Death Comes to Time

Chapter the 322nd, is like an alternative universe version of a favourite science fantasy franchise (but probably not the one you're expecting). 

Plot:

The Doctor and an android companion he's made for himself, Antimony, are sent a message (in a weird way) by another Time Lord, the Minister of Chance. Two Time Lords (the Time Lords don't seem to live on Gallifrey anymore and are only a few in number scattered around the universe) have been killed on Earth, and the Minister wants the Doctor to investigate. The Minister in turn will return to the planet Santine where the Doctor was previously, and help its people against the invading General Tannis, an evil Time Lord. Ace is a prisoner of Tannis but another Time Lord Casmus rescues her, and trains her to become a Time Lord. The Doctor and Antimony work with a UNIT operative Speedwell on Earth, discovering that two vampires are behind the killings of the Time Lords and some other massacres of innocent people in London. The Doctor kills one vampire by allowing it to drink a little of his blood after secretly eating some garlic (yes, really). The other is killed by Speedwell. The Doctor and the Minister then both separately help the rebels of Santine; well, that's the plan, but neither are very effective. Tannis is a step ahead of the Doctor and kills Antimony. The Minister in anger at the rebel leader getting killed lets rip with his superpowers (the Time Lords have superpowers now), destroying many of the invading troops. Tannis has already left, though; he's planning to invade Earth. Tannis finds and kills Casmus. Ace has been given a TARDIS to travel to a planet where she faces a test. She fails, but this is all part of her training. The Doctor meets her and they travel to Earth. The Brig, Speedwell and UNIT have spaceships now and are ready for the invasion. Tannis confronts the Doctor near Stonehenge. The Doctor uses his superpowers (see above) to destroy Tannis at the cost of his own life.

Context:

So, the blog is again veering away from the resolutely canonical, and therefore I must ask some questions of the next story up for consideration: Does it star the Doctor? Yes, he's a little bit sidelined but he's definitely there. Does it have visuals? Yes, they may be basic, but they are present. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, Death Comes to Time was cleared for viewing. I watched from youtube where all the audio episodes are presented with Lee Sullivan's accompanying art. This was over the course of a week in February 2025. I didn't try to get anyone else from the family to watch with me; the story is a bit too niche for that.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially (which also might be the end of Doctor Who if you believe what you read in the tabloids!). Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed eight Doctors' televisual eras proper (the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 34 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In 2001, I was an enthusiastic reader of and contributor to Doctor Who online message boards (see the Deeper Thoughts section of my 2024 blog post on The Scream of the Shalka for more details). The news that a pilot for a new Doctor Who radio series was being made was much discussed there (the driving force behind Death Comes to Time Dan Freedman who produced, wrote, and directed it, as well as his script editor Nev Fountain, were regular presences on the boards at that time). The news was received with much excitement and anticipation. The disappointment when BBC Radio 4 made the decision not to develop a series was short lived, if I remember correctly, as the announcement that it instead would be developed into a webcast on the BBC's Doctor Who website came very soon afterwards. In July of 2001, I struggled with the realplayer software and my dial-up connection and managed to watch all of the first episode. I thought it was okay; nothing that blew my socks off, but I held out on forming an opinion as it was incomplete. The rest of the story landed between February and May 2002, with chunks of episodes two to five becoming available weekly. The real player often crashed, or timed out; again, I may be misremembering, but I believe I then tried an option aimed at those like me with bandwidth challenges to stream the story audio-only. I found the story difficult to follow without the pictures, and I wasn't particularly enjoying what I was able to see or hear; so, I bailed on the webcast version. I tried again with the audio version when it came out on CD in October 2002. It was still a bit hard to follow everything that was going on, but I made it to the end on that go. I have not listened to or watched the story again until now.

Reaction:

At one point during Death Comes to Time, the words of Tim (as played by Simon Pegg) in the TV comedy Spaced where he says "Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like Shaft" came to my mind, which led to me thinking the following: Death Comes to Time makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back. Unfair? Maybe a tad, but the comparison wouldn't leave my mind. This is probably because every moment of Death Comes to Time made it clearer and clearer to me that the mythology of Star Wars was its blueprint. The story is replete with space battles, rebels fighting invading troops and the like; those genre trappings are plentiful in many a Doctor Who story before and after Star Wars was invented, of course; Death Comes to Time, though, builds that material into the tale of the dying days of the final few Time Lords (Jedi), who have magical powers because of their connection to time (the Force), with one of their number Tannis (Vader) having turned to the dark side, but there is hope for a future generation as Ace (Skywalker) is being trained to become a Time Lord (Jedi) by old, beardy mentor Casmus (Obi Wan). There is no equivalent to Ewoks included, but this is a con not a a pro, I think, as some additional levity might have better offset the rather doomy tone. The story emerged from plans for a new Doctor Who radio series; as such, it should and did have free rein to be its own thing and not slavishly follow how Doctor Who had been done before. I've tried to bear that in mind when watching. It's complicated, though, by the inclusion of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. They are a direct link back to a version of Doctor Who that came before with wholly different continuity, set-up, rules and tone.

Another complication is that rather than being on the radio for a mass audience where this break from the past might not have mattered so much, it ended up as a webcast on a website made for fans. Fans want Doctor Who to be like Doctor Who, because they like Doctor Who. It's disconcerting as a fan viewer therefore when Time Lords are depicted as a few nomadic souls wandering the universe, bound by a code that prevents them using magical powers; Time Lords were never ever like that. It's mildly irritating when the Doctor and other Time Lords use those magical powers to resolve plot complications rather than their ingenuity, because one key aspect of the Doctor's appeal is his ingenuity. The Doctor does a bit of investigating in the second episode, but at its denouement the villain essentially gives themself up. He does a bit of planning to rescue a child later in the story, but that comes to nothing as the tables are turned on him. The climax of the story and defeat of the Big Bad just involves the Doctor using a magic off-switch to end the plot; it's imbued with a significance that it doesn't deserve, as it's essentially a cheat, by the Doctor sacrificing his life with that action. This ending is another source of discombobulation to the fan viewer, as it means they have to mentally edit out the Paul McGann TV movie from existence. A lot of those fans didn't like the Paul McGann TV movie, and have likely been trying to mentally edit it out of existence since they first saw it; if it were an easy thing to do they would have done it long before. All this adds up to make Death Comes to Time difficult to watch; and, as mentioned above, the technology already presented something of a barrier, so the difficulties are compounded.

It's fascinating in its way too, looking at an alternate universe take on the show; but. it would only be worth the effort if this new take was truly original, or at least engaging. Unfortunately, it's neither. Breaking with the past sets up the expectation that we'll get something new not just a tired spin on Star Wars, and engagement is undermined by there being too much going on. The action is split between the Doctor and Antimony's bits, the Minister of Chance's bits, and Ace and Casmus's bits. The first two of those are populated with far too many characters, most of whom have silly names that aren't enunciated well as dialogue is usually in haste or with explosions happening over the top of it. The battle that's depicted through most of the story's running time is between the Saltines and the Canestens - is that right? That's what it sounds like, but they are a type of savoury biscuit and a brand of thrush cream respectively, so probably not. The third set of bits with Ace's training is terribly dull; nothing happens in that subplot until the final episode, but that doesn't stop the other action from being interrupted through the first four episodes to cut to another sequence of Casmus being gnomic and irritating. Sometimes, often when they were just getting interesting, a subplot disappears for a long period while the others become the focus; elsewhere, though, there are sequences that restlessly cut back and forth between them after only one or two lines of dialogue (this kind of intercutting is a tell tale sign that someone on the production was trying to make two dull sequences seem interesting by chopping them up). Unnecessary cameos by good actors (Jaqueline Pearce, Anthony Head and David Soul each pop up at different points, say a line, then disappear) further muddle things.

Reportedly, Freedman had planned a 13 episode season for radio; perhaps trying to condense down all the ideas he had for that length of run to five parts created some of the problems I've described. The best section is probably the majority of the second part set on Earth with the Doctor hunting vampires. It has no superfluity of characters (arguably, it has too few as it is very clear who will secretly turn out to be undead given that there are no other suspects); it has a nice, grounded character in Speedwell (he's one of a small number of characters in the whole story that's not a Time Lord, alien, vampire or robot). It sees an honest to goodness mystery, albeit a bit of a gory one, that the Doctor has to use his wiles to investigate and address. If it was standalone, was tweaked a bit to make the Doctor more active in the denouement, had Ace swapped in for Antimony, and didn't have such an overpowering tone of pretentious ennui, it would make a great pilot for new Doctor Who for either radio or online webcast. What actually got made is neither fish nor fowl, a duck-billed platypus of a story. If one wanted to avoid doing something traditional, then it should not have starred Sylv and Sophie. It could potentially have worked if it just had the Minister as protagonist, but changed his name: a story with Stephen Fry playing the Doctor is better than one with him playing someone a bit like the Doctor. It also might just have worked if Paul McGann had starred in it, and died handing the baton over to a newly appointed Time Lord companion or the Minister or both (I can't see McGann wanting to star as the Doctor once more just to get killed off, mind). Anyway, time has passed, Doctor Who's back on TV and Death Comes to Time is what it is. It's probably worth it existing just to have the late great John Sessions in Doctor Who. He is having so much fun, unlike any of the others in the doomy cast of characters, and many of his lines are deliciously evil.

Connectivity:

Death Comes to Time and Day of the Daleks both have titles of four words starting with a 'D', and both feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, plus other UNIT personnel who report into him. Both see significant elements of the series return after five years away from viewers' screens. Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor in 2001 after last having been in the series in the TV Movie in 1996, the Daleks returned in the 1972 story after last having been seen in Doctor Who in 1967.

Deeper Thoughts:

Seriously? After being an early adopter of online social communication (see First Time Round section above) I have now, as mentioned in posts passim, given up social media altogether. I occasionally google "Doctor Who" just to check I'm not missing any news about the show, and that recently led me to see an online article published in February 2025 on the Spectator's site, titled "Doctor Who fans - and its writers - need to grow up". Prepare your Max Max Fury Road GIFs because obviously 'That's bait', but I clicked on it anyway. It was a very slightly more thoughtful piece than the usual clickbait; it also wasn't banging on about Doctor Who being woke, as I'd half expected (for those unaware or outside the UK, the Spectator is a weekly news and reviews magazine that's aimed at a highly conservative segment of the market). The writer can't resist a mention of the programme's "woke agenda" but at least has rectitude enough to put the phrase in distancing quotation marks. Mostly, though, the comment piece is a rant about "trash TV" or "pulp TV" (the writer uses both phrases) being taken too seriously. It was prompted by interviews done for the announcement of new writers that worked on scripts for Ncuti Gatwa's second season due to air in spring 2025. One of these writers, Juno Dawson, was quoted saying "Scripting the best TV show of all time is truly a dream come true"; another, Inua Ellams that "[Doctor Who] invited me to dream, to live beyond my reality" and added, "Getting to write for the show felt like touching God". Without social media, I don't know if there was a backlash from the online fan community to the Spectator article (as might have been the intention, at least of the sub-editor creating the headline), but the piece doesn't talk much about fans, anyway. Blame is reserved for the BBC.

Long-term Doctor Who fans are used to articles written by people who don't understand why anyone would like Doctor Who. I don't agree with the editorial slant of the Spectator, but I at least have empathy enough to understand other people might enjoy reading it. There is a nice line in the piece where the writer says "Part of the art of living... lies in knowing what to ignore". He couldn't manage that in this instance, though, because he feels that the BBC as "our national broadcaster" should not present Doctor Who as "a pinnacle of contemporary culture" or "a major artistic achievement" instead of the "mediocre kids' TV show" he feels it actually is. "Not everything need be high culture" he adds. As is often the case, though, he doesn't give examples of high culture, or even of any TV that is not trash; he gives examples instead of children's TV, Top Gear and moments in an old Doctor Who story that are nicely irreverent, not falling into the trap of taking themselves seriously. He also states that "Entertainment is low culture" damning everything on the box, because who is making anything for broadcast - even in news and documentaries - that doesn't aim to entertain the audience at some level? If all TV, including expensive scripted drama like Doctor Who, is trash, then  - guess what - it's all of a level, so comparisons are pointless, a kind of lively arts communism that I didn't expect to see espoused in the Spectator. One could put one's head above the parapet and make an argument that Dickens or Shakespeare are high culture even though they were the popular entertainments of their day, but someone can always disagree and set the culture bar higher. Qualifying high culture becomes such a vanishingly small selection that it ceases to have significance. High and low culture labels therefore have no utility, and the discussion boils down to things that one likes, and things that one doesn't like.

That leaves the question about whether the BBC is right or wrong to hype up the quality of Doctor Who beyond its natural limits. The criticism here I think makes two fundamental errors. The first is to imagine that the content of a single BBC Media Centre press release (let alone the comments of a couple of excitable freelance writers commissioned to work on a series) is in anyway representative of the views or approach of the BBC as an entity, or the people who make Doctor Who as a team. It's a press release, hyperbole is de rigueur. If they could have found a Doctor Who writer willing to say for the press release that they were very excited to be hired to write for a mediocre kids' TV show as they needed the money, I think the Spectator wouldn't hesitate to use that as a different stick to bash the BBC. The second error is in imagining that the content of any TV story, or any dramatic work, is in any way consistent with the process of its making. Creating a comedy requires exactly the same level of seriousness and graft, perhaps more, than making a tragedy. Doctor Who stories (even Death Comes to Time, which was tonally quite dour overall) contain moments of levity and even frivolity. But the people making them can't be frivolous; the massive budget for Doctor Who (a big give-away to those in the know that it's not just a kids' show) and the sheer number of people involved mean everything needs careful, sober management. There's probably moments of fun involved, but never frivolity. One could make up one's own clickbait headlines like 'Overpaid Doctor Who production team needs to take things more seriously' that would spring up over right-wing media if there was ever evidence to the contrary.

  

An instructive example of this was also written about online in February 2025: the Doctor Who story Fear Her had a voice role rerecorded, so it could be returned to the corporation's streaming service, the iplayer. This was because the original voice over was done by disgraced news presenter Huw Edwards, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to three counts of making indecent images of children. The decision to do this was no doubt treated with as much seriousness by those behind the scenes of Doctor Who as any considerations by those looking at any one item of BBC news and documentary archive where Edwards was a presence. Arguably, though, a more delicate job needs to be done by the entertainers. As mentioned above in relation to Death Comes to Time, metatextual distractions that impact an audience's engagement with a drama risk killing the drama altogether. Factual archive will at least have the distance of time and eventually history to potentially ease the sting of what is currently a raw issue. Taking out one acting performance and replacing it with another is risky; the situation with Fear Her was at least made easier by Edwards's performance being rubbish (the new voiceover is better) but it wasn't something that could be done in an offhand manner. In summary: Doctor Who's content should be - and is - relatively light and occasionally irreverent, but that can only be achieved if the people who make it treat it very seriously indeed.

In Summary:

A duck-billed platypus of a story, but not as fun as that sounds.

Day of the Daleks

Chapter the 321st, which - if you think about it - features two separate days of the Daleks, with the Daleks time-travelling from one to the other (but that's not as snappy a title, obviously). 

Plot:

The dire political situation of the 1970s or maybe 1980s (depending on the dating protocol) makes a third world war seemingly inevitable. Sir Reginald Styles is arranging a peace conference at Auderly House, a government owned country pile. Before the conference, a guerrilla soldier appears from thin air as Styles is working there, raises a gun as if to shoot him, then disappears again "like a ghost". UNIT investigate while Styles leaves to ensure the global delegates attend the conference. Evidence found suggests the guerrilla came from the future. The Doctor and Jo spend the night in Auderly, and in the morning three more guerrillas arrive and threaten the Doctor, thinking him to be Styles. They have come from the 22nd century to kill Styles as their history states that he tricked those attending the conference, then blew up the house killing everyone including himself. This started years of wars, then the weakened Earth was invaded by Daleks. Realising they have the wrong man, the guerrillas send one of their number to get new orders, but he does not return. Jo accidentally operates one of their personal time machines and is sent to the 22nd century. Ogrons, back from the future, attack the house. The Doctor chases after the fleeing guerrillas and travels with them to the 22nd century. He is captured and reunited with Jo and meets the local controller, a human who does the Daleks' dirty work. The guerrillas rescue the Doctor and Jo, and ask them to go back to the 20th century and kill Styles. The Doctor realises that it was the remaining guerrilla not Styles who blew up the house, as a last ditch effort to complete his mission. He and Jo go back, and evacuate the house. The Doctor persuades the guerrilla to instead use his explosives to destroy the Daleks and Ogrons who are attacking the house. UNIT fall back and let the invading aliens in. Auderly promptly goes boom, righting the timeline.

Context:

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the latest BFI Doctor Who event (see Deeper Thoughts section below). It does require a lot of luck. For the uninitiated, it involves being a member of the BFI (well worth the money, if you are even vaguely geographically close to London) but also wrestling with the BFI's website. When the monthly programme opens for members, all events in that programme - not just Doctor Who ones - sell out quickly. For those few minutes, the website gets hammered and sometimes responds in quirky ways. For the February programme's launch, the website for the first time had added rate limiting / queuing functionality; this meant that visitors that morning were shown a holding page until tickets became available, then were added to a queue. The weird thing was, it added people to a queue in a random order, rather than first come first served. The amount of luck required to get these tickets therefore increased even further. Even though our queue position was supposedly 6000+, two tickets were bagged; if the photos look further away than usual and from an awkward angle, though, this is why. This blog is all about using random factors to pick the next story. The box set schedule and the mad carousel of the BFI website had to be chance enough; I had no choice but to then blog Day of the Daleks, as it is the final Jon Pertwee story remaining to align with the write-up of the event. I watched the special edition version of Day (originally made for DVD in 2011) from the Blu-ray an episode an evening during a week of early February.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jon Pertwee's third Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth, making eight Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 34th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In February 1988, both Spearhead from Space and Day of the Daleks came out on VHS and I bought them (from W. H. Smith in Worthing) and watched them for the first time. In fact, the date of the BFI event was exactly 37 years to the day of the VHS release date of Spearhead; Day of the Daleks came out a little later on the 15th February in 1988. In those days, I had no idea what was coming out when, so walking into a shop and finding new tapes on sale was an unexpected pleasure. Before that, my Doctor Who collection was only four tapes, one of them another Jon Pertwee Dalek four-parter (Death to the Daleks) and one of them a definite crowd-pleaser (Pyramids of Mars). These new releases in February (The Robots of Death came out at the same time as Day), though, felt like a real step up in quality and excitement; plus, seven tapes felt like more of a collection than four.

Reaction:

It was a very hard choice whether to watch the as transmitted version or special edition of the story. When I first saw it in 1988, it didn't occur to me that anything in Day of the Daleks needed to be fixed; I didn't notice anything wrong with the Dalek voices, nor the climactic sequence of the attack on a country house. I still don't think the latter is that bad: yes, there are only three Daleks involved, but one could chalk that up in the story universe to each Dalek being so powerful that that's all they need (rather than the paucity of props that was the real reason). The filmed additions the special edition makes (shot using the same type of cameras used by the original crew) to that and other action sequences are done fairly seamlessly, anyway. No, it was the Dalek voices that swung the decision for me. Over the years since my first watch, I've seen all the other Dalek stories, such that the very different approach taken by the voice actors in Day have stuck out more and more. The story was made many years after the last Dalek had featured in Doctor Who, and nobody on the production knew exactly how to achieve their discordant delivery. The tendency in Day is for the dialogue to be done slowly, haltingly, without the shrill aggression, so it gets a bit boring (particularly as secondary alien foes the Ogrons also deliver everything slowly). New series voice actor Nicholas Briggs recorded new voices for the edition in 2011 that are much more in keeping with the other Dalek stories of the 1970s, and with those switched on I was able to watch without being distracted from the action quite so much. I won't cover any of the other changes or new material here, but will concentrate on the majority of the story material that is in common to both versions.

There are a few things that could do with fixing in the story that the special edition couldn't address. It can't just be me (though a quick google search doesn't find anyone else bothered by it at least enough to post somewhere online), but isn't the exterior footage quite soft? Maybe bordering on out of focus in places? I don't think (though I've not got an expert eye by any means) that this has been created by transfer of the film to video before broadcast, it looks to have been burnt in when the film was originally shot. It's a shame, as the locations used (both for the house and its grounds, and the gone-to-seed vistas of the future Earth) are good enough to want to see them with pin-sharp clarity. It was possibly a deliberate choice, as presumably was the decision to include the 'sting' from the end credits in the recap of the cliffhanger of the following parts (when I first got the story on VHS it was a stitched-together omnibus version losing all the interstitial credit sequences, and when I heard the end theme start to play for a few seconds over the action, I assumed it was somebody's editing error). Some of these aspects might be down to the inexperience of new director Paul Bernard. He does, though, get some good performances from the regulars and the guest cast playing the guerrillas (particularly Anna Barry as their leader Anat). Aubrey Woods as the Controller makes some more questionable choices. He's very theatrical, with some deliberately exaggerated physicality. Again, this may have been deliberate on the part of actor and director, the better to counterpoint those cooperating in the Daleks' Vichy regime against the more naturalistic freedom fighters bringing that regime down. I can't think of any other reason why the technicians working for the controller speak like they're hypnotised zombies.

The storyline could be said to be generic Pertwee, playing a lot of the beats that had been established in his first two years (a conference under threat, an obstructive government representative, a couple of UNIT action sequences), and it has a good few 'moments of charm' humanising its military-scientific squad (the Brig early in the morning needing coffee, Benton on the search for some food only for it to be taken by Yates because "Rank Has It's Privileges", the Doctor and Jo on ghost watch in a supposedly haunted house). Some visual moments are created at the expense of logic: the guerrilla's time travel devices behave a little differently each time they're used, depending on the needs of the plot. A lot of the scenes of world building are a bit too leisurely in their pacing. But none of the quibbles matter; the story as a whole is protected by the strength of the underlying plot of people travelling back in time to try to change the future, only to end up creating it. It's wonderful and innovative, and the moment the Doctor reveals the twist ("Styles didn't create that explosion and start the wars - you did it yourselves") is goosebumps central. Yes, in 1972 a few viewers may have known of such a story structure from an SF short story, but for the vast majority this would have been something brand new. Even in 1988 when I first saw Day of the Daleks, it was new to me and I'd guess many others buying that video (1984 film The Terminator, which uses exactly the same plot 12 years after Day, was not as well known in 1988 as it would be a few years later when its sequel came out, and I hadn't seen it at that point). The biggest selling point of the story is of course that it features the Daleks, but they are just icing on the cake (the original drafts of Louis Marks's script did not feature them). This one serves up big timey-wimey.

Connectivity:

After two stories which didn't (really) feature the Brigadier comes one that empathically does, with Nick Courtney's character not away in Geneva or Peru, or stuck inside a cyber-suit, but fully present instead in the South East of England where all the alien action happened in those days. Other than their both at least mentioning the Brig, and featuring lead characters that first appeared on Doctor Who in the 1970s, Day of the Daleks and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith also both have denouements that feature an attack on a big and mostly unoccupied building in its own grounds.

Deeper Thoughts:

From one Jon Pertwee season opener to another: BFI Spearhead from Space event, 1st February 2025. It was a crisp, bright February morning as I walked along the South Bank to the BFI. As well as myself, others of the usual crowd that come to these events in attendance were Alan, Chris, Dave and Tim. The NFT1 screen's auditorium was packed out, as is usual for these Blu-ray box set tie-in events, and the hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The former started proceedings by welcoming Doctor Who fans back to the BFI after four months, and telling us that he was "Very happy not to be presenting The Happiness Patrol". "Well, fingers crossed," added Fiddy. Jokes about the snafu at the BFI event for that story in August 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) seem to have replaced jokes about Fiddy's first name as go-to gags for warming up an audience. Later, we were still encouraged to "Shout for Dick" if we thought we knew the answers to the quiz, and as an aside Fiddy asked fans to stop shouting the same at him during conventions as the hotels involved didn't like it. Before that, Johnson read a few of the more choice comments related to the day's event on twitter. There was the obligatory tweet from a fan planning to trawl the event for cute guys (the feeling of our hosts was, not in exactly these words but definitely in their spirit, 'good luck with that'). Another regular favourite was a post from a person wearing a tie-in item of clothing; this time it was a gentleman in our row who was wearing a Silurian jumper. There were quite a few cosplayers dressed as Jon Pertwee's Doctor too. My favourite online comment read out was from someone who said that the event would be scary because "I have to be around other Doctor Who fans for hours".

The event did not have a panel per se. There are so few people to invite, as most involved in the story from both behind and in front of the cameras have passed. Instead, there were a series of one person interviews on stage. The first, before any episodes screened, was with Mark Ayres. Billed as "Sound Impresario", Ayres is responsible for restoring the audio of stories for the Collection Blu-ray box sets. He joked that the story we were about to see "follows on directly from The War Games In Colour". The recent version of the final Patrick Troughton story, now with added regeneration into Jon Pertwee, was also worked on by Ayres. Spearhead from Space is the only classic series story made in a format, 16mm film, that is compatible with HD standards. As such, it has already had a stand-alone Blu-ray release, over a decade ago. For the box set, audio restoration started again from scratch. The restored audio was described by Ayres as a "patchwork quilt" made from various sources. The original 16mm sound mags disintegrated long ago, but there are safety copies (though they were also mostly unusable) and CD copies in the archive, and all of these were reviewed. Ayres is given a rough cut of the video to work with and takes its audio track as a guide, using the best sources he has and a lot of skill to produce a restored version. He mentioned that he'd just received the guide videos for the episodes in the next box set; Johnson asked him what season that was, but Ayres would only say that it was "Season X ... or season XX". One early scene of the Brigadier and Liz Shaw had a lot of echo on the vocals, and Ayres did a lot of work to reduce that, and hopes people will now have nothing to complain about. Johnson joked that they'd probably complain thus: "You've not taken off the echo effect for God's sake?!!!".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

The first two episodes were shown next. I don't think you can go wrong with Spearhead from Space, really, and the story seemed to go down well with the audience. There was applause when Caroline John first appeared as Liz Shaw, and her first dialogue scene is now completely devoid of any distracting echoes. Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well is present and correct on the second episode's soundtrack (rights issues have meant it has appeared and disappeared from home video releases over the years). People laughed in all the intended places, and some unintended ones: the wheelchair chase at the end of episode one garnered some titters, but I think it is a rather good example of some dynamic editing. What came over most was the high quality of the characters and the dialogue. When the lights went up after the end of episode two, a cast member was invited onto stage; Robin Squire had portrayed uncredited an Auton, so hadn't got to display much character, and certainly no dialogue. He was an engaging interviewee, nonetheless. Squire's real job on the series was as assistant script editor, and he had also been mucking in on location for the filming of Spearhead as a driver, picking up and conveying actors to where they were needed. The person originally booked to play the Auton had "freaked out" on being presented with the costume and head of the creature, so Squire mucked in again. His abiding memory of playing the role was of refreshment breaks during the filming wearing a head without any mouth hole, and pining about "what it must be like to have a nice cup of tea". He got to stay with the cast and crew in the hotel on location, asking Jon Pertwee one day over breakfast to run through all his famous funny voices.

Squire (R)

Squire recalled that the shoot in October 1969 had been blessed with marvellous weather. He also remembered Caroline John coming up to ask him, having been sent by producer Derrick Sherwin, what polymer chains were (these are mentioned by Liz Shaw in dialogue). Squire didn't know why Sherwin thought he would have a clue, and assured John that as long as she was pronouncing the words right it would all be okay. His tenure as assistant script editor was relatively short. He got to see the recording of a Patrick Troughton story when he'd just started and was surprised by the tattiness of the sets; it was explained to him that "in black and white, the tattiness doesn't show". Later, he'd pitched a story idea - presumably for Inferno - but didn't get to write the screenplay, "They used a proper writer, who'd worked for Hammer". In later life, he has returned to writing, penning a non-fiction book "The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy", and very recently a screenplay which he is hoping will be filmed soon. Squire left the stage, and the final two episodes were shown. There were many more unintended laughs in the second half, some of which I didn't really share in. The total destruction effect - where film is played backwards and then sharply edited to show a person imploding and then vanishing - looks a bit Monty Python, I suppose, but the moment where Channing appears distorted through the glass of a door got a big laugh too, and I think that's an effectively creepy visual. The Nestene creature - felt by most commentators over the years to be rubbish - got off lightly by comparison. After the story ended, the person responsible for the visuals looking as good as they did was interviewed. This was Peter Crocker, who billed himself as "The Emperor of Pixel Wrangling".

Crocker (R)

Crocker is to the video as Ayres is to the audio; he confirmed on stage what Ayres had also hinted at: season 7 was the most tricky season to clean up for a box set so far, as the archive holdings are relatively poor. Spearhead presented the least issues, as it had been worked on for the stand-alone Blu-ray release in 2013. The technology available improves; also, as Crocker explained, all such restorations are time limited and so are never exhaustive. There was still more clean up to do this time, and he'd also noticed when watching the episodes shown that day some things that had still been missed; he said they would likely get fixed " the next time it comes out, in 2035". He confirmed in answer to a question from Johnson that whatever small issues remain, the Blu-ray versions will be much better than anything seen on a TV in 1970 ("We know this from recordings done at that time"). After a brief introduction of the Colour Recovery process, Crocker showed on NFT1's big screen a fascinating four-way comparison. The same clip from The Ambassadors of Death played in four different versions in each corner of the screen: top left was the black and white film version, top right was an off-air US colour video tape version, bottom left was the raw colour as created by the recovery process, and bottom right was the final restored version. It was an extreme example, but still highlighted the amount of effort that goes into this work. The colour in the bottom left section was patchy, and in the top right was barely there at all. Through technology and graft the bottom right version, which looked splendid, was created. Crocker believed that final version should pass muster with everyone barring pedants and BBC engineers (though he did concede that the former group will contain a lot of Doctor Who fans).

Next to be shown was a selection of sneak peaks at the Value Added Material: as usual it ended with a humorous selection of responses from the Behind the Sofa watchers, this time viewing season 7's finale Inferno; before that there were clips from documentaries about writer Malcolm Hulke and actor Nicholas Courtney, a clip from a Robin Ince fronted documentary on contemporary science's impact on Who, an emotional John Levene In Conversation, and a clip from a documentary about Who's relationship to suburbia. Matthew Sweet, involved in the last two on that list, was the next guest. He's often in the audience for these BFI events, but I've never seen him on stage before. He was as entertaining and humorous an interviewee as he is interviewer, though he couldn't help turning the tables a couple of times: "So, how did you two get together?" he asked of Johnson and Fiddy at one point, and later in a tiny lull smilingly barked "Come on then, ask me a question?". When it was suggested that the clip of John Levene showed a gamut of emotions, Sweet hinted that we hadn't seen anything yet, "The gamut goes on". He outlined his theory that Doctor Who is one of the most researched things there's ever been; when future alien archaeologists reflect on evidence they've found on Earth, he expects they'll think that Who "must have been ... as important as America." There was particular focus on the detail of his approach for his ' In conversation' interviews with Doctor Who alumni. There is a limit to how much time they will spend with any interviewee, as the one-to-one interview is an exhausting experience, so it's important to create a space where people feel comfortable to share. From the vantage point of age, interviewees seem to be more free to speak, can be more reflective, and less worried about speaking about some topics.

Sweet (R)

Sweet was asked what it's like as interviewer and long-term fan when an interviewer gets details of their long ago activity wrong; he recalled having to gently remind Michael Grade three times - for the interview on the Season 22 box set - that Grade hadn't cancelled the programme, merely taken it off the air for a few months. Sweet had differing responses to some comparisons about his interviewing style (Russell Harty was fine, but he was not so keen on Piers Morgan). There was an amusing but off topic reminiscence about interviewing Norman Wisdom at his house ("We called it an interview but it was more like a hostage situation"); then, finally he touched on what Doctor Who means to him ("I consider myself profoundly afflicted... it's in my DNA... in my dreams"). Once he'd left the stage, another guest was introduced who could also make the claim that Doctor Who was in their DNA. Daisy Ashford is the daughter of Caroline John, who played companion Liz Shaw in season 7, and Geoffrey Beevers, who had a smaller role in season 7 and later played the Master in the series. Now, Ashford plays the character her mother originated in Big Finish Doctor Who audios. I think I've met Daisy briefly: as recounted in the blog post for Spearhead linked a few paragraphs above, I once met John and Beevers (with family members, one of which I'm sure was their daughter) waiting for the lift at a Doctor Who convention. Ashford asked the audience for a show of hands of who had met her mother, and I was able to put my hand up. She also recounted John's leaving the show thinking she hadn't done well in the role, as I touch on in the Spearhead post. It took joining the convention circuit, starting with one in Manchester in the 1990s, to persuade her otherwise; "Being back in the fold meant a lot to her".

Ashford (R)

Ashford thought the newly restored episodes she'd seen that day were "beautiful" and "stunning"; she has had to view the season as a whole previously in preparation for the Big Finish role as Liz. "How many people here know Big Finish?" she asked. Almost all hands shot up. "You're speaking to the right audience" said Johnson. When she was offered the role, she instantly said yes (and imagined her late mother saying "I'm going to sort out some acting work for you"). The responsibility of what she was doing only hit her once she was in the studio, but Tim Treloar (who plays the third Doctor for audio) and Jon Culshaw (who was a guest actor in her first audio) helped her adjust. She understands what a privilege it is, and enjoys how it's a connection to her mother. She talked a bit about what her mother was like as a person and an actor, including an anecdote about seeing her on stage at the National Theatre catching a bee that had been buzzing around the actors, and releasing it away from the stage, all the while staying in character. Ashford confirmed that she had been a Doctor Who fan as a child, her era was Sylvester McCoy with Sophie Aldred as Ace, but she didn't "connect the dots" to her mother's era, "It was like a different show". One audience question related to the feminist angle of Liz Shaw's character, something Ashford appreciated in the 1970s stories, thinking that her mother's character was " a trail blazer" who "had to defer to men somewhat, but didn't do it willingly". She recounted how her mother had met female fans who had been inspired to become scientists because of Liz. Of the season 7 stories, Ashford's favourites are the Silurians story and Inferno (both see "The good guys being not that good, the bad guys not being all that bad").

How did these two get together?

After Ashford's interview, the box set trailer was shown, and the event was over (apart from the obligatory few post-screening drinks in the BFI bar). The next event at the end of February 2025 is a screening of the animated version of The Savages, and I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to that one too, so all being well should be able to share a write-up of it here in a few weeks.

In Summary:

An innovative plot, which has been used elsewhere so much since 1972 that we don't give Day of the Daleks the credit it deserves.