Beyond the Roundels

Apparently Maggie Stables who played Evelyn Smythe, Six's lovely and awesome audio companion, has just died.


And just to be really cheerful on the subject of Six-era ladies, also in the news this weekend, was Lynda Bellingham, who is dying of cancer. (She's stopping her chemotherapy in November, and the timing should give her one last Christmas.) In addition to being known here as "the OXO lady", she was the Inquisitor at Six's Trial (and I believe has since also been in the Gallifrey audio series, so make this a particularly bad weekend for Big Finish fans.


*is very sad*


Probably, in honour of the one companion who could really keep Six in order, a sort of final salute of chocolate cake is required...


Following on from Kate O'Mara earlier in the year, it seems an exceptionally bad year for awesome ladies who knew the Sixth Doctor. :-/

fandom_stocking went live yesterday, and I had so many nice things in my stocking! Thanks so much to everyone who left anything there for me. ♥ Anyone liking the sound of any of the following should go check it out. (Yes, I am displaying the contents of my stocking for you all...)

* I got TWO sets of David Collings gifs. Yes, really! \o/ I did ask, but I didn't think anyone would actually make me any. (I'll see about putting one or maybe two on the LJ version of this post, but I'm feeling a bit too lazy for Photobucket just now). They were made v kindly for me by brooms and liadt. ♥ ♥ ♥

* A tiny-but-cute Lorne & Fred ficlet (Ats) from yhlee

* A Mary Dove/Inspector Neele drabble from john_amend_all (Miss Marple, A Pocketful of Rye, and, um, yes, it's my fault. It's all to do with me wanting professional thief/detective and ITV casting Matthew Macfadyen and then sticking meticulously to the book, when the BBC 1980s version got the shippy vibe. Damn TV makers are so contrary.)

* kaffy_r wrote me a wonderful Sapphire and Steel fic Green, Red and Gold, and Blue Follows

* ladymercury10 left me a very tempting-looking set of Doctor who recs

* cosmic_llin wrote me a lovely Sarah & Harry ficlet. (Sometimes Harry is much more practical than the Doctor, after all.)

* A beautiful little set of Blake's 7 icons from usuallyhats

* An IOU for West Wing fic from feathermoon_scarletsky

* dbskyler gave me some vid links, and you should check them out but especially the adorable penguin one.

* Summer Afternoon Blues by glinda, another AtS ficlet, this one about Lorne and the first time he heard music and it's just gorgeous and if anyone round here also knows Angel, do take a look.

* Seven-and-Ace fic by clocketpatch, which is every bit as wonderful as you would suppose and I'm delighted.

* And last (but absolutely not least, since it contained infinity) - Unccountable Infinities from eve11 and Eight and Charley ficlet, which answered my first first Straybunnies prompt for the two of them investigating something really surreal. And Eight and Charley! *joy*

*plus various good wishes and season greetings from kind folks. Oh! And intriguingly, a promise for some David Collings graphics at some point this week from weaselett.

So that was pretty amazing and thanks again to everyone. I did manage to write and make some bits and bobs for other people, too. I (rather belatedly yesterday evening, sorry about that) put them in the AO3 collection as well, so I'll put up another post with the fics in sometime soon. (There were also a few graphics/icons and recs, but they were all pretty specific for the recipients.)

This feels like it ought to be one of the prompt ficlets, but actually it was just a thing I wrote. (I do that still?) I listened to The Silver Turk a while back, thanks to paranoidangel42 & at the end Eight wanted a waltz. Well, if Eight wants a waltz, he should have one, that's my thinking... (And I'd forgotten how much I liked Eight and Mary from The Company of Friends.)

Title: Viennese Waltz
Author: lost_spook
Rating: All ages
Word Count: 643
Characters/Pairings: Eighth Doctor, Mary Shelley
Notes/Warnings: Slight (non-spoilery) tag for the end of the BFA The Silver Turk. (Mary Shelley is Eight’s companion in a three-story run of audios. It’s not just random historical fic.)

Summary: Before they leave Vienna, Mary decides to let the Doctor have his waltz, after all.

( Viennese Waltz )

Icons I've made but somehow never posted over this past year. Maybe some were even longer ago? Anyway, FINALLY...

Teaser:


Credsit: Textures by tiger_tyger and twinstrikeish & probably some others. The usual rules apply: want, take, have, credit. No hotlinking, comments are ♥

53 Big Finish icons, text and images. As I did many of these for naarmamo, some may be a little random, but bear with me - I'll definitely do some more when I can.

Teaser:



( Icons Here! )

Some nice things:

1. I have been catching up with some Big Finish, and have been listening to some more Eight and Lucie (I wish they weren't so much shorter - it makes them terribly more-ish!). I got to The Zygon Who Fell to Earth and was interested to see it had Steven Pacey in (who is, of course, Tarrant in Blake's 7). I wondered what he'd sound like now (and, yes, I KNOW he's in a Spooks episode, but I haven't seen that one since I've seen B7) and he was puuting on a West Country accent, drat him. And then being a Zygon. And then singing.

So, um, now the story is The One With Tarrant the Singing West Country Zygon. And to check it was him singing, I looked him up, and I hadn't realised he'd also been a bit of a West End star (apparently he got an Olivier award for playing Bertie Wooster in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's By Jeeves. Now I am all intrigued. Are there any clips of this?). I'm not usually one for bothering about rl actor details for characters, but there really ought to be some sort of cracky B7 fic in that, probably with Vila trying to make money out of it. (And then I also thought that B7 would work really well as an AU in which 'B7' was a pop group, with rivalry and people going solo, and rival bands funded by an evil corporation. It would explain the outfits. And I may have been delirious, yes. Sorry.)

... And I will be back another time with further delirium, as I see it is time for lunch now. :-)

(You can hear bits of it in this Behind the Scenes from R7 Here. There's a clip of the song at 3.14)

belantana asking me about Classic Who reminded me that I'd given up reporting on my rewatching in order (that I started about four years ago now - so long that I'm just pining for One, Ian and Barbara by now.)

This was because I kept watching bits of serials and only finishing them months later in a very unorganised way, so here goes, nevertheless:

(Naturally, there will be 1978 spoilers).

( Thoughts on the first half of the Key To Time )

The below are as spoiler-free as I can manage, though:
( The Company of Friends )

( The Shadow of the Scourge )

(Did I say my reviews are boring as I mostly like things? It's true.

The last of my Big Finish audios I ordered the other day came this afternoon, which is good, because of course, the ones I wanted to listen to first came last. (There seems to be a universal law about this sort of thing.)

So now I have:
The Harvest (Seven, Ace, Hex)
The Settling (")
The Fires of Vulcan (Seven, Mel)
The Shadow of the Scourge (Seven, Benny, Ace)
Bloodtide (Six, Evelyn)
Brotherhood of the Daleks (Six, Charley)
The Raincloud Man (")

I should also add that me trying to get the cheapest deals (second hand or new) on Amazon led to my bank deciding that this was suspicious activity and putting a security marker on my card which led to a very awkward moment at the petrol station when I discovered my card wasn't accepted. And given that evening's spending also including a donation to Comic Relief... Yes, thieves always steal debit cards and donate to charity! Actually, that sounds like an odd sort of modern Robin Hood story idea there...)

So I'm a bit wary of buying any more now... I dunno. (Oh, and persiflage_1, just the back of The Harvest is giving me ideas!)