otherwise - which is in total defiance of the Genre Conventions.

Sarah has escaped from the cupboard where the Butler put her, and managed to get back into the fake spaceship. She tries to persuade the mannys there that the spaceship is fake (something which she could easily have done by leaving the door open) but most of them would rather stubbornly persist with their collective delusion about being the "chosen group" and so they allow Ruth to convince them Sarah is "mad."

Mark believes Sarah (though he has the advantage of having seen her open the door and leave), and there is enough doubt in Adam's mind that he contacts "Spaceship One" and asks to speak to Grover.

The Doctor and the Brigadier dodge dinosaurs as they drive to the secret base. The Doctor drives a lot of jeeps in this story, I'm surprised he didn't want to take his own brand new car, the novelty can't have worn off already, can it? The Brigadier says

"Well, I never thought I'd find myself blowing up a tube station."

even though a plan to blow up a tube tunnel was one of the very first plans that the then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor ever did together.

Grover comes into the fake spaceship wearing a fake spacesuit to fool the mannys there. He confronts Sarah and Mark, but Adam listens in so that when Grover explains the evil plan (he just can't help himself) it means Adam hears it too. Even now Grover doesn't want to kill Sarah and Mark, which makes him one of the more complicated Doctor Who baddys - he doesn't mind wiping out "generations" of mannys, but can't kill (or order killed) two that he has met. So when Grover leaves Adam comes in and releases them.

Benton gets briefly captured by General Finch, but manages to overpower him too. 

Finch: "You'll be court martialled for this, Sergeant!"

Benton: "Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir!"

It cuts away just before we see Benton beat the shit out of Finch.

Sarah opens the spaceship door to prove it is a fake, then leads a lot of very angry mannys outside to "demand an explanation" of the mannys who tricked them. The Doctor is also loose in the secret base by now, where he encounters the Butler and uses Venusian Oojah on him, although it looks more like thumping him in the stomach to me. I can't remember the last time I watched a story in which our heroes were so pissed off at the baddys and, therefore, so determined to give them a kicking.

The mannys from the fake spaceship arrive just in time to stop Whitaker from activating his machine. Adam says to Grover

"You're going to destroy all the civilisations of man. Leaving Earth for another planet, that was one thing, but this is evil!"

He thought they were going for a science victory, but it turns out they were trying to wipe out all the other players. The ultimate twist of this story - it was actually just one giant game of Civilization.

The Doctor enters, followed by the Brigadier and Benton.

Whitaker pulls a lever, which causes a special effect to freeze everybody except the Doctor. He is able to pull the lever back and stop the effect, then he presses some buttons that means when Grover pulls the lever again only he and Whitaker and the machine disappear, Whitaker's last words being

"No! He's reversed the polarity!"

The Doctor pulled a Superman 2 on them. Sarah realises the Doctor wasn't effected in the same way as all the other mannys because he is a Time Lord, which seems fair enough and is not a cop out at all, because it was established as early as part two that the Doctor wasn't affected by the SFX in the same way as the mannys were.

We hear from the Brigadier what happened to Mike Yates in the end:

"Extended sick leave and a chance to resign quietly. Best I could do."

This is very generous of him. And of Malcolm Hulke for that matter - Yates got let off much more lightly than Captain Hawkins did, after all, and he didn't even betray anybody.

The story ends with Benton telling the Doctor and Sarah about how he got to "punch a General on the nose."

"Just don't make a habit of it, Benton."

says the Brigadier, lol. And then the Doctor tries to persuade Sarah to come with him in the TARDIS for more adventures - hopefully ones with less evil baddys next time, like maybe only the Daleks.

What's so good about Invasion of the Dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs!

Making this story at all must have been a tremendous technical achievement, especially on a BBC budget. I mean, it was 20 years before Jurassic Park, when Hollywood gave dinosaurs the blockbuster treatment. And there was no CGI in the 1970s, making this even more impressive.

So how did they manage it? I can only conclude that Barry Letts must have somehow gotten some real dinosaurs for the show. This must have been done under conditions of total secrecy, or else every manny and his theme park would have wanted one - and this might explain why some of the effects were made deliberately poor, to fool viewers into thinking the dinosaurs were only models, or maybe mannys in costumes.

However, to the observant viewer there are several clues that give the game away. Firstly there are occasions when, by using the greater picture clarity of DVD that wouldn't have been available to the casual viewer in 1974, we can clearly see that the dinosaurs aren't models - these include the pterodactyl attacks in parts one and four, plus the bit in part six where the jeep goes under a dinosaur, a neat bit of stunt driving.

But for me the real clincher is the very obvious CSO used to put the actors in the same frame as the dinosaurs - this would have been essential because dinosaurs are very dangerous and, just as Kirk Vilb didn't fight a real lion, they wouldn't have wanted the likes of Jon Pertwee or Nicholas Courtney to get et by being too close to a tyrannosaurus.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

While there is some padding, particularly in part five where it seems to be needed to keep the cliffhanger in the right place, this is an impressively paced story that could even have justified more than its six episodes, because of all the parts to the plot that we didn't see on screen.

Part one began in media res, when the Doctor and Sarah joined the story, with London already evacuated and UNIT already aware of the dinosaur invasion (there are some similarities here with The Web of Fear, which also saw London deserted before the TARDIS arrived, although that had a prologue in which Professor Travers accidentally reactivated a Yeti control sphere), but we could have been shown scenes from when the baddys' plan was just starting, and maybe seen something of the Brigadier and UNIT trying to cope without the Doctor's help.

We are given very little backstory for any of the baddys, nor do we see how they came together to form their not-so-little (considering how many of the named characters of this story turn out to be in it) conspiracy. I suppose none of that is strictly necessary, and we can still enjoy watching Grover, Whitaker and Finch being fairly archetypical baddys without it, but we don't even see how Mike Yates came to join them, or much of a reason why he should - the scene where he says he likes London in its deserted state barely qualifies.

This means Yates's betrayal of his friends, without having been coerced or hypno-eyesed in any way, feels like something out of the blue crystal. We are left to infer that he must be the sort of gullible idiot who would fall for every fad and scam going. In the modern day, left to his own devices, he'd probably be into all manner of wacky conspiracy theories on the internets, while living in the UNIT era (an early '70s vision of the near-future) he'll probably be into meditation, Buddhism, and other hippy bullshit.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Five

Starcat is sticking with me and Dragon as he wants to know what's happening in the spaceship subplot, and how Sarah can be three months ahead of the Doctor when Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity would mean that, in a spaceship travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, time should be passing more slowly for Sarah than for the Doctor and the mannys still on Earth. Unless, argues Starcat, if they are to reach a habitable planet outside the solar system in only a few months, the spaceship must be travelling faster than the speed of light, in which case time passing more quickly for Sarah than for the Doctor might be possible after all - such is the logic with which monkeys make their spaceships. Anyway, Sarah escapes from the "reminder room" and gets away from Mark.

The Doctor has figured out that Finch, Grover and Yates are all baddys, and W-wording together with Whitaker. Yates orders Benton to keep the Doctor prisoner, but fortunately Benton is not a baddy.

Benton: "Right then, Doctor, you'd better get busy."

Doctor: "What?"

Benton: "You'd better start overpowering me, hadn't you? You know, a bit of your Venusian Oojah."

So the Doctor uses Venusian Oojah on Benton to knock him out and escape. This is the third style of Venusian martial arts which the Doctor has been shown to be a practitioner of, to go with Venusian Karate and Venusian Aikido.

Whitaker and the Butler demonstrate to Grover that their machine is now ready to make time run backwards, by the clever process of reversing the film (or tape, since they're in a studio). This is very clever, and presumably marks the first time ever in the history of the world that mannys were able to rewind their videos back to the start before returning them to the rental shop.

Sarah discovers something significant about the spaceship, but doesn't tell us what it is yet. First she fetches Mark.

Sarah: "Mark, where is this planet we're heading for?"

Mark: "In another solar system close to Earth."

Sarah: "The nearest possible solar system to us is four light years away. With the most advanced spaceships developed, it would take hundreds of years to reach there."

Mark: "One of our members invented a new space drive."

Starcat feels vindicated by this bit.

Sarah: "Do you see that bruise? I got that just before I was kidnapped and brought here. Now if I'd been here three months, it would have gone."

I feel vindicated by this bit. Presumably so does Terence Feely.

Mark: "You were in suspended animation."

Sarah: "Oh, Mark! I've only been here a matter of hours. Alright, alright, if we're in space, how did I get here?"

Mark: "You must have been transferred from one of the other ships."

Sarah: "There aren't any other ships. All this is a fake, we're not on a spaceship at all!"

What a twist! Mark is as surprised as Starcat was. But we don't have time to stop and consider the implications of this, as the Doctor has escaped in a jeep and driven to the big building where Deeta Tarrant and Vinni had their duel in Death-Watch - an even more surprising twist!

Sadly the Doctor isn't here to have a Venusian Oojah fight with Mike Yates (or any of the other baddys for that matter, and he's spoiled for choice in this story), he is still being chased so he has to drive away. A double disappointment for Starcat and me.

This episode is quite padded, but it is pretty well disguised by keeping things tense and exciting with lots of chase scenes. Not many dinosaurs so far though, which is a shame. The Doctor drives to some woods where he tricks the soldiers chasing him and nicks off with their jeep, leaving them behind with his now useless one.

Sarah escapes back to UNIT's HQ where she meets General Finch. There are enough baddys in this that it could be easy to lose track of them all if you're not paying attention, and that is exactly what happens here as Sarah forgets that Finch is a baddy and tells him everything she has found out - which is, she claims, "everything." To prove it she takes Finch with her to Grover's office, and it is only when they are in the secret lift that Finch pulls his gun on her.

Finch takes Sarah in to see Grover and Whitaker so that she can hear their plotting. Grover says

"It's time to go into the final phase. You, Whitaker, will produce a last wave of apparition monsters all over London to drive out any remaining people. [Finch,] you will order the complete withdrawal of all your troops, including UNIT."

Grover seems to relish explaining his evil plan to Sarah.

Sarah: "What you're doing to those people on there is cruel. They all believe that they're going to a new world."

Grover: "And so they are, but their new world is this one. This world of ours swept clean and returned to its early innocence."

Sarah: "You're going to take them back to the past?"

Grover: "We're going to bring the past to them."

Sarah: "I don't understand."

Grover: "By rolling back time, by taking the Earth back to an earlier, purer age."

Sarah: "What about all the people on Earth now?"

Grover: "They'll vanish. They and their ancestors will never have been born."

Finally Whitaker gets around to summoning some more dinosaurs - a triceratops, then an apatosaurus, then a stegosaurus, then a rarring tyrannosaurus rex, then the Doctor sees another apatosaurus, and then another tyrannosaurus rex appears and menaces him. Typical - we wait all episode for a dinosaur, and then five come along at once.

Dinosaur cliffhanger count: 4

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Four

The tyrannosaurus rex being cute when it had sleeps has made Scary Cat lose interest, but for this episode I am joined by my friend Starcat who was intrigued by the cliffhanger at the end of part three, and much more interested in watching now that the story involves space and spaceships. 

Also Dragon is here as well. After the recap the story goes back to the Doctor and the Brigadier, still on Earth.

The Doctor gets in Josie (sometimes known as the "Whomobile") for the first time, although it is not given a name on screen - just being called the "new car of mine" by the Doctor.

The Brigadier is so amused by the Doctor's new car that he can't resist a lol to himself and a quick fourth wall break... one of the few walls not already broken by the tyrannosaurus rex last time.

Sarah meets more of the mannys on the spaceship. Mark tells her they are going to New Earth, so no wonder she is unhappy - that is a terrible episode! Ruth (though not Ruth) says that mannys are evil so they're going to a new planet "undefiled by the evil of man's technology." Starcat rightly points out a glaring flaw in this plan - that without technology they won't be able to watch their Blakes 7 DVDs, oh noes!

They have lots of other mannys all having sleeps, and other spaceships with yet more mannys on them. If they don't like "man's technology" then I wonder who made their spaceships for them? Monkeys, I expect.

Sarah very quickly begins to spot the flaws in both their plan and in the story she has been told about having been on the spaceship for "three months," because she can still feel the bruise on her hed from when she was knocked out escaping from the dinosaur. Maybe Sarah has watched The Schizoid Manny and remembers how Number Six saw through Number Two's plan in that one. Or even if she hasn't, Malcolm Hulke certainly has.

The Doctor detects something so he goes to investigate. He sees the Butler using a secret lift, so he follows him down to their secret base. Whitaker and the Butler notice the lift being used a second time so they trap the Doctor using slidy-shutter doors until he has no choice but to go back up in the lift... because the Doctor has never been able to escape past locked doors before, mew.

When he comes out, Whitaker summons an actual pterodactyl to attack the Doctor, and he is forced to defend himself using a mop. The Doctor gets away and brings the Brigadier back with him to show him the secret lift, but between the scenes the baddys have removed it (this idea would later be nicked for use in the film Moonraker, except whenever Malcolm Hulke tried to complain about it to somebody else, he would find the offending scene curiously missing). This means they have no evidence to show to Grover (who they still don't know is a baddy), so he claims not to believe the Doctor's story.

The other mannys on the spaceship are all volunteers, and they don't believe Sarah when she says she was catnapped and brought there. So they put her in a room and make her watch documentaries as a punishment. The documentaries are supposed to "re-educate" Sarah, which I think means hypno-eyes her. Ruth reveals she is a baddy when she says

"If she doesn't respond to re-education, we shall have to destroy her."

More like Ruthless if you ask me, mew.

The other baddys - Grover, Whitaker, Finch and Yates - all meet up to plan how to get rid of the Doctor. Yates still refuses to let Finch kill the Doctor, so Grover says they "must discredit him."

The Doctor gets a telephone call from Whitaker, who says

"I was tricked. It's the Minister, Grover. He told me I was working on a government project, but I've escaped and now they're after me."

He arranges to meet the Doctor in the place where the tyrannosaurus rex escaped from, because they already had the set for it.

Once the Doctor gets there, Whitaker summons a dinosaur to meet the Doctor in his place. But the plan isn't for the dinosaur to nom the Doctor, it is a different kind of trap. Finch comes in with the Brigadier and says

"There's your monster maker, Brigadier. Caught in the act."

even though this makes no sense.

The Doctor makes a confused face (as did me and Starcat), because this is a rubbish cliffhanger - without any equipment for summoning dinosaurs nearby, the Doctor obviously couldn't have summoned the dinosaur. So the fact that Finch is accusing him of this proves he must be in league with the dinosaur-summoning baddys, thus all Finch has done is give himself away as a baddy. Although the last-minute appearance of a stegosaurus means this does at least count as a dinosaur cliffhanger, which partially redeems it.

Dinosaur cliffhanger count: 3

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Three

Gamma Longcat found part too two scary for him, so this time I am joined by the bravest and scariest of all my cat friends, Scary Cat.

Also Dragon, who says he hopes the tyrannosaurus rex noms the Doctor. On the grounds that this is a six-part story, if for no other reason, I think this is - to say the least - unlikely. Why then, if I know that the Doctor isn't going to get et, was the end of part two such an effectively scary cliffhanger? I expect the answer is because although we know the Doctor will avoid becoming dinosaur noms, we don't know how he will avoid becoming dinosaur noms. Let's find out...

The Brigadier orders his soldiers to fire at the dinosaur, but they only knock the Doctor over instead. This forces Yates to run in and save the Doctor by using the stun gun on the tyrannosaurus rex, after first undoing his own sabotage. The next scene sees Yates turning on Whitaker and the Butler, accusing them of trying to kill the Doctor. Good old Mike Yates, I knew he wasn't a baddy really!

After he tries to persuade Whitaker to let the Doctor in on their plan (their secret plan, I mean, he already knows about the dinosaur-summoning bit) because "he might be sympathetic" he gets told no, like a naughty puppy, and sent back to do more sabotage because they still think the Doctor is a danger to them.

They should also be worried about Sarah, who has been doing some investigating of her own, into any mannys who know about time travel (another opportunity for a gratuitous reference to Ruth and Stuart missed...) and she has found out about Whitaker. Grover also knows about Whitaker, but he dismisses the possibility that Whitaker could be responsible for the dinosaurs out of paw, which is itself very suspicious since we know Whitaker is responsible. 

General Finch seems more responsive to Sarah's theory, which is also suspicious because he was so dismissive of her last time. Is there anybody in this story who isn't on the side of the baddys? At this rate the Doctor and Sarah would do better to team up with the dinosaurs, at least all they want to do is invade nom things.

The tyrannosaurus rex looks quite cute when it is having sleeps, d'awwwww. It's just like Dragon when he's having sleeps. (Dragon denies being cute and insists he is mighty.) Sarah goes in to take photos of it being all cute and sleepy, but the camera flashes wake it up and it is, unsurprisingly, pretty grumpy at having been rudely awakened. It goes on a rampage and smashes the place up in exactly the way that Dragon says he will but doesn't whenever he gets in a bad mood.

The Doctor helps Sarah run away. I bet he wishes he had a packet of Chewits on him right now! Oh, and isn't that a really big brick wall there, by the way? If I didn't know better I'd swear there was some clever use of models going on.

Sarah is convinced that somebody tried to deliberately get the tyrannosaurus rex to nom her, and this seems to be confirmed when Benton discovers the chains holding it down were sabotaged. This means they now know somebody is in league with the baddys, but not which of the several suspects - that the story has already carefully established - it was.

Sarah decides to investigate the mystery of the secret power source that she knows Whitaker must be using to summon dinosaurs with, so she goes to ask Grover for help finding it.

Grover has a suspiciously Village-like telephone on his desk. He takes Sarah into a cupboard (naughty Grover) to show her some "confidential ministerial files" (oo-er missus) and these prove to Sarah that the secret "nuclear generator" "must be under this building." The immediate implications of this escape Sarah, as she is pleased about this discovery right up until the point where Grover captures her.

Sarah: "You're mad. You're absolutely raving mad!"

Grover: "On the contrary, Miss Smith, my associates and I are on the only ones who are sane."

Sarah: "Creating monsters in central London?"

Grover: "There's a very good reason for it, which you will one day learn. Now I'm afraid I must leave you."

Sarah: "They'll find me, you know."

Grover: "I very much doubt it, Miss Smith, not where you are going."

Grover and the Butler put Sarah in a room where she gets hypno-eyesed by flashing lights - Grover's whole setup is very reminiscent of The Prisoner, maybe where Sarah is "going" is the Village?

Actually when Sarah wakes up she finds that she is on a spaceship, and the manny she meets there, Mark, tells her

"We left Earth three months ago."

Cliffhanger!

This is a great twist, but it left Scary Cat very disappointed that there wasn't another surprise dinosaur.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Two

Now back in colour, the Doctor and Sarah run away from

"A tyrannosaurus rex. The largest and fiercest predator of all time."

Oh noes! This is too scary for me to watch on my own, I'm going to get help from my friend Gamma Longcat. And Dragon has joined us too - he likes dinosaurs because, so he says, they are nearly as large, powerful and ferocious as dragons.

The soldiers shoot uselessly at it for quite some time, until eventually one of them remembers he has a grenade, although it doesn't seem to be any more effective than their bullets.

The Doctor and Sarah hide in a room where they meet a manny who calls the Doctor "accursed wizard." Has he just turned up two episode too late to be in The Time Warrior? The Doctor responds in the same way as he did then and denies being a wizard. They ask the manny what year it is and who's the king, to which he replies

"Well, Richard, of course. But he's in the Holy Land. John rules now."

Aha! So i was basically right when I surmised that it was set during the reign of one of the Plantagenets. This narrows The Time Warrior down to the years of the third crusade (1189 to 1192), or possibly a little later when king Richard was a prisoner of Leopold of Austria until 1194.

The manny fights with the Doctor and Sarah, until a special effect causes Sarah to go backwards and the manny to disappear. The Doctor does his second best Mr Spock impression* when he says

"Fascinating! Absolutely fascinating. That was a time eddy. For a moment there time went backwards."

They hear soldiers approaching and the Doctor gets ready to Venusian Aikido the first one that comes in...

...but it is the Brigadier.

It cuts to UNIT's HQ where the Brigadier is giving them (and us) exposition about what has been happening

"It all started just after you, Doctor, and as we later discovered, Miss Smith, went off on your last little jaunt."

This probably means that the Brigadier and UNIT don't know if the dinosaurs and mannys coming forwards in time are connected to the disappearing scientists and the "man in armour" from The Time Warrior, so I'm sure the Doctor and Sarah will be quick to reassure him that they aren't and explain exactly what happened.

"Yes, some other time, Miss Smith, if you don't mind?"

No, it turns out the Brigadier couldn't care less about what became of "half a dozen leading scientists and several million pounds worth of ultra-secret equipment" because he's more concerned that

"A variety of prehistoric reptiles began to appear in the central London area."

He means dinosaurs have been invading. Benton is also there and is keen to explain about their map:

"It's a colour code, Doctor. We're using red pins for tyrannosaurus, blue for triceratops, green for the stegosaurus, and pink for your actual pterodactyl."

The Brigadier tells the Doctor

"So far we've absolutely no idea where they're coming from or, come to that, where they go."

The Doctor has clearly already deduced the answer to this but, before he can explain, they are interrupted by General Finch and Mike Yates, so they are present when the Doctor says

Doctor: "Somebody or something is operating a temporal displacement on a very vast scale."

Finch: "Never mind your scientific gobbledygook."

Doctor: "The creatures are being brought from the past into the present, General, staying here for a while and then returning to their own time."

Finch: "Rubbish!"

Doctor: "I take it then that you have a better theory."

Finch: "Yes, some mad scientist fellow has been secretly breeding these things. Now they've all got away."

Escaped from his theme park, perhaps? Gamma Longcat, who hasn't seen this story before, wondered if it could be Silurians, because they had pet dinosaurs? It's certainly a possibility, since the writer of both this story and Doctor Who and the Silurians, Malcolm Hulke, does like his continuity references, as we saw back in Frontier in Space.

There's a report of another dinosaur. General Finch wants to blow it up using "artillery" (he's like a version of the Brigadier who hasn't had four seasons of character development) while the Doctor prefers to study it instead, and so he and the Brigadier go to see it.

Poor Sarah is left behind to talk to Mike Yates. He tells her how he likes London with no mannys about.

"I rather like it. Have you noticed the air? It's clean. No cars, no people. Do you know yesterday I saw a fox in Piccadilly?"

That does sound good, so long as there are still cats. Sarah disagrees, and says

"No, I like London the way it was, traffic jams and all."

The Doctor is just about to try a plan to capture the dinosaur when the same SFX as before makes the Brigadier and his soldiers go backwards and then the dinosaur vanishes. Again only the Doctor is unaffected, so back at UNIT's HQ he tries to explain what happened:

Doctor: "Whenever a creature appears or disappears, the temporal displacement causes a localised distortion in time. Now as far as the people in the immediate vicinity were concerned, time literally runs backwards, so naturally, they'd have no recollection of what occurred."

Finch: "The man's mad. Temporal displacement? Time travel is impossible, we all know that."

General Finch urgently needs to be told what show he's in, mew.

The Doctor deduces that whoever is bringing the dinsosaurs through time is hiding somewhere in the area where they are appearing, and he has a plan to track them if he can capture a dinosaur.

We see that the mannys responsible are Professor Whitaker (played by Peter Miles, so there is a definite possibility that he is really Dr Lawrence under a new name) and his Butler (who I don't think is ever named on screen, but is played by Martin Jarvis). Gamma Longcat and I are agreed that Whitaker could definitely have been the Master in an alternative version of this story, as this is exactly the sort of zany scheme he would come up with to troll the Doctor and UNIT with. Alas that it is not. Another possibility that I considered is that, given they are two scientists messing around with time travel, Whitaker could have been replaced with Ruth and the Butler with Stuart from The Time Monster. That's probably a level of continuity beyond what would have been reasonable in the 1970s era, even for Malcolm Hulke, and is more the sort of thing that might have happened in the 1980s or the new series.

The Doctor is trying to make his machine to knock out a dinosaur when he keeps getting interrupted, first by Mike Yates, then by Sarah, then by the Brigadier.

The Doctor wants them all to go away.

Sarah: "Oh alright. I'll go and chat up that nice Captain Yates."

Doctor: "Yes I'm sure he'd enjoy that."

The Doctor must be vexed indeed to resort to sarcasm like that, mew!

The Brigadier wants the Doctor to meet "Charles Grover, Minister with special powers" but he's obviously not the same Minister as from The Green Death because the Doctor is pleased to meet him, saying

"Oh my dear Grover, I'm delighted to meet you. This planet needs people like you."

Somebody from UNIT is secretly W-wording for Whitaker, and we soon see that it is Mike Yates!

Yates tells them what he knows of the Doctor's plan, and Whitaker implies that Yates should kill the Doctor to stop him from interfering in their "Operation Golden Age." Yates replies

"I'll do nothing to harm the Doctor, nor will I allow him to be harmed. If we descend to that sort of thing, we're no better than the society we intend to replace."

Whitaker changes tack immediately, and instead tells Yates to "sabotage the Doctor's stun gun," giving him a small device to do just that with. This scene puts a different complexion on the earlier scene where Yates spoke with Sarah - now we can tell that he was really testing her to see if she might be sympathetic to the baddys.

Gamma Longcat thinks Mike Yates must have already been secretly hypno-eysed by the baddys before this story began, even though he was also hypno-eyesed in the last story he appeared in, which is pretty unlucky to say the least. I disagreed with him, because I have never liked Yates; from the very beginning I have seen him as an usurper to the rightful place of Captain Hawkins as UNIT's regular Captain character, so it doesn't surprise me that he would turn out to have been a baddy all this time, just waiting his opportunity to betray the Doctor and the other UNIT mannys. Also, I have seen this story before, mew. On the other paw, if the Master had been the main baddy in this, it would have made a lot more sense for Yates to have been hypno-eysed into obeying him.

Gamma Longcat still expects to be proved right, and he is waiting for the Doctor to bring out the blue crystal in order to de-hypno-eyes Yates once again. Silly Gamma Longcat, we shan't be seeing the Metebelis 3 crystal again! One thing we can both agree on is that Yates will be lucky to make it to the end of the story alive seeing as Malcolm Hulke is the writer, and he has form for killing off UNIT captains - Yates is just lucky to have dodged appearing in any of his stories up until now.

The Doctor, the Brigadier and Yates all go to where the latest dinosaur has appeared.

"Apatosaurus, commonly known as the brontosaurus. Large, placid and stupid. That's exactly what we need."

says the Doctor, giving us all a lesson about dinosaurs. He isn't scared of this one, but says of his his stun gun plan:

"Mind you, I wouldn't like to try it on a tyrannosaurus rex."

Yates sabotages the stun gun before he gives it to the Doctor, who then goes forward to pew it only to find that his stun gun is borked. The SFX comes in yet again, making the "placid" dinosaur disappear, and replacing it with the very scary tyrannosaurus rex - the one thing the Doctor didn't want to happen! It rars at the Doctor - cliffhanger!

Dinosaur cliffhanger count: 2

* His best being that time he replaced a picture of Mr Spock on The Goodies DVDs for rights reasons.

Happy new year 2022

Here is the winner of our 2021 Calendar Doggy of the Year competition to wish you all a happy new year for 2022.

And a happy new year to you from all of us cats, doggys, Totoro, Dragon, Cthulhu, Monkeys With Badges, squirrels and zanni as well.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Blakes 7: Dawn of the Gods

Dawn of the Gods is the 30th episode of Blakes 7. It was written by James Follett, the first of two - the other one was Stardrive in season four.

Avon, Vila, Cally, Dayna and Orac are playing Space Monopoly, which does not make for a riveting hook into the story. The dialogue for this bit is so trite it is a welcome relief to see Tarrant trying to get the plot started - the Liberator is starting to go off course and speed up, but Zen says that "all systems are functioning normally."

Tarrant suspects a "traction beam" is affecting them, but Zen's scan detects nothing that could be the source. They fly into "sector 12" which Tarrant says is uncharted. Avon wants to predict where they are being drawn towards, and Zen shows them a picture of where that is.

"Three guesses, if you need them."
"A black hole."

Orac is fascinated by black holes, and tells the mannys the facts that even cats know about them:

"Their gravitational pull is so massive that not even light can escape from them. A cubic inch of black hole matter can weigh a million tons."

I don't know much about the writer James Follett, but one fact I do know is that this is a picture of him doing his research for this episode:

The ship is now going so fast that it starts a special effect that knocks out all of the mannys, even as Avon and Tarrant start having a fight because Avon tried to escape in a spacesuit. The dialogue is distorted so we have no idea what Avon's full plan actually was, except that it was only "a faint chance for one of us."

Tarrant wakes up first and goes to wake up Avon. They're best friends again, d'aww, even as Tarrant says

"One day, Avon, I may have to kill you."
"It has been tried."

This is just them flirting.

Cally has been hurt and needs to be put in a small see-through tent to help make her better. Inside it, we can hear somebody communicating telepathically with her. It's the Tharn.

Sorry, I mean "it's the Thaarn." He wants to rule the universe together with Cally.

The others are more concerned with where the Liberator is now. Avon has a theory that they "have fallen through the black hole into the so-called negative universe of antimatter, where time and energy no longer exist."

Tarrant and Dayna decide to fire the neutron blasters, presumably just for the lols, but the shots rebound upon the Liberator. Cally comes in and suggests this is because "space is curved back on itself here."

Cally is surprised to hear from Tarrant that she was delirious and talking about the Thaarn, saying that

"Well, it seems absurd. The Thaarn is as mythical to me as dragons and unicorns are to the people of Earth."

My friend Dragon has been watching the episode along with me, and he would like me to point out that this statement is entirely precise and accurate.

There has been some damage to the outside of the ship, and they need Vila to put on a spacesuit. There is a classic instant reversal gag where Vila says

"Oh no, not me. Not a space suit. Well, it wasn't my idea. One of you can go outside. I never did trust those things. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the whole galaxy can or will persuade me to wear one. Not a chance."

and then it cuts to show him with the spacesuit on, roflmew. Vila goes outside the ship where he discovers there is gravity, and a floor when he falls onto it. This is actually quite a tense and interesting scene, with Vila facing unknown perils alone and only in touch with the other characters over the communicator.

The Thaarn starts communicating with Cally again, so she alerts the others to there being "something out there - a force, something all powerful and evil." That's quite an extrapolation, given all the Thaarn did was say

"Come to me, Cally, I need you."

like he had just invented a telepathic telephone and was testing it out for the first time.

Vila finds some wrecked parts of other spaceships, and then something comes towards him. It has lights on it that hypno-eyes him. Cally's telepathy comes in useful for a change, as she breaks the hypno-eyes and gets Vila to run away. He doesn't get far though because the thing chases him.

They shoot at the lights from the Liberator and that seems to scare it off, but they think Vila is ded when they see him having sleeps on the floor. Tarrant goes outside in a spacesuit next, and he finds that Vila is not ded but has discovered there is a breathable atmosphere.

Back in the Liberator, they analyse the rocks and spaceship parts that Vila found and they discover that all of the Herculaneum has been stolen, which is a neat trick to steal an ancient Roman town from out of a spaceship. Even more amazingly, Orac then says that the Liberator is made from Herculaneum.

Tarrant, Avon, Vila and Cally go outside of the ship and line up looking cool. Something comes towards them with less lights on it this time. Dayna tries to shoot it from back on the ship, but it somehow drains their energy banks so she can't.

It also drains the energy from their pewpewpew guns and then chases them around for a bit while looking derpy, because somebody has painted a silly-looking face on the front. Dragon wonders if this is another attempt by baddys to fake up a dragon, like the baddys in Dr. No did. Suffice to say, he doesn't like it. But if he thinks this is bad, I have seen this episode before and know what is coming next...

Oh noes.

TO BE CONTINUED