Love and Liberty

The Horror Channel goes back to the very beginning of Doctor Who today as it starts showing forty-seven stories across the following months, beginning with the very first. So here are my idiosyncratic picks for the thirteen best stories showing (or just watch the lot, obviously). Horror’s now on both Freesat and Freeview, so everyone can watch it.

Liberal Democrats: activate your TV recording devices of choice and bookmark this article as number 337 of things to catch up with post-election.

Active members of other parties: sit down, put your feet up, watch Doctor Who and argue with my tendentious choices online!




If you’ve never watched Doctor Who before – just pick one, and watch one. This selection suggests which ones I most enjoy watching, but if you need something to tell you who is this Doctor anyway, here’s one I prepared earlier.

The Horror Channel has been broadcasting Doctor Who since last Easter under the banner #WhoOnHorror – initially a selection of stories from the first seven Doctors, they’ve been a ratings hit and so bought the rights to show more. It’s on every weekday in a double bill at around 10am, 2.40pm and 7.50pm, in more or less the original story order, with random movie-format stories (that is, with the cliffhangers and credits taken out) at the weekend. This is the first time their whole cycle of Doctor Who stories has started up again since the Horror Channel arrived on Freeview, so why not begin at the beginning?

The Thirteen Best of #WhoOnHorror

These are my choices. No doubt every other fan will disagree, so why not champion your own? You can point out (and I usually do) that every story has its faults – but I’m looking at what excites me this time. And why choose thirteen? Well, it is the Horror Channel…

1 – The Deadly Assassin
Tom Baker versus the Master and all the Time Lords in the greatest Doctor Who story of them all. It’s got Gothic horror, political satire, film noir, a major reimagining of the Time Lords (and the Master)… And just when you think you know what’s going on, it changes completely into gritty surrealism.
Reasons to watch: the Part One cliffhanger (you keep being told it’s coming, but still the series’ best WTF moment); it enters the Matrix (20+ years before The Matrix); one of the most bitter face-offs between the Doctor and the Master; it’s constantly inventive; it looks amazing (even if Horror’s print is a bit grubby and cuts a bit. If you enjoy it, buy the DVD).
My (surprisingly short) review here.
A brilliant scene here for the Master.

2 – The Curse of Fenric
Sylvester McCoy versus Evil From the Dawn of Time and vampires from the future. A multi-layered story intermixes the World War Two, Norse mythology, Dracula and a touch of The Arabian Nights, and contrasts the 1940s and the 1980s.
Reasons to watch: a brilliant villain; what really repels vampires; the Part Three cliffhanger twist and many other twists and turns; another one fizzing with ideas.
A brilliant scene here under water.
A brilliant line and a bit of a subtext here.
A brilliant scene here where the Parsons’ in trouble.
Yes, it has quite a few brilliant scenes. And keep that last page open, as several more I’ve written about there are coming up…

3 – The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Tom Baker versus good taste. ‘Doctor Who in the inner city: gangs, guns, stabbings and drugs’. But all in the Victorian era, so there were fewer complaints despite even more to offend everyone. From murders in the fog to a night at the theatre, it revels in Victorian cliché – and is probably the most utterly entertaining Doctor Who story of all (Russell T Davies: “It’s the best dialogue ever written”).
Reasons to watch: it looks like perfect horror, but is horribly funny throughout; the Doctor does Sherlock; the Doctor’s friend Leela takes no s**t; a double-act so brilliant they now have their own long-running series, Jago and Litefoot; one whole episode a brilliant conjuring trick.
A brilliant scene here with a comedy of manners.

4 – An Unearthly Child
William Hartnell – the Doctor – versus stupid humans for the very first time. Two teachers investigate a strange old man’s granddaughter… Their lives, and ours, are never the same again, as they fall into the TARDIS and into history. A brilliant beginning that starts off the series’ anti-authoritarian bent by showing how little teachers know – but at least they know slightly more than Stone Age tribespeople…
Reasons to watch: the first episode might just be the greatest piece of television ever; a fantastic introduction to the TARDIS; the Doctor as an hilarious git with brilliant facets; “Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles…?”
My review here (made of many one-liners).
A brilliant scene here where the Doctor invents Columbo.
And it’s on tonight!

5 – Genesis of the Daleks
Tom Baker versus Davros, the Daleks and history. A superbly filmed and scored war story. Perhaps the Doctor’s sharpest moral dilemma is whether to destroy the Daleks at their birth, but this is essentially the story of Davros, a fascist with depth and intelligence, who engineers his own destruction.
Reasons to watch: a completely compelling villain; the Daleks shot like tanks, as they should be; doubt as essential, and certainty essentially fascist; the big confrontation between the Doctor and Davros might be the most electric in the whole series.
My review here of the politics of the story (and of the CD).
My mini-review in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together here.
A brilliant scene here where the Daleks exterminate for the first time.

6 – The Mind Robber
Patrick Troughton versus some very weird s**t indeed. Funny, silly, literary, intelligent… Our heroes find themselves first in a void where they get a massive shock, then marooned in a Land of Fiction.
Reasons to watch: the shocking Part One cliffhanger; the Doctor’s playfulness turning into steely determination; Jamie losing face; Zoe going all The Avengers (UK) against someone who might be from The Avengers (US).

7 – The Androids of Tara
Tom Baker versus the wicked Count Grendel. Imagine a Doctor Who summer holiday, with fabulous frocks, fishing and fencing with electric swords, where the big, serious quest is dealt with in a five-minute joke. Add Peter Jeffrey as a moustache-twirlingly wicked Count, a bargained-down bribe and a dash of sex, then sit back and enjoy.
Reasons to watch: it’s just about the least ‘horror’ Doctor Who gets; it’s sheer fun; it finishes with a proper duel. “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”
A brilliantly ‘romantic’ scene or two here that should put you off weddings (we had it at ours).

8 – The Caves of Androzani
Peter Davison versus death (and versus big business, gun-runners, the army, poison, the phantom of the opera…). A cynical desert war, noirishly twisted love and revenge drama: an extraordinary mixture of the Fifth Doctor’s competing ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ styles, with a terrific script, dazzling direction, rattlesnake-eerie music and compelling actors.
Reasons to watch: pride comes before a fall in a fabulously nasty Part Three scene; brilliant debut for a director so good he did a lot of the 2000s stories too; an explosive regeneration before they were fashionable.
A brilliantly long-suffering moment here.

9 – Logopolis
Tom Baker versus the Master and the end of everything. A small-scale story of the TARDIS itself becoming perilous turns into portents of doom and the unravelling of the entire Universe – before the threat telescopes back in to the Doctor himself.
Reasons to watch: making the familiar sinister; a gorgeous, funeral music score; the Doctor’s most hearts-rending regeneration.
A brilliant scene here for the Master.

10 – The Dæmons
Jon Pertwee versus the Master, a great big Dæmon and the English village; science versus magic. If ever there was a Doctor Who story you’d expect to see on the Horror Channel, this is it. It’s not quite Dennis Wheatley or The Wicker Man, but it does have a Satanic vicar – in truth, the MASTER – and evil Morris dancing.
Reasons to watch: the victim of the Part Three cliffhanger; the perfect locations; the Brigadier and the rest of UNIT getting out and about; the pub. “Five rounds rapid!”
My in-depth review of the novelisation and how it compares here.

11 – The Ark in Space
Tom Baker versus Alien. This is much less comfy Doctor Who horror, out in pitiless space where the last humans are being devoured by giant insects – or possessed by them.
Reasons to watch: it was the first Doctor Who I saw all the way through, and it worked on me – it gave me nightmares; the Doctor’s friends Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan are wonderful; a huge influence on both Ridley Scott and Doctor Who’s 2005 relaunch.
My mini-review in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together here.
A brilliant scene here after the end of the world.

12 – The Two Doctors
Colin Baker versus the Sontarans. And versus aliens who live to eat everyone in sight. With guest star Patrick Troughton being turned into one of them… Appallingly funny black humour. Like some of the other #WhoOnHorror, this was originally in forty-five-minute episodes, so Horror’s split it into their own twenty-five-minute episodes. Thrill at aliens attempting to order dinner before the music screams in!
Reasons to watch: the Sixth Doctor at his most charming and wistful; the Second Doctor at his most disturbing; Sontaran ships on the march to a great musical march.
A brilliant scene here in which the Doctor is interested in everything.

13 – Planet of Evil
Tom Baker versus a terrible scientific mistake at the edge of the Universe. More deep-space horror, more body horror and possession, a seriously convincing and icky alien world.
Reasons to watch: the series’ most alien planet; a Part Three cliffhanger that gave me the most recurring nightmares.
And here is what I think of that brilliant cliffhanger.

The Rest of #WhoOnHorror

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve made an excellent set of choices. The current forty-seven Horror Channel Doctor Who stories include twenty-three that I’d give nine or ten out of ten to – which is as dead-on half as makes no difference – and just six I’d score lower than five out of ten (which I suspect may have been chosen for their famous monsters rather than their quality). I won’t go into detail about the remaining thirty-four stories, but if you’re interested, here’s one line on each, from the completely brilliant to the, er, not completely brilliant, in roughly descending order of enthusiasm…

• Doctor Who and the Silurians – Jon Pertwee versus ignorance and racial hatred. The first appearance of Madame Vastra’s Earthlien race, an apocalyptic disease plot and a tragic ending. My review here, and in its message that green scaly rubber people are people too, one of the stories that made me a Liberal.
  

• The Keeper of Traken – Tom Baker versus an eerie walking statue. A fairy-tale love story turned Faustian pact, it’s like a film noir Shakespeare, with the underlying Liberal message of just how very wrong things go if you make everyone’s decisions for them. My review here, and a brilliant scene here for the villain (spoilers).
  

• The Daleks – William Hartnell versus the Daleks, for their very first time. The series’ first monsters, a dead planet after a war, and a wonderfully gittish Doctor starting to discover his morals. My review here (made of many one-liners), and, here, the most important cliffhanger the series has ever had.
  

• The Brain of Morbius – Tom Baker versus an obsessive scientist and a Time Lord war criminal. Another story perfect for Horror: it’s Doctor Who Does Frankenstein. A brilliant scene here (just how many Doctors are there?).
  

• Snakedance – Peter Davison versus a snake-demon from the Dark Places of the Inside, the rather better sequel. A busy world looks forward to its biggest festival, but some party poopers claim everyone’s forgotten its true meaning. It’s true, but no-one’s happy when they find out what it is. Snakemas treats include future sit-com stars, memorably scary images and the Demonic Antiques Roadshow.
  

• The Robots of Death – Tom Baker versus, well, mechanical people who are killing the non-mechanical people. But at whose behest? A futuristic murder mystery where robots are the weapon, not the real murderers, gorgeously designed and featuring a particularly memorable ‘explanation’ of the TARDIS for the Doctor’s sceptical, skin-clad companion Leela.
  

• Carnival of Monsters – Jon Pertwee versus great screaming dragons, UKIPpers, and television. The TARDIS lands on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in 1926… Or does it? My in-depth review here of the novelisation and how it compares, and though it’s mostly very funny, there’s also a brilliant cliffhanger with those alien dragons.
  

• The Ribos Operation – Tom Baker versus an ex-warrior-emperor who’s one very big jewel short of a crown. Hustle on a marvellously imagined world with its own Galileo. My review here, plus a brilliant scene here where the Doctor doesn’t like being sent on a mission from god, and another here with a brilliant con-artist double-act.
  

• The Pirate Planet – Tom Baker versus a cyborg pirate captain. Douglas Adams’ first script for the series, fizzing with ideas, as funny as you’d expect, but with brilliant and deadly serious twists. Follows on from The Ribos Operation and with even more blatantly gay characters (wait until you get to the third from this season…).
  

• Kinda – Peter Davison versus a snake-demon from the Dark Places of the Inside, the first time. Fantastic scenes inside the Doctor’s friend Tegan’s head. My review here.
  

• City of Death – Tom Baker versus Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, who both as a tentacle-faced alien and as urbane but subtly green Julian Glover is a fabulous villain. Great filming in Paris, beautiful music, much of the script from Douglas Adams, the Mona Lisa and even a cameo from John Cleese. A brilliant opening scene here, plus another very witty moment here.
  

• The Three Doctors – Jon Pertwee versus Patrick Troughton, mainly, and against legendary Time Lord Omega. The series’ tenth anniversary special, with guest appearances from William Hartnell and a titanic but ultimately tragic villain.
  

• The Masque of Mandragora – Tom Baker versus the Mandragora Helix, and science versus magic in a very big way. Gothic horror in Renaissance Italy, dastardly villains and a terrible fate for one of them (or is it both?) in the Part Three cliffhanger. My full review here, and a brilliant scene here where the Doctor takes down astrology.
  

• Remembrance of the Daleks – Sylvester McCoy versus the Daleks. Revisiting 1963 with more politics and much, much bigger explosions (though I have problems with the ending on both counts). My short review here, and several brilliant scenes: a shock in one cliffhanger here, though less so today; a miscalculation in another here; and a thrilling battle here, but where you’re rooting for neither side.
  

• The Green Death – Jon Pertwee versus big maggots and big business. With a fabulously gay evil computer and a strong environmental message. And it builds on the Doctor’s friend Jo Grant’s story which began in…
  

• Terror of the Autons – Jon Pertwee versus the Master, for the very first time. And the Autons, for the second. Don’t even think of hiding behind the sofa, and never trust a daffodil! My in-depth review here of the novelisation and how it compares, and a brilliant scene here for the Master.
  

• Horror of Fang Rock – Tom Baker versus the tentacular Rutans. A claustrophobic thriller where an alien killer stalks victims in an Edwardian lighthouse. I don’t care that other fans seem to like him – the Tory MP deserves it, and I say why in my review here (as well as revealing a bit of sexual gossip about the characters).
  

• Inferno – Jon Pertwee versus fascists and the end of the world. With a thrilling diversion in which the Brigadier is more blinkered than ever before. At times almost unbearably tense, though it goes off the boil towards the end. My review here, and one for the book here.
  

• Frontios – Peter Davison versus gravity. Surviving humans are in trouble on a barren new world – but where’s the trouble really coming from? A brilliant scene from after the end of the Earth here.
  

• Planet of the Spiders – Jon Pertwee versus the final enemy. Great spiders, especially in the big confrontation, great moments for Sarah Jane Smith, a compellingly embittered minor villain, and try to ignore the villagers. My review here, and my favourite brilliant Third Doctor scene here.
  

• The Greatest Show in the Galaxy – Sylvester McCoy versus the Gods of Ragnarok (or the TV audience). If you don’t like clowns, look away now. Eerie, strange and often very bitchy. The greatest scene here.
  

• The Sontaran Experiment – Tom Baker versus the Sontarans. The shortest of Horror’s picks, this one’s just two twenty-five minute episodes. A brilliantly creepy first episode on a blasted Earth and a slightly rushed second one, though with a great villain, for my money still narrowly the best Sontaran. Best watched after The Ark In Space. My mini-review here in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together, and a brilliant scene here from after the end of the world.
  

• The Time Warrior – Jon Pertwee versus the Sontarans. An influential adventure in history with aliens, taking the p**s out of Robin Hood, guest-starring Dot Cotton and introducing Sarah Jane Smith, who’s fab from the off. My review here, and a brilliant Sarah Jane moment here.
  

• The Stones of Blood – Tom Baker versus the Cailleach. An ancient Celtic goddess whose modern-day followers still sacrifice to her and her mobile menhirs? A Lesbian of Evil living quietly in a cottage with a scientific but slightly unaware Lesbian of Good (like the Guardians, but only Evil has a crow on her head)? Or an alien criminal with a massive passion for Clarins?
  

• The Sun Makers – Tom Baker versus big business and big government. Tax satire and revolution featuring Doctor Who’s most iconic silhouettes: the bloke in the scarf, the woman in the leather bikini, and the tin dog. A brilliant scene here.
  

• The Sea Devils – Jon Pertwee versus the Master and the Sea Devils. Thrilling sea-based adventure with the Navy, a prison that should’ve failed its inspections and a dumbed-down sequel to Doctor Who and the Silurians.
  

• Attack of the Cybermen – Colin Baker versus the Cybermen. The Sixth Doctor striding around London is a joy to watch. Horror’s home-made Part Three cliffhanger comes at the end of the three best scenes in it and is very nearly where I’d have put it. And it’s a sequel to…
  

• Resurrection of the Daleks – Peter Davison versus Davros and the Daleks. A grim tale of mercenaries, death and Docklands, much of this looks terrific and it has a great score. On the downside, after a gripping first episode the plot falls apart, and the Doctor is unable to answer Davros’ moral arguments. Horror’s exciting Part One cliffhanger is, again, just a few seconds later than I’d have put it, and has the Doctor rushing to give a Dalek a cuddle (but not in a Katy Manning way).
  

• The Android Invasion – Tom Baker versus the Kraals and their androids. Like The Sontaran Experiment, this has a title which rather gives it away. The Part Two cliffhanger is still awesome, and it’s lots of fun, despite making remarkably little sense. My loving but critical review here.
  

• The Mark of the Rani – Colin Baker versus the Rani, who’s Kate O’Mara and rather fabulous. And versus the Master, who isn’t, and isn’t. The Sixth Doctor is at ease and is constantly diverting, there’s lovely location filming in the Eighteenth Century, and dialogue that needs to be heard to be believed. No, actually, you still won’t believe it.
  

• The Seeds of Death – Patrick Troughton versus the Ice Warriors. A fabulous chase with a still more fabulous line at the end, a great if sadly prescient central idea about space travel, a great villain… But also a bit saggy, and I don’t just mean everyone in the future wearing their nappies outside their trousers.
  

• Silver Nemesis – Sylvester McCoy versus the Cybermen, the Nazis and a sorceress. The sorceress is fabulous, the Nazis are a bit of a mistake and the Cybermen surprisingly vulnerable. Best watch Remembrance of the Daleks, which is a) the same and b) very much better.
  

• Planet of the Daleks – Jon Pertwee versus the Daleks. Have you seen The Daleks? This is like that, and other ’60s Dalek stories, but in crayon. Bright, colourful, crude and sometimes quite exciting, but you probably don’t want to put it on display. The moment where the Daleks work out who the tall stranger who’s been causing trouble is and brick themselves is worth the money, though.
  

• Death to the Daleks – Jon Pertwee versus the Daleks. All Doctor Who is brilliant. But some of it’s more brilliant than other bits. Even the music here is unspeakable. And yet even this most tired of Dalek stories has much to enjoy in it: ancient alien cultures falling to dust; Sarah Jane Smith; and the religious maniacs determined to wipe out their non-conformist naturist cousins. So, yes, I still watch and love this one, too. I am doomed.

The Next of #WhoOnHorror?

First thirty stories… Then forty-seven… Which Doctor Who adventures will the Horror Channel choose next? In the sure and certain knowledge that they won’t read and follow my advice, I’m tempted to say – just buy the rest of the Tom Baker stories and show the lot in order, you’ve got half of them already! But in the spirit of diversity I used for my top picks, here are a further thirteen that I reckon the Horror Channel should consider next. Or that you should, if you’ve got hooked and are looking for a DVD.

• The Rescue – William Hartnell versus the hideous Koquillion. Because it’s very short (two episodes, about the length of one modern episode) but is still a cracking story and displays many more facets of the First Doctor than his first appearances do – stern, kindly, vulnerable, intelligent, embarrassed, and often funny here, too. A brilliant scene here.
  

• The War Games – Patrick Troughton versus war. Which, by contrast, is very long, but keeps building its revelations throughout. It plays around with history and introduces the Time Lords as the biggest villains of the lot, too. My short review here.
  

• The Mind of Evil – Jon Pertwee versus the Master, who’s at both his most Bond-villain and his most slashtastic here (just watch his deepest fear, and his open concern). Jo Grant gets to be kick-ass, there’s lots of UNIT army action, and as it’s recently been restored to full colour, isn’t it time someone got to show it on TV again?
  

• Robot – Tom Baker versus fascists and a Robot. This was the Fourth Doctor’s first story – and mine. Three-year-old me’s first episode was part-way into this, and if the whole of the last forty years are anything to go by, it worked. My mini-review here in the context of the stories it was first broadcast with and how they all fit together, and here, the brilliant scene it closes with.
  

• Image of the Fendahl – Tom Baker versus the Fendahl. An embodiment of death from his own mythology, this is a Time Lord ghost story and probably the story it’s most surprising Horror haven’t snapped up yet, as it’s really their sort of thing. Mine, too. My review / snarky answer to a much-asked question here, and a brilliantly scary first cliffhanger here.
  

• The Power of Kroll – Tom Baker versus a really, really giant squid (and big business again). Horror have shown the first four stories in The Key To Time (The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara), and though admittedly this is a bit of a dip after those, it’s still rather fun.
  

• The Armageddon Factor – Tom Baker versus war and the Black Guardian. And this story closes The Key To Time story arc, so come on, Horror, show us the ending. I rather like the actual ending to this, which is very Doctor-ish, and the sinister early parts, though the middle is rather saggy.
  

• Full Circle – Tom Baker versus… Well, we’re meant to think scary Marshmen and big spiders, but versus ignorance, really. A fiercely intelligent evolutionary fable where elders decide everything by revealed truth, only for the Doctor to ask all the awkward questions and take a moral stand, and it looks great, too. A brilliant scene here.
  

• State of Decay – Tom Baker versus vampires. Another one that seems like it should have ‘Deliver to Horror Channel’ marked all over it. This and the stories either side form a looser arc lost in E-Space, but as both Full Circle and Warriors’ Gate are brilliant, that shouldn’t discourage Horror from showing them.
  

• Warriors’ Gate – Tom Baker versus weird s**t and slavery. Brilliantly weird visuals, haunting music, a strong story of exploitation and cyclical history, a Part Three cliffhanger that’s one of the series’ very best what-we-call-now-timey-wimey-I’m-so-sorry moments… Go for it.
  

• Castrovalva – Peter Davison versus the Master. The Fifth Doctor versus the Master became almost as much A Thing as the Third, and this gorgeously designed and scored story even forms the end of a loose trilogy with The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis.
  

• Vengeance on Varos – Colin Baker versus the slimy Sil, television, the voters, and big business. With an outstanding villain, this is usually described as satirising reality TV like Big Brother years before it existed, but right now I’m thinking The Governor is a dead ringer for Nick Clegg: blamed for not doing the impossible. A brilliantly meta cliffhanger here.
  

• Ghost Light – Sylvester McCoy versus Victorian Values. Psychopathic would-be businessmen, science-hating zealots, destroying angels and all, but it’s the Doctor versus his friend Ace that causes him the most trouble. A brilliantly intricate script, a claustrophobic Victorian house, bats in the belfry and husks in the cellar. Horror with a heart, a brain and a bowl of soup.

There were six stories that I was so tempted by I would probably have picked most of them – The Aztecs, The Tomb of the Cybermen, Spearhead from Space, Pyramids of Mars, Earthshock and Revelation of the Daleks – but they’re occasionally shown on another channel, so I suspect the rights may not be available. Obviously, I thought of lots of others, too. The Time Meddler, a first-again outing for The Enemy of the World (though I bet the budget wouldn’t stretch to animating the one missing bit of The Web of Fear), Terror of the Zygons, The Hand of Fear, The Face of Evil – oh, just the whole of Tom, again – Survival, The Trial of a Time Lord… But that way madness lies. Particularly with the last one.

But the fresh thirteen above would be a good start, eh, Horror Channel? Go on.

Labels: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Horror Channel, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Top Tips, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

I’ve been watching Sylvester McCoy’s first story as the Doctor this week, inspired by Time and the Rani turning twenty-seven years old last Sunday and by the BBC celebrating this happy anniversary the day before with another new Doctor, Peter Capaldi, playing the spoons. It wasn’t the most promising debut for Richard’s favourite Doctor, but over the years I’ve come to find a lot of fun in it, most of all revelling with Kate O’Mara in her villainous star turn as the Rani. And who’d have thought back then that Sylvester would star in bigger films than any of Kate’s?

It didn’t seem at the time that Time and the Rani would mark the start of one of Doctor Who’s most fabulous eras – and that heralding another – but it did. I’m not just fond of it for that, though. I’m fond of it because it’s ridiculously bright and cheerful, because I can rouse myself shouting at the screen over its politics, and most of all because some of the bits that most embarrass other fans are absolutely bloody hilarious – and are meant to be.

So I dug out a pair of old reviews, almost the oldest I’ve written that I still have copies of, and read what I had to say about the Rani’s twin mid-’80s TV escapades. They weren’t good. The stories, nor the reviews. And I hesitated before republishing them not just because I’d do very much better today should I manage to get my finger out, but also because it seems unkind so shortly after the sad news has broken of co-author Jane Baker’s passing (following that six months ago of Kate O’Mara). But Time and the Rani Part Two was first broadcast on this day in 1987, and Doctor Who online lists tell me that this is also the birthday of Gary Cady, who caught the thirteen-year-old me’s attention without knowing why in the Rani’s first story back in 1985, so it’s as appropriate a day as I’m likely to find.

These twin reviews were published in September 1995, shortly after the release of the two stories on VHS, in Liberator Magazine 231’s idiosyncratic review section. After all this time – blimey, nineteen years – I can’t quite understand what I was thinking by picking these two stories to review. I have a nagging memory that I’d heard a rumour both Kate O’Mara and Colin Baker were celebrity Liberal Democrat supporters and used that to justify their getting a place, but what my real reason was eludes me. Perhaps the two VHS releases just came out the month I fancied writing Doctor Who reviews. Perhaps I was aiming to write several pieces in the run-up to the no-doubt fantastic TV Movie due the following Spring (a clue: doubt, though I did better immediately before it aired with a review of Survival). But while I used to write reviews mainly to evangelise to a Liberal audience – how unlike today’s blog – and remember, for example, proselytising several Babylon 5 and The Avengers releases, these reviews had a very different agenda. To crit-fic my own motivations, I suspect I was writing about how bad the writers were because it was easier and more fun to write snark than to find an interesting way of praising something I loved (or even a sympathetic way of criticising something). So now the reviews look more to me like bad writing, and I feel I’ve learnt better since. Or you may feel I’ve lost the knack of writing a short review when spending a year chipping ten thousand words out of a novel-length block of notes will do.

Doctor Who – The Mark of the Rani

“What’s he up to now? It’ll be something devious and overcomplicated – he’d get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line…”

The Rani, a new renegade Time Lord played by Kate O’Mara, gets all the halfway decent lines in a generally weak script, and usually at the expense of the Master. Given some of the worst dialogue ever heard in Doctor Who (“Unfortunate? Fortuitous would be a more apposite epithet,” he quips at one point, apparently playing Just a Minute in a story that might have been tolerable at that length), Anthony Ainley falls to the occasion and gives his worst performance as the Doctor’s very arch arch-enemy. He all but twirls his moustaches in capering villainy as the Doctor is strapped to a table sent hurtling along a railway line…

Set in Nineteenth Century Northumberland, this story tries hard to convince you it knows a lot about the period. Sadly, it’s too late for Luddites, George Stephenson didn’t do half they claim and a few of the other characters mentioned – such as a passing inspiration of geniuses – weren’t alive at the time. Colin Baker is excellent and endlessly watchable, his portrayal of the Sixth Doctor being much-underrated, but even fairly high production values, sumptuous location footage and Gary Cady being one of the sexiest men ever to appear in the programme can’t rescue a story damned by a silly plot and an earnestly awful script.

Today’s Doctor Who viewers may be interested to know that The Mark of the Rani is currently one of the stories being shown in rotation on the Horror Channel (as well as available on DVD and in the VHS department of a charity shop near you), so you too can get wood with Mr Cady. It also looks like the primary source of one of the recurring gags in Steven Moffat’s first TV Doctor Who work (as well as inspiring him to write every single female character since he took over the series as the Rani).

The paradox about The Mark of the Rani for me remains that the worst thing about it is also the best, and to take it out would make the whole thing unwatchable. This story’s a tipping point for Anthony Ainley’s Master, up ’til now veering between cracking and creaky performances while saddled with increasingly absurd schemes, then here a career-worst for character and actor and made the butt of all the jokes. You wonder what the programme thinks it’s doing to its lead villain, but his nadir gives the Rani a massive boost. She’s mostly written as coldly clinical, but those bitchy put-downs give her a character – as well as enabling viewer belief in her efficiency that simply wouldn’t have been possible had she gone along with the cackling idiot. Yet I can’t help thinking something’s gone a bit wrong when you need to invent another Time Lord to act as the voice of the viewer, and when even her best line’s stolen from the Police.

Doctor Who – Time and the Rani

“I have the loyhargil! Nothing can stop me now!”

The Rani is back, unfortunately bringing with her the same authors, Pip and Jane Baker, once infamous in British TV sci-fi for writing the worst Space 1999 story. Here they have a (synthesised orchestral) stab at doing the same for Doctor Who.

Kate O’Mara’s first appearance as the Rani, in which she acted, got her a role as Joan Collins’ sister in Dynasty. She returns with big hair, big earrings, big shoulderpads and a style so over the top it’s out of the trench and half-way to Berlin. Playing in effect a fusion of both evil Time Lords from her last story enables her to survive perhaps the most ludicrous Doctor Who script ever written, apparently based on a half-read article in a dentist’s waiting-room science magazine, with extra bizarre technobabble and a side order of more ‘geniuses’ – even a giant brain on top – because the authors again mistakenly hope it may rub off.

This is the first story with Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor… After which, he gets much better, though he does bring some fun moments first time out. Guest stars such as Wanda Ventham and Mark Greenstreet look rather embarrassed (although considering the latter’s appearance in Brat Farrar just before this, he was probably used to it). On the plus side, while the theoretically far superior earlier Rani story tries hard to be serious and is rather dull, this is immensely colourful and entertaining, in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category.

Worth watching if you like pretty special effects, because you have to see ‘Colin Baker’s exit’ to believe it, but most of all for Ms O’Mara’s hilarious impersonation of Bonnie Langford.

And I didn’t even spot at the time how dodgy its politics were, which would at least have been topical for a political magazine. Oops. In brief, think of the alien ‘hero’ as Nigel Farage.

You can read my lovely Richard’s far more enthusiastic and far more interesting review of Time and the Rani at The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant.

At the same time as watching Sylvester’s opening story, I’ve started reading several books about or starring his Doctor. There may be more on those stories later… And though they’re all you’ll find of her in the regular TV series, the two stories above weren’t all there was to the Rani, either. Kate O’Mara came back for an even camper charity mash-up with EastEnders (no, really), in which a very respectable actor plays her henchman Shagg, then a semi-licit audio play that I can’t honestly recommend, and was due to return to the role again for Big Finish’s official Doctor Who audio series. In interviews she always said she loved the character and wanted to do more with her, and it seems behind the scenes she was just the same, giving her blessing when she knew she wouldn’t be able to do it for a new incarnation of the Rani to take over later this year. The Rani’s also turned up in the pages of several novels and short stories, as well as one 1986 book by Pip and Jane Baker themselves that had eventually more than a little to do with Time and the Rani…

Labels: Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Reprints, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, The Golden Dozen, The Mark of the Rani, The Master, Time and the Rani

Remember the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who late last year? Of course you do! I had been counting down towards the great event with my choice of Fifty great scenes… Then, let’s say, things went mildly awry. But I still have Fifty marvellous moments to champion, and Doctor Who goes on too. Tonight, I bring a great cliffhanger and a massive spoiler (so get your The Ark DVD now) as I go back to the youngest-oldest Doctor (William Hartnell), and forward to – well, failing to write a blog isn’t the end of the world, you know. But this is…

“The last moment has come.”

Hello again, possibly extinct regular reader! I hope you’ve been hibernating for the Winter, or perhaps in suspended animation. I won’t go into it all, but – short version – Richard is lovely, and most of the rest of life hasn’t been. It is, chasteningly, six months ago today that I last wrote anything on this blog (an article that, in retrospect ironically, was titled “Speeches I Didn’t Make”), and seven months yesterday since I posted Number 35 in my exciting Doctor Who Fifty countdown. A happier anniversary is that tonight is the 48th anniversary of (mild spoiler) The Return, the third episode of Doctor Who serial The Ark and the one that goes on to explain just what the security kitchen was going on at the end of the brilliant cliffhanger I’m about to celebrate. This much-delayed blog post is also, it turns out, my 700th on Love and Liberty, and 700 is a significant number in this particular plot. It’s time for the excitement, the adventure and the really wild spoilers, and, I mean, you may think it’s a long time down the blog since I published, but that’s just peanuts to this Ark in space…

Back in March 1966 – or forward at least* ten million years from another point of view – the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his friends Steven ‘Space Pilot of the Future’ Taylor and Dodo ‘Aptly Named Walking Extinction Event’ Chaplet materialise on a huge space Ark carrying some of the last of humanity and their friends colleagues servants the Monoids. The Monoids have already lost their world and came to humanity as refugees; with the Earth about to burn up, humanity seized the opportunity to be the upper-class refugees (something which surely will not come back to bite them on the bum). They’re on a 700-year voyage to a new planet, one which seems lush and uninhabited but about which several of the humans are deeply paranoid in case there turns out to be anyone there who wants to boss them around, presumably meaning that despite what you might expect there is no “A” Ark following on to perform that function nor “C” Ark en route to perform all the practical functions that the Arkists we meet are patently unsuited to.

Naturally, the Doctor and his friends are the ones who treat the Monoids as people, while some of the Ark humans explode with xenophobic panic against our heroes, merely because Dodo infects them all with her antediluvian cold and threatens to wipe out what’s left of humanity (and, you know, Monoidony, nothing to see there). With, inexplicably, no telephone sanitisers to hand, it’s left to the Doctor to find a cure while the Ark sails from the Earth and the torches start burning.

Doctor Who – The Ark is a strange beast. It’s brilliantly structured, and has an epic sci-fi feel to it rare in the series’ early years (with impressive visuals for the time, too)… But the ambition doesn’t extend to creating much in the way of characters, and the second half trails off into B-Movie shonkiness. It also inspired a fabulous YouTube video to “Get Back!” which has sadly long since been double-copyright-bombed off the Internet, but if any readers happened to take an illicit copy…? But I’m looking for what’s most brilliant about the story and that, unusually, comes exactly in the middle. It’s something that Doctor Who was able to do to viewers in the 1960s and, if you don’t read the Internet too much, today – when stories aren’t given a simple title and an episode number, but an individual title each week that might leave you guessing how long each particular plot will run. This third season of Doctor Who had already had a story that consisted of just one episode and another that lasted for twelve, so when in the last few minutes of the second episode the cure is found, the moral expounded and the Earth de-rounded, there was no reason not to think that the TARDIS would be off to a completely different adventure the following week after this fortnight’s sci-fi parable.

But the TARDIS crew, and the viewer, were back on the Ark after the Hartnell era’s second and most inspired false ending.

The TARDIS materialises and Dodo, her undeterred eagerness to explore nothing to be sneezed at, rushes off to see the new sights. To everyone’s surprise, they’re more like the old sights. The TARDIS hasn’t moved at all – an important and popular fact that is wrong in all important respects – but the Ark’s vast indoor jungle is suddenly looking rather overgrown (and, still more disturbingly, no longer seems to host elephants). The Doctor explores rather gingerly, noting:

“Well, that’s strange. Something must have gone wrong. It appears we’ve landed back in the same place.”

Dodo, on the other hand, bursts into the huge control area, expecting to see their friends and previous persecutors, but is puzzled by the apparent lack of humans as well as elephants, assuming “They can’t be far away” because “We’ve only been gone a few seconds.” Steven, taking his cue from the Doctor and more used to time travel, wonders just how long their “few seconds” may have been for the Ark.

If you’re familiar with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias and the statue which inspired it, I like to credit The Ark with inspiration rather than coincidence in throwing that idea into reverse just as it throws the TARDIS far forward in time. While most humans and Monoids are to sleep through the Ark’s seven-hundred-year voyage, the great ship’s dedicated guardians set themselves a task to mark the journey: that while generations lived and died in space to build humanity’s future (oh, and the Monoids’, nothing to see), they would build a vast statue, an embodiment of humanity’s greatness that would at last be completed for the Ark’s arrival. When we saw the Ark setting out from Earth, only the mighty feet were complete.

Unlike Ozymandias, the feet are a sign of hope and promise; the reversal and despair of the mighty only comes when the statue reaches its height.

Dodo sees, towering above the Ark’s deserted centre…

“Doctor – Steven – look! …The statue. They’ve finished the statue.”

The camera follows Dodo’s gaze up the chiselled muscles of the nearly-nude figure that holds a new world in its hand in a thrilling exploitation shot… To the great Monoid’s head at the top.


*The Doctor, told this is the Fifty-Seventh Segment of Time by the Arkists’ reckoning, and told that two particular historical events took place in the First by the same reckoning, instantly calculates that (providing the Segments are of equal duration) “We must have jumped at least ten million years” from the TARDIS’ previous landing in the 1960s. Mathematically inclined readers will note that given this minimal information, it is possible to deduce a minimum period of time but not a maximum one, and that this is exactly what the Doctor does. This may prove handy, in a different segment of time.


Astute readers may have deduced that in the last few weeks I’ve been assisted in my faint desire to make life more helpful and intelligible by watching and listening to at least five different variations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, some of them even legal. This is not the story of that book, or even of the mind behind it and his contributions to Doctor Who. However, you may also be aware that Douglas Adams began with the idea of a series of quite different stories, all of which would end with the destruction of the Earth. Doctor Who has had much the same idea, with the exception that all of its many versions of the ends of the Earth can, if you squint generously, be said to agree with each other (just don’t get started on Atlantis). In this spirit, rather than just one bonus quotation below, I’ve picked out a selection that all more or less relate to the destruction of our small, blue-green world, though not necessarily all to the same destruction. There’s one related event that I’ve omitted, not because I can’t find a gorgeous line about it but because – in a more minor failure of forward planning than the general one of being a year late – I’ve already used it as a bonus quotation for a completely different one of the Fifty. Arguably, the title of the Doctor Who story involved may maintain some mystery about the planet and its fate (Richard isn’t entirely convinced, if you scroll down to his “… In A Hurry”), so I shan’t spoil it for you here, instead inviting you to click this link and read the Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation only if you feel yourself thoroughly prepared. This story may safely be made the subject of suspense, since it is of no significance whatsoever.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Frontios

Early in Part One, the Doctor (Peter Davison) has decided to sort out the TARDIS. His priorities and efficiency in doing so are uncannily similar to when I aim to tidy our flat, and for the TARDIS, too, things are going to get far more untidy before long. His friends – well, it’s 1984 (or ten million / five billion and forty, etc), so perhaps I should call them ‘his bitching contestants’ – Tegan (Australian) and Turlough (alien, and therefore British but a bit fey) just think he’s gone completely hatstand. On the sunny side, at least I don’t drive; here, the driverless TARDIS has drifted above the planet Frontios, where the forecast is less sunny than cloudy with a hint of meteorites. Turlough and Tegan try to bring this to the Doctor’s attention, though their main interest remains in sniping at each other. She’s louder, but he’s more cutting. And he can read…

“Doctor? Something’s happening to the controls.”
“BOUNDARY ERROR
“TIME PARAMETERS EXCEEDED”
“Ah. We must be on the outer limits. TARDIS has drifted too far into the future. We’ll just, ah, slip into hover mode for a while.”
“We’re in the Veruna System… Wherever that is.”
“I had no idea we were so far out. Veruna! That’s irony for you.”
“What is?”
“Veruna is where one of the last surviving groups of Mankind took shelter when the great – ah – yes. Well, I suppose you’ve got all that to look forward to, haven’t you?”
“When the great what, Doctor?”
[Sheepishly] “Well, all civilisations have their ups and downs.”
“Fleeing from the imminence of a catastrophic collision with the Sun, a group of refugees from the doomed planet Earth—”
“Yes, that’s enough, Turlough.”

Tegan wants to visit – “Laws of Time,” the Doctor weasels, and changes the subject to wanting a pair. That’s not unusual for this Doctor. Guess where they end up? Only to find that this group of fleeing humans are, if anything, even more useless than the first lot, with a total, brilliant ship in a worse state than the TARDIS – for a while….

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The End of the World

The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) takes Rose – and most of the audience – on her first trip in the TARDIS to the far future… An elegant, spacious chamber; a huge, shuttered window; a mystery. Momentarily. What a magnificent vista for a pre-credits teaser: the shutters retreat to reveal the wide Earth below and, looming beyond, the swollen Sun…

“You lot… You spend all your time thinking about dying. Like you’re going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. That maybe you survive. This is the year Five Point Five Slash Apple Slash Twenty Six, five billion years in your future. And this is the day… Hold on. [Glances at watch to time the Sun’s sudden blazing red] This is the day the Sun expands.
“Welcome to the end of the world.”

Like The Ark, this story has multiple perspectives on time. It’s set at the same moment as the mid-point of the earlier story (of course it is); it was, mind-expandingly, the future, not just on screen but conceptually for its promise of a whole new Doctor Who; it loved and learned from the past (not least The Ark, The Ark In Space and Douglas Adams); and today it seems so dizzyingly long ago. Back in the olden days of nine years ago or five billion years in the future, in the dawn of Russell T Davies when actions had consequences and stories had endings, I loved it for its perfect collision of soaring optimism with sobering wisdom:

“Everything has its time, and everything dies.”

Incidentally, I saw the ‘film poster’ above years ago online, as you do, and thought it rather lovely. I’ve not been able to find the site since, though, so if you happen to know who created it, could you drop me a line in order that I can say ‘Thank you’ and they can say either ‘You’re welcome’ or ‘Take it down, impudent worm’?

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Ark In Space

In early 1975 (or, again, the far future, but not quite as far as the others), Tom Baker had just started to be the Doctor, and I’d just started to watch Doctor Who. This was the second story for both of us, and it scared me so terribly that I had recurring nightmares of it for years afterwards. It was marvellous. But there’s a famously hopeful moment amid the horror, and ironically it comes just as we realise that the Earth has been scoured of all life…

The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friends Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan spend the first episode alone (save something lurking, green and horrible), exploring an apparently deserted space station that still manages to suffocate, shoot at or freeze-dry them in turn. Some chambers hold records of Earth; others, its unliving animal life; then, to a swirl of sober, eerie music, the Doctor and Harry find themselves amid cold towers of cold people, each in their own compartment. While Harry faffs about, humansplaining about massive mortuaries, the Doctor realises that the station and the ‘bodies’ are waiting until the Earth can live once again:

“Homo sapiens… What an inventive, invincible species… It’s only a few million years since they’ve crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts, and now here they are amongst the stars, waiting to begin a new life, ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable. Indomitable!”

Tom Baker’s speech near the end of Part One is utterly magnificent – both script and performance – establishing him as the Doctor even more than the manic energy of his first story. And in a story all about humanity, the Doctor reasserts an alien point of view which like so much of this story echoes across future series.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Sontaran Experiment

In this short but smart sequel to The Ark In Space that swaps claustrophobia for agoraphobia, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and his friends beam down to Earth to see if it’s ready for the return of humanity yet. Good news: it is. Bad news: others found it first. There’s going to be a sinister alien, whose species I shall keep secret for the moment (what’s that? Oh, damn!), but first we meet some other humans. Not the clinical, compartmentalised people of the previous story who slept in the sure and certain hope of resurrection and the even surer certainty of superiority, but a rougher, tougher breed who weren’t among the Chosen and had to work for it, viewing the Earth their distant ancestors fled not as their manifest destiny but a useless and long-junked irrelevance. They’ve only been lured here to become prey, so, just for a change, they don’t trust the Doctor…

“I’m sorry to keep contradicting you, but there is a transmat beam from Space Station Nerva.”
“From where?”
“Space Station Nerva.”
“Is he crazy?”
“A joker.”
“You don’t expect us to believe that.”
“Nerva – transmat beam – Earth. It’s as simple as that. Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because Nerva doesn’t exist, that’s why. There’s no such place.”
“Fascinating. You don’t believe it exists, yet you’ve obviously heard of it…?”
“Everybody’s heard of the lost colony.”
“Lost colony? Ahhh. You mean it’s become a legend, like lost Atlantis?”
“Like what?”
“Lost Atlantis. It’s a legendary city… A go— Never mind. This is extremely interesting. Are you going to cut me loose?”

Shhh. He mentioned Atlantis once, but I think he got away with it.

And in sharp contrast with the Doctor’s previous rhapsody, they’re not impressed. The budget didn’t stretch to a statue, but Ozymandias is back in spirit:

“Listen. If you are one of the Old People, we’re not taking orders from your lot. While you were dozing away, our people kept going – and they made it. We’ve got bases all across the galaxy now. You’ve done nothing for ten thousand years while we made an Empire! You understand? …We’re not taking any of that ‘Mother Earth’ rubbish!”

Surprising Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Doctor Who and the Silurians

After The Sontaran Experiment’s cold-water-in-the-face upending of The Ark In Space’s assumptions and the Doctor’s paean to its self-important survivors or even the importance of Earth itself, and going back right to the realisation that perhaps the Monoids might have something to say rather than just seeing everything from humanity’s perspective, I thought it appropriate to finish after the world ended and nobody noticed. Well, nobody you know, anyway. In 1970, or probably about 1976, or the 1980s, or – look, sometimes it’s easier to agree that ten million is the same as five billion – the Earth’s original owners woke up, and they weren’t happy. The different perspective of the Silurians / Homo Reptilia / Earth Reptiles / Indigenous Terrans is a three-eyed rather than a one-eyed one, but in this story the series had come on a long way in the four TV years since 1966. Going into sleep for millions of years, only to find the end of their world hadn’t quite wiped out all the little mammals, this was a story where the ‘aliens’ had as much of a claim to ‘our’ world as we did. But while the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) could see both sides by Episode Four, try telling that to either people…

“I spoke to it. And it understood me.”
“What was it like?”
“Reptilian. Biped. A completely alien species.”
“And it didn’t attack you?”
“Liz, these creatures aren’t just animals. They’re an alien life form, as intelligent as we are.”
“Why – why didn’t you tell the Brigadier?”
“Why? Because I want to find out more about these creatures; they’re not necessarily hostile.”
“Doctor, it attacked me.”
“Yes… But only to escape – it didn’t kill you. It didn’t attack me when I was in Quinn’s cottage. Well, don’t you see? They only attack for survival. Well, human beings behave in very much the same way.”

Next Time… The Next Time is out of joint – this one might have been ‘I had a little drink seven hundred years ago…’ – so while in the past I’ve offered a not terribly cryptic clue each time about what each time I was confident would be a planned, specific entry at the same time next week, I’m aware that this has been both a different Number 34 to that hinted at last August and that had I written it the next week it would have been, well, last August. So in the light of my impressive record so far, I will make no rash commitments. But if I do get to Number 33, and I do feel that you might need something cheerier after multiple and among them possibly even final apocalypses, it could be:

Next Time… Daylight! Music! Romance!

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Douglas Adams, Jon Pertwee, Personal, Peter Davison, The Ark, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Last time I unleashed the scene-stealing megalomania of the seven TV Masters. Who could follow that but the Doctor simply being Doctorish – not rising to universal glory, but an individual who’s endlessly fascinated, fascinating and fun. So here are some tips for whoever gets tonight’s blessing on how to do it… Accompanied by a supporting selection of other Doctorish Doctors that spring to mind (but which?), in the lead today it’s Colin Baker, summing up the Doctor in a perfect moment:

“I am interested in everything…”

It’s been too long, hasn’t it, since the last one of these? And it’ll need more than getting back each Saturday to catch up. But never mind all that – the best thing is just to get on with it. I saw Colin Baker at an event three weeks ago today and he was, as ever, a delight: friendly, interesting and very funny. Today it’s common to praise Colin’s Doctor for his Big Finish audio adventures*, and it’s true that he has a finely tuned voice and an especially erudite way with words (and an occasionally bombastic style that greatly influenced my early public speaking). But it does him a disservice to do that at the expense of his TV portrayal. What’s rarely mentioned is how fabulously watchable he is, not just being one of the sexiest Doctors, not just in big actions, but in small but intriguing moments, constantly worth keeping your eye on – even when, all right, sometimes he has to play against the scripts – in always giving the impression of being interested in everything.

That, for me, is a defining trait in the Doctor, and whenever you watch Colin’s incarnation, you can see it even before The Two Doctors author Robert Holmes (someone who understood the Doctor about as well as any writer ever has) came along to give him lines that went with his flow and then asserted that character point explicitly. And for those who find this Doctor less watchable for one particular visual reason, in this scene he’s even got out of that coat.

Paired with a popular former Doctor, Patrick Troughton, you’d expect Colin’s Doctor either to have the show stolen from him or be frenetically overcompensating throughout The Two Doctors. Instead, he gets to be more confidently the Doctor than in any of his previous stories. It’s not just because Colin’s working harder to compete – while he certainly rises to the challenge, he seems counter-intuitively far more relaxed in his portrayal than he had been until now, and it’s because Bob Holmes instinctively knows how to write for the Doctor and Colin’s happily in harmony with that.

Half-way into Part Two, the Doctor (Colin Baker) has sensed echoes of a previous self (Patrick Troughton) in trouble and leapt, electrified, to his aid. But when the TARDIS materialises rather strikingly in a Spanish grove, the Doctor emerges with his enthusiasm tightly focused. Taking in everything around him, he strikes exactly the right note with a useful witness who takes the TARDIS for a branch of Interpol – a washed-up ham actor and restaurateur, accompanied by his braver and more practical companion…

“Officer! We have to report a tragedy. Stark disaster has struck this – simple countryside.”
“Has it indeed? What manner of disaster, Mr…?”
“Botcherby. Oscar Botcherby at your service, sir, and this dark-eyed naiad is named Anita.”
“Oh, come on, Oscar. There’s been a plane crash.”
“Well, of course, it may not be your department. I – I can see from your raiment that you obviously belong to the plain clothes branch.”

And, all right, I always laugh at that bit. Oscar and Anita are another of Mr Holmes’ sly mirrors of the Doctor and companion – Oscar goes on a bit, and we bet she’s not his girlfriend – but his florid digressions about clothes, groves and moth-hunting give Colin a marvellous opportunity to make his own performance smaller while still fascinating, and as the ‘concerned copper’ prompt the lily-livered thespian’s sense of public service. In my favourite part of the exchange, you can help but know that the Doctor’s reply, though gently guiding Oscar back to the point, is the absolute truth:

“Are you interested in Lepidoptera at all?”
“I am interested in everything, Mister Botcherby – but mainly, at the moment, in this ‘crash’ you heard.”

It’s a small but perfectly formed scene in which I always share the Doctor’s evident delight at having found the trail – and at having found someone else whose life will never be the same again…


*Big Finish have just announced a permanent price cut to some of their ranges, including now offering their first fifty Doctor Who stories at just £5 for the CDs or £2.99 on download: happily if you want to experience the Colin renaissance, this includes several of his very best, from The Marian Conspiracy, an historical adventure that introduces a companion and cake, to The One Doctor, which is an absolute scream, more of his definitive sparring with Terry Molloy as Davros, and of course two brilliantly uncomfortable black comedies from later Doctor Who TV writer Rob Shearman which I would thoroughly recommend – The Holy Terror, just reviewed by Andrew Hickey, and my own personal favourite of the range, Jubilee.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 1 – Marco Polo

Inspired by tonight – and by being the antithesis of the Master – I let several other especially Doctorish moments simply spring to mind. This one has perhaps my favourite Doctor in one of the Doctor’s first and still most arrestingly unpredictable moments. On my previously long-derelict Doctor Who story-by-story blog Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient! I’ve finally been getting back into the swing over the last few weeks with a preposterously wide array of random one-liners about the early story Marco Polo. In Marco Polo Episode One, the TARDIS has broken down in the Himalayas and the time-travellers’ lives saved by Messr Marco. But, determined above all else to get home to Venice, the self-serving git shows he’s not taken them and the Ship along for altruistic reasons. He wants to bribe his master the Mighty Kublai Khan into releasing him from his service with no less a stolen ‘gift’ than “a caravan that flies”. The thief holds our heroes at swordpoint and lectures them on why his need is greater than theirs, an argument he upholds by refusing to let them answer back. The Doctor’s reaction is much that you’d expect: impatience; blazing fury; incredulity at Polo’s blithe suggestion he can build a new TARDIS in Thirteenth-Century Venice. But after Polo stalks off, refusing to be made to feel guilty merely for committing armed robbery and stranding people, the travelling companions turn to the Doctor (William Hartnell) for an answer. He hasn’t got a clue. So in one of the most endearing moments in fifty years of our hero, they all have to stand by in appalled resignation as he does the only thing he can when faced with such utter calamity: he sees the funny side and collapses into uncontrollable giggles.

“Grandfather – Grandfather!”
“Yes. Go by sea, he says!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Ooh, hoo hoo hoo!”
“He means it!”
“Doctor, he’s serious!”
“I know he is, yes!”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Oh, ho, ho! I haven’t the faintest idea!”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 2 – The Enemy of the World

By ten minutes into Episode 1, our heroes have landed for a paddle at a deserted Australian beach, found it less deserted when they’re shot at by assassins in a hovercraft and rescued by an even more dangerous woman in a helicopter on orders from a mysterious superior who seems to been in charge of the others, too. So when they take a breather, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) senses that however friendly she may seem, the band of gunmen may have had an ulterior motive for trying to kill him and she may have an ulterior motive for saving him. He gives very little away until he knows more, and this time he makes her laugh as he cleans her flesh wound while quietly parrying all her questions with an undercurrent of questions of his own – and it’s not long before he finds out just how ruthlessly efficient she is, nor what everyone suddenly sees in him…

“Oh, you’re a doctor?”
“Well, not of any – medical significance.”
“Doctor of law? Philosophy?”
“Which law? Whose philosophies, eh?”
“Oh, I see. You’re determined to be mysterious.”
“Am I?”
“Um… Doctor of science?”
“Septic spray. That should be right.”
“A Doctor of divinity, then!”
“You’ll run out of Doctors in a minute.”

But we still haven’t.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 4 – The Ribos Operation

The Doctor (Tom Baker) is all set to go on holiday when interrupted by thunder. Well, that much is typical. What’s less typical is that the thunder is inside the TARDIS, and that after the lights go out, suddenly the place blazes with light, organ music bellows, and a mighty voice asks if he really needs to know who’s calling. He might use the name “Guardian”, but we know who this is, and you do have to wonder how much of an influence it was on Time Bandits for a loud, scary God to then be revealed as a quiet, much more scary character actor giving understated orders and threats. That is, if all those people taking him at his word that he is the nice one are right: he is, after all, something of a bastard, and not only does he not offer the Doctor any of the drink he’s sipping, sat on his chair in his white suit and hat, but the green liquor in carafe looks like absinthe, and you know another word for that. But whether to God or Devil, the Doctor’s response is the same – he’d prefer to make his own choices rather than be ordered about, thank you very much. The Doctor is more annoyed by having an assistant foisted on him than by being ordered on a mission: people are more important to our hero than the big things from the first… Our hero doesn’t preen at being chosen as The Hero for a mighty quest; he’s not after glory. He’s after mucking about and seeing what he fancies – interested in everything. The deceptively mild-mannered higher power knows what makes the Doctor tick, too, and in a steely aside, makes one of the most effective threats ever heard in the series:

“Look, I’m sure there must be plenty of other Time Lords who’d be delighted…”
“I have chosen you.”
“Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that. Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn’t that it?”
“Precisely.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me?”
“Nothing at all. Ever.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 7 – Remembrance of the Daleks

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has been cross-luring Daleks around 1960s after a terrible Time Lord totem. But he’s at his most Doctorish for me at the end of Part Three, when plans don’t really quite work after all. Thinking he’s got most people evacuated from the dangerous bit of Shoreditch and the remainder safely out of the way in a local school, he aims to let two warring sets of Daleks fight it out for him to deal with later. But even to this day there are few more visually impressive moments in Doctor Who than the Doctor’s getting it ever-so-slightly wrong as a great big honest-to-goodness spaceship comes down in the school playground, not CGI but actually there, blowing out all the windows and blowing his plans. He even has the good grace to blink and duck out of his own cliffhanger crash-zoom.

“Doctor, we’ve had a report of a radar contact.”
“On a re-entry curve from low orbit?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll be the Imperial Dalek shuttlecraft.”
“What? They’re not landing a spaceship here?”
“Here? No. They’re much too far from the main action.”
[Roar of engines]
“You’re sure?”
“Whoa!”
“Ace, get away from the window! Down!
“…I think I might have miscalculated.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 11 – A Town Called Mercy

And for the last few minutes when we all think of him as the Doctor (Matt Smith), the marvellously Doctorish current incarnation has been a real pleasure. Not least in strolling through the American Old West, eyeing up the town called Mercy: to quiet, plucking strings, he sees an animal-skull “KEEP OUT” sign and stone-piled boundary and does exactly what the Doctor always does with a boundary. Crosses it, points out the electric street lamp about ten years too early, and as mothers hold their children back in fear at the windows, blazes with enthusiasm:

“Anachronistic electricity; ‘Keep Out’ signs; aggressive stares… Has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”

Next Time… From The Two Doctors to the double act of double acts.


Update: We’re both absolutely delighted with the announcement of Peter Capaldi. Hurrah! And of course he’s already had a scene for the 50, in at Number 41 – just a shame I didn’t include a photo of him and look as prescient as his character’s daughter, damn damn damn… But it’s not only one of the series’ finest stories, it’s also an impressive source of future casting, isn’t it?

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Peter Capaldi, Sylvester McCoy, The Two Doctors, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… This one’s the newest entry in the Fifty and, improbably, from the first in the current TV season. That’s because Doctor Who returned last night for the second half of its thirty-third season (having skipped a few years along the way). It was broadcast last Autumn, and though that was the first time since 2005 that a new season hadn’t premiered at Easter, looking back at it now, what could be more festive than…

“Eg – eg – eg – eg – eg – eg – egs—”
“What? Sorry, what?”
“Eg – eg – eg – eg – eg – egs—”
“Eggs? You mean those things?”

OK, I’ll confess: Doctor Who may have been forced to skip a few years of its fifty when it came to TV, but with less of an excuse I’ve skipped a few of my Fifty to get to this one – and while most will be renumbered, I’d already published the “Next Time…” for Number 39, so that’s a piece of rescheduling that can’t hide. It’ll be along soon. But meanwhile, a happy Easter to all of you at home!

The Doctor (Matt Smith) has been lured and captured by the Daleks, who are using human corpses as part of their evil scheme. To save the Daleks – perhaps, though read Richard’s review on Millennium’s Fluffy Diary for an idea of what they might really be after – the Doctor and his companions are sent down to the planet where the Daleks seal away their mad (madder). Strange things happen: the dead rise; Carmen plays; a young woman called Oswin makes soufflés, but – spoilers – it’s obvious by the end of the episode that she’s not going to be significant. While the Doctor and Amy wander the planet’s surface, Rory has fallen right through to the decaying chambers below, where the Daleks’ unloved ones sleep the sleep of the rusted…

Rory’s unnerved wandering the dim-lit deep, Daleks all around him. Many Daleks. All, we hear, deranged. Most damaged – burned, battered, balls missing. Daleks of all designs and varieties, ancient Skaro to Special Weapons Abomination to bronze-studded Russell T Dalek, almost to a mutant more popular than certain later models a celebration of the best of Doctor Who shouldn’t mention. But his fear mixes with fascination and a nurse’s care for the injured – which leads him to examine one with his pen-torch, as if testing for common eye problems. The Dalek’s eye lights up. That’s a problem. It starts, stutteringly, to speak.

Rory finds bronze spheres in the dust. The Dalek’s missing some of its globes. He picks one up and offers it.

“Egggggs.”

The others’ eyes are beginning to glow, too. They’re starting to fidget, as they come out of their long sleep. Rory thinks they want a fry-up for breakfast. What do you think, boys and girls?

“Eggs… Stir… Min… Ate.”
“Exterminate.”
“Exterminate!”

It’s that word again. The first energy blast comes close to frying Rory. Then his legs stir, as fast as they can carry him.

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Revelation of the Daleks

The Doctor (Colin Baker) has been lured and captured by… The Daleks’ creator Davros (Terry Molloy), this time, but also exploiting human corpses, and even more thoroughly, in another jolly food-related moment. It’s the ’80s – first broadcast 28 years ago last night – so Davros, short of a Dalek army for a while, has set up on his own in a very profitable business: his genius for science offers the promise of making death just a temporary condition for the galaxy’s rich “resting ones” flocking to his graveyard planet of Necros. This ferocious black comedy isn’t just writer Eric Saward being the Robert Holmes Tribute Band, but Davros styling himself after the Doctor – “the Great Healer”, in fact, borrowing from his enemy but unable not to make himself just that bit bigger (and there’ll be another of those in the missing Number 39 when that turns up). But, being the ’80s, there’s not much altruism in this promise of resurrection. The Great Healer charges a very high price while the hopeful dead await medical breakthroughs in their frozen tombs, but that’s not the half of it. The families are happier spending their inheritances than having them returned to life and control, so it’s in their interests for them to stay on ice, while Davros has his own plans for the loved ones – especially the Yuppies. What are the two popular ideas of immortality? Being born again, or living on through those you leave behind? Be careful what you wish for…

“Do you never do anything but kill?”
“There you are mistaken, Doctor. I am known as ‘the Great Healer’. A somewhat flippant title, perhaps – but not without foundation. I have conquered the diseases that brought their victims here. In every way, I have complied with the wishes of those who came in anticipation of one day being returned to life.”
“But never, in their worst nightmares, did any of them expect to come back as Daleks.”
“All the resting ones I have used were people of status. Ambition. They would understand – especially as I have given them the opportunity to become masters of the Universe!”
“With you as their emperor. But what of the lesser intellects? Or will they be left to rot?”
“Ahhh. You should know me better than that, Doctor. I never waste a valuable commodity. The humanoid form makes an excellent concentrated protein. This part of the galaxy is developing quickly. Famine was one of its major problems.”
“You’ve turned them into food?”
“A scheme that has earned me great acclaim!”
“But did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?”
“Certainly not. That would have created what I believe is termed – consumer resistance.”

Colin’s Doctor and Davros make a terrific pairing, and this deliciously horrible bit of dialogue (sponsored by the Soylent Corporation) never fails to make me laugh.


As this one’s jumped ahead, its “Next Time…” would just have been “Happy Easter!” – and it’s once again:

Next Time… Hiding behind… Oh, no, hiding from…

Labels: Asylum of the Daleks, Colin Baker, Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Today’s is Doctor Who’s first major use of the “timey-wimey” – back in 1972, as a one-off key dramatic turning point with consequences. It’s also the first scene in my Fifty to be a really massive spoiler, so I’m warning you before this gripping revelation. In a dystopian future Earth controlled by the Daleks, human freedom-fighters are desperate to change time with an assassination… And, in addition to all the avenues that sends me down, I have a small tribute to Ray Cusick, creator of the Daleks.

“You went back to change history – but you didn’t change anything. You became a part of it.
“…You’re trapped in a temporal paradox! Styles didn’t cause that explosion and start the wars. You did it yourselves.”

Mysterious figures have been appearing out of nowhere to try and kill top diplomat Sir Reginald Styles before a crucial peace conference. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee), still exiled to Twentieth Century Earth and working with UNIT, is called in to investigate – who are the real villains? The combat-clothed would-be assassins? The brutal Ogrons pursuing them? Or, perhaps, in a story called “…of the Daleks”, could there be some other force behind it all…? Well, no, the involvement of the Daleks isn’t the big spoiler. The Doctor and his companion Jo are both drawn forward in time to a ruined 22nd Century Earth that’s little more than a giant Dalek slave-camp. The human resistance have utterly failed in taking the fight to the Daleks on an already shattered Earth… But their history tells them that Sir Reginald was a murderer who destroyed his own peace conference and triggered the world wars that left Earth easy pickings for the Dalek invasion. Using stolen Dalek time-travel technology, they’ve been travelling back to kill him first. Before you ask, this was a decade before The Terminator (and Harlan Ellison wrote an introduction to the US edition of the Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks novel rather than an instruction to his lawyers, so clearly it was differently creative to the way The Terminator arrived at its plot). Though I do wonder if its starting point might not have been 1984 – that to control the past is to control the future, and not just by altering the textbooks?

It’s a story of contrasts: exciting and flat; intelligent and flawed. The final episode deploys the most of both, its first half largely made up of brilliantly escalating, compelling dialogue scenes that bring out the best in the actors, its second half the big action finish that director and budget fail to deliver perhaps most conspicuously out of all Who stories (something which the Special Edition tries hard to overcome, with limited success). I was first gripped by the novelisation Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks some years later, which avoids some of the flaws of the television version and carefully walks the line between the human assassins being ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom-fighters’ by generally terming them “guerrillas”. And while it’s easy to think of them as ‘freedom-fighters’ once their initial ambiguity is resolved into the knowledge that they’re fighting against the Daleks, at the story’s finest moment – a scene running from about seven minutes into Episode Four to a climax about five minutes later (or at the end of Chapter 12), in effect a perfect mid-episode cliffhanger – we come to question their fight all over again. They’re careless of human life and have little objection to killing or abandoning the Doctor – until learning that the Daleks fear him makes him in their eyes a weapon to be utilised. It’s the Controller of this sector of Earth, a Dalek-appointed bureaucrat, who shows the most humanity in his haunted tale of the wars that ruined Earth, and the brutalised fighters who’ve only ever known a Dalek Earth who show mercy only at the Doctor’s urging when they burst in to rescue our hero from Dalek suckers. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and the Controller (Aubrey Woods (the Controller)) are both grandstanding performances at their best when suddenly focused down into quiet, intense dialogue scenes, and it’s the Controller’s despair more than the guerrillas’ determination that moves the Doctor, setting him on a vital train of thought once taken to the guerrillas’ base.

Once held by the human suckers, the Doctor’s given a simple proposition: they’ll send him back to the Twentieth Century, and he can kill Sir Reginald for them. But a lot of this makes the Doctor uneasy, and it’s not just the implicit feeling that murdering people in cold blood is the sort of thing the Daleks do and not him. Impatiently, the guerrilla leader tells him that, improbably, people still wrote history books through the wars, pinning all the blame on a power-hungry Sir Reginald, and that, improbably, they’d managed to find out that the Daleks had time travel and steal some of their devices, both a portable time machine and a large bomb. How convenient. Having met Sir Reginald and formed the impression that, while a dick, he’s no dictator, Jo and the Doctor each put their fingers on potential problems with this. He breaks it gently:

“But your history [No good for me – na, na, na na] could be wrong, you know?”

She’s more blunt:

“But if this is true, Sir Reginald Styles must be completely round the bend!”

It is notable that no-one seemed ever to have found any cells of fanatical Stylesists around the world ready to seize power as the bombs fell – in fact, the only cells of fanatics who might in some way be being manipulated by fascist dictators are the ones the Doctor is sitting in, and he’s already observed that

“Changing history is a very fanatical idea”.

So, which fascistic fanatics who want to rule the world and have the power to change history do we know of, readers? Fortunately the dialogue is better-written than that and builds the drama to a peak rather than dropping quite such explicit hints, but Doctor Who’s deep-grained suspicion of ‘The ends justify the means’ (paraphrased in this scene by the Doctor) gives a very satisfying philosophical steer to the direction of the dramatic revelations. As the Doctor slowly brings out the truth with his questions, we’re reminded that one of the assassination cell was wounded and left for dead in the last attempt on Sir Reginald – both in dialogue, and in cross-cut images of him slipping into the cellar of the government mansion where the peace conference is due to take place… Complete with the bomb, taken along as a last resort.

If there’s no reason to think that Sir Reginald got his hands on some terrible new explosive and used it to blow up the peace conference – incompetently killing himself in the process – then somebody else must have done it. And, though it’s never made explicit, isn’t history always written by the winning side? While some of the story disappoints in the TV version, for me both on the page and on screen it’s one of Jon Pertwee’s finest moments as he pushes the logic of the guerrillas’ plans to its remorseless conclusion – a last suicidal attempt to carry out orders that doesn’t defeat the Daleks, but creates their future for them.

Always a favourite scene of mine, it’s relatively recently that it’s come to redeem what was one of those slight disappointments for me about the story: that it sets up what could be an intriguing mystery of motives as well as of time travel, but blows it too early. Presented with two apparently violent, villainous groups, camouflaged assassins taking orders from the moustached leader of their terror cell vs brutal ape-like aliens taking orders from an icy Controller (known only as the Controller), it not only offers a visual pun – guerrillas vs gorillas – but, in their mutual antagonism, a puzzle of which are the real ‘baddies’. Almost immediately, though, it’s revealed which side is working for the Daleks, and with that the mystery collapses into obviously evil Ogrons and quisling Controller vs misunderstood or misguided freedom fighters, making Jo seem dumb for clinging throughout to the opposite interpretation. And yet, the last time we watched the story, Richard wisely observed that this climactic scene and the ones following (which you’ll have to watch yourself) not only reverse everything the guerrillas know, but everything the audience knows about who’s really doing the Daleks’ evil work:

“All through this, Jo thinks that the Controller is the goodie, and the guerrillas are the baddies. And it turns out she was right all along.”

It’s not without some controversy. This whole scene’s a major point of disagreement in the principal DVD documentary (of several). Lead writer of the time Terrance Dicks is quite right to say that the story needed it – arguing that if strange things happen, the viewers are unsatisfied if they don’t get an explanation. Barry Letts, often spot-on with his instincts as producer, here gets it entirely wrong, claiming that it shouldn’t happen in the last episode – the last episode should be action. So Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy should start by saying who the mole is, then just make time until an extended shootout? Particularly when the ‘action’ climax of this story is so infamously thin, it’s great to have such a memorable a mid-episode climax that depends on concept and actors rather than budget. As Ben Aaronovitch says, otherwise there’d be nothing of substance in Episode Four, though even he seems to wish there was somewhere else to put it. Not at all. I didn’t come to the story as a middle-aged, thoughtful Liberal, but a boy who drew ray-blasts all over my books because there were never enough in the illustrations (and it was one of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks’ pictures that taught me how to draw explosions). And even then, I was gripped by the big twist even more than by the fabulous Dalek battle in my head.

Day of the Daleks and the Time Paradox

This was really the first time that Doctor Who had brought together the philosophical and practical sides of time travel into what would now be called a “timey-wimey” story – previously, the Doctor had talked about the impossibility or undesirability of changing time, rather than us being shown its effects, while stories featuring more time travel than just ‘TARDIS arrives at beginning, TARDIS leaves at end’ had effectively made time a different form of space to chase about in. This moment of this story was the first time that time was really used as intelligent drama – as well as providing in itself a warning that getting stuck in timey-wiminess is bad, and that trying to resolve it by getting deeper into timey-wiminess is worse, and that you’ll have a miserable life in which everything becomes meaningless. I always took this as proof that, while if you came up with a really good one-off story in which it had consequences that would work as drama, you couldn’t possibly do it every week. Some might argue that Doctor Who later doing it every week disproves that rule – but probably not if they’ve watched it. Notably, the next time that the Doctor is pitched against the Daleks in a story about changing history, the Time Lords position him on the wrong side, leading to deeper philosophical argument, the Doctor no longer having a get out of jail free card for a moral dilemma, and arguably the start of the Time War which consumes both Time Lords and Daleks. Again, drama means consequences.

There have been many heated debates across the years about exactly how the ‘Dalek future’ that the Doctor averts comes about (not least round at a couple of leading fan-writers’ place one Christmas, when Richard and one of them debated it to the death while I and the other partner kept our heads down in the kitchen). I won’t go into it in metaphysical or philosophical depth, nor detailed temporal physics, but here are a few thoughts. When I was a boy, reading the story, it always made sense to me, possibly because my religious upbringing prepared me for the conceptual leap of some exterior cause with different, Creator’s rules. A lot of essays I’ve read seem to assume that the Daleks do the hard work of invading, then the guerrillas accidentally use Dalek time travel to create a paradox which spares them the trouble, after which the Daleks retrospectively doss about just protecting the new timeline; or that it’s a parallel universe, which nobody ever mentions (this is, instead, explicitly the time-travel version of the sort of story Inferno was, with Pertwee again at his best up against it); or that the Daleks just ‘found’ the wrecked Earth or that in some other way the paradox just started by itself and the Daleks found themselves a part of it.

The forty-one-year-old me has much the same reaction, albeit with longer words and paragraphs, to what I’m confident the seven-or-so-year-old me who first read the book would: that’s silly, far too complicated, and missing the point. Obviously, the Daleks are the baddies, and are almost as good at time travel as the Time Lords, and as the Doctor can’t change history then obviously this isn’t how history is supposed to go (unlike the Daleks’ first invasion, in about the same spot, but that’s another story). So the reason the Doctor can put a spoke in this particular timeline must be that the Daleks intervened to set it up in the first place.

“We have changed the pattern of history.”

The time paradox is a closed system which goes round and round perfectly, once the Daleks somehow from outside the closed system just gave it a little starting push. As a boy, I pictured (perhaps in a mixture of science fiction, perpetual motion and theology) the Daleks lifting out a section of history as a bubble, intricately joining bits of it together and then setting it back in place to spin round and round. I can’t to this day explain the mechanics of that, but the conceptual image still makes perfect sense to me: the Daleks used their extremely clever time-travel engineering to bootstrap it and can then stand back while it circles for ever. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know exactly how it works, because the logic of the story and everything we know about the Daleks is that they’re behind it all, and unlike all those other ‘explanations’ that require there to be all those extra and often contradictory elements added to the story, my instinctive understanding has an Occam’s Razor about it and credits the Daleks with being clever. As well as appropriately making them the authors of their own destruction, as it’s only when they fearfully identify the Doctor as their enemy that makes the humans pay attention to him.

Richard wrote a more detailed and carefully considered analysis of what he sees as time paradoxes when considering What Does Timey-Wimey mean? in reviewing 2011’s Doctor Who – The Girl Who Waited on Millennium’s Fluffy Diary, as well as revealing that while a timey-wimey story may have been conceptually exciting to me as a one-off, when given nothing but so that no event means anything any more and Doctor Who disappears up its own timeline, my response is… Well, I may have given a hint there. But my Fifty aims to be positive, so I’ll stick to pointing you in Richard’s direction where, fascinatingly, despite having more of a head for high-level temporal physics than I do, he sees Day of the Daleks as philosophical rather than temporal engineering, driven by a plot in which the Daleks symbolise determinism and the Doctor free will. Rather brilliantly, this makes Day of the Daleks a battle between The Dalek Factor and The Human Factor, and a thematic sequel to The Evil of the Daleks after all. So the Doctor’s paradox trumps the Daleks’ not just dramatically but allegorically, when both quisling and terrorists – each thinking the other the enemy, but each raised with a Dalek mind-set – believe the ends justify the means and are equally surprised when the Doctor has compassion for the individual instead, in different ways the salvation of each of them (and of the world). Have a read.

Ray Cusick and the Daleks

Writing about any Dalek story this week is going to have a touch of melancholy, following the death of Raymond P Cusick. Doctor Who has been so extraordinarily lucky in so many of the people who’ve worked on it over the last half-century – actors, writers, designers of sound and landscape, and more – that even a shortlist of ‘If it weren’t for these people, the series wouldn’t be around today’ couldn’t be very short. But Ray Cusick would always be in the top tier: the man who designed the Daleks. There were others who were vital to them, too, including Terry Nation, Peter Hawkins and Brian Hodgson, but Mr Cusick created that iconic look and propelled the series to its first great success. He was an immensely talented designer, whether working on planets, historical periods or giant suburbia (and that’s just his Doctor Who work), yet he’ll always be remembered for creating the series’ first and still one of its most visually striking and coherently imagined alien worlds and Doctor Who’s first big monster.

There’s a touch of guilt for fans, too, in that the other thing he’s remembered for is as ‘Laughing Ray Cusick’, a way to cope with the reason that his interviews about the series were always unsmiling and with unhappy undertones, what became almost the series’ original sin – that while other people and the BBC itself made an awful lot of money out of the Daleks, the person who most deserved to didn’t. I hope he still found some pride in them. And it’s notable that in all the minor redesigns of the Daleks that have followed, to take them too far from the logic of Mr Cusick’s originals is to invite disaster. Bringing them into colour for the first time in the TV series, Day of the Daleks at least makes the right choice in making some of its Daleks gun-metal grey for a lasting suggestion of one-being tanks, yet it not only robs them of much effect by directing them very feebly but ignores the work of the original actors and sound engineers, as a result proving that messing up the vocal design can be almost as big a mistake as throwing out Mr Cusick’s shape. Notably, it’s the only DVD for which an alternative Special Edition completely redubs every Dalek line rather than just changing the special effects…

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet

I’ve always been curiously fond of the opening for the prosecution in the Doctor’s big Trial, and gave The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet as near to a rave review as it’s likely to get for the DVD, there choosing a Golden Moment of existential crisis. And there’s more to come in the Fifty, too. But one of the things I particularly like about it is that it lets Colin Baker really blossom as the Doctor, not just through him finding interesting things to do to distract you from the script, as in too many, but simply writing well for him – giving him good speeches and a good relationship with Peri. It was the last full script from Robert Holmes, master of the speech, the scary bit and the one-liner and probably the greatest Doctor Who writer of them all, here in the first of what will be quite a few of his lines featuring in my countdown.

It’s half-way into Part One, and the Doctor (Colin Baker) and Peri have discovered that the mysterious planet is, inevitably, a familiar one: ours, and two million years in the future, it’s gone down the Tubes. So, it’s another dystopian future Earth, but at least this one wasn’t created by the intervention of a bunch of Time-Warring superbeings with a magnetron. Er… Anyway, confronted with the ruins of Marble Arch Station, Peri is distraught; the Doctor, sympathetic but worldly (it’s not that long since he was faced with his own gravestone). It’s a beautifully elegiac scene for both of them, her reacting at the human level to the loss of her world, him taking the long view.

“Planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, reforms into – other patterns. Other worlds. Nothing can be eternal.”

Extra Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – Father’s Day

The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) has wise words about putting things in perspective.

“The past is another country. 1987’s just the Isle of Wight.”

Next Time… Duelling futures (it’s more timey-wimey, I’m afraid).

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Fandom, Ideas, Jon Pertwee, Obituary, Richard