The Cave Of Skulls

I was in a hotel on Saturday night, so I'd probably have to pretend I missed Doctor Who. But we're only pretending it's fifty years ago, so let your mind slip back to half past five on Saturday November 30, 1963, and we'll watch the second episode of this new science-fiction series that was fun last week!

Actually, first, we get to watch the first episode again - repeated for the benefit of everyone who was distracted by John F Kennedy or power cuts last weekend. But now we get that spooky opening sequence again (since it was on twice in the repeat already tonight, we're getting very used to it by now), and then we pick up where we left off, with the TARDIS in a barren, rocky wilderness and an ominous shadow approaching it.

The shadow turns out to be a caveman, looking mystified, as well he might. Then we cut to a cave where a whole lot of cavepeople (wearing appropriate unidentifiable-animal-furs) gather around a man who's trying to start a fire. The camera focuses for quite some time on a woman with very 1960s-looking permed hair, for some reason, before panning up to an old woman who contemptously mocks the firemaker, Za - between them they deliver the appropriate exposition.

It really is gripping stuff, right from the start! The cavepeople talk in BBC English, rather than the usual grunting, but their dialogue and actions really capture a primitive mindset - Za's father knew how to make fire but didn't pass on the secret before he was killed, so now Za tries to recreate his actions by rolling a bone between his hands and glaring at a pile of twigs. The old woman thinks fire is a bad thing, because they didn't have it in her day. There's real personality here, it's great writing.

Will the outsider, Kal, replace Za as leader and get the most attractive woman, Hur? But back in the TARDIS, Barbara and Ian wake up among the knick-knacks. The Doctor and Susan are looking at the instruments and the scanner screen to see where they are. And when - although the yearometer is broken, so they're not sure on that point. The Doctor doesn't answer to "Dr Foreman", and is unhelpful to Ian's demands that he open the door. Still, he knows he's gone back in time and wants to establish the year with the aid of a few rock samples and his geiger counter.

Out they go, much to Ian's astonishment (Barbara takes it all in her stride, comparatively speaking). It's cold outside, there are unseen birds squawking off-camera, and the Doctor's most concerned by the fact that the police box is still a police box, rather than having changed shape to match their surroundings. He wanders off, followed by that caveman. Ian, Barbara and Susan investigate an animal skull, then Barbara tries to reassure Ian that they'll just have to put up with all this insanity.

The Doctor lights his pipe - an amazingly huge thing, is it a pipe of the future? But he's attacked by the caveman, and the others can only find his hat and smashed geiger counter. "He may have been taken," Ian intones. Susan, meanwhile, demonstrates that her acting range has two modes; deadpan and hysterical screaming. She finds the Doctor's precious notebook, which he'd never leave behind. As they go off to look for him, Ian notes that the sand is freezing cold. This gets a burst of dramatic music, as if it's important.

But we cut back to the cave, where cavechildren are playing, and the cave politics plays out between the adults - Kal has been boasting that he's seen people make fire and will probably learn how to do it if they make him leader ("Orb" will tell him). Za vows to make everyone follow him instead. Then in comes Kal, carrying the Doctor. Excellently, he describes the TARDIS as 'a strange tree', and praises his own bravery in approaching it when Za would have run away. The exchanges between the cavemen are just awesome.

Kal promises to get the Doctor to make fire and insists that the others acclaim him as leader - they live somewhere where tigers and bears are a problem, incidentally. The Doctor wakes up and tries to talk his way out of it by promising to make fire, but then it turns out he's lost his matches. Za takes advantage of this by denouncing Kal as a liar and getting the tribe back on his side. They display a talent for sarcasm as they laugh at him.

Then Ian, Barbara and Susan come in and stage a hopeless attempt at a rescue. The Doctor insists that there'll be no fire if they kill Ian, so Za reaches a compromise and announces that they'll be killed the next morning as a sacrifice to Orb. Meanwhile, they're imprisoned in the cave of skulls. While caveman-politics plays out between the various characters, our heroes are in a cave full of skulls, and do their best to get out of the bonds holding their wrists together. The cavemen seem to be good at knots. And also at splitting skulls open. Next episode, "The Forest Of Fear".

This was fun, although you would have expected a bit more focus on the four time-travellers. Instead, it's the cavemen who are the really interesting ones...

Remembering the world again

I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised by how well I did at the world championship - I went into it with the intention of just getting okay scores in everything and not trying for any big results, and I achieved that quite admirably. 500 championship points in each discipline is a respectable target to aim for, and I did it in nearly everything (names and faces doesn't count, of course).

The good thing about the current schedule for the WMC is that names and faces comes first, so we can get it out of the way. One of these days, I'll work out a good way to do it, but until then a score of 53 or so will just have to do. It was close at the top of the leaderboard, though - Boris Konrad won with 106, just barely ahead of Jonas von Essen and James Paterson on 105. Boris was hugely delighted with the result, jumping up and down and celebrating (the Germans have always liked to use lofty titles like "World Champion of Names and Faces Discipline") and James was just as thrilled with his silver medal, having achieved in one stroke his aim for the whole competition.

We got the results of the names and faces at the usual time, after lunch, incidentally, despite the WMC's strict new schedule of not announcing anything until the following morning. Scores, though, were uploaded in a timely manner onto the statistics website (at those times when it wasn't broken or the wifi at the conference centre wasn't dead - as I've mentioned before, memory competitions have an amazing talent for breaking the internet) and the top ten announced with a minimum of confusion by Tony. It was still necessary to print out pieces of paper and stick them to the walls for everyone to crowd around, but that's all part of the fun of the world memory championship!

One thing we did have on the big screen was Andy Fong's timer, showing how much time was left for memory and recall, and a traffic-light graphic telling competitors when they could and couldn't leave the room during the recall period (stay in your seats in the first and last five minutes, please) - it really worked, too!

Binary digits came next, and bearing in mind the UK Championship, when I went through them at my normal speed and only got a score around 2000 (and not having done a single bit of training since then), I was extra-slow and careful, reading them once then closing my eyes and trying to make sure I remembered everything. I got through about 3700 digits in that way, and was hoping for a score a bit above 3000 (which I've always seen as the minimum 'cool' score in binary), but ended up with 2810.

Other people were rather cooler - I fondly remember the days when only Gunther and I ever scored over 3000, but this year we had a winning score of 3841 from Jonas, and three more 3000-plus results from Johannes Mallow, Ola Kåre Risa and Christian Schäfer. I think of that lot as the 'new generation' of memory, although there's a new new generation now who'll be winning championships before long. I must be getting old.

And we finished with hour numbers. I was again super-careful with this one, reading each journey three times and trying to be certain I got it fixed in my head. I spent about six minutes on each journey before moving on to the next, when my normal time to aim for is two and a half. Probably a good plan, because when I eventually moved on to the seventh journey I felt that my brain couldn't take any new information, so I gave it up half-way through and just concentrated on the 1521 digits I'd looked at. And I got a final score of 1360 (you lose 40 points for making a mistake in a row... wait, did I get that final one digit wrong, or did they forget to mark it? I want a stewards' enquiry!) Of course, 2000 is the 'cool' score nowadays, and three people surpassed that once-unthinkable level - Jonas, alarmingly good Mongolian newcomer Namuuntuul Bat-Erdene (who also beat me in binary) and Christian top-scoring with 2351. I've never ever done 2000 in a competition, even when I was top of the world.

Also on Saturday I had my first interview with the Telegraph. On the two following days I was interviewed by two more people from the same newspaper, leading me to think that they've got a serious over-staffing problem. They've got an accuracy problem as well - Tony Buzan was very keen for me to sue them for misquoting me in Sunday's article, to get memory sports that extra bit of publicity, but I don't think I really want to become the kind of person who sues newspapers. Although it might be a good way to raise some extra cash...

Day 2 started bright and early - the weather was really nice, incidentally, dry and sometimes sunny, and never particularly cold. I was staying in the Travelodge just down the road, and it's got my recommendation if you're ever visiting Croydon. And we launched straight in to the abstract images. I haven't looked at my images flashcards (bits of paper) for months, so I decided to be extra extra careful with this one, and just attempt 200. The big names do well over 400 now, and so although I got a perfect score of 200, it was way behind Jonas's 459, Johannes's 425 and Christian's 418. Those three were clearly the hot favourites after the first day - Hannes had been unwell on the Saturday afternoon and hadn't got a good score in hour numbers, but you can never rule him out.

And this was amply demonstrated in 5-minute numbers. I went for a safe 240 (which used to be my 'safe' score donkeys' years ago, before I bumped it up to a safe-ish 360) and got it right, but Johannes either threw caution to the wind or is hugely confident in his abilities (or else he's a daredevil who does the 'risky' score in the first trial and then a safe one in the second if that goes wrong) and produced a new world record 501! That proved unbeatable, even by himself in the second trial, with number-whiz Tsogbadrakh Saikhanbayar (remember him from the memoriad last year?) in second with 440, and the much-improved-all-of-a-sudden Marwin Wallonius third with 360.

Marwin is of course the second part of Team Sweden - if they add a third top-level competitor, maybe they'll be challenging Team Germany's monopoly of the team championship?

In between the two trials of speed numbers, so that the first could be scored and announced before the second, came historic dates (why did it take so many years to realise that doing it this way would save a lot of time?) I used to be awesome at historic dates even without doing any training for it, but I suppose I was benefitting from the general mindset of having practiced, because I'm not nearly as good when I'm mentally out of shape like I am at the moment. Still, a score of 72 would have been awesome in the old days, so maybe it's just that everyone else is getting better. Anyway, Johannes won what has always been one of his specialist subjects, with 116, but Jonas was close behind on 106 and Christian on 92.

And then in the afternoon it was hour cards. I'm always confident of getting a good result here, even without any training, but I played it safe and went for just 21 packs, hoping to make sure I got them all right. Despite which, to my annoyance, several of them just didn't feel quite right when I came to write them down - I ended up with a respectable 18 packs, 936 cards. Jonas was top of the tree again with 1266, followed closely by my protegé Ola with 1224. In third place was the third Mongolian to get a top-three-in-a-discipline medal, Sengesamdan Ulziikhutag, with 960.

I had been hovering alarmingly around tenth place all weekend - my stated aim being to finish in the top ten and still look like a half-way competent memoriser, it was looking worryingly like I might not even achieve that. I had to step it up a gear or two on the final day.

Along comes random words, and either they were easier than usual or my mind was in a more relaxed kind of state without the stress of being good at memorising numbers, because I breezed through 181 words without any kind of problem, head-scratching or having to mentally run through the list of every word I know to try to remember the one I've forgotten. That was the fifth-best score, the kind of position I'd be happy with even if I was at my best, since I've never been all that great at words. Someone who always has been that great is James Paterson, who scooped the gold medal with 224! Is he our new always-wins-at-names-and-words guy? Johannes was just behind with 222 and Jonas with 211.

Jonas seemed to be safely in the lead by this point, but the thing about spoken numbers and speed cards is that it's easy to score little or nothing if you really make a mess of it...

But all fears in that direction were allayed when he got a perfect 200 in the first trial. So did Tsogbadrakh (who was awesome in the 'flash numbers' in the memoriad) and Mark Anthony Castaneda (who was awesome in the spoken numbers last year). As for me, I was delighted to have remembered 141 digits perfectly, and then hugely annoyed to find that I hadn't - one of the earliest groups of digits was 675, and I'd somehow heard and memorised it as 765.

As I told a journalist between trials, maybe it was because the story at that point worked better with a person, rather than a lizard. But that theory was shot down in the second trial when something almost identical happened - I mis-memorised 075 as 095, even though 095 is an inanimate object and at that point I was thinking "this is a lot of objects in a row, I hope something alive comes next..." So when I eventually got 72 in the final trial, it was a relief.

Those two good results had kept me in contention with all the other much-too-good opponents I was facing, but I was still only in tenth place as we went into the speed cards. I was only fractionally behind three people, though, so a good time could easily bump me up the rankings. So first time I did a safe run, which went surprisingly slowly and awkwardly and ended up with 44 seconds or so. Jonas did a safe minute-and-a-half, enough to guarantee a World Championship victory even despite Johannes's 27.55 seconds. He joins the under-30-seconds club with that, I think!

I renewed my membership in the second trial, with a delightfully trouble-free 28.08! It's good to know I can still do something right. Ola got 29-and-a-bit as well, proving that sub-30-second times are becoming old hat these days.

That time bounced me all the way up to 5th place overall! That was a bit of a surprise, actually - since I had to leave early in order to get back here for work the next day (the championship was awkwardly scheduled at the month end, which is a time when I'm not technically supposed to take time off work), I'd worked out the final scores in my head based on what I thought everyone had scored and told everyone on Facebook that I'd come seventh.

The people who've been complaining that it took so long to put the results online need to remember that in my day all you got was a spreadsheet emailed to you a week later if you were lucky. Now in this advanced era, you can see all the results here or here, according to preference. The Memocamp results page is good for a laugh - scores are highlighted green for a personal best, yellow for a national record or red for a world record, and my line is a colourless desert in a sea of yellow and green!

Let him sedition hush

I feel I should point out that that Telegraph article makes me out to be a lot more seditious that I actually am. He turned a statement that was a masterpiece of tact, along the lines of "I get in trouble if I sound like I'm saying these techniques are completely useless, so let me be clear that I'm just saying I don't use them myself for anything except memory competitions..." into practically denouncing everyone who says memory techniques are good things as a charlatan. Oh well, if that's what sells newspapers. I'm not friends with any Telegraph readers, anyway.

Keeping with the theme of this blog post's title (and forcing you all to go to Google to find what I'm talking about), we now have rebellious Scots to crush in the memory world! His name's Hugh, and although he was originally registered as English, he pointed out that he is in fact from Scotland (English accent notwithstanding) and so now forms team Scotland all by himself! How long before we have a Home Nations Memory Championship with us all competing against each other?

I've just got back to the hotel after an interview with an English television crew, following which I forgot I'd taken my jumper off and had to go back and get it, and then an Italian crew, following which I had to go back and give them the microphone I was still wearing. The Italians also shone incredibly bright lights in my eyes, so I'm just hoping I'm touch-typing this into my laptop, and not an old brick or something.

Hard Thought

There's an article in the Telegraph today about the world championship. I'm shockingly misquoted - I didn't wonder whether I'd met the journalist somewhere before, I had absolutely no recollection of him and told him so, even though he said he'd interviewed me a few years ago!

I do remember another Telegraph interview, but not the person who talked to me - I think he must have got new glasses since then, because I would have remembered the big round ones he was wearing yesterday.

The paper does redeem itself by including accurate little featurettes on the ten disciplines and the world records, which most media coverage doesn't. This is the kind of thing that will actually encourage people to take part, so I approve - even if it repeatedly calls me the first person to memorise a pack of cards in under 30 seconds (true, but old news nowadays when plenty of people have done better...)

Nice use of that old picture of me in the Brazilian Mystery Cloak, though!

Remember, remember, the thirtieth of November

Here I am in glamorous Croydon, after the first day of the World Memory Championship 2013! We're in a surprisingly silent conference centre in the middle of a street market full of mongers yelling about their cheap fruit and veg, and the competition room comes equipped with a big screen displaying the time remaining to memorise or recall, as appropriate! We've never had that kind of hi-tech stuff at a WMC before, so all glory to Andy Fong for creating it!

Not having practiced, I'm in the pleasant situation of being here with no expectations and no intention of doing anything but have fun. With Simon Reinhard not being here, Johannes Mallow is the blistering hot favourite, but maybe one of our up-and-coming new mental athletes will give him a run for his metaphorical money (no prizes).

Hard to say, so far, because we've only had the results of the names and faces, and you can never judge what form people are in until we've had a 'real' memory discipline or two announced. The statistics website, unsurprisingly, has dropped dead, but if it can be brought back to life the results can be found here first. If not, Memocamp might be able to get hold of the information somehow and upload it there...

Boris Konrad won the names and faces, fractionally ahead of Jonas von Essen and James Paterson (the usual suspects, in other words), and I got some dreadful score that I'm really not unhappy with at all.

With binary I went for an unusual slow-and-steady kind of approach, making sure I could remember everything, only attempting something a bit less than 3750 and hopefully ending up with a score around 3000. Not the way I'd do it if I'd done any training, but a lot more effective than trying to go at my usual kind of speed and forgetting almost everything (the technique I adopted in the UK Championship). I did the same for the hour numbers, only even slower and steadier, attempting just 1520 (well, 1521; I do them in groups of 9) and I think not being a million miles away from getting them all right. 1200 is a respectable score even in these awful modern times when people get 2000+ as a matter of course, so if I got something around there I won't be disappointed. The aim this year is to finish in the top ten and not make a complete fool of myself. Modest expectations, you see.

The day after the Day of the Doctor

I know I've been talking about Doctor Who a lot lately, but it was that good. The fiftieth anniversary special was amazing! Rather than taking the view that an anniversary special just means showing pictures of all the Doctors in some kind of dramatic exciting fight that doesn't make any sense if you think about it for half a second, they did that bit in just one throwaway scene near the end and spent most of the 75-minute episode doing genuinely clever things with the concept of time travel - something that the 21st-century series generally hasn't done at all well so far. This story, though, was intricate in its construction, with lots of little moments that get a big thumbs-up from me, and the three Doctors and Clara were wonderfully characterised!

I'm happy now. Just keep making Doctor Who, please!

An Unearthly Child

I thought it would be fun to watch an episode of Doctor Who every Saturday, fifty years after it was first shown, and also share with my blog-readers what I think about it. The days of the week go out of sync next March, because 1964 was a leap year and 2014 isn't, but I'll probably have got bored with the idea by then anyway, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

For now, though, it's Saturday November 23, 1963. We're sitting around at home watching Grandstand (interrupted regularly by news updates about President Kennedy's assassination yesterday) and we've never even heard of Daleks. Last week's Radio Times (people who write about TV shows in those days never remember that every single television-owner in Britain bought the Radio Times back then - it was the one and only place to see the BBC TV listings) told us that "Saturday's serial begins when two teachers (Jacqueline Hill and William Russell) probe the mystery surrounding one of their pupils (Carol Ann Ford) - and meet the strange Dr. Who" and shows a picture of the three of them.

This week's RT has a much bigger feature, spelling Carole Ann Ford's name right and telling us a lot more about the intriguing-sounding new series. It looks like fun, doesn't it? There was a trailer for the new series last Saturday evening, and another last night, but since they no longer exist in the BBC archives, I'm going to assume we missed seeing them. It involved William Hartnell talking to the camera and saying basically the same thing that's in this article...



Okay, it's 5:15, we're settled down in front of the black-and-white TV with a cup of tea and a sandwich, and we're lucky enough to be in one of the houses in Britain not being affected by the widespread power cuts. It's cold outside, there are only two TV channels, so we might as well watch this new thing on the BBC!

It's running late - another news update from America - but then when it starts, we get the opening titles...

Spooky. A line of white light twists and distorts, to the accompaniment of eerie music and hissing noises, then turns into flying white patterns of light rushing at the viewer, and the words DOCTOR OHO appear on the screen - turning into DOCTOR WHO a split second later when it becomes clear that the writing was reversed and overlaid on top of itself in order to look more spooky. That part doesn't really work, but the rest of the opening sequence is completely awesome and like nothing we've seen before on television here in the year 1963!

The music keeps on playing as we see a policeman wandering around a foggy night-time street and shining his torch on an old wooden gate with "I.M.Foreman, Scrap Merchant, 76 Totters Lane" painted on it. Dixon of Dock Green is on the BBC in an hour and a half - are they showing that early by mistake? No, the policeman wanders off after checking that the gate is locked, and then it opens all by itself, leading the camera into a junkyard filled with miscellaneous scrap. Among it is a police box - a normal sight on the streets of London, although it's a bit strange to see one inside a yard like this. The title "An Unearthly Child" appears as the theme music finally stops, followed by the name of the writer, Anthony Coburn. We zoom in on the police box's phone hatch, then we blur-dissolve to the noticeboard of Coal Hill School.

Strange and mysterious beginning, but it's effective! Makes you wonder what's going on...

The school bell's ringing, sixties teenagers are larking about on their way home, and teacher Barbara Wright comes into the chemistry lab to talk to her colleague Ian Chesterton. His first question "Not gone yet?" is a bit strange, since the bell for the end of school rang less than 30 seconds ago, but never mind. They chat about Susan Foreman's strangeness - she's an uncanny genius fifteen-year-old, but secretive about her home life, and Barbara is worried about her, especially since her home address is just a junkyard with no house attached. Ian vaguely remembers that Susan lives with her grandfather, who's a doctor, and they resolve to play detective and check it out.

Back to the English classroom, where Susan is listening to loud music on a transistor radio. Beatlemania hasn't hit the BBC yet, obviously, it's very late-fifties stuff and not what genuine teenagers are listening to these days at all. Susan is rather unearthly-looking, with short hair in an unfashionable style and a rather strange appearance. She's also not played by a very convincing actor, unfortunately. Ian and Barbara are both good, in a BBC-drama kind of way, and likeable too. They go on their way, leaving Susan to read a book about the French Revolution and exclaim that the writer's got it wrong!

The book is a cheap and hasty TV prop, with a paper dustcover containing no words except "THE FRENCH REVOLUTION" on the cover. Did they forget to make one until filming had already started? The rest of the sets are very good - detailed and well-made classrooms! If I was the director (who otherwise does an excellent job here), I wouldn't have chosen a close-up on the book as my transition to the next scene...

In Ian's car in the dark, the two teachers wait outside the junkyard gate and reminisce about Susan's strangenesses as they try to pretend to themselves that they're motivated by anything other than curiosity. Susan doesn't know how many shillings there are in a pound, and when the other pupils laugh at her, she recalls that the decimal system hasn't started yet. [Doctor Who's first and possibly best ever prediction of the future - the change to decimal currency was planned in 1963, but wasn't definitely going to happen and a timescale for it hadn't been set yet. Retrospectively, it's understandable that Susan got mixed up, she's less than a decade too early for it, although since we later learn that she's been on Earth, in Britain, for five months, it's surprising that she hasn't seen money yet.]

The cutaways to Susan show her in the classroom sets, with Barbara's and Ian's voices off-screen - it's a strange way to do it by 2013 standards, and looks weird, but if we click back into the 1963 mindset when most television was broadcast live or (like Doctor Who) recorded 'as live' with multiple cameras and two or three sets squeezed next to each other in the same studio, it doesn't look weird at all. Susan's also bored with Ian's chemistry experiments, finding them too obvious or incomprehensible because they only calculate in three dimensions rather than five...

Susan goes in through the junkyard gate, and the teachers follow her. Ian drops and loses his torch in the dark, and isn't carrying any matches (most 1963 people did!), but they still manage to find the police box. It's vibrating strangely, although Ian walks all around it and can't see any power cable. But then they go and hide as a mysterious old man comes along. He starts to open the police box, and Susan's voice greets him (There you are, Grandfather!) from inside, surprising Ian and Barbara enough that they make a noise attracting the old man's attention.

We finally get to see the title character of this new series! His name goes unmentioned in this episode, although the Radio Times article variously called him 'Dr. Who' (the character's name on the credits) or 'the Doctor'. His first line of dialogue is rather stagey, but then he becomes really quite captivating as he infuriates Ian and Barbara by denying everything and refusing to let them see inside the police box. He chuckles to himself, peppers his speech with "Hmm?" and completely takes charge of the situation even though Ian is bigger, younger and very assertive. His long white hair is very strange-looking for 1963, he's got a woolly hat on, plus a black coat and colourful scarf. The conversation goes round in circles, until the teachers are on the point of being forced to just go away and fetch a policeman, but then the police box door opens, Susan calls out to her grandfather from the inside, and Barbara and Ian force their way in.

And now we get the real science-fiction part at last! The brightly-lit room they stumble into is much, much bigger than the police box! Strange walls with big recessed circles in them, a variety of large and peculiar ornaments, and a hexagonal control panel in the middle of the room. Very strikingly designed and fascinating to see! The ever-practical Barbara is concerned with asking Susan whether she's okay, while Ian is bewildered - he walked all around the police box, after all! The Doctor strips off his coat and scarf, ignoring the teachers' questions and generally scoffing at their ignorance. He's wearing an old-fashioned shirt and tie under a black jacket. He and Susan explain that they're all standing in a 'ship', the TARDIS, that can go anywhere in space or time. And they wonder what they're going to do with these interlopers from 1963...

He explains that he's from a different planet and time, and that he and Susan are exiles, all alone, but that they'll get back home one day. And while Susan begs him to let her teachers just go, he insists that they'll tell everyone what they've seen, and the time travellers will have to be on their way. The Doctor laughs to himself merrily as he locks Ian and Barbara in the TARDIS, sneakily electrifies the controls so Ian gets a shock when he touches them, and finally when they're distracted by Susan works the controls.

The room starts to shake, there's an eerie wheezing noise, we see London receding into the distance, and then an extended version of the spooky light patterns from the opening titles. Ian and Barbara fall down unconscious and we get close-ups of Susan and the Doctor, intercut with swirly light effects and creepy noises. This kind of thing is terrifying to a 1963 audience!

The television screen in the TARDIS now shows a barren, rocky landscape. The police box is now standing incongrously among the rocks and bare trees, and a human shadow is seen approaching it...

Next episode, says the caption, "The Cave Of Skulls"! The title music plays, the credits scroll, and the scene gradually fades to black. 1963 audiences probably noticed the unusual fact that the producer is a woman, Verity Lambert, and the director is an Indian immigrant, Waris Hussein.

It really is a great start to a series! It's a fascinating story, and it leaves us wanting to know what's going to happen next. I would certainly be tuning in next week if I was watching in 1963, intrigued by the setup in this first episode and the promises in the Radio Times that this strange quartet will be travelling all around the universe in the weeks to come...

Mit Schirm, Charme und Melone

Okay, it was three weeks ago, but here's my account of my German TV adventure!

Although in some ways planned in advance, the trip to Germany was a last-minute kind of thing - the qualifying contest between Simon and Johannes was filmed on Tuesday night, and it was the vote of the studio audience at that show that decided which three disciplines would go through to the grand final. Since I'd booked Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off work anyway, I would've felt silly going back and explaining that I wasn't on German TV after all. Luckily, though, the memory challenge was spectacular enough to qualify, and I was off to Cologne.

Arriving at Düsseldorf on Thursday morning, I shared a car with the UK's Strongest Man, Eddie Hall, plus his wife and baby son Maximus the Muscle Baby. Well, I just made up the subtitle, but isn't Maximus the best possible name for a strongman to call his son? We were conveyed to Cologne and set up in the Hopper Hotel on the very memorably-named Dagobertstrasse (Donald Duck's Uncle Scrooge is called Uncle Dagobert in German; I have no idea why. But that's the only thing anyone in Germany would ever associate the name with, although the street was presumably named after some mediaeval saint.) And then it was off to the TV studios for our first rehearsal.

The challenge had been trimmed down a little from the original plans - the qualifying contest between Simon and Johannes gave them a maximum three minutes to memorise 50 digits, 100 heads-or-tails coins (that is, binary digits in a clever disguise) and 40 words. The grand final added 32 cards (7 to ace, like in the popular German game Skat) for a great all-round test of memorising. But then they realised that it took way too long to recite all those heads and tails, so the coins were removed from the final. Which is a shame, I was looking forward to that part, and binary is perhaps the only remaining discipline where I've still got the edge over Simon.

Generally speaking, the European masters were separated from the German winners in rehearsals - it was supposed to be a big surprise for them when they saw their opponent on the live show. Since Simon and I know each other quite well, the TV people didn't bother to keep us apart, and let us do the rehearsals together - unlike in the first show, when they sat down and looked at computer screens, this time it would be more visual, with the cards, numbers and words appearing on separate screens that the competitors walked between, with a big red buzzer to press at the end (the first one to finish presses the buzzer to make the screens go blank for both competitors). The studio looked very cool - quite a bit bigger than the ones I've been in at BBC Television Centre in the past.

After a practice run with the speed memory challenge, which was held up by a technical problem or two, we had dinner in the studio canteen and then faced the important decision of what to wear on the show. The Germans got to wear their normal clothes, but the European challengers were dressed up in something a bit more spectacular. The costume woman had already hit on a way to make me look extremely British and colourful - a kilt. I thought she was joking, but she really didn't seem to see anything wrong with that idea - and to be fair, everyone in England has been making comments about lederhosen, which sounds just as absurd to Germans in the Rhineland as a kilt does to English people. Anyway, it was good to have something to say 'no' to - the TV people, spearheaded by the wonderful Uschi, were constantly asking me if their various ideas were okay and whether I was unhappy with anything. For future reference, I'm basically fine with everything in the world, always. Except wearing a kilt on TV.

So they eventually were persuaded to go with the second choice - a suit and tie, bowler hat and umbrella. I looked surprisingly awesome in this get-up! My beard's quite long at the moment, and I looked like some kind of absent-minded professor. I need to dress up like that more often. I would have much preferred the outfit they put Eddie Hall in, though - a studded leather gladiator-style skirt (what is it with the Germans trying to make the English wear skirts?), leather thongs around his wrists, bright red cape and nothing else.

We all dressed up in full costume for the big dress rehearsal on Friday evening, including my big entrance - the giant screen splits in half to reveal me standing on a pedestal and looking awesome, to the accompaniment of dramatic music. In the rehearsal, actually, it looked much better - I looked serious and sinister until the last moment, then smiled just as it cut to the pre-filmed sequence of me going about my everyday life (standing next to the Robin Hood statue in Nottingham, that kind of thing). On the show itself, they stopped the music a beat earlier, so I missed the smile.

I attempted to talk in German with the host, which was made a bit more difficult by having a translator in my ear, five seconds delayed, telling me what he was saying and generally meaning that I couldn't follow either of them. I tend to find it difficult to understand what Germans are saying to me; replying in German is a lot easier for some reason. Hopefully I made some kind of sense. So we did another practice run of the challenge, which worked better this time, although I still wasn't much good at the memorising, and then went out into the pouring rain (it was nice and warm compared to the weather here in England, but rained most of the time I was there) for a meal with Simon and Johannes (who was there as Simon's guest - mine, arriving on Saturday, was Boris, who'd been Simon's guest at the first show but now had to pretend to support the evil foreigner). They attempted to talk in German, but I didn't understand a word, so we switched back to English

Saturday gave me a chance to look around the shops of Cologne (the Friday was a bank holiday in Germany, and they closed down everything, just like they do on Sundays - Germany is a different world) before the big show in the evening. I had to be at the studio two hours before the show started, which was a bit excessive considering the memory part was the second from last and didn't happen until two and a half hours into the show and I'm ready to go with a light coating of makeup - since I was wearing a hat, I didn't even have to have powder plastered on my bald head to stop it reflecting the studio lights and blinding everyone! But the TV people, wonderfully, had set me up with an empty, silent conference room to compose my thoughts in - I even had the choice between that and hanging out in the green room with various other international competitors, so I only went up to the quiet room once the show had started and Boris had joined the audience.

I'd had a talk with the commentator, explaining how my memory techniques work (basically, exactly the same as Simon had already told him), and told him the journey I'd be using today was around Toton, Nottinghamshire. He wrote it down as "Toten", and I'm fairly sure he told the watching German audience that I was picturing myself in the village of the dead.

Despite all the 'mental preparation time', I was strangely nervous about the show - much more than I ever am about a memory championship. You'd think that by now I'd be used to never doing any good on TV shows, but obviously not. Since I'd gone too quickly with the numbers in rehearsals, in an attempt to catch up with the speed Simon was going at, I made a point of going more slowly and carefully this time. But then we had to re-start, because Simon had the same numbers as he'd had in the first programme, which was a little bit disorienting. German mind-games. So I quickly racked my brain for a journey that I hadn't used in practice too recently, settled on the Queensgate Centre in Peterborough, and started again.

Simon hit the buzzer while I was still half-way through my second reading of the words (we'd both decided to go through each list twice, rather than risking a single sighting), so I wasn't clear on a lot of them. But more importantly, I couldn't for the life of me remember what the first pair of cards was. So, having won the coin toss, I made Simon go first, in an attempt to give myself some more thinking time and remember it. Didn't work. And in any case, Simon was so perfect in his recall of everything that he would have won whatever I did.

So while the winners sat with their trophies in big gold armchairs, awaiting the viewer phone vote as to which performance was the most spectacular (it was the running-up-a-wall-and-backflipping-over-a-high-jump-bar, which admittedly looked a bit cooler than the memory show), I got to watch the last of the show in a room with the other losers. And a very fun experience it was for everyone, too! It's just a shame they didn't let me keep the bowler hat...

I'm back

Sorry I haven't blogged for such a long time. I've got a half-written account of my fun exploits in Germany to finish, and I'll post it for the world to see soon, I'm sure. Just to share my thoughts with the world on an array of other topics...

Doctor Who! Oh, wow, the Children in Need special was the best thing ever! I'm sure everyone who cares has seen it already, but I still won't spoil it - go and watch it on YouTube and not the BBC website, which spoils the surprise with the still-frame it uses to represent the episode! And now I'm quite giddy with excitement for the anniversary episode next week - I seriously don't remember ever being properly excited about a TV programme before, but I am. Very.

Davis Cup! I'm always a fan. It was always going to come down to the doubles, though, after Tipsarevic pulled out, so not playing Djokovic has to be a mistake. This is also the reason why Britain don't have a chance against the USA next year - a one-man team against a side with the world's best doubles players is doomed to failure.

Memory! I did an hour cards practice this morning, which is more than I've managed in a very long time. Successfully forced myself to keep at it all through the three hours, which is the important thing. Couldn't bring myself to sit down and do a binary practice this afternoon, but tomorrow, I hope...