Love and Liberty

You’ll be familiar with “Shag, Marry, (Throw Off A) Cliff” and all its bowdlerised* variations. It doesn’t do a lot for me: it’s judgemental, it’s shallow, and you never get the exact number of people to pass your shallow judgement on.

As Richard drove us through the wilds of Cambridgeshire on Saturday on our return from holiday, I had an epiphany for something more interesting: Yaxley, Stilton, Ramsay.

We were listening to The News Quiz, and as usual groaning or heckling at all the usual tired bollocks. But how to freshen up your reaction to faux-lefty faux-comics with stale material? It’s radio, so you can’t judge which one you want to shag. With their material so tired in just half an hour’s worth, they’d never stay fresh for a marriage (besides, you can kill or shag any number of people – so I’ve heard – but I for one have more exacting standards than a Radio 4 panel to select a partner for life). So isn’t it more fun just to decide, not to punish yourself by inflicting them on you, but what new and exciting ways of punishment to throw at those you’re judging?

As if by magic, the road signs gliding by above our heads kept flashing inspiration:

“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”

Perfect!

Next time you find yourself listening to a terrible panel game, why not delight yourself with the much funnier idea of what to do with each of the most rotten participants?


Throw cheese at them!


(You know what Stilton is)


Throw a carnivorous time-pterodactyl at them!


(Ramsay the Vortisaur, itself a piece of political satire, features in Big Finish’s Doctor Who – Storm Warning and the following three stories starring Paul McGann)


Or, if they’re especially crapulent, throw a Death-Eater at them to curse them in all sorts of inventive ways!


(Yaxley the Death-Eater can be found being rather nasty in the later Harry Potter books and films)


It could be anyone. To take, oh, a random example, you might cry ‘Jeremy Hardavra Kedavra!’

Of course, you could just chuck the cheese and the vortisaur at him as well, to make sure. Up to you.



*But what does it say about the BBC’s attitude to marriage that it’s only as important as snoggage and hiding rather than sex and death, writes outraged of Tunbridge Wells? I demand the next series to be renamed ‘Snog, Date, Avoid’ and its post-watershed equivalent the serious ones. Well, I would, if I weren’t demanding a reformatting as ‘Yaxley, Stilton, Ramsay’ and my royalty payments.

Labels: BBC, Big Finish, Comedy, Harry Potter, Paul McGann, Radio, Top Tips

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… The Doctor’s finished on the telly again, and who most wants him finished? With Doctor Who – The Mind of Evil released this week to complete a rival Time Lord’s adventures on DVD, it’s about time to follow Number 40’s “I’m the Doctor” with a hostile takeover:

“I am the Master.”

And while sometimes I add a second Bonus Quotation here, something’s got into my head (a sort of drumming) and now there are rather more. More spoilers, as well. So, peoples of the Blogosphere: please attend carefully…

“I am many things.”

Springtime for the Master! If he ruled the world, every first day of Spring would be the blizzard (possibly of flying killer heads) that this year’s started out with. After not being at all well and getting out of the habit of writing this Fifty, it’s now the end of Spring, but cast your mind back to the beginning of the season and perhaps it’s just as well that I didn’t post this on the frozen 20th of March – despite it appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of the Axons. Even the alternative date for the start of Spring was still frosty, despite the 1st of April appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of some Sea Devils. And yet the Master’s been very much on my mind, not just nagging me to write but with his own two very special bank holidays – first Beltane, then the Master for one night only from in 1996 (or 1999). The Master, if you didn’t know, is almost the Doctor’s other half – an old friend who also left the Time Lords, but to rule the Universe, not just to see it, longing to make everyone else feel small. He became a jealous enemy across many of his and the Doctor’s lives, and a jack-in-the-box of irresistibly nasty fun across many of years of our television. I may have missed the daffodils, but his blooms last, so here’s something of the first plastic flowering of each Master, most of all the original. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Have a chair…

“This plastic has got unique properties, Mr McDermott. Allow me to demonstrate.”

The Master (Roger Delgado) is a suave, powerful presence with dark, hypnotic eyes and a deep, hypnotic voice. Usually wearing a dark, pointed beard and a dark, elegant suit – most often a round-collared black Nehru suit – he’s also to be found disguised in everything from self-aggrandising pseudonyms to flamboyant robes to the grubby overalls and rubbery face of a phone engineer. The personification of charm when he needs to be; smiling and playful, albeit with his own murderous sense of humour; given to savage flashes of anger. His ambition is to rule the Earth, or occasionally the galaxy, though with an underlying need for the Doctor’s attention – before he kills him in an amusing way. To overcome his status as a one-man band, he forms alliances with a variety of alien races to do is legwork… Always (over-)confident that he can dispose of them when they’re no longer of use, rather than the other way round.

Terror of the Autons is the Master’s first appearance, materialising in the first scene of Doctor Who’s Eighth Season and immediately dominating the show – and the petty ‘big man’ to whom he introduces himself. By the time the Doctor gets a look in, still less when a Time Lord belatedly turns up to warn him of the Master’s arrival, the new villain has already stolen the show (and much more besides). Aiming to create a new spearhead for the Nestene Consciousness and their power over plastic, he’s found Rex Farrel, a young plastics factory manager in a rather nasty fashionable suit eager to make his mark after years following his father’s orders. Unfortunately for him, his new big customer in a much more impressively cut dark suit and gold tie is “Colonel Masters”: meet the new boss; very much not the same as the old boss. But Mr Farrel Senior’s left James McDermott, his own bluff, practical production manager in a sober suit, to report back to him in case his son mucks about too much, and McDermott patronisingly tells Rex the company’s not going to dump all its old customers for a mystery man with no paperwork. McDermott calls up the old man; Rex calls in “Colonel Masters”…

Not liking a new face, McDermott begins with a tirade about changing the plastics mix and ruining a day’s production. The Master is polite, urbane, amused, and shows off a shiny black fat square cushion of material that isn’t to McDermott’s taste at all. But he doesn’t appreciate its unique properties – or the Master’s. At a click of his fingers, the square begins to expand and, to off-key synthesiser music, slithers into the form of a shiny black fat square armchair. Rex seems curiously blasé, but an unsettled McDermott licks dry lips and weakly asks if the new customer is a magician as well as a Colonel. The Master answers quietly, staying still, ominous, powerful, while McDermott fidgets and flails about, trying to assert himself and the company as he knows it. The Master moves to stand behind the inflated chair, arms astride it proprietorially, and strikes a warm, friendly tone:

“Look, why don’t you try it?”
“Well, you’ll never sell that, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Sure, it looks like – like a black pudding.”
“Try sitting in it.”
“It’s got a cold clammy feel to it. Now plastic should be warm and dry to the touch—”
“Sit down, man!”

McDermott’s been eyeing the chair uneasily and prodding it like a first-time swimmer at the water’s edge – but the Master’s sudden whiplash of will is that of a villain who’s suddenly tired of the shaggy dog and wants to skip to the punchline. McDermott can’t help but sit. The moment he does, the chair starts to writhe again, wrapping itself around him and, rearing over his head, suffocating his screams within its thick, blobby synthetic mass and the thick, blobby synthesiser music.

The Master has instant presence, and you can’t tear your eyes from McDermott in the chair. But the third person in the room is in his own way just as fascinating – Rex has come entirely under the Master’s spell, but is shocked for a moment by the horrible death. The Master raises a hand to stop him stepping forward… And, everything over, Farrel is nonchalant again. More even than the Doctor’s companion, Rex is the personification of the viewer here, finding the thrilling new villain utterly compelling, briefly shocked by horror daring you to reject him, then back to watercooler-chat complicity as he steps to the intercom for a killingly funny businessman’s response:

“Sylvia? Will you check Mr McDermott’s entitlement on termination of employment, please?”

Rex Farrel – and the rest of us – are already so far back in the Master’s thrall after all this showing off that when he hilariously affects humility at the waste of so much material for one simple death we’re with Rex in saying, no, no, that was an impressive one, honestly. And like Rex, we want to know what the Master means when he gives a playful smile and promises efficient death with just a few inches of plastic:

“The human body has a basic weakness. One which I shall exploit – to assist in the destruction of humanity.”

I’ve written about the death at the plastics factory before – I didn’t see the Master’s showpiece scene on screen until more than twenty years after it was broadcast, but I saw it in my mind’s eye as a thrilled little boy reading one of the first books I ever bought, Terrance Dicks’ novelisation Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, and not only does it grip you (and Mr McDermott) on TV, it’s just as gripping on the page. Though it makes Rex more sympathetic by taking away his punchline, permitting him more struggling shock and generally removing the impression that his appreciation of the patronising right-hand-man’s death is an eagerness to murder his father by proxy, it gives the Master a terrible gag that I’ve always loved. You can read what in my in-depth review of the novel here, complete with that very scene as my selection of choice (and a terrifying picture of little me). And if you keep watching the DVD, the Master gets another deft little punchline later along the way…

In both forms, this is the Master’s crucial establishing moment – it’s such an outrageously exaggerated swagger of a scene that you just know he’s going to be fun to watch if he’s prepared to put on such a show for an audience of two one (give or take eight million). I don’t know if the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’ was in common currency yet back in 1971 or if the Master has always had the power to serendipitously subvert both the show and its viewers even before the clichés have formed to be subverted, but he reaches out to the audience’s safe place and deliciously makes it something to hide from. Similarly, the whole confrontation comes across like a scene from ’60s industrial power-play drama The Plane Makers being warped out of recognition by a devil from another genre stepping into it for a laugh. Perversely, of course, it also made me long for a blow-up plastic chair.

Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords, all below – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration, most of all Russell T Davies as John Simm takes over and, heretically, delivers for me the best interpretation of that original concept’s viciously playful streak. Roger Delgado is fantastic in this scene, but in other points of his first story he doesn’t yet seem as at ease, as in control, to simply be enjoying himself so much as he does growing into the part. So if you’re inspired by this selection to mount your own ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’ retrospective, while Robert Holmes’ Terror of the Autons is the definitive Master script, you might consider for slightly more compelling stories on screen and with Mr Delgado’s definitive Master performances either The Dæmons, in which he puts on a robe so resplendent it makes vaunting a blow-up chair seem almost introverted and then summons the Devil, or The Mind of Evil, out at last this week and making the whole of the Master’s adventures now available on DVD, in which he gets a big cigar, a big car and a big coat to play the part as a fabulously louche Bond villain.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 1 – The Deadly Assassin

The Master (Peter Pratt) is a daring reinvention of the character, his charm, his humour, his looks, even his skin stripped away, though still boasting a deep, powerful voice. Rather than take the obvious option of simply making him a new regeneration like a new Doctor, Robert Holmes introduces the Master for the second time no longer as the Doctor’s ‘naughty brother’ but his dark side, all his narrow escapes having cost him every life and stretched him to the end of his thirteenth body – after which even a Time Lord must die. A rotting, ravaged ghoul wrapped in a tattered cowl, he’s still walking because he simply refuses to die… And because hate for the Doctor and the other Time Lords keeps him alive. This is The Master Unplugged, stripped to his essence, smouldering with pain and hatred and more impatient than any of his other lives. There’s no time for amusing banter, but only to renew himself at any cost (in fact, preferably at a terrible cost – not merely a killer for fun but a fiend who glories in chaos and destruction). He’s lost his vanity – though the hypnotic power that once seemed like seduction now blazes forth as sheer mental domination. He’s given up his delusions of grandeur – and ironically forms an utterly selfish plan that promises death on his grandest scale yet. He doesn’t hide behind pseudonyms – instead presenting his hideous face almost with pride and bellowing his name as if that is all that he has left. It’s almost as influential an introduction as his first, with the idea of the Master as walking corpse such a powerful one that he’s never quite whole again.

The Master has lured the Doctor back to their home planet of Gallifrey and framed him for the killing of the President – in part as a complex attempt to get his hands on the ancient relics of the Presidency and unlock the secrets of the Time Lords, though mostly to gloat. He will rip their power source away to bring himself new life, destroying their world and perhaps destabilising the Universe itself, making the story – for my money, Doctor Who’s best – a uniquely apocalyptic film noir. In the crypt where the Head of the Presidency and all its regalia lie in state, the Master rises from apparent death to seize them, only to be interrupted by the Doctor and two old Time Lords (the local police chief and the local librarian). As with Terror of the Autons, the confrontation of these equal and opposites is all the more effective for being held back until the finale, and the Master steps from the shadows, pissed off beyond endurance, to answer the Doctor back:

“The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.”
“Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.”
“Not in your case. You’d delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly.”

Even as the camera lingers on the Master’s gun – and he’s never more brutally trigger-happy than here – even as he’s twisted with physical agony, even he’s as kept alive by his absolute focus on the most important person in his life, the subject of all his rage and envy and vengeance, the one who he’s crafted all this to get his attention before he dies in disgrace, the Doctor still just dismisses him. That hurts.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 2 – The Keeper of Traken

I did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


The Master (Geoffrey Beevers) remains a twisted, skeletal wreck of himself, but has had to learn patience. He’s found another astronomically powerful Source to steal a new life from, but at the price of sitting it out on a planet that might make him regret calling the Doctor “insufferably good”; on Traken, evil simply gives up and calcifies. But he’s safe inside his TARDIS – disguised as a gorgeously twisted statue, a Melkur of local legend – and uses his time well to plot not just how to gain control but how to twist and corrupt a people kept without real knowledge of good and evil by the Keeper of the world exerting moral sense on everyone’s behalf. The Master here is an outstanding corruptor, blatantly the serpent in this Eden and with a marvellously silky, persuasive voice, pan-fried in evil with extra goose fat. As Richard says, this isn’t just evil. This is rich, gloating M&Ster evil. From the mildness of a wise advisor to the high, gloating glee of triumph at last, the Master’s greatest weapon is his voice. Though blazing energy beams from Melkur’s eyes come in handy, too.

The Master has waited until the old Keeper’s thousand-year reign is faltering, and turns a bride’s love into his instrument for removing the chosen successor. Again, the confrontation between the Doctor and the hidden Master is reserved for the finale – with one stunning scene in particular as the Master taunts him, and demonstrates that surrendering all your decisions to absolute godhood is a dangerous thing – but there are some marvellous exchanges between the Doctor and the Melkur as it slowly evolves from the ivy-covered feature in the background to a creepy walking statue at the centre of events. And it places itself most literally at the centre as the old Keeper dies: with the benign controlling intelligence of centuries suddenly gone, chaos breaks across the world in a storm of unchecked nature, and through the howling gale Melkur gloatingly offers a merciful death, its shrivelled, secret occupant looking down at the Doctor through great eye-like screens. The Doctor defies “Melkor” – appropriately recalling a famous fallen angel, and of what great order was the Doctor a member, and who fell the furthest? – but it’s too late. The Master’s catspaw is on the Keeper’s Throne. In the spellbinding last minutes of Part Three, all seems dark: the Keeper who called to the Doctor for help dead; the Master’s Machiavellian machinations turned almost the entire Court against our hero; the true nature of Melkur about to be revealed when it doesn’t merely walk but, with a wheezing, groaning sound, dematerialises to take the Throne – and, heralding that cliffhanger, long-term viewers feel the hairs rise on the backs of their necks as we see inside Melkur a room roundelled in black with a cowled plotter at the controls… Who turns to us with a great swell of music and with the ravaged face of the Master and, as all the years of insufferable imprisonment come to an end, with a tone of wonder and exultation:

“Now, this Traken web of harmony is broken. I am free…!”

Although Geoffrey Beevers’ time as the Master was a short one on television – though I do love The Keeper of Traken – the Master of voice has appropriately become the definitive audio Master, with many delicious readings of Doctor Who novels (not least Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons) and a splendid new array of adventures for Big Finish. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Joseph Lidster’s Master, which has more than a passing influence on TV Master stories to come…

If you find yourself in the mood for audio-play Masters, two others are available, with actors you’re highly likely to recognise and enjoy in the part. But both of them are big twists! So I’ll mention Doctor Who Unbound – Sympathy For the Devil, which was released ten years ago and so you’ll probably have heard of it if you were ever going to, but not the one from last year, which is also terrific fun (email me if you want to know). You’ll certainly remember it if you’ve heard it, and I will say that bears a remarkable resemblance to the much earlier Master story The Claws of Axos – done rather better, and very much bigger…

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 3 – Logopolis

The Master (Anthony Ainley) still carries the mark of having used up his lives, a synthesis of his predecessors – and of the poor schmuck whose body he stole as a consolation prize for failing to hold onto the renewing power of the Source. Dark-haired, dark-bearded, sometimes charming, he has something of the look of one prior Master, but the rotten dead heart of the other. Usually dressed in the embossed black velvet of the Traken Court – a reminder of the victim in whose dead body he scampers, father of one of the Doctor’s companions and taunting her with it horribly, while still ever more wounded in his cadaverous existence and needing help with further degradations from or for the Cheetah People, the Tzun or his own carelessness – he’s another Master with a taste for increasingly ambitious disguises, sometimes less for function’s sake than on the edge of sanity. That’s the key to this Master, whose old, confident desire for domination is mostly displaced into being more than ever a one-man band with one man on his mind, obsessed with the Doctor in as bizarre revenges as possible. Laughing all the while. And laughing. And laughing (yet I’ve not picked “Heh heh heh heh!” as his signature quote).

The Master seized a new body as the twist in the tail on Traken, but it’s by insinuating himself throughout Logopolis that he really makes his mark. Glorying in vicious deaths, stalking fear and, as ever, cutting the Doctor down to size, he’s initially little-seen but a palpable presence throughout his first full story. He may laugh a lot, but he’s got a cold, dispassionate air that’s very sinister. A cold, high, echoing music, too. This time, he’s dangerous. But even he doesn’t realise how dangerous, as his greed to find out what secret the planet Logopolis is hiding sparks the greatest catastrophe in all of Doctor Who and the Universe itself begins to unravel. He loses his nerve like a typical bully and bolts, then teams up with the Doctor not to undo the damage – nothing can do that – but to save what’s left by transmitting a new lifeline into another universe to give ours breathing space… And, recovering his composure, he finds again an eye for the main chance. Again borrowing from the iconography of Terror of the Autons, Christopher H Bidmead’s script crafts a far more powerful climax up in the dizzyingly high control room of a radio telescope. But this time they do not get on: the Doctor is revolted by everything the Master’s done, and all the Master’s overtures are ostentatiously mocking of a man he clearly thinks is past it. It’s the final episode of the story, the final episode of this Doctor, and the Master sees himself as the coming man, a lithe, Thatcherite go-getter contemptuous of self-sacrifice and concern for others. But before he finds to his shock that the real coming man is yet to come, he patronises the Doctor’s old, comfy ways and mockingly praises him for a technological deliverance that he clearly thinks he could have delivered himself – but was instead keeping the Doctor busy while he worked out how to turn it to his advantage. The Doctor knocks the Master’s congratulatory hand away as if stung – and, even as he tries to bundle the Doctor out, he can’t resist giving the game away with a good taunt. The gloves are off…

“So it works. Congratulations, Doctor. I always knew you’d do it.”
“You did most of this.”
“Oh, no. I was little more than a humble assistant – but I have learned a great deal. And now I think it’s time for you to go and explain the presence of your friends. There’s quite a hubbub outside.”
“You’re quite right. One mistake now could ruin everything.”
“I know that, Doctor – and it could happen so easily.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Universe is hanging on a thread. A single recursive pulse down that cable and the CVE would close forever. Even a humble assistant could do it.”

Logopolis is probably Mr Ainley’s most dangerous performance – and certainly his Master’s most deadly effect – but, if you want a wider variety of Doctor in your ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’, like Mr Delgado he has other stories worth a look. I’d recommend Planet of Fire for a different and rather glorious interpretation of the Master in which he has a great deal of fun and is pitted for the last time against the ‘new’ Doctor who becomes his arch-enemy as they were in the early ’70s. Then there’s a more different still portrayal in Survival, Mr Ainley’s last TV appearance but, as with his first, not quite managing to finish off the Doctor (here one who shares Mr Ainley’s birthday, and his companion’s, too).

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 4 – The TV Movie: Time Waits For No Man

The Master (Eric Roberts) comes back from being executed first as a wriggling morphant monstrosity and then to possess yet another body, this time an unlucky paramedic. A mere human body begins to rot immediately, though his inner wriggling thing does at least give him the ability to spit sticky and occasionally hypnotic bile at those who get in his way. First underplayed, charismatic and rather sexy, his chiselled, clean-shaven features looking cool in shades, when bits start falling off his rapid deterioration leads to a waspish temper and a desperation to get the Doctor’s body – no, not like that. Oh, I dunno though. He also puts on his grandest frock yet for that big occasion. And yet he’s still not ‘the camp one’.

The Master has charmed a street gangster to his side with hard-luck tales of how – well, he’s no saint, but that awful, awful Doctor! A substantial quantity of gold helps. And the Doctor has made the mistake of choosing his companion rather less well: she’s already killed him once, she doesn’t believe him, and she’s more concerned with her sofa than his TARDIS. Never mind poor Mr McDermott: this is the sofa to really fear. And to top it all, she’s gooily hypnotised by the Master into abetting his S&M torture-possession plans, in a story that does millennialism considerably more stupidly than the one two above. And yet this Master is great fun and more of a mirror to the Doctor than he’s been in years, full of black humour when the Doctor plays it straight and, yes, I’m afraid heavily coded as the Hollywood Homosexual of Evil against a suddenly straight Doctor. I can’t help but enjoy both one-night-only Time Lords taking the piss immensely, and most of all as the Doctor wakes and expresses sheer incredulity as the Master’s companion swallows everything, his own slaps him because she’s evil now rather than merely banal, then the Master interrupts him, flouncing down the stairs with a flourish like Blanche turning up to the end of the world, which only the Doctor seems to notice:

“You! You took my things – where are they?”
“They’re not your things any more. Pretty soon, everything around here’s going to belong to the Master again.”
“Again? What’s he been telling you?
“When he gets his body back from you, I’m going to be rich.”
“And you believe him?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I suppose he neglected to mention that there won’t be any place to spend your money?”
“Which is why we have no time to waste.”
“But time to change!”
“I always dress for the occasion.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 5 – Utopia

I really, really did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


Professor Yana (Derek Jacobi) is a brilliant, eccentric scientist, perhaps the last – the savant at the end of the Universe (no longer delayed). An old man with a young companion, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, selflessly helping everyone (though it would be nice, just once, to get a little credit), with strange twinges of memory about time travel, the Doctor’s companion accidentally alerts him to the significance of the Gallifreyan symbols on his pocket watch. Not long before, the Doctor had used such a watch to hide his true self while living a normal life in a body and person made suddenly human. So with this dear old man so obviously Doctorish, surely there couldn’t be any doubt who’d be inside when he opened the watch…

The Master (Derek Jacobi) is older than some, with grey hair and an old body… But he finds new vigour and purpose – and newly compelling, dark eyes – when his whispering inner self takes over again (and you’ll recognise some of those voices). If you remember him sitting waiting inside a statue, an even better disguise was sitting inside a nice man (sweet? Effete!). If you think he was in drag last time, this was a performance so great that he was lost in it. And if the Doctor’s deepest wish when he had to make himself a new person to hide in was to become an ordinary man, the Master’s deepest wish was to be the Doctor… But just a little bit better. Fleeing service in the Time War, tormented by the drums in his head, in recovering himself the Master’s a real live wire, suddenly turning with contempt on his other life and his friend, sneering at and scorning everything about her – unwisely – and leaping back into murder and sabotage for spite. That came very easily.

This really shouldn’t be here at all. I may not be breaking the laws of my Fifty, but I am— no, hang it, I am breaking them, because here’s a moment, quite a bit of a moment, that’s going to turn up again later. I won’t tell if you won’t. This is only a part of it where, let’s say, the Master has seized control of the Moment. That sounds ominous, and it is. To simply fantastic music, the greatest outing for the 2007 theme we know as ‘Dance of the Macra’, Professor Yana has gazed into the abyss, the abyss has gazed greedily back and, with his most disturbing and brilliantly portrayed possession so far, the Master now takes possession again of – himself. Locked outside, humanity’s twisted, cannibal offshoots the Futurekind bay in hungry frustration as, above, humanity’s more hopeful survivors soar off in search of Utopia; below, the Doctor is confronted with the appalling realisation that You Are Not Alone. And, at the heart of the otherwise abandoned outpost, Professor Yana’s friend Chantho is being confronted with evidence that her friend may no longer be in residence. Black-eyed and delighting in life again, the man in his place is about to rediscover a taste for murder, but first can’t resist some playful, vicious fun as he operates the master controls first to lock the Doctor away from his TARDIS, then to let the Futurekind into the silo to greet (and eat) the Doctor and his friends. Chantho is appalled; the Doctor panics as a massive door slams in his face; and the Master – oh, the Master makes me laugh.

“Chan—but you’ve locked them in—tho…?”

[“Get it open! Get it open!”]

“Not to worry, my dear. As one door closes, another must open.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 6 – Last of the Time Lords

The Master (John Simm) is young, and strong, and we see that he’s at last won that new lease of life – he explodes from his previous self’s mortally wounded body with a new voice and new hyperactivity. Or is it simply that, taunted by the Doctor’s survival and rejuvenation, he regenerates by sheer force of will? He bounds away from the end of the Universe and lays a long plan, taking the Earth, a wife and leadership of his most insanely loyal allies yet. He spends months building himself up as Harold Saxon, charismatic Prime Minister and saviour. Urbane, excitable, with just a hint of madness, he’s more spectacularly hypnotic than ever before, and more than any other Master a mirror of and match for the Doctor. And that viciously playful streak is given full reign – over all the Earth, the Universe to follow – with not just taunts, and pranks, and killing again and again, but now dance. Handsome in an untrustworthy way, dark-haired but clean-shaven, he tends to wear sharply tailored black suits and ties, but with just a flash of purple inner lining to mock a Doctor’s cape of old (though after things go a little wrong even with his back-up plan, he turns up again rather the worse for wear and rather more on the side of madness than urbanity, less cheeky than feral). And if the Master really were the Doctor’s equal, what would that mean? He’d win. He does.

The Master takes over the world and the lead – it’s only a shame that Russell T Davies didn’t also remake the title sequence starring John Simm in THE MASTER. The reborn Master can hardly contain himself when at last he gets to speak to the Doctor; he tells him to run, taking command of the whole narrative; he rejoices in teasing him as a public menace; he proclaims the fall of the human race. Well, one of them, anyway. Topping every other writer’s conception of him as fallen angel, he stages the Rapture with terrible pedantry and glories in his legions of the Damned fleeing the ultimate judgement day. And, for a fan who loves The Deadly Assassin more than any other story and grew up intoxicated by novelisations of Roger Delgado’s stories, this tour-de-force follows through on the Master’s original promise and reaches through the screen to take control of me, too: he’s never better than in this story, and it’s an amazing performance, taking everything that Robert Holmes gave the character to set sail and flying away with it. It’s the most fun he’s had since the Chair – this time with the Cabinet. And he’s both very, very funny and utterly horrible. This is perfectly encapsulated a year into his reign, riding high above the Earth, tormenting a Doctor he’s long made a captive audience and aged to infirmity, always ready to make him feel small. He sees the Doctor making a grab for his laser screwdriver and revels in his failure, helping him back to his wheelchair, staring into his face, derisively ‘commiserating’ with him – then laughing in sheer delight.

“There you go, Gramps. Oh, do you know? I remember the days when the Doctor – oh, that famous Doctor – was waging a Time War, battling Sea Devils and Axons. He sealed the rift at the Medusa Cascade, single-handed. Phew. And look at him now. Stealing screwdrivers. How did he ever come to this? Oh yeah – me!”

Here’s to many more Masters – future and past.


Next Time… Who could follow that?


[Number 38 has already been published, but its “Next Time…” would simply have been “Happy Easter!”]

Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Jon Pertwee, Made-up DVD Sets, New Beginnings, Paul McGann, Terror of the Autons, The Master, The Plane Makers, Tom Baker

This time last week, Richard and I were watching and enormously enjoying The Hobbit – An Unexpectedly Small Proportion of It. Neither of us have been able to write reviews yet, sadly (though we might see it again), but I cheered at Sylvester McCoy appearing in big movie-star letters, and thrilled at his having not just a character cameo but major scenes: the gathering dark; the extended comedy action piece; the full-on action scene where he bests the most dangerous character in the entire film… So it got me thinking. Who else might Doctor Who fan Peter Jackson have cast?

The Hobbit

Starring







And in especially large letters at the end




Proper blogging may reappear soon. I’m having a crappy day and humming That Dwarf Song to keep warm.

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Michael Jayston, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tolkien, Tom Baker

Before Doctor Who became the biggest non-soap opera TV drama and demanded a Radio Times front cover even a fortnight before it’s next on, it was once in a struggle to survive. Before Sylvester McCoy became a big movie star – will next week’s opening beat James Bond to the year’s biggest? – he was the Doctor. And exactly twenty-three years ago (checks watch) now, he walked off into the sunset at the end of a gorgeous adventure that was positively not the last of Doctor Who. It felt like a new start. And, in several ways, so it was…

Having picked a short and relatively classy trailer for Doctor Who’s no longer final year in my Eleven Great Trailers opening a celebration of the series’ fiftieth year, brace yourself. Survival has a superb guitar score that, like the story itself, is both part of and a critique of the ’80s. This trailer counts down to Doctor Who’s ‘final’ year without that critique, an overlong, overblown piece of – there’s no hope for me – irresistible cheese to get you in the mood.

With Richard and I re-reading Sylvester’s New Adventures twenty years on, I’ve also been watching his TV stories over again. Richard’s already reviewed Survival for Millennium’s blog; I hope to start a series of reviews to complete them all. But as tonight’s the anniversary of not the end, the end seems as good a place as any to start – so before I return to Survival on DVD in detail, I just happen to have a much shorter review to hand written by a much younger me in April 1996 (I suspect I’ve since evolved both more love for Survival than I had then and a greater resistance to fan clichés in my reviews). It was published in Liberator Magazine, looking at the VHS release and hoping desperately that the Doctor Who TV Movie starring Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy would be a huge success…

“If we fight like animals, we’ll die like animals!”

For too long, we all thought this was to be the last TV Doctor Who story ever made and mourned it, even as we rejoice in Virgin’s superb series of original New Adventures novels. Transmitted back in 1989, a BBC production with a BBC budget, Survival has the same protagonists as the new TV Movie, but played by (mostly) different actors and almost certainly with a very different tone, with perhaps the last use of cliffhanger episode endings – all of which are refreshingly effective.

Survival is good, solid, average Who: story-driven, with something familiar, a few surprises, mostly rather well done drama and the odd let-down. Something is appearing in North-West London and carrying people away, aided by the Doctor’s arch-enemy. They turn out to be giant cat-people on horseback, a strikingly effective sight (although their animatronic cat ‘hunting dogs’ betray the budget). Their home world is falling apart as they fight – not just a quarry, but with a pink sky, the odd volcano and a satisfyingly stormy look. And while the inhabitants affect the planet, it casts its strange spell over them in turn…

There is a slightly dreamy air to this allegorical tale, which shows no love for machismo and ’80s values. A retired sergeant teaches ‘survival of the fittest’, but is killed in turn by a sharp-suited yuppie, and the Doctor in the end chooses not to fight. Both the Doctor’s companion, the self-reliant Ace, and his opposite, the Master, are possessed by the Cheetah Planet in superb performances (although some of the minor actors are a bit ropey). Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor was by this stage far darker, less goofy and with a far greater presence than when he started; while Anthony Ainley’s Master had sometimes descended almost into panto, here he is underplayed and sinister, fighting to survive with the gadgets and the veneer stripped away. He positively smoulders as he and the Doctor circle each other in a fine send-off for the old leads.

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger. Somewhere there’s injustice. And somewhere else, the tea is getting cold.
“Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do.”

And next month…

Well, the next month saw that TV Movie, and it wasn’t quite the huge success for which I’d hoped. Yet though that starred Sylvester and no previous Doctor appeared in Rose nine years later, Russell T Davies’ new series felt far more like Survival than the Movie ever did. Following this story with the glorious, inventive, emotional, allegorical New Adventures makes perfect sense; jumping straight to Rose, which takes the same real-world roots and family ties and does them so much more deftly feels equally right. I always wonder if the business with something nasty through the council estate cat-flap is a deliberate homage to this story, but I suspect Russell had better reasons for casting Noel Clarke than that his birthday is today. Though I can’t completely rule it out (it’s my Mum’s birthday too, though I don’t think she’d have been quite as right as Mickey). “I felt like I could run forever,” said Ace. And Russell made sure that it did.


I hope this has whetted your appetite for much more of the Sylvester McCoy years, a time when both on screen and on the page Doctor Who was determined to be strange and interesting – and under the surface of Survival more than most there’s a challenge to the viewer, to the times and to the series itself. When I return to it, I’ll look at how as well as reshaping the Master it looks right back across Doctor Who with an implicit critique of ‘standards’ like the Daleks, the Cybermen and UNIT era, while looking forward into the New Adventures, Professor Bernice Summerfield and of course Doctor Who’s triumphant return to TV.

But first, coming soon…

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, New Adventures, Paul McGann, Reviews, Survival, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, Tolkien

Say ‘What you need is more of The Time Monster’ to most fans and they’d back slowly away. And yet, against all reason, a dozen different Doctor Who stories – right up to last week’s episode – take inspiration from what seemed one of the most uninspired. Plucked from the wreckage and polished, other authors took TARDISes inside each other, Chronovores, battles snatched out of time, hermits and more and made something (usually) more interesting of them. Less surprisingly, The Time Monster was inspired by earlier tales in turn; less Greek myths than two other Doctor Who stories in particular.

The Time Monster and The Dæmons

One of Patrick Troughton’s earliest and, most concur, shonkiest stories as the Doctor was The Underwater Menace, in which he lands in the ruins of Atlantis and – not wishing to give away the entire plot – competes with the local mad scientist to see who can make them more completely ruined. It does not have a high reputation. So you do have to wonder what Barry Letts was doing when he replicated much of the same Atlantis set-up: the ‘villain from outside with the crazy destructive plot’ by whom ‘the ruler is chatted up, only to realise too late he’s actually a bad thing and that the Doctor was right’… Though the Doctor dropping a brick and exposing the villain’s ambition at a key moment is quite well-delivered in both.

The Time Monster co-writers Robert Sloman and Barry Letts had a much more obvious source of inspiration for their not terribly successful Doctor Who Season Nine finale, though: The Dæmons, the enormously successful Doctor Who Season Eight finale by, er, co-writers Barry Letts and Robert Sloman. If you thought some elements of Russell T Davies’ end-of-season epics were a little repetitive, he had nothing on Barry Letts. And it’s not just the overarching plot – essentially The Dæmons again with the end of Atlantis thrown in, and even that was mentioned in The Dæmons – that’s familiar, but many little details of the story are recycled. Ready?

• Jo tries to tell the Doctor about some newsworthy New Agey events, and complains he never listens to a word she says (hello, also, to the same authors’ next season finale The Green Death, too. And, slightly later in the story for variety, their one after that, Planet of the Spiders).

• Benton is about to go on leave but is pressed into duty.

• The Doctor listens to Jo at the last minute and they rush off to intervene in his car Bessie, getting lost along the way so the Master can do a spot of summoning at the end of Episode One.

• Bessie gets some extra superpowers.

• There’s an alien object that can’t be lifted, and not because it’s stuck down.

• ‘An Obviously Fake Name is the Classical Language* word for Master!’ (*Greek scholars will work out why this technically isn’t true, though points for Jo’s working it out logically this time)

• The Master dominates the local authority figure, who comes to a sticky end from the creature with wings he’s called up.

• A mighty mythological creature turns out to be real, powerful and not as willing to obey the Master as he thinks it should, turning on him so he has to plead for his life.

• The Doctor’s killed as the mighty mythological creature’s summoned in a cliffhanger. Oh no, wait, he’s alive (at least when Paul Cornell did that with his more exciting sort-of Chronovores in Father’s Day he managed to keep the Doctor dead for a bit).

• UNIT get split up and spend ages trying to bring their different teams together.

• There are lots of “Venusian” silly words.

• The scientifically capable but baffled human finds the Time Lord-designed MacGuffin Machine they’re operating “running away” and it blows up.

• A big church is destroyed.

• Did I mention Atlantis?

• Jo offers to sacrifice herself and foils the Master (though, incredibly, that one bit of the plot makes more sense in this one; and as that scene is of the Master knowing what makes the Doctor tick and being sure he won’t destroy them both, but hasn’t bargained on the woman, you might think of Last of the Time Lords, too).

Perhaps, then, given that I’ve now written about Barry Letts’ and Robert Sloman’s The Time Monster, The Green Death and Planet of the Spiders, it may be time I reviewed The Dæmons? But first, there’s something much more surprising than a list of elements The Time Monster ripped off – an idea of some of those it inspired!

An Unlikely Inspiration

Watching The Time Monster to ready myself for these reviews, I was taken aback – yet again – at just how horrible the one-story-only TARDIS redesign is. Known as “the Tupperware TARDIS”, the control room covered with huge, hideous ’70s plastic plates, it’s the equivalent of giving the Ship nylon flares, and makes me realise that Matt Smith’s is OK after all… Though the Master’s knobbly steel time rotor does have a look that might have inspired Matt’s bobbly glass one. Even Terrance Dicks’ novelisation, which isn’t bad but wasn’t able to make a silk purse of The Time Monster, has a cheeky little aside about this ghastly redesign that was dropped straight away:

“Something had altered, something about the circular configuration of the walls… From time to time, the Doctor altered some detail of the TARDIS interior. More often than not he decided he didn’t like what he’d done and reverted to the original.”

Given all that, it’s perhaps surprising that one of the biggest influences this story had on later ones is to do with the TARDIS. Though the first major reappearance of an idea from The Time Monster is the Doctor’s old guru, mentioned here and then turning up in person – distractingly played by one of this story’s actors in a different wig – in Planet of the Spiders before subsequently being referred to in several other stories in several other media, the first really interesting examples of one of this story’s inventions being reworked come a few years later, in Tom Baker’s last two season finales. Douglas Adams’ Shada was never quite completed for TV, but features some very similar sequences of TARDISes dancing about each other in the vortex and the Doctor being temporarily expelled; Chris Bidmead’s Logopolis, in which the two TARDISes (probably the same two TARDISes, at that) being inside each other become something altogether richer and more threatening. This year’s Comic Relief double-sketch Space / Time borrowed it, too, before last week’s The Doctor’s Wife made everyone sit up and take notice properly (as well as giving us another one-off TARDIS design. And does that mean she still has the Tupperware TARDIS on file? The horror).

The ‘deadly things out of time’ sequence, wasted padding out the middle of The Time Monster, is used to great effect in Doctor Who Magazine’s finest comic strip, The Tides of Time, complete with medieval knight on horseback suddenly appearing in the Twentieth Century countryside. And that one really is a silk purse. Paul Cornell has used Chronovores, or something very like them, in his rather wonderful Christopher Eccleston story Father’s Day, and his rather less wonderful novel No Future. There was even another tribute to The Time Monster in last year’s The Lodger (possibly to make up for losing a villain from another famously rubbish story), which builds something out of the most outrageous slow-down-the-plot device in all of Doctor Who. And many other novels and TV stories have had other references along the way.

The most notable influence wielded by The Time Monster, however, was on two Doctor Who novels from the Noughties. Like karmic twins, they are opposites, and it’s rumoured that should anyone ever read both together, one of them is bound to be torn into little pieces and stamped on. And I know which I’d choose. They are prequel and sequel; subtle and self-indulgent; brilliant and utter rubbish. I know some people enjoy “fanwank”; if so, The Quantum Archangel is for you. But I never wish to read it, nor ideally think about it, ever again. Where The Time Monster fails spectacularly but has many redeeming features, the novel that sets out to do the same story again, but bigger, manages only the first half of that summary. Fortunately, it’s not the only novel whose entire basis was inspired by The Time Monster…

Doctor Who – Fallen Gods

Everyone can think of stories which can seem ruined retrospectively by terrible sequels. The Time Monster, unusually, has a prequel which succeeds in lifting it, at least in the memory – unlike Myths and Legends, Fallen Gods really does come across as a Greek legend, and more a phoenix than a load of bull (as Daryl Joyce’s frontispiece captures). Who could be attacking the mighty Minoan Empire, protected by their own fleets and by the divine power of the Fallen? What is the secret of the fiery demon bulls that consume all that they touch? And who will the suddenly helpless people of Thera turn on in their rage and fear?

—One of the disadvantages of being a child of the gods is that you rarely see your family.
—Oh, I wouldn’t say that was the main problem.
—What would you say, then?
—That you’ll always be a child.
—In the divine realm, children overthrow their parents with startling regularity.

The New Adventures of the mid-’90s were among Doctor Who’s golden ages, though, as most people never read them, you might think of that as mythical; one of the series’ best finds as an author (along with such influential names as Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss and Lawrence Miles) was Kate Orman, who wrote 2003’s Fallen Gods with her writing partner and husband Jon Blum. It isn’t what you expect. From the out-of-print but in this case very much worth searching out range of Doctor Who novellas from Telos Publishing, this one has the length and depth to be more a novel than novella and, indeed, won the Aurealis Award for Best Novel; its distinctive prose style is quite unlike their other work, and unique; Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor is captured here in a way that fits in with the convoluted and up-themselves BBC novels of the time, but happily soars above all that (he may or may not have destroyed his homeworld by now, and may or may not remember. He may have other things missing too, but that’s not important right now); and, while this is undoubtedly and absolutely a prequel to The Time Monster, it never says so, and doesn’t need you to be familiar with it in the slightest.

Don’t look for names from The Time Monster, then, or crowd-pleasingly crass nudges and winks. This is a book that requires imagination from the reader to see the currents between different times – though the Doctor and at least one other character do appear in both, if you look for them. In some ways, Fallen Gods has an ecological message that’s more Pertwee than Pertwee – yet in a completely unPertwee way, with a very different Doctor. It’s something wonderful and strange, and not like any other Doctor Who book. And yet, again, both The Time Monster and Fallen Gods begin with Thera (one as trendy news and a hook, one with the history, even making the famous bull-leaping its keystone image), so that Fallen Gods has two starting points, one declared and ‘real’, one an uncredited Doctor Who story that’s poles apart, and yet it moves them inexorably towards each other. Take a look at The Time Monster’s first major scene in Atlantis, the debates between Hippias and Dalios on how “the blessings our forefathers once enjoyed” were cruelly stolen, to see how both stories grow in stature if you take them together in the right way.

Crystalline, Fallen Gods is a book in which you can see many different sides reflected. I said it has an ecological message; some might barely see it, and yet – in the sense of an ecology as everything taken together, rather than just ‘environmental issues’, this might be the most ecologically minded Doctor Who story of all. And while it tells what is for the most part a cracking good story on its own, just as you’ll get more out of it if you see how it in turn makes The Time Monster something bigger, you’ll most appreciate this novel if you recognise that it takes history and myth and deftly shapes them into a glittering pattern of allegories.

Perhaps the most obvious thing to ‘get’ about this story is that almost everyone in it is a fallen god – the Doctor both literally and metaphorically (there’s a fabulous place for the TARDIS to park, that in itself calls up myths of ancient heroes avoiding the maelstrom). Perhaps the thing that’s most missing from the book is Doctor Who’s sense of fun; true, it starts with a playfulness and sense of wonder, but very soon everyone and everything will have feet of clay, though not all of them will be brought down to Earth. Perhaps the novel’s central concern is with being forced to see the truth and take responsibility – but along the way it deals with blessings and betrayals, guilt and exploitation, and it’s rare for Doctor Who to so agonisingly debate making compromises. You might read it at any time and see an allegory of colonialism; knowing it was published in 2003, it’s obvious that much of it is informed by 9/11; yet if you were told it came out last month, it would seem just as clearly a commentary on the deficit.

So this is a Greek tragedy. Very serious, very stylised (and, you might say, everyone’s wearing masks – except one). While it’s written for Paul McGann’s Doctor of the books, I can still more easily imagine him as Christopher Eccleston, consumed by but hiding his guilt and responsibility, taking on an ‘apprentice’ while really longing for something else, and not really being to her what she thinks he is as he diverts her future and uses her past (with the priestesses, it always makes me think of the empty horror of The Tombs of Atuan). Still more than in Season 14, he’s explicitly Prometheus here, but more complex, a figure not just of gifts but of sex (one of many things she might think of him that might not be) and betrayal.

The first half of the novel, as you spiral closer and closer into the mystery until the appalling moment where you suddenly realise what’s going on, is certainly the stronger. Written in five parts, the key moment, when your jaw drops, is the end of Two. Utterly chilling, utterly brilliant, nothing afterwards matches it and perhaps some of the latter passages might have been trimmed, though admittedly what for me is the overly repetitive torture-anger-atonement sequence is really much shorter than it feels. It’s how the characters react to it all that keeps the drama flowing: the Doctor and how he changes things, from fashioning weapons to what turn out to be his two apprentices; the Fallen themselves (I’m not sure I buy their origin, but they’re used brilliantly); and virtually all the scenes with King Rhadamanthys are fascinating. He feels like a powerfully effective king (in all the good and the bad ways), while the Doctor teaching the King’s two sons brings a lot out of all concerned – the Doctor thinks he’s giving them something to think about, whereas in fact…

It may not be easy to find a copy of Fallen Gods, but look for it if you can. It takes both The Time Monster and Greek myth and asks, ‘If these were true, what would they mean?’ And it makes both great and terrible, rejecting easy rage and easy answers, but ending in redemption, of a sort. Because it has to. If you’ve never seen The Time Monster, you can enjoy Fallen Gods without knowing it. If that means you never have to watch The Time Monster, that may be preferable! But, much as they may fall at opposite ends of the Doctor Who quality range, like all the best prequels – or, more accurately, reimaginings – I think you’re best knowing The Time Monster first, then riding the winds of time back through Fallen Gods to find both are the richer for it.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Fantasy, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, New Adventures, Patrick Troughton, Paul McGann, Religion, The Master

On the day after tomorrow, we’ll have a new Doctor Who episode and a new Doctor. Are you as hugely excited as I am? And as desperate to avoid spoilers (though the 70-second preview on Freeview 301’s OK)? Then why not distract yourself with the other Doctors instead? The last time the most popular Doctor ever left he was Tom Baker in 1981, and to ready you for the youngest Doctor ever when he was Peter Davison the BBC mounted a repeat season, The Five Faces of Doctor Who. Here’s how to spend your Easter holiday weekend doing the same. Just don’t tell your local Lib Dem campaign team…

Where To Start?

If you’ve had the misfortune never to see , by the way, and don’t know what it’s all about, click over for a couple of minutes to So Who is This Doctor Bloke Anyway? which reveals that the series’ essentials are actually very simple. Just very strange. A couple of the names have changed since – it was written exactly three years ago – but all the meaning’s still the same. And once you’re done, you should be all primed to want to watch some of it… Which is what today’s article is about.

Before DVDs, videos and more than three TV channels, five old Doctor Who stories – or even four old stories and one that had been on a few months earlier – was almost unbearably exciting. We had a William Hartnell story, a Patrick Troughton story, a Jon Pertwee story, one with all three, and then the final one of Tom Baker’s… Complete with eight seconds of freshly-regenerated Peter Davison looking around blearily at the end (making it five faces, even though technically none of Peter’s stories had been broadcast yet, you see?). These days, of course, you can easily amass an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection, or watch old stories online through legal means or others Lord Mandelson wants to cut your head off for, so a repeat season’s both less exciting and far easier to put together at home.

For today’s exciting suggestions, girls and boys, it’s best have an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection to hand. If you are unaccountably missing such an obvious household necessity, there’ll be a free selection along tomorrow, all sourced in a BBC-authorised way that Lord Mandelson won’t cut you off for except in the case of some horrendous ‘punish first, ask questions later’ cock-up (O noes!).

To get into the spirit of the thing, imagine that you’re a BBC channel controller. What if you were designing an exciting proper repeat season to go out on proper telly and everything? And so – as BBC1 is for brand new Doctor Who and BBC3 is for endless repeats of slightly less brand new but definitely from this century Doctor Who, followed by as many different permutations of young people copping off with each other as can fill up the schedules – you can opt for either The (action-packed with famous baddies) BBC2 Schedule or The (very very slightly more intelligent) BBC4 Schedule. Or make up your own, of course, but that would be insanity.

Of course, if I really were a BBC channel controller, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I’d find it impossibly tempting not either to start at the beginning of Sir Thomas Baker and show his whole lot (his stories being, in general, my favourites), or – ideally – to pour the channel’s entire budget for the year into making swish animated versions of the Doctor Who stories from the ’60s the BBC carelessly burnt and showing all of those (the first two Doctors being, in general, my favourites, and the stories damn well deserving to be brought back to life). But with a new Doctor, you should be balanced, really, shouldn’t you?

For that proper Five Eleven Faces feel, just as they did in 1981, you should start at the beginning with the very first story, An Unearthly Child, and finish with the very latest so far, The End of Time – so you can plunge breathlessly into the TARDIS when it was shiny, new, and utterly incredible, then get those breathless few seconds of shiny, new, and utterly incredible Matt Smith as the battered old TARDIS plunges towards… Where? But unlike the original repeat season, I’m going to recommend other William Hartnell and David Tennant stories to show them off as well – because the Tenth Doctor deserves a story of his own rather than just a big run-up to the Eleventh, and because… Well, because William Hartnell is utterly, sublimely brilliant in An Unearthly Child, but so scarily otherworldly that he’s not quite ‘the Doctor’ yet. That first story, incidentally, was four episodes long and for me the whole thing is terrific, but the very first episode – also called An Unearthly Child – makes an ideal introduction on its own, starting with two ordinary people in our own world who stumble across a futuristic time machine and then travel deep into the past. For either channel, I’d show those first twenty-five minutes as a standalone prologue to the whole series, probably back-to-back with a ‘Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?’ half-hour celebration piece. I can’t make the latter for you, but I can suggest you start with the series’ first ever episode, perhaps the single greatest piece of television of the 1960s.

The BBC2 Schedule

BBC2’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on Saturday afternoons or evenings, each story roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones) and edited together into a movie format to grab people’s attention in one go and fit into the same slot each week. As one of the main channels, it would be quite populist, with infamous enemies people new to Twentieth Century Doctor Who would recognise from the last five years. So would you watch it…?

Introducing the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, starring William Hartnell…

William Hartnell is the Doctor in The Dalek Invasion of Earth

First of all the alien invasion stories, with scenes of a deserted London under Dalek occupation it would be impossible to shoot today. There’s grim horror, a famously marvellous closing speech from the Doctor, and some rather splendid DVD extras – including a fab CGI flying saucer that I’d show the story with rather than the slightly disappointing original. And yes, this is one of two stories here that are rather longer than my ‘limit’, but Daleks are a good draw for audiences, and this one was remade as a movie with Peter Cushing… So the idea of re-editing the proper version into movie form entertains me.

Patrick Troughton is the Doctor in The Tomb of the Cybermen

An ancient alien world, superb design, terrific villains and a trap laid by monsters who aren’t as dead as everyone thought… Suspense, eerie music and memorable images are all here, but the heart of it is the Doctor comforting his companion in a simply gorgeous quiet conversation. Introduced to all the old Doctors, Matt Smith saw this story and decided that Pat was his favourite – it’s where he gets the bow tie from – and Pat is so spellbinding in this story that it might just be my favourite single performance from any Doctor.

Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in Spearhead from Space

A newly regenerated Doctor crashes to Earth with a knackered TARDIS and takes a while to find his feet… You might find this influential, with Autons too taking the high street by storm in one of the series’ most memorable sequences. It’s also very witty, with the show almost stolen by the Doctor’s two companions, the bluff Brigadier and sharp scientist Dr Liz Shaw.

Tom Baker is the Doctor in Pyramids of Mars

Horror a hundred years ago, with stiff upper lips pitted against walking mummies and a dark god with the voice of the Beast – perhaps the series’ most chilling villain. All this, plus Michael Sheard (Mr Bronson), Bernard Archard and the wonderful Sarah Jane Smith. The DVD’s packed with marvellousness, too.

Peter Davison is the Doctor in Earthshock

The Cybermen are on the march in a brilliantly directed future war story with a famously tragic ending… In one of the series’ most macho stories – there are many roles for women, but most of them are written as if they could be Arnold Schwarzenegger – it’s also fantastic that the aggressive space captain is played not by Sigourney Weaver but Beryl Reid. This could only be Doctor Who.

Colin Baker is the Doctor in Revelation of the Daleks

A stunning black comedy, with a gurglingly delighted Davros plotting away at the heart of it, some great guest stars, really rather a lot of death and one nearly-Dalek that you will never forget. The director’s so good he’s the only one to direct Doctor Who in both centuries, too.

Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor in The Curse of Fenric

Vampires and counterplotting in World War II, with a story that’s both action-packed and intelligent. It’s also the easiest of all the choices – for Doctors where there’s a choice – for a season of movie-length repeats, as a rather brilliant movie-length special edition has already been created for the DVD. Pop it on, then.

Paul McGann is the Doctor in Doctor Who – The TV Movie

Another newly regenerated Doctor faces a fight on slightly-ahead-of-modern-day Earth, this time in America and against the Master. Admire the Doctor, enjoy the Master, see how pretty it all is, and try to ignore the script. While I took a while to decide on stories for some of the Doctors, with at least a dozen rattling around my head from The Tom Baker Years, sadly there aren’t many to choose between from The Paul McGann Early Evening… Though if I was doing a repeat season on BBC7, he’s had some fabulous audio adventures.

Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor in The Empty Child

Mysterious zombies stalk the night in a very different World War II story written by new Grand Mekon Steven Moffat – witty, scary, uplifting, even award-winning, and introducing Captain Jack. Featuring Richard Wilson as you’ve never seen him before (well, unless you’ve watched it in any of the 832 times it’s been shown on BBC3).

David Tennant is the Doctor in Last of the Time Lords

And, again, I cheat. I could have gone for The Impossible Planet, perhaps the most movie-like Doctor Who story I can think of – or the terrific Daleks-Cybermen-Torchwood battle of Doomsday. So a three-part season finale that adds up to well over two hours, where each episode is so different from the one before that it would make a very oddly-structured movie, seems a peculiar choice. And yet… It has one of the show’s three most stunning regenerations, and the only one of those that isn’t the Doctor. It’s funny, it’s shocking, it’s downright peculiar; David Tennant suffers outstandingly; Martha is heroic; it encapsulates the series’ travels through time and space by going from an alien world at the end of the Universe to our own Earth to Earth gone terribly wrong – most of all, despite its faults, it’s the single one of Russell T Davies’ stories that I keep coming back to watch over and over again for the sheer joy of it. Not least in that the return of the Master is the perfect scene-setter for…

David Tennant is the Doctor in The End of Time, which is on BBC3 again tomorrow night if you don’t have the DVD… And introducing Matt Smith!

That was awfully difficult, you know. I was torn between several for most Doctors, and many for Tom. I jotted down my instinctive choices, then thought, ‘but how balanced is that selection?’ With the most varied and marvellous series ever imagined, can any selection show every angle – a dash of horror, adventures in history, enough wit to make you smile, enough ideas and strangeness and to make you think, and enough action to get you excited…? So, raising my inner geekdom to heroic proportions, I made a great big table of all the elements that needed to be in a repeat season, so it wouldn’t all be the same, and make sure I had stories that balanced out neatly… Which is why I’ve ended up with two pairs of consecutive stories by the same authors, and two set in World War II, two mummy pastiches, and lots of scary ones and probably not enough funny ones, and, and, and… Oh, just watch ’em. The last to be crossed out, incidentally, were Tom’s Planet of Evil (another scary one, with the series’ most stunning alien world), The Robots of Death (a murder mystery with more gorgeous design), and The Pirate Planet, The Androids of Tara and City of Death, simply because all of them are fabulously playful fun.

Tune in to BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 11am, incidentally, for a programme that will almost certainly feature parts of The Pirate Planet and City of Death – because each was either written or co-written by Douglas Adams. I suspect there may be a remarkable amount about Life, the Universe and Everything, too, Douglas’ novel adapted from an unused Doctor Who script, with bits of several other Who stories flashing into it too. What I always notice is that the two characters who occupy a vaguely Doctorish space in Douglas’ novels – Ford Prefect and Slartibartfast – are squeezed in different directions for the rewritten Doctor Who story, Ford suddenly becoming far more louche and Slartibartfast far more driven… Because if either had kept their usual characters, you’d have noticed them competing (just not very hard) for the same sort of role in the narrative. Somewhere in some alternate universe, there’s a version of the book in which Ford decides to save the Universe with the reluctant aid of a Slartibartfast who wants to sit about just looking at fjords. That is, as you may have guessed, The Doctor and Douglas, Radio 4, 11am, 2nd April.

The BBC4 Schedule

BBC4’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on weekday evenings, repeated as the original episodes rather than re-edited, but with two shown back-to-back each night to fill the best part of an hour’s slot, and again made up of stories lasting in total roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones), making each spread across two nights or so. As one of the smaller channels, it could find an audience for Doctor Who that’s perhaps more thought-provoking, more satirical and more just downright strange. So would you watch it…?

Introducing the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, starring William Hartnell…

William Hartnell is the Doctor in The Aztecs

Pure history, with marvellous dialogue and a central moral dilemma – Barbara, perhaps the strongest of all the Doctor’s companions, seems to have been put in a position where she can change history and sets out to do it. The Doctor sets out to stop her. Both Jacqueline Hill and William Hartnell are simply stunning… And, if you’re a Shipper for the Twenty-first Century stories, here the Doctor gets engaged (but no tongues).

Patrick Troughton is the Doctor in The Mind Robber

The TARDIS explodes into the Land of Fiction in one of the weirdest, most brilliant of all Doctor Who. From sci-fi to superheroes, mythology to mind games, the inventiveness keeps going – and wait ’til you see the Doctor’s companion losing face. It might fit a little awkwardly into a BBC4 slot, as it’s actually in five episodes – but, as they’re each shorter than usual, the whole thing is barely longer than an ordinary story.

Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in The Time Warrior

Though starting off in Pertwee’s comfort zone of the-just-after-present-day, with a little help from the Brigadier, before long he’s travelling back to a castle in the Thirteenth Century to fight the original Sontaran. It’s the first story for Sarah Jane Smith, too, and she really grabs it – in a very funny story, she also gets the best deadpan joke without meaning to… Oh, and it’s got Dot Cotton and Boba Fett in it! While two of these stories have new effects on DVD that are must-sees, and two more have new effects that I can take or leave, this one puts me in a quandary: mostly, the added CGI offers greatly improved effects that I’d prefer to broadcast – but the final one replaces a stock great big explosion with a feeble one that resembles a dragon sneezing through a gateway.

Tom Baker is the Doctor in The Deadly Assassin

Death strikes on the planet of the Time Lords, as the Doctor and the Master return in a serial that’s exploding with ideas for both story and storytelling. It starts as film noir political satire, then swerves into virtual reality and gritty surrealism, with great cliffhangers along the way and even inspiring The Matrix movies… What more could you ask for?

Peter Davison is the Doctor in The Caves of Androzani

An extraordinary mixture of ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ styles, with a terrific script, dazzling direction, rattlesnake-eerie music and compelling actors. A cynical desert war, noirishly twisted love and graveyard humour meet for a revenge drama where everyone’s destroyed in a chain reaction from picking on an innocent – the Doctor. And it kills him: at the end, nice Peter explodes into Colin in a striking regeneration.

Colin Baker is the Doctor in Vengeance on Varos

Politics meets reality TV before reality TV was invented – with an irresistibly horrible new alien villain. Sharp, funny and violent, it’s just the thing to watch before a General Election: Martin Jarvis isn’t every voter’s favourite (though Jason Connery with his top off might be).

Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor in Ghost Light

A Nineteenth Century Darwinian fable that’s witty, intelligent and looks rather splendid, if you like spooky old houses, this is the one for you. It’s the shortest of my picks, at just three episodes, but worth watching over and over (and perhaps necessary), with the Doctor’s friend Ace put to the test not just by alien angels and icy screen legend Sylvia Syms but by the Doctor himself. And apologies to the author, who I know’s read this blog on occasion and doesn’t like one-line reviews; I’ll return to it properly eventually!

Paul McGann is the Doctor in Doctor Who – The TV Movie

Another newly regenerated Doctor faces a fight on slightly-ahead-of-modern-day Earth, this time in America and against the Master. Admire the Doctor, enjoy the Master, see how pretty it all is, and try to ignore the script. While I took a while to decide on stories for some of the Doctors, with at least a dozen rattling around my head from The Tom Baker Years, sadly there aren’t many to choose between from The Paul McGann Early Evening… Though if I was doing a repeat season on BBC7, he’s had some fabulous audio adventures.

Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor in Bad Wolf

The Doctor regenerates again to get you in the mood for Matt, this time giving us a glimpse of David at the end – but it’s Chris’ story, and he’s fantastic. Along the way, there’s more savage TV satire, the most memorable cry of “Exterminate!” you’ll never hear, and the series’ most stunning Dalek action (if you’ve watched my William Hartnell choices, here’s a still more brutal Dalek invasion of Earth and still more groovy saucers, as well as another companion becoming a goddess).

David Tennant is not the Doctor in Human Nature

The Doctor turns human, and his adventures turn into dreams. But the aliens chasing the inner him turn them into nightmares… A gorgeous, moving story in the looming shadow of World War I, John Smith is torn between love and war, while wild-eyed young Son-of-Mine has super, super fun. Perhaps my favourite of all the Twenty-first Century TV stories so far, and a small-scale, heartfelt moment to treasure before the epic that is…

David Tennant is the Doctor in The End of Time, which is on BBC3 again tomorrow night if you don’t have the DVD… And introducing Matt Smith!

This choice seemed easier, though again I drew up a great big grid to make sure it was terribly well-balanced – and so, of course, ended up with several stories by one author, and a clutch of postmodern satires about TV. Rather than The Time Warrior and Vengeance on Varos, by the way, I nearly opted for Carnival of Monsters and The Two Doctors; the former making a slightly better TV satire, though the latter with noticeably worse Sontarans. I probably enjoy the latter two stories more – all four are funny, and often tasteless – but, while The Two Doctors has Colin at his very best, it also goes on a bit too long and has some rather iffy morals… Besides, that would have ended up with four in a row from the same writer, and while he may indeed be my favourite, that’s a bit much for variety.


Finally, if you don’t have time for all of those, to warm up for Saturday why not just go for the epic of time-travelling warlords, where the Time Lords catch up with the Doctor and prove to be utter bastards, that ends in long goodbyes and the Doctor’s regeneration? No, not The End of Time, but the finale for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor – The War Games.

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

To split up two long fulminations about things named “Mail,” I have a confession: I’ve become addicted to the BBC’s prime food porn. I remember when Masterchef was endearingly amateur and Loyd Grossman was entertainingly imitable… But then it became blokeish and rather more like The Apprentice, so despite the gorgeous voiceovers from Doctor Who’s India Fisher (of whom more in a minute), I’d left it. A few weeks ago, though, Richard put the latest version on in the background for something neutral while we cooked, and I’ve been glued to it ever since. Particularly for posh egg and soldiers.

I won’t, in fact, be posting my fulmination about the Daily Mail for a few days at least, nor many others I’ve half-written and probably let go off in the last few weeks, as I’m about to dive off up north and I don’t know where the Internet cafés are in Stockport and Manchester. What excitement is this? Seeing my parents; hopping on the train with old friends to brave the October winds at Blackpool and visit the Doctor Who Exhibition before it finally closes, like the beloved one of our youth; and to have my teeth drilled. Well, I hope the rest’ll make up for that (and hush, Lib Dem Conferencegoers who claim you’d rather have your teeth drilled than return to Blackpool. I bet you wouldn’t).

There are two key differences between Masterchef – The Professionals and the ‘ordinary’ Masterchef: first, it features young, ambitious professional cooks rather than members of the public doing it for fun; and second, and this is the key for me, they’ve got the balance of presenters right. Rather than two ‘blokes’, rough Gregg Wallace is now joined by smooth Michel Roux Junior, and they make a persuasive combination. Gregg is, if anything, a little too overawed by the famous chef: he hardly ever brings himself to disagree with him, so you can imagine how frightened the competitors are. For me, Michel is a great combination of steely disapproval and warm encouragement, with the most amazing grin when – rarely – he’s taken off-guard and delighted by something, though I suspect I’d find his style of meat very underdone (he likes it pink; I like it charcoal), and almost every dish before him seems to need more acidity. One of my few disappointments with the series has been that we didn’t see him introduce his father uncle [oops!] at the Michelin-starred high tea restaurant; Roux Senior, sitting wizened but authoritative and wielding absolute power over the pastry chefs, surely deserved younger Michel looming over the finalists to intone, ‘I hope these fancies will be perfect, for your sake. My father uncle is not as forgiving as I am’. You’ll not be surprised, I suspect, that the scariest bit about the competition for me is the way they have to do everything precisely to time…

Anyway, we’re now into the extended final all week, between Steve, Daniel and Marianna. The unceasing parade of determined, slim young men (is it just me who never quite trusts a thin chef?) finally ceased with no slim men in sight in the last round. I rather liked some of the ones who fell, though. The chunky, slightly dour French guy with the rare but nice smile who played it too safe and lost his flair in the semi-final; the tiny chap with the messy hair, rustic food and desperate eyes; the lean French-African guy with the amazing eye for invention, who I suspect Michel didn’t pass through to the next round because he wouldn’t follow the rules… And the one that really scared me, the cold-eyed epitome of the ambitious young man, who evoked the Terminator when he promised that all his work would be perfectly executed.

My money’s on Steve, who not only delivers exquisite food but is inventive with it. Despite all the scary encounters with Michelin chefs (one who cooks by touch and refuses to use timings, another who goes by the gram and the second and measures lines on the plate…), the dish that’s looked most interesting was his inspired reinvention of egg and soldiers, involving poaching, twisty concoctions and a smoke machine (with a dessert based on an exquisitely cooked ‘bag of sweets’ last night, his speciality seems to be supercharged versions of childhood treats). It was only last week, so it’s probably still on the iPlayer if you want to look. Though my favourite single moment was Marianna, praised, declaring it was “Heaven. Total heaven” – if only because I misheard it as “Potato heaven,” which just sounds fabulously surreal. Besides, you can tell Steve’s a perfectionist: look at his knifework on that designer stubble. Daniel’s beard growth varies, but Steve always looks like he’s just got out of bed.

India Fisher

And finally, the lovely India. I must dash, but Doctor Who listeners for Big Finish and BBC7 will know her as Charlotte Pollard, Edwardian adventuress, introduced in Storm Warning for many travels with Paul McGann’s Doctor, then latterly – if anachronistically – with Colin Baker. And she’s lovely. I’ve met her a couple of times, and she’s unfailingly intelligent and fun (for politics fact fans, she’s the daughter of Mark Fisher MP).

So what does she do on Masterchef?

She’s the voice. She narrates it with the perfect vocals – low, sexy, like chocolate pouring.

And there I must, literally, leave it: I don’t want to miss my train, but look out in a few days for an anecdote or two, my theory of why she doesn’t appear on TV much despite being heard so often, which of her final Doctor Who adventures is best – oh, look, it’s Paper Cuts, and it’s brilliant, but the others aren’t bad, either – and the effect she has on the straight boys…

In the meantime, you can always read the interview with her in the latest Doctor Who Magazine.

Update: …And, several days later – after seeing my parents, having another stage of root canal, and making obeisance to Kroll – I’m back, so it’s back to India. She’s an incredibly talented actor, and it’s certainly worth catching up with some of her Doctor Who work: the earliest ones with Paul McGann or her later ones with Colin Baker are probably her best, though if you snap up her final trilogy with Colin (Patient Zero, Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet) you may be surprised to find her not exactly playing Charlotte Pollard. In that, and in Masterchef, you can admire her marvellous voice… But it’s a shame you rarely get to see her.

The only time I can remember seeing her on TV, in fact, was in a dodgy wig impersonating one of the Eastenders cast on Dead Ringers shortly after Dirty Den and the Mitchell brothers had each made increasingly improbable returns from the dead (or from other channels) to the East End: wondering which villain from the past would be next for a preposterous reappearance, there was an ominous droning sound from above. India looked up and delivered a line that corpsed me completely:

“It’s the Luftwaffe! They’ve come back!”

Now, as well as having to admit that I’d call her voice sexy, and she’s one of the few women who, when I’ve met her, I can see exactly what the straight boys see in her. She looks fantastic from head to toe, as well as being witty, intelligent and awfully nice (each of which helps, I usually find). At a mini-convention a couple of months ago, I met her for the third or so time and, queuing for her autograph, told her that it’s always an enormous pleasure to hear her voice when I switch on at the end of Masterchef (“The gift that keeps on giving,” she described it on stage, adding that she refuses to read out menus for her friends). “The end of Masterchef? You cheeky sod!” she exclaimed, laughing, so I reassured her that it’s because Richard’s often not in until nine, and if I watch it I’ll already have given way and eaten before I cook for him. I’m forced, again, to admit that – having now watched most of the latest Masterchef – The Professionals series – this has turned out to be all too true. It mollified her, though, and after she’d signed for me, I was able to observe at first hand the India Effect on the heterosexual chap next in the queue. Returning to our seats and another friend not so bothered by autographs, the one who’d been behind me wailed, “How is it you could just speak to her, and I was right behind you and I melted?” You’ll be amazed that my reply involved a mime in which I talked to her by making eye contact, while [name excised to protect the guilty] stammered to two lower parts of her anatomy, which I suspect had something to do with our respective ability and inability to sound coherent. On the other hand, Gordon Warnecke was a guest on the same day, and as he played just about the first sexy gay role I saw on TV and fancied when a shy teenager, I probably gibbered a bit when I met him. Particularly as he still looks gorgeous.

The point of that little sexual reverie was to wonder just why, although India does have a very sexy voice, her voice seems to be all of her that the telly uses. Yet she’s a superb actor both vocally and physically, and – as this is often the determining factor for TV casting – I know very few straight men who’ve met her who’ve not found her fantastically attractive. So why doesn’t she get on the telly more often in person? I’m afraid the only answer I can think of is not one that reflects well on casting directors: she isn’t a stick. Like, oh, how can I describe them, real women, she has curves. And I suspect that it’s very difficult to be cast as a beautiful woman, probably, unless your ribs are showing.


Oh, and finally: Steve did win a well-deserved victory in the competition (another one with a rare but very sweet smile), and I think I was right about his speciality. In the, er, final parts of the final, too, some of his most distinctive and imaginative creations were exquisite reimaginings of things he’d loved when he was a boy. As well as being a great USP for a chef to open a restaurant on, you probably don’t have to look very far through this blog to work out why that might have a special appeal to me. How long before the Doctor Who production team commissions him to cook for them, I wonder?

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Comedy, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, Food, Paul McGann, Reviews