The Moonbase

 There’s absolutely nothing I can write that will live up to the expectations for this one, so with a few deep breaths:

The Moonbase

(episode 1)

Well, here we are then.

We’ve escaped from the nefarious plots of Zaroff, and now the TARDIS is crashing!

The Doctor desperately tries to stabilise his machine as his companions hold on for dear life, and succeeds.

The TARDIS took this opportunity to land.

Polly thinks the inhospitable landscape seen on the scanner is Mars.

The Underwater Menace

 The Underwater Menace

(episode 1)

Right, let's get back to the Troughton era.

It's episode 1 of that story Official Fandom always told us was a bit naff, until Episode 2 got found and it got reappraised as "our kind of naff".

Still, four months on from Gerry Davis murdering the historical, let's see if some B-movie shlock can improve things.

The Highlanders

 Gerry and Innes kill off the historical, in one final flourish. We are also introduced to a Doctor Who icon, not that you'd know from this.

The Highlanders

(episode one)

I knew sod all about this story, incidentally. Jon Arnold speaks highly of it, Jamie joins the TARDIS crew, and a very young Hannah Gordon appears in it.

It's Scotland! Culloden Moor. And there's a fight going on. Young Frazer Hines drags a man to safety. Another man rushes a red coat and kills him. Lots of people battle.

I thought Gerry Davis was aiming to lighten the historical mood?

Top 40 Chart Singles (1994)

The slowest moving project in the world continues. I'm not saying it's glacial, but George RR Martin has been mocking its deadlines...

The recap:

A number of years ago, when the BBC4 Top of the Pops repeats reached 1984 (they are currently on 1994) I realised that, if you took the best forty songs which made the Top 40 in that year, you would get an amazing playlist. Which you did. The challenge was then to create such a list for each year of the charts. To gnash in fury when favourite songs only made it to forty-two in the charts, and were thus ineligible. To try and get forty good songs out of a year dominated by Jive Bunny.

The elephant in the room is that this is based on the art. Some of the artists may not have been the nicest of people. I'm a Gerry Rafferty man. He was a musical genius, and also a complete sod. So far, I've only disqualified one song based on the artist, a Welsh one from 2001. Which is to say that, when we eventually cover his era, Michael Jackson will be there, because you cannot look at the eighties and ignore Billie Jean. However, R Kelly will not be appearing at all, because personally I think his stuff was rubbish. Hope that helps.  

This is the 1994 edition of this project. 1994 was a brilliant year for charting music in the UK. I can say this with confidence because I turned eight years old in 1994, and watched Top of the Pops religiously for the first time, and so all of the major hits are nostalgically embedded into my brain. This made a list of forty rather difficult, however. Where does nostalgia end and greatness start? For too long, I wanted to hang on to songs I liked because they reminded me of youthful times, while finding no room for subjectively better tracks. In the end, here is the best hodgepodge of 1994, and tomorrow I could give you a different list.

Columbo Episodes Ranked (Part 4)

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here we are, it's the final episode, the cream rises to the top, the A list. 

What we have left is solid TV gold and yet, someone sod still had to rank them.