The Two Doctors

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

Plot:

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

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

Context:

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

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor. The tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 11 now remain.

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

Cala'n Forcat

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

Ciutadella

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

In Summary:

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

Timelash

Chapter the 258th, where the Doctor and Peri go out on the Lash and get wasted (i.e. the lead actors' talents are wasted on this.)

Plot:

The planet Karfel is a brutal dictatorship, policed by blue-faced androids and beekeepers (alright, they're guardoliers, but they look like beekeepers), and ruled by the Borad, who's only ever seen in public broadcasts never in person. He has many experiments going on, including those involving a time/space tunnel called the Timelash, which he has the occasional rebel thrown into. He is also stirring up interplanetary war with the neighbouring Bandrils. The corrupt Tekker takes over as the Borad's second-in command, and starts being mean to everyone. Vena, a noblewoman of Karfel, in possession of a MacGuffin that can be used to control the Timelash, inadvertently falls into the time tunnel. At the same time, the Doctor is navigating the TARDIS through the Timelash. The Doctor has been to Karfel many years before, and had become a hero of legend before the Borad banned everyone from talking about him. After arrival, Tekker takes Peri hostage to force the Doctor to fetch Vena and the MacGuffin. This takes him to 1880s Scotland, and someone from there, an aspiring writer called Herbert, stows away in the TARDIS on the trip to take Vena back to Karfel.

There's stand-offs and squabbles once they all return. The Borad turns out to be a scientist that the Doctor reported on his first visit for performing unethical experiments on the local large reptile life, the Morlox. The Borad has experimented on himself, making him half-Karfelon, half Morlox. He wants to do the same to Peri, who will then become his mate; then he'll wipe out every other non-Morlox on the planet. Tekker stands up to the Borad but is killed. The Doctor uses a gizmo powered by crystals from the Timelash to get the Borad to shoot himself with his own death ray, then flies off in the TARDIS with Herbert (after a long conversation with Peri that one wouldn't think there was time for in the situation) to deflect the approaching Bandril fleet. It appears that the TARDIS is destroyed, which makes the Bandrils retreat. A clone of the Borad turns up and grabs Peri. Luckily, the Doctor has survived (somehow) and distracts the Borad, allowing him to be pushed into the Timelash. The Doctor believes he'll travel back to the other end of the tunnel, Loch Ness, and apparently just swim around in it forever, occasionally being mistaken for the monster. This seems unlikely. Herbert wants to stay on Karfel, but the Doctor suspects he'll return home. He shows Peri Herbert's card that he'd dropped earlier; he is a young H. G. Wells.

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc in the season 22 box set with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10), an episode a week over two Sundays in late February 2023. The Better Half declined to join us and said things to the effect that putting on Timelash for the kids was edging towards child cruelty. But  - I thought, on pressing play on episode one - it's not that bad, is it? The trouble is, and this may come down to one's frame of mind when watching, it isn't often so poor as to be fun - though it sometimes is - it's more often just a weary slog to get through. It didn't hold the children's attention al all, with the younger two giving up and leaving the living room before the end of each episode. Only the eldest stuck around to the end to give his one word verdict - "Shit" - before leaving too. We watched the story as broadcast, by the way, without the whizzy new effects available as an alternative viewing experience - effects are the least of Timelash's problems.

First Time Round:

The 22nd season of Doctor Who was broadcast in early 1985, back on Saturday afternoon's after a few years on weekday evenings. It was the final season to be broadcast before my family had a video recorder, so whenever I - as a burgeoning teenage gadabout - didn't make it back home by 5:20pm, I would miss the episode with no way of watching it, perhaps forever. Given that the 1985 stories were mostly two-parters, that meant missing 50% of the narrative, and this happened a few times. Luckily or unluckily, I caught both parts of Timelash in full. Didn't miss a second of it. The story was somewhat overshadowed by the recent hoo-hah of the announcement of Doctor Who's 18-month hiatus; I remember that being in my mind when I watched for the first time. I also remember thinking that Herbert was going to join as a new companion, and the reveal of his true identity at the end came as a nice surprise.

Reaction:

Many an online wag over the years has been tickled by the simple fact that 'Timelash' is an anagram of 'Lame Shit'. It seems apt, but is it really? The production saddled with the pre-scrambled moniker doesn't need any thought or analysis to uncover its lameness; it's pretty obvious to anyone watching it for even the shortest length of time. A truly apt title for the story would be just to call it Lame Shit and get it over with; nobody's going to be fooled for long. Is that a smidge unfair? Maybe. When I watched as a teen, I thought the story was okay if not exactly top drawer. Every time I've watched since, though, I've seen more and more flaws. The script development process seems to have generated a story with significant problems, and then - bad luck upon bad luck - the execution in all departments has made things worse. There's examples at the macro or the micro level, but just to take one: mirrors are banned on Karfel, so the script mandates that the sets and props literally be dull. Peri even points this out at one point, picking up a matt grey drinking vessel. Why, though? Is it because the Borad hates his face after his genetic experimentation, and doesn't want any risk of seeing his reflection? But he never comes out of his secret lair, anyway. Maybe it's because they interfere with the androids, as the Doctor demonstrates to extricate himself from the episode one cliffhanger at the start of episode two. But that comes out of nowhere - how did the Doctor know it would work? The script doesn't explain. There's only a couple of small moments where the mirrors have any relevance, and for that visual interest has been sacrificed.

I suppose the sets and props might have ended up being dull anyway. There's nothing in the script to mandate dull performances, but that's what the director mostly elicits. It's hard to watch the early scenes where rebels in beige clothes run through beige corridors and spout beige dialogue (it's particularly infuriating to see this material given to the couple of them - Tracy Louise Ward and Stephen Mackintosh - who became much more famous subsequently). Eric Saward script editing (and reportedly doing some significant rewriting of relatively inexperienced writer Glen McCoy's scripts) attempts to achieve narrative dynamism by bumping characters off one after the other, without the audience having sufficient time to get to know them: Renis, Kendron, Brunner, Mykros, Tyheer - I couldn't pick any of them out of a line up and I've just watched it. Where a performance is memorable, it's usually for the wrong reasons. Jeananne Crowley as Vena delivers every line staring into the middle distance, displays inappropriate emotion seemingly at random, and sounds out individual words as if she's reading phonetically written Latin from an autocue. The script doesn't help: Vena's father obeys the Borad's order to redirect power knowing that it will mean his wife on life-support in a hospital will die. The Borad then has him killed anyway. Vena never mentions her mother ever (maybe she thinks she's still alive?), and when she finds out her father is dead, her scripted reaction is as if someone's just told her it's beans for supper.

The Doctor arriving livens things up a bit, but - like in most of the stories of season 22 - that doesn't happen until far too late in the first half. Before that, he's stuck in the TARDIS expounding on the wonders of the universe while Peri snarks at him (why does Saward think this stuff is clever?), fiddles with technology, and fits seatbelts to the TARDIS console (it's like something out of a comedy sketch, except it isn't funny). Why does it occur to nobody writing stories in 1985 to just have the Doctor and Peri arrive at the beginning and start having adventures straight away?! Even with delaying tactics reducing the duration of the character's time on Karfel, McCoy and Saward still can't fill that time with anything for Nicola Bryant as Peri to do: she spends the whole story standing about, sometimes chained to something, sometimes not. At least she gets to wear reasonably sensible clothes after spending the previous few stories in garish leotards. Paul Darrow as Tekker chews the scenery, and the lighting rig and a couple of cameras. His OTT performance is always watchable - I love the relish with which he talks of the Doctor not living up to the legends told of him - but there's no coherence to his actions. He just does scene after scene of random panto bad guy stuff like provoking a war in which he must at least suspect his planet could get destroyed, then at the end does a volte face and gets himself killed standing up to the Borad.

Robert Ashby is great as the Borad, and the make-up and prosthetics are excellent. It's not quite enough to offset the feeble model work, the invading alien race portrayed by one glove puppet, or the Timelash made of polystyrene and tinsel. Plus, again, the character's villainy is blasting out in so many random directions: he experiments with time, and genetic hybridisation, and cloning. Pick one thing. The reason for this sci-fi smorgasbord is to hint at the many topics of the works of H. G.Wells. David Chandler's performance as Herbert is fun, and the reveal at the end that he's going to one day be the famous English author is a satisfying moment. It would be better, of course, if the character had any biographical details in common with the real Wells, but as the audience only finds out who he is in the very last shot of the story, that's not something that can trouble one too much on first watch. The script tries to pull the same retrofitting history trick by suggesting that the Borad, banished to the Scotland of centuries before by the Timelash, has been sighted since and taken for the Loch Ness Monster. But he doesn't look anything like the Loch Ness Monster, so that doesn't work. There's some truly honking dialogue, from the swallowed a thesaurus insults favoured by this era "You microcephalic apostate" to the on-the-nose exposition that doesn't even need to be said in the first place, such as this exchange: "He will destroy every Karfelon in the Citadel" "All five hundred of us?!"

Poor Timelash can't catch a break. It starts to build to the climax, with the Borad killed and the Doctor flying off in the TARDIS for a last-minute effort to stop the approaching war-fleet. Then, everything slows to a near halt, and the last-minute effort turns into a last seven minutes effort. Saward has to introduce a long scene of padding as the second episode was found to be seriously under-running. The footage was filmed during one of the next story's studio days, so options were limited: it has to happen in the TARDIS control room (the series' only recurring set) with minimal cast (aside from the two regulars, they got Chandler back to play Herbert again). It would be a tall order, but possible, to maintain the rising tension through many minutes in one location, but Saward doesn't appear to try. It's just the usual comic business and characters arguing, and it kills the ending stone dead. He doesn't even add a retrospective explanation for how the TARDIS survives a collision with missiles in space. In the already shot footage the Doctor waves this away with an "I'll explain one day - it's a neat trick" cop out. Because everything's slowed down, when the Doctor returns to Karfel to face another Borad (the baddie having cloned himself), a development that's silly but not entirely ridiculous for this heightened genre, it doesn't feel like a final exciting corkscrew turn of the plot, it just makes one internally scream "Is this not over yet?!". The anti-cherry on the cake is the Doctor then proceeding to defeat the Borad by taunting him about how ugly and deformed he is. It verges on being ableist for me, and I fear it would fall foul of a 21st century sensitivity reader (if they managed to get that far).

Connectivity:

Both Timelash and Demons of The Punjab feature scenes in Earth history where benign aliens are witnessed by a male human who takes them to be demonic.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who without the Doctor. Infamously, the producer of Timelash John Nathan-Turner took his two lead actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant out of rehearsals for the story to work on a pantomime that Nathan-Turner was directing as a side hustle, and which he had roped them into to star. At the time, and for a good length of time afterwards, it was de rigueur within fandom to criticise JNT for everything he did. I think people were mostly being unfair, but in this case it's hard to defend him. Throughout the making of Doctor Who, before and since Timelash, there have always been the pressures, logistical headaches and compromises that come from needing to get x number of episodes in the can per year without enough time or resources. To make that situation even worse for a somewhat frivolous side venture (albeit one that I'm sure was well made and enjoyable for those who attended it) seems like an obvious, unforced error. What couldn't happen in the 1980s was that the characters just be written out for a while; that was unthinkable. I talked in the last blog post about how the expectation is that the Doctor will almost always be the protagonist of any Who story's narrative, so obviously he or she has to appear. It was not always thus, however. In the 1960s, Doctor Who production involved the rehearsal and recording of a new episode every week, for almost every week of the year. The workload and turnaround equivalent to that of a soap opera today.

Unlike a soap, though, Doctor Who only had a maximum of four regulars to take the weight of the narratives. If someone was absent for a week's work because of illness or holiday, it was much more noticeable. Clever (and sometimes not so clever) strategies were required. This wasn't restricted to the 60s either; every year for a good few years after Doctor Who returned in 2005, they needed to squeeze one more episode out of the schedule than they had time for, and had to employ what was called double-banking. Two stories would be made simultaneously, meaning that another character (either the companion or a guest character) would take the majority of the action in one of them, while the Doctor starred more fully in the other. This gave rise to the so-called 'Doctor lite' episodes like Love & Monsters or Blink. They were never 'Doctor-less' episodes, though. Some footage of the Doctor, maybe gathered in only a few hours, would be intercut with the action to give the lead character a presence. This was sometimes employed in the 60s too, with a bit of pre-recording - on film or sometimes just audio - done of the Doctor or companion who was otherwise out for that week's multi-camera shoot in studio. The production line approach to making the episodes didn't leave as much time for this to be done as there was in the 21st century, though - it would usually mean an actor missing some of a previous week's rehearsal to go to Ealing studios, and would be limited to short scenes (editing anything into the finished product was a lot less easy than later too). Sometimes, it just wasn't possible.

So, are there any episodes without the Doctor in at all? The answer is yes, but very few. Every Doctor from Jon Pertwee up to Jodie Whittaker appears in every one of their episodes in new footage; so, it's only the black and white years we need to look at. Patrick Troughton was away for four episodes in all. In the first of these (episode four of Evil of the Daleks) he's in pre-filmed sequences; in the second (episode two of The Web of Fear), he appears at the start in the reprise from the previous episode. Often a reprise would be performed by the actors again as part of the recording session for the next story; the rest of the time (particularly if there was an actor featured who was not in the studio that week), it would be edited in from a film recording of the end of the previous episode. For the last two of Pat's holidays (episode two of The Wheel in Space, and episode four of The Seeds of Death), the Doctor's knocked out and represented by a body double sleeping with face pointing away from the camera. Not the most imaginative method, but it suffices. So, the Doctor appears but not played by the usual actor (though the use of Doctor doubles in scenes is by no means limited to holiday cover, so it counts).

William Hartnell had ten weeks off in all, either for holiday or illness. Body doubles were used for two (The Dalek Invasion of Earth four and The Tenth Planet three) who were both depicted in their first scene, shot from behind almost identically, to faint, then kept out of the way after that. A couple of episodes (The Space Museum three and The Time Meddler two), the Doctor is present in the film-recorded reprise, plus in the latter Hartnell has recorded audio that's played in to simulate him talking to another character through a door. In the two middle episodes of The Celestial Toymaker there's pre-recorded audio again, plus a body double. Well, really, its just a hand double - the Toymaker makes the Doctor invisible except for his hand, which can be seen moving the pieces of the Toymaker's trilogic game. The two middle episodes of The Massacre are open to interpretation: Hartnell appears (albeit in one he's only present in pre-filmed sequences) but he's maybe not playing the Doctor. When I covered the story for the blog many years ago, I came down on the side of the Abbot of Amboise shown in the episodes being a separate character. This is the consensus view of commentators over the years, but there is a possible reading (though a stretched one) that it is in fact the Doctor impersonating the Abbot in some scenes. That leaves three where the Doctor is most definitely absent: Mission to the Unknown (which features none of the regular cast), and episodes three and four of The Keys of Marinus from the very first Doctor Who season. So just three (or five depending on your Massacre interpretation) Doctor-less as opposed to Doctor lite episodes. Unless current showrunner Russell T Davies takes things in a very unexpected direction, that's how it's going to stay.

 

In Summary:

Karfel now! Down with this sort of thing!

Attack of the Cybermen

Chapter The 223rd, which covers an action-heavy cyberman story, and the screening of an action-heavy Dalek story; one of each with scraps.

Plot:

The Doctor and Peri arrive in London in 1985, tracing a distress call. This has come from the mercenary Lytton, stranded on Earth after he escaped the Daleks whom he'd been working with in Shad Thames. Lytton has assembled a gang of crooks (including, unbeknownst to him, one undercover policeman) to help him break into a vault via the sewers and steal some diamonds. I'd list the gang member's names, but it's pointless as they do not impact the plot one jot, and then they get killed. The diamond job's a lie anyway, as all Lytton wants to do is make contact with some Cybermen in the sewers. Why they are down there is not explained, but it might have something to do with some complicated backstory from a 1960s Cyberman adventure with Patrick Troughton (but it doesn't matter). This is all part of their plan to travel back in time, and knock Halley's comet off course in 1986 so that it impacts the Earth. This will prevent the Cybermen's original planet Mondas from being destroyed because of a slightly complicated bit of backstory from a 1960s Cyberman adventure with William Hartnell (it similarly doesn't matter).

The Doctor and Peri and Lytton and a gang member are taken prisoner, and the Doctor is forced to pilot the TARDIS to the Cybermen's adopted planet Telos. They have suspended animation 'tombs' on Telos because of a slightly complicated bit of backstory from another 1960s Cyberman adventure with Patrick Troughton (it really doesn't matter). On Telos, a couple of rejects from the Cyber-isation process are plotting their escape from the planet. I'd give you their names, but they also do not impact the plot one iota, and then they get killed. Lytton has picked up the Doctor's sonic lance that he lost in the sewers and returns it to him. On Telos, the local populace, the Cryons, have contacted Lytton to help them defeat the Cybermen. This is interesting, because if the Cybermen succeed in changing time so that Mondas isn't destroyed, this is very good for the Cryons - it means that the Cybermen will never have invaded and massacred most of them. Still, unrealistic as it may seem, the Cryons are noble and good and self-sacrificing to the end, side-stepping the potentially interesting conflict about who should better be saved, Cryons or humans. Thank goodness that moral dichotomy was avoided or things might have got dramatic.

The Doctor is locked up with a Cryon in a cell in the Cybermen's base. Also in there is a hundredweight of a powerful explosive, because that's exactly what you'd lock up your dangerous rebels with if you were a race of beings who do everything logically, isn't it? Stick Guy Fawkes in with the dynamite - what's the worst that could happen? Well, the worst that could happen is that the Doctor gives the Cryon the sonic lance so she can ignite the explosives and blow the Cybermen up, and he escapes. Finding out that Lytton is working with the Cryons rather than the Cybs, the Doctor feels bad and tries to rescue Lytton from their clutches, but it's too late - Lytton's been turned into a Cyberman. The Doctor shoots the Cyber Controller and then dematerialises the TARDIS, escaping with Peri. The sonic lance heats up the explosive such that it destroys the base and all the other Cybermen. Peri does nothing of note in the story. Lytton picks up something. The Doctor gives that something to a Cryon. The Cryon uses it to blow stuff up. That's it. That's the plot, really - just that. Sigh. 

Context:

It was a curious and unprecedented situation; a week before the BFI screening to tie-in with the latest Doctor Who Collection Blu-ray boxset (season 22), the set still did not have a confirmed release date. Thinking that the date, even if confirmed on the day of the screening (it wasn't), could still remain weeks away, I decided to blog a Colin Baker story from that season ahead of time, to make a blog post home for my write-up of the BFI event without it having to wait around for an indeterminate while. There are very few Colin Baker stories remaining that I haven't done already, but the last one was covered a good 14 months back, so another didn't feel too soon. One of those previous ones covered was the story being shown at the screening, Revelation of the Daleks, which I blogged over five years ago. With a choice of three others from that year, I could have randomised the decision, but decided to decide this time: one of the three remaining was too long (The Two Doctors) and one was too ridiculous (Timelash), so I picked Attack of the Cybermen.

I watched the first episode from the DVD on the Sunday before the screening, and the second a few days later on a mid week evening. Leaving the gap was something of an experiment: both the younger two of my children (boy of 12, girl of 9) joined me for the first part, though their 15-year old brother wasn't interested. Would they be tempted back by episode two? As I started the episode, it seemed like a no, as I was on my own. Just as I was convinced they were starting that 'growing out of Doctor Who' thing that I'd heard was possible, the middle child came in (about halfway through) and stuck around until the end. Towards the denouement, as the Doctor was gunning down the Cyber Controller, he said "I guess the Doctor likes guns now" witheringly. I approved of this.

First Time Round:

Searching my memory in order to complete these First Time Round sections is a constant process of discovery. It's intriguing what one remembers, just as it is when one comes up blank. I first watched Attack of the Cybermen on its debut broadcast on BBC1 on the first two Saturdays of 1985 (the 5th and 11th of January that year). For the start of the previous year's run (Peter Davison's last season, starting with Warriors of the Deep), I can vividly recall sitting down to the first episode. I can see in my mind's eye the room I was in, and where exactly I was sitting, I can still feel the anticipation, and the sudden panic as the continuity announcer began their introduction, worrying that I needed to rush off to the loo for another wee. Thinking about a similar moment a whole year on from that, though, I can remember nothing specific. I was a bit older, of course, but I most certainly was not doing the 'growing out of Doctor Who' thing, as was borne out by each and every year of obsessive watching since then. Maybe I was a bit less enthusiastic because of how ropey the last story The Twin Dilemma had been, but I don't think so: I was still tuning in to the new season loyally. It's just odd what nonsense one can't shake from the brain, even though it's not that important.

Only a few months earlier, I was an older primary school pupil, and I can remember never being able to keep hold of a pen for more than a day without losing it; I got into trouble for that. I can remember our teacher Mrs Rawlings making us keep diaries for a couple of terms as a writing exercise. Just a paragraph a day underneath the date as a kind of title, obviously sharing only what we were comfortable to share with Mrs. Rawlings (so it was hardly Adrian Mole). Throughout the month of February 1984, after reading the day's entry, she would always add an extra underline to every date. I couldn't understand it, and thought it was maybe because I wasn't underlining them neatly enough, so every entry I got more and more painstaking with my ruler. But still she kept underlining the date again. At the end of the month, she took me to one side and told me off. She'd been underlining the month as I was constantly misspelling it as 'Febuary'. She made me write the word out correctly 100 times in my jotter in consequence. Now, why do I remember that, but I can't remember what I was doing or feeling when I saw the Cyber Controller, having been stabbed, spewing out green goo all over the place? The obvious answer is that those events at school provoked strong emotional responses; perhaps Attack of the Cybermen doesn't. Why should this be? Let's see... 

Reaction:

This story is the beginning of a new season, the first for the new Doctor introduced the previous year; the show has also had some changes in format and scheduling, returning to its old home of Saturday early evenings with 45-minute episodes instead of the 25 minuters that had been the norm since the show started in 1963. At the time, anyone could have been fooled by these trimmings into thinking that what they were about to watch was going to be thrillingly new. The first thing that leaps out that's strikingly different about Attack of the Cybermen, even before the beginning credits have finished, is that it is written by a woman (a rarity throughout most of the series' history, particularly in the 20th century). The problem is, it's not necessarily true. Although the story is credited on screen to Paula Moore, that person doesn't exist. Attack of the Cybermen is the only Doctor Who story where authorship is so debated, and - to this day - debateable. Paula Moore is an alias for Paula Woolsey, who was a writer friend of the script editor Eric Saward back then. Depending on who you choose to believe, Woolsey either wrote absolutely nothing and was just acting as a front for Saward, as he was prevented in his script editor role from commissioning himself as a writer, or she wrote an initial version of the script that was heavily rewritten by Saward. In either case, Saward used ideas coming from Doctor Who fan Ian Levine, who was acting as an unofficial continuity advisor to the production at the time.

A Saward / Levine argument then arose. Levine to this day believes he should have something like a (retrospective) 'Story By' credit for Attack (and a few concepts do indeed come from old Cyberman stories of which only Levine is likely to have been aware out of all the major players in this). Saward feels that, as Levine never wrote anything down related to either plot or character, just having had chats with Eric about ideas, he shouldn't have any credit. Nobody disputes, though, that Saward wrote the final scripts for the programmes that were aired. This no doubt explains why Attack is essentially just a rerun of the previous years Saward-penned Resurrection of the Daleks, which in itself was just based on the template of his story Earthshock from a couple of years before that, which spawned similar stories by other writers on Saward's watch like Warriors of the Deep, and - most successfully - The Caves of Androzani. It is Resurrection of the Daleks that it is most like, though: the same director (Matthew Robinson) has been booked to helm it, and the same composer (Malcolm Clarke) is also back, providing music in a similar style. The story again features Commander Lytton (played by Maurice Colbourne) who also featured heavily in Resurrection. Plus, in one other similarity to the previous year's Davros and Daleks story, Attack of the Cybermen's script has objective, provable and pretty sizeable flaws. Whatever you think of the final productions in either case, there are some shocking plotting issues in both. Attack is not as bad as Resurrection, which is one of my least favourite Doctor stories (see here for more on why), but that's not saying much.

When you take out the many abortive subplots, the through-line plot of Attack is quite simple. The Cybermen, from their base on the planet Telos, are planning something bad that will destroy the Earth. The locals on Telos that they've repressed want to rebel against them and foil this plot. The Doctor arrives and helps these rebels blow up the Cybermen, then leaves. That is a simple, archetypal Doctor Who plot and could very easily be presented in an understandable but thrilling manner if populated with good characters (and the characters in Attack are fine). It gets bogged down very early on, though, and thereafter keeps sinking deeper into a swamp of confusion. The story has to start in London so that Lytton can be included, but this could be handled efficiently enough - the best parts of the story are the scenes of Lytton's gang on film planning their diamond heist in motors and lock-ups. If the Doctor landed nearby and bumped into them creeping around the eerie sewers, and if they then all got captured by the Cybermen and got taken to Telos by, say, 22 minutes into the action, it would be fine; but it takes double that amount of time. The Doctor and Peri wander the streets of London for simply ages tracing the transmitter of a distress call in scenes that are just pointless 'shoe leather' and keep them from being an effective part of the action for too long.

There's no obvious explanation for what the Cybermen are doing in the sewers. The initiated can speculate that these are Cybermen from the story The Invasion, which also saw the silver brutes in this location. But even if one ignores that they're a different design, it doesn't add up: it's elsewhere shown that they have deliberately come to London as part of the Cyber Controller's plan, so they can't be left over from that particular skirmish. It would cut through all this just to establish that Lytton has contacted them offering his services, no doubt planning to double cross them later, and they've come to pick him up. The pretence of the diamond heist would still work as a lure to ensure he had back-up and muscle accompanying him. The coincidence of the Doctor also turning up is par for the course, and the Cybermen could capture him as a bonus, and force him to take them and Lytton to Telos in the TARDIS as they do in the broadcast version (but without the cheat of having them already in the TARDIS without any explanation of how they got in). This London-set section is also lengthened and confused by lots of discussion about time machines. The Cybermen stole one, and used it, but can't really operate it, and also they want the TARDIS. Why not dispense with this altogether, as it adds very little? It stems from an irresistible (at least to Ian Levine, I'm guessing) coincidence that this story's broadcast is close to 1986, the year when the first ever Cyberman story The Tenth Planet was set. So, the Cybermen have to be time travelling back to change history. This doesn't have much meaning to anyone not steeped in Who lore, though. It's also evidence of some of the curious decisions that create unforced errors. To whit: why is the story not set in 1986? That's the year when it's all going to go down, when the comet will become a threat. Why set it in 1985, with all the action still a year away from being tangible?

It would be better, I think, to forget about time travel and forget about continuity and just have an exciting story where the Cybermen threaten Earth with the deflection of Halley's comet, but are defeated. As it is, they never get round to that part, so it's only talked about (tell not show). If you have to have the time travel part, then keep it simple: have the Cybermen lay a trap for the Doctor so they can use his TARDIS as part of their plan, rather than it be a happy accident that he arrives; then, they could force him to go to 1980s London to pick up Lytton. If the time travel plot is going to be embraced, then it's unforgivable to miss an open goal as the script does by not making the Cryons even slightly tempted to allow time to be changed to save themselves. That's the most interesting hook the story could possibly have: the Doctor is usually on the side of the down-trodden masses, but this time he's caught in an ethical cross-fire, as if he does what the Cryons desire, the Earth will die. As the London section has dragged on so long, though, there wouldn't likely be time to do this plot justice in just 44 minutes. At a push, it might be possible if one dropped the subplots. This is where the story is at its most cynical, and where there's the most sadism and violence. The character Russell played by Terry Molloy, the undercover policeman embedded in Lytton's crew, looks like he'll be something of a moral centre of the piece, allying himself with the Doctor and Peri. Abruptly, though, he's killed off when his story hadn't got going. There really didn't need to be an undercover policeman in the story at all, it doesn't lead to any plot development.

Admittedly, Saward couldn't have known when he wrote the final scripts that the mighty Brian Glover would be cast as Griffiths. He did however make Griffiths a foil for Lytton and give him a lot of the best lines; upon Russell's death, he becomes the human heart at the centre of this drama, so it's perverse that Saward then abruptly kills him off too (are you seeing a pattern here?). Glover is the best thing in Attack, but Molloy is very good too, and their talents are utterly wasted. Griffiths's character had by that point got involved in a subplot to take control of the Cybermen's stolen time machine, a subplot that's run through both episodes. It starts in episode 1 with a couple of vivid (if a bit shouty) characters called Bates and Stratton - partly Cyber-ised humans where the process has gone wrong - who survive blasts and scrapes to eventually team up with Griffiths and Lytton. Eventually, all of them near the object of their quest. This is towards the end of the story, and is the culmination of many minutes of screen time. Lytton gets captured, but it's been established that the time machine can be piloted by only three people, so the others struggle on. They finally reach the door of the machine, when they all - see if you can guess - abruptly get killed off. The time machine never gets used for good or for ill, and nothing the characters of Bates, Stratton and Griffiths has done in the whole story has made an iota of difference. What's the point being made here? That life is meaningless and death comes without rhyme or reason? Why is the writer choosing to make that particular point in the TV show Doctor Who?

Whenever I look at Saward's work on the show, I always find myself asking whether he even likes Doctor Who. He certainly doesn't seem to like the Doctor. Most of his stories involve other characters griping and moaning at or about our favourite Time Lord and/or the Doctor being sidelined with the focus on a different protagonist (like Lytton or Orcini). Here he has the Doctor beating himself up at misjudging the somehow saintly Lytton (Saward's own creation). This would be dodgy anyway (Lytton has been shown in the series to be a cold-blooded killer, and doesn't do anything in Attack of the Cybermen to indicate he's helping the Cryons for any reason except money), and doesn't fit with the established narrative (they never met in Resurrection of the Daleks), but it's also never followed up on in any future story, and does not lead to any change in the Doctor's behaviour, so is ultimately meaningless. The production isn't a total loss despite all this; like Resurrection, it's very well made in all departments (except the script department). The first episode hangs together reasonably well, particularly some of the scenes of characters creeping around in the sewers and being picked off by Cybermen, and Colin Baker gives a good performance when he's not given lines to repeat three times at increasing volume ("Unstable? Unstable?! UNSTABLE??!!"). Having the TARDIS assume shapes different to a police box, only to return to its familiar form by the end, is a fun enough gimmick too.

Connectivity: 

Both Attack of the Cybermen and Tooth and Claw see the Doctor accompanied by one female companion arrive in the UK to discover an alien stranded on Earth who allies itself with a group of heavies. They both feature actors who've previously appeared in Doctor Who in different roles (Terry Molloy played Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks the year before Attack, Pauline Collins played Samantha Briggs in The Faceless Ones in the 1960s).

Deeper Thoughts:

Order of service from the perpetual instatement of Arthur Stengos: BFI Screening of Revelation of the Daleks, 5th March 2022. 'Rail replacement bus service'; four words to put fear into the heart of any UK traveller. Issues with the trains meant that it took me three hours each way to get to the venue on London's riverfront, but it was worth it for a packed programme. Now that all official Covid-19 precautions are no longer mandatory in England, the organisers were able to reinstate all the activities that had become part of these events before 2020, plus there was another innovation. Once our usual hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy had taken the stage, and Johnson had got the Dick joke out of the way early on (talking of the benefits of in-person over online interaction, he said "I'd got so bored of looking at Dick on my laptop every day"), and read a sweet message from Revelation director Graeme Harper who'd planned to be present but had an unexpected clash with work, Johnson then read out a few of the tweets people had been sending over the previous few days in anticipation of the event. One was from someone who was promising to attend wearing his 'Tasambeker socks', and when challenged the tweeter made himself known, and got up on the stage to show off said novelty hosiery. I was too far away to get a photo, but I saw a twitter-shared pic of them later; they were indeed made of a material with a repeating pattern of Jenny Tomasin as her Revelation of the Daleks character. Other tweeted comments that Johnson mentioned were of people complaining about the London-centric nature of these events. He was a bit too dismissive of these I think, but more on that later.

Johnson (L) and Fiddy (R)

The quiz was next, and had some more interesting giveaways than usual (action figures and comics as well as the usual Blu-rays and DVDs that I already own); the trouble was, I'm losing my touch. I'd forgotten that Martin Jarvis appeared in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, for example. After the screening, regular Doctor Who pub trivia session The Quiz of Rassilon was held in the BFI cocktail bar. Our party didn't take part, but one of us heard and relayed one of the questions - "Which comedian played Droxil?" - and I came up blank on that too (it's Bill Bailey). Maybe I need to hand in my scarf, as I'm no longer a true fan! Anyway, after the quiz, one of the suppliers of prizes came on stage to talk to Johnson and Fiddy. This was Gareth Kavanagh of Cutaway Comics, a Kickstarter-funded range featuring characters from the worlds of Doctor Who. Gareth started the venture during Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, approaching Doctor Who writers to write for or give permission for the use of their own creations, not owned by the BBC. Writer of Revelation Eric Saward was the first one approached, and comics featuring Lytton and Revelation character Orsini have featured in Cutaway's titles. Artists have come from the pool of experienced souls that have worked on Doctor Who Magazine over the years, and they've employed new artists too. Gareth amused everyone by saying that to a degree all these works were "Fanwank"; he also bemused me, at least, by saying that every Doctor Who story effectively acted as a pilot for a spin-off "Except maybe The Highlanders". I don't know why that particular story was singled out. The comics come with a disc containing an audio commentary from linked cast or crew. Johnson moderates some of these, and recalled humorously a particularly difficult remote recording session with Brian Blessed, who didn't know he was supposed to be talking about Doctor Who, referred to Peri throughout as "Pearl", and had to cut things short as Kenneth Branagh had come to his house for tea. 

 

Gareth Kavanagh (Centre)

Next up was the first episode of the story. Swept up in the event, I felt better disposed to it than I did when I wrote it up for the blog all those years ago (the link again is here). If one just accepts that it is a bunch of coinciding subplots, it rattles along quite enjoyably. Graeme Harper is probably most responsible for making it appear much more coherent than it really is. As ever when watching Doctor Who stories with an audience, the comedy came more to the fore. In Revelation, it's mostly intentional. The performances of the characters Vogel and Jobel delighted the audience most, and Orcini getting his leg blown off got a big laugh. The surround mix sounded great in NFT1, and I was very surprised that the Jimi Hendrix song on episode 2's soundtrack was featured in full (rights clearance has not been possible for previous home video releases). Still on the audio front, the guest interviewed on stage between the episodes was Roger Limb, the composer of the incidental music for Revelation. The previous evening, he and the still touring Radiophonic Workshop had performed in Coventry Cathedral to celebrate Delia Derbyshire Day (commemorating the talented innovator that first realised the Doctor Who theme), one of around 60 concerts done since the ex-members were brought together to perform in 2009. In a wide ranging chat, Limb talked about how he'd grown up with music, studied music, and gradually broken into the Workshop as a full time employee after years of occasional work there; this was to get away from his previous day job as a continuity announcer saying "This is BBC1" twenty times a day for many years. He had a couple of years overlapping with Delia and they were "Good buddies", going to each other's gigs. When he finally joined full-time, Delia's tape cutting and manipulation approach was fading out, and synths, guitars and multi-tracking were in the ascendant.

Fiddy (L), Roger Limb (R)

After the second and final episode, the next on stage interviewee was Chris Chapman, director of many documentaries that appear as Value Add Material on the Blu-rays, as they did on the DVDs before that. He talked mainly about his work on the season 22 box set. For every release, there's a review done of what material exists originally made for the DVDs that can be ported over to the new Blu-ray set, to see where there are gaps in coverage. It's sometimes as prosaic as a story not having a dedicated Making-Of (the case for The Two Doctors, which Chris informed us is being rectified by another director, Steve Broster). The DVD extras taken as a whole, Chris saw that there was no on-location footage, and less of Colin Baker and Nicola than expected. To resolve this, he made a documentary taking both of the two stars to each of the UK locations used in season 22. Opportunities are then found to provoke memories that might lead to interesting areas not often examined. He gave an example of this, when Colin Baker was shown a photo taken when he was on the first day of filming for Attack of the Cybermen in London - the first time he had filmed in public in costume - and was surrounded by kids, signing autographs. This brought back some new memories for the doco. Moving on to more general discussions, he mentioned the documentary on the recent Galaxy 4 discs as being a particular stand-out, creating some fun with companion actor Peter Purves, Toby Hadoke and a model Chumblie. When talking about feedback from Doctor Who fans, he commended our lovely, nice vibe compared to those tweets he reads from Countryfile fans when he goes online and checks out the programme's hashtag after one of his editions airs; apparently, it is just the same "20 people saying how shit it was" for an hour after the broadcast. It gives one hope after so many years of being a Doctor Who fan, and witnessing other Doctor Who fans' comments, to know that we might not be the worst enthusiasts out there.

Fiddy (L), Chris Chapman (R)

Next shown was a clip package from the box set. The set's trailer was first - really a magnificent short film, The Eternal Mystery by Pete McTighe featuring an older Peri played by Nicola Bryant. It looked and sounded amazing, and maybe even produced a tear or two from this nostalgic chronicler as he watched. It was followed by an extract from one of the 'In Conversation' interviews on the set; Matthew Sweet in this instance was talking to Michael Grade about his decisions to cancel / postpone Doctor Who, made when season 22 was being shown in 1985. It's an interestingly contentious choice (there were some boos from the audience), and I look forward to seeing the interview in full based on the short section shown. An excerpt from Chapman's doco was then shown, with Colin and Nicola visiting the farm where the early snowbound scenes of Revelation were filmed, catching up with the farm owner Susan Shone and director Graeme Harper. There was such warmth shown from everyone appearing on screen, that I'm betting the whole thing is going to be a feel-good masterpiece. Finally, a few clips from the Behind the Sofa edition on Timelash, with some hilarious reactions from the various Doctor Who luminaries to the performance by Paul Darrow in that story. One naughty person - you'll have to watch it to see whom - describes it as "Pure ham and eggs". All told, I'm sold (though I was already, and have my longstanding pre-order sitting there online waiting for a release date confirmation).

Nicola Bryant as Peri in The Eternal Mystery

The next and final part of the proceedings in NFT1 was the big panel interview with the stars of Revelation of the Daleks. The guests came out one by one; first, was guest actor Colin Spaull, to give him a chance to answer a few questions before Colin and Nicola inevitably became the focus for the fans watching. He said, in what Johnson thought must be a well rehearsed line, that playing the part of Lilt was "Totally tropical". Spaull had originally been cast as the mutant that appears - and gets killed - early in episode 1, but was bumped up by Harper. Later, producer John Nathan-Turner was enthusiastic about the idea of featuring Larry Olivier in the story (perhaps the distinguished veteran's "grandchildren watched it" mused Spaull). JNT offered the role of the mutant; or, in Spaull's joking way of telling it: "Would Laurence Olivier play the part of the Mutant as Colin Spaull has turned it down?". Next up on stage was Nicola Bryant. She spoke about how much she enjoyed the entire process, from sharing ideas to the finished product, of making The Eternal Mystery (Pete McTighe was in the audience and took a bow after prompting from the stage), and that Peri was "In charge of the TARDIS now". Johnson took this as a cue to say "I know someone who'd have something to say about that", and - to the loudest applause of the day - old Sixie himself, Colin Baker, came up on to the stage. He, like me, had shed a little tear at the trailer, but added "My emotion subsided when I saw Michael Grade on screen". There was a suggestion that Mister Grade could be invited to the BFI next time, with a whipping stool to sit upon.

Colin Spaull (L), Johnson (R)

Sticking with box set extras, Baker said that now he'd seen Peter Davison's more vicious reactions to other Doctor's stories in Behind The Sofa, he wouldn't be holding back so much when he came to view Peter's stories. All three actors on the panel then talked about the making of Revelation. Baker said of his and Nicola's characters: "I didn't notice at the time, but we're hardly in it!". Everyone remembered the cold of filming on location in the snow. Spaull and the other half of his Laurel and Hardy-style double act Trevor Cooper were supposed to film a scene on location, but it was abandoned because of the weather. Nicola remembered her hair being adjusted with curling tongs before a take, and a lot of it snapping off due to the temperature. Alexei Sayle played the D.J. role very flat in rehearsals, only going full throttle once in the studio. He changed a lot of lines as he went along, and Nicola just had to adjust in her scenes with him. Everyone felt that it was a significant achievement to appear in a Dalek story. Nicola's Dad, clearly somewhat of an enthusiast for the show at the time, had badgered her every week about when she was going to do a Dalek one. Spaull said it was significant to have it on his CV, and was chuffed that 28 years later he got to do a Cybermen story too ( he appeared in The Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, again working with Graeme Harper, all those years later).

(L to R) Spaull, Bryant, Johnson

During a discussion about Colin's costume, an audience cosplayer in the full technicolour outfit was asked to stand up for a round of applause. Baker asked "You didn't come on public transport dressed like that, did you?" only to find that the young man indeed had. An old man on this mode of transport had apparently said to him that he liked his coat "And then he went off, tapping his white stick"  joked Baker. Apparently, he'd then been asked by a stranger for a selfie with him in costume, as they wanted a photo with an entertainer, despite his protestations that he was no such thing. "In that moment, you were," Baker added. When asked by Johnson whether Mary Whitehouse might have had a point about the level of violence in Doctor Who, citing Tasambeker's vicious stabbing of Jobel with a syringe as an example, Baker waited a theatrical beat and then said "Nah!". He went on to add that he thought children were more tolerant of violence than adults were, mentioning Grimm's fairy tales; "Maybe one person in a million watching will turn out to be a mass murderer, but they would have anyway". (An aside: given that Colin's stories could get viewing figures up to 9 million, that still feels like too high a proportion to me!). He summed it up by saying that violence is a part of our lives that it would be wrong to ignore.

(L to R) Spaull, Bryant, Colin Baker, Johnson

Audience questions prompted coverage of Peri's costumes (she didn't like the leotard and shorts look, thought anyone sensible would have stuck to trainers rather than high heels after the first time running down corridors, and she once wore outfits made by Sheena Easton's costumier), Baker's lack of regeneration, until he did his proper finale with Big Finish on audio ("I was the longest serving Doctor after all - Sylvester was an imposter like those medieval popes"), and how things would have played out had the 1985 cancellation crisis and hiatus not taken place "We'd still be doing it now, we'd never have left" "Poor Jodi"). Once the screening ended, it wasn't the end for the hard-working panellists. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant were signing autographs for a big queue of people for hours afterwards. As some sort of measure, I had four drinks in the BFI's Riverfront bar and lots of pleasant conversation with the various friends that regularly come to these events while they were working away. We almost had a full house, with myself, Trevor, Alan, Tim, and Dave, plus David and Chris. These last two were the very final people in that signing queue (well, full disclosure, they hung back in the bar with us drinking and joined the queue much later, as any sensible people would). The two of them asked Colin to recreate a photo pose that they had taken with him in 1989 after meeting backstage of the Doctor Who theatrical extravaganza The Ultimate Adventure. Colin duly agreed, putting his arm around Chris on his left and David on his right. It was snapped for posterity, and none of them look a day older (!).

I could never queue and interact with stars like that; it's just not something with which I'm comfortable. Even an impromptu selfie with someone - such as Frank Skinner, who was in the audience of the screening and then posed for pictures with some fans in a corridor as I passed by - is not something I do. Interestingly, as everyone's different and there's layers and layers of different feelings and behaviour about this kind of stuff, Frank Skinner was comfortable to ask Colin and Nicola to be in a photo where he was the fan (he posted it on his twitter feed a week after the screening, and had the biggest grin on his face in the picture). This is a great strength of the BFI events; a fan who finds some of these aspects a bit overwhelming can be only a few metres away and completely unaware anything is happening, unlike in, say, a comic con where queues and stars and selfies might be a bit more 'in one's face'. This strength comes I think from the historic National Film Theatre venue, and perhaps is the key reason why these events are so London-centric, as the disappointed tweeter had it. The Classic Doctor Who events are managed by the BFI's London venue rather than the BFI as a countrywide entity. Unfortunately, Classic Who is a little too niche for such a relatively small event to work in a hired venue, and it wouldn't get the levels of sponsorship to fund simulcasting the on-stage material in regional cinemas (at the moment they can only run to some comic and DVD giveaways, but maybe the day will come when technology reduces the costs of doing such simulcasts). Anyway, I'm from the South East and it still took me 3 hours to get home (and mine wasn't the longest journey of our party by a long way). It's definitely worth making a weekend of it, if you have the funds. Maybe I'll see you at the next one...

In Summary:

It's amusing that of all the stories, it's Attack of the Cybermen that people are arguing over for authorial recognition, like blind looters in The Day of the Triffids fighting over a tin of dog food.