vivdunstan

Enjoying my Patreon membership of Time Team, and the bonus content we get to see as a result. They’re digging at Sutton Hoo again right now, and we’re currently watching a patron-only video with Stewart Ainsworth exploring and musing over the landscape.

Finally resuming my listening and reviewing of Benny audios from Big Finish's series!

Just as a reminder, Benny/Bernice was introduced as a companion of the Seventh Doctor in the early 1990s Doctor Who novels. She then spun off to have her own adventures, and Big Finish made a long-running series of audio adventures starring Benny, played by actress Lisa Bowerman. Benny, like the more recent River Song, is a professor of archaeology. The stories are set in a scifi universe full of Doctor Who lore and monsters. Benny is often sent to investigate an archaeological site or matter on other planets. But in the series she is largely based at the Braxiatel Collection, an archive of strange artefacts, run by the mysterious Irving Braxiatel.

My latest listen is another in the 6th season of Benny audios. In this one, Benny and her former husband / on-off lover Jason Kane go to investigate the status of a museum on a war torn planet.

This is another sometimes brutal audio to listen to, following The Kingdom of the Blind. Like that one this includes accounts of torture, though less directly, rather recounted later. But it's still a tough listen, and does capture the sense of a society in anarchy, with a complicated picture of right and wrong, and certainly not a clear-cut black and white image.

More worryingly the soundscape is chaotic and it can be difficult to follow what's going on. I don't think it was as coherent as it could have been. However there are extremely powerful musings on the role of museums in preserving and sharing culture, and also their potential misuse for propaganda and power reasons. Benny also faces some rather direct questions about the supposedly open nature of the institution she works for.

So it was ok, but not one I'll rush to listen to again. Though the repartee between Benny and Jason was strong. Old friends rather than lovers now, but with a comfortable relationship that sees them survive a dangerous mission.

Crikey I so wanted to type 2024 there haha!

I've got off to a flying start this year, partly with 2 books that were hang overs from before, but also a quick read for my book club. But then I also quickly read 3 other books that had been hanging around for too long, and I wanted to pass on to charity shops. I'd previously started reading a couple of them.

1. An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson
2. Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri
3. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
4. Egyptian Myths: Meet the Gods, Goddesses, and Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by Jean Menzies
5. Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb by Zahi Hawass
6. ABBA: The Treasures by Ingmarie Halling and Carl Magnus Palm

An Academy for Liars is a dark academia book, with rather a lot of violence and gore added to the mix. It was ok, but I had to push to keep reading it to the end. 3/5 stars.

Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri was an incredible insight into the experience and history of black hair. A strong 4/5 stars.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop was another 3/5 star read for me. Ok, mostly, but a rather odd writing style, and an unexpected and lengthy shift away from the cosy bookshop setting mid way through. 3/5 stars.

Egyptian Myths by classical historian and YouTuber Jean Menzies was an entertaining and informative text, full of striking large format illustrations from Katie Ponder. I did find the order and structure a little confusing in places, but I learned a lot. 4/5 stars.

Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb is a large format coffee table book, filled with huge photographs and details of many hundreds of items from Tutankhamun's tomb. The items chosen are a selection carefully curated by Zahi Hawass, and it's not exhaustive. But for what you did get it was jaw dropping, including multi-page folding out large photographs. Both Martin and I were stunned by parts. 5/5 stars.

ABBA: The Treasures is a large format squidgy book telling much of the story of ABBA in photographs, reminiscences, and reproductions of paper ephemera connected with them, tucked into folders inside that you open up and work through the contents of. It's a nice book, but a rather narrow perspective on their life, focusing mainly on some of their 1970s international tours, which one of the authors accompanied them on. I did feel that I was missing out on the wider story. But the folders of paper ephemera were a delight. I was particularly amused by the customs list, for the Australian tour I think, including a "piano accordion". 4/5 stars.

I discovered today there is a "Waiting For You" zine dedicated to TV series The Detectorists. Issues 3 and 4 are still in print to buy and PDFs of issues 1-4 are available to buy. All available from the publisher directly.

There is also a short semi academic book about the series, Landscapes of Detectorists. For a while it was out of print, and I was waiting for it to come back into print. Now ordered, plus the zines. More info.

On to another Benny audio, and this one's a sequel of sorts to the first Tom Baker story "Robot" from 1974. Though it's also inspired by a tie-in jigsaw featuring the robot released in 1978. For the full story see the "Notes" section of this audio's entry on the TARDIS Wiki website. This audio even features the original robot voice actor from the 1974 TV story, and has callback elements to that story. But you don't need to have seen the 1974 Doctor Who TV story to follow the audio.

Benny ends up on a planet - shot down! - with just a couple of human survivors and one robot. Why she's there is slowly revealed, and also the complicated goings on of the survivors and their back story. It's definitely one of those Benny audios where the often small cast numbers are too painfully apparent. With just a father and daughter plus robot as guest characters it does feel like a remarkably sparse setting.

It does become more interesting as you listen on, when things also expand somewhat. But I was hampered throughout by frustration with the daughter character, who I think I was meant to empathise with. Even Benny gets phenomenally frustrated with her. And this then lessened the impact of certain plot elements later.

However it's an ok audio, and Lisa Bowerman as Benny was fab as always. Benny in this archaeologist phase is definitely someone I'd like to have been in a scifi alternative me, flying from planet to planet to investigate relics and archaeological sites, with hefty doses of sarcasm and spunk. But it's also an audio that highlights some of the problems with the range.

British archaeology TV series Time Team is 30 years old today, originally airing on Channel 4 on 16th January 1994. It's still creating new broadcast content, featuring new digs, free to watch on YouTube. What a fabulous legacy from all those years and now.