The Tenth Planet

Chapter the 282nd, which covers the animation of a significant episode, plus the animation of another much less significant story.

Plot:
The Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive at the South Pole in 1986, and enter a monitoring base for a global Space programme. A rocket in orbit is in trouble because a new planet has arrived in the solar system, which has knocked them off course and is draining their energy. The energy drain starts to affect Earth. Creatures called Cybermen invade the base. They are from the new planet, Mondas, an ancient twin planet of Earth that floated away and has now come back. They have replaced their body parts and organs with cybernetic components and removed their emotions. The Cybermen on the base are destroyed but it is too late to help the rocket. Another rocket has gone up, though, piloted by the base commander General Cutler's son. Cutler wants to use a powerful bomb to blow up Mondas to save his son, even though this risks the Earth. The Doctor says that all they have to do is wait and Mondas's energy intake will cause it to explode, but Cutler will not listen. Ben is pressganged into helping prepare the bomb, but persuades some of the crew to sabotage it. It fails to launch. Cutler wants to try again, but is killed when more Cybermen enter the base. They take Polly and the Doctor to their ship as hostages, and want to use the bomb for themselves. There are mass landings of Cybermen across the Earth. Ben realises the Cybermen don't like radiation, so uses radioactive rods to overcome his guards. Mondas explodes and all Cybermen collapse and disintegrate. The base starts working to get General Cutler's son down from space. Ben goes to the Cyber ship and frees his two friends, but something is wrong with the Doctor. After they take off in the TARDIS, the Doctor collapses and starts to change... 

Context:

Knowing that I would post the blog about the next story in November 2023, the month of Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, I overrode random selection to pick something significant. Looking at the stories that were left unblogged at this point, there was only one contender: William Hartnell's last story, the first ever regeneration from one Doctor to another, the introduction of the Cybermen... The Tenth Planet has 'Significant' running through it like 'Blackpool' in a stick of rock. I watched the whole story in one go one afternoon from the DVD with the animated version of the final (currently missing aside from its audio) episode. I didn't realise until afterwards that I had watched the story on the 29th of October, the 57th anniversary of the day that fourth episode originally aired and the change from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton was first seen.

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog; this time it's season 4 (the last couple of William Hartnell stories plus the initial run of Patrick Troughton tales). This is the 17th season completed by randomly ordered blogging (out of the total of 39 seasons that have been broadcast at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13). 

First Time Round:

November has for a long time been a significant month for Doctor Who, even if not in a big anniversary year. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was the month of the final VHS or DVD release of the year, and often these would be special sets. In November 2000, the big release was the Cyberman tin, a nice container for two VHS tapes starring the cybernetic nasties, Attack of the Cybermen and The Tenth Planet. The black-and-white story was completed with a reconstruction of part four marrying the existing audio with surviving clips and off-screen photographs. I first saw the animated version of the episode when it came out on DVD many years later in October 2013, another big anniversary year.

Reaction:

As a story that was part of the same season as The Tenth Planet, in fact broadcast only three stories later, and as they both have had episodes animated for commercial release, I thought I would pair up this main blog post on The Tenth Planet with my write-up of the BFI screening of The Underwater Menace from October 2023 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). The Tenth Planet, as mentioned above, is a very significant story in the Doctor Who canon; The Underwater Menace meanwhile is usually thought of as silly and maybe embarrassing. How unexpected it therefore was that I enjoyed the latter much more than the former this time round. As will be detailed below, the latest version of the fishy Troughton tale now has a stylistic coherence the story has never had before, which helps it enormously. Bad luck makes such a unity of style impossible for The Tenth Planet. While the last episode remains missing from the archive - there have been many rumours about its return over the years, but they've always turned out to be false - it can never be wholly complete as a live action piece. Even if the whole story was animated as Underwater Menace has been, there would still be the issue of the third episode, where the Doctor - in the part of his swansong which is building towards the end and his departure - isn't in it. William Hartnell was unfortunately ill that week of production, and the usual last-minute stop gap is employed where he, played by an extra in a wig seen from behind in a long shot, faints and spends 25 minutes in bed recovering off-screen. It means that his big plan to solve the problem of the Cybermen at the South Pole has to be relayed by other characters whom he's supposedly told earlier in the story, even though the audience has not been privy to this.

If one could travel back in time and somehow reverse those two pieces of bad luck, though, the story still wouldn't be improved sufficiently to be good to my mind. The Doctor's big plan mentioned above is.... drumroll... to do nothing. The Cybermen's own plan contains a flaw that will lead to their destruction, so things just need to be allowed to play out. That's interestingly different to the steps normally required to solve the problems the TARDIS crew face, but it means that the Doctor has no active role in the denouement, which isn't acceptable in his big finale. It would work if this just a smaller story in the middle of the season, and in a very real way it is just that. In 1966, Doctor Who was being made on a rolling production line, and decisions dictated by unexpected circumstances (like one's lead actor being ill for a week) had to be reactive rather than proactive. Unless there was coincidence of timing, decisions related to circumstances that might have been a bit more expected but not by much (like one's lead actor finally giving up the role) wouldn't line up with the story before the brief break in the Summer where Doctor Who wouldn't be on TV (not really thought of as a season finale in the modern sense anyway). Hartnell instead bows out in the second story of the run, and the new bloke debuts properly the following week in the third. The passivity of the Doctor is just one way the writers fail to capitalise on the unique opportunity this offered to the storytelling. The concept of regeneration, as it later became known, is rightly praised as an imaginative solution for recasting, but it is in no way the focus of The Tenth Planet. It is tacked on at the end of the story, and only explored in Patrick Troughton's first story, The Power of the Daleks.

What The Tenth Planet does have to explore is a new villainous race, one that would go on to become one of the most popular returning foes of the series, the Cybermen. The backstory and - even though its a bit unwieldy - the design of the creatures seen here is magnificent. But the Mondasians don't appear until the end of the first episode, and like the Doctor they don't really have an active contribution to the third. Half the running time is essentially Cyber-free. This happens because a squad of them invade the base but are destroyed, then later another squad invades the base again. Such a repeated story beat is clumsy, and points to the scripts needing at least another draft; it also undermines the threat of the Cybermen if they can be so easily destroyed. If the story was reworked so that the same Cybermen are in control of the base throughout and only dispatched in the last episode, it would be much stronger. The script is making room, though, for a lot of time to be spent on the base crew and their efforts to save a stricken rocket. Well, two stricken rockets. In another double story beat, they cannot save one rocket, but another is then sent up. The issue for me with so much screen time being given over to the base crew's efforts is that they aren't very interesting characters. Script co-writer and the show's scientific adviser of the time Kit Pedler loves his teams of scientists working away diligently under pressure, but I'd rather have more of the TARDIS team and the Cybermen. As the solution to the main plot is a passive one, the conflict comes from the crew continually ignoring the Doctor's wise counsel, which doesn't exactly endear them to the audience.

It also doesn't help that the base crew's leader General Cutler is played as aggressive and unpleasant, so it's hard to empathise with him even when his son is in danger. It also seems ridiculous that his son has been put into danger in the first place. Why would the authorities on Earth send up another rocket when the situation is so unclear and potentially dangerous, unless they were all idiots? Again, a redraft to focus on only one rocket, which has Cutler's son as one of the crew from the outset, would fix this. There's still the massive coincidence that in a story on the scale of planets in the solar system and an entire global space programme, two significant people are related, but that can be explained in a few lines of dialogue (Cutler pulling strings perhaps) and would be forgiven as it humanises the drama. Cutler shouldn't then become so unhinged - there are already Cybermen to provide villainy, it doesn't need Cutler planning to nuke the Earth just to get his son back too (Pedler's desire for scientific rigour has been completely abandoned here, as there would obviously be fail-safes in place). Cutler goes so far in the story as it ended up on screen that the only option is to kill him off, which means father and son are never reunited even though the latter is saved. It's an unsatisfactory end to that subplot. The main plot's ending is not much more satisfactory. When Mondas blows up, all the Cybermen conveniently disintegrate. As their weakness to radiation has been discovered earlier, it might have been better to use that in some way to get rid of the final few.

It's not all bad. There are significant efforts to show diversity in the future, with Earl Cameron portraying an astronaut of colour, and even - though it's a much smaller role - a technician job shown to be held by a woman (though not in the all-male South Pole where men are seen to leer at Polly in a sexist way). The snowy scenes are well realised, and the scenes of ranks of advancing Cybermen in that snow, underscored by the stock music tune 'Space Adventures' that would become their theme in their early appearances, are thrilling. The idea of a twin planet to Earth returning to the solar system is an interesting one. As had been trialled in The War Machines a few stories earlier, use of newscasts intercut into the drama to add scale is effective. The original voices of the Cybermen are unique and eerie (they'd go a different way in future Cyber stories, so this wouldn't be capitalised on again until Peter Capaldi's time as the Doctor decades later). There's a few individual moments that have gone down in Who's history ("Love, Pride, Hate, Fear - have you no emotions, sir?", "This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin", "It's far from being all over!"). Steve Plytas gives a decent performance as Wigner, but his voice is so distinctive and I've seen the Gourmet Night episode of sit-com Fawlty Towers so many times, that I couldn't stop seeing him as Kurt the drunk chef instead of a space commander. At least that was interesting on some level, though, The Tenth Planet was mostly dull apart from the last few minutes. Funnily enough, "dull apart from the last few minutes" describes exactly how I felt about a later story that links into the events depicted in The Tenth Planet, Twice Upon a Time - perhaps that later story was an apt sequel after all.  

Connectivity:

The Tenth Planet and Thin Ice both see the TARDIS landing in a cold environment.

Deeper Thoughts:

Zaroff's experimental journal entry: BFI Screening of The Underwater Menace animation, 21st October 2023. I was lucky enough after over a year of clashes or rapid sell-outs to get to the BFI Southbank again for a Doctor Who related event. This was the unveiling of a new animation, and what a difference a year makes. The panel at the last event I went to in September 2022 (for the animation of The Abominable Snowmen) indicated that there would likely be a long pause before any further stories got this treatment, but with The Underwater Menace the range is back, back, back. As will be noted later, the main panel on the 21st October strongly suggested that other stories are being worked on, and other animated releases will be coming out soon. For any Doctor Who fan who's liked these releases, this was great news. Before we got to that, though, the event started as they always do with an introduction from hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The latter gentleman, who had watched the original broadcast, said it is now as he always remembered watching it as a child in 1967, i.e. animated and in colour.  There was the usual quiz where the audience answer Doctor Who trivia questions to win swag. Johnson then read out an appreciation of the story from the Radio Times a few years back written by Patrick Mulkern. Mulkern was in the audience, and this led to an impromptu short interview about his memories of interviewing The Underwater Menace's director Julia Smith, and - sweetly - led to the revelation that the story was his first ever memory of Doctor Who. Another impromptu interview onstage happened with Cutaway comics' Gareth Kavanagh talking about his latest releases.

(L to R) Fiddy, Johnson, Kavanagh

The lights then dimmed; before the first two episodes were shown, a lovely and heartfelt video message from Anneke Wills (who played Polly in the story) was projected onto the big NFT1 screen. Wills is not currently doing public appearances, but Johnson happened to be close to her Devon home before the screening, so was able to capture this on his mobile phone. After the first two episodes, Mark Ayres - Doctor Who music and sound archivist who remasters the soundtracks for use in the animations - was interviewed onstage by Fiddy. The soundtrack for the animation was mostly from the home recordings made by fan Graham Strong, as they are of best quality even compared to the optical soundtracks of the two episodes surviving on film. At Fiddy's prompting, Ayres explained why this was, as audio stored as patterns of light on the celluloid is subject to noise from any dirt that gets onto the film. In the second episode, 10 minutes of the optical soundtrack had to be used, and one of Ayres's jobs is to ensure that the listener does not notice the difference. Though he tries to be careful to be as faithful as possible, this isn't always possible, as sometimes changes need to be made to serve the new medium. As an example of what he described as "slight liberties", he mentioned a sequence with a brazier fire that wasn't quite coming across in the animation, so needed to be beefed up a bit. He also talked about the dangers when remastering that one can make something sound too clean. He revealed that he has an audio file with looped "studio sound and magnetic tape noise" to apply at a subtle level underneath a soundtrack to make it sound human again, and also to smooth out any edits.

(L to R) Fiddy, Ayres

The final two episodes of the story followed. As mentioned above, the colour animation really pulls this story together. My original review of the story, from early in the blog's life when it came out on DVD, can be found here. As mentioned in that post, the story is a cartoon, a heightened comic B-movie science fiction creation like the movies of Ed Wood in the 1950s. It's almost certainly deliberately so, though the original production maybe didn't quite realise this. It therefore suits the animated medium, and the addition of colour. It's always robbed the experience of something watching this story in half episode / half reconstruction form, or listening to the audio only. This is the best it's ever going to look and feel I think (even if the missing episodes are found, as it lives to be larger than black-and-white). Animation director-producer AnneMarie Walsh said later that she enjoys hearing all the laughter when the animations are shown to an audience, and the laughter didn't really stop this time. The comedy is almost certainly deliberate too; I don't believe that Joseph Furst is pitching his performance as Professor Zaroff for drama. The animation leans into this, creating some more humorous bits (e.g moments between Zaroff  and his pet octopus). The immortal line from this over-the-top baddie "Nothing in the world can stop me now" got a round of applause both times (at the end of episode three, and in the recap at the start of episode four). My only mild criticism is that Polly's likeness is not as good as in some of the other animations, but it isn't a big deal. I thoroughly recommend you order a copy on shiny disc, if you haven't already.

Next was the big final panel chaired by Johnson, where Walsh came onstage alongside The Underwater Menace executive producer Paul Hembury, and Charles Norton, who was billed on the animation as a Doctor Who consultant, and played down his role on the episodes. This led to him being gently chided by the other two for excess modesty as he had been a prime mover for the animation range as a whole (having directed early animations). AnneMarie talked on similar themes that she has covered at these events previously. When creating the new imagery, it's impossible to be faithful to surviving episodes as framing and movement for the animated medium need to be very different to live action. For example, two characters in a shot not talking or moving much can work if they are real people with body language and full facial expression, but to do the same with two animated characters "looks weird". They instead go back to the scripts and imagine what the original production team would have done if they had fewer budgetary fetters. Norton agreed with this saying that, for every animation project they have embarked on, they've done so with all the reverence for the material that the original production teams had "which is none at all"! Walsh consoled any purists in the audience telling them that all surviving materials and reconstructions using them are also on the discs that will be out to buy ("I've learned how to plug" she jokingly said to Hembury).

(L to R) Walsh, Norton, Hembury 

Paul Hembury was the first executive for the animations (or the Blu-ray range for that matter) to come up on stage to answer questions on a panel related to Doctor Who product, at least as far as I can remember back through my seven years attending these BFI sessions. This is very brave, as questions can be very probing, of the "What's the next story you're working on?" style when usually the people involved can't even confirm whether they are working on anything at all. Hembury joked that he'd have to give politician answers, "I'm glad you asked me that, but I'm not going to answer", but it was most eyebrow-raising - and was picked up by online entertainment news channels immediately afterwards - that three questions by my count were answered with a simple "Yes". The first was in answer to whether any further animations were planned, and his response caused an immediate round of applause, to which he added "And that's why": as long as there's budget - and it seems like an alternative source of funding has been found to replace BBC America's contribution, as it was confirmed that they are no longer providing any money - and as long as there's an audience, they should keep coming. The second "Yes" was in response to whether the plan is eventually to cover every missing episode and story. It was qualified with a mention that the physical media sell-through market is not getting any bigger, so alternatives will need to be found. He couldn't comment on whether putting the stories on BBC iplayer might present a new market opportunity, but only because he didn't know at that moment in time (since the screening, animated classic Who episodes, though not all of them, have arrived on iplayer). The final "Yes" confirmed that the animations will be put on the relevant Blu-ray box sets when the time comes, which presumably also contributes something to the coffers.

Hembury was keen that the event, and any other such event, should be a celebration of the creative teams that make the animations, and praised them for delivering "Routine Magic", quoting a NASA slogan. Some discussion inevitably went to selection criteria for what is up for animating next. There are known challenges (e.g. The Highlanders, as it is hard to animate Tartan-clad characters), and they also tend to take into consideration fan opinions on what stories are most desired, and then go in the exact opposite direction to keep things surprising. There's no conspiracy or even rationale why, for example, there have been more Troughton animations than Hartnells, and past decisions shouldn't be used by fans to predict future releases. Nothing the animators have ever changed has meant the certification of a story has changed, though they are conscious on not making things more violent (the DVD and Blu-ray of The Underwater Menace is certified 12 in the UK, but this is because of a special feature on the disc). Superfan Ian Levine was in the audience, and was allowed to ask a question because - as Justin Johnson put it -"he's promised to be on his best behaviour". This is a reference to Ian's being somewhat less than diplomatic in the past when taking exception to recreations of stories that weren't faithful to the original. Obviously, he can be direct, but he's passionate and honest, and nobody should ever have a problem with that. Anyway, Ian went out of his way to praise the efforts of the people on stage, particularly Walsh's previous production The Evil of the Daleks.

A final audience question was asked of the panel: which remaining unanimated story they would choose to do next if time and budget were no issue? As Walsh thought about this, Johnson added "So, if you had, say, five years and three million pounds?" She in the end went for the 13 episode behemoth of linked stories Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks' Master Plan. "3 million won't be enough" piped up Norton. "30 million then," added Johnson, "Sold to Ian Levine!". It ended the event good-naturedly, and I went off out of NFT1 and into the main part of the BFI building looking for a couple of people to say Hi to that were there. Not many people from the usual group of us that attend these events could make it this time, and there isn't to be a similar event for the rest of the year. Showrunner Russell T Davies had recently gone on record that there would not be big public screenings or conventions tied in to the 60th anniversary, unlike the 50th, as the current team wanted to concentrate on things that everyone could get to see. Because of the anniversary, though, a lot of new product is being released - like the 60th anniversary specials which have sell-through release dates following fast after their television broadcasts -  that will mean that the classic releases of animations and Blu-ray box sets that the BFI events tie in to will not now be happening again until 2024. I'll certainly be trying to get tickets when these screenings start up again. 

In Summary:

Unsatisfactory for such a significant episode; it makes the Doctor a bystander in his own swansong. Also, somewhat ironically, it's a story that's a bit emotionless.

The Highlanders

Chapter the 259th, features the young pretender (in his second appearance as the Doctor).

Plot:

The Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden in Scotland 1746. They meet the local Laird and members of his clan, including a piper called Jamie McCrimmon. The Laird is ill and the Highlanders believe the Doctor can help him. Polly goes off to fetch water with the Laird's daughter Kirsty, and while they are gone everyone else is arrested by the Redcoats. A solicitor called Grey saves them all from the noose. Grey, with his clerk Perkins, is involved in some dodgy dealings, and takes the Doctor, Ben, Jamie and the Laird to become slaves and be transported off to work the plantations. The Doctor bamboozles everyone with many ruses and disguises, and manages to escape. The others are held near port, in a ship stolen from a Scot and captained by the piratical Captain Trask ("Arrr!"). Meanwhile, Polly and Kirsty get the better of an effete Redcoat Lieutenant Algernon Ffinch, and use him to track down their friends. Reunited with the Doctor, they buy up weapons using money stolen from Ffinch, and row out to help the others. Trask is killed in their uprising, and the Highlanders sail out towards the safety of France, leaving the time travellers at the docks with Jamie who has stayed behind to show them back to the TARDIS. When they reach there, they are almost recaptured by Grey, but Ffinch turns up and arrests him. Jamie decides to travel with the others in time and space.

Context:

Over a few days in early March 2023, I watched an online reconstruction of the four episodes which used off-screen images, surviving clips and the full soundtracks (taped off the telly by fans in the 1960s) to recreate as closely as possible these now lost episodes. This version also had the explanatory narration by Frazer Hines taken from the official BBC CD audio release, so the website hosting it was definitely breaching some copyright regulations. Thus, here is where I state that I have in the past fully supported the official releases, purchasing The Highlanders audio and surviving clips in the formats on which they have been made available for sale (more details in the First Time Round section below), and would buy them again if they came out with or without animation on a Blu-ray.

First Time Round:

The first time I would have seen any material from The Highlanders would have been in November 1998. The big Doctor Who VHS release in advance of Christmas that year was The Ice Warriors; this came with official reconstructions much like the ones I watched this time of The Highlanders (see Context section above) of its missing two middle episodes. Additionally, it had an extra tape with a documentary about missing episodes in general. This featured a lot of excerpts from otherwise long-gone visuals including recently found material that had been excised from Doctor Who episodes by Australian censors. Archiving vicissitudes had meant that the bits not felt suitable for broadcast had ended up being retained, the rest thrown away. So, there were a couple of clips on that VHS from The Highlanders showing brief shots of a stabbing and a hanging. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see any glimpse of an otherwise lost story, however brutal or short. The audio of all four episodes with that explanatory linking commentary came out a couple of years later, and I snapped that up too.

Reaction:

The Highlanders was Patrick Troughton's second story after he took on the role, and the final regular Doctor Who historical (i.e. a trip into history for its own sake, not as the backdrop for a science fantasy tale). To an extent, it's a try-out in the same way as his first story: how is this new Doctor going to comport himself within a historical context, now we've seen him ace the previous sci-fi one? However well he did, though, it would turn out that there weren't going to be any further stories of this kind; as such, it's a bit of a curio. Troughton's Doctor lands in only two further historical settings in his tenure, and both of them could really be anywhere / anytime as the history is not essential to the story being told. If this was going to be the last, it's at least a fun, engaging story to go out on, and Troughton does indeed perform well. He's not calmed down to become the Doctor he would be later, but the story gives ample scope for some of the wild antics that were intrinsic to his earliest days: there's lots of disguises and putting on funny voices, trying on of different hats and causing mayhem. The scene where - pretending to be a German Doctor with an outrageous accent - he bangs the clerk Perkins's head repeated on a table only to then enquire whether he suffers from headaches reaches remarkable heights of anarchic comedy. It's not something one could ever imagine William Hartnell doing, which is maybe the point. Troughton (like the second Doctor) has less and less to prove as his stories continue, hence why the play-acting and slapstick lessens.

The story doesn't make any attempt at realism or examination of the period. Bonnie Prince Charlie is mentioned a few times (the reward for his capture becomes a plot point as the Doctor uses it to bamboozle his enemies occasionally), but he never appears. The story seems to have been commissioned more as a literary pastiche than an exploration of history. As The Smugglers a couple of stories back displayed the influences of Stevenson's Treasure Island, this story seems to have taken a little from another of his works, Kidnapped. It hones the formula; like The Smugglers it is populated with a colourful collection of rogues, but they seem a more diverse and rounded selection than in the earlier story. Each, though, is unified in one purpose - to make money. An abiding theme of the piece is how every non-Highlander character is motivated purely by avarice. It's not exactly uncommon for this to be a motivator for Doctor Who villains, but it is rare to see it done so comprehensively, with every lowly Redcoat featured having their hand out expecting corrupt remuneration at some point. The Highlander characters meanwhile are concerned only for their own survival. As such, it doesn't make any sense at all for Jamie at the end to forego the safety of a journey to France so he can instead help the Doctor, Ben and Polly find where they parked. This, of course, only happens to allow Frazer Hines to join the TARDIS crew.

Note that I worded it above that Frazer Hines had joined the TARDIS crew, rather than Jamie. The most significant long-term contribution of this story is a new addition to the regular cast, but there's nothing much in the action that makes Jamie stand out. He's personable, but has hardly anything to do in the narrative. It seems very likely that the decision to keep him on had more to do with the actor's behind the scenes working relationship with Patrick Troughton (they'd worked together before The Highlanders), and maybe a smidge to do with him looking pretty on camera perhaps, than anything in the character of Jamie. It was ultimately the best decision for the show, but it means there's too many people in the time machine; this leaves less for Ben and Polly to do, and ultimately would lead to them leaving the series. This is a great shame, as The Highlanders is one of the best stories for the pair of them. Sailor Ben gets to be aboard ship again, and do a Houdini-style escape; Polly is resourceful and ruthless, besting poor Algernon Ffinch at every turn, and in a flirtatious manner to boot. The actors Anneke Wills and Michael Craze have lots of fun with the material. Beyond that, there's a couple of good fight scenes (as well as one can tell from the audio, anyway) and some nice bits of comedy. It's not perfect: Polly and Ben's historical knowledge waxes and wanes depending on the plot point of the moment: Polly knows that France is a safe haven for the Highlanders when moments before she was surprised that the Redcoats and Highlanders couldn't get along as friends. But it's fun, and rattles along at a good pace without ever overstaying its welcome.

Connectivity:

Both The Highlanders and Timelash see the TARDIS travel back in time to the Scottish Highlands of yesteryear.

Deeper Thoughts:

A visit to Riverside Studios for Time and Riverside, 11th March 2023. When I started this viewing of The Highlanders, it was coincidentally 56 years to the day since the master video tapes of the story were wiped. It was the very first story to suffer this fate, on 9th March 1967, only a few weeks on from the story's debut BBC1 broadcast. The policies of the broadcaster that allowed this to happen are not easy to understand with the benefit of decades of hindsight. A couple of days later, it was time for looking back at the BBC's activities again, but this time more fondly. I had a ticket to a Doctor Who Appreciation Society event at Riverside in Hammersmith, an arts centre and cinema built on the site of the studios where all four parts of The Highlanders were shot (just four of something like 80 Doctor Who episodes that were created there - the original building having been demolished in 2014). The format of the day was for three individual episodes of Doctor Who from William Hartnell's tenure that were made at Riverside to be shown, each followed by a panel. Before all that, I arrived and met up with a number of the friends that I've been attending BFI events with for a good while, all of whom have been mentioned previously on the blog: David, Trevor, Alan, Chris and Scott. For the event, a full-size TARDIS police box replica had been erected in the building, near to the doors down to the cinema theatre where the episodes would be screened. All of us got our picture taken with that beauty. This was also the chance to say hi to a few familiar faces that attend these events regularly, and to chat to new people too.

Yours Truly pictured with TARDIS prop

The first episode shown was Flashpoint, the finale of The Daleks Invasion of Earth (my blog post for the whole story is here), and the ending with Susan leaving still packs an emotional punch, leaving me moist-eyed in Riverside. The prints being used to project the episodes were a bit of a surprise after recently seeing this (and all the episodes shown on the day) restored for the season 2 Blu-ray set; they appeared to be masters based on the original VHS releases. Seeing all that film dirt and video wobble brought about a nostalgia rush for this viewer at least. The panel afterwards featured Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, Jessica Carney, the Doctor's other granddaughter (or rather William Hartnell's real life one), and a surprise guest Nick Evans, a Dalek operator in Flashpoint. Evans was hilarious, describing himself as "the oldest Dalek living in captivity" and covering some well-worn anecdotes like the queue of bursting Daleks on location waiting to relieve themselves down a grating. Although he was a bit frail, Evans didn't need as much help to get to his seat down the steep steps of the Riverside cinema theatre as did a cosplayer in an accurate Sensorite costume including full mask. That's commitment. Ford was her usual slightly reserved but professional self, answering questions she must have answered hundred of times before. Carney eloquently summarised the appeal of Doctor Who as mostly "nonsense" but occasionally true, and highlighted something I'd not consciously noticed: Hartnell fluffs when dealing with unreal situations, but is very rarely anything less than superb when he has material with emotional truth (not just his big speech to Susan at the end, but little moments like his reaction to Westminster bells sounding out over the desolate but now liberated London "Just the beginning, just the beginning...").

(L to R) Evans, Carney, Ford + Interviewer

The quality of any Doctor Who might be judged on its nonsense to truth ratio. Perhaps that was why a large number of the audience got up and left before the start of the next episode, The Centre (the final episode of The Web Planet). I found it relatively easy to sit through just 25 minutes of the story, but that's probably the maximum I can do in one go. The informative panel afterwards featured the director Richard Martin, and vision mixer Clive Doig. The 88-year old Martin had clearly decided not to even try to get down the steep steps, so talked with a microphone from the back seats about the challenges of making the story, sleepless nights before studio days spent planning with a bottle of whiskey. His memory was good but not perfect. At one point he said "We should have got a dancer in" to choreograph the action of the Menoptera characters; cue everybody in the audience inwardly screaming "But you did!! Her name was Roslyn de Winter and she was credited for supplying 'Insect Movement'". After the panel was a two-hour break for photos and autographs; I don't do either of those, but Doig was probably the only person there that Saturday for whom I might have broken that rule. Everything he's been involved with I've loved, from vision mixing many episodes of early Doctor Who to the children's programmes of the 1970s and 80s he produced like Vision On, Jigsaw and Eureka, and even the puzzle page he wrote for the Radio Times for many years. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth queueing as I didn't want a photo or signature, I just wanted to say thank you; hopefully some other fan did this for me on the day.

 

Doig (on left); Martin (not pictured) was sat in 'the gods' 

We spent the break looking for the pub nearby that's anecdotally noted as Riverside Studio Three by cast members (there were only two studios, so this is a joke akin to calling a golf club bar the 19th hole). I couldn't find anything online to specify exactly which watering hole it is (answers on a postcard), so we had a drink in the Blue Anchor, and then a spot of lunch in the Rutland Arms - both of them have been around since decades before the 1960s, so are both potential candidates. Given the date, one topic of conversation dominated. It was another BBC policy that was not easy to understand, but this one brand new. Gary Lineker, a popular sports broadcaster, had been banned from presenting that day because of comments he'd previously made that were critical of the UK government. Every other BBC sports presenter, pundit and commentator had refused to work in sympathy, and there was breaking news throughout the day about all the different programmes that were being cancelled. It must have been seismic to get six of the least sporty men in London that day talking about it. I couldn't help but compare what was happening to all those lost Who episodes, including the many filmed at Riverside (only about 50% of which survive): an inadvertent institutional persona developed that forgets about all the things that made it great in the first place. After the break, we were back for the final screening, of The Planet of Decision, final episode of The Chase. This was followed by a panel of Maureen o' Brien, who played Vicki, and Peter Purves, who played Steven.

O'Brien (Middle) and Purves (Right)

After a couple of questions about the usual - irascible Bill Hartnell who had a heart of gold, etc. etc. - it got more interesting as the interviewer moved onto other less familiar areas of their careers. O' Brien talked about why she stopped writing crime novels ("My editor hated my seventh book"), and some of her notable theatre roles, including playing Rosalind in As You like It at the Sheffield Crucible in a cast with the young Alan Rickman. Purves talked about some of the interesting films he was part of for children's television programme Blue Peter, including building houses in Tonga and walking the suspension cable of the Forth Road Bridge. He also talked about having directed 30 pantomimes in his time (I wish I'd been brave enough to shout out "Oh no you haven't" from the audience, but alas I wasn't). Once the panel was over, and artist Alister Pearson had raffled off a print for charity, it marked the end of an enjoyable event, and the six of us then spent a few hours in the Riverside's bar / restaurant. After having to miss the last couple of BFI Doctor Who events because of other commitments, it was nice to go to something similar and celebrate the history of the show as it reaches its 60th anniversary year. That's a big birthday, and a long lifespan for a show. Everything that was lost because of the BBC's inadvertent throwing out the baby with the bathwater policies is nothing compared to what the ravages of time can accomplish: every fan should appreciate having living links to the earliest parts of our favourite show's history, while we still have them. The next Time and Riverside event is concentrating on a single story, The Crusade, and will be taking place on Sunday 21st May. Further details can be found here.

In Summary:

A fun final Highland fling before this sort of story fell out of fashion.

The Evil of the Daleks

Chapter The 203rd, which sees various humans come together to be inoculated with the Dalek factor.

Plot:

Instead of just capturing the Doctor and Jamie, the Daleks use human accomplices in 1966 to steal the TARDIS and leave an over-complicated trail of clues to lead the two time travellers to an antique shop in London. The shop is a front for another time traveller Edward Waterfield, who is really from 1866. He gasses the Doctor and Jamie to unconsciousness and uses a Dalek time machine to transport them to his scientific partner Theodore Maxtible's mansion in his own time. He doesn't do it immediately, though, he leaves an over-complicated trail of clues for them first. Waterfield is an unwilling accomplice: the Daleks have taken his daughter Victoria hostage in another wing of the house. Maxtible, though, is secretly doing a deal with the Daleks to give him the secret of turning base metals into gold (yes, really, in 1866 this is his number one desire).

The Daleks want to isolate the Dalek factor to inject into humans and turn them Dalek-y, but instead of experimenting themselves, they con the Doctor into doing it by asking him to isolate the human factor; then they can make the Dalek factor the exact opposite (or something - it's not an 100% clear nor logical plan). The Doctor monitors Jamie as he is manipulated into trying to rescue Victoria, escape booby traps in the house, and fight a mute strongman Kemel. This provides the data to form the human factor, which the Doctor injects into three Daleks. The Daleks are transported to Skaro after the experiments conclude, as are the Doctor, Jamie, Victoria, Waterfield, Maxtible and Kemel. They meet the Emperor Dalek there. Then, the three humanised Daleks spark a civil war, which destroys the race finally, but everyone except the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria, including her father, end up killed. Victoria joins the TARDIS crew.

Context:

The BFI Screening of The Evil of the Daleks was a hot ticket: a well thought of story, and the biggest animation yet at seven episodes, with encouraging glimpses seen online beforehand. Plus, there hasn't been a new Doctor Who animation shown at the BFI Southbank for over 18 months because of Covid. This wasn't why tickets were limited to two per person - it seems to be the new policy for these events, and was the same for the Galaxy 4 animation screening, which went on sale this week. It made coordination of obtaining the tickets more difficult than usual for the group of us that attend, but had the benefit of creating a few new BFI members (members get to order tickets in advance of non-members). We ended up with one ticket too many, so I extended the invite to Phil, university friend mentioned many times before on this blog, who watched new Doctor Who videos and DVDs with me when they came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we both lived near each other in Brighton. David, Trevor, Alan, and Chris were also in attendance. Another change that seems only for this screening was that there was no allocated seating, it was first come first served, and the BFI had sold all the seats (they still had distancing gaps between seats for the screening of Dragonfire in June). As well as being a hot ticket, it was a hot auditorium too, very stuffy on a warm September Sunday. This made me a little worried about the quality of ventilation in NFT1, though everyone was masked. At the time of writing, a few days after the screening, nobody has shown symptoms or been pinged. Fingers crossed.

First Time Round:

The first time I experienced this story was when it came out as a cassette tape with linking narration voiced by Tom Baker in July 1992. I believe I got the tape from Volume One in Worthing when at home during the Summer Vac between my first and second years at university in Durham. I had told Phil before we went to the BFI that the Evil tapes were the ones he was very sniffy about back in the day ("I've got orchestral recordings from the 20s better quality than this") when I was listening to it in my room in college. I'd not known at the time that they were home made rather than official recordings (the audio of the episodes otherwise missing from the archives only exist because young fans in the 1960s taped them from the telly). I have just realised though that the story to elicit his response was instead Fury From the Deep; I found the audio of Fury in a Newcastle shop in term time - as related in a bit more detail in the First Time round section of the Fury blog post from 2016. Coincidentally - I do not believe it was coordinated, that wasn't the style of the ranges at that time - the extant episode 2 of Evil was also released in July 1992 on the Daleks The Early Years VHS tape. I bought this, also from Volume One, at around the same time as the audio tape, and was able to experience all the surviving material of the story at that time. In between then and now I have watched an online reconstruction, but the story is long and has many action sequences, so it didn't feel very effective as a slide show with accompanying audio despite sterling efforts by the re-constructors. Finally, I recently read the very expensive novelisation (see the Deeper Thoughts section of a recent post for more details).

Reaction:

The late, great US film critic Roger Ebert often used the term 'idiot plot' to describe a narrative that would be "resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot". It's a good gag, and like all good gags contains a certain amount of truth; but, the more I've learned and thought about the craft of creating stories, the more I've come to believe that all plots are idiot plots. Some, though, are better at justifying their characters' idiocy than others. The fatal flaw of a tragic or comic character is the thing that blocks them from realising they are being an idiot. The Evil of the Daleks is the second of two 1960s Dalek stories written by David Whitaker in the season that saw Patrick Troughton take over as the Doctor. The former, which also got the full animation treatment in recent years, was The Power of the Daleks. In that story, had the Doctor had been listened to early on, the Daleks would have been destroyed and everyone would have lived reasonably happy ever after. But almost all the characters in the story apart from those that arrived by TARDIS are blinded by obsessive scientific curiosity, or desire for power and status, and so a relatively simple Dalek plot ends with a bloodbath that a lot of the guest characters do not survive. Evil too ends up with almost everyone dead and an explosive civil war playing out on Skaro, but its characters have made mistakes to lead up to this that seem too hard to explain away.

For example, if the Daleks never wanted the human factor injected into the Dalek race, why did they provide three test subject Daleks to the Doctor at all? It's bound to lead to trouble. If the Doctor cares for Jamie's life, why send him into a dangerous booby-trapped scenario? Why does everyone trust the Daleks to be good to their word and return a daughter / provide the secret of alchemy? In Power, the Daleks are cunning and hide their strength and true nature, but here they are violent and dismissive from the off. At first glance, the screenplay for Evil seems more complex than Power's, but it's really only convoluted. The simplicity of Power's narrative through-line - the Daleks growing stronger and stronger - allows the character plots to shine as they dance around that straight line. The characters are more colourful in Evil, but their actions don't always make sense. Why doesn't Waterfield just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie and send them back to 1866? Through his criminal associates, he has the means and opportunity. Why do the Daleks need someone who has travelled in time, but not too much, to experiment on? Why hypnotise Victoria to go off with the Daleks to another wing of the house rather than just force her at blaster-point, or knock her out and carry her? Why bother trying to do a dodgy conditioning job on Arthur Terrall to obey the Daleks when they already have other people in the house serving them, willingly or unwillingly?

The answer is that it takes up time, and seven episodes is difficult to fill. The first one and a half episodes of the story set in 1966 are pure padding, but it's quite entertaining padding. The Doctor picking up clues without realising he's being manipulated is great to watch, and once the action moves to 1866, all that's gone and forgotten about, and the story moves on to, well, another few episodes of padding. Watched episodically week on week, it might not have caused anyone issues, until they could look back on all seven weeks and reflect, and by then it was probably fading from memory. Terrall's subplot could also lift out and not affect matters one jot, but is mysterious as it happens. All the hocus pocus of creeping around dark rooms in abandoned wings of old houses, and hypnotism, and talk of ghosts - it's all unnecessary for plot, but perfect for atmosphere. Once we're on Skaro, the story changes gears into a third different genre, and forgets about the stuff in the stately home. Even this last section is padded, and could be done in half the time. Do the Daleks really need to pretend to Maxtible that they're giving him the secrets of gold production he's been hankering for, just to get him to walk through an arch? They could - as dialogue later states baldly - just push him through. But it's nice to watch him get his comeuppance, even if it seems inefficient from the Daleks' point of view.

The Evil of the Daleks is a strange brew for sure, and some gulps go down nicer than others, but floating in it are some absolutely delicious fruity segments: scenes that epitomise the best of this era and Doctor Who as a whole. However badly it hangs together ultimately, it's good to have Evil in existence with wonderful animated visuals just so we can enjoy these scenes. The conflict scenes between Jamie and the Doctor are an example. Also, watching with an audience hammered home that the heart of the piece is the collection of sequences with Alpha, Beta and Omega, the humanised Daleks. Without Dalek movement synced to the audio, one loses the full incongruity of the child-like voices emanating from the traditional pepperpot shapes of Doctor Who badness. Being limited to audio reduced these three Daleks to just silly voices, but now they can be seen as characters in their own right. A huge "Awwwwww!" emerged from the audience when one was killed in a skirmish towards the end. The reveal of the Emperor Dalek and the final sequences of destruction as civil war rages on Skaro were marvellous at the time, as much as one can tell, but are - dare I say it - even better in the 2021 version of the story. Animation producer AnneMarie Walsh confirmed that they got an unprecedented 18 months to work on Evil of the Daleks and it shows; but, I believe that every release from this team betters the last anyway. Details in Evil caught my eye that I thought improved on anything we'd seen from the Who animations before; for example, many scenes with candlelight and smoke, and motes of dust floating about; plus, the swordfight between Jamie and Terrall is much better than the punch-up in the airport car-park in last year's Faceless Ones animation.

The movement of the 2D animated characters seems smoother and more expressive than previously. I compared what was on screen to the live action of surviving episode 2 in my mind's eye, and most moments seemed just as good if not better. No animated face can show as much emotion as Troughton does in the wonderful moment when he first realises that it's the Daleks he's up against, but the animated version almost matches the effectiveness of the moment in its own medium. It's a shame that the very first scene of episode 1 of the story involves the Doctor and Jamie chasing after the stolen TARDIS, as running is the one thing that the characters cannot do convincingly. Everything else was perfectly good, with bravura scenes like the Doctor riding on the humanised Daleks (a technical challenge as it is a 2D character on top of a 3D character) coming off very well. The backgrounds and character designs are uniformly excellent. The hypnotism scene has some close-ups of the faces of Molly and Maxtible, and they looked amazing on the big screen of NFT1. There was a difference of opinion amongst my viewing companions about some shots that couldn't have possibly been achieved by the 1960s production. The mansion is introduced with a sweeping establishing 'drone shot', which for some took them out of the action briefly as it didn't fit with a 1960s story style; others didn't mind it at all, mind.

A few other random points of interest after this watch: having a character in the early episodes share the same name (Mister Perry) as me was nice, though for a plot point they have to reveal his first name eventually, and it isn't the same as mine, alas; Kemel's characterisation is a trifle dodgy, a mute Turk in traditional dress who strips to the waist to do strongman feats, and is accompanied by on-the-nose music. Waterfield and Maxtible's successful time travel experiments are in keeping with the general tone of Victorian prestidigitation rather than sensible science: they created a link to another space/time event by applying static electricity in polished mirrors?! (Did they rub a balloon on the mirrors, perhaps?) Maybe for padding reasons again, but the Doctor's being a bit thick in the latter episodes musing how the Daleks expect to persuade him to cooperate (they're going to inject you with the Dalek factor, Doctor, it's obvious - they basically just said they would!!!). Finally, having a credit on the earlier episodes for "Skaro Concept and Design" does give away that the action is going to switch to scenes on that planet before the end. This wouldn't bother the hardcore fan, of course, but Phil knew nothing about the story going in, and there were probably a few unspoiled souls like him elsewhere in the audience too.

 

Connectivity: 

Both The Evil and the Daleks and Smile feature a new autonomous form of robotic or part-robotic life (the Human Factor Daleks and the Vardy / Emojibots) coming into being and this causing conflict with another group.

Deeper Thoughts:

Waterfield and Maxtible's Experimental Notes: BFI Southbank The Evil of the Daleks screening, 12th September 2021. Our hosts as ever were Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. As with the last screening, restrictions meant that there could be no quiz at the beginning nor audience Q&A at the end. Johnson dropped a hint that this might change for a soon-to-come screening that hadn't been announced on the 12th (but which I now have to assume is the November screening of the animated Galaxy 4). As the story was a mighty seven episodes long, the programme didn't have much time for extra content anyway, but we still got a brief interview after the interval (between episodes 4 and 5) and a more substantial Q&A at the end  Before the episodes were shown, Fiddy paid tribute to Roger Bunce, a camera operator on many Doctor Who stories including Evil, a pioneer of green-screen shooting, and before it "luminous overlay", a similar approach for black-and-white shows, which was used in The Evil of the Daleks. Roger had died two weeks earlier, having been due to make an appearance on stage that day. His family were in the audience and got to witness an appreciative and celebratory round of applause in his honour, and Fiddy dedicated the screening to him. After the first four episodes, the midway interview was with Mark Ayres, music and sound Maestro. He cheerfully explained that days before he'd been called to the BFI as they were having a rehearsal for the screening (an intriguing glimpse of the behind the scenes preparation that goes into these sessions); a BFI technician thought there was something wrong with the sound. They weren't aware of the home-made nature of the 50 year old recordings, and what they were hearing "didn't meet the expectations of a modern HD presentation". I think this is actually a compliment: Ayres has clearly got the sound as good as it can be so it almost sounds like it was recorded recently.

He mentioned that he had got the "noise floor" down, and been able to pull out a few buried lines, though he can't change the mix (as he does not have the elements like studio sound and music separately for stories of this vintage; the BBC didn't often retain those even for stories that it kept). Fiddy thought that elements had been enhanced, but Ayres put that down to him being able to hear the higher frequencies for the first time. On the musical side, Ayres commended Dudley Simpson's score and its pioneering use of synthesisers (and it is great, that Morse code-like rat-a-ta-tat Dalek theme is so memorable). Music was also the reason Ayres had to make so many different versions of the animation soundtrack. In the episode 1 coffee bar scenes, two contemporary pop songs were playing in the background. One of these has always been problematic because of rights issues, as it's The Beatles' Paperback Writer. For the UK, Ayres has (miraculously) replaced it with a number by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tish. For the US, both tracks had to be replaced by library music. Then different versions of both have to be made for alternate versions that are also going to be included on the DVD / Blu-ray: the 1968 repeat version of the programme (which was presented to TV audiences in 1968 with a couple of additional Troughton voiceovers as he was supposed to be relaying the tale to new companion Zoe, and the narrated telesnap version. Ayres made a version to keep on file with Paperback Writer included too, just in case it ever becomes possible to release it in future.

(L to R) Fiddy, Ayres

After the final episode, Johnson welcomed three people involved with the animation on to the stage: producer AnneMarie Walsh, storyboard artist Barry Baker, and 2D character animator Tom Bland. Interestingly, the team are not as big fans as many others that are involved in projects like this (like Ayres, say, or 3D animator Rob Ritchie who was in the audience and pitched in some comments and took some applause after a shout out from Walsh). Walsh mostly missed the show as she was too young for the original series, and too old for the new. Bland described himself as a "Doctor Who virgin". Baker was more of a fan, having watched the original series from the beginning up to the Tom Baker years, but displayed he wasn't quite as obsessive a fan as presumably 90% of the audience when he did a gag about the show being cancelled one week because of the "assassination of some US president or other"; true obsessive fans know that this is a myth, and the first episode of Doctor Who (that aired the day after JFK's death in November 1963) was barely even delayed. An early question was on how the particular stories are chosen for the animation treatment. Walsh would not be drawn on what was coming next despite some friendly interrogation from Johnson, but said that conversations happen between her team and BBC studios, and various factors are taken into consideration. They have their favourite Doctor and companion combos, but there's also an aim to complete seasons and close gaps, and they currently have to veto any story that they know features something that they currently could not handle such as large crowd scenes.

The balance was discussed between being sensitive to fans by not deviating too much from the story as it was originally, versus doing things that work better for animation. They reference any material they can get (camera scripts, stills, surviving footage) and do a certain amount of detective work. The location for Maxtible's estate Grim's Dyke had been used for filming of various Hammer horror films, so they were watched to get colour references. The 'drone shot' of the house was justified as being something the 1960s production would have done if they could have, and I just about buy that. Elsewhere, the audio has to be edited to remove dead moments that would work if one were looking at the human faces and movements of actors, but are too static when it's just animated characters not talking. 1960s TV favoured longer shots, and the modern animation, as would be expected, cuts more frequently. The extra time given for the production allowed more "in between" drawings, and so animated faces are more moveable; this made it possible to have more tight close-ups as in the hypnotism scenes I mentioned above. When asked whether the pandemic had impacted production (the 18 months of work, 6 pre-production and 12 for animation, fell pretty much entirely in the Covid lockdown period), the panel's answer was perhaps surprisingly that it had made no difference at all. The team - of about 11 full and part-time people - tend to work from home anyway, and share information on calls, emails and spreadsheets.

(L to R) Bland, Baker, Walsh, Johnson

Favourite bits, or bits that stood out on this watch, for each of the panel members: Bland's favourite character was Maxtible, and he enjoyed working on his face and hand movements to make him as expressive as possible; he could relax during the screening for anything he hadn't been involved in animating, but for those bits he had worked on, he was scanning the screen looking for mistakes; Baker liked the three humanised Daleks, and storyboarded their sequences to be as funny as possible, liking that they had gone down well with the BFI audience; Walsh likes the Skaro sequences, but thought they might prove controversial with fans as the animators have gone their own way rather than recreate what the 1960s production did. I think anyone unhappy would have to be a bit ungrateful as those sequences are excellent, and I think in keeping with the sprit of the original. Walsh hoped that fans would be as supportive of this animation as they have generally have been for the team's work previously. They made it as good as it could be in the time they had; if they'd had five years and a huge budget it would have been much better. The Q&A ended with her entreating fans to lobby the BBC for that treatment for the next story! After that, it was the usual trooping out to the BFI Riverfront bar, followed by a few drinks and chats with my friends and with other fans. It only occurred to me later that the one thing there wasn't in the whole day was a single Dick joke, not one instance of a double entendre based on Mr. Fiddy's first name. These are usually ubiquitous, but then so was Frank Skinner attending in the audience back in the day, and he doesn't seem to come along anymore. Will this aspect of the BFI experience return next time? I'll tell you in November, as I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Galaxy 4 screening...

In Summary:

Padded, but gorgeous; rather like Yours Truly in his middle age! It's now more animated than I tend to be, though.