Top 5 Dr Who Companions

I have a growing stack of top fives that need more time than I've got to complete so it's handy to find a quicky topic every now and again to give me a bit of breathing space. I'm also always pleased to hear other people's suggestions and had quite an extensive list from a new reader the other week. This one was something I hadn't done and didn't take long to knock into shape.

1. Sarah Jane Smith - Elizabeth Sladen
(3rd & 4th Doctors, cameos with 10th & 11th Doctors)
I started watching Dr Who towards the end of Jon Pertwee's run on the show and so Sarah Jane was the first companion I knew. Not sure what it was about her but as a seven year old I definitely had a bit of a crush on her. I spent most of the Tom Baker era hiding behind the sofa, so it might just be that the Sarah Jane moments were the only bits I was brave enough to watch. Having returned recently in the spin-off series "The Sarah Jane Adventures" she doesn't seem to have aged at all and, despite being 20 years older than me, still has a certain something about her.

2. Jamie McCrimmon - Frazer Hines
(2nd Doctor)
Before he went on to star as a farmer in Emmerdale, Frazer Hines played an 18th century Scottish piper who became the second Doctor's companion. Sarah Jane might have appeared with more Doctors but Jamie appeared in 116 episodes with Patrick Troughton, making him the longest serving companion. These episodes were before my time but I got into them, having graduated to the comfy side of the sofa, when the BBC repeated the old series.

3. K9 - voice of John Leeson
(4th Doctor)
Looking back K9 seems a bit naff but he was something new and exciting when he first hit the screens. There was no flying and shooting lasers, he just wheeled about and shared his extensive knowledge, often to the point of tedium. He spoke with a formal tone and was always polite to his master but at times could be slightly condescending. Almost a robot dog version of Stephen Fry.

4. Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
(11th Doctor)
Its early days for Amy but she's made quite an impact in one series already. A feisty companion with a hint of mischief, flowing red hair and a suitably short temper.

5. Leela - Louise Jameson
(4th Doctor)
Savage warrior Leela effectively replaced Sarah Jane, so it took me a while to warm to her. But in 1978 there weren't many opportunities to see quite as much of the female form during suitable veiwing times for a 10 year old, so her appearances soon became unmissable.

My Top 5 Doctors are here in case you want to compare.

Top 5 Fonts

You may not have noticed but I recently changed the font of this blog from Arial to Verdana. I can get a bit obsessive about fonts. This probably dates back to my cartographic training days when we used hot glue and Letraset to add lettering to maps. It was quite theraputic chopping out place names and deciding the best position to stick them (usually top right). The arrival of computers added a whole new array of interesting fonts to use and I wasted many an hour selecting the right type face for a letter or report and, consequently, not enough time on the actual report. Blogger, thankfully, only offers five.

1. Helvetica - A no nonsense font that works for every occasion. Simple yet stylish it has developed something of a cult following and even inspired a film. Microsoft don't supply Helvetica, possibly due to ownership and costs, and palm us off with Arial instead.

2. Charles Rennie Mackintosh font - The ultimate Art Deco font and about as far from Helvetica as you're likely to get. Mrs Chop has a bit of a thing for CRM and we used this type face on our wedding invites. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect who included incredible levels of decorative detail in his designs and created this font specifically for his work.

3. Courier - Courier used to seem the least worthy of fonts. Designed to replicate the look of an old fashioned typewriter it didn't offer the same excitement as fancy new fonts like Bauhaus 93 and Rockwell Extra Bold. I appreciate it much more now. It's a getting things done type of font, a font that does the job without the need to look pretty.

4. Lucida Calligraphy - I quite like the whole Lucida family. The calligraphy variant is an elegant type face that provides the impression of handwriting without the amibiguity of the real thing.

5. Desdemona - Another Art Deco-esque style font but one that comes included with Microsoft Office. A Charles Rennie Mackintosh-lite if you will.

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Top 5 Seaside Piers

Hastings pier was almost completely destroyed by fire last week following an arson attack. It set me thinking about my favourite Piers, a distinctly British creation. The National Piers Society state that there are around 55 traditional Victorian piers still standing in the UK today. There used to be about 100 but they're tricky constructions to maintain, expensive to insure and vulnerable to the forces of nature, vandalism and under funded owners. In compiling this list I realise I've not visited very many. Mrs Chopper and the boys may find our holidays over the next few years revolving around fading seaside towns with a Victorian pier.

1. Eastbourne Pier - I spent most of my school summer holidays in Eastbourne and this was the first pier I visited. I can remember it being one of my holiday treats to be allowed a bit of money to use in the arcades, maybe buy a souvenir and usually have an ice-cream. It had been opened in 1870 designed by prolific pier architect Eugenius Birch. By my teens I was visiting Eastbourne with my mates, mainly because my best friend's parents owned a holiday flat in town, and we graduated to the pier nightclub.

2. Llandudno Pier - A big old pier that juts out into the Irish sea from the headland near Llandudno. It's a wide promenade that takes you out to the triangular platform at the end. There's a extension that runs back along the shore front, adding to the length and making it unlike any other pier I've seen.

3. Brighton Palace Pier - Brighton's only pier since the older, and Birch designed, West Pier was all but destroyed by two fires in 2003. The Palace Pier opened in 1899 and was the third pier to open in the town. It's probably the most profitable active pier in the country and is as well developed a pier as you're likely to find.

4. Blackpool North Pier - Blackpool still has three piers but the North pier is the oldest. The second of the fourteen piers designed by Eugenius Birch (the first being Margate Pier) was officially opened in 1863. I think it's the only Northern pier I've visited.

5. Aberystwyth Royal Pier - I spent a bit of time in Aber when one of my pals was at Uni there. The Royal Pier (another Birch design) is nothing special to look at and a good deal shorter that others of it's era having seen the seaward end swept away less than seven months after it opened in 1865. A subsequent replacement extension was eventually built but this was also swept away in 1938 and the Pier has since remained in stubby form. It does boast the benefit of a public house called the Inn on the Pier which is the only pub in the UK that remains open 24 hours a day.

A few famous piers that I've not visited yet. Southend Pier is very long but doesn't appear to offer a great deal other than the feeling of being a very long way out to sea on a rickety Victorian structure. Wigan Pier is not at the seaside and barely visible but of interest thanks to George Orwell and Paul Simon. Ryde Pier was the first pier built in England and remains the oldest timber planked pier still standing. I've been to Ryde but the pier is pretty dull and is there for the practical purposes of getting ferry passengers to and from the ferry. I also considered Piers outside of the UK but the only one I can remember visiting is Pier 39 in San Francisco which is so vast you wouldn't even know you were on a pier.

Top 5 Flintstones

It's a week late but thanks to the Google Doodle I noticed it was the 50th anniversary of The Flintstones last Thursday. Unlike most of the cartoons I used to like as a kid the original Flintstones series ran for some six years and over 160 episodes.

1. Barney Rubble - Could you get a better best pal? Happy with his lot in life but always prepared to back Fred's latest scheme.

2. Wilma Flintstone - Definitely the brains of the family. Betty Rubble may be hotter (can I say that about a cartoon?) but it's Wilma who runs the show.

3. Fred Flintstone - Stone Age forerunner of Homer Simpson.

4. Dino - I always liked Baby Puss (the Sabre-tooth cat that appears in the titles) but Dino makes a bigger impact in the show, and on Fred's stomach.

5. Arnold the Paperboy - Very minor character who contributes to a fairly long-running gag in which he annoys and outsmarts Fred on a regular basis.

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Top 5 Achievements at School

We're currently going through the anguish of looking at secondary schools for our eldest. This largely involves visiting different schools, listening to various head teachers, and walking round a lot of classrooms. Apart from sore feet and a nagging doubt I'm about to be told to stop running and tuck my shirt in, this has brought back a lot of memories of my own school days. I was never a big fan of school. It was something that got in the way of playing football and watching TV. Possibly that's why I didn't particularly excel in anything.


1. Making my one and only appearance for the school cricket team - Clearly desperate for an eleventh man and with anyone of any ability unavailable I was picked for the school team about 2 hours before the match was due to start. I didn't bowl. I fielded on the boundary, only twice having to make any effort to retrieve a ball. The opposition were all out for 33. I came in to bat as 11th man with our total standing at 30 for 9. Having successfully Tavare'd the first ball I faced my partner scored a quick single off the first ball of the final over. Feeling a bit of pressure as I faced my second ball I made remarkably decent contact and was able to score the 3 runs required to win the game. Euphoria erupted in all directions and I was literally carried off the pitch on the shoulders of my teammates. I was never selected again.

2. Appearing on "That's Life" as part of a Gospel Choir - "Harris, you can sing, follow me!" were the words my music teacher bellowed as he flew past me in the corridor. He was collecting a growing gaggle of students and I joined the throng to find out what was up. Mr Sutton knew someone who worked for the BBC. That's Life were in desperate need of a Gospel Choir to sing a song about a man who had bought an Aero and found it didn't have any holes in it. Quite why the BBC thought that a secondary school in Surrey was the best place to find a Gospel Choir at short notice I'm not quite sure but we appeared on the show, in full flowing red gowns, and sang the funny song.

We met Doc Cox, who was funny, Joanna Monro, who was lovely, and Adrian Mills, who was a bit of a cock. We also met the men from Aero who plied us with lots of free chocolate bars. The show was recorded shortly before transmission and was shown, in a time before we owned a video recorder, as we were travelling home on the coach.

3. Winning the trophy for services to Sport - Awarded for attending one inter-school athletics meeting as assistant to my polish PE teacher Mr Grazinski. My duties were not particularly onorous and basically consisted of looking after the starter pistol and timing each race with the school stop watch.


4. Being let off School Lunch - At Junior school I used to have school dinners. They were dreadful and to make matters worse we had to ask the duty teacher if we could leave what we had not eaten. One of the least enjoyable meals was Liver and mash and there was nothing worse than being told you had to finish off a bit more liver when you'd already eaten all the mash and veg. I was a fussy eater, even at home, and the constant rotation of horrible food led me to bunk off lunch. I realised that whilst in classes they always took a register at dinner time there was no such check. I survived for a good six months without lunch before reaching the point where I felt I was ready to take on whatever the canteen could throw at me. I joined the dinner queue with my mates, my taste buds tingling with anticipation of a proper meal. I was hoping for sausages and beans or spam fritters or shepherd's pie. My face dropped when I realised it was liver and mash. I ate the potato and veg and sliced a few tiny slithers off the liver. It hadn't improved a great deal. I took the long walk to the duty teacher, who smiled as I approached. "You've not been up for ages David! Of course you can leave that". I skipped for joy as I joined the queue for a large dollop of Chocolate Semolina.

5. Playing a bush in my first Nativity - I was not the most forthright of children and was never going to vie for a lead role in any school play. Clearly this was recognised by my teachers as my very first school nativity saw me cast as a bush. This pretty much boiled down to carrying a piece of scenery on to the stage at the appropriate moment and hiding behind it. There may have been a bit of singing involved but this was fine, I had a bush to hide behind. I wasn't the only child entrusted with a vegetation based role, one of my best friends had the more prestigious part of third tree. I'm not sure we entirely got the story of the Nativity in Thames Ditton.

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Top 5 Bands

1983 was my year zero for music. The point at which I started to take an interest in music beyond what I heard on Top of the Pops and that I found in my parents record collection. Since then I've always maintained a mental list of my favourite bands. In fact this was probably the beginning of my obsession with top fives. By the end of that year my Top 5 Bands list would have looked something like this;

1. Status Quo
2. Marillion
3. Iron Maiden
4. Pink Floyd
5. Big Country

My musical tastes remained fairly set for the best part of ten years. These bands were set in stone. Somewhere around the early nineties my musical horizons began to expand. I went to the Reading Festival and saw six bands in three days, my mental list began to unravel as I discovered new bands, new genres and new friends.

I thought it was time for me to have another go. It wasn't as easy as I thought it might be. My top two are pretty set but beyond that I've changed my mind at least ten times since I started to put this together. So, currently, my favourite bands/artists are thus.

1. Pixies

2. Johnny Cash

3. The Specials

4. A Silver Mount Zion

5. Arcade Fire

This will almost certainly change next week.

Top 5 Vincents

Another pub generated top five this week. Can't remember how we got on to the topic but Vincent is one of those names that seems to me to be unerringly cool.

1. Vincent van Gogh – An artist I really didn’t appreciate until I saw his work for real. I’m no connoisseur but seeing the texture and depth of paint on the original canvas adds an new dimension to his work. He lived briefly in Isleworth, not far from a flat I used to rent, though disappointingly I'm yet to discover any paintings produced during that period.

2. Vincent Furnier – Having been given such a fabulous rock’n’roll moniker at birth I'm not sure why he decided he needed a stage name. Never been the greatest fan of his music but you have to admire someone who can rip the heads of baby dolls one moment and play golf with Ronnie Corbett the next.

3. Vincent Price – A genuine legend of horror. For some reason he's associated in my mind with playing Dracula but a quick Google of his filmography suggests he never did.

4. V.I.N.Cent - One of the robots in “The Black Hole”, Disney’s 1979 attempt to cash in on Star Wars. The slightly desperate acronym stood for "Vital Information Necessary CENTralized" (which someone must have come up with very late on a Friday). Despite being poor substitutes for R2D2 and C3PO, he and his friend Old B.O.B. were the stars of the film.

5. Vinnie Vincent – So good they named him twice. Vincent Cusano was rechristened by Gene Simmons when he replaced Ace Frehley as guitarist in KISS. His tenure was short lived featuring on the “Creatures of the Night” album and tour and the band's first make-up free release “Lick It Up”.

Contenders who didn’t make the cut include Vinnie Jones (Footballer, Actor, Gamekeeper & Thug), Vincent Gallo (Actor, Producer, Composer, Director, Screenwriter, Songwriter, Singer), Vince Cable (Lib Dem MP and now coalition Business Secretary), Vince Hall (Michael Doyle in the original cast of Grange Hill) or Vince Taylor (50’s British r’n’r star and writer of "Brand New Cadillac).

Top 5 books by Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams made a big impact on my world view as a teenager. I think he'd still make my top five favourite authors. I know these books are not great literature (something my A-Level English teacher was very quick to point out when I included them on a list of my favourite books!) but they make me laugh and taught me more about life than Tess of the bloody D'Urbervilles ever did. I've just finished the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy. It wasn't written by Douglas for obvious reasons (he's dead if you didn't know, but had he been alive it wouldn't have been written by him due to his failure to ever comply with a publishing deadline) but Eoin Colfer (author of the excellent Artemis Fowl series) has done a brilliant job of writing in the Adams style.

I read the two original Hitchhiker's books after seeing the BBC TV series and have been hooked ever since. "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" was the fourth book which I think prefer over the busier "Life, The Universe & Everything" and the bleaker "Mostly Harmless". Douglas wrote two Dirk Gently novels which provided the same quality of humour but free of the Hitchhiker's situational limitations. Finally "The Meaning of Liff" was a joint effort with John Lloyd, providing alternative meanings for town names in Britain.

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

2. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

4. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

5. The Meaning Of Liff

In the unlikely event that my old English teacher is reading this, I have expanded my reading knowledge over the years but these are still some of my favourite books.

Top 5 Subbuteo Kits

Subbuteo was never quite the game you imagined it was going to be. My best friend DB used to come round to my house every other Friday and we'd spend hours setting up World Cup style tournaments before abandoning the idea after less than ten minutes. Our abject failure at ever completing a competitive tournament didn't prevent us from spending most of our pocket money on increasing our collection. DB got an astro turf and a grandstand, I got some floodlights and a television tower. Most of the accessories just made it harder to flick the players, though the astro turf did dramatically reduce the number of times we had to reset everything after catching the old felt pitch. Looking back, if I'm truthful, my Subbuteo obssesion was actually about collecting different teams. There was really no need to have more than two but I would spend hours pouring over the catalogue trying to decide who I should get next.

1. Fulham 1960s - I inherited this team from an older cousin and though I already had a Fulham side this allowed me to play a 50s/60s Fulham team against a 70s/80s side. I even labelled the boxes with player names. The 60s team was one of the original collections with heavyweight figures. They looked a bit more handmade than the 80s version but had a certain gravitas I liked.

2. Southampton 1976-1980 - DB was (and still is) a Southampton fan so we went to quite a few games at the Dell. I loved their kit from that era, the variation in stripe thickness seemed a radical idea at the time. The picture below is from this Subbuteo blog and features a hand painted reproduction. It's a hundred times better than any original team. Not sure if I owned this or had to settle for the wider striped follow up but Southampton v Fulham formed the basis of our most regular matchups.

3. West Ham United 1976-80 - Much like the Saints, I had a soft spot for West Ham dating back to my introduction to football with the 75 FA Cup. This kit was another favourite and my version was machine painted and managed all three chevrons.

4. Brazil 1970 - Classic seventies Brazil style kit failed to improve my ability to win games. In the words of Feargal Sharkey "He always beat me at Subbuteo, 'cos he flicked to kick and I didn't know". (Photo taken from the Evil Vince Photography blog)

5. England 1966 - I had an England '82 kit that I liked a lot, but the classic red World Cup winning shirt had greater prestige. This picture is from the Old Subbuteo UK site which sells hand painted teams to order. There are some lovely examples on there, including both Ally and Nazi teams from "Escape to Victory". Trying not to be tempted into buying one!

So I got through all that without once mentioning Half Man Half Biscuit's "All I want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague away kit". I'm not sure if the kit below is the home or away (TOFFS suggest it's the home kit) but Subbuteo never made a copy. I did spend a lot of time looking at unusual foreign teams for interesting colours though, but they were never available in the local newsagents when I went to look.

Just for good measure here's the song too.

Top 5 Thunderbirds

Bit short on time again this week so I needed a topic that was quick and easy. Couldn't get much more straightforward than my favourite Thunderbirds, there being only five to choose from. OK, I know there was a Thunderbird 6 used in the film of the same name but it only had one outing and was actually a tiger moth biplane.

1. Thunderbird 2 - Not the most streamlined design but unlike any vehicle I'd ever seen. Thunderbird 2 was nearly always the most important part of any rescue and had a brilliant, palm tree bending, take-off sequence.

2. Thunderbird 4 - A close second, Thunderbird 4 was the most compact member of the fleet. It's outings were rare but that only increased my love of the little yellow submersible.

3. Thunderbird 3 - Alan Tracey's trips to Thunderbird 5 were few and far between but always great to see this bright red space rocket blast out of the middle of Tracey island.

4. Thunderbird 1 - TB1 may have been fast but having arrived at the rescue scene first Scott would nearly always have to wait for TB2 to turn up and actually do the job. Lacked the style of TB3 and looked a bit awkward in flight.

5. Thunderbird 5 - Poor old John Tracy got the rough end of the deal stuck alone on TB5 for most of the year. The space station displayed few signs of having any thunder and was pushing it a little to be described as a bird.

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