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.

More than 30 Years in the TARDIS

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Aside from the occasional sideways step into spin-offs or oddities like More than 30 Years in the TARDIS, I have completed five Doctors' eras and 30 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 2, 4, 5-7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

Whose Doctor Who Title Card

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

McCoy doing a link for The Hartnell Years

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

The Silver Nemesis VHS came with The Making of Doctor Who

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

In Summary:

Docu-tastic!

The Time of the Doctor

Chapter the 274th, where the Doctor makes a house call and stays for simply ages (it tends to happen as one gets older).

Plot:
A coded message is being signalled out from a planet, and this attracts spaceships from every alien species (you know, like in the Pandorica one). The Doctor investigates, but Clara distracts him for a bit getting him to pose as her boyfriend making an appearance at Christmas dinner on contemporary Earth (where Clara's relatives see him naked - don't ask). Soon, Clara is helping him uncover the mystery of the message. It turns out to be from the Time Lords, and the planet turns out to be Trenzalore, the place where the Doctor is destined to die. Tasha Lem, a great friend of the Doctor that he's never mentioned before and never will again, is leader of a religious order based on one of the ships in orbit. She helps to get the Doctor and Clara down to the planet; they land in the town of Christmas, where no one can lie. In a tower in the town, the Doctor discovers the crack in space and time that he first saw in Amy Pond's bedroom. Through it, the Time Lords are broadcasting the signal from another universe in which they are hiding; once decoded it is heard to be the question "Doctor Who?" If the Doctor answers with his name, they will know it is him because of the truth field they are also creating, and will know it's safe to come through. This, though, will start the Time War again. All those in the ships surrounding the planet will attack to prevent the Doctor answering the question (in other words, to ensure 'silence will fall').

The Doctor tricks Clara into travelling home in the TARDIS, and stays to defend the town and the planet. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, annoyed at being sent home, comes back with the TARDIS. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor has been there many years, and is looking much older. The Doctor persuades her to travel home in the TARDIS again, and stays to defend the town some more. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, still not happy at being sent home, is picked up by Tasha Lem in the TARDIS, and comes back. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor's been there many more years, and is looking very old. The Daleks come in for a final big attack. The Doctor knows he's going to die, as he has no regenerations left, and has seen the future of his tomb on the empty battlefields of Trenzalore. Clara doesn't want to accept this, though, and persuades the Time Lords, talking through the crack to them, to grant the Doctor more regenerations. He uses this gifted regeneration energy to zap the Dalek ships, then goes back to the TARDIS, sees a vision of Amy Pond, and changes into Peter Capaldi. He then talks about his kidneys for a bit.

Context:

It's been a while since the randomiser has chosen an unseasonable festive special to watch in the middle of Summer. As if to compensate for this, the UK weather at the start of August 2023 when we watched this turned chillier and wetter. At least it didn't snow. I watched this on a Sunday afternoon with all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) from the disc in the 50th Anniversary Collector's edition Blu-ray box set, which brought together the specials shown in 2013. All the children did me proud one way or the other. The eldest, when watching the (first) scene where the Doctor fools Clara into leaving in the TARDIS because the situation is too dangerous, said "Isn't this just a rip-off of The Parting of the Ways?" He's so right. After the story had finished, the middle child went into a very Doctor Who fan rant about how the Timeless Child arc from Jodie Whittaker's time had retrospectively ruined the drama of The Time of the Doctor. He's a chip off the old block. The youngest really enjoyed all the jokes about the Doctor and Clara being naked. (You hear that Moffat? The humour is at just the right level for 11-year olds!) She was also excited to see Amy again at the end, though she'd forgotten all about the significance of fish fingers and custard.

First Time Round:

Christmas day 2013. After the in-laws had gone home in the early evening and the kids were abed, the Better Half and I would have had a friendly and harmonious discussion about which we would watch first that evening, the Doctor Who or the Downton Abbey special episode. My memory is that Julian Fellowes's posho potboiler was on an hour later than Who, around the time we were both finally alone, so we could watch it as it went out live. So, we did. When Downton finished it was 10.30pm; after a long day of eating and drinking and being merry, I feel sure that the BH went to bed at that point, leaving me alone to watch the recording of The Time of the Doctor. She then caught up when I watched it again the following day. Some of the later Capaldi festive ones I left until I was a little fresher on Boxing Day, but at this point it was still important to me to watch the special on the big day. Reminiscing years later, when I wrote the blog post for the The Doctor, The Widow, His Wife and Her Lover or whatever it's called, I satirised the tired, tipsy conversations the BH and I would exchange when trying to work out the continuity of the show that was the other person's favourite, thus: "Why is he in old guy make-up now?" "Why is the crack in the wall back?" "Have we ever met this footman before?" "What relation is the American guy from Sideways to the Granthams again?". I feel, though,  that this is probably verbatim what was said on December 25th and 26th 2013 chez Perry.

Reaction:

Responding to change can be better than following a plan. There's so much evidence that Steven Moffat, writer of this story and showrunner since Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, had planned for this finale throughout his time in charge; so many detailed set-ups are paid off here. I wonder, though, whether he anticipated that he would have to set the story that represented the culmination of all that work at Christmas, and almost immediately after a big, showy anniversary episode, and whether he had sufficient time to respond to that. I think not, as the narrative structure of The Time of the Doctor is all over the place. It's particularly striking just how wrong the structure is, because this is an area where Moffat is usually very strong. Three years worth of plot comes to an end in this story: where Gallifrey has disappeared off to, what was the final significance of the crack in space/time that appeared in Amy's bedroom wall, what the true meaning was of the oldest question, hidden in plain sight, why silence had to fall, what was destined to happen on Trenzalore, who exactly were the Silence that the Doctor encountered in 1969 and why they wanted to kill him, what the Doctor's greatest fear was that he saw in The God Complex. All these are explained in a coherent sweep: it's all about stopping the time war from starting up again (and so links ever further back to the very earliest episode of the relaunched series, Rose). I don't know how much Moffat worked out opportunistically as he was going along, but a lot of past material must have been produced knowing exactly where things would end. But, in The Time of the Doctor, all that explanation is done in the first 20 minutes out of 60; there's still two thirds of the running time to go.

Why in the name of all that's sacred did Moffat blow all that story material so early on? It's even worse than it seems, as that first 20 minutes is also shared with some misfiring comedy about nudity, domestic scenes of Clara's Christmas (the scantest lip service being paid to the festive season), and lots of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters like the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels. The culmination of the plotting of three years of episodes is spaffed away in something like 10 minutes. This would be okay if there was a lot of incident left to happen in the remaining running time, but there's barely anything. A clear indication that something's gone wrong is that, in the last two-thirds of The Time of the Doctor, Clara is tricked by our favourite Time Lord into getting in the TARDIS, is sent back home to safety, refuses to accept that and returns to find the Doctor has aged in the meantime... TWICE. The same damn story beats - too similar, as my son pointed out (see above), to what happens to Rose in another regeneration story - play out again in the same way. It's first draft stuff; any cursory review of a screenplay would clearly show this, and the two sets of repetitive beats would have to be combined to form one stronger sequence. For a start, the first time round, the TARDIS stays with Clara, which is a terrible mistake that the second time round rectifies. It can't be a heroic sacrifice by the Doctor to defend Trenzalore if he's trapped there anyway and has no choice. Was this a first draft? Did Moffat put all his energy into preceding 50th anniversary story The Day of the Doctor and have no time to do any rewrites on the subsequent script?

Aside from Clara yo-yoing back and forth between contemporary Earth and Trenzalore, all that's left is a Western-style stand off, with the Doctor as the Sheriff protecting the small town from bandits, or rather another succession of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters (Sontarans and Silence included as well this time). It's not that there aren't nice moments (Dan Starkey being funny as identical Sontarans, a wooden cyberman being outwitted, the Silence fighting alongside the Doctor) but each lasts for a few seconds at a time. The rest of the final two-thirds of the story is just a lot of droning on about mortality (to get my own back, I am going to drone on a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below about my own mortality - you can judge how entertaining or not it is). Even if a viewer has been living under a rock and missed that Peter Capaldi is taking over (and that was showcased in its own live broadcast entertainment extravaganza), they still know the Doctor's not going to die, so the ageing of the Doctor and the long, drawn out sequences dwelling on it seem dull at best, over-sentimental and manipulative at worst. To make it in any way work, Smith has to persuade us that at least the Doctor really thinks he's going to die, but he struggles to do that from deep within a mound of latex. There is no make-up job that can convince that the youngest ever Doctor is an old man. Maybe he could do this with his performance, and Moffat was quoted as saying that he thinks that it's Smith's best performance in the role, but I don't agree. His best performance was when he was the Doctor, young and early on. This is tacitly confirmed by returning him to look like that before the regeneration happens properly.

The significant character of Tasha Lem is so similar to River Song that it makes one wonder whether Alex Kingston just wasn't available and it was a hasty recasting. Tasha Lem doesn't age (presumably to avoid a guest artist having to also endure a restrictive make-up job), but that doesn't make sense (it's covered by a quippy line of dialogue). Two fine actors - Rob Jarvis and Tessa-Peake-Jones - are wasted in tiny cameos as passers-by in the town of Christmas; this isn't the first time such a thing would happen in the Moffat era, but it's a problem here as it would be good to have more feeling for the people whom the Doctor is protecting. The scene in the TARDIS for the regeneration with the appearance from Karen Gillan as Amy is fine, but Capaldi's first line being about his kidneys doesn't really work, and displays a desperation towards wackiness. Less is more. Here's how I think it should have played: first, lose the nudity gags. Expand out the investigation and solving the mystery to 35 to 40 minutes; there is definitely enough there to keep things pacy at that duration. At that point, send Clara home (just the once) and return the TARDIS immediately to Trenzalore, so the Doctor is choosing to stay. If you can't get Alex Kingston to play a Library hologram version of River (who wouldn't age), then have a succession of different cameo appearances as different leaders of the religious order over the years or write out the role altogether, and instead build up the roles of one or two people who are with the Doctor on Trenzalore. At around the 50-minute mark, get Clara back to find out the Doctor's aged (but maybe just have Smith play him older rather than overdo the latex), Clara then works out how to save him, and there's Daleks and energy bolts just as it plays now. When Smith turns into Capaldi have the Doctor and Clara look at each other for a moment or two, then he says "Just one question: do you happen to know how to fly this thing?!". Crash to credits, and we're out.

Connectivity:

The Time of the Doctor and The Ambassadors of Death both feature a grey-haired Doctor stuck on a planet helping the locals against alien invasion. Both stories see the Doctor go into battle on the same side as some scary-seeming but ultimately nice aliens (space-suited ambassadors in the Pertwee story, the Silence in Matt Smith's swansong).

Deeper Thoughts:

What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a question, even after half a century of ageing, that I keep asking myself. I'm not looking yet as old as Matt Smith in either stage of his old man make-up from The Time of the Doctor (but then, I doubt anyone has ever looked like that, it's well over the top!). Recent readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I have found a box of old diaries when cleaning out the garage. Reading these and getting a glimpse of the old me at different and more youthful stages of my life, I do find myself dwelling upon my mortality and my place in the world, very much in the manner of the Doctor in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to share a section of a diary entry from 1995 here, as I think it's illuminating, and I think that the 22-year old me who wrote it pretty much nails it. Is there ever anyone who dwells upon their own mortality more than a 22-year old bloke does? Except maybe characters in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry, perhaps? Anyway, to set the scene, it is early 1995; I had finished at university the year before, and hadn't shined academically; without a clue what to do next, I had come back to my home town of Worthing, and started working in a temp job to pay off my student overdraft, while I waited for inspiration to hit me. At university (in St. Aidan's College, Durham) I'd vaguely known a chap that was a student union rep, and wrote for the university magazine, Palatinate. On February 21st of 1995, with a long wait for a bus to take me home after work, I popped into the W.H. Smiths near the bus stop and flicked through the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 223, out since the 16th February, fact fans!). With surprise, I found that that chap I vaguely know from university, Gary Gillatt - for it was he - has become the editor of said magazine.

 

This immediately made me, a wannabe writer who received the same class of degree as Gary after three years, incredibly uninspired, and very envious. The following day, I explode the following screed upon the pages of my journal: "First off, you're young and the world of the telly and the world of you and your mates are entirely separate. It stays that way (unless you're at stage school, or happened to be young like I was when that 10-year old from Musical bloody Youth was always on the TV) for many years. Then, at about sixteen or seventeen years of age, you realise that the teenage daughter in the sitcom is the same age as you, and you fancy her and she's probably doing coke at Stringfellows every night. Then, you get a little older (and maybe wiser) and you're still on the same course or the same pay. You're flicking through the Mirror lifestyle pages when you find out that Andi Peters / Dani Behr / some page 3 model are one year, two years, three years younger than you. Then, the first of your baby sister's friends has an abortion. A year later, you're maybe hanging around the student union, when someone tells you that the woman you were sure was looking at you in the bar used to have a promising career in modelling. A friend gets engaged. Someone from another class at middle school dies on the flyover. Then, you get to the present, and you're flicking through Doctor Who Magazine when you realise that it's being edited by someone you knew vaguely at university. The world of the media and the world of you and your mates are almost overlapping. The next stage will be for someone that you're good friends with to become famous. And it better be me!"

I never did become famous. Nor did any of my friends. I know a couple of radio presenters, and some people who have written Doctor Who extended universe media, or other books or films. That's about it. I only ever wanted to write, and I suppose I am doing that. In fact, I'm doing it right now. Piecing things together, I look at the dates of all the diaries collected in that box from the garage. In fits and starts, I keep a journal from youth in the mid-1980s through to starting university. Then, in all my time studying for a degree, I don't keep a diary. I'm instead writing lots and lots of poems (which occasionally are taken seriously by other parties and get performed and shared in a small way). As soon as I've finished studying, I start a diary again, and again in fits and starts keep that going through the rest of the 1990s.  From 2000, I give up writing poems and work seriously on screenplays for about a decade. During this time, I never keep a journal, though I do have a blog. When I stop screenwriting, I start a diary again. I give that up, and within a few months I start this Doctor Who blog, with enough material to keep me going for a decade. Writing is less a vocation and more an affliction; one can't stop doing it, it'll escape out, one way or the other. This makes me feel better - if I had become famous or not, it would have been the same, I'd have still been writing. An author too can be any age when first successful, so I can always live in hope. It makes me more disposed to be nicer to Steven Moffat, a habitual writer if ever there was one, for his sometimes less than perfect efforts. I can also take some small comfort - now that I can look such things up easily on the web - in my being slightly younger than both Andi Peters and Dani Behr.

In Summary:

Some good stuff is buried in there, but the screenplay desperately needed another rewrite.

The Invasion of Time

Chapter the 264th, David Agnew's first script for Doctor Who (his next one would be better).

Plot:

The Doctor is behaving erratically and keeping secrets from Leela. He has a mysterious meeting on a spaceship with persons unknown, then materialises on Gallifrey claiming the title of president (which he got on a technicality during his last visit home). He's erratic and rude to everybody, particularly his old tutor Borusa, and seems to be working for some baddies called the Vardans whom he helps invade. The Vardans appear to be made of light bouncing off sheets of aluminium foil. As part of his investiture, the Doctor is connected up to the Matrix (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / computer) which gives him some knowledge, but he also needs the Great Key (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / key). His erratic and rude behaviour was a tactic for blocking the Vardans from reading his thoughts, and he plans to get them to fully materialise and then trap them in a time loop. Borusa hands over the Great Key, and the Doctor opens a small gap in the forcefield around Gallifrey. The Vardans materialise and in person they are much less interesting than aluminum foil. Leela, who has been banished outside the Time Lord Citadel, allies herself with some Time Lord drop-outs; they attack and the Doctor is successful in his plan to get rid of the Vardans. As everyone's celebrating, some Sontarans appear on Gallifrey, having used the Vardans to get the forcefield gap opened, then snuck in while everyone was distracted. The Sontarans run around after the Doctor and friends for a bit, first in the Citadel and then within the TARDIS. The Doctor builds a powerful weapon, the Demat gun, and uses it against the Sontarans. Leela and K9 Mark 1 decide to stay on Gallifrey. The Doctor leaves, and starts building K9 mark 2.

Context:

This completes another season of Doctor Who, covered peripatetically over the years for this randomly ordered blog. Season 15 (Tom Baker's fourth, middle year as the titular Time Lord) is not the most popular with fandom, but it certainly has its moments. Although the middle stories were muddled up, I did start the journey to completing this set with the opening story Horror of Fang Rock back in May 2016, and have ended here with the season finale. As The Invasion of Time is six episodes long, and isn't that well thought of, I didn't even ask the children or Better Half to watch with me, but caught up with an episode every other evening or so (from the DVD, without the optional new CGI effects) across the course of a couple of weeks in late April and early May 2023. I tried to have an alcoholic tipple to accompany each episode (if you've ever seen the story, you'll know why). I realised after watching it that this also completes another set of stories more personal to me (see First Time Round section below for details).

First Time Round:

The first time I saw The Invasion of Time was exciting. Not because of the story, of course, but because of the medium. It was the 20th July 1997, and I'd just paid for cable to be connected in the flat where I was living in Worthing. This was the first time I'd ever received anything beyond terrestrial channels (of which, if I remember rightly, there were only four available to me - Channel 5 had started earlier in the year, but couldn't yet be picked up in my area by a normal aerial). I didn't want sports or movie channels, I just wanted and got a channel package that included UK Gold, who showed repeats of Doctor Who stories some of which were not yet out to buy. I paid for the channel for three months; weekly on a Sunday morning during that time, a full story would be shown as an omnibus edition, with advert breaks to separate the episodes rather than full beginning and end credits. The first weekend I was connected up, I got to watch (and tape to watch again and again), this Gallifrey and Sontaran epic in all its shabby-chic glory.

I'd timed things badly, as there then followed eight weeks of stories I already had on official BBC VHS. (An aside: the planned showing of The Armageddon Factor on the 31st August was pulled because of the breaking news a few hours earlier of Princess Diana's death - it features a princess in jeopardy - and replaced by Planet of the Spiders, which I also had on official BBC VHS.) I then watched and taped the three remaining stories I needed from season 16, and then Meglos, before I cancelled the package. I think they put the prices up, I don't think it was just because every Who story they happened to be showing at that time was sub-par. I finally got to see the full story including all those interstitial sets of credits three years later when it came out on official BBC VHS. I bought the tape, even though I had the UK Gold copy already, just for those sets of credits and a nice box, because of course I did. With this post, I have finally blogged every one of the set of five stories I taped off cable TV channel in 1997. What a milestone!  

Reaction:

Just when you think The Invasion of Time's story is going to run out of steam, it does. A bit later it throws a lovely narrative curveball by introducing the Sontarans at the episode four cliffhanger, and changes the focus of its last two episodes. There's not, though, anywhere near enough story to sustain the first four episodes, or the last two either. Given the circumstances, one has to forgive this to a certain extent. The script for this story was a rush job after another one fell through. Like for the later story in producer Graham Williams's tenure when this happened, Williams and his script editor worked together to assemble a screenplay at speed, crediting the resulting story to the in-house pseudonym David Agnew. That latter story was City of Death. As part of a 60th anniversary poll, the latest Doctor Who Magazine at time of writing contains a full scored rundown of the Tom Baker stories. City of Death is at the number one position, the most popular; as the accompanying commentary to the poll says, sometimes it's possible to spin gold out of straw. Sometimes, though, you just get slightly tangled straw, as in the case of The Invasion of Time which languishes at position 36 of 41. It's not entirely a fair comparison: when Douglas Adams and Williams created City of Death they already had a plot that David Fisher had constructed. If anything, their job was more to pare away material (and add lots of jokes and good lines too). Williams and Anthony Read, the script editor when The Invasion of Time was required to plug a gap, started from an empty page. They get some jokes and good lines in there, but the plot can't help but look like what it is, something constructed in a hurry.

It starts with an intriguing idea: could the Doctor have gone rogue? Tom Baker's particular take on the main character is well suited to create some moral ambiguity, and he's always been at odds with his own people. It could work, but isn't sustainable for long; unfortunately, like everything in the story, it nonetheless has to go on for a long time, stretched out to fill a lot of pages. If you don't buy it, every scene where the Doctor is being unpleasant with people is difficult to watch as you know it's not real and there's going to be a plot switcheroo at some point; if you do buy it, it's just unpleasant to watch one's hero behave in this way. It also doesn't make much sense. Before the events of this story, the Doctor somehow bumps into the Vardans and realises that they can travel along any wavelength including thought, and he does a deal with them to let them in to Gallifrey. This is part of a plan to defeat them, but why bother doing the deal and letting them in to Gallifrey if that's what they want? Why not just leave them where they are? What threat are they if the Doctor just goes about his business and never travels back to his home planet? Any explanations given are muddled. They don't travel to Gallifrey in the Doctor's head as thoughts, as if they did, the Doctor wouldn't need to drop the transduction barrier to let them in. What is a transduction barrier, anyway? It can't be a forcefield, because in later episodes, the Doctor needs to drop the forcefield too, to let the Vardans in, erm, again (but more so). The script is rife with these repetitious beats, with just one more meaningless MacGuffin - the Matrix, the rod and sash of Rassilon, the Great Key, the Demat gun, the primary refraction tube of the fail safe controls - to be collected and used before this threadbare plot can finally be switched off.

With this intrinsic confusion, I don't think the Vardans would work as villains with even the most big budget style of visual realisation. Needless to say, they don't get this. Like everything in this story where the money looks like it's run out, they are rubbish. In their early form, they are light reflected onto some kind of foil on one camera, mixed into the picture of another; in their final form, they're just some dudes in dull uniforms. The mask of lead Sontaran Stor is okay, but the hands are very fake and plasticky. Both lead villains are essentially hidden from view, so needed very good vocal performances; unfortunately the people cast in the roles are just not strong enough vocally. It might not matter, anyway, as villains are only as good as what they do, and neither the Vardans or Sontarans do anything in the narrative. Whole episodes are taken up with characters just walking around. Maybe all the budget went on shoe leather? It's hard to call these chase scenes, as moving too fast would mean they would be over too quickly, and that can't happen in The Invasion of Marking Time. Balanced against this, the model work is particularly fine. The reused Gallifrey sets are good, but they have been embellished with tacky-looking plastic chairs and cushions, or very tatty looking desks and computer units. Controversially for fans, the final two episodes set in the TARDIS were filmed in a location rather than using specially made sets, meaning some rather drab brick walls. There's the odd interesting idea (the TARDIS power room being disguised as an art gallery) but again it all goes on far too long, and with the déjà vu gag of characters walking the same corridor and staircase over and over, is horribly repetitive too.

What bright points there are come from some of the performances. Baker has some good moments, but it's not his finest hour. Oh, how I wish this story only lasted an hour. As it is, there's plenty of time for lapses, like various scenes of maniacal laughter, or Baker staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall with a "Not even the sonic screwdriver can get me out of this one!". John Arnatt as Borusa gives a solid performance despite some inconsistencies in his character's behaviour from scene to scene. Milton Johns is on fine, oleaginous form as the comic relief Castellan Kelner, who - as a running gag - adapts to offer his utmost loyalty to whichever n'er-do-well is in charge of Gallifrey for that episode. Apart from this, though, he doesn't really contribute anything to the plot, and he's not the only one. All the drop-out ex-Time Lords living in the wilds of outer Gallifrey meet up with Leela when she's been cast out by the Doctor (to keep her safe / stop her from needing to be involved in the slight plot). They then storm the Citadel, achieving not very much that Leela couldn't have done on her own. In the final two episodes, they pretty much disappear altogether. If Leela had to fall in love with someone to leave the show, surely it should be one of these people who are slightly wild hunters just like her, rather than an effete guard with whom she barely shares any scenes. Properly scripting the outer Gallifrey scenes as part of a romantic subplot would have made them much more worthwhile an inclusion.

As it ends up, Leela's exit is ridiculously abrupt. Reportedly, Graham Williams didn't want Louise Jameson to leave and put off creating a proper ending until it was too late, hoping she could be persuaded to stay. He was right that she was worth the programme holding on to, as she's the best thing in The Invasion of Time. Watching these episodes was the most uncomfortable I've ever been at how she is objectified by the skimpy outfit. There's a scene where Leela swims that doesn't serve any plot function; yes, it was undoubtedly included like everything else in the story in a desperate attempt to fill time rather than for titillation, but it still strikes one as odd that it's in there. Various times that Leela is running round in her chamois underoos, I was very anxious that there was going to be a wardrobe malfunction. The only good thing about Jameson leaving the show was putting an end to that nonsense. Her performance rises above it, though, and it's a shame to see her leave. The character of Rodan, a prototype Romana, is paired with the Doctor often throughout, as a sign of things to come.

Connectivity:

Like Boom Town, The Invasion of Time features someone being held in the TARDIS (this time for their own protection), and a device being connected to the ship that threatens breaking it apart. Both stories also feature the companion character going on a date. Well, alright The Invasion of Time doesn't, but Leela's date must happen off camera between scenes, or else her falling in love with Andred after having barely looked at him previously doesn't make any sense.

Deeper Thoughts:

The High Street - My Part in its Downfall. There's not much more to say about The Invasion of Time, is there?! I already discussed its accidental forming of a subgenre of Doctor Who stories set on Gallifrey in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post about Logopolis. A couple of reminiscences recently for the blog perhaps suggested another topic of interest. Well, interest to me, at least. Be warned: this is probably the most trivial subject for investigative journalism imaginable. Above I demonstrated clear recall about my first experience of The Invasion of Time on TV and on VHS. What about on DVD? The story came out in that medium in May 2008, the final one of the four classic series Sontaran stories to come out on DVD. As well as appearing as a single disc release, it was also collected with those other three stories in the 'Bred for War' box set; this was a rare example of the DVD range tying in to something broadcast in the new series, as revamped Sontarans had just appeared on TV in the one with the killer Sat Navs. I know this because I was often online on the old Restoration Team forum (part of the website of the team who worked on the Doctor Who releases), where these things were discussed. As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, and the new millennium wore on, talking about Doctor Who with like-minded fans online gradually and then rapidly became mainstream. It had been feasible to do this throughout the 1990s, but those old newsgroups were analogous to a niche telecommunications hobby like ham radio. As things became more commoditised, another new activity then became available - buying Doctor Who stories online.

Long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I had preferred suppliers of Doctor Who on VHS and then DVD, and these were bricks and mortar shops. This may have been a UK thing, but I don't remember any bespoke sell-through VHS stores, neither chains nor smaller independent businesses. My favourite place to buy Doctor Who and other cult TV videos was a section within a local bookshop in Worthing called Volume One; lots of other big chains that sold books and/or music would also stock them. VHS had started as a medium for rental, and lots of rental places existed - Blockbuster for example having first arrived on our shores in 1989 - but no dedicated stores that just sold tapes. This changed in the early 2000s, with DVD seen as more of a sell-through medium than VHS. Chains adopted DVD alongside VHS to buy, but smaller shops sprouted up too. They were mainly focussed on film, and usually more expensive than places like MVC where I would regularly buy Doctor Who DVD titles in those early days, but it was nice that they were there for the rarer and less mainstream films that I was also collecting at the time. Sadly, such enterprise already had a finite life expectancy because of something else that was taking hold, that at the time I would have called e-commerce. It wouldn't be too long before the e- became superfluous; for a vast array of products that up to then would have been purchased in person, online sites became the default place and way to do commerce.

Physical media for music, TV and films were obvious early options for online purchasing as they were easy to distribute by post, and didn't require a customer's detailed, in-person scrutiny before the decision to buy. I was a relatively early adopter, making my first online purchases in 2000. Availability was a main driver rather than cost; shopping with clicks would supplement shopping in stores made of bricks for a book or a record you couldn't easily find, or an imported region 1 DVD of a film not yet released in the UK. What is lost to my memory is when I first bought a Doctor Who DVD online. Availability for the discs wasn't a problem in those days. I know that I was still purchasing Who traditionally in 2003 (bought the final ever Doctor Who VHS box set in the London Bridge MVC) and 2004 (I remember reading the inlay of the Ghost Light DVD on a commute back to Gillingham, the first new Doctor Who DVD I'd bought to watch in my newly-wed pad with the Better Half). By autumn 2007, I was 100% pre-ordering online for delivery on the day of release (it was a big deal cancelling my pre-order of The Key to Time DVD box set to save some pennies, only to find that I couldn't buy it thereafter because of its limited edition nature). So, I've narrowed it down to sometime in 2005 or 2006 that I made the change. The trouble with investigating this is that none of the companies I was buying from is still trading, so I can't just check my order history on a website.

A good summary of the 'etailers' around in these years can be found on the marvellous Film Stories by the marvellous Simon Brew, link here. I purchased for a while from Sendit.com (and had got non-Who product from there when they were called Blackstar). Later I used play.com (and again had purchased non-Who product from them when they were called play247. What prompted the full move to online I'm not 100% sure on, but I think it probably was the loss of that convenient MVC on London Bridge. My day job office moved out of the City of London to the nearby Royal Mint Court in 2005, meaning it was out of my way to walk across London Bridge. That didn't matter for that long though, as the shop closed anyway shortly after and MVC went into administration. They wouldn't be the last traditional retailer to suffer this fate, and it would happen to etailers too. Sendit.com no longer exists. Play.com were taken over by Japanese company Rakuten in 2011, and stopped selling direct (becoming instead a marketplace for smaller vendors) two years later. I moved on to the online BBC Shop and was still purchasing DVDs from them when this blog started, though by then I was wondering how long Doctor Who on physical media would stick around (see Deeper Thoughts of The Underwater Menace post for more details). The BBC Shop then itself closed in early 2016. Non-physical sell-through was obviously becoming a bigger and bigger thing at that point, which influenced the BBC decision with them trying out a short lived download-to-own model with the BBC Store instead. The smaller etailers closing probably had more to do with their not being able to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

I have somewhat begrudgingly used Amazon for Doctor Who Blu-rays since 2016 as the only reliable option for getting titles on the day of release (but never earlier - one of my small joys in the pre-Amazon days had been the rare early arrival on a Doctor Who story on the Saturday before the release date, giving me a weekend to start on it). Amazon has a comprehensive order history for me, so I can see that the first story I purchased from there was the Blu-ray of The Power of the Daleks animation late in 2016. Purchases are less frequent now than back in the day, of course, with only the box sets of new series, and classic ones as part of the Blu-ray Collection, plus a smattering of animated stories here and there. Armed with this investigation into my personal history, I can answer the question about The Invasion of Time: I would have pre-ordered it from play.com, and received it on release day in the post. I can't tell for sure what my first story purchased online was, though. It would probably have been sometime in the Summer of 2005, so could have been one of the four single-disc volumes of the new Eccleston episodes, or a classic story that was released around then such as Revelation of the Daleks or The Web Planet. Whichever it was, it marked my first blow against the High Street, which would take many blows from many others from then on. It may well be having a bit of a renaissance of late, though. As I was writing this, I saw the good news announced that the big Oxford Street HMV store, that had been closed and replaced by one of those American candy stores / possible money-laundering fronts, is coming back. Whether it'll tempt me enough to even visit there again, let alone to buy any Doctor Who product there, remains to be seen.

 

In Summary:

It deserves some leeway because of the circumstances of its creation, but nonetheless is around one episode's worth of story (including a couple of nice moments and lines) stretched over six.