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 Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang

 

Chapter The 198th, which proves that any long-running series must eventually have a wedding episode.

Plot:

The Doctor and Amy follow a message from River Song (Rory at this point has been erased from existence by the mysterious crack in time) and materialise in England near Stonehenge in 102 AD. River has been guided to this place by a painting by Van Gogh that's been passed down through the many guest stars of the 2010 series until it comes into River's possession. The two TARDIS travellers find her ensconced in a nearby Roman legion's camp pretending to be Cleopatra. Together, the three of them discover the Underhenge, an area under Stonehenge containing the Pandorica, an impregnable mini-prison rumoured to contain a trickster or warrior. Stonehenge is transmitting a signal which appears to have attracted Spaceships of every alien race the Doctor has ever encountered, including Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans, to take whatever is inside. It's a trap, however. The villains are in an alliance, and are not after what's in the Pandorica, but instead lock the Doctor in it - he's the fabled trickster / warrior (surprise surprise). One of the Romans is Rory, but he - and all of the legion - are really Autons, brought to life from the Nestene Consciousness mining Amy's imagination. Rory, desperately trying to resist his programming shoots Amy, whose memory has come back as to who he is.

River, trying to escape the TARDIS which has been taken over by forces unknown (and never really adequately explained - presumably it's the Silence, but how they are able to remote control the TARDIS; who knows?), finds herself  trapped as it explodes. The explosion causes the cracks in the fabric of reality, which devour all energy in the universe, causing all the stars to disappear, never to have existed. Rory is cradling the dying Amy, when the Doctor appears from the future, travelling using River's vortex manipulator. With Rory's and others help, this future Doctor contrives the means of his own escape from the Pandorica, and puts Amy in (as the box looks after its occupant very well, it will heal her). Nearly two thousand years later, during which time Rory has guarded the Pandorica, never ageing as he's plastic, the young Amelia is able to open the box, and reunite the older Amy with the Doctor and Rory. The Doctor rescues River from the exploding TARDIS where she's been kept alive in a time loop by the ship's emergency systems. Despite reality still collapsing around them, and despite an attack by a stone Dalek, a vestige of the universe that never existed, the Doctor is able to formulate a plan where he uses the Pandorica plus the energy of the exploding TARDIS to recreate the old universe again with a second big bang; the cracks in the universe will heal, but the Doctor will be on the wrong side when they do, and will no longer have existed.

As his timeline slowly unravels, the Doctor finds he is able to speak to Amy on a couple of key past occasions. He tries to imprint himself in her memory, along with the tale of the TARDIS that he took from Gallifrey. As with Rory, Amy's memories can come back to corporeal reality (something to do with living for years with a time crack in her bedroom, although in the new rebooted reality she hasn't lived with a time crack in her bedroom, but best not to think too hard about that as it's quite confusing). On her wedding day, the phrase "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" reminds her of the TARDIS, and the blue box and its pilot arrive. The Doctor dances at the wedding reception, and then he, Amy and Rory fly off in the TARDIS for more adventures in time and space... 

Context:

Watched each episode from the disc in the series 5 Blu-ray boxset, on two Sunday afternoons separated by a week; this was so my viewing companions - all the kids: boys aged 15 and 11, girl aged 9 - could feel what it was like to wait the regulation amount of time before the cliffhanger of The Pandorica Opens was resolved. I expected a chorus of disapproval and entreaties to put on the next episode immediately after the first, but came there not a peep. Maybe it's not as compelling as I thought. Comments from the children ranged from the youngest congratulating herself on seeing the Van Gogh painting "I knew it was going to be the TARDIS!"; but, she was wrong-footed by the Pandorica opening in the second episode to reveal Amy rather than the Doctor. All three children were confused at how a stone Dalek could survive when none of the other aliens did. I didn't have a satisfactory answer to this (I hesitated to give what I thought was the true reason: that a Stone Dalek looks cool in a way that a stone Silurian, say, probably wouldn't). 

First Time Round:

The date of the The Big Bang's first BBC1 broadcast is quite close to my eldest son's birthday. He was quite young at the time, but we were nonetheless planning a birthday party on the Sunday. The main memory I have is of tidying up the back garden all day Saturday, to allow it to be used as a play area for half a dozen pre-schoolers the following day. As a long and beautiful sunny evening was finally ending, the Better Half and I decided we'd done enough, and came in to watch that night's Doctor Who, and - if I remember correctly - both enjoyed it. Thinking of this, made me wonder whether at least one episode of Doctor Who had been broadcast of each of the family's birth dates, and a bit of research (see Deeper Thoughts section for more details) showed me that this was indeed the case. The three children have never had a Doctor Who episode shown on their birthdays during their lifetimes thus far, but the date for each had seen a few past episodes shown before they were born. Myself and the Better Half have both had Doctor Who seasons start on our birthdays in recent years.

Reaction:

Steven Moffat does not believe that less is more. This double-parter is his definitive statement that actually more is more. It features every monster he could cram in, and includes every possible ally, or references to plot points and loose ends, from all the previous stories of the 2010 series. The scene at the end of the first part The Pandorica Opens, with every alien race teamed up to put the Doctor into his bespoke prison, is like a frame of a particularly over-excited Doctor Who comic strip come to life, or how an army of 11-year olds in 1983 imagined The Five Doctors would be before they saw it (when they discovered it was just eight blokes in cyber-suits on a damp, Welsh hillside, and one Dalek in the studio). In terms of scale, one could not be disappointed. The whole episode is structured to build to a triple cliffhanger: the Doctor locked in the Pandorica, Rory shooting Amy, and River stuck in the TARDIS as it explodes. The universe ends, leaving only the Earth alone in a blank and infinite space. And that's just part one of two. If Doctor Who had any monsters made out of kitchen sinks, Moffat would undoubtedly have thrown them into the mix too; he does after all include a kitchen mop. It's well structured, though; by no means is everything just being thrown at the viewer to see what sticks. Although there's no real reason apart from spectacle why the plan to trap the Doctor couldn't be managed by only one alien race, a couple of moments for featured creatures are very well handled. For example, the dismembered parts of a cyberman having life of their own come together as a full suit keen to capture a new occupant, with the head snapping at Amy like a crocodile's jaws. The Autons too: their reveal, and making Rory a plastic facsimile that does not know he's not real, is the best use of the Nestene duplicate concept since its introduction.

The big reversal of The Pandorica Opens - that the Pandorica does not contain an evil "trickster", but that person as referred to in the legends is instead the Doctor and he's going to end up in the box - is telegraphed from fairly early on, but I don't think it matters. What it does do is unfortunately render meaningless the much celebrated speech that the Doctor does from Stonehenge to the assembled aliens, where they appear to back off because of his bravado. Instead, they are fooling him, turning the moment into one of defeat rather than victory - it's a nice speech, though, and it's only undermined on the second viewing; when it plays out (assuming you're not a clever dick like me who saw things coming) it feels like a punch the air moment, so they get away with it. The other minor thing that doesn't sit right in the first part is the use of Amy's childhood memories to create the scenario aimed to ensnare the Doctor. It doesn't make any sense: the Doctor's no more likely to fall into a trap just because it involves some things Amy read about as a nipper, and if it were spotted it is more likely to give things away (as it indeed does in The Pandorica Opens, albeit too late); this is, though, setting up the possibility of things coming back if Amy can remember them, which will pay off in the second part.

For all the many showy elements of The Pandorica Opens, the story structure is simple and traditional. The same cannot be said, though, for The Big Bang, which is much more timey-wimey, for want a better phrase. The episode plays out in multiple sections too. First, there's the section of the Doctor zipping back and forth through time between 102 AD and the young Amelia Pond in an alternative universe 1996, where there are no stars. The first thing that's notable about this section is that it is a gargantuan cheat. If the Doctor can use time travel to escape from the most secure prison ever made, and then go back in time to explain to people how to free him in the past, there is nothing stopping him doing that every week to escape whatever scenario he ends up in. It's carried along, whizzing past any audience scepticism, by the speed of the telling, and the charm of the performances, particularly Matt Smith and also Caitlin Blackwood as Amelia. Just at the point where it starts to get a bit smug and irritating (something like watching Back to the Future 2 on fast forward) the Doctor makes one more jump, arriving back to appear before himself, Amy and Rory apparently dead. Suddenly, things are serious again. This is the climax of the first section. The second section is the more traditional build up to the ending where the Doctor has to sacrifice himself to put everything back to normal. Some lovely distractions from what is essentially a linear segment are a gun-totin' River Song, and a Stone Dalek (lovely visual, doesn't really make sense - see above for my kids' reaction).

The third of four sections sees the Doctor's existence unravelling as he watches. He's able to drop in on events of the 2010 series as they run backwards. It contains perhaps the most bravura moment of plotting in the whole of Steven Moffat's tenure as showrunner: the scene where the Doctor talks to Amy in the Byzantium. We've already seen this play out in the Weeping Angels 2-parter earlier in the year, but now we see it again, and fully understand what's happening. Finally, there is Amy's wedding. The actors playing her parents are odd choices (and never appeared again), and it's weird that it's the day of her wedding where Amy is suddenly aware that something has changed in her life now she's got them back. A big deal is made, both in this story and earlier in the season, that the TARDIS explodes on Amy's wedding day, the 26th June 2010. But the actions depicted in this story make it feel more like it explodes in 102 AD. If not, how is Amelia affected in 1996, where there are no stars despite it taking place before the explosion, if that happened in 2010.  Maybe the impact rippled backwards in time; whenever anything in post-2005 Doctor Who doesn't quite make temporal sense, the answer is always that it rippled backwards in time somehow. It also occurs to me now that all three of Matt Smith's finales take place in a parallel universe (where there are no stars, where all time's happening at once, where the Doctor's victories have all been undone). It did get a bit wearisome all this messing with time and realities, but first time out it is interesting.

The climax of this last section is a tour de force of lyrical skill: Moffat uses the traditional wedding saying of "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" to describe the TARDIS and bring it back into being. The whole structure of the second episode is built around this clever bit of wordplay. It would ultimately be more satisfying if it was a visual rather than verbal flourish, but it's still nonetheless exciting. All the visual elements surrounding it, marshalled by director Toby Haynes, are wonderful, window dressing or otherwise; and there's far too many great things to call them all out here (I haven't had time to go into Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan's emotional scenes as the latter realises who the former is, for example). There's a tiny niggle at the back of my mind that Moffat is including everything he can in a sort of desperation that he doesn't believe his storyline is strong enough in and of itself. He's obviously decided that every finale should be as big as anniversary special used to be (just as next season he'd decide that a series opener could be as big as a finale), but if this is just ultimately a bag of tricks, it's a bag of the best tricks one could imagine.  

Connectivity: 

Like The War Machines, this 2-parter is a big story to finish a season, and looks to have had a fair amount of the budget spent on it. Both stories significantly set some action on a date roughly contemporaneous with the broadcast of the story (the 1960s story is set around the 16th July 1966, with its final scene confirmed later as happening on the 20th; Amy's wedding in the The Big Bang is on the 26th June 2010, the same date that episode debuted).  

Deeper Thoughts:

Everything's an anniversary of something, old boy. The focus on tying the action of The Big Bang to the date of its broadcast, and of the proximity of that date to my son's birthday (see above), reminded me of something I have often meant to research in more detail about my favourite TV programme. I follow a lot of fans and feeds on social media related to the venerable Time Lord, and often someone will post something along the lines of "It's 25 years to the day since The Keeper of Traken episode 1" or "On this day in 1979, City of Death was getting record breaking audiences for its second episode" or such. Doctor Who's been going a long, long time, and before that there was a gap, but before that gap it was going an even longer long time. In the early days, Doctor Who was on every week almost all the year round, only stopping for a short break in the Summertime. I wondered whether there was any day on the calendar which wasn't the anniversary of something; so, I did an hour or two's research on the internet. I set a reasonably high standard for what the something could be; it would be too easy to fill a year if I counted the birthday of every actor ever to appear, down to those heroes who play the third Ood on the left and similar. No, it had to be the debut to air of a Doctor Who episode or something reasonably significant related to the show. There were, as it'll probably be no surprise for you to hear, lots of detailed websites I could utilise curated by committed individuals where such information was held.

The first sweep was to go through and find the list of dates where the show has not been broadcast. Like Doctor Who, I originate from the UK, so I'm only counting premieres on British television, but just that - and only looking at first runs of episodes of the main show, no spin offs - covered approximately 80% of the year. Every day from the start of January to the end of April, for example, a Doctor Who episode has been launched on BBC1 in at least one year. The autumn's very popular too for both new and classic series alike. A period from late June to the end of August is a bit fallow, though. It's traditionally been seen in TV as a no-go zone, a time when the best shows were held back to launch in Autumn, rather than lose viewers to various outdoor sun-kissed activities in the school holidays. That's less true these days, though, and a couple of times (the second half of the 2011 series after a mid-series break, and Peter Capaldi's first series in 2014) a run has started in late August. Beyond that, it was standard in the classic series era to have terrestrial repeats in the Summer months when Doctor Who was off the air. Given that in those days it was pretty much impossible to catch up with an episode once it had been shown, these repeats were as important as the original airings, so I don't think it was too much of a cheat to include them. With that, the number of anniversary-free days shrinks markedly down to only a dozen dates out of 366 (February 29th, which I did wonder about, was the date for the 1964 broadcast of an episode of Marco Polo in Doctor Who's first ever season).

I thought I'd need to lean heavily on episodes of spin-offs to get to that level (97% coverage), but no. For the most part, spin offs like Torchwood or The Sarah-Jane Adventures first aired on days of the year that Doctor Who had already been shown. The exception was Torchwood: Miracle Day. Three episodes of the mostly US-based fourth series of that spin-off (on the 14th, 21st and 28th July 2011) were shown on days that nothing else from the worlds of Doctor Who had ever aired. That took the total unaccounted for dates down to nine. On the 29th June 2007, an episode of Totally Doctor Who - a non-fiction magazine show for children - was shown. This wouldn't normally be so special, but the episode included the TV debut of an episode of the animated David Tennant story The Infinite Quest, so that counts. On the 20th December in 2012, the only day of the twelfth month where a full episode or special hadn't already been shown, a teaser for the year's Christmas special called Vastra Investigates premiered on the Red Button. On 21st August 2014, there was a Blue Peter special introducing Peter Capaldi to the young viewers a couple of days before his first story aired. So, with all that considered, there are only six days in the year that aren't an anniversary of something new being shown: the 4th, 15th, 22nd, 29th and 31st July, and the 28th August. Now, it would be ridiculously completist to hope that a series of Doctor Who from 2023 onwards (it's too late for this year, and we're only getting specials next year) could go out of their way to show some new episodes on all those six dates, so every day of the year can showcase something. Ridiculous. But I can't help hoping for it anyway. Until then, a happy anniversary for the 6th August, the date I'm writing this: 41 years since the BBC1 Summer repeat of Destiny of the Daleks episode 2, and on this day a year later in 1981 discerning viewers were enjoying a repeat of Full Circle part 4.

In Summary:

An everything including the kitchen sink drama.

Terror of the Autons

Chapter The 156th, where a supposedly Machiavellian genius turns out not to be much cop, really.

Plot:

The Master, a Time Lord renegade and exile who knew the Doctor back on Gallifrey, arrives on Earth, steals the one Nestene globe left over from the previous invasion in Spearhead from Space, and brings back the Autons, because... well, it's unclear. He wants to team up with the Nestene meanies to destroy humanity, because... well that's unclear too. It's likely he's doing all this just to annoy the Doctor. Anyway, there follows a lot of convoluted attempts to blow up or hypnotise or kidnap the Doctor, or his new assistant Jo, or the plucky fellows of UNIT. In parallel, the Master teams up with the manager of a plastics factory and builds lots of prototypes of plastic objects that can be brought to life and kill people. He settles on plastic daffodils, and hires a coach to do a promotional tour of the country, giving the fake flowers away, town by town, like super villains do. The plan is to send a radio signal to activate the daffs, which then shoot a quick setting plastic over the face of anyone nearby, suffocating them; in the confusion of a wave of deaths, the Nestene invading force will land and take over. The Doctor and UNIT attack before the signal can be sent, but the Master still has time to use a radio telescope to signal the Nestene Consciousness into corporeal existence on Earth. Before it can fully materialise, though, the Doctor foils the Master's plan by... telling him not to do it. The Master is persuaded to turn on his co-collaborators, just like supervillains sometimes are apparently. The Autons defeated, the Master escapes. But the Doctor has swiped a vital component from the Master's TARDIS, meaning they are both stuck on Earth and all set for a rematch or four.

Context:

I watched this one with the whole fam, old school style: one episode a week over the course of a month. No particular reason for this, but it has been more difficult to find big swathes of time during lockdown for watching Doctor Who. Both the Better Half and I are lucky enough to be working full-time from home, and have been since the start of our isolation 10 weeks ago. On top of that, we're home schooling the three kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 8). The notion I had at the start of the lockdown about having extra time to tackle new projects was naive. We've done a bit of work in the garden, and streamed a few films, but that's about it. There's still time, though; the government of the UK is relaxing lockdown rules as of now, but neither myself or the Better Half need to go back into our offices to continue working, so we're going to be staying home as much as possible. This is a personal decision, but I still feel very guilty that I went with government advice before the lockdown (including travelling to London and congregating with a large number of people at a BFI Doctor Who event - not quite Cheltenham but still makes me feel bad looking back). The government were too slow to introduce strict lockdown measures, and I believe they are too quick now in lifting them; I don't want to make the same mistake again of paying their advice too much heed. Maybe I'll get to write that novel or learn a foreign language yet. Or, most likely I'll just watch a bit more Doctor Who. It's all good.

Anyway, the kids generally found the story diverting enough. The Better Half was very vocal about how rude and insufferable the Doctor acts during the story. The infamous description by the Doctor of Jo in their first scene together when she ruins his experiment, that she's a "ham fisted bun vendor" was misheard as "ham fisted bum vendor", which caused many minutes of hilarity. I had to pause the DVD to let the laughter die down.

First time round:

I'd seen a couple of intriguing clips of Terror of the Autons in black and white on Resistance is Useless; this was a documentary shown on BBC2 in early 1992 just before a season of repeats. It was just over a year later when it came out on VHS, and by this time it was in colour. Clever people, Who fans and BBC engineers, had worked out how to produce a broadcast standard colour version by merging various surviving versions of differing qualities. I bought a copy in WHSmiths when I was making a necessary trip to Durham (as I happened to be in my second year of university there). It was very exciting at the time to be getting full colour versions of some of the Jon Pertwee stories released on VHS that had previously only been available in black and white. To celebrate this unique selling point, the spines of the video boxes were adorned with a paintbrush logo, annoying the purist collectors by making them inconsistent with the rest of the collection, and meaning nothing to anyone else. Great days.

Reaction:

I'll start by saying that Spearhead from Space - the Auton story that, like Terror, kicked off a new series of Doctor Who the previous year - is one of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories. Even if you don't like it as much as me, I think you'd have to concede that it made a big splash: first ever colour story, introducing a new approach and new regular cast for the show, and it's all made very glossily on film. Plus, it has a great new monster race, who work well both visually and conceptually: they like all things plastic, they copy people, they create a soldier class that look like shop window dummies; it's all very good stuff. Down to the smallest detail, Spearhead gets it right. The sound effects for example, are very distinctive and memorable - the buzzing drone sound that accompanies an Auton whenever it's close, the satisfying whirr when the guns emerge from their plastic hands, the "ka-choo" whoosh when they fire. All this and more made it almost certain that there would be a sequel. A year later, and here it is, a technicolour blast to re-introduce the Doctor and UNIT to the nation's Saturday afternoons.

The second invasion plan of the Nestene Consciousness is not, though, quite as solid as the first. In Spearhead, they arrive in small numbers, take over a plastic factory secretly where they can mass produce troops, then gradually replace people in positions of power with plastic facsimiles while smuggling those troops into multiple cities as shop window dummies, waiting to be activated. This is all pretty sensible (it should be, as the Nestenes clearly have been monitoring Earth broadcasts for a while, and cribbed their plot from old episodes of Quatermass). In the sequel, they don't bother with starting small, nor copying people in positions of power, and the main thrust of their invasion plan is to hire a coach and very slowly do a magical mystery tour of the shires of England, handing out plastic flowers in giant Frank Sidebottom heads; stealth is definitely not in it. By some miracle, despite their drawing massive amounts of attention to themselves, the Doctor and UNIT don't find out about this activity until the Autons have given out enough of these flowers to endanger a significant number of lives. Or so they say. Presumably, they have allowed for the percentage of households that have thrown their plastic flower away, or left it in a drawer, or even put it on display in a room that won't have any people coming in to it at the crucial moment when the signal is sent. If the idea is that the deaths have to happen all at the same time to create diversionary chaos, it seems a bit of a wonky plan, to say the least.

What, or rather who, has happened to make the plan so silly compared to last time? The Master. He loves an over-complicated plan to the point of ridiculousness. This isn't just fan snarkiness after the fact either, it's a key and intended part of the character. In later stories in other eras, he is said to be someone who would "delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly" or "get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line", but it's right there from day one too. There's a conversation when the Doctor and the Master finally meet in Terror where the Doctor comments that the Master's contribution to the Nestene plan is "vicious, complicated and inefficient", and that this is typical of his way of thinking. Now, one already has a monster in this story that can't invade a planet unless there's a convenient plastics factory to hand; it may seem to be stretching things too far to also add a villain that deliberately delights in making things unnecessarily convoluted.

The problem is that the Master was conceived without any obvious motivations for his actions (more on that later), and also to be a vehicle for a specific actor; this later aspect of the character's genesis makes up for any other deficiencies: Roger Delgado is perfectly cast, works well as a foil for Pertwee, and can suavely deliver any line or action, no matter how crazy. The action has been cleverly structured to keep the Doctor apart from his adversary until the end, with only a brief phone call before that (this approach must have made an impression on the young Russell T Davies as he reused it later in The Sound of Drums). Obviously, if the Master can sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's out to put in a Nestene-controlled plastic telephone flex as a trap, then he could probably just sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's in to, you know, shoot him. Shoot him, if you want him dead - just shoot him. To me, Delgado plays this as just a game, that the Master doesn't really want to kill the Doctor, but needs to keep up the pretence. The only time the script gives him something to which he can't grant verisimilitude is at the climax, where the Master has to volte face and turn against the Nestenes. Delgado tries his best, but it's pretty unbelievable, and would be a hard ask of anyone to find some truth in that moment.

The other key difference between Spearhead and Terror of the Autons is the producer Barry Letts, who is also on directing duties. The story a year before had been produced by Derrick Sherwin, and Sherwin had commissioned and handed over the structure and scripts for the rest of the year too. Terror of the Autons is the first opportunity for Letts to fully put his stamp on the show. The accent is much more on family-friendly fun; the scientific and military aspects of UNIT are toned down and the adult self-possessed assistant Liz Shaw is replaced by Katy Manning, who plays Jo as a child, getting things wrong and falling into trouble. The succession of different captains assisting the Brig is replaced with a permanent character in the shape of Mike Yates. The introduction of the wicked uncle character of the twinkly, sly Delgado as the Master completes the UNIT family, as they have since become known. This format, with increasing breaks for off world adventures with The Doctor doing jobs for the Time Lords - another change Letts would make, but which obviously there's no sign of yet in Terror besides the hint of a Time Lord turning up to offer guidance - would remain in place for the next three years.

As well as cast, there's tonal changes instigated in this story. The Doctor Who stories broadcast in 1970 starting with Spearhead were in colour, but they didn't have the colour of Terror of the Autons, and the stories that followed it. It's positively gaudy in places. Again, the changes go towards the more fun and family-friendly - the Autons aren't silent killers accompanied by that sinister buzzing noise anymore, they speak, which makes them less frightening somehow. It wasn't enough of a change, though, to avoid this episode being considered controversially frightening by many at the time - with dolls coming to life, policeman turning into blank-faced killers, and so on. There was quite an outcry. This would be something that they would continue to tweak as things went along, until the balance was right. This spirit of innovation extended to the technical side too. Letts as director pushed the technology, with lots of use of cutting edge green-screen work, to such an extent that a lot of it looks rubbish now. I can't fault the ambition. If it weren't for the existence of Spearhead from Space as a yardstick, it would be fine, but because of it's sequel - practically remake - status, the comparisons can't be avoided. For all its triumphs, Terror looks a bit tacky compared to the original.

Connectivity: 

Plastic. Both the alien consciousness in Terror of the Autons and the alien pathogen in Praxeus love plastic.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Conan Doyle Master Plan. The story told often afterwards about the creation of the character of the Master, is that Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, having seen the relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier as something like that between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, realised that the Doctor needed his equivalent of Professor Moriarty. They were referring, as most people do when they allude to Holmes and Moriarty, to the perception that's grown up about what that protagonist / antagonist relationship was like, not what's written in the books. Moriarty appears in only one Sherlock Holmes story, and is mentioned in a few more. I've read a number of Sherlock Holmes stories and have never come across any reference to Moriarty. You couldn't miss the Master when he was first introduced - he was in every single story for a year. Given the nature of Doyle's character (a shadowy figure that guides and protects the criminals of London in exchange for a cut of profits), he could have been behind any of the plots of any of the books, I suppose, but he most definitely wasn't a front man, as the Master is. He only shows his hand in The Final Problem, as I understand it, in retaliation at Sherlock's impact to the schemes in which he has a vested interest. There is a clear and understandable motivation for Moriarty: he's a criminal kingpin.

The Master doesn't have such a motivation. If he were a mercenary, or at least were a bit mercenary, it would make sense of his teaming up with the Autons for profit, but there's no sign of that, and no evidence in stories before or since that either Time Lords or Nestenes use cash. As noted above, if his aim is to destroy the Doctor, he could go about it much more efficiently, and he passes up at least one obvious opportunity to do this in every story. He clearly wants to get the Doctor's attention, often going out of his way to ensure his supposed nemesis finds out about whatever plans he's got on the go. But why? With a blank space in place of a rationale for the character's behaviour, successive writers and the audience at home have filled it in with all sorts of ideas and theories, some more sensible than others. A prevailing fan theory for a long time in the 1980s explained the rivalry by imagining that the Master was the Doctor's brother; other stories have suggested - not necessarily very effectively - that he's just an amoral agent of chaos, and stories after Delgado's sad untimely death established that he had used up all his Time Lord lives, and made his raison d'etre just d'etre - his own survival. Again, though, this usually failed to convince as the plots he was involved in - with a couple of exceptions - weren't anything to do with extending his life.


Dodgy motivation is a flaw that often occurs with the big sci-fi adventure genre's supervillain role, but it seems more so with the Master. Perhaps this is because he was created just to be someone else's dark reflection, so it's unlikely he's going to have much life of his own. It's odd that he was so created, as the Doctor had managed to get by without a Moriarty figure for seven years. The main reason for this was that the Doctor has the Daleks. Yes, they lacked a single figure that could appear in a confrontation scene with our hero (this would eventually be rectified with the creation of Davros later), but still - if most people had been asked before Terror of the Autons who was the Doctor's equivalent of Moriarty - the answer would have come back naming Skaro's finest. The Daleks had not appeared in the show for a while when Terror of the Autons was broadcast, of course, and the resulting creation of the Master gave the new series a third 'big bad' to shuffle in to the series finales alongside the Daleks and the Cybermen, or combinations thereof. This also means - as Steven Moffat has pointed out regarding the Daleks - these top 3 baddies, because they return for the most rematches and the Doctor always has to ultimately win, are also paradoxically the top 3 most defeated too.

In Summary:

A good introduction for the Master and Jo, but the rest is a little bit plasticky.

Rose

Chapter The 82nd, in which a TV programme comes back from the dead at Easter-time.

Plot: 
Late one evening after the end of her shift at a department store in London, Rose Tyler goes down to the basement to deliver the staff syndicate's lottery money to the Chief Electrician, Wilson. As she walks around, the shop window dummies in storage down there come to life around her. Backed into a corner, she is surrounded and they come in for the kill. A Manc fellah in a leather jacket saves her just in time, and they escape in a lift. He blows up the roof of the building just after she gets clear. Before disappearing off, he introduces himself as 'the Doctor' and explains that the dummies are living plastic, brought to life by an alien intelligence transmitting a signal. The Doctor then turns up at Rose's house the next day, trying to track the signal. Rose presses him for answers, but he isn't forthcoming, and goes off again, seemingly into a mysterious disappearing big blue box.

Intrigued, Rose researches on the internet, and meets up with a conspiracy theorist, Clive, who has been combing history for signs of the Doctor, and believes him to be an immortal alien who brings death in his wake. Rose's boyfriend Mickey waits outside Clive's house in case Rose is in any danger from this man she met on the internet, but the plastic wheelie bin nearby has been taken over, and swallows him up. He's replaced by a slightly unconvincing plastic duplicate, who questions Rose about the Doctor later when they're out for dinner. But the Doctor has tracked them to the restaurant and rescues Rose when plastic-Mickey starts smashing the place up. They escape into the blue box (called the TARDIS) which is bigger on the inside than the out, and the Manc fellah turns out to be a space-wizard, and grumpy to boot.

Tracking the source of the signal to an underground chamber beneath the London Eye, the Doctor and Rose rescue the real Mickey. The Doctor confronts the Nestene Consciousness - a big vat of talking gloop - but is captured, and a signal is sent using the Eye's structure as a transmitter. All over London, shop window dummies come to life, and attack people including Rose's Mum Jackie, who survives, and Clive, who is killed. Rose uses her childhood gymnastics skills to swing on a chain,  knock over a couple of dummies and free the Doctor; in the confusion, the Consciousness gets destroyed, the signal cuts out, and the mannequins become inanimate once again. The Doctor invites Rose (but not Mickey) to travel with him; she hesitates at first, but on the second offer runs into the TARDIS leaving Mickey behind.

Context:

The random number generator method used to select which story to watch next for the blog settled on Rose, an intriguing choice with lots of associations; this was good, as I'd been busy and it had therefore taken me ages to write up the last story for the blog; something to inspire me to write with more efficacy was to be welcomed. I also happily realised it was a perfect blog post to publish during an Easter weekend, it being the biggest episode ever broadcast at Easter, and one that started a tradition that lasted for a good few years afterwards that the kick off of a new run of episodes should debut on the Saturday following Good Friday. This in turn reminded me that in the year when Rose first aired, that Saturday had also fallen towards the end of March. It then dawned on me that the 13th anniversary of that historic broadcast was the very day on which I was having all these thoughts, the 26th of March, and if we started watching in the next few minutes it would be bang on to the exact minute. Hurry, hurry.

As it was, it took a while to gather the interested parties together in the living room, and we started at 7.08pm, eight minutes later than Rose had started in 2005. Close enough, unless you're some weirdo obsessive about these things (hush). Anyway, the interested parties in question were all the kids (boys of 11 and 8, girl of 5) and the Better Half who, hearing the urgent preparations, joined us as the title sequence was rolling. We watched from the DVD, and there was a lot of visible evidence that it was doing what it was supposed to do: the youngest was scared by the quiet bits, the middle child was jumping up and down during the exciting bits, and even the cynical eldest pre-teen said "this is the Doctor I like the best", only to be corrected by his sister: "He's not called the Doctor, he's called Doctor Who". Based on the credits of Eccleston's era at least, this was quite accurate of her. The eldest was also taken by Clive's son when he said "Dad, it's one of your nutters". There's clearly something in the story for everybody!

First-time round:
There was immense build up of interest before Rose's initial BBC1 broadcast. It is mirrored somewhat by what's happening now in anticipation of Jodie Whittaker's debut series, with little teasers (new logo, hero images, snatches of audio) released months before the really big marketing push. When things really got going in 2005, it was verging on the ridiculous - stupid great billboard advertisements, talking points on review shows, special edition Mastermind tie-in episode. I wonder what sort of hoop-la we'll see this Autumn. Things peaked when Rose was leaked early in March, a little under three weeks before it was due for transmission. I read about the leak, but resolved to be strong. The next day, however, a colleague and friend at my day job of the time, Lee -  that guy one knows in every office who has an evangelical belief that copyright is an affront to personal liberties - came in and handed me a DVD-R, then walked away without a word. I was not strong enough to resist, and started watching it on my laptop during the working day. In the evening at home, I showed it to the Better Half, and rewatched it again more than once before the Easter weekend.

I saw the live broadcast with the Better Half, my sister and her partner James, in my sister's old flat in Worthing. My sister, never the biggest Doctor Who fan, was hosting us with such enthusiasm, even down to providing bowls of jelly babies, that I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I'd already watched the story multiple times. I don't regret it, though; the version I saw first didn't have an audio interruption from Graham Norton spoiling the most tense bit.

At the time, the BH and I were living in Kent, so had to stay over; I went out in Worthing early afternoon on Saturday 26th March 2005 as I needed to buy something, rushing as I didn't want to risk missing a minute of the pre-match build up including that Doctor Who: The New Dimension show narrated by David Tennant (whatever happened to him?). While I was out, I saw the front cover of a red-top rag, I forget which, bigging up the competition for Saturday night audience between Who and Ant and Dec. I had a sinking feeling: what if it bombs?! Luckily, the ratings revealed the next day were stratospheric; they didn't quite sustain at that level, so there must have been many curious souls in Rose's audience that decided it wasn't for them. One of these was my university friend Mark - the least enthusiastic whenever we had a video watching session in Durham - who texted me at 7.45pm on that Saturday to say "It's still shit".

Reaction:

There's only one way I think one could be disappointed by the story Rose, and that's by stubbornly assuming its plot is supposed to be about Autons, which it clearly isn't, and thereby accusing it of having a thin plot, which it doesn't. Just look at the synopsis above - there's lots of story beats, they're just not centered on defeating aliens. Sure, anyone can dislike the show because of its tone, or production values, or the performances of the leads. But if you disagree with the plot being structured around the person with an ordinary life getting pulled into the mysterious stranger's orbit (or 'turning Doctor Who into a soap', as it was called by online crazies ad nauseum) then you have to seriously think about what would have happened had it been done differently. This outside-in approach is the only viable option to bring the show to a new audience. It's how it was done successfully in 1963, and the opposite of how it was done unsuccessfully in 1996. Paul McGann's TV movie is the epitome of an inside-out approach: start with the Doctor rather that the audience identification figure, alienate some of your viewers, and add swathes of narration to paper over the cracks. Avoiding this is a big reason the show is still running to this day, allowing many different types of story to be told, including many big 'defeat the aliens' plots for traditionalists (though not ever a proper rematch with the Autons, curiously enough).

I never understood the soap opera accusations at all. It's not exactly brutal realism, nor even a misery-fest confection like Eastenders (the comparison most often made by the online crazies). All the tourist biscuit tin shots of red buses and the houses of parliament clue us in that we're watching a somewhat heightened version of reality. I miss this bright, fun adventure look and feel, which has got progressively gloomier over recent years of Who's new episodes. What I feel many don't like, but can't bring themselves to say, is that Rose, Jackie and Mickey are common - if they were realistic and the centre of the narrative, but were middle class professionals (like Sarah Jane Smith) I think some people would have less of a problem with it. But never mind those people - it's all about the characters, and these characters are great.

Like many of the stories in the 2005 run, all the surrounding spectacle belies the deliberately small nature of the story. There are only five significant roles in this piece - the two regulars, the two semi-regulars, and a nice guest performance by Mark Benton as Clive - and their interactions drive the story forward. All five are expertly cast, and perfectly performed. Noel Clarke has been harsh in reflecting back on his choices in these early episodes, but as part of his overall arc throughout the season, I can't fault his work here. Camille Coduri gets the best lines: "Skin like an old bible", "I know she is Greek, but that's not the point" and so on. Her brief scene with the Doctor in her bedroom was the funniest thing there'd been in Doctor Who up to that point. Eccleston and Piper are so good, I can't really express it without being dull, they are too good if anything; while not looking like as well-matched pairing as, say, Tennant and Piper, they have bags more chemistry. They are another two big reasons why Doctor Who took off again.

It's not quite all there from day one. The music is not yet enhanced by real recorded orchestral parts, it's all synthesised, and now sounds a little tinny and cheap in comparison to what came later. There's a few parts where they haven't quite got the tone exactly right, but they're brief, a few seconds of the running time in all, and the show would get better very quickly at this. Piper's treatment of Mickey at the end jars a little, but not as much as it did first time I watched. It's not exactly subtly expressed that Mickey is not a good boyfriend, and Davies has gone on record of not wanting Rose to be too perfect, but her kiss off line is just the wrong side of cruel for me. When it comes together, though, it's magic. There's one glorious moment, a tiny thing that you could blink and miss: just after the plastic Mickey's head's been pulled off and the male diner has screamed, there's a look on Eccleston's face of madcap joy, like he adores the chaos all around him.

One other thing I noticed this time, because I'd so recently watched the first first episode of Doctor Who, was the parallels between the debut deaths in the twentieth and twenty-first century versions: Old Mother and Clive are both prophets of doom, and probably the wisest non-Gallifreyans to appear in their respective stories; they try to warn other characters in the narrative that they're in danger, but in the end it's they who come a cropper. It's an interestingly bleak theme of Doctor Who that might be inadvertent here, but is picked up deliberately elsewhere too: you can be as clever as you want, but without the Doctor, you'll never be safe.

Connectivity: 

Both Rose and The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky are Russell T Davies era earth-based stories involving invasions by slightly reworked monsters from the original series. In both, the Doctor confronts the aliens at the end with a MacGuffin device that will destroy them, but won't activate it until he's given them a chance. In both instances, he can't bring himself to do it, and someone else has to intervene.

Deeper Thoughts:
Who Knows Part Three. Well, a few weeks back I'd have said that another of those mysteries of Doctor Who to which we might never get answers was what exactly happened between Christopher Eccleston and the production team in the early days of filming the return series of Doctor Who. But he's only gone and spoken about it, thirteen years on. He must have finally got frustrated with people asking him over and over and/or thought that, as so much time has passed, he could share some details. From small comments made in the intervening years by many parties involved, it's consistently clear that whatever happened to cause Christopher Eccleston to quit happened in the first production block (covering Rose and the two-part Slitheen story, all directed by Keith Boak). It's been hypothesised that Eccleston fell out with Boak, or producer Phil Collinson, or many other people on the senior production side; his interview suggests he fell out with all of them, including Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner. As he puts it: "They lost trust in me, and I lost faith and trust and belief in them".

Eccleston felt the weight of being the most seasoned member of the cast, yet in a role that was out of his comfort zone; the part was one he felt required "a natural light comedian" which is not how he saw himself. His resultant insecurity made it a stressful experience. From other testimonies about this time, though, it's clear nobody knew what they were doing; there was no frame of reference for making a show like Doctor Who's 2005 model, as there hadn't been anything quite like it done before, certainly not in the UK. With a lot riding on it being successful, it's not surprising everyone was stressed. There were many issues and delays; the planned schedule was clearly inadequate, as it's been reported they were something like three weeks behind after only a day of filming. This was not an atmosphere conducive to on-set harmony. But if the producers really lost faith in Eccleston's performance, as he seems to have done himself, then this viewer at least thinks they're dead wrong. If he was out of his comfort zone, he used it to spur him on to something special. It makes sense: the Doctor is a character putting on a brave face while inside he's not enjoying himself as much as he appears; that's a pretty good summary of Eccleston himself as he did it.

Where even Eccleston's acting wasn't good enough, was the publicity drive after the series had wrapped. He’d made an agreement with Davies not to damage the reputation of the series, and he did his best; but, as anyone who saw those interviews and appearances can testify, he couldn't help but come over as awkward and defensive. I hope getting the negativity off his chest in this recent interview has helped him. A good sign is that he has agreed for the first time ever to attend a sci-fi convention, with an appearance at London Film and Comic Con planned for July. It's just a shame he's charging an arm and a leg (and two hearts and a respiratory bypass system) for an autograph.

In Summary:

If the kids don't like that, then the kids don't deserve to have any television ever shown to them again.