Nephew

 Photo copyright Lisa Hazlegreaves

Nephew was an Ood trapped on the sentient asteroid named House in the episode called The Doctor’s Wife.  House kept Nephew alive along with the other ‘Patchwork People’ for hundreds of years as a lure to attract Time Lords.  House fed off the ‘rift energy’ that powered Time Lords TARDIS’s and it would use the bodies of the dead time lords to patch up the people to keep them alive. 

We love The Ood in our house, we imitate them all the time.  It’s common place if one of the kids is upset or having a strop for me to dangle my hand under my chin in an Ood fashion to try and break a smile.  We even have our own little rhyme for when we burp.

Pardon me for being so rude

It was not me

It was The Ood.

Therefore it was natural for me when choosing our tickets for the Doctor Who Convention to go with The Ood stream (you could pick Ood or Silurian) we met an Ood at the convention, it was a very strange feeling.  I mean I’m a 41 year old woman (I will deny that if ever asked again) I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Oods were some creation made up in the mind of a brilliant writer, that the makeup and costume was put in place by some highly talented team but when I posed with The Ood to have my picture taken I was a little nervous.  I’d like to state at this point that neither of my children would go near him and I was just explaining to small child in that way that you do because they think it’s real, that it’s absolutely fine because Oods are only bad if their eyes are red as this means they are possessed...then standing a few inches away I turned to look at The Ood and realised it’s eyes were red.  I was more than a little nervous, I actually felt fear.  It’s ridiculous how I felt, I mean my very sensible head was telling me that it was a person like me, dressed up, but every other part of my being was thinking ‘oh my god it’s eyes are red’  The photos aren’t very good, they are a little blurry, well, Father took them and he is the most technically useless person that I know but I wanted to post them because you can quite clearly see by my body language that I am more than a little nervous.  There is one when Father said ‘do the thing, do the hand thing’ so I did the hand thing, my little imitation of The Ood that I do at home at least five times a day, and then, then I felt embarrassed because I had taken the mickey out of the person standing beside me.  This shows how Doctor Who gets into us in a way that nothing else can and why we as a family love it so.

 

Photos copyright Lisa Hazlegreaves

Mother Who's Podcast Review

Transcript of Mother Who's Podcast Review on The Ood Cast

This month I’ve been listening to The Ood Cast, podcast.  I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the researching I am doing so you don’t have to, The Ood Cast has four wonderful presenters  Andrew, Chris Alpha, Chris Sigma and Laura, I think it’s safe for me to say that although all four are staunch fans of Who, the three chaps are experts on Classic Who, with Laura being a huge fan of new Who and not such a big fan of Classic and she doesn’t mind admitting that she finds classic who a tad boring, which I love as I sometimes find that podcasts alienate (pardon the pun) fans who know little of Classic Who. The Ood Cast is a monthly podcast, although when Who is broadcasting on the telly box they produce a fortnightly show.  

The episodes I’ve listened to over the past week or two were all reviewing episodes of series 6.  The show comprises of skits of the episode they are reviewing with some not too shabby impersonations of our favourite Who characters.  It also has some Excellent sketches, which really did have me belly laughing and some wonderfully written songs. Having now listened to a few different Who podcasts I think so far the Ood cast for me is the most accessible.  I do not think you need to be a staunch Whovian who knows the name of the actor who played Tom Bakers Scarf to get pleasure from this cast.  It is so wonderfully written, the humour is very well pitched, I’ve listened with my 14year old daughter and my 8 year old son and both enjoyed different bits of it equally. That is not to say that the presenters do not know their stuff, they definitely do, however because The Ood cast is so well thought out and because of the sketches and the humour I would even go so far to say that even someone who had recently joined the Whovian fanship and had maybe only watched one or two episodes would get pleasure from this cast and understand it. 

If you have never listened to The Ood Cast before I would recommend downloading the 50^th episode anniversary special from iTunes which has a fine selection of the best bits of what they do.  It is hard for me to believe that the presenters on this cast do this in their spare time and still manage to have any sort of a live outside of the Oodcast, it must take hours to write and edit the sketches but this time taken is very well spent because what the listeners get is a highly professionally written and edited show and I am quite aghast that this little nugget of Whovian loveliness hasn’t been picked up by some astute broadcaster somewhere.

Mother Who can be found on Twitter @itsmotherwho

Talking Who can be found on Twitter @talkingwho

The Ood Cast can be found on Twitter @theoodcast