'When I was a kid and this was repeated on BBC 2 it gave me an incredibly misleading impression that the Troughton era was far more interesting than it actually is.'
This was the first Troughton I saw, and created in my head a conceptual swinging sixties psychedelia Troughton era that is more vivid to me than the real thing.
Jack Harkaway is in fact a real creation, and the Master of the Land of Fiction is something of an amalgam of his creator, Bracebridge Hemyng, along with Billy Bunter writer Charles Hamilton and Ling himself. In fact, the metafiction of this episode is more fourth wall breaking than immediately apparent, and the more you unpack it, the darker it becomes. I hold that this is actually a psychological horror story disguised as a fantasy romp. (For more on this, see the Relative Digressions episode Wrenna and I did!)
The fun thing is that Jamie being turned into a cardboard cut-out was already in the script, it wasn't added cos FH fell ill. It was just a wacky idea like Zoe being in a jar. So the recast only meant a very short extra bit needed to be written.
Given that both Blackbeard (Edward Teach) and Cyrano were real people, the idea that they became trapped in the land of fiction because they were written about and their fictional avatars became better known than them is quite a striking one.
'When I was a kid and this was repeated on BBC 2 it gave me an incredibly misleading impression that the Troughton era was far more interesting than it actually is.'
This was the first Troughton I saw, and created in my head a conceptual swinging sixties psychedelia Troughton era that is more vivid to me than the real thing.
Jack Harkaway is in fact a real creation, and the Master of the Land of Fiction is something of an amalgam of his creator, Bracebridge Hemyng, along with Billy Bunter writer Charles Hamilton and Ling himself. In fact, the metafiction of this episode is more fourth wall breaking than immediately apparent, and the more you unpack it, the darker it becomes. I hold that this is actually a psychological horror story disguised as a fantasy romp. (For more on this, see the Relative Digressions episode Wrenna and I did!)
The fun thing is that Jamie being turned into a cardboard cut-out was already in the script, it wasn't added cos FH fell ill. It was just a wacky idea like Zoe being in a jar. So the recast only meant a very short extra bit needed to be written.
This is surely the best Troughton story by a country mile.
Given that both Blackbeard (Edward Teach) and Cyrano were real people, the idea that they became trapped in the land of fiction because they were written about and their fictional avatars became better known than them is quite a striking one.