The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

Chapter the 347th, one of the two best things made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

Plot:

It's late 2012, and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is less than a year away. The fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison is concerned that the planned TV special will only feature new series Doctors, and starts a campaign for old Doctors to be included too. He recruits sixth and seventh Doctor actors Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (eighth Doctor actor Paul McGann could only promise to be involved subject to work commitments, and fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker doesn't answer his phone). The three of them protest outside Television Centre; a passing John Barrowman informs them that the special is being filmed in Cardiff. They get a lift with Barrowman, sneak into the studios via the Doctor Who Experience exhibition, and end up performing in the special inside three Dalek props. They celebrate while ignoring a phone call from Russell T Davies, who's also desperate to be involved. In post-production, the scene with the three Daleks is cut, but luckily they were also filmed for a scene where they hide under dustsheets (as the Zygons do in The Day of the Doctor), which makes it to the finished programme.

Context:

At the time of writing, the most recent Blu-ray season box set from the Doctor Who collection has been out about a month; this one showcases the 21st season of the series, first broadcast in 1984. I've been watching the episodes and extras on it continuously since it came out, and I'm only halfway through - it is a very comprehensive ten disc set. One of the extras I have watched already was The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, Peter Davison's comic short film made for Doctor Who 50th anniversary in 2013. I did touch on this story in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on The Five Doctors, which I blogged in 2020. Seeing it again on Blu-ray, and listening to the newly recorded commentary on the set, I feared I hadn't done it justice with that fleeting reference, so am covering it as another unexpected extra for the blog in April 2026 (following the two episodes of Dalek Master Plan covered last time).

First Time Round:

One could argue forever about what's the worst or the best Doctor Who story. The Season 21 Blu-ray season box set contains one story (The Caves of Androzani) that has topped polls, and one (The Twin Dilemma) that has languished at the bottom of the same polls. A good few fans, though, find the former a bit overrated and the latter unfairly maligned. Official Doctor Who skits are much less numerous, of course; with less competition, I think there's a good argument to be made that The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is the best Doctor Who skit. It was probably given a boost on my first watch from coming hard and fast after what is indisputably the worst Doctor Who entertainment show. Again these are few and far between, so there's never been a poll. If there were, Doctor Who The Afterparty would almost certainly come last. On the evening of 23rd November 2013, after having enormously enjoyed The Day of the Doctor anniversary story (another poll-topping story), I switched over to BBC3 to watch the Afterparty. This was a shambolic live show attempting to celebrate 50 years of a television show by being dismissive of most of its stars and interviewing pop band One Direction over the worst satellite link-up ever seen on live television. It did do a good service in featuring the three stars of the comedy skit that was to land on the red button service immediately after the live show, something that might not have been known about by many viewers. To say that the following 30 minutes of comedy were better than the Afterparty is like saying that chocolate is better than a tracheotomy.

Reaction:

Elsewhere on the aforementioned Season 21 Blu-ray box set, there is an interview with companion actor Mark Strickson (who played Turlough in the 1980s) recorded at the Doctor Who 50th Celebration at the ExCeL in London, the day after The Day of the Doctor's transmission. Strickson is a little grumpy from being in the middle of travel to and from his home in New Zealand (and - who knows?! - maybe from being at the Afterparty the previous evening too). Asked what he thought of The Day of the Doctor, he tells the interviewer that it was a good story, but maybe not that great as a celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who. Featuring all the old Doctors just with archive clips clearly wasn't celebratory enough for Strickson, and perhaps many other viewers. What's fun, though, is that - by extending a gag about his taking mock umbrage at this very idea - Peter Davison ends up creating exactly the celebration required. Stuffing The Day of the Doctor with all the surviving classic Doctor actors, many looking markedly different to how they did back in their day, could have been made to work (The Power of the Doctor has a good stab at it a few years later), but it would have been contrived and cluttered. Steven Moffat made the right choice; his insurance, of course, was providing production funding to Davison's comic short; he'd clearly seen that Davison had stumbled across an original and effective way to complement the main anniversary special. It's not just a clever name - the Reboot acts as a nice comic sequel to The Five Doctors, and has the same intent: to showcase as many Doctors, companions, guest stars and monsters as possible. It even has some call backs - the use of Shada footage to explain away Tom Baker's lack of involvement, and Davison getting to say "Sorry - must dash!" at one point.

It's funny too. Though Davison had long displayed comic chops as a performer, he was untested as either a comedy writer or director, but does both extremely well. His co-stars Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker have also both demonstrated over the years that they can handle humorous material, and with their director they each form distinct and heightened comic personae as themselves (in inverted commas): Peter is a bit grumpy and at odds with the world, Colin is the slightly brash voice of common sense, and Sylvester - in a sweet performance - is permanently bemused. McCoy's delivery of "He probably won't", after talking of famous Hollywood director Peter Jackson's tendency to keep his cast hanging around until he gets a moment of inspiration, is worth the entrance fee on its own. Then there's his almost thrown-away "Got it a bit wrong actually" when he and Baker are both quoting their best Doctor Who lines. This is prompted by McCoy being asked by baker whether he wants sugar in his tea, calling to mind a famous scene in Remembrance of the Daleks ("Every great decision creates ripples" / "In your tea?"). McCoy was filming the Hobbit trilogy with Jackson around this time, which forms a running gag. Watching all these mentions of the director and his work, one doesn't think for a moment that Jackson would actually appear, but then amazingly he does, and even more amazingly we get Ian McKellen in costume as Gandalf too. It's the biggest but not the only casting coup. Getting Olivia Coleman was impressive enough - as is mentioned on the Blu-ray commentary, the joke about Coleman's ubiquity ("I'm usually in everything") has become even more relevant in the years between then and now.

One shouldn't underestimate the casting coups that came from inside the world of Doctor Who, of course. From the commentary, it's clear that a certain guerrilla style was required, with Davison grabbing any opportunities when he could (filming at a real-life convention allowed him to get a very funny scene with Paul McGann, short notice arrangements nabbed a quick scene with Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, a sheer fluke led to an appearance from Dan Starkey in costume as a Sontaran). A sequence inspired by Davison's regeneration sees Steven Moffat haunted by floating heads of many, many companion actors from Doctor Who's long history whizzing around him. Most are accounted for, though it's a shame that Mark Strickson didn't get to take part in this very celebratory moment. He was in New Zealand during filming, of course, but then so were Peter Jackson and Ian Mckellen! John Barrowman gets a bigger cameo. The revelation of the personal secrets of "Barrowman" ("Don't tell anyone - please") is such an insanely good gag that I won't spoil it for the uninitiated by spelling it out here. It's undoubtedly coincidence, but the action meshes perfectly with the real world of Day's production: Tom Baker doesn't need to join the classic Doctors' protest as he's been cast in the 50th anniversary show already; Paul McGann is up for it but then drops out, off filming The Night of the Doctor. Davison, Colin Baker and McCoy appear in the sets used for Day, and interact with many of the real life production crew playing themselves.

It was only when Russell T Davies appeared right at the end of this story that I realised he had otherwise kept himself completely out of the 50th anniversary hoopla. Maybe he didn't want to steal any of his friend Steven Moffat's thunder. Or maybe he was just saving himself for this triumphant moment ("Quel dommage Davros!"). Everyone is more than happy to send themselves up, and it's all very good natured and fun. Doctor Who's a family show, and the stars and fans alike all talk about the Doctor family; as such, it's appropriate that this is a family affair. Davison's wife, sons and grandson appear in the story. His daughter appears too as well as producing the short, and she ropes in his son-in-law. Georgia Moffat and David Tennant are both hilarious, acting out being put-upon by Davison and reluctantly helping him with his crusade. Colin Baker's family are all present and correct and contribute to another funny scene. The sons of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee are in small roles within the piece too. It's like the most expensive home movie ever, but is always entertaining enough to justify its existence (rather like the show that inspired it). It truly is the perfect celebration of Doctor Who's history in all its quirky glory.

Connectivity:

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, like the two recently found episodes of The Daleks Master Plan, features Daleks and journeys between different locations within one story. If one were to cheat just a tiny bit and include Day of Armageddon (the episode in between the newly found episodes, discovered a couple of decades earlier) they both feature human characters disguising themselves as aliens (the three heroes of the Reboot pretend to be Daleks and Zygons, the first Doctor dons the garb of alien delegate Zephon).

Deeper Thoughts:

More new old Who. After nearly a year of no Doctor Who on TV, spring 2026 brought not only a couple of found episodes, but three stories newly available in novelised form. These new Target paperbacks are clad in the usual stylish design, with evocative cover illustrations by Dan Liles. It may be my imagination, but the paper stock being used feels a little bit nicer than for previous books in the range too. Unlike the last few batches which concentrated on recently broadcast tales, these three adapt stories from 2005 to 2010. The first, Aliens of London, is a version of a story from the earliest season of the relaunched series. It's adapted by long-term Doctor Who extended universe creative Joseph Lidster. In an author's note, he celebrates ticking off a bucket list achievement in writing a Target novelisation. It surprised me that he'd not done one before now, to be honest. He's a good fit for the material (a favourite story of mine, by the way, though many wouldn't share my opinion). Like many a long-term fan, he comes to this book primed with approaches that have been used before for such adaptations. He chooses what I'll call the Malcolm Hulke method: finding or inventing POV characters within the story to expand on the events they witness. This undercuts just one moment: there's a great throw-away line on TV about a character having a "wife, a mistress and a young farmer" that doesn't work as well here because we've had a preceding scene where we've met all three at length. The rest of the time it works. I enjoyed sequences from the perspective of Barry (I'll give nothing more away - it's better to go in unspoiled) and Tosh (Torchwood's part of the action is somewhat expanded from the original). The strictness shown in avoiding any omniscient narration, and some nips and tucks for better flow, mean some details are lost, for example the rising hysteria about aliens that gives context to Jackie's reporting the Doctor and Rose to the authorities.

The inner life of characters like Mickey, Jackie and Harriet Jones brings out the melancholy in the story that TV viewers might have missed.  Lidster's work also nicely dovetails with Russell T Davies's short story prequel "Where Did They Get the Pig?" from a Doctor Who Magazine special in 2025. There's some nods to future stories, like a scene of Captain Jack watching Margaret Blaine escape to the Isle of Dogs at the end. Jenny T Colgan gets to pull the same trick in her adaptation of the Weeping Angel 2-parter from Matt Smith's first season, The Time of Angels. River Song's inner thoughts are informed by the knowledge she has that Amy is her mother, even though that wasn't revealed to the audience back in 2010 (presumably the writer of the TV version Steven Moffat already had it in mind back then). With the full details of River, Amy and the eleventh Doctor's character arcs (which Moffat probably hadn't fully worked out this early) known to her, Colgan is able to be add many nice touches, and she captures all the characters well. There's also a - very nerdy, but nonetheless welcome - reference to Amy somehow being linked to the Pompeiian character also played by Karen Gillan in earlier story The Fires of Pompeii. All the stories adapted this time are 2-parters, so there isn't the need to put in much extra material to fill the page count. Colgan adds an opening section introducing the person that wrote the journals about the Weeping Angels referenced by River and the Doctor; amusingly, this is a person from our present who romanticised the past and sought the Angels out to send him there. He finds once he's living in it that it's very far from being a golden age.

If you want more radical new material, then the final one of the three books is for you. This is Matt Jones's The Satan Pit, based on his own scripts for the 2006 David Tennant story. If Lidster took the Malcolm Hulke approach, then Jones does it like Donald Cotton: he reshapes the material using a framing device where his characters tell the tale in their own words. We join the story after the events depicted on TV have taken place, and the rest of the book is formed of first-person testimonies from the three survivors, Ida, Danny and Zack, to authorities that disbelieve their talk of a magic man in a flying box that saved them. The book acts therefore as both novelisation of and sequel to the TV version. Like Lidster, Jones is rigorous about limiting the action to what these three characters' experience, though at the end there's a clever way of covering the climactic events for which none of them are present. Like Colgan, he makes use of future developments in the series after this story - by the end of the book, the Ood have been liberated (as shown in TV in Planet of the Odd, a couple of years on from The Satan Pit), and there's an addendum connecting to The End of Time. Jones tweaks the characterisations of the guest cast to make them more distinct from one another. Danny becomes a hopeless romantic who rapidly develops a somewhat creepy crush on Rose. Having this as Danny's emotional starting point gives more room for him to mature into as the story progresses. I don't rate the TV version of this story that highly (though many wouldn't share my opinion), but this prose version is much better. The book ends with a courtroom drama climax, the resolution of which will be new to anyone reading, For this reason, and for its more original structure, it's probably my favourite of these latest three books, but all of them are definitely worth a read.

In Summary:

A very expensive home video, but much better than that sounds!

Index: Colin Baker

Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor Stories ...

Season 21:

The Twin Dilemma

Season 22:

Attack of the Cybermen

Vengeance on Varos

The Mark of the Rani

The Two Doctors

Timelash

Revelation of the Daleks

Season 23 "The Trial of a Time Lord":

The Mysterious Planet

Mindwarp

Terror of the Vervoids

The Ultimate Foe

Return Appearances:

The Power of the Doctor

Spin-offs, crossovers, and such:

Slipback

The Ultimate Adventure

More than 30 Years in the TARDIS

Real Time

Honorable Menshes:

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (Colin Baker, but not playing the Sixth Doctor)

In Summary:

The technicolor scream-coat one.

The Two Doctors

Chapter the 336th, is a Doctor Who two for the price of one offer, a BOGOF with Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Plot:

The Doctor takes Peri fishing on an alien planet, then collapses in the TARDIS. He's somehow been linked across time to his second self. That Doctor, accompanied by Jamie, is on a mission for the Time Lords, just like he always wasn't. He is visiting Professor Dastari, who runs a research centre space station, trying to persuade him to stop some of his team doing time travel experiments that could endanger the universe. Dastari's own research is in genetic manipulation; he has augmented an Androgum (aggressive, food-obsessed aliens) called Chessene - she is planning an attack on the station, having allied herself with the Sontarans. The attack happens, Jamie escapes and the Doctor is apparently killed. Really, he's been taken to Earth by Chessene, with another Androgum called Shockeye plus Dastari (who's in on the conspiracy). They are joined by two Sontarans. The other Doctor and Peri arrive on the abandoned station to investigate, and find Jamie living wild in the ducts. The Doctor recreates the mental link with his former self and works out that he is being held in Seville. The three of them travel there in the TARDIS, and run into Oscar and Anita, who have just witnessed the Sontaran ship land. Oscar has been setting up moth-catching equipment for later that evening, but he and Anita need to go back to their jobs at a nearby restaurant.

The Doctor, Jamie and Peri attempt to sneak in to the hacienda where the other Doctor is being held. Chessene, Dastari and the Sontarans are trying to get that Doctor's help to get the experimental time capsule to work. He refuses. Chessene betrays the Sontarans, killing them with acid. Dastari operates on the Doctor turning him into a hybrid Androgum to make him more amenable, but he and Shockeye escape and go to the centre of Seville to have a meal at Oscar's restaurant. When he won't accept alien currency for the meal, Oscar is stabbed to death by Shockeye. Shockeye escapes; the second Doctor is left behind, and returns to normal. The sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive just in time to get him out of the restaurant before the policía arrive. Chessene captures them all and takes them back to the hacienda. The sixth Doctor pretends that he has made the capsule operational. Shockeye is going to cook a human (Jamie) for himself and Chessene to eat before they leave. When the sixth Doctor tries to free Jamie, Shockeye wounds him; the Doctor flees outside, with Shockeye pursuing him, following the blood trail. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar's cyanide jar and uses it to kill Shockeye. Chessene sees some of the Doctor's blood and licks it up, much to Dastari's disgust. He turns against her, so she kills him, and tries to escape in the capsule. It blows up, killing her. The second Doctor summons his TARDIS by remote control, and he and Jamie say goodbye. The sixth Doctor decides that he and Peri should become vegetarians.

Context:

It has become an annual tradition that I download a Doctor Who story to watch when I'm away on holiday. It's not always possible, but often the selected story is vaguely appropriate because it includes scenes filmed in my holiday destination, or just scenes filmed in a country other than the UK. Sometimes, the characters in the story themselves go on holiday. The Two Doctors has not been selected for any trips before; I was holding it back thinking the day would probably come when the family visited Seville. We came very close in 2025; a nice Airbnb was very nearly selected, but we decided instead that the kids would prefer somewhere with a beach. So, to Menorca we went and - with very few stories left to blog - The Two Doctors had to finally accompany us (well, me, anyway, I didn't try to get any of the rest of the family to watch with me). Menorca is at least Spanish territory, so there is something of a link. I downloaded the three episodes from the BBC iplayer and watched them on my phone over the course of the break. 

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. This story completes another season and another Doctor. 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, 11 now remain.

First Time Round:

I have a clear memory of watching the first episode on its initial UK broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday 16th February 1985. My Mum had made me a 'boil in the bag' prawn curry (definitely not a Vesta, probably Birds Eye or Tesco's own brand) for my tea. I watched Doctor Who in the living room, with the plate of food on my lap. I remember seeing the scene where the Doctor lands a weird alien fish on screen, and this momentarily putting me off my food. It didn't last long, and the plateful was scarfed down soon afterwards. An underlying message of the story is a promotion of vegetarianism but this didn't take with me. I've no strong memories of the rest of that episode nor my first watch of the others on the following two Saturdays, but I do remember a general feeling - in my serious fan manner - that it was too early in Colin's era for him to be sharing the spotlight with a returning Doctor. Now a lot of time (more than 40 years) has gone by, would I feel the same way?

Reaction:

Robert Holmes, who penned The Two Doctors, was one of the writers most instrumental in the success of 20th Century Who. There's a run of stories through the 1970s that he was involved with, directly or indirectly, that is seen by a majority of fans as a golden period, a template for Doctor Who excellence. As I mentioned in the blog post for one of his two 1960s stories The Space Pirates, though, that golden period doesn't quite extend to everything he wrote for the show. His first two stories are not generally liked, and neither are his last two. The final one was The Trial of a Timelord, co-written with many other people, and with so much negative stuff happening behind the scenes (including Holmes' failing health and death before his scripts were realised) that it would be churlish to criticise him or any single contributor. What, though, of his penultimate story? The Two Doctors was commissioned and produced before the BBC had threatened Doctor Who with cancellation in 1985; the series was ostensibly in rude health. The story Holmes had written immediately before was The Caves of Androzani, one that forever after would be in the top tens of all-time Doctor Who story polls. He was on a hell of a high. Immediately before Caves, though, Robert Holmes had been the first writer commissioned to write 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, and he could not manage it. He tried but failed to weave the excessive set of 'shopping list' demands of returning actors and plot elements into a coherent narrative. The Two Doctors is a similar challenge: it requires the inclusion of a returning Doctor, companion and monster, and the arbitrary locating of some sequences in a foreign country (originally planned to be New Orleans, but when filming there fell through changed to Seville).

Maybe Holmes wanted to prove that he could achieve a 'shopping list' story after all. Or, perhaps, he was chosen because the story slot was the equivalent length of an old six-parter. There hadn't been a story of such length broadcast since the late 1970s when Holmes was last regularly writing the show. Even then, though, he didn't often write those longer ones. Usually in the 1970s, Holmes would work with writers to shape such stories to have a "dogleg", a sharp turn of the plot to a new focus after the two or four episode mark, to feel like a new but linked story was starting, keeping audience interest from sagging. He eschews that approach for The Two Doctors. There's a more gradual move from the action set on the space station to the action in Seville. It might have worked better to confine the space station stuff to part one and concentrate on Seville for parts two and three, or maybe vice versa. Probably, Holmes thought he had enough elements to keep things interesting without such a structure, and to be fair he does almost pull it off. The sixth Doctor doesn't appear early enough at the beginning, and the Sontarans are dealt with too early before the end; with a couple of tweaks to resolve both those points, the story would flow pretty perfectly. The second point is more forgivable as his new creations the Androgums are conceptually strong and nasty enough to carry the climactic villainy on their own. The first point, though, is much more of a problem. Aside from his face in the beginning credits, Colin Baker doesn't appear for the first 10 minutes of his own show.

The story starts with Patrick Troughton (seen in black and white at first, and using an older TARDIS console prop, both nice touches), and that is okay; it's an intriguing hook. It then stays on him, and the minutes stretch out. At several moments, I was inwardly screaming "Cut away!" and not just because it would be polite to the leading man. I was right in my feeling in 1985 as mentioned in the First Time Round section above; it's too soon for Colin's Doctor to be sharing the spotlight, and being pushed so far out of it delegitimises him - it feels like Troughton is conferring official status on him, rather than the other way round. Cutting away, and then intercutting between the parallel action of Colin and Pat's exploits would additionally have given the story a boost to its dynamism. A restless intercutting approach, a combination of script and direction decisions, was one of the things that enlivened The Caves of Androzani, after all. That, though, was directed by one of the most dynamic Who directors of the time, Graeme Harper; The Two Doctors, on the other hand, is directed by Peter Moffat. He is a safe pair of hands, and known for getting all the needed material in the can efficiently, even sometimes ahead of schedule (almost unprecedented for Doctor Who with its complexities far exceeding its budgets); the material that ends up in the can, though, isn't usually energetically paced. There's a couple of major issues with how key story beats are revealed; these may have stemmed from the script rather than having been introduced by the director, but one can't help but believe that a different director would have seen the issues ahead of time, and nudged the more than competent writer or script editor to fix them. Alternatively, of course, they could very well have been introduced by the director.

The first reveal of a Sontaran, and the moment where it becomes clear that Dastari is a traitor who is allied to the bad guys, are both handled in the same way: the reveal is held back for a long time, then finally achieved in a pedestrian long shot that might usually be used just for establishing a location. In both instances, the long shot is from no character's POV, so the moments are robbed of any drama. It should be a big deal for the Doctor (either of them) to discover that his old enemies are involved in the plot, and his old friend allied with them. As it is, the moments are underwhelming, and the impression is given that there was no need to hold the revelations back at all. Moffat achieves better things in the quieter moments. Though not perfect, the interactions between the sixth Doctor and Peri are much warmer and wittier than elsewhere in the season, with the squabbling dialled down. The sixth Doctor's haunted monologue as he worries about the fate of the universe is one of Colin Baker's standout moments in the role. Troughton and Frazer Hines effortlessly recreate the second Doctor and Jamie, with many funny lines and bits of business. Moffat gets two compatible but interestingly different takes on villainy from the two actors playing Androgums, building on the script's efficient world-building, establishing the race's culture and attitudes. John Stratton gets the showier Androgum role, drooling over the prospect of eating many different members of the cast, the hissable panto baddie. Jacqueline Pearce gives a masterclass performance throughout of savagery suppressed and hidden behind a veneer of elegance. The shocking moment where she cannot control her animal impulses and licks up spilled blood from the ground is magnificent, even though it is again mostly filmed in a long shot. At least there's a cut to a reaction from Dastari watching in disgust (a medium shot).

This era of Doctor Who comes in for some flak for excessive violence; but, as shocking as Shockeye's actions are, I don't think anything here is gratuitous. The underlying theme of the piece is about the ethics of how we treat creatures we perceive as lesser than ourselves; Shockeye's sadism is therefore very much in keeping. His callously offhand murder of bumbling comic foil Oscar fits with character and theme, and ups the ante when he has the Doctor cornered towards the climax of the story. The Doctor's use of Oscar's abandoned cyanide jar on Shockeye comes in for a lot of criticism. Again, though, I think it's the direction that's the problem. It needs to be urgent: the Doctor is about to be killed, and stumbles across the only thing he can find with which to defend himself when his adversary is almost on him. Because what made it to screen is instead done at a much more leisurely pace, it makes the action seem too premeditated. People don't like the Doctor's quip afterwards "Your just desserts", but I think it's rather funny. The tone is consistently of a dark comedy. Given the theme, all the subplots about genetic manipulation also integrate rather well. As such, I'm not sure it needs the prototype time travel machine as the MacGuffin. The Sontarans could just want to weaponise the genetic augmentation process somehow, and Chessene could just be planning to upgrade her whole planet en masse. This would mean no need to feature machinations by the offscreen Time Lords - a plot idea already overused in the series at this point - and would also mean that the second Doctor doesn't need to be working on his people's behalf (which breaks the established continuity to such an extent that a lot of complicated backstory has needed to be reverse-engineered by fan writers over the decades since the story's broadcast).

Other points to note: there's very good lighting in the scenes of the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie in the space stations ducting; Colin's lighter, more summery version of his costume works much better than the usual version; Peter Howell's score is one of his best. Although there is no reason at all why the action has to take place in Seville, it's still interesting to get away from the usual visual textures on occasion. The story can't resist the insertion of some touristy moments in the chase scene, which does slow things down when they should be speeding up as the denouement approaches. The only truly heinous moment is when Dastari has a flower thrown to him from a woman on a balcony. The characterisation, costumes and masks for the Sontarans are different from what went before, but work well. All in all, it is not as bad as its reputation; Holmes script is pretty close to the quality of his 'golden period' work; with more dynamic direction, and a few tweaks, this could have been another classic.

Connectivity:

Both The Two Doctors and Search Out Space feature the current Doctor unexpectedly teaming up with at least one character from the show's past (Colin working with the second Doctor and Jamie, Sylv with K9).

Deeper Thoughts:

The joy between the land and the sea. Perhaps a summer holiday is not a conducive time for too much original thought; I'm undoubtedly not the first to notice it, but it struck me in a contemplative moment in the sun of Cala'n Forcat that travel is all about dwelling in liminal spaces. The hotel we stayed in appears in photos like it's sitting atop a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean. In fact, it's on a high cliff edge, and behind the hotel are paths and steps down to multiple small coves. This is Cala'n Forcat; though there weren't the huge expanses of sand that you might except on a Spanish beach, there were clear blue waters to swim in at the base of ravines, with tall rock walls either side. It was a dramatic landscape, similar to (but a lot warmer than) the Welsh cliffs featured in 2024 story 73 Yards. In the script for that story, its writer Russell T Davies highlights such areas at the edges of things as places of magic, but also of conflict. I half suspect he just introduced the line about the war between the land and the sea to be a reference to the planned spin-off series, but there is a truth there nonetheless. The Balearics have been of strategic importance in many wars, annexed and occupied multiple times. The nearest town to where we were staying was Ciutadella (literally, the Citadel), which has been a fortification since the times of Ancient Carthage. Obviously resorts don't tend to be warzones these days, but liminal spaces come with risks as well as potential; this is possibly why we are drawn to them. Even if one doesn't go for beaches, the act of travelling takes one to the liminal spaces that are airports and train stations. Even if one never leaves home, taking a break puts us in the liminal mental space of being between work and play.

Cala'n Forcat

Looking back at the first holiday trip I covered for the blog in 2016, we again stayed in a place on the boundary between one area and another, outside a castle on the edge of woods. I started the blog the previous year, but had fit my posts around holiday breaks in the summer of 2015. As this time we were staying at Leeds Castle, somewhere that was the location of a Tom Baker story, and said story could be brought with us to watch in the cottage, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste. This started an annual tradition. I took The Leisure Hive (a story where the Doctor goes on holiday) to Shanklin in 2017 (between land and sea again), but ended up watching the story when back home, much closer to the liminal space of the Brighton beach on which some of it was filmed. The following year was the first foreign trip for the blog, to Tenerife, and I took along a story that involved the production team taking a foreign trip (Vincent and the Doctor). In 2019, I visited a European location with It Takes You Away (in which the TARDIS fam visit a European location). After a couple of years' suspension of holidays away because of Covid and lockdowns, I took Hell Bent to watch on the island where it had been filmed, Fuerteventura, in 2022 (and stayed in a resort at the edge of sand dunes). The year after, I listened to Marco Polo (The Doctor and friends on a long trip) while on a short trip to Kos. In 2024, I revisited Fuerteventura, this time with The Ice Warriors (completely thematically divorced from the surroundings, but I did at least experience the Troughton era mainstay of a foam machine during that break). That brings things up to this year and The Two Doctors.

Ciutadella

Holmes's Sontaran story itself comes from a liminal space in Doctor Who's span. It was a watershed between celebration (the hoopla of 20th anniversary) and chaos (the hiatus and the aforementioned crises in the making of the subsequent Trial of a Time Lord season), between when the series was seen as an unassailable institution able to film abroad, and when it had to struggle to endure. The production team were adjusting to a new format of 50 minute episodes before circumstances dictated they revert back again to half that length. Given another year, someone might have realised that they could have had a one-part self contained story (or even more than one) rather than three part stories like The Two Doctors. Would that have made a difference to the programme's longer term survival? At the time of writing, Doctor Who is in another such uncertain space. Will it endure? As said above, liminal spaces contain risk, but they also contain potential. Recent announcements up to August 2025 have been of a new multimedia event for 2026 in the mould of previous years' Time Lord Victorious and Doom's Day, and a new fan show on the official Youtube channel. Neither are things that tend to happen for shows that have been cancelled. Even more positively, news reports on the 21st August 2025 quoted an interview with Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, at the Edinburgh TV Festival. She said that the series will remain on the BBC "with or without Disney". Comments from the Beeb in 1985 were nowhere near as friendly to the show. Amusingly, she summarised the position as "The TARDIS is going nowhere" which perfectly summarises both the potential and the risk of this liminal space. Anyway, I'm almost out of stories to blog, and they'll have to get their fingers out to have new ones before summer 2026, so I might have to vacation without a Doctor Who story next year. What a thought!

In Summary:

Not too bad, and quite a dark comedy for something filmed in such bright sunshine.

Slipback

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. To put that point off a bit, just so the blog doesn't have a period where I just cover a succession of Ncuti Gatwa stories, I am throwing in a few spin-offs and oddities like Slipback. Beyond those, I have completed nine Doctors' televisual eras proper (the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 35 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

The Sun 1985 Doctor Who speculation

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

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

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

Series '2' is coming soon...

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

In Summary:

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

More than 30 Years in the TARDIS

Chapter the 315th, which celebrates more than 30 years of More than 30 Years in the TARDIS.

Plot:

A young boy playing on the streets of London sees shop window dummies come to life, a web-strewn newspaper seller, and a post box that turns into a Dalek. Or maybe it's just in his imagination as he watches Doctor Who from behind the sofa. The Doctor (or Jon Pertwee) rides in the Whomobile again and is surrounded by dinosaurs that then disappear back in time. Susan (or Carole Ann Ford) is chased by Daleks in Westminster; she leaves some behind by climbing up some steps, but a Dalek hover scout pursues, so she escapes in the TARDIS. Cybermen patrol around St. Paul's Cathedral, following the Doctor and Peri (or Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant). Our heroes give the metal meanies the slip, but then a Cybermat attacks them. The Doctor and Ace (or Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred) are chased by Haemovores who turn out just to be actors in costumes. Sarah Jane (or Lis Sladen) is observed by a Sontaran entering a house. She watches TV alongside the young boy. Robomen and Daleks as they looked in the 1960s movies are observed by the movie Susan (or Roberta Tovey). The Brigadier (or Nicholas Courtney) visits the National Army Museum, but is attacked by Autons. He escapes in his chauffeured car, but the driver is also an Auton. The boy walks into the TARDIS and sees Susan, but then a Dalek appears in the control room. The boy, now back on the sofa with Sarah Jane, is grabbed by her when she is taken over by the Sontaran, with her eyes glowing green. Jamie and Victoria (or Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling) find themselves on Skaro surrounded by the Emperor Dalek and dozens of his underlings. In between all this, people are interviewed about the history and making of Doctor Who's first thirty years, and lots of clips are shown from Who and other shows.

Context:

This seemed like an apt one to watch for Doctor Who's anniversary on Saturday 23rd November 2024, which was not that far from the 30th anniversary of this cut of the documentary's release on VHS. But how would it stand up to a grilling from the standard canon questions I ask about my occasional off-piste viewings? Does it star the Doctor? Yes, I think there are moments where Jon Pertwee is appearing as the Doctor rather than himself, and there are sequences with Autons and Daleks, etc. Does it have visuals? Absolutely. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Hmm... the dramatic sequences aren't played for laughs, so I wouldn't say it's a skit, but obviously the main point is documentary rather than drama - I'm giving it a free pass. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. The assessment being successfully done, I watched from the DVD, on my own - it was a bit too niche a prospect to try to interest the family in - musing a little as I did why it has not been made available on the BBC iplayer. It is probably prohibitive rights issues for all the many non-Who clips featured.

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. Aside from the occasional sideways step into spin-offs or oddities like More than 30 Years in the TARDIS, I have completed five Doctors' eras and 30 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:

I watched the original version of the documentary live as it went out on BBC1 in the UK on Monday the 29th November 1993. The celebrations for Doctor Who's 30th anniversary were many that year. The documentary was shown halfway through a weekly repeat of Planet of the Daleks: interrupted the previous Friday by Children in Need, it would resume four days after the documentary was shown. The Children in Need telethon featured the first part of Doctor Who skit Dimensions in Time, with the second part shown the following evening on Noel's House Party, a shiny-floored primetime entertainment show of the time. I was in my third year student house in Durham for all of these; we had a Radio Rentals big screen TV (my housemates and I all chipped in at the start of the year for the hire costs) connected to someone's toploader VCR brought from home on which I recorded the documentary onto a VHS tape. I don't still have the tape; this is a shame, as - unless I'm missing it - I can't find the original version as transmitted that Monday anywhere on any online video sharing sites. I am much more familiar with the extended version that is the subject of this blog post - it was released on VHS almost a year later, and that's when the 'More than' was prepended to the title. I bought and watched it, at home in Worthing by that time as I'd graduated, on or soon after its release date on 7th November 1994. I can't remember all of the differences between the two. I don't think the TV version had the section interviewing Roberta Tovey on her own about the 1960s Doctor Who films, nor the sequence where Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling stumbled across the Emperor Dalek. The TV version had a scientist explaining how time travel might be possible which was excised for the VHS. I'm sure there were many other differences too, as it was over a half hour longer than on TV.

Reaction:

When Doctor Who videos started coming out regularly in the early 1990s, they weren't the only tapes the BBC were releasing. For a good few years it was boom time, with lots of different television science fiction and fantasy titles coming out. The 1981 TV adaptation of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was one of those titles, released on two tapes in 1992. Before the episodes on them played, each tape had a brief message asking the purchaser to register their interest (maybe by writing to a PO box, or possibly phoning a number, I don't have the tapes any longer to check) in the purchase of a potential behind the scenes making-of documentary that might be made available. Enough people must have responded, and that indirectly led to the creation of this Doctor Who documentary. Kevin Jon Davies directed The Making of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and it was released on its own VHS early in 1993. Having done this, Davies was perfectly placed to make a similar documentary for Doctor Who later in the year. The Hitch Hiker doco used a framing device which featured Simon Jones playing both himself and Arthur Dent in newly staged scenes within the fictional universe of the show; More than 30 Years in the TARDIS did the same with multiple cast members. Interview material from the same session with Douglas Adams appears in both pieces (Adams was a script editor on Who, as well as creator of Hitch Hiker, of course). I have looked around online and can't find any absolute confirmation whether the original 30 Years documentary was initially commissioned for BBC TV, or for BBC Video as his previous effort was. Whether it was as an extension of the original remit, or the culmination of the original aim, or indeed a bit of both, a re-cut documentary expanded with additional material not shown on TV was released on VHS towards the end of 1994.

There's a lot more of Doctor Who than The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so Davies has more of a challenge to give every area of Who sufficient coverage in a coherent fashion. He finds a good structure to achieve this. The documentary is in three sections: the Doctor and the Daleks, Monsters and Companions, and Laughter and Tears Behind the Scenes. Sections end with a cliffhanger resolved in the next section, and in between sections are Who-related adverts for Walls Sky Ray ice lollies and Prime Computers. The interviewees are a pretty comprehensive selection; there's nobody from behind the scenes of Patrick Troughton's time, but there were few of those people still living in 1993. Peter Davison is conspicuous by his absence; probably he was too busy rather than wanting to distance himself from the role. Tom Baker is only represented by archive material. All the expected topics are covered: the genesis of the show, Daleks and other monsters, the companions and sexism, special and visual effects, the right level of frightening for kids, the use of humour, the show's eventual cancellation and its afterlife in novels, comics and videos. Davies also manages to explore some of the less well-known nooks and crannies of Who history. The 1960s Dalek movies are given generous coverage (Davies would create another VHS documentary dedicated to these two movies soon after More Than 30 Years). In the fake credits bits in between the sections, he sneaks in test footage for the series' different title sequences. There's un-transmitted sequences from stories included, a couple of Doctor Who novelty songs accompanying clip montages, and lots of Doctor Who being covered on other shows (Blue Peter, Crackerjack, Nationwide, Pebble Mill, and more).

There are loads of clips from Doctor Who, of course, but I think many fans including myself were getting a bit blasé about such glimpses of old Who by then. The aforementioned boom time of VHS had convinced us that all of Doctor Who would be available to own before too long, but - as will be discussed in the Deeper Thoughts section below - behind the scenes documentaries were more rare. Therefore, curios like the adverts and the excerpts of studio footage were more enticing. The newly staged scenes and recreations (Daleks on Westminster Bridge, Draconians and Ogrons on the South Bank, Cybermen at St Paul's) were as close to new Doctor Who as fans were going to get at the time, and so were received with enthusiasm. It was also gratifying, though this might seem strange to someone who wasn't around at the time, that commentators were on screen being interviewed as self-proclaimed Doctor Who fans. Such was fandom's perceived lack of wider affection for their favourite show, that getting Mike Gatting, Toyah Wilcox, Lowri Turner and Ken Livingstone involved seemed like a boon. I have never thought of Cybermen or Jon Pertwee in the same way since hearing Wilcox and Turner rhapsody about how sexy both were. Some of my favourite moments from the documentary: seeing William Hartnell's family photographs courtesy of his granddaughter Jessica Carney; a great live telly moment where a Doctor Who competition on Good Morning with Anne and Nick goes a bit wrong; discussions on a new younger generation of fans featuring Gerry Anderson with his son Jamie, and Lis Sladen with her daughter Sadie Miller. The parents are sadly no longer with us, but both the youngsters now grown up have ongoing roles in the world of Doctor Who audio.

There are loads more goodies. The effects sequence where a character opens the police box doors and enters the TARDIS control room in one shot is marvellous, and was the first time this had ever been done. Mary Whitehouse, an activist who lobbied for her own self-defined standards to be applied to television, is - in my opinion, of course - patronising and wrong about violence in Doctor Who in her interview, but Davies mischievously cuts from her to John Nathan-Turner saying he was happy whenever Whitehouse complained about the show as it added 2 million to the viewing figures. Douglas Adams comes over as the cleverest person involved in the documentary when talking about how humour and drama should best work together. This is unsurprising for two reasons; first, Davies was a long-time collaborator with Adams and so he was bound to show him in a good light; second and more importantly, Douglas Adams was the cleverest person involved in the documentary. There's a wonderful moment towards the end where Alan Yentob, who at the time was Controller of BBC1, is asked about ongoing discussions about Doctor Who's future (that would lead to the Paul McGann TV movie three years later) and quotes Michael Dobbs' Francis Urquhart "You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment". This came at the very end of the documentary in its initial form as broadcast on TV, and my only criticism of More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS is that in the recut it is followed by two scenes; I would have kept the initial ending and moved those other bits up. All in all, though, watching this documentary was a great way to celebrate Doctor Who's 61st anniversary.

Connectivity:

If I counted up correctly, there are three clips of The Seeds of Doom in the documentary; so, both the Tom Baker story and More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS clips feature the Krynoid.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Doctor's Documentaries. I have collected all the DVD releases of Doctor Who stories and all the Blu-ray releases so far. Each disc of this collection is replete with myriad extras including many a documentary, and I've diligently watched them all. As such, it's hard now for me to cast my mind back and realise that for many years of my fandom a Doctor Who documentary was a rare and precious thing. And before that it was an impossibility. For the whole of the 1980s up to the end of the original run (I started watching in 1981 and continued all the way through the classic series in that decade), I never saw a single one as there wasn't really one to see. There had been only one significant documentary made for the UK by that point. This was Whose Doctor Who, a Melvyn Bragg presented 60-minute long episode of the BBC's Lively Arts strand from 1977 (a few sequences from it were reused in More than 30 Years in the TARDIS). I hadn't been a Doctor Who fan in 1977; even if I had, as I was but four years of age I probably would not have been interested in something about Doctor Who that wasn't Doctor Who itself. Shows like that didn't get archive repeat showings on TV, and in the 1980s the Doctor Who VHS range was only just releasing Doctor Who episodes, with no indication that it would ever release documentaries too. The first time I got to see Whose Doctor Who was when it was released as an extra on The Talons of Weng-Chiang DVD in 2003. I didn't feel I was missing out too much, because there was a Doctor Who magazine every month covering the making of the show in some detail, and occasionally there was a brief feature on a kid's TV show (Mat Irvine talking about effects on Saturday morning TV, or a behind the scenes view on a BBC programme like Take Two, as a couple of examples). There was definitely a gap in the market, though, for something more long form.

Whose Doctor Who Title Card

So, who had the nous to spot that gap, and make the first Doctor Who documentary I ever saw? It pains me a little to say it, because the blog has been a bit critical at times of his work creating them, but it was John Nathan-Turner and it was the Years tapes. Nathan-Turner was producer of Doctor Who throughout the 1980s, and after that had become a consultant for BBC Who product ranges. By 1991, VHS tapes ere being released more regularly than in the 1980s, and there was room to do something different. As a way to package up orphaned 1960s episodes where the rest of the story was not present in the archives, Nathan-Turner successfully pitched the idea of Years tapes: documentaries framing the included episodes and clips. In June of that year, the first two (The Hartnell Years and The Troughton Years) were released. This was ahead of its time thinking from the former producer; while working on the range, as well as creating new documentaries, he made expanded versions of stories incorporating material cut for time, and audio versions of missing stories with narration. In The Tom Baker Years, needing a new idea as Baker's era existed in full with no orphaned episodes, Nathan-Turner created the in-vision commentary, many years before DVD existed, with Tom Baker talking through and reacting to various clips from his stories. All these ideas would become standard much later, after his pioneering but embryonic attempts. A key problem was that there was minimal budget to realise any of these, and that tended to show. I wasn't as wowed as I should have been on watching my first ever long form Who documentary, because it just involved one actor (Sylvester McCoy in the case of The Hartnell Years) speaking brief links to camera. I also would have preferred to watch a full story (and there were loads still to be released) rather than odd episodes, so the main draw between the links wasn't engaging me either.

McCoy doing a link for The Hartnell Years

In January 1992, I saw my first documentary not created by John Nathan-Turner, Resistance is Useless, a 30 minute clip show with a framing device even cheaper than Nathan-Turner's (just an actor's voiceover accompanying a static prop giving us what was captioned as the 'Thoughts of an Anorak'). It was shown to herald the start of a BBC2 season of archive repeats that started immediately afterwards. Though it was great to see the clips, and interesting to learn some facts about the show, this still wasn't a full, proper documentary. That came the following year, also courtesy of the VHS range. As an extra on the tape of Silver Nemesis, a documentary The Making of Doctor Who made by a New Jersey public broadcast network on the making of the story was included. This was the full package, including interviews with cast and crew and behind the scenes footage of rehearsal and production of the 25th anniversary story. One could argue that the BBC shouldn't have needed programme makers from the US to show it how to make a Making Of, but I was very excited by this addition no matter who made it (more than I was by Silver Nemesis, if I'm honest). The documentary remained unreleased on shiny disc for many years, but finally was included on the season 25 Blu-ray box set released in October 2024 (I've got the set, and the US doco is every bit as comprehensive and fun as I remembered). Later in 1993, 30 Years in the TARDIS became the definitive retrospective documentary (particularly in the extended VHS version). The 1996 TV movie had Electronic Press Kit (EPK) material shot during its making, as was becoming more and more common.

The Silver Nemesis VHS came with The Making of Doctor Who

A few years on and DVD arrived, its additional capacity allowing for - and making consumers demand - more content accompanying the main feature. There was an explosion of Doctor Who documentaries as a result. By the time new Doctor Who launched on screens - and shiny discs - in 2005, it would have seemed more odd for its production to go unrecorded than not, and duly a sister show Doctor Who Confidential (later called Doctor Who Unleashed, but essentially the same show) was created. It would have an episode for each story, covering the behind the scenes process of its making. Some of this material would also make it on to the home video box set releases. In 2022, an authored documentary was created called Doctor Who Am I, showcasing Matthew Jacobs - writer of the aforementioned 1996 TV movie - and his engagement with mass fandom. This achieved the rare feat of a brief theatrical run in UK cinemas. Documentaries about the Doctor have come a long way since those early forays, and any child starting to watch Doctor Who now will likely have a much better first documentary experience than I did. Nonetheless, a debt is owed to those that pioneered such work, including JNT.

In Summary:

Docu-tastic!