A major (two volume) upgrade of this book is to be released in 2023, removing some of Miles' work (no doubt) as Tat Wood is now the central author of these, having already released updated versions of the other colour Doctors. I think this version is verbose and self-consciously erudite enough for me, actually! ( )

Certainly useful, have to admit though it's not quite as enjoyable a read as Sandifer's work. I'll refer back to it as I watch the episodes and blog about the show myself, but I don't know if I'll try to read other volumes straight through. Maybe the essays, but probably not the individual story write-ups; going to treat them more as a reference companion while watching the stories than as a sustained work about the show.

My major complaint is their approach to continuity. Not that I don't appreciate the insights and attention to detail, I just felt like the overall effort to "find" the explanations that might make the stories make sense in a larger continuity felt like a hollow exercise. If a thing's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well, and if the creators of the show couldn't be bothered to make a reasonably coherent continuity over time, I don't think it necessarily follow that fandom should pick up that slack. Where there is continuity, I'm all for it, but forcing square pegs in round holes strikes me as a sucker's game.

I did enjoy how the critiques got a bit tetchy as they got into Prosecution and Defense mode, but I think Miles (they're unsigned, so I'm making some assumptions about authorship in those sections that may not be accurate) gets the better of Wood every time.

Probably essential for fans. Probably not for anyone else. A contrast from the Eruditorum volumes, which I think stand on their own as criticism worth reading for even non-Whovians. ( )

In the ever-confusing history of the About Time series, this was actually the second written.  As a result, the series is clearly still growing into the format that it would perfect with About Time 1 and 2, covering the 1960s stories.  Still, this one is pretty good.

I found it hard going at first, but once we got into Season 14 or so the book began to pick up a bit and yield more interesting insights.  I wonder if this is because Miles and Wood obviously both love the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, and so the analysis often tends to boil down to "they got it just right"; perhaps there's more for them to sink their teeth into with Graham Williams's often misfiring producership.  This is also the part that sees the "Critique" essays being split into "Prosecution" and "Defense," with one author writing each one (but they don't say which is which).  Oddly, even though I don't really like Season 17, I found myself agreeing with the defense more often than not-- the prosecution's arguments often boiled down to "you can't do X in Doctor Who," when the case wasn't that you couldn't do X, but that X just hadn't been done well.

It's a good read, as all the About Time volumes have been, but strangely, my main takeaway has been a desire to watch The Invasion of Time and The Armageddon Factor again, of all things.  Now that's some good Doctor Who. (No, really.)

By this point in my Who watching, I was getting pretty tired of it. Too much Who in too short a time? Too shoddy production values? Too much (far too much) Tom Baker? Probably all of the above.

Hell, the book itself may have been more entertaining than the stories it was commenting on. But then, that's at least as much due to how fantastically enjoyable these books are, as to how uninspired the Tom Baker years were (for me). ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/917754.html

I loved the first two books in this series, but felt it would be difficult for the same quality to be kept up for all volumes. This one, covering six of the seven Tom Baker years as Doctor Who, is, frankly, squashed, with fewer than nine pages on average for each story covered, compared to eleven-ish per story for the first two volumes. (Though in pages per episode broadcast it comes out better, at 2.2 which is the same as Vol 1 and a shade more than Vol 2.)

I can forgive it. What's been cut is the back-stage gossip about the relations between and among the production team and the cast, with enough left in to make it very annoying that you don't get more; but I felt that the book is as good as the others in the series at looking at the roots of the stories covered, and impassioned in its assessment of the dramatic impact of the programme as broadcast.

Also, it is my favourite period of Doctor Who. This is when I was watching it most assiduously when first broadcast (the second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen was shown on my eighth birthday), and also, frankly, I think it includes a disproportionate number of the truly great stories of Old Who. The Doctor Who Dynamic Ratings Site agrees, with five of its top six Old Who stories dating from this era (The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death, Pyramids of Mars and The Deadly Assassin, with The Robots of Death, The Seeds of Doom and The Ark in Space not far behind).

Miles and Wood explain really well how it was that Hinchcliffe and Holmes made it so good, and how and why Williams simply wasn't able to deliver the same product (and Tom Baker is fingered as a major culprit in that process). There are also the usual enlightening essays about bits of Who-lore, BBC procedures and British culture of the day (of which the best is surely the piece on Top of the Pops). So, while I didn't learn as much from this book as I did from Volume 1 or 2, I did enjoy wallowing in nostalgia as I read it. ( )