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).

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.

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.

(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.

Friday, 14 February 2025

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.

Saturday, 16 November 2024

The Seeds of Doom

Chapter the 314th, where confidence is a preference for the habitual collector of what is known as ... plant life!

Plot:

A three-man scientific team in Antarctica discover a large, green plant pod in the ice. They send word to the World Ecology Bureau, who bring in UNIT as the pod's presence is unexplainable. The Doctor and Sarah travel to the scientists' base. Not heeding the Doctor's warning not to touch the pod, the scientists examine it, and one of them is attacked by a shoot that whips out of it. He starts to go green and transform into a plant. Meanwhile, a civil servant from the Bureau, Dunbar, makes some money selling information about the pod to a millionaire plant enthusiast Harrison Chase. Harrison sends his Head of Security, a mercenary called Scorby, and nervy pet scientist Keeler off to Antarctica to fetch the pod. The Doctor knows all about the pod, and knows that there will be a second one buried in the snow, duly uncovering it. It is a Krynoid, a carnivorous alien plant creature that will kill everyone on Earth if it isn't stopped. The scientist transforming into a Krynoid goes on the rampage. Scorby and Keeler steal the other pod, escaping after setting a bomb on a timer. It blows up the base, destroying the Krynoid. Luckily, the Doctor and Sarah survive. They are picked up by a rescue team and return to the UK. They trace the second pod to Harrison Chase's estate and sneak in to the house. Sarah is captured, and Chase intends her to be the second victim of the Krynoid. The Doctor rescues her, and Keeler is instead the one attacked.

Keeler begins to transform, and the insane Chase - desperate to see what sort of plant he will grow into - imprisons him in a cottage in the grounds and has him fed raw meat. Dunbar, trying to make amends, enters Chase's estate to confront him. He is killed by the escaped Krynoid, which has now grown bigger than a human. The Doctor, Sarah and Scorby are trapped in the cottage with the Krynoid outside, now grown almost as big as the cottage. The Doctor devises a plan, and escapes to return with reinforcements. Scorby and Sarah hide in the main house. The Krynoid can now control nearby plant life; vines and ivy smash through the windows of the house. Chase has somehow developed a mental link with the Krynoid and wants it to succeed. The Doctor returns with UNIT troops who use weedkiller sprays to keep the plants at bay. Scorby makes a break for it, but plants drag him to his death in a pond in the grounds. Chase tries to kill the Doctor by putting him in his industrial-size compost maker, but ends up falling in and getting minced himself. UNIT contact the RAF who blow up the Krynoid (now the size of Chase's manor). The Doctor takes Sarah on a holiday in the TARDIS, but they end up back in Antarctica again.

Context:

Watched from the DVD with the individual episodes spread out a little bit (I watched one every other day, approx.) during late October and early November 2024. People from the household would drift in and out during my viewings, but nobody sat down and watched the story with me. The Better Half was in the room, if not actually fully watching, for a couple of the episodes. She commented at one point that Tony Beckley's velvety villainous performance as Harrison Chase - one of my all-time favourite turns in classic Who - was, quote "A bit like Dick Dastardly". I thought this was a mightily unfair assessment, but after that there were a couple of scenes where Chase rants about how he's "surrounded by idiots", so maybe there's a little truth in it. As it turned out, I made a good choice to watch from the DVD. Had I viewed the story on the BBC iplayer, the story would have disappeared halfway through my watch. Both The Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Zygons were taken down from the streaming platform on the 1st November 2024, a year after being made available as part of the wider 'Whoniverse' section. There are two things unique about those two stories in the Doctor Who canon - they're the only ones written by Robert Banks Stewart, and the only two scored by Geoffrey Burgon. Presumably an agreement with the estates of one of those gentlemen (most likely Stewart) ran out after a year.

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 marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, and not just any Doctor. Completing every one of the stories starring Tom Baker, the longest-running Doctor ever having been in the role for seven years, was a big milestone. I'll go into more detail to mark this in the Deeper Thoughts section below. Tom is the fifth Doctor completed so far (the seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth Doctors having been completed before Baker). This post also marks the completion of another season, the 30th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

The obsessive detailing of every aspect of Doctor Who on the internet helps me to precisely date when I first watched particular stories. It works only if the first time I watched a story is when it was broadcast or repeated or released on a home video medium (the dates of which are freely available online for every story); there are a few, though, that are more difficult to pin down exactly because I first encountered them on a pirated video tape, the sort that was lent out or exchanged between fans in the 1980s and 90s. The Seeds of Doom was one of these: I know that my first glimpse of the story was on the Tom Baker Years clip compendium released on VHS in September 1992 (I was a bit bemused as to what was going on when watching a clip of various characters carrying pot plants from one place to another). So it was sometime after that but before the sell-through VHS release in August 1994. In that period, the only person who would have provided me stories that hadn't been officially released yet was fan friend David (mentioned many times before on this blog). I'd met David at university, but he was a few years ahead of me, and in 1992 had graduated. He did come to visit sometimes, though, so my guess is on one of those visits he brought a tape with him for us to watch. It was most likely early 1993 (I remember that Doctor Who was being repeated on BBC2 when he came back up to Durham in my second year). The reason why I'm particularly interested is that, given all the evidence above, I first watched The Seeds of Doom in my early 20s, but the one thing I can remember very clearly about that first watch is that the story creeped me out. I thought I was beyond being scared of Doctor Who by that age, but The Seeds of Doom still had the power to horrify.

Reaction:

Just as I started to write up my reaction to The Seeds of Doom, the final story I had to blog of the early and popular Tom Baker era produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and script-edited by Robert Holmes, the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 610) was sent out to subscribers and dropped through my letter box. It was momentarily disconcerting to flick through the magazine and find this era and in particular Hinchcliffe himself was being covered in unprecedented detail, taking up about a third of the magazine. I thought for a terrible moment that he'd died, but happily this was not the case. It seems that his reaching his 80th birthday was the prompt for an in-depth and lengthy interview on his years working on the programme. Because he is so ubiquitously lauded by fandom, I probably react against that and tend to underestimate Hinchcliffe's input into the stories of his that I've covered here over the years. Undoubtedly he made a huge contribution to The Seeds of Doom. The most obvious sign of this is that the story's roots are showing; as with many a story that he and Holmes elicited from writers for Who, there is an obvious monster movie inspiration, or inspirations plural in this case: the first two-episode section set in Antarctica steals like a genius from the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. The second four-part section is a mash-up of Quatermass and The Day of the Triffids. That innovative way of structuring a six-part story in two sections is also something Hinchcliffe and Holmes brought in, and writer Robert Banks Stewart makes the most of it. As the audience has seen the impact on a human attacked by the pod once, there's enhanced dramatic energy in the third episode as the anticipation builds about who will be the second victim, and then the next three episodes show the process happening again, quickly progressing beyond what had been seen before.

Although all of that input from producer, script editor and writer is significant, it's the contributions from director Douglas Camfield and composer Geoffrey Burgon that are most important - they provide the eerie atmosphere I felt on my first watch that is this story's defining factor. The same people worked on the beginning story of the season as well as this season finale. They achieved a similar atmosphere in that story at first, but as I'll mention in the Deeper Thoughts section below the drama and excitement couldn't be sustained in the Zygons story. In this their second attempt of the year, they almost manage to sustain it for the full six episode length. Only once the interesting villain and henchman are dispatched do things start to fall apart. The solution to the Krynoid monster, that has grown to the the size of a mansion, is simply to blow it up. This is disappointingly prosaic, particularly as the Doctor has been quoted earlier in the serial saying that "Bullets and bombs aren't the answer to everything". Then, there's a supposedly humorous coda where the Doctor and Sarah end up back in Antarctica because the Doctor has failed to reset the TARDIS coordinates. Not only is this a continuity error (they didn't travel there in the first place by TARDIS but were helicoptered in) but it is also obscure. They join in reciting "Have we been here before ... or are we yet to come?" portentously, and then burst into laughter. But it's not a joke and it's not a quotation, so what does it mean? It's a bizarre way to end both story and season. It's a shame that the only major negative aspects of the story are saved for the very end, as everything else is pretty wonderful.

There are some good action set pieces: another thing that Camfield regularly brings to stories is well-shot scenes where soldiers blow things up, and he doesn't disappoint here. The soldiers in question are a kind of zombie UNIT. Technically this counts as the final UNIT story of their initial era, but none of the regulars of Jon Pertwee's time are featured, all having bowed out in stories earlier in the run; as such, this lot may as well be any old squaddies. There's a couple of moments where the Doctor behaves quite violently for the time - a neck twist he gives Scorby is particularly nasty - but these are brief. A rightfully praised bravura moment sees the Doctor smash down into a room through a skylight, knock out a baddie, grab a gun, save Sarah and deliver a quip (when asked drily by Chase what he does for an encore, he replies "I win") then exit the room, all in about 30 seconds. The production design is great (the skylight that Baker breaks and the room he drops into look real. The effects are all of high quality; Some scenes creating Antarctica are more impressionistic than realistic, but they work. The model work is intricate and excellent throughout. The stages of Krynoid transformation are mostly good, with only the wobbly version that attacks Dunbar at the end of episode four looking a bit too Monthy Python to be scary. Small lapses like that don't matter too much, though, as all the actors are playing the material with utmost conviction, and the material is rich. Baker is at his most brooding; the line "You must help yourselves", when suggesting that one scientist amputate the other's arm to stop the infection, is a moment that shows the Doctor at his most alien. Lis Sladen gets to challenge the baddies in some emotive scenes too.

The three scientists in the first two episodes are good, particularly as two of them have to deliver their performances from behind awfully fake beards, but it's the main guest characters that feature throughout or in the last four episodes that make this story special. Tony Beckley is fantastic at the velvety villainy, and does a plausible take on a rapid descent into madness. His childlike delivery of the line "I could have had two pods" is telling and chilling in equal measure. To my mind, though, he is marginally bested by his henchman. John Challis's turn as Scorby is one of the all-time best performances in the classic era of Doctor Who. Even though he is at first glance a stock heavy, Challis takes Robert Banks Stewart's words, which already give the character more depth than usual, and adds more to make Scorby a living, breathing and three-dimensional creation, and every scene he appears in is lifted by his presence. That's not to ignore some other great character performances, like repentant sell-out Dunbar (Kenneth Gilbert) or nervy reluctant accomplice turned victim Keeler (Mark Jones). The scene where the partially transformed Keeler starts to rant at Sarah, chanting "You want me to die" over and over is one of the moments in Doctor Who that most scared me - and, as mentioned above, I was in my 20s before I saw it for the first time. Even a minor character like Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge) shines. It's a nice bit of writing that she looks like a one-scene comic relief character, then unexpectedly returns as a complication factor, threatening Chase's plans. Just when we believe that she's coincidentally blundered in to things, it turns out she's a spy, deliberately investigating. It's no coincidence that when all these characters have exited or been killed off, the story runs out of steam - a giant green monster just isn't as interesting.

Connectivity:

I don't think this has ever happened before, but the titles of this story and the last one on the blog rhyme. The Seeds of Doom follows Boom. Bada-bing, bada-boom! Apart from that, both stories feature soldiers and an explosive device with a countdown. There's a reference in Boom to sentient mud, which is I suppose not that far from sentient plants, though the mud in the Ncuti story turns out not to be sentient in the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

Milestone Watch Extra. As mentioned a couple of times before in blog posts this year, I have given up social media. As such, I have to get my news, including my Doctor Who news, from other sources. There's a certain obsessive fan flavour of FOMO - what if a box set was announced and I didn't hear about it to pre-order until the next Doctor Who Magazine arrived, and what if that was too late and they'd sold out, arrggh! - that compels me to regularly do an online search on the phrase 'Doctor Who' and check the News tab. There's very rarely any actual news, of course, but there are always hits. Nine out of ten of the hits will be clickbait articles on 'entertainment sites' speculating about something or other, or investigating some continuity error from a decade ago, or extrapolating a major character's return from something an old actor said at a convention. The tenth hit will invariably be an unconnected article with a headline along the lines of "Colorado doctor who slept with dozens of his patients jailed". I'd still rather get my Doctor Who news this way, though. This is because there's one thing I don't ever have to deal with using my approach: seeing Tom Baker trending, and having to investigate to confirm that the worst has not happened. My FFOMO, my fan fear of missing out, does not cross that boundary. The news that one day is sure to come, and may it be a long way off, that Tom has passed on is news that I'm happy to miss out on for as long as possible. I didn't grow up with Tom Baker's Doctor. I first watched Doctor Who when he'd just left the role, and the first story I ever saw of his was his swansong Logopolis when it was repeated in late 1981. Yet, such is the significant impact Baker had on the show in his time in the title role and ever since, that I feel it is required to take stock in the Deeper Thoughts section now I've completed blogging all his stories.

I promise I won't make a habit of this in posts to come (I'm near the end now, so most blog posts from this point on will be finishing some era or other). But, completing Tom Baker's era - seven years, 41 (or 42) stories, 170+ episodes, the exact numbers will depend on whether you count Shada or not - is the biggest mountain in the range I have had to climb, and is worth dwelling upon for a while. As I mentioned above, I only got into Doctor Who after Tom had left the role, so my experience of watching his stories was in a random order, which I then emulated in the way I've watched every Doctor's stories for this blog. After the repeat of Logopolis, the main way for me to watch his stories was when they came out on VHS as part of the official range. That range was slow to get going, but when tapes did start to be released the majority of them were for those stories starring Tom Baker. The first story of his I saw on tape was Revenge of the Cybermen, and the first one I bought was Pyramids of Mars. As noted in the First Time Round section above, there were eventually other ways to see Baker stories for the first time; I did see a few from pirated videos, and watched a few on UK Gold. The one thing I never did after Logopolis was catch a Tom Baker repeat on the BBC. This was mainly because the Beeb kept showing the same story (Genesis of the Daleks) whenever they repeated one of Tom's ones, and I'd already watched it on video. I worked out when I blogged it that the final Tom Baker I watched was The Sun Makers, when that story was released on VHS in 2001, so it took me 20 years to view every part of Tom's Who oeuvre (or Whoeuvre, if you will).

It didn't take 20 years to rewatch all the stories randomly for this blog, but it was getting on for half as long. The first one to come up was The Armageddon Factor - not an auspicious start - which I blogged in July 2015; nine years and four months later, the job was done. Tom stories came up with a reasonable regularity in the years in between. It didn't take too long (up to October 2017) for the blog to land upon Tom's first ever story, as the chronometer flies, Robot - the Deeper Thoughts section of whose post contains my tribute to the man behind the scarf, including mention of the time I met and had a book signed by Tom (a tale I think I may have told elsewhere on the blog too - apologies, I'm an old man who sometimes repeats himself). It took a lot longer before I blogged his last ever story (and the first of his I ever saw) Logopolis. I finally blogged it in December 2021. I had a few surprising reactions to stories over the years; the most disappointing watch was probably Terror of the Zygons. I'd always enjoyed viewing the story, never seeing - until the watch for the blog in September 2021 - that the story falls apart half way through. The same team (writer, director and composer) worked on The Seeds of Doom, and second time round they manage to put off the point where things fall apart until late on in the final episode, so it's overall much better. The Robots of Death maintains its high quality with every watch, including the one in December 2022 for the blog; Horror of Fang Rock gets better every time I see it, and might well turn out to be my favourite Tom in a couple of viewings' time. Underworld is nowhere near as bad as you might think. All in all, this body of work is a decent legacy for the great man. Seeing as they'll seemingly let anyone have a go at being president (twice, even) no matter how manifestly unfit and unqualified they might be, I'd say let Mister Baker do it. Tom for President!

In Summary:

It's got atmosphere, it's got pace, it's got engaging characters and a lot of incident... it just hasn't got an ending.

Doctor Who - Done To Death

Sunday, 15 February 2026

Index: Tom Baker

Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor Stories ...

Wednesday, 4 February 2026

Index: Jon Pertwee

Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor Stories ...

Monday, 22 September 2025

Exploration Earth: The Time Machine

Chapter the 338th, a tiny bit more of Tom.

Friday, 14 February 2025

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).

Saturday, 16 November 2024

The Seeds of Doom

Chapter the 314th, where confidence is a preference for the habitual collector of what is known as ... plant life!