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!

Frontier in Space

Chapter the 285th, here be Dragons...

Plot:
The TARDIS materialises aboard a cargo spaceship. It's the 26th century and there is a frontier (in space) between the Draconian and Earth empires. Relations are strained as both sides have apparently been attacking each others ships. The Doctor and Jo see Ogrons board, but the crew - thanks to a hypnotic signal - see them as Draconians. By the time rescue arrives, the Ogrons have gone, taking the TARDIS with them. The Doctor and Jo are arrested as spies in league with the Draconians, and nobody will believe them when they say a third-party is stirring up both sides to create a war. The third-party turns out to be the Master who arrives posing as an official from a colony planet with forged warrants for the Doctor and Jo's arrest. The Doctor has already been taken to a prison on the moon where political prisoners are held. During an attempted escape that goes wrong, the Master rescues the Doctor and takes him and Jo off in a stolen Earth ship. Later, the Draconians board them, and the Master signals the Ogrons to rescue him. On Draconia, the Doctor is meeting the Emperor when the Ogrons attack. They escape with the Master, but leave one of their party behind. When the hypnotic signal wears off the Draconians see him change from a hallucinated Earthman to an Ogron, and are convinced. There's more back and forth space shenanigans: Jo is captured by the Master and taken to the Ogrons' planet, where the TARDIS is; the Doctor and a Draconian prince persuade General Williams on Earth to help, and they all go there too. The Master reveals for whom he's been plotting - the Daleks. They want a war to destabilise things so they can invade. Williams and the Draconian prince leave to warn their respective empires. There's a tussle where the Doctor is hurt (somehow), and the Master escapes (presumably).

Context:

I was a little bit Who-ed out towards the end of November 2023. There was such a lot of different programmes old and new being made available (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) and I'm still working my way through the episodes on recent Blu-ray purchases (The animated Underwater Menace and the Season 20 Collection box-set) too. As such, I set myself a one episode per day limit to avoid Time Lord Appreciation Fatigue. I have enough, with everything that's being shown, or that I plan to watch from newly bought disc, or cover for the blog, to get me to Christmas Day and Ncuti's debut. I watched Frontier in Space therefore stripped across six consecutive days in late November and early December 2023. The family have current Doctor Who back on TV with David Tennant and Meeps to keep them amused now, so they didn't join me.

Milestone watch: I started this blog in 2015 to cover all of the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order. I am keeping closer track now that I'm nearing the point of catching up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, the 10th season, Jon Pertwee's fourth run from 1972/73. This is the 18th season done out of the total of 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

This is a rarity, a story where I saw the final episode first, long before the rest. The reason for this was a VHS release in early 1992 called The Pertwee Years. The Years tapes were the brainchild of former Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner when he worked as a consultant to the VHS range in its early days. The Hartnell and Troughton Years tapes had come out the year before, and provided a home for some of the orphaned episodes, where the rest of the story was missing. Jon Pertwee's tape was made at the same time, and there was a plan to complete the series for all seven of the actors who'd by then starred as the Doctor, but Nathan-Turner parted company with BBC Video before all of them were completed. The later tapes that did get made (for Bakers Tom and Colin) involved clips rather than full episodes as everything of theirs was present and correct in the archives. But this was true of Pertwee too. Perhaps the episodes were Pertwee's favourites, or perhaps Nathan-Turner selected them; however it came to be, the three that ended up on the tape were the final episodes of Inferno, The Daemons, and Frontier in Space. To put it another way, the Pertwee Years tape celebrated his tenure as the Doctor by ruining the ending of three of his stories. I had already seen Inferno and The Daemons on fan-exchanged nth generation tapes by 1992, so it was only Frontier in Space that had me scratching my head working out what might have happened in the first five-sixths of the story. I finally found that out when it was released in full on VHS in August 1995.

Reaction:

Frontiers, politics, different space-faring races, neutral zones being entered at the risk of war: this story is bloody Star Trek more than Doctor Who, isn't it? This kind of space opera underpinned by relatable politics is much more commonly done by my favourite show's US rival. Gene Roddenberry's famous creation might not have been a direct inspiration; writer of Frontier in Space Malcolm Hulke tended to imbue his tales with political parallels, and the creature races in his stories tended to have more depth (except for the Ogrons, perhaps, but they were inherited from an earlier story - more on them in the Deeper Thoughts section below). Who had anyway blazed the trail of peripatetic space opera in its early days with stories like The Daleks' Master Plan, and that was before Star Trek even existed. There's no reason why the flexible format of Who shouldn't try something like this, but the one thing Frontier in Space doesn't have is warp drive. There's mention of hyperspace and hyperdrive, but they don't seem to make things swift enough: travels through space and to planets in this story take up a lengthy amount of story time, which can get a little boring. Such sequences are interspersed with capture-escape-recapture moments which are less boring at first but get quite repetitive as things progress. You could lose almost all of episode four, for example, and the narrative would barely be impacted. The Master extricates the Doctor from the prison on the moon, they travel to his base but are boarded by Draconians, then the Master secretly signals the Ogrons to rescue him. That's all that happens in 25 minutes: two minutes of plot - less than the recap for some of the story's episodes.

 

What you would lose by jettisoning that episode is character moments; the three regulars - Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo and Roger Delgado as the Master - are on fine form, particularly Delgado, who is at his most snarky in this story. There is a sequence where Jo (or maybe Katy?) has to improvise long monologues moaning about the lot of working for UNIT and being the Doctor's companion. Such material sometimes veers too far into silliness (the Doctor talking about a purple horse with yellow spots) or gets uncomfortably close to sending up the tropes of the series, but it's mostly fun. It's not quite enough, though, to make the dull, repetitive scenes of going from place to place fully worthwhile. One problem is that there's lots of other repetition going on in the story. The entire second episode is a succession of scenes of the Doctor and Jo telling different sets of disbelieving people that they are being manipulated towards an intergalactic war, over and over again. The only intermissions are zap-gunfights shot amidst the Brutalist architecture of the South Bank area. (I'm very familiar with this area from many visits to watch Doctor Who at the BFI, so I was trying to work out exactly which overhead walkway and staircase was being used in which shot). The repetition is the point, of course, highlighting the difficulty of convincing the obdurate authorities, but it unfortunately doesn't get paid off. The ending sidesteps everything that's come before.

General Williams, the embodiment of the aggressive warmongers of Earth, is ultimately persuaded far too easily that he's been in the wrong, with a revelation from the Draconian prince about a past misjudgement he made in battle. It doesn't, though, prove anything about the third-party manipulation theory. Okay, he's only persuaded to mount a mission to fetch evidence, but crucially he isn't actually seen to ever gather such evidence. He and the Draconian Prince go to the planet, see that the Daleks are behind everything, and then the Doctor tells them to "Get the truth back to your respective governments". But that's what people have been trying to do without success for five and a half episodes: why should it be any more successful now? It's as if, once the Daleks have been revealed, the production team wants to switch off the Draconian plot so they can get the Dalek story going (perhaps anticipating how their audience might be feeling too). If we give the benefit of the doubt and imagine that Williams's ship's sensors have recorded details of the Ogrons and the Daleks somehow, then at least we can assume that there isn't a terrible Earth-Draconia war, even if we aren't shown that to be definitively the case. If the status quo is re-established, though, that still means that political opposition is being ruthlessly quashed, with its leaders locked up for life in a corrupt prison on the moon. The President (played expertly by Vera Fusek, one of many instances of more diverse casting choices than usual) is presented as a goodie, but this has all been happening on her watch.

Maybe leaving the lunar subplot unresolved is a deliberate statement about the darker side of centrist politics, but to me it comes over more as a rather lax Terry Nation style 'Episode three was weeks ago, haven't you forgotten about all that by now?' approach to serial drama. Hulke is normally better than that. Even if we imagine that it's resolved too somehow, the defeat of the Master at the end is heinously bungled. I don't know what happened in the production - I don't know how it's possible to have such insufficient coverage when you're shooting multi-camera - but something must have gone wrong, or they ran out of time. There's a melee when the Doctor uses the Master's hypnotic device to scare the Ogrons, then a series of abrupt jump-cuts: the Master in close-up, a reaction shot from Jo, an explosion near the Master, the Doctor tussling with Ogrons, another reaction shot from Jo, the Doctor on the floor clutching his head, the Ogrons running away. Then, we cut to a longer scene of the Doctor and Jo alone, with her helping him up and into the TARDIS. It's not clear how the Doctor got injured or when and how the Master got away. It's especially sad, though nobody knew this at the time of course, that this would turn out to be Delgado's final work on the series - his last appearance is a disappearance, one second he's there and the next he's not.

There is a lot of merit in the earlier material leading up to this moment, don't get me wrong. Including lots of spaceships, locations and characters might have tested the resources of the Beeb, but they were not found wanting: the model work and design is pretty good throughout, particularly the Draconian masks, costumes and make-up. The filmed scenes of wire-work to show space walks are pretty effective. But, if you recall (see First Time Round section above), I saw the final episode with all its clumsy non-resolutions before I saw the rest of the story. It's possible that viewing it in that order may have sullied my enjoyment of the majority. The story also can be seen as just the first part of a two-story arc continuing with Planet of the Daleks: that second story doesn't in any way tie up the Frontier in Space plot either, but maybe it gave viewers of the time another six weeks to forget about it. 

Connectivity:

Both Frontier in Space and The Star Beast feature conflict involving spaceship fights and gun battles between different alien races. They also both have a significant lead-in at the end to the next story.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody wants to bring the Ogrons back. Because they're racist? It's probably because they're racist, I think. It doesn't matter whether the many Ogrons seen on screen in the 1970s were played by black actors or by actors blacking up, neither way makes it better. Doctor Who throughout its long life has taken inspiration from the animal kingdom of Earth for creature designs, but visualising a race of ape-men came with unfortunate connotations. The manner of the Ogrons' comportment and speech too taps into a hoary old trope of the savage native (from Great White Hunter / Explorer films, or the depictions of native Americans seen in older Westerns). The insensitive nature of this was almost certainly inadvertent on the parts of the makers of the two stories in which the Ogrons feature, Frontier in Space and Day of the Daleks, but does that count for much to a viewer in the 21st century? Did it count for much to a viewer back in the 1970s? These sort of things might have been accepted, but maybe weren't or shouldn't have ever been acceptable. On screen, the Ogrons are a striking visual, of course, but that probably makes things worse rather than better. Visuals are powerful. One could argue or rationalise that they are just alien baddies and any similarities to anyone's skin pigmentation is coincidental and isn't supposed to suggest any aligned savageness, but the eye receives information before the brain. The new series has never brought the Ogrons back, but if for some reason a writer or showrunner wanted to do so in future, there would have to be a radical rethink in terms of how they are presented.

So, to recap: characters with a striking look originating in 1970s Who are likely to be problematic to a modern audience because of a negative connotation related to a minority group. There may not have been an intention to be insensitive on behalf of the people who created and designed these characters, and there was no specific plot point or line of dialogue that linked their bad actions to how they are or how they look, but they tap into old tropes that it's probably best to break away from when making television in the 21st century. As such, if they ever were to return, they'd have to be treated very differently to how they were in the past. Is this sounding familiar? This is similar to current showrunner Russell T Davies's expressed position about the character of Davros, which caused a bit of a storm of online opinion for a week in November 2023. After the Children in Need special scene on 17th November, there was a taster mini-episode of new behind-the-scenes show Unleashed, and Davies was interviewed. I'd watched the short, where the Dalek creator is seen without his usual wizened appearance or Dalek-like bottom half, and just assumed that it was set before whatever had happened to change him into the Davros I knew. Davies explained that there was more to it than that: "Time and society and culture and taste has moved on, and there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user who is evil ... A lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil, and trust me there's a very long tradition of this." Thus: "We made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair ... This is how we see Davros now."

Davros, as seen in Destination: Skaro

That was fair enough, wasn't it? It veered a bit towards virtue signalling, I suppose, but he was talking about a contribution to an evening long telethon for a children's charity. If there was ever a moment for virtue signalling, it was then. A lot of Doctor Who fans online, though, did not like what they heard. Some accused him of seeing negative intent from past creators of Doctor Who that wasn't there, but in the same interview he had said "I'm not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes Doctor Who has to change as well". Some accused him of ableism for seeing all disabled people as having one monolithic viewpoint, assuming they'd all be offended, but he did no such thing. He didn't talk for anyone but himself and fellow members of the production team. These are the people whose job it is to decide what is broadcast under the Doctor Who banner, and - as long as they stay within appropriate broadcasting regulations - they can make Doctor Who be anything they want it to be. That's why they're being paid. At the root of all this is probably the inflexibility of a certain Doctor Who fan towards the continuity of the lore. Many fans have interpreted Davies's comment to mean that if Davros were to come back in future, even if it was in a scene set later in his personal timeline, he'd still have the use of his legs and his good skin. He might just mean that they'll only revisit Davros in his past. Even if they do change the later Davros, there will be many narrative possibilities offered by a show featuring time travel and alternate universes to explain it.

No fan seems to have any problem in terms of narrative plausibility with the decision of successive production teams not to bring back the Ogrons. They have appeared twice, as allies of big-hitting A-list Doctor Who villains the Daleks and the Master. So, why has the Doctor never come across them again, when he bumps into old enemies and allies on a very regular basis? It seems to me that that's equally as explainable as some disturbance in the timelines creating an alt-Davros. I'm not immune to some of these fan feelings, of course. My first thought upon watching the interview with Davies was that it was a shame, as I like the character note that Davros created the Daleks in his own image. That's really only of relevance in Genesis of the Daleks, though, and that story isn't going to be remade or censored. On the contrary, it's more available to people than ever, and the same of course is true for the stories featuring the Ogrons. (In fact, the sole existing Doctor Who serial from the 60-year catalogue that is more difficult to view than the others is not being supressed for 'woke' reasons; much the opposite, it seems - but that's another story.) If Davies's decision means that in future even just one fewer wheelchair user gets called 'Davros' by some nob that thinks they're funny, then it will definitely be worth it. 

In Summary:

There's lots of good stuff in these six episodes, but the action is drawn out, and the end is abrupt and unresolved.