The Star Beast

Chapter the 284th, one November spawned a monster hit.

Plot:
[Beware spoilers! This is the most recently aired Doctor Who story at the time of writing, so I'll content myself with a teaser synopsis as per the previews in Doctor Who Magazine or Radio Times, but I do have to reveal a few plot details in later sections below.] A spaceship crashes in north London. Not that Donna Noble noticed; she had other things on her mind. Besides, there's no such thing as aliens - right?! But then one turns up in her garden shed: the Meep. Another - the Doctor - barges into her kitchen. By the time a squadron of Wrarth Warriors shows up on her doorstep, the Noble family must face facts: Donna's past is catching up with her. And her mind is about to be blown...

Context:

The override of the usual random selection of Doctor Who stories for the blog continues. This is the last of a trilogy of stories selected to post about in November 2023 to tie in with Doctor Who's 60th anniversary celebrations. After watching The Tenth Planet, one of the most significant stories of that 60-year period, and then viewing a celebratory docu-drama about the creation of the series, the final November post brings things bang up to date with the first of a different 60th anniversary trilogy. The Star Beast is one of three specials with a returned David Tennant and Catherine Tate for late 2023. I watched it go out live on BBC1 in the UK on Saturday 25th November 2023, accompanied by the whole family (Better Half and three kids, boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). Everyone enjoyed it. The youngest adored the Meep at first sight, was a little taken aback when it was revealed to be the baddie, but ended up adoring it again by the end of the story despite that. She expressed the desire to have a Meep plushie for Christmas. A merchandising trick was missed there, I think.

Milestone watch: I started the blog in 2015 to cover the stories of both the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order. All these years later, I am closing in on the point where I complete the stories from between 1963 and 2023, and catch up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. This time marked the first point in over a year - the longest period ever since the series returned in 2005 without a new Doctor Who story broadcast - that a new item has been added to the 'To Do' pile. Even with this, two more 60th specials, a Christmas special and a series starring Ncuti Gatwa, I don't necessarily have enough stories left to keep up my usual blogging rate through to the end of 2024. We'll see how it goes...

First Time Round:

I first experienced the story in its original comic book version. In 1979, Marvel comics created Doctor Who Weekly, a magazine that featured a mix of comic strips and articles about the series. Slowly it morphed into a monthly then four-weekly publication that leaned more into the articles, but kept a few pages reserved for an ongoing comic strip, and it has remained that way to date. In issues 19 to 26 of the Weekly, from February to April 1980, The Star Beast appeared. I didn't get into Doctor Who until the following year, and didn't start buying the magazine until the year after that, so my first read must have been in 2004 when The Star Beast was collated with a few others from the early days of the magazine and released as a graphic novel titled The Iron Legion (after the first story in the batch, also written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and drawn by David Gibbons). I'd definitely heard of Beep the Meep long before that, though, it's one of the enduring legends from Doctor Who's long history.

Reaction:

Before it aired, this story was loaded down with probably more anticipation than any other in the history of Doctor Who. Of the other contenders that occur to me, The Day of the Doctor was a keenly awaited anniversary celebration, and Rose was the first story in a brave new era for the show. The Star Beast effectively had to be both, and it exceeded expectations. Adapting the comic strip story was a great choice for an engaging opener to the trio of specials, and writer Russell T Davies expertly weaved the Meep and Wrarth Warriors plot into the story of Donna and the Doctor. Catherine Tate and David Tennant instantly and effortlessly click back into their on-screen relationship. The script doesn't make us wait too long before they're together, with their meet cute the first thing to happen in the story bar a short explanation for viewers who may not remember their situation from episodes shown 14 years ago. That sequence involves both the characters talking to camera, the Doctor in long shot superimposed against a starfield background. It's an odd choice, but this is probably my only quibble about the show - I loved every moment that followed unreservedly. I've liked or loved most Doctor Who stories made since 2005, and then gone online to see fans ripping them apart, sometimes based on rather trivial points. Something else that was nostalgic was seeing that happen again after all these years to Davies, undoubtedly one of the greatest UK TV creatives currently alive. You think there was a clunky line of dialogue or a poor resolution sequence? It's Russell T flippin' Davies - isn't there just the tiniest possibility that he knows what he's doing, and can be trusted?

Davies concentrates this story on three Fs that have served him and the series well in the past: Fun, Family, and Fucking off bigoted people. Let's take each in turn. It is undoubtedly a story pitched at 'romp'-level, despite the Doctor and Donna strain of melancholy within it. Davies has been influenced a lot by the knockabout style of the early Doctor Who Magazine comic strips, and in fact has - consciously or subconsciously - riffed on the Star Beast before in Smith and Jones, which has an innocent-seeming character turn out to be a nasty criminal on the run from aggressive troops who at first look like the bad guys. Like Smith and Jones this is a relatively lightweight opener to a run. There's loads of fun dialogue (The Doctor's desperate dissembling about being a friend of Donna's nemesis Nerys, "Tuna Madras", and many more examples). There are a couple of great new larger than life characterisations: Ruth Madeley's Shirley Anne Bingham, for example, the new scientific adviser to UNIT with inbuilt weapons in her wheelchair and a gobby Northern attitude. Miriam Margoyles does expert voice work as the Meep, complementing the immaculate combination of performance, animatronics and CGI enhancement used to realise the creature, which in turn make three-dimensional the wonderful design and concept originated by the comic makers (the Meep must inevitably come back at some point for a rematch with the Doctor). There's people taken over by a psychedelic sun whose eyes glow, there are exciting zap-gun battles on suburban streets, there's an escape sequence where the Doctor and the Noble-Temples creep through people's lofts. All this is expertly visualised by director Rachel Talalay.

The other returning actors also seem like they've never been away. Jax King as Sylvia Noble is as great as always - the scene where she sees the Doctor at the front door of Donna's house and advances on him aggressively was a highlight, as were her attempts to shield Donna from seeing him ("Skinny man!"). It was also good to have more time in the company of Karl Collins' Shaun Temple, a man happy and secure in the knowledge that he's not in charge. Yasmin Finney is perfect casting for the central and important role of Donna's daughter, Rose. The family are kept grounded and ordinary with an explanation of why they aren't rich (the last time we saw Donna she'd just won the lottery thanks to the Doctor's time-travelling ticket buying) that also adds to the melancholy (Donna was unconsciously channeling the Doctor to do good) and comedy (the first thing that occurs to Donna once she has her memories back is to bemoan that decision). A lot of Davies's other works, particularly those about LGBT+ characters, concentrate on chosen families, often because of a character's being rejected by the family assigned to them at birth. Here, he can show the strength that can exist in traditional families if there's tolerance and love. Donna will protect Rose come what may, Shaun will love unconditionally, Sylvia will do her very best, worrying about saying the wrong thing, and that's okay. All of that was wonderful to see. To put it into a realistic context, though, there's a scene early on where some kids deadname Rose, and this really shocked me. It's rare that Doctor Who depicts such direct queerphobia; there's enough such awful things happening in the real world without it intruding into Doctor Who's usually more utopian fantasy.

Of course that's the whole point of why it was crucial to challenge audience members like myself there, but Davies goes beyond just representation and polemic, and creates a kind of poetry. Rose being trans is crucial to the resolution of the plot, binary ideas being restrictive when dealing with the cosmic problem of a Time Lord meta-crisis. At the climax, Davies creates a punch the air moment ("Binary, binary..." "Non-binary") out of some nonsense dialogue he wrote in a story in 2008, and he also makes the meta-crisis a metaphor, an embodiment of the feelings of otherness and isolation Rose felt - when it's resolved, she finally can be herself and let some of the negativity go. What an ending! People online still criticised it as being too easy, and coming too early with "10 minutes left"; actually it was only six minutes, and those included a lead-in to the next story and the end credits, as well as the reveal scene of the magnificent new TARDIS control room. People who were perhaps less progressive criticised references to pronouns, but the only reference to pronouns is regarding the Meep; it's as innocuous as someone accidentally misgendering someone else's cat (no offence to the Beep of all Meeps) and being corrected. It's barely political at all, though it acts as a reminder to us all to be thoughtful and polite. A few people took exception to the sonic screwdriver being overpowered; sorry, but the Doctor creating screens and shields with it was very cool. To sum up: it was wonderful. I waited patiently for this story for 13 months. After watching it, I could barely stand to wait another week to see the next one. You can't get better than that.

Connectivity:

I thought I'd struggle to link anything to the last story as it wasn't an episode of Doctor Who, but I can say that the lead actors of both The Star Beast and An Adventure in Space and Time were part of the regular cast of the TV show Broadchurch; also, both actors are depicting a new version of someone who last had anything to do with the series many years before. Both stories see weird creatures on the streets of London, which wouldn't have been that big a deal during many phases of Doctor Who's life, but it hasn't happened very much at all during Jodie Whittaker's tenure. RTD's style is more capital-centric than Chris Chibnall's clearly.

Deeper Thoughts:

Diamond Geyser: an outpouring of Doctor Who content for the 60th anniversary. From the start of November 2023, so much Doctor Who stuff has been created, shown or made accessible, that I thought I'd round it all up here (so I could keep it all straight in my head more than anything else!). On the 1st of the month, there was the launch in the UK of the Whoniverse, a branded collection of programmes made available on the BBC's streaming service, the iplayer, with a nice banner and ident animation reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a definite statement that Doctor Who content was entering a new joined-up era. As well as almost all of the surviving classic and new Who stories, there were full runs of many spin-offs like the Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood and Class, full runs of making-of strand Doctor Who Confidential, and one-offs like 1977 Documentary Whose Doctor Who or Brain Cox's filmed lecture The Science of Doctor Who from 2013. The big delivery on that day, though, was something new: Tales of the TARDIS is a set of six new sequences that top and tail omnibus versions of classic Doctor Who stories, to frame them for new viewers and add to the overall tapestry. A wonderful new set to host these was created from the paraphernalia of 60 years, a memory TARDIS. This was a clever concept that allows - rather like the Edge and its Guardians from The Power of the Doctor - actors to return to their roles at whatever age without any visual trickery, and then to tell each other 'fireside' stories while we listen in.

In the order that they're presented, there is Earthshock with Peter Davison and Janet Fielding as the Doctor and Tegan, The Mind Robber with Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury as Jamie and Zoe, Vengeance on Varos with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Doctor and Peri, The Three Doctors with Katy Manning and Daniel Anthony as Jo Jones and Clyde Langer, The Time Meddler with Peter Purves and Maureen o' Brien as Steven and Vicki, and finally the extended DVD / Blu-ray version of The Curse of Fenric with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. Between them, the three were written by showrunner Russell T Davies, Phil Ford and Pete McTighe, all of them channelling the style and emotion that the last listed of those gentlemen has brought to the short films that are part of the Blu-ray collection trailers; those have similarly brought back old characters for reunions over recent years. Like many a fan, I watched the new sequences early on the 1st, fast-forwarding through the stories themselves as I've seen them many times before. I couldn't pick a favourite as they were all so wonderful, but I will say it was fantastic to see Purves play Steven again for the first time since 1966. Watching them was emotional in another way too. I became a Doctor Who fan after watching a 1981 curated series of repeats from throughout Doctor Who's history. Could these Tales of the TARDIS become someone's Five Faces of Doctor Who style induction into the magic world of the series? I hope so.

So much content available to stream on that day overshadowed that two new programmes were shown on broadcast television (and, of course, immediately available as part of the iplayer Whoniverse after that). Talking Doctor Who was a David Tennant fronted compendium of clips from the archive, and was rather like sitting down to watch a Blu-ray special feature with the man currently playing the Doctor. The other programme broadcast was the Doctor Who @60 A Musical Celebration concert that had previously been available on BBC Sounds (I reviewed it in the Deeper Thoughts of a recent blog post) but this time with pictures. It was good to see it for the first time, and listen to it again. After that big day, there was a bit of a lull for a while. At some point a huge trove of archive material was uploaded to the web at www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho. There's documents, photos, clips and oral history there, more than I've had time to review in any depth as yet, but what I have seen is most interesting. In mid-November, two new Doctor Who sections appeared on BBC Sounds, The Missing Episodes and The Audio Adventures, providing content that had previously been a commercial concern free at the point of use to UK licence fee payers. The former is a space for the narrated audio versions of stories whose moving pictures are no longer held in the archives; the latter, a selection of Big Finish audios featuring characters from all eras of the programme in further adventures. I listened to Out of Time (a team up between the David Tennant and Tom Baker Doctors), The Beginning (companion actor Carole Ann Ford telling the story of her character Susan's first ever trip in the TARDIS) and Ravagers (a trio of audio episodes featuring Christopher Eccleston reprising his take on the titular Time Lord).

Friday 17th November brought the biggest thing yet: a taste of what was to come. During the Children in Need telethon on BBC1 (and thereafter available as part of the Whoniverse) was a five minute scene 'Destination: Skaro' bridging the gap between The Power of the Doctor and The Star Beast. It was a great amuse-bouche with some nice comic moments, though there was one music cue I'd have removed as it felt like it was trying too hard to suggest whimsy. There was also a taster for the new making-of show Unleashed, with a short version of an episode enthusiastically presented by Steffan Powell, behind the scenes on the Skaro shoot. Also featuring the Daleks was the big new (well, new-old) programme shown on the anniversary itself Thursday 23rd November 2023. This was a new version of the very first Dalek story, colourised and edited down from seven 25-minute episodes to a lean 75-minute omnibus shown in the evening on UK channel BBC4. The idea (and it seems to be one that will be repeated with future stories after this experiment) is to provide an alternate version alongside the originals that might better engage a modern audience, giving them an entry point into old Who like Tales of the TARDIS. Going in, the editing made me much more apprehensive than the addition of colour, but I tried to switch off my ingrained memories of every familiar scene and line of dialogue and concentrate on what was on the screen rather than what wasn't. It was a very effective and clever job done by Benjamin Cook in the cutting, with the story flowing nicely without being too choppy in most places. The colour also made the story pop in a way that it hadn't before, and the additions of new music, Dalek dialogue and effects sequences truly makes this a parallel universe version of the original.

The biggest surprise was at the end of the story, where there was a 'coming soon trailer' in the shape of several more colourised clips from throughout William Hartnell's era. The following programme shown that night also had a last minute surprise; this was a repeat of An Adventure in Space and Time but in the scene where William Hartnell, as played by David Bradley, sees into the future of Doctor Who, it was Ncuti Gatwa rather than Matt Smith looking back at him. Gatwa had such presence in just this short, silent performance, that I'm very excited for Christmas. In the week leading up to the anniversary, there were also several new radio shows related to Doctor Who, and all were enjoyable. Toby Hadoke's A to Z of surviving Doctor Who covered the fan experience; Matthew Sweet's The Wilderness Years covered the period when Doctor Who was off the air; The Welsh Connection outlined the special relationship between that country and the show; 60 Years of Friends and Foes discussed how Doctor Who has reflected political and social themes relevant to the changing times in which it was being made. There was a Doctor Who themed Bargain Hunt; David Tennant presented the Cbeebies bedtime story; there were countless appearances on news and magazine shows plugging the 60th anniversary specials. If you wanted more information on The Star Beast after it was shown, you could watch the corresponding episode of Unleashed, listen to a reaction podcast, and watch an in-vision commentary. You could even switch over to the UK's Channel 5 and get some gossip in Doctor Who: 60 years of Secrets and Scandals. I've probably missed a few things above, and there's still two more specials to come. We've never had it so good!

In Summary:

And we're back.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Chapter the 283rd, which may be cheating, but doesn't care - it's anniversary time!

Plot:
The Matt Smith Doctor is minding his business in the TARDIS control room, when he suddenly finds himself projected into an alternate universe where Doctor Who is a TV series performed and made by people who look slightly different to the same people in our real life universe. One of these is Sydney Newman, a brash Canadian recently arrived and wanting to shake things up. He puts together a team to create a new science fiction programme for Saturday evenings. Two key members of that team are outsiders: a 20-something woman producer with loads of talent trying to make it in the man's world of 1960s TV, and a gay British-Indian director with loads of talent trying to make his mark and facing everyday racism. They are Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein, and with help from others and a lot of determination they get the show on air. One of the big decisions is the casting of the Doctor. William Hartnell is looking for something a bit different to the military roles he always seems to get; he isn't sure about committing to a TV run, but Verity and Waris persuade him. After a shaky start, the second story featuring the Daleks captures the public imagination. The series goes from strength to strength, but this success means that people that Hartnell likes working with move on to other things, including Verity and Waris. When there's nobody left of the original team both in front of and behind the camera, Hartnell has become ill and more difficult to work with. Newman informs him that they are recasting the Doctor, and he films the handover to Patrick Troughton. The appearance of the extra-dimensional Matt Smith reassures him that he has secured the legacy of the series, which will run and run.

(Obviously I realise it's just a drama based on real events with a sentimental cameo from the then current Doctor at the end, but how else does one rationalise Smith's appearance within the world of the story as presented - he's either a time traveller or an apparition appearing to a Hartnell who somehow can see into the future; the former seems more appropriate an explanation for a Doctor Who related piece.) 

Context:

To mark the month of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who first being on TV, November 2023, I am overriding random selection for a few posts to watch some stories in keeping with this celebratory time. After last time having watched the monumental moment when the Doctor first regenerated (allowing the main actor to pass on the role to another), this time I thought it would be worth watching the docu-drama that depicted the backstory behind what played out on the TV screen in 1966, even though it's not an episode of Doctor Who per se. I watched it with the Better Half (more enthusiastic to watch this than any story of Who proper) and the younger two of our three children (boy of 14, girl of 11). It was a Sunday in early November 2023, a week on from the viewing of The Tenth Planet. As that story had coincidentally been watched on the 57th anniversary of the original broadcast of the regeneration in Tenth Planet's final episode, the date of watching An Adventure in Space and Time was - again coincidentally - the 57th anniversary of the first broadcast of Patrick Troughton's debut episode as the Doctor.

Milestone watch: Although this isn't officially a Doctor Who story, it is the last of the specials from 2013 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the programme to be covered for the blog. The others The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor were covered previously.

First Time Round:

I watched this with the Better Half a day or two after its broadcast for the first time in the UK on BBC2, Thursday 21st November 2013. I couldn't watch it go out live as I was working in Paris for the day job in the week leading up to the anniversary (as briefly mentioned in the First Time Round section of the Day of the Doctor post, linked to above). That Thursday evening (pretension alert!) I was out somewhere buying a bottle of that year's vintage on Beaujolais Nouveau day, to take home with me when I travelled back on Friday the 22nd. I can't remember whether I persuaded the BH to watch the story that evening or the following morning, but I do remember it was before Day of the Doctor was broadcast on the evening of the Saturday. I remember enjoying it very much, but can't recall much else from that first watch.

Reaction:

It's on record that the writer of An Adventure in Space and Time, long-term Doctor Who fan Mark Gatiss, pitched the idea of An Adventure in Space and Time to the BBC a decade earlier in 2003 for the series' 40th anniversary. Ten years later, the time was finally right. By then, Gatiss was a seasoned pro having written many episodes of the new series and other dramas. I don't know whether it was a decade's more writing experience, or a decade's more thinking of how to tell this tale, or whether indeed he had it all worked out from the very beginning, but he managed to find a story structure that fixes a fundamental instability inherent in the real life material: he makes one coherent television film from two separate and in some ways opposite stories. The story of the successful creation of Doctor Who by a group of people - a couple of whom were early in their careers and trying to make their mark - is an interesting one, but it's not perhaps one that would sustain a taut 90-minute TV drama. There's characterful moments and challenges overcome but not enough to equate to major highs or lows. It is merely an Act One for Verity or Waris. The person, though, for whom it represented highs and lows, maybe even life or death, was William Hartnell. But he's not part of the story at its beginning, and doesn't appear for a long stretch of the running time. Gatiss squares this circle by starting with a flashforward. This scene shows Hartnell parked in his car, contemplating his lowest ebb after having got the sack from this wonderful lifeline of a show. A policeman taps on the window and says a loaded line of dialogue "You need to move on, you're in the way."

The action cuts to activity on the set of the TARDIS, showing how the star has got difficult and proprietorial, then uses the device of time travel (the year-o-meter on the TARDIS console rolling back from 1966 to 1963) to end the flashforward and go to the beginning of the story which then plays out in chronological order. The creation of Doctor Who is then essentially a strong subplot that takes over for a while from the main plot of Hartnell's bittersweet late-career renaissance, providing the necessary backstory. It makes the upturns in the careers of Verity, Waris and Hartnell's co-stars downturns for Hartnell as he loses what's familiar to him and has to carry the show on his own. This is still a difficult balancing act to manage, but Gatiss and everyone involved in the production pulls it off. It requires, for example, the actor playing Hartnell to find the perfect mix of his outer gruff and rough edges and his inner sweetness and vulnerability. You know who would have been perfect casting? William flippin' Hartnell, that's who. That's an exact description of the sort of performance he could do in his sleep. In the great man's sad absence, David Bradley is the only acceptable substitute - he inhabits the role, and has continued to do so in his subsequent appearances as the first Doctor in the main show (playing the first Doctor and playing Hartnell, not coincidentally, overlap by a significant margin). Casting throughout is superb, as it needs to be: Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert, Waris Hussein - these are real and important people, and moments of their story need to hit home, even though it is not the main plot. Luckily, every casting decision is bang on: Brian Cox, Jessica Raine, Sacha Dhawan... Lesley Manville as Heather Hartnell... Jeff Rawle... all those playing the regular cast members of Hartnell Who... everyone is magnificent.

Perfect casting is paired with some faithful recreations of key moments in Doctor Who's history. The attention to detail is everything you'd hope for to keep up the sense of reality for the casual viewer and to provide the fans with no ammunition for criticism. The newly made version of the original TARDIS control room and console is a work of art, but even smaller details like the mock-up of the first ever Doctor Who annual are spot on. Seeing the Daleks on Westminster Bridge again, correct to the smallest detail, is amazing. Shooting some beautiful exteriors at Television Centre also helps. There's a certain irreverence in the treatment of this material that stops things from being too stifling, though, such as seeing a wonderfully recreated Mondasian Cyberman having a cigarette break. The script is full of gags, in-jokes and allusions that keep things interesting for viewers, no matter their level of historical knowledge, from the opening scene being set on Barnes Common in the fog (an alternate setting for the start of Doctor Who that David Whittaker created in his novelisation of the first Dalek story) through to Hartnell echoing David's Tennant's last words as the tenth Doctor "I don't want to go". There are also many, many cameos from the original 1960s actors too. Director Terry McDonough pulls all these wonderful elements together with a lot of visual flair. His most bravura sequence is the intercutting of Cox as Newman reading the screenplay for the first Dalek story with scenes of an assassin in Dealey Plaza, preparing his rifle.

It's not perfect, but the moments I can find fault with are minor and few. The script is even-handed in its treatment of William Hartnell generally, but the scene of him being verbally aggressive to his granddaughter didn't ring true based on everything I've ever heard about the man, and it didn't seem necessary to the plot. Patrick Troughton was such a visually distinctive performer that I don't think any other actor could embody him accurately; Gatiss's colleague from the League of Gentlemen comedy team Reece Shearsmith does his best, but it's a tall order to ask of anyone. The surprise of the moment means one might not notice it first time, but the shot of a clearly-not-there-on-the-day Matt Smith on the TARDIS set is very badly composited. Any aspect that doesn't completely work is met by as many as ten magic moments however - the point early on in his getting to grips with the Doctor character where Bradley's Hartnell first gets to grips with his lapels, for example, or the park scene where he acts as the Pied Piper for a group for schoolchildren. Gatiss was interviewed in 2023 about whether there could ever be a sequel to An Adventure in Space and Time, covering a different period in Who's history, as the 1963 start had been covered definitively; he suggested the Trial of a Timelord period, with the difficulties of the show being put on hiatus, and the falling out of members of the production team. It might be a bit too soon still, and it would be a painful watch for a fan, but on the basis of what he achieved in 2013, I'd love to see Gatiss have a go at that tale.

Connectivity:

An Adventure in Space and Time includes a recreation of scenes from The Tenth Planet, so both feature Mondasian Cybermen and the first regeneration of the Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

After all, that's how it all started: a book report on Pull to Open by Paul Hayes. Longer-term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know I had this book - which like An Adventure in Space and Time tells the story of the initial creation of Doctor Who - lined up to be my holiday reading when the family and I went to a Greek Island for a sunny week in August 2023. Alas, it didn't arrive until we'd flown out to Kos. It worked out okay, though: the book's a bit too precious an artefact to have risked reading it poolside. Anyone who knows Stuart Manning's visual Doctor Who work would probably guess that a book published by his Ten Acre Films company would be elegantly put together, and that's definitely the case - it's on good paper stock with clear type and unfussy design touches. Content is king, though, and it doesn't disappoint in that regard either. Author Paul Hayes previously wrote about the genesis of the second iteration of Doctor Who in The Long Game, which I read and reviewed earlier this year (see the Deeper Thoughts of the Midnight blog post). Hayes uses the same overall structure as he did for his previous book, propelling the story forward roughly chronologically, with the occasional 'side bar' chapter focussing on a specific topic (casting the main characters, say, or the creation of the beginning credits and theme tune). There are less side bars than in The Long Game, as that book had to cover a number of different activities that were going on in the wilderness years in parallel with the main narrative about a new series becoming a reality. Here, it's a start from nothing, so it is much more focussed on the single journey from blank page to screen, though that journey takes a few twists and turns.

Each of the two books is describing a slightly different inevitability. The Long Game was the story of pressure gradually building like a weight of water against the dam of (perhaps imagined) rights issues, until the pressure became too much and the dam broke. The forces of antagonism in Pull to Open are not so centred, but are more numerous (inadequate facilities, apathy or misunderstanding from other people or whole departments at the BBC, mistrusting executives worried about budgets, etc. etc.). Instead of water against a dam, a better analogy for what Hayes captures is the story of the collected endeavour of Doctor Who production over time as a novice painter trying to capture a likeness. We know what the inevitable picture will look like, but Hayes gives us an engaging and thorough description of each preliminary sketch or abandoned embryonic attempt. As with The Long Game, he does this by illuminating every character with well-researched potted biographies informed by his understanding of broadcasting and the careers of those who work in it. Even Lime Grove studio D gets a few paragraphs of personal history. Unless you're David Brunt or Andrew Pixley or a similar uber-researcher of Doctor Who, a lot of this material will be new, and some names and life stories will be ones you have not heard before. There are no major new revelations, but a lot of small details are revealed that in aggregate turn this into a fresh take. For example, most fans know that the production team didn't get on well with designer of the first TARDIS console, Peter Brachacki, and felt he wasn't taking the assignment seriously (Gatiss covers this in his dramatisation). This probably was just a misapprehension on everyone's part of some tetchiness caused by Brachacki being ill at the time, imminently to be hospitalised.

The rough timeline is that in 1962, two reports on the potential of science fiction for BBC TV are prepared for the then Controller of Programmes Eric Maschwitz. Around the same time, Sydney Newman - then working at rival ITV company ABC Weekend Television - is offered a job by the corporation as head of drama. He has to wait a while to take up the post and starts in late 1962. Early on in the following year, he has a meeting with executives about concerns with filling a ratings-slump gap on Saturday nights between the football results and music programme Juke Box Jury. In late March 1963, there's a meeting to start the development of a programme to fit in that gap, and by this time it already seems to have been decided for this to be a science fiction series as some of the authors of those 1962 reports are in attendance. A number of different series proposal documents are worked on through to May, and then scripting of the first episode of Doctor Who (apparently at one point it is just possible it could have ended up being called Mister Who) gets underway. Newman hires Verity Lambert to be the producer. Greater or lesser contributions are made by some people who stay close to the series once it gets going (Donald Wilson, David Whittaker, Mervyn Pinfield) and some who fall away (C.E. Webber, Rex Tucker). The main characters are cast, writers are found including Terry Nation, whose script about mutated creatures in personal transport machines is pulled forward to be the second story made as other scripts aren't ready. Hayes lays this all out while also providing context of what was going on in the wider world, which was a lot (the Profumo affair, the Great Train Robbery, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's shock resignation, The Beatles getting bigger and bigger, historical speeches by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King).

On the 27th September 1963, after a bit of pre-filming, the pilot episode of Doctor Who goes in front of the cameras. The story thereafter is more familiar, based on many other retellings including An Adventure in Space and Time. The pilot's rejected, they remount, then they finish the caveman story and move on to Terry Nation's Dalek tale. The broadcast of the first episode on November 23rd 1963 is overshadowed by the assassination of JFK the previous day, but the Dalek story captures the public's imagination. The book still has the possibility to surprise even here, though: every fan knows that the Beeb wouldn't at first commit beyond 13 episodes, but I had no idea there was a bit of a wobble about the risk of overspends, and that 13 could have just been four. It's mentioned in passing in An Adventure in Space and Time, and I just thought it was exaggeration to serve the drama, but there was a real possibility that Doctor Who could have just been the caveman story, and everybody would have been ordered back to the drawing board to think of a new idea. Thankfully a compromise position was found, and the rest is history. The 'What Ifs' presented by the narrative are fascinating. Two designers' major contributions to Doctor Who's early years might never have happened: if Brachacki hadn't been in hospital, Barry Newbury wouldn't have needed to take over on the first story; had Verity Lambert not insisted on the same designer working on the Dalek story's filming and studio sessions, then future Hollywood film director Ridley Scott might have designed the Daleks rather than Ray Cusick. Hayes ends the book at the point those first two stories have been broadcast and appreciated by the viewing audience, with a testament to all the many contributions to get to that point and how they have created an expansive story that will never stop being told. It's perfect reading for this anniversary period, and I recommend every fan should get themselves a copy. 

In Summary:

The tale of the Doctor Who's beginnings will undoubtedly continue to be told and retold in different forms, but as a TV bio-pic this is probably the last word on the matter.

The Tenth Planet

Chapter the 282nd, which covers the animation of a significant episode, plus the animation of another much less significant story.

Plot:
The Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive at the South Pole in 1986, and enter a monitoring base for a global Space programme. A rocket in orbit is in trouble because a new planet has arrived in the solar system, which has knocked them off course and is draining their energy. The energy drain starts to affect Earth. Creatures called Cybermen invade the base. They are from the new planet, Mondas, an ancient twin planet of Earth that floated away and has now come back. They have replaced their body parts and organs with cybernetic components and removed their emotions. The Cybermen on the base are destroyed but it is too late to help the rocket. Another rocket has gone up, though, piloted by the base commander General Cutler's son. Cutler wants to use a powerful bomb to blow up Mondas to save his son, even though this risks the Earth. The Doctor says that all they have to do is wait and Mondas's energy intake will cause it to explode, but Cutler will not listen. Ben is pressganged into helping prepare the bomb, but persuades some of the crew to sabotage it. It fails to launch. Cutler wants to try again, but is killed when more Cybermen enter the base. They take Polly and the Doctor to their ship as hostages, and want to use the bomb for themselves. There are mass landings of Cybermen across the Earth. Ben realises the Cybermen don't like radiation, so uses radioactive rods to overcome his guards. Mondas explodes and all Cybermen collapse and disintegrate. The base starts working to get General Cutler's son down from space. Ben goes to the Cyber ship and frees his two friends, but something is wrong with the Doctor. After they take off in the TARDIS, the Doctor collapses and starts to change... 

Context:

Knowing that I would post the blog about the next story in November 2023, the month of Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, I overrode random selection to pick something significant. Looking at the stories that were left unblogged at this point, there was only one contender: William Hartnell's last story, the first ever regeneration from one Doctor to another, the introduction of the Cybermen... The Tenth Planet has 'Significant' running through it like 'Blackpool' in a stick of rock. I watched the whole story in one go one afternoon from the DVD with the animated version of the final (currently missing aside from its audio) episode. I didn't realise until afterwards that I had watched the story on the 29th of October, the 57th anniversary of the day that fourth episode originally aired and the change from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton was first seen.

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog; this time it's season 4 (the last couple of William Hartnell stories plus the initial run of Patrick Troughton tales). This is the 17th season completed by randomly ordered blogging (out of the total of 39 seasons that have been broadcast at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13). 

First Time Round:

November has for a long time been a significant month for Doctor Who, even if not in a big anniversary year. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the month of the final VHS or DVD release of the year, and often these would be special sets. In November 2000, the big release was the Cyberman tin, a nice container for two VHS tapes starring the cybernetic nasties, Attack of the Cybermen and The Tenth Planet. The black-and-white story was completed with a reconstruction of part four marrying the existing audio with surviving clips and off-screen photographs. I first saw the animated version of the episode when it came out on DVD many years later in October 2013, another big anniversary year.

Reaction:

As a story that was part of the same season as The Tenth Planet, in fact broadcast only three stories later, and as they both have had episodes animated for commercial release, I thought I would pair up this main blog post on The Tenth Planet with my write-up of the BFI screening of The Underwater Menace from October 2023 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). The Tenth Planet, as mentioned above, is a very significant story in the Doctor Who canon; The Underwater Menace meanwhile is usually thought of as silly and maybe embarrassing. How unexpected it therefore was that I enjoyed the latter much more than the former this time round. As will be detailed below, the latest version of the fishy Troughton tale now has a stylistic coherence the story has never had before, which helps it enormously. Bad luck makes such a unity of style impossible for The Tenth Planet. While the last episode remains missing from the archive - there have been many rumours about its return over the years, but they've always turned out to be false - it can never be wholly complete as a live action piece. Even if the whole story was animated as Underwater Menace has been, there would still be the issue of the third episode, where the Doctor - in the part of his swansong which is building towards the end and his departure - isn't in it. William Hartnell was unfortunately ill that week of production, and the usual last-minute stop gap is employed where he, played by an extra in a wig seen from behind in a long shot, faints and spends 25 minutes in bed recovering off-screen. It means that his big plan to solve the problem of the Cybermen at the South Pole has to be relayed by other characters whom he's supposedly told earlier in the story, even though the audience has not been privy to this.

If one could travel back in time and somehow reverse those two pieces of bad luck, though, the story still wouldn't be improved sufficiently to be good to my mind. The Doctor's big plan mentioned above is.... drumroll... to do nothing. The Cybermen's own plan contains a flaw that will lead to their destruction, so things just need to be allowed to play out. That's interestingly different to the steps normally required to solve the problems the TARDIS crew face, but it means that the Doctor has no active role in the denouement, which isn't acceptable in his big finale. It would work if this just a smaller story in the middle of the season, and in a very real way it is just that. In 1966, Doctor Who was being made on a rolling production line, and decisions dictated by unexpected circumstances (like one's lead actor being ill for a week) had to be reactive rather than proactive. Unless there was coincidence of timing, decisions related to circumstances that might have been a bit more expected but not by much (like one's lead actor finally giving up the role) wouldn't line up with the story before the brief break in the Summer where Doctor Who wouldn't be on TV (not really thought of as a season finale in the modern sense anyway). Hartnell instead bows out in the second story of the run, and the new bloke debuts properly the following week in the third. The passivity of the Doctor is just one way the writers fail to capitalise on the unique opportunity this offered to the storytelling. The concept of regeneration, as it later became known, is rightly praised as an imaginative solution for recasting, but it is in no way the focus of The Tenth Planet. It is tacked on at the end of the story, and only explored in Patrick Troughton's first story, The Power of the Daleks.

What The Tenth Planet does have to explore is a new villainous race, one that would go on to become one of the most popular returning foes of the series, the Cybermen. The backstory and - even though its a bit unwieldy - the design of the creatures seen here is magnificent. But the Mondasians don't appear until the end of the first episode, and like the Doctor they don't really have an active contribution to the third. Half the running time is essentially Cyber-free. This happens because a squad of them invade the base but are destroyed, then later another squad invades the base again. Such a repeated story beat is clumsy, and points to the scripts needing at least another draft; it also undermines the threat of the Cybermen if they can be so easily destroyed. If the story was reworked so that the same Cybermen are in control of the base throughout and only dispatched in the last episode, it would be much stronger. The script is making room, though, for a lot of time to be spent on the base crew and their efforts to save a stricken rocket. Well, two stricken rockets. In another double story beat, they cannot save one rocket, but another is then sent up. The issue for me with so much screen time being given over to the base crew's efforts is that they aren't very interesting characters. Script co-writer and the show's scientific adviser of the time Kit Pedler loves his teams of scientists working away diligently under pressure, but I'd rather have more of the TARDIS team and the Cybermen. As the solution to the main plot is a passive one, the conflict comes from the crew continually ignoring the Doctor's wise counsel, which doesn't exactly endear them to the audience.

It also doesn't help that the base crew's leader General Cutler is played as aggressive and unpleasant, so it's hard to empathise with him even when his son is in danger. It also seems ridiculous that his son has been put into danger in the first place. Why would the authorities on Earth send up another rocket when the situation is so unclear and potentially dangerous, unless they were all idiots? Again, a redraft to focus on only one rocket, which has Cutler's son as one of the crew from the outset, would fix this. There's still the massive coincidence that in a story on the scale of planets in the solar system and an entire global space programme, two significant people are related, but that can be explained in a few lines of dialogue (Cutler pulling strings perhaps) and would be forgiven as it humanises the drama. Cutler shouldn't then become so unhinged - there are already Cybermen to provide villainy, it doesn't need Cutler planning to nuke the Earth just to get his son back too (Pedler's desire for scientific rigour has been completely abandoned here, as there would obviously be fail-safes in place). Cutler goes so far in the story as it ended up on screen that the only option is to kill him off, which means father and son are never reunited even though the latter is saved. It's an unsatisfactory end to that subplot. The main plot's ending is not much more satisfactory. When Mondas blows up, all the Cybermen conveniently disintegrate. As their weakness to radiation has been discovered earlier, it might have been better to use that in some way to get rid of the final few.

It's not all bad. There are significant efforts to show diversity in the future, with Earl Cameron portraying an astronaut of colour, and even - though it's a much smaller role - a technician job shown to be held by a woman (though not in the all-male South Pole where men are seen to leer at Polly in a sexist way). The snowy scenes are well realised, and the scenes of ranks of advancing Cybermen in that snow, underscored by the stock music tune 'Space Adventures' that would become their theme in their early appearances, are thrilling. The idea of a twin planet to Earth returning to the solar system is an interesting one. As had been trialled in The War Machines a few stories earlier, use of newscasts intercut into the drama to add scale is effective. The original voices of the Cybermen are unique and eerie (they'd go a different way in future Cyber stories, so this wouldn't be capitalised on again until Peter Capaldi's time as the Doctor decades later). There's a few individual moments that have gone down in Who's history ("Love, Pride, Hate, Fear - have you no emotions, sir?", "This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin", "It's far from being all over!"). Steve Plytas gives a decent performance as Wigner, but his voice is so distinctive and I've seen the Gourmet Night episode of sit-com Fawlty Towers so many times, that I couldn't stop seeing him as Kurt the drunk chef instead of a space commander. At least that was interesting on some level, though, The Tenth Planet was mostly dull apart from the last few minutes. Funnily enough, "dull apart from the last few minutes" describes exactly how I felt about a later story that links into the events depicted in The Tenth Planet, Twice Upon a Time - perhaps that later story was an apt sequel after all.  

Connectivity:

The Tenth Planet and Thin Ice both see the TARDIS landing in a cold environment.

Deeper Thoughts:

Zaroff's experimental journal entry: BFI Screening of The Underwater Menace animation, 21st October 2023. I was lucky enough after over a year of clashes or rapid sell-outs to get to the BFI Southbank again for a Doctor Who related event. This was the unveiling of a new animation, and what a difference a year makes. The panel at the last event I went to in September 2022 (for the animation of The Abominable Snowmen) indicated that there would likely be a long pause before any further stories got this treatment, but with The Underwater Menace the range is back, back, back. As will be noted later, the main panel on the 21st October strongly suggested that other stories are being worked on, and other animated releases will be coming out soon. For any Doctor Who fan who's liked these releases, this was great news. Before we got to that, though, the event started as they always do with an introduction from hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The latter gentleman, who had watched the original broadcast, said it is now as he always remembered watching it as a child in 1967, i.e. animated and in colour.  There was the usual quiz where the audience answer Doctor Who trivia questions to win swag. Johnson then read out an appreciation of the story from the Radio Times a few years back written by Patrick Mulkern. Mulkern was in the audience, and this led to an impromptu short interview about his memories of interviewing The Underwater Menace's director Julia Smith, and - sweetly - led to the revelation that the story was his first ever memory of Doctor Who. Another impromptu interview onstage happened with Cutaway comics' Gareth Kavanagh talking about his latest releases.

(L to R) Fiddy, Johnson, Kavanagh

The lights then dimmed; before the first two episodes were shown, a lovely and heartfelt video message from Anneke Wills (who played Polly in the story) was projected onto the big NFT1 screen. Wills is not currently doing public appearances, but Johnson happened to be close to her Devon home before the screening, so was able to capture this on his mobile phone. After the first two episodes, Mark Ayres - Doctor Who music and sound archivist who remasters the soundtracks for use in the animations - was interviewed onstage by Fiddy. The soundtrack for the animation was mostly from the home recordings made by fan Graham Strong, as they are of best quality even compared to the optical soundtracks of the two episodes surviving on film. At Fiddy's prompting, Ayres explained why this was, as audio stored as patterns of light on the celluloid is subject to noise from any dirt that gets onto the film. In the second episode, 10 minutes of the optical soundtrack had to be used, and one of Ayres's jobs is to ensure that the listener does not notice the difference. Though he tries to be careful to be as faithful as possible, this isn't always possible, as sometimes changes need to be made to serve the new medium. As an example of what he described as "slight liberties", he mentioned a sequence with a brazier fire that wasn't quite coming across in the animation, so needed to be beefed up a bit. He also talked about the dangers when remastering that one can make something sound too clean. He revealed that he has an audio file with looped "studio sound and magnetic tape noise" to apply at a subtle level underneath a soundtrack to make it sound human again, and also to smooth out any edits.

(L to R) Fiddy, Ayres

The final two episodes of the story followed. As mentioned above, the colour animation really pulls this story together. My original review of the story, from early in the blog's life when it came out on DVD, can be found here. As mentioned in that post, the story is a cartoon, a heightened comic B-movie science fiction creation like the movies of Ed Wood in the 1950s. It's almost certainly deliberately so, though the original production maybe didn't quite realise this. It therefore suits the animated medium, and the addition of colour. It's always robbed the experience of something watching this story in half episode / half reconstruction form, or listening to the audio only. This is the best it's ever going to look and feel I think (even if the missing episodes are found, as it lives to be larger than black-and-white). Animation director-producer AnneMarie Walsh said later that she enjoys hearing all the laughter when the animations are shown to an audience, and the laughter didn't really stop this time. The comedy is almost certainly deliberate too; I don't believe that Joseph Furst is pitching his performance as Professor Zaroff for drama. The animation leans into this, creating some more humorous bits (e.g moments between Zaroff  and his pet octopus). The immortal line from this over-the-top baddie "Nothing in the world can stop me now" got a round of applause both times (at the end of episode three, and in the recap at the start of episode four). My only mild criticism is that Polly's likeness is not as good as in some of the other animations, but it isn't a big deal. I thoroughly recommend you order a copy on shiny disc, if you haven't already.

Next was the big final panel chaired by Johnson, where Walsh came onstage alongside The Underwater Menace executive producer Paul Hembury, and Charles Norton, who was billed on the animation as a Doctor Who consultant, and played down his role on the episodes. This led to him being gently chided by the other two for excess modesty as he had been a prime mover for the animation range as a whole (having directed early animations). AnneMarie talked on similar themes that she has covered at these events previously. When creating the new imagery, it's impossible to be faithful to surviving episodes as framing and movement for the animated medium need to be very different to live action. For example, two characters in a shot not talking or moving much can work if they are real people with body language and full facial expression, but to do the same with two animated characters "looks weird". They instead go back to the scripts and imagine what the original production team would have done if they had fewer budgetary fetters. Norton agreed with this saying that, for every animation project they have embarked on, they've done so with all the reverence for the material that the original production teams had "which is none at all"! Walsh consoled any purists in the audience telling them that all surviving materials and reconstructions using them are also on the discs that will be out to buy ("I've learned how to plug" she jokingly said to Hembury).

(L to R) Walsh, Norton, Hembury 

Paul Hembury was the first executive for the animations (or the Blu-ray range for that matter) to come up on stage to answer questions on a panel related to Doctor Who product, at least as far as I can remember back through my seven years attending these BFI sessions. This is very brave, as questions can be very probing, of the "What's the next story you're working on?" style when usually the people involved can't even confirm whether they are working on anything at all. Hembury joked that he'd have to give politician answers, "I'm glad you asked me that, but I'm not going to answer", but it was most eyebrow-raising - and was picked up by online entertainment news channels immediately afterwards - that three questions by my count were answered with a simple "Yes". The first was in answer to whether any further animations were planned, and his response caused an immediate round of applause, to which he added "And that's why": as long as there's budget - and it seems like an alternative source of funding has been found to replace BBC America's contribution, as it was confirmed that they are no longer providing any money - and as long as there's an audience, they should keep coming. The second "Yes" was in response to whether the plan is eventually to cover every missing episode and story. It was qualified with a mention that the physical media sell-through market is not getting any bigger, so alternatives will need to be found. He couldn't comment on whether putting the stories on BBC iplayer might present a new market opportunity, but only because he didn't know at that moment in time (since the screening, animated classic Who episodes, though not all of them, have arrived on iplayer). The final "Yes" confirmed that the animations will be put on the relevant Blu-ray box sets when the time comes, which presumably also contributes something to the coffers.

Hembury was keen that the event, and any other such event, should be a celebration of the creative teams that make the animations, and praised them for delivering "Routine Magic", quoting a NASA slogan. Some discussion inevitably went to selection criteria for what is up for animating next. There are known challenges (e.g. The Highlanders, as it is hard to animate Tartan-clad characters), and they also tend to take into consideration fan opinions on what stories are most desired, and then go in the exact opposite direction to keep things surprising. There's no conspiracy or even rationale why, for example, there have been more Troughton animations than Hartnells, and past decisions shouldn't be used by fans to predict future releases. Nothing the animators have ever changed has meant the certification of a story has changed, though they are conscious on not making things more violent (the DVD and Blu-ray of The Underwater Menace is certified 12 in the UK, but this is because of a special feature on the disc). Superfan Ian Levine was in the audience, and was allowed to ask a question because - as Justin Johnson put it -"he's promised to be on his best behaviour". This is a reference to Ian's being somewhat less than diplomatic in the past when taking exception to recreations of stories that weren't faithful to the original. Obviously, he can be direct, but he's passionate and honest, and nobody should ever have a problem with that. Anyway, Ian went out of his way to praise the efforts of the people on stage, particularly Walsh's previous production The Evil of the Daleks.

A final audience question was asked of the panel: which remaining unanimated story they would choose to do next if time and budget were no issue? As Walsh thought about this, Johnson added "So, if you had, say, five years and three million pounds?" She in the end went for the 13 episode behemoth of linked stories Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks' Master Plan. "3 million won't be enough" piped up Norton. "30 million then," added Johnson, "Sold to Ian Levine!". It ended the event good-naturedly, and I went off out of NFT1 and into the main part of the BFI building looking for a couple of people to say Hi to that were there. Not many people from the usual group of us that attend these events could make it this time, and there isn't to be a similar event for the rest of the year. Showrunner Russell T Davies had recently gone on record that there would not be big public screenings or conventions tied in to the 60th anniversary, unlike the 50th, as the current team wanted to concentrate on things that everyone could get to see. Because of the anniversary, though, a lot of new product is being released - like the 60th anniversary specials which have sell-through release dates following fast after their television broadcasts -  that will mean that the classic releases of animations and Blu-ray box sets that the BFI events tie in to will not now be happening again until 2024. I'll certainly be trying to get tickets when these screenings start up again. 

In Summary:

Unsatisfactory for such a significant episode; it makes the Doctor a bystander in his own swansong. Also, somewhat ironically, it's a story that's a bit emotionless.