Day of the Daleks

Chapter the 321st, which - if you think about it - features two separate days of the Daleks, with the Daleks time-travelling from one to the other (but that's not as snappy a title, obviously). 

Plot:

The dire political situation of the 1970s or maybe 1980s (depending on the dating protocol) makes a third world war seemingly inevitable. Sir Reginald Styles is arranging a peace conference at Auderly House, a government owned country pile. Before the conference, a guerrilla soldier appears from thin air as Styles is working there, raises a gun as if to shoot him, then disappears again "like a ghost". UNIT investigate while Styles leaves to ensure the global delegates attend the conference. Evidence found suggests the guerrilla came from the future. The Doctor and Jo spend the night in Auderly, and in the morning three more guerrillas arrive and threaten the Doctor, thinking him to be Styles. They have come from the 22nd century to kill Styles as their history states that he tricked those attending the conference, then blew up the house killing everyone including himself. This started years of wars, then the weakened Earth was invaded by Daleks. Realising they have the wrong man, the guerrillas send one of their number to get new orders, but he does not return. Jo accidentally operates one of their personal time machines and is sent to the 22nd century. Ogrons, back from the future, attack the house. The Doctor chases after the fleeing guerrillas and travels with them to the 22nd century. He is captured and reunited with Jo and meets the local controller, a human who does the Daleks' dirty work. The guerrillas rescue the Doctor and Jo, and ask them to go back to the 20th century and kill Styles. The Doctor realises that it was the remaining guerrilla not Styles who blew up the house, as a last ditch effort to complete his mission. He and Jo go back, and evacuate the house. The Doctor persuades the guerrilla to instead use his explosives to destroy the Daleks and Ogrons who are attacking the house. UNIT fall back and let the invading aliens in. Auderly promptly goes boom, righting the timeline.

Context:

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the latest BFI Doctor Who event (see Deeper Thoughts section below). It does require a lot of luck. For the uninitiated, it involves being a member of the BFI (well worth the money, if you are even vaguely geographically close to London) but also wrestling with the BFI's website. When the monthly programme opens for members, all events in that programme - not just Doctor Who ones - sell out quickly. For those few minutes, the website gets hammered and sometimes responds in quirky ways. For the February programme's launch, the website for the first time had added rate limiting / queuing functionality; this meant that visitors that morning were shown a holding page until tickets became available, then were added to a queue. The weird thing was, it added people to a queue in a random order, rather than first come first served. The amount of luck required to get these tickets therefore increased even further. Even though our queue position was supposedly 6000+, two tickets were bagged; if the photos look further away than usual and from an awkward angle, though, this is why. This blog is all about using random factors to pick the next story. The box set schedule and the mad carousel of the BFI website had to be chance enough; I had no choice but to then blog Day of the Daleks, as it is the final Jon Pertwee story remaining to align with the write-up of the event. I watched the special edition version of Day (originally made for DVD in 2011) from the Blu-ray an episode an evening during a week of early February.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Jon Pertwee's third Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth, making eight Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 34th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In February 1988, both Spearhead from Space and Day of the Daleks came out on VHS and I bought them (from W. H. Smith in Worthing) and watched them for the first time. In fact, the date of the BFI event was exactly 37 years to the day of the VHS release date of Spearhead; Day of the Daleks came out a little later on the 15th February in 1988. In those days, I had no idea what was coming out when, so walking into a shop and finding new tapes on sale was an unexpected pleasure. Before that, my Doctor Who collection was only four tapes, one of them another Jon Pertwee Dalek four-parter (Death to the Daleks) and one of them a definite crowd-pleaser (Pyramids of Mars). These new releases in February (The Robots of Death came out at the same time as Day), though, felt like a real step up in quality and excitement; plus, seven tapes felt like more of a collection than four.

Reaction:

It was a very hard choice whether to watch the as transmitted version or special edition of the story. When I first saw it in 1988, it didn't occur to me that anything in Day of the Daleks needed to be fixed; I didn't notice anything wrong with the Dalek voices, nor the climactic sequence of the attack on a country house. I still don't think the latter is that bad: yes, there are only three Daleks involved, but one could chalk that up in the story universe to each Dalek being so powerful that that's all they need (rather than the paucity of props that was the real reason). The filmed additions the special edition makes (shot using the same type of cameras used by the original crew) to that and other action sequences are done fairly seamlessly, anyway. No, it was the Dalek voices that swung the decision for me. Over the years since my first watch, I've seen all the other Dalek stories, such that the very different approach taken by the voice actors in Day have stuck out more and more. The story was made many years after the last Dalek had featured in Doctor Who, and nobody on the production knew exactly how to achieve their discordant delivery. The tendency in Day is for the dialogue to be done slowly, haltingly, without the shrill aggression, so it gets a bit boring (particularly as secondary alien foes the Ogrons also deliver everything slowly). New series voice actor Nicholas Briggs recorded new voices for the edition in 2011 that are much more in keeping with the other Dalek stories of the 1970s, and with those switched on I was able to watch without being distracted from the action quite so much. I won't cover any of the other changes or new material here, but will concentrate on the majority of the story material that is in common to both versions.

There are a few things that could do with fixing in the story that the special edition couldn't address. It can't just be me (though a quick google search doesn't find anyone else bothered by it at least enough to post somewhere online), but isn't the exterior footage quite soft? Maybe bordering on out of focus in places? I don't think (though I've not got an expert eye by any means) that this has been created by transfer of the film to video before broadcast, it looks to have been burnt in when the film was originally shot. It's a shame, as the locations used (both for the house and its grounds, and the gone-to-seed vistas of the future Earth) are good enough to want to see them with pin-sharp clarity. It was possibly a deliberate choice, as presumably was the decision to include the 'sting' from the end credits in the recap of the cliffhanger of the following parts (when I first got the story on VHS it was a stitched-together omnibus version losing all the interstitial credit sequences, and when I heard the end theme start to play for a few seconds over the action, I assumed it was somebody's editing error). Some of these aspects might be down to the inexperience of new director Paul Bernard. He does, though, get some good performances from the regulars and the guest cast playing the guerrillas (particularly Anna Barry as their leader Anat). Aubrey Woods as the Controller makes some more questionable choices. He's very theatrical, with some deliberately exaggerated physicality. Again, this may have been deliberate on the part of actor and director, the better to counterpoint those cooperating in the Daleks' Vichy regime against the more naturalistic freedom fighters bringing that regime down. I can't think of any other reason why the technicians working for the controller speak like they're hypnotised zombies.

The storyline could be said to be generic Pertwee, playing a lot of the beats that had been established in his first two years (a conference under threat, an obstructive government representative, a couple of UNIT action sequences), and it has a good few 'moments of charm' humanising its military-scientific squad (the Brig early in the morning needing coffee, Benton on the search for some food only for it to be taken by Yates because "Rank Has It's Privileges", the Doctor and Jo on ghost watch in a supposedly haunted house). Some visual moments are created at the expense of logic: the guerrilla's time travel devices behave a little differently each time they're used, depending on the needs of the plot. A lot of the scenes of world building are a bit too leisurely in their pacing. But none of the quibbles matter; the story as a whole is protected by the strength of the underlying plot of people travelling back in time to try to change the future, only to end up creating it. It's wonderful and innovative, and the moment the Doctor reveals the twist ("Styles didn't create that explosion and start the wars - you did it yourselves") is goosebumps central. Yes, in 1972 a few viewers may have known of such a story structure from an SF short story, but for the vast majority this would have been something brand new. Even in 1988 when I first saw Day of the Daleks, it was new to me and I'd guess many others buying that video (1984 film The Terminator, which uses exactly the same plot 12 years after Day, was not as well known in 1988 as it would be a few years later when its sequel came out, and I hadn't seen it at that point). The biggest selling point of the story is of course that it features the Daleks, but they are just icing on the cake (the original drafts of Louis Marks's script did not feature them). This one serves up big timey-wimey.

Connectivity:

After two stories which didn't (really) feature the Brigadier comes one that empathically does, with Nick Courtney's character not away in Geneva or Peru, or stuck inside a cyber-suit, but fully present instead in the South East of England where all the alien action happened in those days. Other than their both at least mentioning the Brig, and featuring lead characters that first appeared on Doctor Who in the 1970s, Day of the Daleks and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith also both have denouements that feature an attack on a big and mostly unoccupied building in its own grounds.

Deeper Thoughts:

From one Jon Pertwee season opener to another: BFI Spearhead from Space event, 1st February 2025. It was a crisp, bright February morning as I walked along the South Bank to the BFI. As well as myself, others of the usual crowd that come to these events in attendance were Alan, Chris, Dave and Tim. The NFT1 screen's auditorium was packed out, as is usual for these Blu-ray box set tie-in events, and the hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The former started proceedings by welcoming Doctor Who fans back to the BFI after four months, and telling us that he was "Very happy not to be presenting The Happiness Patrol". "Well, fingers crossed," added Fiddy. Jokes about the snafu at the BFI event for that story in August 2024 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) seem to have replaced jokes about Fiddy's first name as go-to gags for warming up an audience. Later, we were still encouraged to "Shout for Dick" if we thought we knew the answers to the quiz, and as an aside Fiddy asked fans to stop shouting the same at him during conventions as the hotels involved didn't like it. Before that, Johnson read a few of the more choice comments related to the day's event on twitter. There was the obligatory tweet from a fan planning to trawl the event for cute guys (the feeling of our hosts was, not in exactly these words but definitely in their spirit, 'good luck with that'). Another regular favourite was a post from a person wearing a tie-in item of clothing; this time it was a gentleman in our row who was wearing a Silurian jumper. There were quite a few cosplayers dressed as Jon Pertwee's Doctor too. My favourite online comment read out was from someone who said that the event would be scary because "I have to be around other Doctor Who fans for hours".

The event did not have a panel per se. There are so few people to invite, as most involved in the story from both behind and in front of the cameras have passed. Instead, there were a series of one person interviews on stage. The first, before any episodes screened, was with Mark Ayres. Billed as "Sound Impresario", Ayres is responsible for restoring the audio of stories for the Collection Blu-ray box sets. He joked that the story we were about to see "follows on directly from The War Games In Colour". The recent version of the final Patrick Troughton story, now with added regeneration into Jon Pertwee, was also worked on by Ayres. Spearhead from Space is the only classic series story made in a format, 16mm film, that is compatible with HD standards. As such, it has already had a stand-alone Blu-ray release, over a decade ago. For the box set, audio restoration started again from scratch. The restored audio was described by Ayres as a "patchwork quilt" made from various sources. The original 16mm sound mags disintegrated long ago, but there are safety copies (though they were also mostly unusable) and CD copies in the archive, and all of these were reviewed. Ayres is given a rough cut of the video to work with and takes its audio track as a guide, using the best sources he has and a lot of skill to produce a restored version. He mentioned that he'd just received the guide videos for the episodes in the next box set; Johnson asked him what season that was, but Ayres would only say that it was "Season X ... or season XX". One early scene of the Brigadier and Liz Shaw had a lot of echo on the vocals, and Ayres did a lot of work to reduce that, and hopes people will now have nothing to complain about. Johnson joked that they'd probably complain thus: "You've not taken off the echo effect for God's sake?!!!".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

The first two episodes were shown next. I don't think you can go wrong with Spearhead from Space, really, and the story seemed to go down well with the audience. There was applause when Caroline John first appeared as Liz Shaw, and her first dialogue scene is now completely devoid of any distracting echoes. Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well is present and correct on the second episode's soundtrack (rights issues have meant it has appeared and disappeared from home video releases over the years). People laughed in all the intended places, and some unintended ones: the wheelchair chase at the end of episode one garnered some titters, but I think it is a rather good example of some dynamic editing. What came over most was the high quality of the characters and the dialogue. When the lights went up after the end of episode two, a cast member was invited onto stage; Robin Squire had portrayed uncredited an Auton, so hadn't got to display much character, and certainly no dialogue. He was an engaging interviewee, nonetheless. Squire's real job on the series was as assistant script editor, and he had also been mucking in on location for the filming of Spearhead as a driver, picking up and conveying actors to where they were needed. The person originally booked to play the Auton had "freaked out" on being presented with the costume and head of the creature, so Squire mucked in again. His abiding memory of playing the role was of refreshment breaks during the filming wearing a head without any mouth hole, and pining about "what it must be like to have a nice cup of tea". He got to stay with the cast and crew in the hotel on location, asking Jon Pertwee one day over breakfast to run through all his famous funny voices.

Squire (R)

Squire recalled that the shoot in October 1969 had been blessed with marvellous weather. He also remembered Caroline John coming up to ask him, having been sent by producer Derrick Sherwin, what polymer chains were (these are mentioned by Liz Shaw in dialogue). Squire didn't know why Sherwin thought he would have a clue, and assured John that as long as she was pronouncing the words right it would all be okay. His tenure as assistant script editor was relatively short. He got to see the recording of a Patrick Troughton story when he'd just started and was surprised by the tattiness of the sets; it was explained to him that "in black and white, the tattiness doesn't show". Later, he'd pitched a story idea - presumably for Inferno - but didn't get to write the screenplay, "They used a proper writer, who'd worked for Hammer". In later life, he has returned to writing, penning a non-fiction book "The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy", and very recently a screenplay which he is hoping will be filmed soon. Squire left the stage, and the final two episodes were shown. There were many more unintended laughs in the second half, some of which I didn't really share in. The total destruction effect - where film is played backwards and then sharply edited to show a person imploding and then vanishing - looks a bit Monty Python, I suppose, but the moment where Channing appears distorted through the glass of a door got a big laugh too, and I think that's an effectively creepy visual. The Nestene creature - felt by most commentators over the years to be rubbish - got off lightly by comparison. After the story ended, the person responsible for the visuals looking as good as they did was interviewed. This was Peter Crocker, who billed himself as "The Emperor of Pixel Wrangling".

Crocker (R)

Crocker is to the video as Ayres is to the audio; he confirmed on stage what Ayres had also hinted at: season 7 was the most tricky season to clean up for a box set so far, as the archive holdings are relatively poor. Spearhead presented the least issues, as it had been worked on for the stand-alone Blu-ray release in 2013. The technology available improves; also, as Crocker explained, all such restorations are time limited and so are never exhaustive. There was still more clean up to do this time, and he'd also noticed when watching the episodes shown that day some things that had still been missed; he said they would likely get fixed " the next time it comes out, in 2035". He confirmed in answer to a question from Johnson that whatever small issues remain, the Blu-ray versions will be much better than anything seen on a TV in 1970 ("We know this from recordings done at that time"). After a brief introduction of the Colour Recovery process, Crocker showed on NFT1's big screen a fascinating four-way comparison. The same clip from The Ambassadors of Death played in four different versions in each corner of the screen: top left was the black and white film version, top right was an off-air US colour video tape version, bottom left was the raw colour as created by the recovery process, and bottom right was the final restored version. It was an extreme example, but still highlighted the amount of effort that goes into this work. The colour in the bottom left section was patchy, and in the top right was barely there at all. Through technology and graft the bottom right version, which looked splendid, was created. Crocker believed that final version should pass muster with everyone barring pedants and BBC engineers (though he did concede that the former group will contain a lot of Doctor Who fans).

Next to be shown was a selection of sneak peaks at the Value Added Material: as usual it ended with a humorous selection of responses from the Behind the Sofa watchers, this time viewing season 7's finale Inferno; before that there were clips from documentaries about writer Malcolm Hulke and actor Nicholas Courtney, a clip from a Robin Ince fronted documentary on contemporary science's impact on Who, an emotional John Levene In Conversation, and a clip from a documentary about Who's relationship to suburbia. Matthew Sweet, involved in the last two on that list, was the next guest. He's often in the audience for these BFI events, but I've never seen him on stage before. He was as entertaining and humorous an interviewee as he is interviewer, though he couldn't help turning the tables a couple of times: "So, how did you two get together?" he asked of Johnson and Fiddy at one point, and later in a tiny lull smilingly barked "Come on then, ask me a question?". When it was suggested that the clip of John Levene showed a gamut of emotions, Sweet hinted that we hadn't seen anything yet, "The gamut goes on". He outlined his theory that Doctor Who is one of the most researched things there's ever been; when future alien archaeologists reflect on evidence they've found on Earth, he expects they'll think that Who "must have been ... as important as America." There was particular focus on the detail of his approach for his ' In conversation' interviews with Doctor Who alumni. There is a limit to how much time they will spend with any interviewee, as the one-to-one interview is an exhausting experience, so it's important to create a space where people feel comfortable to share. From the vantage point of age, interviewees seem to be more free to speak, can be more reflective, and less worried about speaking about some topics.

Sweet (R)

Sweet was asked what it's like as interviewer and long-term fan when an interviewer gets details of their long ago activity wrong; he recalled having to gently remind Michael Grade three times - for the interview on the Season 22 box set - that Grade hadn't cancelled the programme, merely taken it off the air for a few months. Sweet had differing responses to some comparisons about his interviewing style (Russell Harty was fine, but he was not so keen on Piers Morgan). There was an amusing but off topic reminiscence about interviewing Norman Wisdom at his house ("We called it an interview but it was more like a hostage situation"); then, finally he touched on what Doctor Who means to him ("I consider myself profoundly afflicted... it's in my DNA... in my dreams"). Once he'd left the stage, another guest was introduced who could also make the claim that Doctor Who was in their DNA. Daisy Ashford is the daughter of Caroline John, who played companion Liz Shaw in season 7, and Geoffrey Beevers, who had a smaller role in season 7 and later played the Master in the series. Now, Ashford plays the character her mother originated in Big Finish Doctor Who audios. I think I've met Daisy briefly: as recounted in the blog post for Spearhead linked a few paragraphs above, I once met John and Beevers (with family members, one of which I'm sure was their daughter) waiting for the lift at a Doctor Who convention. Ashford asked the audience for a show of hands of who had met her mother, and I was able to put my hand up. She also recounted John's leaving the show thinking she hadn't done well in the role, as I touch on in the Spearhead post. It took joining the convention circuit, starting with one in Manchester in the 1990s, to persuade her otherwise; "Being back in the fold meant a lot to her".

Ashford (R)

Ashford thought the newly restored episodes she'd seen that day were "beautiful" and "stunning"; she has had to view the season as a whole previously in preparation for the Big Finish role as Liz. "How many people here know Big Finish?" she asked. Almost all hands shot up. "You're speaking to the right audience" said Johnson. When she was offered the role, she instantly said yes (and imagined her late mother saying "I'm going to sort out some acting work for you"). The responsibility of what she was doing only hit her once she was in the studio, but Tim Treloar (who plays the third Doctor for audio) and Jon Culshaw (who was a guest actor in her first audio) helped her adjust. She understands what a privilege it is, and enjoys how it's a connection to her mother. She talked a bit about what her mother was like as a person and an actor, including an anecdote about seeing her on stage at the National Theatre catching a bee that had been buzzing around the actors, and releasing it away from the stage, all the while staying in character. Ashford confirmed that she had been a Doctor Who fan as a child, her era was Sylvester McCoy with Sophie Aldred as Ace, but she didn't "connect the dots" to her mother's era, "It was like a different show". One audience question related to the feminist angle of Liz Shaw's character, something Ashford appreciated in the 1970s stories, thinking that her mother's character was " a trail blazer" who "had to defer to men somewhat, but didn't do it willingly". She recounted how her mother had met female fans who had been inspired to become scientists because of Liz. Of the season 7 stories, Ashford's favourites are the Silurians story and Inferno (both see "The good guys being not that good, the bad guys not being all that bad").

How did these two get together?

After Ashford's interview, the box set trailer was shown, and the event was over (apart from the obligatory few post-screening drinks in the BFI bar). The next event at the end of February 2025 is a screening of the animated version of The Savages, and I'm lucky enough to have a ticket to that one too, so all being well should be able to share a write-up of it here in a few weeks.

In Summary:

An innovative plot, which has been used elsewhere so much since 1972 that we don't give Day of the Daleks the credit it deserves.

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.