Saturday 3 September 1977

Horror of Fang Rock

Dark Doubles

The Colour of Monsters, Episode 3
Sunday 7 December 2025

Terrance’s planned vampire story has been unexpectedly cancelled, and he has only a few weeks to come up with a replacement. Fortunately, he’s brilliant. Melvin Peña joins us to discuss Horror of Fang Rock.

Notes and links

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer best known for his gothic stories, including the short story Carmilla (1872), which is a foundational vampire story, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. It’s likely that Terrance Dicks named his vampire queen Camilla after Le Fanu’s character (more of which next week).

The Forsyte Saga is a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy (1867–1933), originally published between 1906 and 1921, and published together in 1922. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, starting in the 1880s. Millie Gibson recently appeared in a TV adaptation, The Forsytes, which screened on Channel 5 in late 2025.

Among many other things, Andrew Orton creates digital models of the sets of Classic Doctor Who stories.

If you want to hear more of Peter and Simon in furious disagreement about the quality of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, here are the relevant episodes of Flight Through Entirety — Episode 220: Centuries of Embittered Religiosity, and Episode 221: Generic Potato Person.

When Season 22 of Doctor Who was first broadcast in Australia in 1985/86, its 45-minute episodes were split in half and broadcast from Monday to Thursdays at 6:30 PM. As a result, we got to experience some pretty terrible cliffhangers. Simon quotes the cliffhanger to our Part 3 of The Two Doctors:

DOCTOR: Perhaps you can lead us to this hacienda?
ANITA: Of course. It’s this way.
[sting]

The Tales of Ratiocination refers to three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), which are sometimes considered to be the first examples of detective fiction. In each of these stories, a mystery is solved by C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective from Paris. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844).

The Willem Dafoe/Robert Pattinson movie Melvin mentions is The Lighthouse (2019), in which two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers are isolated in a lighthouse by a storm, alternately making out and hitting each other with axes, apparently.

Here’s an adorable image of Peter, aged about 8, with a small subset of his collection of Target novelisations.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Horror of Fang Rock in Episode 50: The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive, released on Sunday 25 October 2015.

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Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hide in your basement flicking the lights on and off until you come downstairs and ask us politely to stop.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Maximum Power returned with its field report into the release of the Series 2 blu-ray box set at the British Film Institute.

And we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched The Best of Both Worlds and The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, perhaps two of the most well-known and significant episodes not just of Star Trek: The Next Generation but of the entire Star Trek franchise. We thought they were a bit slow.