Chapter the 338th, a tiny bit more of Tom.
Plot:
The Doctor and Sarah Jane hover the TARDIS in space, and use a two-person capsule to float outside the ship and watch the formation of the planet Earth, taking many time jumps forward to see the progress of the planet, oxygen forming, life starting. Occasionally during this, the Doctor is harangued by Megron, lord of chaos. Megron believes that what is being witnessed is chaos, but the Doctor insists that on the contrary it is order. Eventually, the Doctor and Megron have a mental battle; the Doctor wins, and Megron is banished from planet Earth.
Context:
I wanted to link a blog post to the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event tying in with the Blu-Ray release of classic Doctor Who season 13 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I chose the only story that I hadn't previously covered (and as we shall see, describing it as a story is a stretch) featuring the season 13 team of Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. But would it pass the test questions I use to validate spin-off worthiness? Let's see... 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, there's a villain and a confrontation, albeit in scaled-down form. 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 last few curios blogged, the Shada webcast and Search Out Space, it did end up as an extra on another story's disc eventually, but that wasn't how it was first pitched. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. I covered the similar Tom and Lis audio story The Pescatons in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post, but have not done the same for Exploration Earth: The Time Machine. That was a full house of correct answers, so I watched it from the Blu-ray disc featuring it (see First Time Round below) one day in mid-September 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 niche items like Exploration Earth's Doctor Who episode, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.
First Time Round:
I wasn't yet a fan of Doctor Who in October 1976 when this story was broadcast. Even if I had been, though, it was unlikely I would have heard it. I was only four years old; at that age, I might just have been in front of a TV at teatime on a Saturday, but would not have been played a schools' radio programme on BBC Radio 4 VHF. I first heard the story when it came out on CD. From 1999, a Doctor Who audio range on shiny disc started up, mostly releasing the soundtracks of missing stories with linking narration. Amidst these, a soundtrack for a wholly un-missing story was released in July 2001. This was a Genesis of the Daleks audio based on an abridged version of the story with linking narration released on record in the late 1970s. Added as an extra to this CD release was Exploration Earth, as it was labelled on the disc's packaging. Technically, Exploration Earth was the name of the educational series in which Doctor Who happened to be featuring just the once, and the episode in which that happened was called The Time Machine. As Doctor Who has endured in public consciousness and Exploration Earth has not, by 2001 it wasn't felt necessary to be so exact. I am using the complete title here, but it makes me realise that I should have labelled the similar curio blogged a few posts back as Search out Science: Search Out Space, and that will bug me now, possibly forever. At least that means Exploration Earth: The Time Machine has a chance of sticking in my memory. I couldn't recall anything of that first listen in 2001, nor of when I listened to it again as a Blu-ray extra in 2020 (when the Season 14 box set came out, it was included on The Hand of Fear disc as a special feature).
Reaction:
Given that I'd blogged another 20-minute long educational programme starring Doctor Who characters in Search Out Space, it would have been unfair to skip this one, which is essentially the same concept from a decade and a half earlier, but on the radio. The 1976 story is extremely slight, though, so there might not be that much to talk about: the Doctor describes some astro-phenomena relating to the formation of the planet Earth to Sarah. Sarah's job is only to listen, and occasionally offer some descriptive dialogue to aid the listener. She doesn't get to ask any intelligent questions. Given that asking questions is a big part of her role, and would mean she was representing the schoolkids listening in, it seems like a missed opportunity. Then, a Doctor Who villain turns up, but doesn't do very much, just booms a lot at the Doctor. They ultimately have a mental battle, pitting their strengths by "telepathic will deployment" - this might mean that the writer of the radio show Bernard Venables had seen recently aired story The Brain of Morbius, which ends with a mind-bending contest, and it stuck in his mind when he came to write this episode of Exploration Earth. It is a generic enough idea to be just a random coincidence, of course; this is a shame as there is no other evidence that Venables has ever seen an episode of Doctor Who, and it would be nice to pin that down.
The story has the opposite problem to Search Out Space. That programme had the recognisable characters of the Doctor and companion in an uncharacteristic setting. Exploration Earth's production team at least make it worthwhile sampling the format by having the TARDIS team go to space and confront a baddie (even if they possibly got there more by luck than judgement). The characters of the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, though, are not as recognisable as were the seventh Doctor and Ace. The Doctor tells his friend to "Stop wittering" at one point, and later snaps "Not now, Sarah, I'm busy" at her. Sarah's first line is the very out of character "Oh, the great Doctor in travail, hmm?". Nobody talks like that, certainly not Sarah Jane Smith. One wonders why the actors didn't push for dialogue changes. I'd hazard a guess that the time and money allocated to a kids' educational radio show didn't afford the scope for such niceties. Tom Baker would get much better later in his career at challenging poor material he'd been given to perform in a sound recording booth - google "Tom Baker distilled whippet shit" for more details (NSFW).
Connectivity:
In both Exploration Earth: The Time Machine and The Interstellar Song Contest, the Doctor floats in space outside his usual craft, the TARDIS, with meagre protection provided by something else (a capsule or a bubble).
Deeper Thoughts:
The South Bank Shows. I couldn't attend the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event, but as there are very few stories left to blog, see Milestone Watch above, this felt like it could be the last time I get to write in the Deeper Thoughts section about the Doctor Who BFI events. They have become a regular treat and source of content during the years I've been keeping this blog (see the final three paragraphs for a summary). I chose Exploration Earth: The Time Machine to tie loosely in to the event, and hoped I could relay information passed to me by the group of fan friends with whom I often attend these events, as they were planning to go. Unfortunately, they couldn't get tickets. I adore everything about the BFI apart from its website: the functionality of this site when queueing for tickets that have just become available, selecting those tickets, putting those tickets in the site's shopping basket. and finally paying for those tickets - in other words, every step of the journey - is sub-optimal, and having to engage with the functionality is a stressful ordeal. This time it fell to Trevor, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on the blog, but it defeated him (as it has all of us at some point in the past) - the seats appeared in the basket, but had disappeared again before he could pay for them. By the time he tried again, the remaining tickets had all sold out. I'd been slightly more successful in getting a single ticket to a different September event at the BFI, so I will write about that instead. It wasn't a Doctor Who event, but it will be interesting to compare and contrast (plus there are no photos available related to Doctor Who's Exploration Earth episode, so at least I can include some visual material and not just have a big block of text here).
The event was a double bill of films featuring Pet Shop Boys music held on Friday 5th September 2025; first shown was It Couldn't Happen Here, the feature film they made in the late 1980s with writer-director Jack Bond; second, silent classic Battleship Potemkin with the score they wrote for it in 2004 (the score was performed live at a screening in Trafalgar Square that year). In between, there was a Q&A with singer Neil Tennant. The first thing that contrasted with a Doctor Who event was the very fact that I was able to get a ticket. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't ever been a Pet Shop Boys BFI event before (there was one planned in April 2020, but that had to be cancelled because of Covid); Doctor Who events happen several times a year, but of the two it was the Doctor Who event that sold out faster. Maybe Doctor Who is just a bigger draw (there is no monthly publication in newsagents called Pet Shop Boys Magazine after all); the band can still fill arenas around the world, though, so I think it's probably just that - because they have been happening with some regularity - the Doctor Who events have built up a reputation and a following. As soon as the event began on that Friday, another difference was immediately apparent: there was no Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The host introducing proceedings was John Ramchandani, the BFI's Head of Video Publishing & Online Programming (the event was tying in to the release of Potemkin on Blu-ray). Though Ramchandani gave a heartfelt tribute to Bond (who died late in 2024) and wished "All the West End Girls and East End Boys" in the audience an enjoyable evening, he couldn't match Johnson and Fiddy for repartee. There was also no quiz (the BFI presumably not having the budget to give any copies of their Blu-rays away as prizes).
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| John Ramchandani |
PSB fans can certainly match Doctor Who fans regarding how critical they can be. It Couldn't Happen Here is not generally well regarded (I love it), and in the gap between the two films waiting for Tennant to take the stage, I heard a plummy voiced old gent say to a friend "Wasn't that tedious ... I think the phrase is: what have I done to deserve this?", then a middle-aged woman nearby said to her neighbour "It was like Christmas, there was so much turkey". Neil Tennant settled into his seat on stage addressing the audience with "Well, you all survived" (it's not uncommon for those on stage to take affectionate pot shots at the Doctor Who stories that they were involved in either). Tennant was interviewed by Paul Tickell, a filmmaker and friend of both Tennant and Bond; it was an informative, if short, interview, but wasn't quite as witty and irreverent as Doctor Who audiences have come to expect. During the chat, which was recorded and can be seen at this link, Tennant revealed an exclusive: he and bandmate Chris Lowe are finally recording A Man from the Future for commercial release. A Man from the Future is a piece inspired by the life of Alan Turing that was performed at the Proms in 2014, so fans have been waiting over a decade to get a copy for their collections. News like that about Doctor Who would have been up online within minutes on fan and entertainment news sites. At the time of writing, more than two weeks after the event, it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. In other ways, the fans were less restrained: Tennant got a standing ovation when he left the stage, which I've not seen for any Doctor Who guest. Audience questions tended to be prefaced with almost tearful paeans to everything the band had meant to the questioner; in one case, the questioner ended just by asking for an autograph, getting a slightly irritable reply from Tennant that they were supposed to be talking about the films.
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| Neil Tennant takes to the stage |
All in all, it was an enjoyable event, but it did demonstrate that those arranging the Doctor Who events do put in a little bit extra. There have been screenings at the BFI (or National Film Theatre in old money) going back a long time, but the current versions emerged out of some special screenings that took place for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary in 2013. Fan friends David and Trevor attended a few of those (the website was terrible even in those days, but they managed to bag tickets to some of them). It went quiet for a bit, but then in 2016 there was an event to showcase The Power of the Daleks animation; about a year later, there was a similar event for the partly-animated Shada. Not long after that in January 2018, there was a screening of The Day of the Doctor accompanied by a panel including Steven Moffat. There's usually a product release to justify the sessions, but The Day of the Doctor was an exception; it formed part of a John Hurt retrospective season. The launch of the Blu-ray collections meant more product, which meant more events. A screening of Earthshock tied in with the season 19 box set launch (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post for details). There was a showing of Logopolis in February 2019 ahead of the season 18 set, but I managed to miss it being advertised - there's at least one write-up online if you google. Though they never gave away expensive limited edition box sets, the animation events included the story's DVD as part of the BFI ticket price up to and including The Macra Terror, which was showcased at the BFI in March 2019; thereafter, they stopped that.
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| (L to R) Neil Tennant, Paul Tickell |
2019 was a busy year, with a Planet of the Daleks screening following in June (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post), Mindwarp in September, and The Curse of Fenric in June (see Deeper Thoughts section here) - these were linked to the collection sets for seasons 10, 23 and 26 respectively. Alongside The Curse of Fenric was also for the first time a separate screening of a feature-length documentary from the same set (this was Showman, about producer John Nathan-Turner). There were two screenings in the first quarter of 2020, The Faceless Ones animation in February (see Deeper Thoughts here) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang in March for the launch of the season 14 box set (which also included Exploration Earth: The Time Machine as mentioned above). The pandemic then meant a hiatus. Things resumed with a Covid-friendly screening of Dragonfire from the season 24 box set in June 2021. Two animation events followed later in that year, The Evil of the Daleks in September, and Galaxy 4 in November (see Deeper Thoughts here). There was also a City of Death screening in December to tie in with the season 17 set; I had a ticket, but had to give it up as I had finally succumbed to a variant of the aforementioned coronavirus. Friends went and guest Julian Glover was reportedly very good value. Season 22 set taster Revelation of the Daleks (see Deeper Thoughts here) followed in March 2022, and The Abominable Snowmen animation in September.
I couldn't attend season 2 set tie-in The Time Meddler in October of 2022, and this ushered in a short period where I always seemed to have a clash. I missed the Sea Devils / season 9 set and The Five Doctors / season 20 set events in March and September 2023. I might not have got a ticket to the latter even if I'd been able to go, though - it was much sought after, and sold out within minutes. Later in the year, I was able to see the animation of The Underwater Menace (see Deeper Thoughts here) in October, and an event about the TARDIS (see Deeper Thoughts here) in November. In February 2024, there was a screening of Horror of Fang Rock as well as a Graham Williams documentary (both from the season 15 box set, and both covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of this post). A month later, there was a showing of animated The Celestial Toymaker (see here). Later in the year, The Happiness Patrol infamously got two screenings - the as transmitted version in August (see here) and a new special edition version in September (see here). February 2025 saw both Spearhead from Space (see here) and The Savages animation (see here) showcased at the BFI. As an unfortunate impact of avoiding all social media I missed that there was a screening of new series story Father's Day in May 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary of Christopher Eccleston's season launching the new series era, only finding out about it after it had been and gone. That brings things up to the Terror of the Zygons screening. I'm sure there will be more events at the BFI (there are still eight seasons to release as Blu-ray box sets, and many stories left to animate), so I will no doubt be wrestling with that website for years to come, even if I probably won't be writing about it here.
In Summary:
Not quite distilled whippet shit, but not a very effective encapsulation of Tom Baker's Doctor and Lis Sladen's Sarah Jane. Well, except, I suppose, if one is pedantic, there's the part of the narrative where the characters are in a capsule - they're encapsulated quite well (and very literally) during that bit.
