Search Out Space

Chapter the 335th, is - if one's honest - not that ultimate a challenge (it's barely 20 minutes long).

Plot:

The Doctor presents the Ultimate Challenge, an intergalactic game show (presumably beamed out to millions of viewers picking up the signal on their Time-Space Visualisers). The challengers on the show are Ace, K9 and an alien called Cedric (from the planet Quirk according to the ever-reliable internet, but the subtitles on my DVD - erm, I mean Time Space Visualiser, of course - say it's the planet Glurk). Various questions are posed about planetary motion and other aspects of astronomy. Occasionally, the programme is interrupted by commercial breaks. At one point K9 can't answer a question and ends up transported into deep space, where the Doctor rescues him. The final question from the Doctor challenges people to find the key to the universe in 30 seconds. K9 tells him this can't be done, and that's the correct answer. The Doctor has an ice cream, and the programme concludes.

Context:

As you can see in the Milestone Watch below, there are very few Doctor Who stories left for me to cover. I'm also running short on curios like Search Out Space to intersperse with those stories, but there are still a few left that meet my set criteria for spin-off inclusion. To whit... Does it star the Doctor? In the case of this story, that's a definite 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)? It's not just a skit and there is a small element of jeopardy (ish). 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. Like the recently blogged Shada webcast, Search Out Space did end up as an extra on a DVD eventually, but when it first came out, it was the main attraction. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. That was good enough for me, so I watched it - from the Survival DVD disc upon which it eventually ended up - on my own one evening in late July 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up: aside from sideways trips into spin-offs like this, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 14 now remain.

First Time Round:

Search Out Space was shown on UK TV channel BBC2 on 21st November 1990, almost a year after the last Doctor Who story proper was shown on BBC1. Circumstances when the 1989 season came to an end were similar to the time of writing this in 2025: without a commission for a future run, there was uncertainty about the programme's future. To get a tiny little bit of new in-character material from Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace (not to mention an appearance from K9) was an early Christmas gift for fans, even though it was just an edition of an educational programme called Search Out Science. For some reason, though, I didn't watch it. I must have known it was going to be on (I was regularly buying and reading Doctor Who Magazine in late 1990). Perhaps, as a serious 18-year old, I thought watching a kids' programme (as opposed to the proper, hard-hitting drama that was Doctor Who) was beneath me. The first time I saw it would therefore have been when the aforementioned Survival DVD came out in April 2007.

Reaction:

Of all the Doctor Who curios I've covered on the blog, this might be the most curious. Search Out Space is very odd for an educational programme: all the questions posed in the course of the narrative, such as it is, aren't answered. What shape is the Earth? What makes day and night? What causes the seasons of the year? They aren't necessarily hard to answer, but the programme was aimed at a primary school audience, so you'd expect there to be some confirmation of hard facts included. Instead, the characters drop hints and give clues, but leave it up to the audience to decide. Perhaps the intention was that it would prompt discussion after viewing with a parent or a teacher. There are meta questions without an answer too. For example: if one wants to engage a young audience, why use characters from a TV show that had been cancelled a year earlier? Twelve months is a long time in a primary school playground. Did any of the kids watching remember as Sylv did his 'standing on a wobbly platform' acting against a green-screen (which he does fantastically well, of course) that he was once a hero who battled monsters? Aside from the very beginning credits (Search Out Science was a strand that presumably searched out lots of different topics in other episodes less memorable to Doctor Who fans), it's all Doctor Who; the Who theme is played immediately after those credits and also accompanies the end credits, and there's no explanation or introduction to explain that these are characters from another series. It's an odd approach to give over an episode on one show wholly to another, and would be odd even if the incoming show was a raging success rather than yesterday's news.

Another meta question without an answer: why get actors in to play specific characters only for those characters to present a fictional in-universe programme? Why not cut out a step and just have Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred present a quiz about space? Instead, nobody breaks character, even though they're not doing things those characters normally do (adventures, monster defeating), but are doing things that the actors who play them have done often (presenting children's television). It saves the programme makers having to write and make a Doctor Who style of story, of course, but it's something of a wasted opportunity: an exciting adventure narrative, even with the low budget that the programme had, would probably have been more engaging than disconnected scenes such as K9 whizzing around London trying to decipher what parts of a star's life cycle various coloured sweets represent, while the others cheer him on in a chaotic and noisy fashion. That bit ends with K9 transported into outer space, so at least the Doctor gets to be Doctorish when he goes to rescue him. Though they don't leave any unanswered questions, apart from maybe 'Uh?', the commercial breaks in between the action - actually a succession of comedic sketches - are uninspired. The programme then ends with another question with no answer. The final challenge is about the "key to the universe". I assumed this was some kind of metaphor, and the answer was going to be 'We don't know the key to the universe, but we keep searching and learning new things' or something similar. Instead, K9 just says that it is "hopeless" and the Doctor grins and agrees. It's a bit of a bum note to end an educational programme with a comment about the hopelessness of trying to discover difficult truths.

This wasn't the very last gasp of the classic era (there was still the extended Children in Need skit Dimensions in Time and the Paul McGann TV movie to follow later in the 1990s) but it's close to the end. Despite Search Out Space's oddness, it is fitting that Doctor Who had come full circle, regaining the educational remit it had when the show started in 1963. Just as Sydney Newman wanted, it is again highlighting scientific concepts to young viewers. 

 

Connectivity:

Both Search Out Space and The Robot Revolution feature at least one robot, and see the Doctor rescuing someone who's been transported off Earth. In both, the TARDIS hovers in space at one point. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Past Masters, Ranis, Sontarans, Yeti, Autons, etc. Search Out Space, as mentioned above, was an extra with season 26 story Survival on its DVD release (Survival being the most recently broadcast Doctor Who story before Search Out Space was shown). Intriguingly, though, it wasn't included on the Blu-ray box set of the season that included Survival, nor either of the other two Sylvester McCoy seasons. (An aside: isn't it nice that Sylv is the first 20th century Doctor to have his entire oeuvre released in an HD format? He was so often associated with being the last of something; it's good that he gets to be first in that particular race.) What could be going on with this missing extra? It might be something prosaic like a lack of space on discs, or an issue with rights. Fandom has a different theory, though. The Blu-rays (with umbrella title Doctor Who: The Collection) are season by season releases that started in 2018; the intention is to create the definitive library of Doctor Who TV stories from the classic era. As well as stories, the collection aims to be definitive in accompanying documentaries and featurettes too: one thing that the makers of the discs have been sticking to is ensuring pretty much everything that was included on the DVDs in the way of extras carries over to their HD disc versions, along with even more value added material. At the time of writing this in summer 2025, they're well past half way done. There are 26 seasons of classic Who, and - as with this blog - the collection has been releasing season box sets in random order. There are nine unreleased seasons (five out of the six black and white runs, a Pertwee season, two Tom Baker seasons and a mainly Peter Davison season that includes one Colin Baker story at the end).

One of the remaining Tom Baker seasons (season 13) was announced in July 2025 to be coming out later in the year; so, there will be a maximum of eight sets left going in to 2026. Or will there? Sylvester McCoy may be associated with Doctor Who endings, but he wasn't the last Doctor of the 20th century; that was Paul McGann in the TV movie mentioned in the Reaction section above. In addition, as well as Search Out Space, there was Dimensions in Time, and the Shada webcast (all also mentioned above). Plus, there were three other webcasts made between 1990 and 2004, the years where Doctor Who wasn't being made as an ongoing series (sometimes referred to as the wilderness years). None of these have been included on any Collection Blu-ray set. The fan rumour is that all these and more are being held back for a 27th Doctor Who Collection set, to cover The Wilderness Years. Could it be true? There's been no official word, but most fans online seem to believe it. There are many mock-ups of box set art and proposed contents lists out there, should you care to look for them. I can understand the desire on behalf of fandom to will such a thing into existence. Looking at an analogous collecting space - the official recorded tracks of The Beatles - one sees a precedent for this 'cleaning up the offcuts' idea. The Wilderness Years box set, should it happen, will be the equivalent of the Beatles Past Masters albums.

The Beatles were in many ways a collector's dream with regards to neatness. Depending on how you judge it, they only had 12 or 13 studio albums. A side of material was paired with the songs from an EP to make Magical Mystery Tour, and another side of material was paired with some orchestral music by George Martin for the soundtrack of a movie on Yellow Submarine. Beyond that, though, there were only enough non-album singles and B-sides, and other odds and sods, to make two volumes of Past Masters collecting up the stuff that wasn't on any other album. These two volumes were first released under that title in the late 1980s (just before Sylvester McCoy bowed out of Who as an ongoing series). Later, to satiate a hungry market, there were a few collections of studio outtakes, alternates and experiments, but the Beatles output when they were a going concern is limited to a maximum of 15 discs. Doctor Who, though, has a tendency to sprawl by comparison. The Beatles as a recording group were limited to four people. Doctor Who, on the other hand, belongs to everyone. If William Hartnell isn't involved, it still counts. It's far from an ordered democracy too, more like a billion spores from many many dandelions being blown into the wind. It was only after about a year from the start of Doctor Who in 1963 that comic strip adventures and books featuring the good Doctor started, and they haven't stopped since. There's then been audios and spin-offs and fan made videos and more besides. So, it's very likely that there could be a 27th box set of Doctor Who: The Collection, there's certainly enough material for it; just don't expect it to be definitive, complete, final or neat. Doctor Who can't be contained like that.

In Summary:

Raises questions that it`doesn't answer, the biggest being Why? (Unless the answer is "To give a tiny little extra something to Who-starved fans".)