( with pictures and everything! )

I rest my case.

Once upon a time, before John Nettles played a policeman investigating ridiculously unlikely crime amongst the posh people of Midsomer, he played a policeman investigating ridiculously unlikely crime amongst the posh people of Jersey in Bergerac. Like Shoestring only shit, Jim Bergerac's claim to fame was his massive nose and extraordinary poetic skills ability to make a map of Jersey mutate into his own name once a week. How the criminals cowered!

As if shagging Leela every week weren't enough to assert his Whovian cred, old Jim met up with a certain ginger gentleman in 4.04, 'Low Profile'. In the interests of skience I have tracked it down...

( swimming again, Turlough? )

Bergerac being the Casualty of its day, the rest of the Whoniverse of course receives excellent representation.

( isn't that the bloke from... )

Now wasn't that educational?

Campion. Oh, so, so, lovely. I have now read Sweet Danger, and am entirely entranced by the wonderfulness. Allingham is thoroughly at the Sayers end of the detective fiction spectrum, where the point is to write a proper clever witty book with fabulous people in it, which also happens to be a detective story (unlike Christie - spit spit - who can't even write decent mysteries since the denouement always relies on information you couldn't have known, and whose characterisation is shockingly lazy. He is...Belgian! She is...young and wears red lipstick! Mhmm). She also included a character called Stukely-Wivenhoe, which is the sort of thing that makes me very pleased indeed. And Campion describes himself as a 'Universal Uncle and deputy adventurer', which makes me want to give him a hug (and does nothing whatsoever to separate him in my mind from His Beigeness).

Am now on The Fashion in Shrouds, which, by pure coincidence, follows on with a certain character from Sweet Danger. More than that, it takes place 8 years later, and the change in him, and in the tone of the novel, is so marked it's heartbreaking. I had this lovely theory about detective fiction (like many other clearly-defined 'lowbrow' genres) relying on being static, because it was comforting to know that at the end you would surface in the same place, and the detective would solve the case, and thus there is order to the universe. Even Lord Peter and Harriet develop only in the sense of getting married, after all. But this...the whole plot revolves around someone knowing him well enough to exploit his weaknesses, and the whole point of Campion is that he doesn't exist: he's a fantasy in his own head, playing silly games, and suddenly someone is forcing him to engage in some self-examination, to admit he's now 38 and instead of it being all jolly scrapes and a bit of a lark, it's life, and he's getting a little long in the tooth for daft pseudonyms and secrets. And it's the late 1930s, and everyone's so much more brittle, so much more knowing, than even ten years before. It's all so sad.

Back before he was emo 1930s-style, however, there was The Case of the Late Pig, what I watched on the telly with that nice Mr Davison. The entire plot revolves around gingerness. It's like someone out there is making telly just for me!

There must and shall be icons, and I shall make it so, but to facilitate such things I did cap, quite frenziedly. (This time using VLC, bless it, so they are nice .pngs and not shite bitmaps, hurrah.) 40ish caps under the cut: it's only polite to share, after all. (NB: photobucket is being typically infuriating, so lots of them are wee. If you want a biggerer version of any of them, email me, and I shall furnish you with the Peteyness.)

( hatporn! )

Feel free to snag them and make pretty pictures. Or just look at the hats for a bit. Whatever.

Adric's bedroom was a nice innocent place. Poster of space. Books. Eighties mesh chair that my friend Simon had. A perfectly acceptable place for a young Alzarian to curl up on a blanket and think about Maths.

( mmmhomework )

Turlough's approach to suitable bedroom furniture appears to have been slightly different.

( omg bed of porn )

In other news, I have been watching Doctor Who: Lust in Space, aka Mark Strickson Presents Something That Will Make Your Brain Hurt. My fandom is on very hard drugs. John Nathan-Turner making jokes about toast! Nicholas Courtney perving on Katy Manning! Some hats that don't fit properly! Plus a photomontage of b&w images of the Turlough/Peri bikini rescue, set to moving music. Stricko manages, when discussing Tegan, to declare 'She arrived in a school uniform, and ended up in a boob tube!' Freudian slip, darling?

Who cares how batshit it is? It has Stricko being snide in it! Hurrah!

Oh, and I was watching Gaudy Night (the Edward Petherbridge/Harriet Walter one) after discovering that my friend had never heard of Dorthy L. Sayers (I know, I know), and it took me two whole episodes to notice it has Liz Shaw in it. In my defence, Miss Hillyard is being played by Robert Hardy in a wig, which was distracting.

But I'm now having the worrying thought that in my brain, a little bit, Fivey = Lord Peter. Which is just wrong.

Felt strangely compelled to watch some Six, after listening to Sirens of Time and deciding he can't be all that rubbish. So: ( not-very-Tranquil Repose )

( pictorial evidence )

Now, we're all aware (one hopes) of Turlough's pole.

( mmm, pole )

So it was only a matter of time before Tegan realised she needed a pole to fondle too.

( mmm, pole #2 )

I should add that the moving images are far more dodgy-looking than mere screencaps can convey. *must make animated icon of Turlough's pole, yes*

So, sword-fighting Five or sword-fighting Ten: who wins?

( picspam )

Googlefight has declared that dressing gown Five kicks the botty of dressing gown Ten. By this scientific test I have proven its reliability in all things.

( proof, as if it were needed )

Turlough's given up mascara and slapped on the eyeliner instead (not to mention suffering at the hands of JNT's hair-dye crusade - what, was he not ginger enough?).

( Tarty Turlough )

And the Doctor abandons him in full tart mode in a roomful of sailors. Luckily, our boy seems to quite enjoy all the attention.

( More Gay Hats )

Fivey/Tarty = immense levels of cuteness, however.

( Couldn't Tegan have stayed on Terminus too? )

I am quite in love with this story. But I haven't got to Lynda Baron eating the scenery yet, so it may pall.