DIDDLY DUM PODCAST #206 – The Podcasting Lark

Doctor Who: Diddly Dum Podcast

Our old chum Suky Khakh joins us to take a look at the Third Doctor debut story “Spearhead from Space”. Along the way, Mark reports on a visit to Leadworth and we examine the blatant flirting between the Brig and Liz.

DDPC206 – The Podcasting LarkDownload

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SHOW NOTES

(00:00:00) Our guest is Suky Khakh of the “Around the Console” podcast, the “Trek This Out” podcast and the “Take Your Seats” podcast.

(00:00:00) The intro here is of course a tribute to “The Navy Lark”, a BBC radio comedy sitcom about life aboard a British Royal Navy frigate broadcast between 1959 and 1977. For most of its run, the show starred Leslie Phillips, Jon Pertwee and Stephen Murray.

(00:05:59) St Fagans National Museum of History commonly referred to as St Fagans after the village where it is located, is an open-air museum in Cardiff chronicling the historical lifestyle, culture, and architecture of the Welsh people. The museum is part of the wider network of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. It consists of more than forty re-erected buildings from various locations in Wales, and is set in the grounds of St Fagans Castle, a Grade I listed Elizabethan manor house. In 2011 Which? magazine named the museum the United Kingdom’s favourite visitor attraction. A six-year, £30-million revamp was completed in 2018 and the museum was named the Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2019.

(00:07:12) This is an except from Stewart Lee’s “Content Provider” comedy tour.

(00:12:55) This is the 1985 TV commerical for the 5-4-3-2-1 chocolate bar. As the name of the bar suggests, it consisted of five different parts; wafer, crispy rice, caramel, fondant, and milk chocolate. It was made by Crawford’s (who also made Bandit) at their Binns Road factory in Liverpool. The brand was sold to United Biscuits in 1960. Sadly, it was discontinued in 1989 due to poor sales.

(00:39:16) Rosa Lewis (1867–1952) was an English cook and owner of The Cavendish Hotel in London, located at the intersection of Jermyn Street and Duke Street, St. James. Known as the “Queen of Cooks”, her culinary skills were highly prized by Edward VII, with whom she was rumoured to have had an affair in the 1890s. She was also called “The Duchess of Jermyn Street.” She left school at 12 to go into domestic service, working her way up to cook. She claimed that the great chef Auguste Escoffier taught her about cooking. It was he who named her the “Queen of Cooks”. One of her employers was Lady Randolph Churchill. One day, Rosa chased Lady Randolph’s then ten-year-old, red-haired son Winston out of her kitchen, shouting “Hop it, copper knob.” The 1976-77 BBC television series, “The Duchess of Duke Street”, starring Gemma Jones, was loosely based on her life. It is said that some of the scenes in “Vile Bodies” by Evelyn Waugh, in which she appears as her fictional counterpart Lottie Crump, were also inspired by the Cavendish Hotel under Lewis’ management.

(00:53:36) “P.R.O.B.E.” is a series of direct-to-video science-fiction films mostly written by Mark Gatiss and produced by BBV Productions. It was the first live-action Doctor Who spin-off series. The series features Caroline John as Liz Shaw, working for the Preternatural Research Bureau. Many former Doctor Who actors, including former Doctors Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, appear in the series playing different roles. (Due to licensing restrictions, no overt reference to The Doctor is permitted.) Doctor Who alumna Louise Jameson co-stars with Caroline John in the original four films, as Patricia Haggard.

(01:05:21) This rallying call for the BBC bolshies comes from the end of the opening credits music of “Citizen Smith”, a British television sitcom written by John Sullivan, first broadcast from 1977 to 1980. It starred Robert Lindsay as Walter Henry “Wolfie” Smith, a young Marxist “urban guerrilla” in Tooting, south London, who is attempting to emulate his hero Che Guevara. Wolfie is a reference to the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, who used the pseudonym “Citizen Smith” in order to evade capture by the Dublin Castle administration. Wolfie is the self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front (the TPF, merely a small bunch of his friends), the goals of which are “Power to the People” and “Freedom for Tooting”.

(01:13:38) “Unman, Wittering and Zigo” is a 1958 radio play by the Anglo-Irish playwright Giles Cooper. A feature film version was released in 1971. The play is part of the curriculum for GCSE and Standard Grade English coursework in the United Kingdom and is frequently performed in public schools.

(01:17:38) The famous Hand of Sutekh makes its debut in episode 2 of “Spearhead from Space” as can be seen on our Youtube channel here.

The Diddly Dum Podcast acknowledges the copyright of anyone we’ve pinched anything from.