Wednesday, 27 May 2026

Doctor Who (The TV Movie) - 4K restoration

Chapter the 348th, 30 years on, he's still back and it's still about time.

Plot:

The Daleks exterminate the Master (nobody knows why); his dying wish is that the Doctor should escort his remains to Gallifrey, and the Daleks agree to this (nobody knows why). It's a trick though, as the Master has survived as a globular snake-form (nobody knows how). The snake-form attacks the TARDIS, forcing a materialisation in San Fran Vancouver on 31st December 1999 (which used to be the future). On leaving the TARDIS, the Doctor is hit during a street gang shoot-out. A gang member Chang Lee accompanies him to the hospital in an ambulance with paramedic Bruce, but the snake-form Master has also hitched a ride. Because of the Doctor's binary vascular system, the surgeon on call Grace is confused and kills him. In the morgue afterwards, a delayed regeneration kicks in, and a new Doctor emerges. The snake-form meanwhile takes over Bruce's body. The Doctor wanders around a disused wing of the hospital suffering from amnesia, changes his clothes, and then finds Grace. She's quit her job at the hospital because the management are covering up that they treated an alien. The Master meets up with Chang Lee and persuades the boy to help him steal the Doctor's life force. The TARDIS power source, the Eye of Harmony, will help with this plan; when the Master opens it, the Doctor regains his memory. Its power becomes a threat to the world, which will be destroyed at exactly midnight. That's midnight Pacific Daylight Time, presumably. Anyway, there's then a chase, a MacGuffin (the Doctor needs to get a chip from an atomic clock to fix the TARDIS) and a big confrontation. The Doctor saves the world, leaves Grace and Chang Lee, and goes back to adventuring in the TARDIS. To be continued... actually, no, not to be continued, alas.

Context:

This may seem like cheating, as I have already blogged about this one, but I ran out of Doctor Who stories to blog last year and at the time of writing I'm still living through a long gap before they show any more. As a 'wilderness years' style break from creating and posting chronological indexes of my random musings for each Doctor - like the Paul McGann starring feature-length story, this blog post is positioned in between the classic and the new series Doctors - I decided to revisit the Doctor Who TV movie. Its 4K restoration, which I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see at its BFI screening in May 2026, anyway makes it seem like something new. In fact, as we in the audience were told at that screening, it was something new, even something unique - the BFI version was specially made so it could be shown at 24 frames per second (as is standard for movies) rather than the 23.98 frames per second standard of Blu-ray. So - in the nerdiest way possible - we were very privileged that day. Insert joke here about how lucky we were to see a TV movie that was over slightly more quickly.

First Time Round:

See my first blog post on the TV movie from early on in the blog's life for my memories of this story from 1996. Casting my mind back again to those days, I see further evidence of a theme that I'll come back to in the Reaction section below: the TV movie could not possibly be wholly successful because it was trying to please too many different groups. Why, for example, was the sell-through VHS of the movie available in the UK before it was broadcast on television? This was simply because BBC Worldwide had put money into the production's budget, and they wanted to maximise sales before a mass audience got to see the story for free. If one were to set out to make a straight-to-video Doctor Who special, though, one would almost certainly go about it differently to how one would make a special aimed at a BBC1 primetime TV audience (a one-off TV movie aimed at a US audience would be approached differently still, and a pilot for a US TV series differently from that). The upshot for me was having to make a decision about how to experience the story first as a fan. In the 1980s, I had been an excited viewer of new Doctor Who as it aired, and I was eager to be one again (even if for one night only). In the 1990s, though, I had become a collector of Doctor Who as it came out on VHS, and the urge to continue this, with something excitingly new rather than an archive release, was strong. I squared the circle by purchasing the VHS as soon as it became available, but not watching it until after the broadcast. As a small commemoration of this (so small that it would go unnoticed if I didn't point it out); I published my blog post indexing Paul McGann's brief tenure on the 13th May 2026, exactly 30 years to the day after the VHS went on sale. And this post celebrating the TV movie's sprucing up has been published on the 27th May 2026, the 30th anniversary of the BBC TV screening.

Reaction:

There's not much I can say about the magnificent restoration that's been done to the TV movie: when viewed in the NFT1 auditorium at the BFI, it looked and sounded amazing. The TV movie always looked and sounded pretty good, though. The restoration can't do anything to fix the script. If the look of the piece is stunning, the narrative just leaves one feeling stunned. Writer Matthew Jacobs for years thought Doctor Who fandom disliked his contribution, but anyone in the know would not blame him: the root cause - as I touched on in the Context section above - is that Jacobs was servant to too many masters. It was too much of a challenge creating something that would appeal to both US and UK audiences (and the executives that represented them) with differing levels of knowledge about Doctor Who and its concepts. The TV movie is the transatlantic equivalent of a 'euro-pudding' movie; this is a term used to describe large-scale European co-productions, where concessions made to the multiple funding sources from different territories result in a homogenised mess. US productions don't suffer in this way as much, because pockets tend to be deeper, but money still needs to come from multiple sources and there still can be the curse of multiple and contradictory exec notes pulling the writer in too many directions. The budget for the production came from four places: Fox, Universal, BBC Worldwide and BBC Television. Much as a UK-based fan viewer might have bristled at too much of a US focus, only Fox had the power to greenlight a series. Producer Philip Segal should have concentrated on pleasing them, and cut - or at least not highlighted - links to the past history of the show. Anything might have happened in terms of the movie's ratings that would have meant there was no future funding from Fox, but at least the pilot would have been coherent.

Some of the truly damaging decisions can't even be blamed on distant execs, but were made by Segal trying to legitimise his story as part of the overall continuity of Doctor Who, pandering to his inner fan. This is not hindsight bias either; even at the time, I was far from alone in thinking that featuring Sylvester McCoy and a regeneration rather than starting with Paul McGann was a terrible idea. This wasn't something insisted on by the BBC (who believed McCoy's years on the original series were a failure), it was all Segal. Focussing on the Doctor's rebirth not only delays the introduction of the star and the main plot, but it also skews the story's focus toward the more esoteric elements of Who lore (regeneration, finite numbers of lives, eye of harmony energy, etc.) instead of something more immediate and accessible like an alien invasion. I was the epitome of devoted Doctor Who fan in 1996, and I didn't care about that stuff, so I'm struggling to think of anyone who would have. Rather than be annoyed at little errors (McCoy holding the sonic screwdriver facing the wrong way, McGann saying the wrong total number of lives a Time Lord has), I was annoyed at anyone thinking they mattered enough to apply clumsy fixes (a blur is applied to the screwdriver, McGann redubs the line). When it's not tying itself up in these knots, Jacobs's screenplay creates some good set pieces, nice lines and good jokes. The casting is perfect, the direction is dynamic. But nothing makes any sense from one moment to the next, and every time I watch, the mounting number of questions this creates in my mind overpowers my viewing pleasure. I've seen the TV movie dozens of times over the years, but the questions keep coming. It's not just questions about Doctor Who continuity either. It can't be midnight everywhere in the world at the same time, can it?! That's just common sense.

Beyond issues with fictional continuity and real world logic, there are character issues. The kiss between Grace and the Doctor is one example. The controversy about the Doctor having a snog has been wildly overstated over the years; I don't remember it seeming too much out of place, even at the time. But Grace's reaction to it - asking the Doctor to kiss her again - doesn't sit well with her attitude before or after the kiss sequence, where she thinks the Doctor is a dangerously unstable individual. The inconsistency in her behaviour throughout regarding how much she believes the Doctor, and how much evidence she's given that he's telling her the truth (a plate glass window goes all wibbly in front of her, that should be a clincher) undermines the moment where she finally picks a side and joins up with the Doctor. This is the sequence with the traffic cop ("Now, would you stand aside before I shoot myself"), which I think is the one truly magic moment of the story. Jacobs captures the essence of Doctor Who in that one scene, and it's magnificent to watch (as long as one forgets anything that came before and after). Every scene probably works better if viewed as a standalone that doesn't relate to any other; even then, though, a lot of the material is very derivative of other sources. It's like a 1990s greatest hits: the paramedic and hospital scenes are very ER, the cover up of alien activity is very X-Files (the skeptical Grace acts as the Scully of the TV movie), the look of the Master is very Terminator 2, the cloister room is straight out of a Batman movie (it definitely has more bats than it does cloisters - it's more of a belfry room). Collectively it becomes a little too much, but it probably made sense to help the uninitiated in the audience orient themselves towards Doctor Who as similar genre fare.

It reads like I'm criticising Jacobs too much, but to reiterate: I think he did the best possible job with the contradictory mission statement he was given, and the same goes for director Geoffrey Sax and the cast. Segal is the one to blame, but it's hard to blame him too much either: the Herculean effort he put in over many years to get this one movie created, and for it to have even the slimmest hope of leading to a series, was almost as much as holding back death and turning back time and all that jazz. It's 30 years in the past now, and Doctor returned to TV as a going concern just under a decade later, so the only tiny trace of blame that can be left is for making something that looks good but doesn't hang together as a narrative. And that's something that's not exactly rare in US television nor in Doctor Who.

Connectivity:

Like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, the TV movie 4K restoration features multiple actors playing the Doctor, one of whom is Sylvester McCoy. Both stories kind-of sort-of feature the Daleks: the comedy short directed by Peter Davison technically features only Dalek operators and props not fictional Daleks from Skaro; the TV Movie just has a voiceover for the offscreen metal meanies, provided seemingly by someone who's never heard a Dalek before.

Deeper Thoughts:

Walker General Hospital patient record for John Smith: the TV Movie at the BFI, 17th May 2026. Fan friends David and Scott, mentioned many times before on the blog, met me early on the Sunday morning of the screening. We took our seats in NFT1, the biggest screen at BFI Southbank. The programme was more packed than usual, and the event was even more like a mini-convention than ever, with a display of props in the building to view after the screening, as well as the usual signing stalls and Quiz of Rassilon event. The quality of the giveaways for the opening quiz was higher than usual, including some exclusive artwork and signed action figure sets. Regular hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy asked a number of people up to the stage to briefly explain what they'd provided: Al Dewar from toymaking company Character Options, Jonathan Wilkins from Titan Comics, and John McLay, the curator of a Doctor Who art exhibition. The quality of the prizes entailed the questions being somewhat more challenging than usual; does anyone out there know the address of the Institute where the Doctor gets the atomic clock chip (nobody did in the audience at the BFI)? Eventually, they dispensed with questions altogether and gave a prize to someone occupying a random seat number, K10 (as K9 would have been too obvious). A couple of prizes were given to those who'd travelled furthest to be at the screening; these were two American gentlemen, one from Boston, one from Virginia ("Don't give them the Blu-rays" said Johnson to Fiddy, who as usual was on duty delivering the winnings to people in the auditorium,"They might not work").

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Pontiff

Next was the traditional round-up of social media posts about the event. One of which was someone asking whether - if they high-fived everyone in the front row - they would get a prize? "Let's see, " said Johnson, after which the tweeter fulfilled his part of the bargain, and Johnson added "The answer's No". Dear reader, this was just joshing and the game fellow did indeed get a prize. All this took longer than usual, leaving not much time to talk to Reecy Pontiff, author of a book called Leap of Eighth, which sounds like a fascinating guide to Paul McGann's Doctor's extended universe appearances. After her brief interview on stage, there was a sweet video statement from Matthew Jacobs shown. In this, he described the TV movie as "a stepping stone through the wilderness years". Then the main feature played out. There wasn't much in terms of surprising audience reaction, though McCoy's scream during the Operating Room scene elicited a few titters (it ended up cut for the first UK transmission, because of concerns about being too scary rather than too risible). There was also a warm round of applause elicited by the final caption with the dedication to Jon Pertwee, who died a week before the movie was shown on UK TV screens in 1996. Before the first panel, there was time for one more single interviewee to come up for a brief chat. This was Doctor Who props enthusiast James Sutton, who showed off the TARDIS toolkit, sonic screwdriver, and an Eye of Harmony staff from the movie. He also wanted to make a statement about something that had bothered him for years: because the 70s prop replicated for the movie was never used consistently by Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker, Sylvester McCoy has been unfairly maligned for decades. There's no way he can be said to be holding the sonic screwdriver the wrong way round. "A huge relief to hear that," said Johnson archly.

Sutton with original sonic and toolkit bag props

The first panel featured four people who had worked on the restoration - David Palfreyman, who scanned the film reels (twice), colourist Darren Mostyn, Mark Ayres, responsible for sound remastering and mixing, and supervising producer and picture restorer Paul Vanezis. They briefly outlined the negotiations with Universal that lead to 219 film reels being delivered to the UK in October 2025. This was in the nick of time, as much of the celluloid is suffering from vinegar syndrome, and might not have been playable had it been left any longer. There then followed round-the-clock work for the small restoration team, or most of them at least. After a detailed description of the overtime put in by David and Paul, Mostyn said "I feel guilty now only doing 9 to 5!". Vanezis was asked about whether there was any new material found, but he explained that it was a fairly lean production, so there aren't any significant deleted or alternate scenes that haven't been seen before. Everything will be on the Blu-ray, anyway. One thing that will be slightly different is a moment where the broadcast had a flaw because of a scratched negative. This has now been fixed, because it "Takes half an hour to do, unlike in 1996". It was a panel that was heavy on the technical detail, and therefore a little dry, but it ended with an impassioned speech from Ayres about the quality of the production, and Geoffrey Sax's work in particular. To anyone who thought that the TV movie was not real Doctor Who his message was "It bloody well is". The panel was followed by what Johnson referred to only as the last piece of footage to be shown as part of the screening. I assumed it would be a compilation of extras from the Blu-ray as is usual, but instead it was The Night of the Doctor in full, and it was wonderful to see it on the big screen.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Palfreyman, Mostyn, Ayres, Vanezis

The final panel featured Geoffrey Sax and Paul McGann. Sax began by saying of the restored version he'd just watched that "It scrubs up very well." McGann hadn't sat through the whole thing, and was asked whether he watches himself onscreen, as some actors don't - "I'd rather not". He explained that it has got easier as the years go by. Because of the strong memories of doing the work, he finds watching things he's in more like watching "A film of a holiday rather than following the story". Both Sax and McGann talked about how they believed while working on the movie that they would later be coming back to Doctor Who as a series: "There was an atmosphere of 'we'll reconvene in six months'", "You know the odds, realistically, but you can't work in that spirit". Sax outlined the differences between working on a pilot compared to standalone or episodic pieces. He also talked about Jacobs's script saying that most of it worked, but there was a challenge to create the final Doctor Master confrontation as the script just stated "They fight in a cool and interesting way". McGann added that sex scenes are written like that. This led to a discussion of the kissing in the TV movie. "The K word!" It was pretty chaste, thought McGann, "No tongues or anything". It was pointed out that Eric Roberts's Master also kisses Grace, and that's a lot more full-on. "That's Eric, though, isn't it?!" said McGann. McGann was also surprised that even to this day no Doctor has given a companion a 'frenchie': "Not even Tennant, like?"

McGann comes to the stage to join Sax

Both gentlemen answered in an unequivocal affirmative when asked if they'd have accepted the same job on a production that was just funded by the BBC without US involvement. Though later McGann did speak about some hesitancy agreeing to sign up for Doctor Who back in the 1990s. Had it gone to series, it would have taken at least six years of his life, and would have meant a move to live in Canada for filming: "The Stakes were high... my kids would have been Canadians". In the end, his agent helped him to be comfortable enough to accept the role. This agent was Janet Fielding (who had played companion Tegan in Doctor Who in the 1980s). McGann hadn't even known she'd previously been an actor prior to the Doctor Who offer as it wasn't something she talked about, but she was able to tell him from experience that (as he quoted her) "It ain't going to be like other jobs ... you'll still be talking about it in 30 years' time". Indeed he was. This may be an exclusive, I can't remember hearing McGann talk about it before, or it may have been a joke, but McGann said he is convinced that Philip Segal could not tell him and his brother Mark apart, and that's why both of them were invited to audition for the Doctor role. Sax discussed the practicalities of filming in Vancouver in the cold of January and February 1996. The final goodbye scene of the movie was shot in heavy rain, which gave Grace actor Daphne Ashbrook's hair "a life of its own". Yee Jee Tso, playing Chang Lee, fell into the fountain during that shoot. McGann described Tso as having a Tigger-like energy. Despite its comparatively large budget compared to BBC-produced Doctor Who, the TV movie was still made with speed and economy, with a maximum of two takes for any shot, according to McGann. He acted out a typical exchange: "Could we go for another take? Was it in focus? Yes. No you can't."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Sax, McGann

What for me was the biggest exclusive of the day was Sax confirming that the Dalek voices heard at the beginning could have been worse. The post-production dubbing was done by a Canadian firm, The Loop Group, and none of them had ever heard a Dalek. So, what was originally recorded were some very polite Canadian voices chanting "Exterminate, Exterminate". Sax ended up having to voice the Daleks himself: "Some people like it, some people think it's absolutely terrible", "It's my Hitchcock moment... I'm also the chicken squawk". McGann talked a little about the making of The Night of the Doctor: it was shot in a day with writer Steven Moffat furiously rewriting as it was being made, handing McGann pieces of paper with new dialogue. He just had to lie to people (including the other Doctor actors when filming The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot) if asked whether he was returning for the 50th anniversary. It eventually did leak, so the release of the short was brought forward. It was supposed to be a red button extra on the anniversary day 23rd November 2013, but ended up released on McGann's birthday 14th November. Moffat texted McGann "Happy Birthday" when letting him know. McGann thought this worked out okay as instead of being lost in the anniversary hubbub, "It had a week to itself". The final question was Sax being asked whether he was ever asked to work on Doctor Who after its return in 2005. He had worked with people involved in post-2005 Who production before, and was indeed asked to direct a couple of times, but he had clashes on the dates involved. After that, he wasn't asked again. "They thought you were playing hard to get" said McGann.

In Summary:

A transatlanti-pudding. But a very good-looking one.

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

Index: Paul McGann

Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor Stories ...

1996 special:

Doctor Who (The TV Movie) and the 4K restoration thereof

Return Appearances:

The Night of the Doctor

The Power of the Doctor

Spin-offs, crossovers, and such:

Shada (Webcast version)

In Summary:

The George Lazenby one.

Thursday, 30 April 2026

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

Chapter the 347th, one of the two best things made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

Plot:

It's late 2012, and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is less than a year away. The fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison is concerned that the planned TV special will only feature new series Doctors, and starts a campaign for old Doctors to be included too. He recruits sixth and seventh Doctor actors Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (eighth Doctor actor Paul McGann could only promise to be involved subject to work commitments, and fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker doesn't answer his phone). The three of them protest outside Television Centre; a passing John Barrowman informs them that the special is being filmed in Cardiff. They get a lift with Barrowman, sneak into the studios via the Doctor Who Experience exhibition, and end up performing in the special inside three Dalek props. They celebrate while ignoring a phone call from Russell T Davies, who's also desperate to be involved. In post-production, the scene with the three Daleks is cut, but luckily they were also filmed for a scene where they hide under dustsheets (as the Zygons do in The Day of the Doctor), which makes it to the finished programme.

Context:

At the time of writing, the most recent Blu-ray season box set from the Doctor Who collection has been out about a month; this one showcases the 21st season of the series, first broadcast in 1984. I've been watching the episodes and extras on it continuously since it came out, and I'm only halfway through - it is a very comprehensive ten disc set. One of the extras I have watched already was The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, Peter Davison's comic short film made for Doctor Who 50th anniversary in 2013. I did touch on this story in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on The Five Doctors, which I blogged in 2020. Seeing it again on Blu-ray, and listening to the newly recorded commentary on the set, I feared I hadn't done it justice with that fleeting reference, so am covering it as another unexpected extra for the blog in April 2026 (following the two episodes of Dalek Master Plan covered last time).

First Time Round:

One could argue forever about what's the worst or the best Doctor Who story. The Season 21 Blu-ray season box set contains one story (The Caves of Androzani) that has topped polls, and one (The Twin Dilemma) that has languished at the bottom of the same polls. A good few fans, though, find the former a bit overrated and the latter unfairly maligned. Official Doctor Who skits are much less numerous, of course; with less competition, I think there's a good argument to be made that The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is the best Doctor Who skit. It was probably given a boost on my first watch from coming hard and fast after what is indisputably the worst Doctor Who entertainment show. Again these are few and far between, so there's never been a poll. If there were, Doctor Who The Afterparty would almost certainly come last. On the evening of 23rd November 2013, after having enormously enjoyed The Day of the Doctor anniversary story (another poll-topping story), I switched over to BBC3 to watch the Afterparty. This was a shambolic live show attempting to celebrate 50 years of a television show by being dismissive of most of its stars and interviewing pop band One Direction over the worst satellite link-up ever seen on live television. It did do a good service in featuring the three stars of the comedy skit that was to land on the red button service immediately after the live show, something that might not have been known about by many viewers. To say that the following 30 minutes of comedy were better than the Afterparty is like saying that chocolate is better than a tracheotomy.

Reaction:

Elsewhere on the aforementioned Season 21 Blu-ray box set, there is an interview with companion actor Mark Strickson (who played Turlough in the 1980s) recorded at the Doctor Who 50th Celebration at the ExCeL in London, the day after The Day of the Doctor's transmission. Strickson is a little grumpy from being in the middle of travel to and from his home in New Zealand (and - who knows?! - maybe from being at the Afterparty the previous evening too). Asked what he thought of The Day of the Doctor, he tells the interviewer that it was a good story, but maybe not that great as a celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who. Featuring all the old Doctors just with archive clips clearly wasn't celebratory enough for Strickson, and perhaps many other viewers. What's fun, though, is that - by extending a gag about his taking mock umbrage at this very idea - Peter Davison ends up creating exactly the celebration required. Stuffing The Day of the Doctor with all the surviving classic Doctor actors, many looking markedly different to how they did back in their day, could have been made to work (The Power of the Doctor has a good stab at it a few years later), but it would have been contrived and cluttered. Steven Moffat made the right choice; his insurance, of course, was providing production funding to Davison's comic short; he'd clearly seen that Davison had stumbled across an original and effective way to complement the main anniversary special. It's not just a clever name - the Reboot acts as a nice comic sequel to The Five Doctors, and has the same intent: to showcase as many Doctors, companions, guest stars and monsters as possible. It even has some call backs - the use of Shada footage to explain away Tom Baker's lack of involvement, and Davison getting to say "Sorry - must dash!" at one point.

It's funny too. Though Davison had long displayed comic chops as a performer, he was untested as either a comedy writer or director, but does both extremely well. His co-stars Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker have also both demonstrated over the years that they can handle humorous material, and with their director they each form distinct and heightened comic personae as themselves (in inverted commas): Peter is a bit grumpy and at odds with the world, Colin is the slightly brash voice of common sense, and Sylvester - in a sweet performance - is permanently bemused. McCoy's delivery of "He probably won't", after talking of famous Hollywood director Peter Jackson's tendency to keep his cast hanging around until he gets a moment of inspiration, is worth the entrance fee on its own. Then there's his almost thrown-away "Got it a bit wrong actually" when he and Baker are both quoting their best Doctor Who lines. This is prompted by McCoy being asked by baker whether he wants sugar in his tea, calling to mind a famous scene in Remembrance of the Daleks ("Every great decision creates ripples" / "In your tea?"). McCoy was filming the Hobbit trilogy with Jackson around this time, which forms a running gag. Watching all these mentions of the director and his work, one doesn't think for a moment that Jackson would actually appear, but then amazingly he does, and even more amazingly we get Ian McKellen in costume as Gandalf too. It's the biggest but not the only casting coup. Getting Olivia Coleman was impressive enough - as is mentioned on the Blu-ray commentary, the joke about Coleman's ubiquity ("I'm usually in everything") has become even more relevant in the years between then and now.

One shouldn't underestimate the casting coups that came from inside the world of Doctor Who, of course. From the commentary, it's clear that a certain guerrilla style was required, with Davison grabbing any opportunities when he could (filming at a real-life convention allowed him to get a very funny scene with Paul McGann, short notice arrangements nabbed a quick scene with Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, a sheer fluke led to an appearance from Dan Starkey in costume as a Sontaran). A sequence inspired by Davison's regeneration sees Steven Moffat haunted by floating heads of many, many companion actors from Doctor Who's long history whizzing around him. Most are accounted for, though it's a shame that Mark Strickson didn't get to take part in this very celebratory moment. He was in New Zealand during filming, of course, but then so were Peter Jackson and Ian Mckellen! John Barrowman gets a bigger cameo. The revelation of the personal secrets of "Barrowman" ("Don't tell anyone - please") is such an insanely good gag that I won't spoil it for the uninitiated by spelling it out here. It's undoubtedly coincidence, but the action meshes perfectly with the real world of Day's production: Tom Baker doesn't need to join the classic Doctors' protest as he's been cast in the 50th anniversary show already; Paul McGann is up for it but then drops out, off filming The Night of the Doctor. Davison, Colin Baker and McCoy appear in the sets used for Day, and interact with many of the real life production crew playing themselves.

It was only when Russell T Davies appeared right at the end of this story that I realised he had otherwise kept himself completely out of the 50th anniversary hoopla. Maybe he didn't want to steal any of his friend Steven Moffat's thunder. Or maybe he was just saving himself for this triumphant moment ("Quel dommage Davros!"). Everyone is more than happy to send themselves up, and it's all very good natured and fun. Doctor Who's a family show, and the stars and fans alike all talk about the Doctor family; as such, it's appropriate that this is a family affair. Davison's wife, sons and grandson appear in the story. His daughter appears too as well as producing the short, and she ropes in his son-in-law. Georgia Moffat and David Tennant are both hilarious, acting out being put-upon by Davison and reluctantly helping him with his crusade. Colin Baker's family are all present and correct and contribute to another funny scene. The sons of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee are in small roles within the piece too. It's like the most expensive home movie ever, but is always entertaining enough to justify its existence (rather like the show that inspired it). It truly is the perfect celebration of Doctor Who's history in all its quirky glory.

Connectivity:

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, like the two recently found episodes of The Daleks Master Plan, features Daleks and journeys between different locations within one story. If one were to cheat just a tiny bit and include Day of Armageddon (the episode in between the newly found episodes, discovered a couple of decades earlier) they both feature human characters disguising themselves as aliens (the three heroes of the Reboot pretend to be Daleks and Zygons, the first Doctor dons the garb of alien delegate Zephon).

Deeper Thoughts:

More new old Who. After nearly a year of no Doctor Who on TV, spring 2026 brought not only a couple of found episodes, but three stories newly available in novelised form. These new Target paperbacks are clad in the usual stylish design, with evocative cover illustrations by Dan Liles. It may be my imagination, but the paper stock being used feels a little bit nicer than for previous books in the range too. Unlike the last few batches which concentrated on recently broadcast tales, these three adapt stories from 2005 to 2010. The first, Aliens of London, is a version of a story from the earliest season of the relaunched series. It's adapted by long-term Doctor Who extended universe creative Joseph Lidster. In an author's note, he celebrates ticking off a bucket list achievement in writing a Target novelisation. It surprised me that he'd not done one before now, to be honest. He's a good fit for the material (a favourite story of mine, by the way, though many wouldn't share my opinion). Like many a long-term fan, he comes to this book primed with approaches that have been used before for such adaptations. He chooses what I'll call the Malcolm Hulke method: finding or inventing POV characters within the story to expand on the events they witness. This undercuts just one moment: there's a great throw-away line on TV about a character having a "wife, a mistress and a young farmer" that doesn't work as well here because we've had a preceding scene where we've met all three at length. The rest of the time it works. I enjoyed sequences from the perspective of Barry (I'll give nothing more away - it's better to go in unspoiled) and Tosh (Torchwood's part of the action is somewhat expanded from the original). The strictness shown in avoiding any omniscient narration, and some nips and tucks for better flow, mean some details are lost, for example the rising hysteria about aliens that gives context to Jackie's reporting the Doctor and Rose to the authorities.

The inner life of characters like Mickey, Jackie and Harriet Jones brings out the melancholy in the story that TV viewers might have missed. Lidster's work also nicely dovetails with Russell T Davies's short story prequel "Where Did They Get the Pig?" from a Doctor Who Magazine special in 2025. There's some nods to future stories, like a scene of Captain Jack watching Margaret Blaine escape to the Isle of Dogs at the end. Jenny T Colgan gets to pull the same trick in her adaptation of the Weeping Angel 2-parter from Matt Smith's first season, The Time of Angels. River Song's inner thoughts are informed by the knowledge she has that Amy is her mother, even though that wasn't revealed to the audience back in 2010 (presumably the writer of the TV version Steven Moffat already had it in mind back then). With the full details of River, Amy and the eleventh Doctor's character arcs (which Moffat probably hadn't fully worked out this early) known to her, Colgan is able to be add many nice touches, and she captures all the characters well. There's also a - very nerdy, but nonetheless welcome - reference to Amy somehow being linked to the Pompeiian character also played by Karen Gillan in earlier story The Fires of Pompeii. All the stories adapted this time are 2-parters, so there isn't the need to put in much extra material to fill the page count. Colgan adds an opening section introducing the person that wrote the journals about the Weeping Angels referenced by River and the Doctor; amusingly, this is a person from our present who romanticised the past and sought the Angels out to send him there. He finds once he's living in it that it's very far from being a golden age.

If you want more radical new material, then the final one of the three books is for you. This is Matt Jones's The Satan Pit, based on his own scripts for the 2006 David Tennant story. If Lidster took the Malcolm Hulke approach, then Jones does it like Donald Cotton: he reshapes the material using a framing device where his characters tell the tale in their own words. We join the story after the events depicted on TV have taken place, and the rest of the book is formed of first-person testimonies from the three survivors, Ida, Danny and Zack, to authorities that disbelieve their talk of a magic man in a flying box that saved them. The book acts therefore as both novelisation of and sequel to the TV version. Like Lidster, Jones is rigorous about limiting the action to what these three characters' experience, though at the end there's a clever way of covering the climactic events for which none of them are present. Like Colgan, he makes use of future developments in the series after this story - by the end of the book, the Ood have been liberated (as shown in TV in Planet of the Odd, a couple of years on from The Satan Pit), and there's an addendum connecting to The End of Time. Jones tweaks the characterisations of the guest cast to make them more distinct from one another. Danny becomes a hopeless romantic who rapidly develops a somewhat creepy crush on Rose. Having this as Danny's emotional starting point gives more room for him to mature into as the story progresses. I don't rate the TV version of this story that highly (though many wouldn't share my opinion), but this prose version is much better. The book ends with a courtroom drama climax, the resolution of which will be new to anyone reading, For this reason, and for its more original structure, it's probably my favourite of these latest three books, but all of them are definitely worth a read.

In Summary:

A very expensive home video, but much better than that sounds!

Monday, 6 April 2026

The Nightmare Begins + Devil's Planet

Chapter the 346th, which features an unexpected return.

Plot:

The Doctor and Katarina land on the planet Kembel trying to find help for Steven, who's stricken with illness after he was injured during a violent tussle in Ancient Troy. Space Security agent Bret Vyon is also on the planet, trying to get word back to Earth that the Daleks are planning on taking over the universe. Bret has an altercation with the Doctor, and then bluffs his way into the TARDIS past the trusting Katarina. Bret provides some tablets that help Steven to recover and eventually they all realise they're on the same side. Later, having escaped in the spaceship of traitorous Earth politician Mavic Chen, the TARDIS team and Bret are brought down on the penal planet Desperus. They fend off the local convicts until they can repair the ship and escape, but one criminal has crept aboard...

Context:

For my last couple of years of blogging, I regularly added a 'Milestone Watch' section to each blog post, counting down the few remaining stories as I watched them in random order. I had reached a point of completion at the end of 2025, having blogged all of Doctor Who's TV stories and many of its spin-offs and oddities. How wonderful then to find that only a few months into 2026, I would have to start counting up. I discovered about the return of these two previously missing episodes on the morning of Friday 13th March 2026. The sun had not long come up, but the Whatsapp group chat with my fan friends was already alight, the messages having started just after midnight when the news first broke. Three weeks later, on Good Friday 2026, the 3rd of April, it was another early start. I didn't manage to get up at 6am (the time the episodes first landed), but around an hour and a half later I sat down to watch episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan from the BBC iplayer while the rest of the family continued to enjoy an Easter lie-in.

First Time Round:

The 2018 blog post covering the full story of which The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet are part can be found here. As said there, I first experienced this story in increments over a number of years, seeing the orphaned episodes as they were discovered and released, and catching up with the full audio recordings separately. These two new episodes are a very welcome new increment, but do they constitute the end of the Daleks' Master Installment Plan? There are seven episodes plus a one-part teaser from earlier in the season remaining to be found, so the story is only 38% complete. It would be lovely if the missing episodes strongly rumoured to survive in other private collections, when returned - and I do believe now that they will eventually be returned - turn out to be more episodes of this epic tale. But it would be just as wonderful if they came from any other story that's wholly or partly missing from the archives. It's a win-win for Doctor Who fans, really, so a big thank you to Film is Fabulous!, the charity that was instrumental in ensuring that these episodes, amongst other finds, were preserved for future audiences to enjoy.

Reaction:

As touched upon in the First Time Round section immediately above, these episodes formed part of a story that had a somewhat unusual transmission pattern when shown for the one and only time in 1965/1966. First, the story was about twice the length of the longest stories made to that point. Second, it had a teaser episode shown in advance that featured none of the regular cast, but teed up the story to come. Third and finally - and somewhat bizarrely - it had a completely unconnected story broadcast in between that starter and the main 12-part main course. This was The Myth Makers, another story that sadly has episodes missing from the archive (all of them, in its case). The title of that story took on a life of its own, though, when it was used for a decades long series of fan-made videos featuring interviews with Doctor Who alumni, both from in front of and behind the cameras. The appropriated title seems to be suggesting that the many people interviewed over the years from throughout Doctor Who's long history built up the mythology with the programmes to which they contributed. It's only when watching these two episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan that I suddenly felt the title of that video series was doing its interviewees a slight disservice: they contributed to something much better than myths. The real myth makers were those responsible for the policies, or lack of policies, that meant episodes were junked and gaps were created in Doctor Who's archive. The joy of watching The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet was seeing them turn in real time from things that were mysterious and to be revered to things that could simply be enjoyed, the intangible becoming tangible. The creatives of Doctor Who didn't set out to create myths, they set out to create stories (and stories are better than myths).

It'll sound silly or even hypocritical given that I'm watching and writing about TV that was made more than 60 years ago, but having moving images to accompany what was only available as audio before makes the action live in the now rather than in some distant past. Just as with previous returns during my time as a fan (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details) this creates a novelty around details that would seem irrelevant to the uninitiated (what's the exact moment in the narrative when Steven dons his corduroy jacket?) that have significance as they've previously only been available to one's speculation not one's eye. A wonderful part of the experience was watching in the knowledge that a time will come when I don't think about these and just watch the tale unfold. That's more than okay - it's right. I can now just about watch the second episode of this story, Day of Armageddon, some 20+ years after its return, without being startled by the interesting choice actor Kevin Stoney makes about how his character Mavic Chen grips a pen (how would anyone ever have speculated on such a thing before the episode was found?). The time will come when seeing that the costumes for the convicts of Desperus each has a 'D' on the back doesn't take me momentarily out of the narrative. That day's not today, but it will come. It's testament to the fluid story-telling of Douglas Camfield's direction that I was mostly engrossed in the action despite a succession of such moments. There's a great scene in the first episode (which was made available as an online clip a few weeks before the episodes landed), where the camera tracks across the Daleks to find the Doctor in the foreground, hidden from them; the camera frames William Hartnell in close-up (Hartnell knows how to work a close-up) and he exclaims "Daleks!". It's just one of many flourishes that Camfield creates.

The other big thing that having these two episodes back gives us beyond additional evidence of the director's expertise is more screentime for characters that had precious little previously. Temporary companions Katarina and Bret Vyon now appear in three times more material than before. All the nuances of both Adrienne Hill and Nicholas Courtney's performances are suddenly visible to us. This is also the case for more minor characters. The only part of Brian Cant's performance as Kurt Gantry available before now was a surviving clip of his death scene, where Gantry interacts only with Daleks. Seeing scenes of his interactions with another actor (Courtney) allows more character to shine through, and gives the moment of his extermination much more power when seen in-situ. There are some unexpected effects treats too: a shot of the Spar ship moving through space, and a long shot of the three criminals on Desperus approaching the Doctor and Co, seen as only three distant torch lights. Details like the Doctor's hair being messed up after his altercation in the jungle with Bret, or just how plasticky the wrench is that Steven uses in the TARDIS, are wonderful to see. Best of all, is that there's more of Hartnell as the Doctor to enjoy. He is magnificent in these two episodes; his every tiny adjustment to his performance depending on what size shot he's in is a masterclass in screen acting, even when he's getting the line completely wrong (the Daleks, according to the Doctor at one point, would "stop at anything" to prevent our heroes warning Earth). Now's not the time to find such fault, I know, but some joy comes from knowing that time will come. Instead of being abstract ideals impossible to criticise, these will in a while just be any old episodes of Doctor Who with all the flaws (how plasticky is that wrench?!) and all the magic that entails.

Connectivity:

Both the two found episodes of The Daleks Master Plan and The War between the Land and the Sea feature the return of top division Doctor Who baddies, and see characters escaping from some form of custody to go on the run. Both feature at least one person with a close-cropped do (Barclay in the 21st century story, the Technix in Master Plan).

Deeper Thoughts:

Many Happy Returns: a personal history of missing episode finds. Over the years, a handful of fans have been involved in the recovery of Doctor Who episodes missing from the BBC archives. For the vast majority of us, though, the experience of this activity has been from the outside-in. Many weren't even aware of the state of the BBC's archive holdings of Who until the publication of the Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special in Autumn 1981. This was the first time a mass publication had specified exactly what existed and what was lost. At the same time as the Special, there was a series of archive repeats, The Five Faces of Doctor Who, on UK channel BBC2. I was watching these, and rapidly becoming hooked on the show, but I wouldn't start buying the magazine or its special editions for another year. I also didn't know enough about the history of Doctor Who, unlike some fans watching those repeats, to wonder why they'd chosen the generally less than popular story The Krotons for Patrick Troughton's Doctor instead of one of his classics. If they managed to get a copy of the Special they had their answer: it was a series of four-part stories, one per Doctor, and there was then only one surviving four-part story for Troughton's Doctor. Based on many retellings in the years that followed, I know this was a great shock to many. One fan who wasn't shocked, one who was in the know from the inside-out, was DJ and music producer Ian Levine. In the late 1970s, he'd discovered the terrible state of the archives. This had come about because, as probably the first fan who had grown up with the show and also had significant disposable income, he wanted to watch old episodes and had the means to engage the BBC to obtain film copies. This led to his involvement in missing episode recovery, and the eventual return of a good few film cans plugging some of the gaps.

Levine wasn't the only person involved then or afterwards, of course. I mention him in particular because ultimately the drive for recovery of the old episodes was the desire to view them rather than for them to sit unwatched in a film library. In previous decades, a combination of factors had created the institutional belief that the episodes no longer held viewing potential for an audience. As they already weren't seen as worthy of a place in any film library, that did for them. This wasn't unique to the BBC or to Doctor Who, of course; it was a widespread belief, but it was changing. The Five Faces season and Levine's early private approaches to the BBC were both signals of that change. They were the early indicators that archive television programmes, even - or, damn it, particularly - frivolous ephemera like Doctor Who episodes, were of increasing value. Before this change nobody had particularly been interested in searching, but not too much time had passed since the initial junking of film copies. As such, the ground was fertile for the green shoots of recoveries. When I finally was reading Doctor Who Magazine, its news page regularly reported finds, and this continued through the first half of the 1980s. I remember at least one missive from the mag's letters page in that period, though, bemoaning the lack of access to these recovered episodes: what was the point of trumpeting the newly discovered existence of The Abominable Snowmen part 2 (returned in 1982) or the The Faceless Ones part 3 (returned in 1987), as just two examples, if they still remained unseen? Luckily, a suitable distribution medium was developing in parallel with these finds: by the mid-1980s, affordable sell-through VHS releases had become a reality and a Doctor Who range had begun.

I had not been too engaged with the subject during this period. I still had a supply of new Who programmes being broadcast annually on TV. Most of the show's history was new to me as well. I was doing my best to catch up by collecting Target novelisations and - as the decade wore on - the first videos, but there was more than enough of that history to exhaust my minimal funds. I remember reacting to the news of the 1988 recovery of four episodes of The Ice Warriors with little more than a shrug (forgive me - I was a teenager!). Four years later, the 80s having give way to the 90s, and things were very different. Doctor Who was no longer on the TV. The VHS range was increasingly covering black and white stories from the early years of Who in the 1960s. There had even been a couple of tapes released in 1991 that showcased some orphaned episodes within a wraparound documentary format. Then The Tomb of the Cybermen was found in its entirety. This was the most exciting recovery to date, as retold in the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post I wrote about Tomb. The VHS range was established such that the story could be rush released, and it sold more in the UK in its first week than many Hollywood movies. More than just the potential of purchasers of archive Doctor Who, there was now a demonstrable market. Thereafter, a pattern was established that any further finds would become available quickly afterwards on VHS, then - as the 90s gave way to the 00s - DVD (and even later as downloads or on streaming platforms). Finds started to become fewer and further between, though.

In a 1998 documentary about missing episodes that was an extra on a VHS release of the recovered Ice Warriors episodes, Levine was quoted saying that he feared that all there was to be found had now been found, though he hoped someone would prove him wrong. That did indeed happen a few times over the following 15 years, but only four episodes were returned in that time, each one an orphan. If anyone thought the days of finding multiple episodes from the same story were over, they were pleasantly surprised when - wonderfully and miraculously - the biggest haul ever was gathered up at the end of that 15 year period. In late 2013, the whole of The Enemy of the World, and all but one episode of The Web of Fear were recovered from a Nigerian TV station. The thrill of that find had to keep us going through almost 13 years of nada, zip, bupkis. The lucky-for-some Friday 13th in March of 2026 saw the situation finally change, when the discovery of the two found episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan was announced. With the 9-episode 2013 returns the only ones this century to come from an overseas TV station, finds from such sources look to have been thoroughly exhausted. Further missing episodes seem more likely to be found in private collections, where there isn't likely to be many found at a time. If anyone cared enough to collect a number of Doctor Who episodes - the collector who ended up with The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet wasn't interested in Who and got them as part of a job lot - they would know what they had and would have returned them before now. There are now 95 missing episodes of Doctor Who in total: nobody can know for sure if or when that number will drop down further, but still we fans live in hope - all things considered, it's a nice place to live.

In Summary:

It's good to have these episodes back so that they can cease being revered mysteries and instead become blissfully ordinary and everyday.