BBC

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Yet again, a Doctor Who annual where the art is rather good for the Doctor but pretty awful for the companion. Since this came out in September 1978, and Leela had left the programme several months before, maybe the compilers of the Annual and the BBC were hoping we had forgotten what she looked like. The woman in the artwork looks if anything more like Mary Tamm's Romana wearing a wig and a bad bra.

But in general the 1979 annual seems to be show more continuing the track of improvement on previous years. The fiction again is well-written and actually fairly substantial, the prose stories taking up 35 pages out of 64 and the comic strips another 12; the comic strips seem to have absorbed the spirit of 2000 AD in both style and substance, very flashy and busy but actually telling a story at the same time; and apart from my whine about the artwork the characterisation of Leela and the Doctor is generally (though not consistently) accurate. I was intrigued by one of the prose filler pieces as well, about the 'Skyship', which I hadn't heard of but turns out to be the ancestor of the Skyship 600 airship which is in fact in commercial use today. (So, yes, I was actually educated by the educational bits.) show less

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This was a collection of short radio pieces broadcast at the rate of one a day throughout 1999, the year after the Good Friday Agreement when the peace process seemed to be lurching back into crisis. Very simply, each day someone who had been affected by the Troubles got a couple of minutes to reflect on their story. The very first one, told on 1 January, gave me an instant shock of recognition: it was the account of someone who I vaguely know, who show more actually shares my surname, of the death of his mother, killed in a Loyalist bomb attack on her home in a Belfast street which I know very well, 32 years ago today. And I think for a lot of people there will have been a shock of recognition as each voice gave a human dimension to incidents which we might or might not remember having happened - Omagh, Bloody Sunday, Loughinisland, Brighton, Kingsmills, come up several times, but many accounts are just of isolated incidents, forgotten except by those who were most closely affected. And we hear from all angles: the paramilitary, the policeman, the soldier, the businessman, the bystander, the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, the orphan, the widow.

It's tough reading, and I think it would be even tougher listening. Grief and horror are not easy subjects. Some have found it difficult to move on from loss, and resent the failure of the state and of politicians to give them closure through justice. Some have moved into numb forgiveness, rejecting all sides. Some have found the grace to move into reconciliation. One can admire the last of these while sympathising with the others. These are awful things to have to deal with.

Putting my comparative hat on, I think Legacy is remarkable. It is genuinely broad and diverse. Many post-conflict initiatives - including also some in Northern Ireland - concentrate on telling only one side of the story. That offers a certain catharsis to those involved, but also entrenches narratives. It is of course a political choice, to emphasise the common humanity of suffering rather than seeking to portray one side's experience as noble and discount other perspectives. But it was the right political choice.

Unfortunately this excellent work is not very widely available. A handsome package including hardback book and 12 CDs was published in 2007, several years after the initial 1999 broadcast, and seems to be now out of print (and cost £25). A dozen of the stories were originally uploaded to the BBC website but have disappeared now. It's a real shame that this particular moment in time, really crucial for the embedding of the peace, has almost been lost. show less

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I very much enjoyed the 1971 Annual, but there was a gap of two years before the next in the series was published and unfortunately the improvement in quality was not maintained. Most of the stories appear to be by an author with little knowledge of the show - the Doctor is repeatedly referred to as 'the scientist' (except in the one story featuring the Master, where the fact that they are both Time Lords in exile gets slipped in) and Jo at one stage show more is described as having dark hair. The plots of the stories rather weakly reflect those of the first half of the Pertwee era, though have a tendency to end rather abruptly and sometimes limply. One is set in Australia, presumably to compensate Aussie viewers for their loyalty (hang on another few years, folks, and you will be further rewarded, if that is the word, with Tegan). The artist who produced the copious illustrations did a very good Pertwee, if rather obviously copied from various pulicity stills, but the depictions of Jo, Yates, the Brigadier and the Master are pretty unrecognisable (though at least Jo is blonde in the pictures if not in the text). The total page length has dropped down to 80 from 96, so all in all I think I would have felt a bit ripped off even at the time. show less

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I must say I found this to be the best written, and one of the best illustrated, of the annuals so far. Somehow tying the format down to Earth, with the threesome of Brigadier, Liz and Doctor, must have prevented the writer(s) from turning in naff space opera tales. The stories (eight in total, no comic strip this time) are a tad derivative of the televised Season Seven but basically OK and sometimes better than OK; the Doctor/Brigadier relationship show more is nicely done (though poor Liz is a bit screamy). One of the stories ("The Ghosts of Grestonspey") appears to have had a couple of final paragraphs omitted (on page 41), but it's clear what is going to happen and if it was done to make more space for the artwork that was probably a good call. show less