Slipback

Chapter the 324th, which covers a Hiatus Hitch-Hiker homage.

Plot:

The Doctor and Peri arrive on a space freighter, the Vipod Mor, as the TARDIS has picked up evidence of dangerous time experiments happening aboard. The experiments are the work of the ship's computer, which has decided that humanity is evil and must be rebooted; it has lured the Doctor to the ship deliberately to get his help. Peri gets split up from the Doctor and meets two undercover police officers searching for an art thief (who turns out to be one of the ship's officers, and nothing to do with the main plot). The captain of the ship has the ability to deliberately generate illnesses in himself that he can then pass on to other people; he gets very depressed at not being able to meet Peri, and incubates an incurable disease that could wipe out the crew; this doesn't happen in the end, and also has nothing to do with the main plot. Reaching out mentally to the Doctor has caused the computer to develop a split personality. It defeats itself, with its good side taking the ship far back in time and setting it to self-destruct. The Doctor is about to avert the explosion, when a Time Lord instructs him not to as it will be the big bang that creates the universe. The Doctor dwells on his meddling behaviour. Presumably, all the crew of the ship are therefore killed.

Context:

Another journey off the straight and narrow of official canon requires answering my standard set of questions of Slipback. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or 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. Does it have pictures? Ah. Without that last hurdle cleared, the choice was either not to blog it, or to relax the rule. I don't want to open the floodgates for every Big Finish audio there's ever been or I'll never ever be finished. On the other hand, some of the missing TV stories already blogged were experienced with no visuals, and some webcasts and recons had barely more than a still image changing every so often. After some thought, I decided to remove that question from the set; I doubt I'll make a habit of covering audio-only stories, but one or two won't hurt. It's also nice to boost Colin Baker's total, as he made so few stories for TV. As I was considering all this, I realised that it must be getting on for the 40 year anniversary of the announcement that Colin's Doctor was going to be taken off TV for 18 months, a period later known as the Hiatus. Slipback originally aired during that period. When I checked it out, I found the exact date of the announcement was the 27th February 1985. On the day I checked it out, it was the 26th February 2025. On the anniversary the next day, I commemorated the event that still lives in the psyche of many who were fans at the time (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details) by listening to Slipback from CD, all in one sitting.

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. To put that point off a bit, just so the blog doesn't have a period where I just cover a succession of Ncuti Gatwa stories, I am throwing in a few spin-offs and oddities like Slipback. Beyond those, I have completed nine Doctors' televisual eras proper (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 35 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

It was 1986 before my family got either a video player or a stereo with radio and tape-deck built in; so, Slipback, broadcast in July and August 1995, was officially the last Doctor Who I couldn't record for posterity. It disappeared into the ether, only persisting in my memory. Not even persisting in my memory, to be honest, because I only listened to the first two episodes. The mechanics of catching it were just too much of an - and I'll use a technical radio term here - absolute ball-ache. It was broadcast in the UK on BBC Radio 4, but not as a programme in its own right; instead, it formed two short segments of a long magazine show called Pirate Radio 4. This ran on three Thursday mornings in the school holidays from 9am to midday, and contained no other segments of interest to this teenager; plus, there weren't separate times for the different segments given in listings. So, I'd have to get up early and stay by the radio for anywhere up to the whole three hours to be absolutely sure I could catch twenty minutes of Doctor Who. After the first time, it didn't seem worth the effort. The story was released on cassette and vinyl in 1988, but I didn't buy it then. I first got to hear the latter two-thirds of the story in 2001, when it was re-released on CD. In between, it was novelised as part of the Target Doctor Who books range. I bought that book, and read it a few times. As I'll touch on in the Reaction section below, Slipback was trying very hard to be like Douglas Adams's work. Maybe it was falling short, but I was young enough not to have discernment, and Adams books didn't exactly get published at an urgent frequency. As such, I fell upon the book with more enthusiasm than it deserved, just because of an aching withdrawal from the real thing. It was like Hitch Hiker methadone.

Reaction:

It's a sci-fi show on the radio in the 1980s, so it was very likely it would ape Douglas Adams's work. The initial radio version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide of the Galaxy in the late 1970s was such a big hit, spawning a TV series and four best-selling novels in the first half of the 1980s, that in 1985 it would have been the first place anyone's imagination went to if creating a relatively light-hearted audio sci-fi story. Eric Saward, writer of Slipback, should possibly have taken time enough to think of a different approach and come out from under the long shadow that Adams was casting; but, I don't want to judge too harshly, as I don't know how long he had. I get the impression that Slipback may have been a rush commission. So, the audience gets some quite familiar moments, such as computers and robots with irritatingly inappropriate personalities, a couple of aggressive space policemen, someone doing a voice like Sandra Dickinson's while reciting probabilities (as Dickinson did as Trillian in the TV version of Hitch Hiker), the captain of a spaceship in a bath, the Doctor talking about going to parties and drinking in a way that's out of character for him but wholly within the character of Ford Prefect, and the weaponisation of awful poetry. What the script struggles to do is find the level of cosmic absurdity in its jokes that Adams's best work has. The most original concept is the Captain's ability to make his psychosomatic illnesses real, and then pass them on to other people, but it isn't integrated into the plot very well. The Doctor only finds out about the threat second-hand without meeting the captain, and never resolves that subplot before the end.

Also at the cosmic scale, of course, is the revelation that the Vipod Mor's time-travel self-destruct is the cause of the big bang that created the universe. This doesn't count in the script's favour, however, as it is such a hackneyed plot device from many a science fiction story before and after Slipback. One instance of such a reveal was in the Doctor Who story Terminus from only two years earlier, which one would think Saward would have remembered as he worked on the story as script editor. Apart from a few homages to Hitch Hiker, and this twist at the end - the resolution of which creates a significant problem of protagonist passivity that I'll touch on in a moment - there's not much here. There are a handful of characters who aren't great company for the listener (and this includes the Doctor and Peri who are still in their bickering mode from season 22 rather than the more friendly relationship the actors insisted on in the next season). These characters mill about, not fully interacting with one another or with the main plot. At the climax, after doing some investigation but not really influencing the events taking place, the Doctor leaps into action to stop the Vipod Mor's explosion. Then, an almost literal Deux ex Machina ending occurs: a Time Lord appears and decides how the story will end, ticking the Doctor off for almost averting the creation of the universe. The Doctor backs down, defeated and chastened. This doesn't sit right with me for the character or the genre: couldn't the Doctor have still worked to save the crew of the Vipod Mor? The way it plays out, it looks like he leaves them to their fate, but nobody needs to be on the ship when it explodes (the computer is controlling the ship, after all).

This means that the Doctor doesn't really do anything in the story. Okay, his personality being imprinted on the computer causes a battle within the machine for control by the two sides of its split personality, which the good, Doctor-influenced side eventually wins. It nonetheless leaves Colin Baker as a bystander in his own show. It's even more evidence backing up my theory that Eric Saward, maybe subconsciously, maybe not, hates the Doctor and Doctor Who. The Time Lords are supposed to be the dull, rigid forces of conformism that inhibit the Doctor's ability to make a difference in his adventuring; yet, in this story the Time Lord has the moral victory. Questioning the central morality of the series and its protagonist might be a good topic for a story, but only if it formed one small part of a series where the rest of the time the Doctor is portrayed as a positive force for good. Otherwise, what is the audience left with: the adventures of a bungling interventionist who needs a schoolmaster lecture any time he tries to do anything? Why would anyone want to watch or listen to that show? It certainly couldn't be covered adequately in a tossed-off little trifle for kids on the radio. Saward had another crack at it; the following season that the viewers would have the long wait to see also focussed a majority of its time on explicitly criticising the Doctor's behaviour, rather than just letting him have fun adventures. Like that next season, Slipback also has ridiculously overblown cliffhangers with the Doctor saying things like "Peri! Nooooooooooo!!!!!", but that's quite fun to be honest. Concentrate on that, and doing the I-Spy book of Douglas Adams references, and you can just about get through the hour of Slipback. Just about.

Connectivity:

Like last time, there's a great link to The Savages (the antagonist attempting to use the Doctor inadvertently picks up some of his personality); unfortunately, The Savages wasn't the last story blogged (though the Deeper Thoughts section covered the animation of it). The Romans and Slipback at least have in common that both feature the Doctor and alcohol (he sips wine on the TV, and on the radio he's recovering from a night where he drank three bottles of fictional tipple Voxnic).

Deeper Thoughts:

The 40 Year-Old Hiatus. Slipback probably got more attention from fans than it would have done, had it not been the only small trickle of new Who action available during an 18 month drought. The announcement and news stories came before Colin Baker's first full run in 1985 had even finished: the show had come close to cancellation, but instead it would be off screens for substantially longer than usual before it returned in 1986. This has been documented extensively elsewhere, but I don't know how easy it is for someone who wasn't a fan at the time to appreciate from that documentation how it felt. In the 1970s, Doctor Who would be on for half of the year, off for half the year, with six month gaps between runs. In the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras (first because of episodes being shown twice weekly, then because of double-length episodes) the seasons were got through in three months, and the gaps between stretched to nine. From the start of April 1985, fans faced a wait double that length, and three weeks of short radio episodes four months in to that wait didn't do too much to soften the blow. Don't get me wrong, though; the blow wasn't about the length of the wait; this wasn't about a lot of spoilt people petulantly stamping their feet and demanding their Who fix now, now now! Some felt like that, I'm sure, but for them (even if they didn't realise it) and for everyone else, the real blow was the forced realisation that Doctor Who being on the TV in any calendar year was optional. I don't think that had penetrated fan psyches before; they could - and did - slag off the show's quality ad nauseum in the knowledge that it would always come back, always evolve. Now, it looked vulnerable, it looked like, on any particular day, it could just stop and not come back for a long time, or at all.

The Sun 1985 Doctor Who speculation

If this had a greater impact anywhere than in the minds of fans, it was in the UK's tabloid media landscape. Doctor Who always made for good press, with all those photo splashes of Daleks and Cybermen queueing for buses, and speculations on whom the new Doctor Who would be, and whatnot. From 28th February 1985 - when stubbornly popular red-top the Sun's front page headline was "Dr Who is Axed in a BBC Plot" - a new seam opened up which has been mined every since: speculations on if the new Doctor Who would be. It's no exaggeration that ever since then stories of the cancellation versus the continuation of Doctor Who have been a constant back and forth on the inky pages, and latterly online websites, of the simpler wing of the fourth estate. In February and March 2025, 40 years on, this phenomenon was again witnessed in a high concentration of speculative articles. These suggested, amongst other things, the following: Ncuti Gatwa was thinking of leaving, or had already left having filmed his regeneration scene; this was because he wanted to go and work in Hollywood, or that he felt that the programme's quality was reflecting badly on him; Doctor Who was facing cancellation because of low ratings, or because of poor management; David Tennant was coming back to play the Doctor again; there had been lots of lay offs in the production team, etc. etc. Some of this was contradictory. If Doctor Who was being cancelled, Ncuti Gatwa would be free to do whatever he wanted and wouldn't have to make a big deal of leaving. If Doctor Who's future was in any doubt, would a regeneration scene really have been filmed (who would they regenerate Ncuti into, if the show wasn't necessarily going to carry on)? The mention of lay offs smacked of dodgy reporting. Almost all the people working on Doctor Who will be freelancers, just because of the nature of the industry, and wouldn't be laid off, just would not have their contracts renewed. This has almost certainly happened.

The 2025 version: an image from The Sun's website

Putting aside speculation, and taking the consistent official statements made on the subject at face value, it is known that Disney+ have not made a decision yet on whether they will continue to co-fund Doctor Who beyond their initial commitment of two series and one spin-off. They will make this decision after Ncuti's second series drops. The production team would no doubt have wanted the decision to be earlier than this. The date for the first episode of the series becoming available has been confirmed as 12th April 2025. In March 2025, post production would be very close to completion for that series, and well underway for the spin-off too (it finished production at the end of December 2024). If a positive decision had been made by Disney+ before, then everyone engaged on the production could have rolled on to a third series (for which Russell T Davies has already written scripts, in order to be ready) without any break. As it is, it would be expensive to keep a lot of contracted crew benched awaiting a decision. So, of course, people will have had their contracts come to end. Perhaps a disgruntled one of their number was a source of the story. Perhaps it was just some rabid Doctor Who fan on social media speculating. Or perhaps there's no source at all, as anyone following things closely could have knocked up such a piece, as long as they weren't too bothered about the truth. For example, all the stuff about bad ratings was disingenuous. First, the most recent story broadcast Joy to the World was in the top ten for Christmas Day and the whole Christmas week, which is hardly cause for concern. Second, that positive rating, and any less positive figures for the series preceding it, mean nothing to Disney+; they will only be interested in their own metrics, which don't include the UK screenings.

Series '2' is coming soon...

Usually streamers keep such things closely guarded, but surprisingly, in the midst of all the negativity, some detail was released, and it was very positive: Doctor Who was in the Disney+ global top 5 for every week when the episodes first became available. If the next series fares as well, is this enough for the House of Mouse to say 'Yes', and for the series to be recommissioned? Only they know for sure. If they don't invest, is the show's UK performance sufficient for the BBC to continue alone, or at least to try to find another source of co-production funds? Only they know for sure. There's every reason for optimism; but, it does seem likely that, if production can only resume in May 2025 at the very earliest, then there will be another hiatus before we get a new season. But we fans have coped with that before, and we can again. In the mean time, there's a brand new series of Doctor Who coming soon to enjoy.

In Summary:

Just about tolerable at an hour's length; but, obviously, real Douglas Adams is better.

The Romans

Chapter the 323rd, which features a bit of a carry on, but no Cleo. 

Plot:

Rome, 64AD. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki have a holiday for a few weeks in somebody else's vacated villa near the city, before the Doctor gets bored and goes off to Rome with Vicki. On route, he finds a dead body by the side of the road, and is mistaken for the dead man, Corinthian lyre player Maximus Pettulian. Ian and Barbara are captured by slave traders. Ian becomes a galley slave on a ship; Barbara is sold at auction in Rome, to work in Nero's court. Ian's ship is destroyed in a storm, and with help from fellow slave Dedos makes his way to dry land; they both journey to Rome. The Doctor and Vicki meet Nero, but manage to miss bumping into Barbara. Nero takes a shine to Barbara, and spends a lot of time chasing after her - literally - much to the displeasure of his wife. Barbara survives her own assassination attempt, as she drinks from the wrong cup, avoiding a poisoned one. The Doctor discovers that Petullian's plan before he was killed was to assassinate Nero. After a rapturous reception for the Doctor's lyre playing, Nero plans to feed the Doctor to the lions in the arena. Nero visits the Gladiator school, taking Barbara with him. Ian and Dedos are forced to fight to the death for Nero's amusement, but instead turn their swords on the guards and escape, Ian telling Barbara that he'll come to find her. The Doctor inadvertently gives Nero the idea to burn Rome to the ground, and is spared death by lions. Nero invites the Roman hoi polloi to his palace and instructs them to set fires in the city; this allows Ian and Dedos to sneak in and rescue Barbara. The Doctor and Vicki also slip out. As Rome burns, all of them travel separately to the villa and meet back there.

Context:

The Romans will probably be the last ever purely historical story I cover, unless there's a surprise change of direction in the new series. The recent post for Day of the Daleks may have been the last Dalek story I ever write about. I've got at least one more story each left for the Sontarans, Master and Cybermen, but nothing more for Skaro's finest. It seems likely that any or all of those could appear versus Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor or a future Doctor (if there is one), though. A 21st century story set in Earth's past with no alien antagonists is much less likely. I enjoyed all the historicals watched for the blog over the years, but must admit that when The Romans came up, as the only Willian Hartnell story remaining to align with the write-up for a Hartnell-related BFI event (see Deeper Thoughts below), I wasn't 100% enthusiastic. It felt like only yesterday that I last watched the story, when the second season came out on Blu-ray. In fact, that was more than two years ago. Rightly or wrongly, I still felt a bit fatigued with it; to get over this, I watched the story one episode a week (on Sundays) during February and March 2025. It was enjoyable when watched in that way. The Better Half joined me at the start, and agreed with me that Ian and Barbara are definitely doing it by now (witnessing their relaxed, and possibly post-coital, scenes alone with each other in that first episode, and at end). This wasn't enough to keep her interested for the remaining three parts, though, and I watched them on my own.

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 yet another Doctor's televisual era; William Hartnell's first Doctor joins the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making nine completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 35th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

I didn't start keeping a diary until the first of January the following year, so I can't be 100% sure, but I believe that the purchase of The Romans on VHS (in a double pack with preceding story The Rescue) was the first Doctor Who product I ever bought with money from post-education employment. I'd finished university in the spring of 1994, dossed around for most of the Summer, then got a temp job. I was working at Griffin Factors (now part of HSBC) in Worthing, in an office a little out of town near the hospital. On the 5th September, or thereabouts, I would have walked into the main shopping area in Montague Street after work, and used my hard earned cash at Volume One. This independent book and video shop was my usual supplier of Doctor Who videos for most of the 1990s, and as such looms large in my memory of Doctor Who stories first watched on video. [I was pleased to find when googling about Volume One, curious to know when it ceased trading, that the author of a couple of excellent non-fiction books about Doctor Who that came out in the last few years, Paul Hayes, was bought his first ever Doctor Who book in the store - see here for the full interview.] My memory of the time is more than hazy, but I would likely have then travelled home on the bus and watched both stories straight away in one sitting.

Reaction:

This blog has been a nearly ten year long experiment into the random. I believed it was much more common, for fans or more casual viewers alike, to encounter Doctor Who stories in no particular order: people watch on TV every so often but not regularly, say, or pick up one or two or all of the books, videos, DVDs or Blu-rays (which have always come out in a haphazard non-chronological order). As such, my hypothesis was that watching the entirety of Who in a shuffled way would garner more insight than starting with An Unearthly Child and progressing in a linear fashion. In the main, I think the hypothesis has held, but on occasion one misses out by not seeing a story in the context of those around it. The Romans is such a case. This was the 12th Doctor Who story, and - though there had been the odd bit of humorous business in the first 11 - was the show's first foray into outright comedy. How jarring would it have been to those watching as it first went out? It's hard to say watching it in isolation, but it would probably be hard to say anyway. Humour is notoriously subjective, but tastes in humour also evolve. The story is 60 years old, and different boundaries existed for what was funny back then, particularly the delicately balanced humour seen here which - though much more prevalent than in other Doctor Who stories - still has to hang on the skeleton of an action adventure narrative. It's so hard to know whether writer Dennis Spooner and director Christopher Barry were just intending it to raise a smile, or to be laugh out loud funny. If it was the latter, I think they failed (at least for this viewer many years later). Perhaps the weight of expectation of this being the first 'funny one' only exists because of the history and the looking back; at the time, perhaps there were no expectation, and that helped to make it more easily enjoyable.

Watching in 2025, when The Romans can't help but seem at a distant historical remove, this translates into some disconcertingly jarring tonal swerves. There's a slapstick fight where Barbara accidentally brains Ian smashing a vase on his head when she was trying to immobilise an enemy. Ho ho. That act, though, condemns them to capture to be sold as chattels, which mere minutes later the characters and the script treat sombrely. Ho ho... slavery? Nero chasing Barbara around is treated like a Benny Hill sequence without the Yakety Sax; but, if he catches her it is clear that he is going to force himself on her, with her consent not a consideration. Ho ho... sexual assault? Okay, it may be unfair to blame The Romans for every bedroom farce that looks tasteless in a different light. The trouble is that in the Doctor Who story the light keeps changing, back and forth. A stage farce would be able to fully commit, anyway, whereas Doctor Who can't. There can't be overt references to sex in the programme, and the regulars have to play to their existing characters (or else the whole dramatic edifice collapses, for this and any subsequent stories). One might just think that they shouldn't have tried it, but Doctor Who and the Hartnell period in particular thrives on experimentation. Besides, a lot of the material in The Romans lands, usually when the script is not trying so hard. For the most part it's sprightly and / or charming. The scenes mentioned above (in the Context section) with Ian and Barbara hanging out and goofing around in the villa are lovely. Some of the Doctor's material is fun. The guest characters are nicely played. Excepting Nero, who's written by Spooner and performed by Derek Francis quite broadly, everyone else has some detail and dimensions to their characterisation provided in the script.

All the near misses where the different members of the TARDIS team just manage to avoid bumping into each other are fun (and reminiscent of the beginning of new series story Partners in Crime). There's a few nice dramatic plot beats, including the moment where Dedos and Ian realise they have to fight each other to the death, the reveal at the end that Tavius's actions have been directed by his Christianity (he's an early adopter), and the shocking moment where it looks like Nero has stabbed Barbara to death, but instead has killed the guard behind her. The Doctor managing to get through a public performance despite not being able to play the lyre by using an Emperor's New Clothes gambit (Nero and all his hangers-on pretend they can hear his 'delicate music' - actually miming - because they don't want to appear unsophisticated) is nice. Ian has a great line of dialogue about the Doctor "I've got a friend who specialises in trouble - he dives in and usually finds a way". Everyone's trying to kill everybody else in the story - it's pretty bloodthirsty for a light comedy - but there's a lot of energy in the scenes where the Doctor's trying to work out in what type of conspiracy the person whose place he's taken was involved. The most interesting part for fans is probably the Doctor inadvertently starting a fire, his glasses magnifying the sun's rays onto some parchment, and giving Nero the idea to burn down the city; it's the first time that our heroes are shown to be able to create recorded history by their own actions. All the following sequences regarding the great fire of Rome are played for laughs, of course: ho ho... destruction and death?!

Connectivity:

The Savages (subject of Deeper Thoughts section below, but not the main focus of this blog post) has a great connection to the last story blogged, Death Comes to Time, as both include vampiric characters attempting to extract something from the Doctor and it backfiring on them. The Romans has diddly squat in common with the webcast story, bar the irritating folksy music played in the latter being a little like the lyre music of Maximus Petullian.

Deeper Thoughts:

From the ancient to the elders: BFI screening of The Savages animation + Q&A, 28th February. This was the first Doctor Who BFI event to take place on a Friday evening, a fact that hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy mined for a few jokes. When Johnson made some mistakes on stage (including having the wrong answer to one of the quiz questions, and getting schooled by the expert fan audience), Fiddy said "We won't do this on a Friday again ... it's his drinking day". In honour of the change of slot, the quiz saw the audience shouting "Richard" rather than "Dick" if they wanted to attract Fiddy's roaming mic. "It's the PG Version" said Fiddy; "We've gone woke!" said Johnson. Both were on good form: later on in the quiz, Johnson asked a comic, fake question playing on the tabloid stories about Doctor Who's possible cancellation: "The Savages is from season three of the original series, will there be a season three of the new show?". Fiddy highlighted the contemporary relevance of The Savages, it being a story about "A rich and powerful elite sucking the lifeblood out of the poor". After musing on whether episode hunter Philip Morris might have the film reels of The Savages "up his sleeve", Johnson said he should probably stop making this "12-year old joke" (Morris returned nine episodes to the archives in 2013, but rumours got out of control that there were more found that had not been returned). As usual, Johnson read out some tweets; it was someone's birthday, it was someone's first ever Doctor Who event at the BFI, someone got a plug in for their podcast. One fan tweeted that they were happy with the event being on a Friday as they find "Doctor Who fans more tolerable when I've had a drink". There was also the obligatory cheeky tweet from a gay fan pretending to be trolling at the event, saying that they - like the city dwellers in the story - would like to "drain some fit men of their vitality too".

Johnson (L) and Fiddy (R)

The first person to be invited up on stage was Mark Ayres, who did sound restoration on the audio that is the basis for the animation. The sources he used for this were the late Graham Strong's recordings of parts one to three, and the 'Randolph' tapes for part four. Strong was described by Ayres as "The first person to take the back off his telly and risk death" by soldering in a direct link from the audio output into his recording device. The latter source is a set of tapes found in a skip; it's unknown who made the recordings, but their labels have the name Randolph on them. These tapes have only just started to be used on Doctor Who releases recently after their discovery a few years back. That new source, plus improvements in technology, skill and experience since, mean that Ayres feels better equipped to tackle some of the challenges yet to come. He mentioned that he'd previously dreaded cleaning up The Myth Makers, as well as one Patrick Troughton story that he left unnamed; now, though, he believes that whichever stories are selected they'll be brought up to an acceptable standard. He echoed Fiddy's comments about the contemporary relevance of the storyline, and also championed the incidental score by Raymond Jones (a link to The Romans, the only story other than The Savages for which Jones wrote music). After that, the first two episodes of The Savages were shown. The animation is in the 2D style and made by the same team that previously did The Underwater Menace and The Evil of the Daleks, and other stories before that. It is an efficient but enjoyable way to visualise the story, with good use of colour to mark out the different worlds inhabited by the city dwellers versus the savages. The likenesses of the Doctor and Steven weren't perfect, but Dodo was spot on.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

As ever when watching with a large group, the humour is more apparent. The Doctor's reference to the machine he uses in the first episode, the Reacting Vibrator, inevitably got a huge laugh from the audience. Beyond that, it was hard to tell as a couple of fellows sitting directly behind us found everything - and I mean everything - side-splittingly hilarious and guffawed all the way through. I suspect some alcoholic lubrication had occurred. Anyway, my original thoughts on the story, written during the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic, are here; one thing that I noticed this time that I didn't in 2020 was the possibly loose way that characters refer to the unnamed planet's inhabitants, savages and city dwellers alike, as human beings. Were they supposed to be colonists, or was this just a shorthand for 'higher sentient beings'? The animation can't do anything about that, but it can erase the possibly dubious use in the original of make-up to darken some characters complexions. According to the panel afterwards, Jano is probably wearing gold face paint, but this doesn't come out very well in the black and white photos from the production. This panel, in a break at the midpoint of the story, focussed on the new pictures and featured animation director and producer AnneMarie Walsh, colourist Vinny Payne, animator Thomas Bland, and executive Paul Hembury. Walsh and Hembury both celebrated the work of the team to achieve what we'd seen on the big screen that day, highlighting the small number of people involved (from six to eight members at different points of an approximately nine month project). Walsh described some of the design choices made: an imaginative jumping off point for the look of the city was a proboscis, to subtly show the blood-sucking nature of those that live there.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Walsh, Payne, Bland, Hembury

Payne presented an interesting clip showing his work in colour grading the episodes, though the loud music on it overpowered most of his commentary (at least from my seat). Bland said that his greatest challenge this time was animating William Hartnell's facial expressions. This is the first Hartnell story that this particular team has worked on. Walsh commended its cerebral script, but added that "Pat Troughton's still my favourite Doctor". Hembury humorously pointed out how much of a Doctor Who expert Walsh had become after starting work on the animations many years ago as a newcomer to the Doctor's world; "I've gone over to the dark side," she quipped back. Hembury went a little into the executive decisions and deals forming the background to the creative work, as he'd done in the panel for the BFI screening of the team's last animation for The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post). Again, he jokingly gave a politician's "I'm glad you asked me that question" reply on one occasion, but again he was forthcoming on some details. He no longer works for the BBC but is continuing in his exec producer role, and is currently in the process of doing a deal to accelerate the rate that this team can produce animations by getting commitments up front for more than one story at a time. When asked if he could imagine a world where all 1960s seasons of Doctor Who had Blu-ray box sets with their archive gaps plugged by animations, he replied "I can definitely imagine that world, I imagine it on a daily basis". He confirmed that is indeed the intention, but again made clear that no deal is finalised as yet.

There was time for a few audience questions; one was about the possibility of crowd-funding (this isn't something that would be explored while BBC Studios still provide budget), and if there were concerns about replicating the original production's make-up (they decided to avoid it altogether). There was also an interesting question about whether there's a risk that anything they animate might impact the age certification of a disc release. Walsh explained that the biggest thing that had come up was not about sex or violence but smoking. In The Evil of the Daleks' animation, the character of Maxtible could hold a cigar, as long as he wasn't seen to light or puff on it. Beyond that, it was more likely to be the special features on a disc that impacted its certification. With audience questions over, the panel members left the stage and the final two episodes were shown. My overall impression is a very positive one, though I should declare that I went in with quite low expectations. Moving visuals make everything in the story so much better: Frederick Jaeger's impression of William Hartnell is more fun, and there are moments of honest to goodness emotion (including Steven's farewell scene, though it's still abrupt). The destruction of the laboratory at the climax probably posed the most challenges to animate, but it works well. After the story was the final onstage interview, this time with Peter Purves who played Steven in the story. Johnson greeted him onstage with "It's nice to see you in 3D", and once sat down Purves said to the audience "You just witnessed the end of my acting career". Very early on in the interview Purves mentioned something that would become a theme for the chat, that his recall of this story and a lot of Doctor Who in general is minimal: "I remember... forgetting all about The Savages".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Purves

The interview started by focussing on Purves's leaving the show in the story, part of more widespread cast changes by new producer Innes Lloyd that would eventually see the leading man replaced also. Purves described it as "an uneasy time". William Hartnell, who as usual got a warm and positive but not uncritical personality appraisal from Purves, tried to get the producer to change his mind about ending Purves's time on Doctor Who. Back then, though, stars had less power than they would now, and it came to nothing. Once he'd left, Purves didn't think much about Doctor Who ("I've never been a nostalgic person... never looked back... never kept diaries") until joining the convention circuit. His first attendance of an event was in 1996, thirty years after leaving Who. After that, doing work on the narrated audio releases brought back a lot of memories, though he conceded some of those memories might well be wrong: "I enjoy talking about [Doctor Who], and some of it will be true". There was a question about his regular anecdote about making a story revisiting the planet of The Savages only to find that Steven had become an awful despot of a leader. He explained that it was never a pitched idea, but that Simon Guerrier had done a trilogy of plays that covered Steven's later adventures for audio company Big Finish. He delivered another frequently told anecdote about William Emms, writer of the third story Steven appeared in, Galaxy 4; Emms had built the story around Ian and Barbara's presence before they were written out, and did a hasty rewrite job meaning Purves's futuristic space pilot got the dialogue and action of a 1960s schoolmistress, much to the actor's chagrin. When asked if he met any of the show's writers during production, he replied "Unfortunately yeah, I met William Emms".

Purves confirmed in answer to an audience question that he never saw The Savages when it first went out, and - just like most in the audience - was seeing it for the first time with pictures that day. He thought the animation captured Jackie Lane as Dodo particularly well in both look and movement; "I was going to say the voice was good," he added, "But it was her!". Towards the end, he comically admonished the animation team for the spoiler they had shown everyone: the video they'd played after the episode two cliffhanger, where the Doctor is in danger, included a clip from the third episode where he's alive: "Naughty!". And that was that: it was time to go to the bar and have a drink and a nice chat with friends Chris, Dave and Tim, and say hello to a few others. It's uncertain when the next BFI event will take place; it will only be when there is a tie-in product (box set or animation) coming out with which the session can align; another box set is expected this year, and potentially another animation too, but they will likely not be until late in 2025 after the new series has been broadcast. As such, I don't know whether I'll still have any stories left to blog to which I can attach any future write-ups; with the new queuing system on the BFI's website (see Context section of this blog post) I don't know if I'll even get tickets in future. If this is the last event of this type that I cover on the blog, it was definitely an interesting one to go out on.

In Summary:

Ho ho! Carry On Slavery, Sexual Assault, Destruction and Death. Erm...