The Doctor and Sarah Jane hover the TARDIS in space, and use a two-person capsule to float outside the ship and watch the formation of the planet Earth, taking many time jumps forward to see the progress of the planet, oxygen forming, life starting. Occasionally during this, the Doctor is harangued by Megron, lord of chaos. Megron believes that what is being witnessed is chaos, but the Doctor insists that on the contrary it is order. Eventually, the Doctor and Megron have a mental battle; the Doctor wins, and Megron is banished from planet Earth.

Context:

I wanted to link a blog post to the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event tying in with the Blu-Ray release of classic Doctor Who season 13 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I chose the only story that I hadn't previously covered (and as we shall see, describing it as a story is a stretch) featuring the season 13 team of Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. But would it pass the test questions I use to validate spin-off worthiness? Let's see... Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or 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)? Yes, there's a villain and a confrontation, albeit in scaled-down form. 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; like the last few curios blogged, the Shada webcast and Search Out Space, it did end up as an extra on another story's disc eventually, but that wasn't how it was first pitched. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. I covered the similar Tom and Lis audio story The Pescatons in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post, but have not done the same for Exploration Earth: The Time Machine. That was a full house of correct answers, so I watched it from the Blu-ray disc featuring it (see First Time Round below) one day in mid-September 2025.

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. Aside from niche items like Exploration Earth's Doctor Who episode, 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, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

I wasn't yet a fan of Doctor Who in October 1976 when this story was broadcast. Even if I had been, though, it was unlikely I would have heard it. I was only four years old; at that age, I might just have been in front of a TV at teatime on a Saturday, but would not have been played a schools' radio programme on BBC Radio 4 VHF. I first heard the story when it came out on CD. From 1999, a Doctor Who audio range on shiny disc started up, mostly releasing the soundtracks of missing stories with linking narration. Amidst these, a soundtrack for a wholly un-missing story was released in July 2001. This was a Genesis of the Daleks audio based on an abridged version of the story with linking narration released on record in the late 1970s. Added as an extra to this CD release was Exploration Earth, as it was labelled on the disc's packaging. Technically, Exploration Earth was the name of the educational series in which Doctor Who happened to be featuring just the once, and the episode in which that happened was called The Time Machine. As Doctor Who has endured in public consciousness and Exploration Earth has not, by 2001 it wasn't felt necessary to be so exact. I am using the complete title here, but it makes me realise that I should have labelled the similar curio blogged a few posts back as Search out Science: Search Out Space, and that will bug me now, possibly forever. At least that means Exploration Earth: The Time Machine has a chance of sticking in my memory. I couldn't recall anything of that first listen in 2001, nor of when I listened to it again as a Blu-ray extra in 2020 (when the Season 14 box set came out, it was included on The Hand of Fear disc as a special feature).

Reaction:

Given that I'd blogged another 20-minute long educational programme starring Doctor Who characters in Search Out Space, it would have been unfair to skip this one, which is essentially the same concept from a decade and a half earlier, but on the radio. The 1976 story is extremely slight, though, so there might not be that much to talk about: the Doctor describes some astro-phenomena relating to the formation of the planet Earth to Sarah. Sarah's job is only to listen, and occasionally offer some descriptive dialogue to aid the listener. She doesn't get to ask any intelligent questions. Given that asking questions is a big part of her role, and would mean she was representing the schoolkids listening in, it seems like a missed opportunity. Then, a Doctor Who villain turns up, but doesn't do very much, just booms a lot at the Doctor. They ultimately have a mental battle, pitting their strengths by "telepathic will deployment" - this might mean that the writer of the radio show Bernard Venables had seen recently aired story The Brain of Morbius, which ends with a mind-bending contest, and it stuck in his mind when he came to write this episode of Exploration Earth. It is a generic enough idea to be just a random coincidence, of course; this is a shame as there is no other evidence that Venables has ever seen an episode of Doctor Who, and it would be nice to pin that down.

The story has the opposite problem to Search Out Space. That programme had the recognisable characters of the Doctor and companion in an uncharacteristic setting. Exploration Earth's production team at least make it worthwhile sampling the format by having the TARDIS team go to space and confront a baddie (even if they possibly got there more by luck than judgement). The characters of the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, though, are not as recognisable as were the seventh Doctor and Ace. The Doctor tells his friend to "Stop wittering" at one point, and later snaps "Not now, Sarah, I'm busy" at her. Sarah's first line is the very out of character "Oh, the great Doctor in travail, hmm?". Nobody talks like that, certainly not Sarah Jane Smith. One wonders why the actors didn't push for dialogue changes. I'd hazard a guess that the time and money allocated to a kids' educational radio show didn't afford the scope for such niceties. Tom Baker would get much better later in his career at challenging poor material he'd been given to perform in a sound recording booth - google "Tom Baker distilled whippet shit" for more details (NSFW).

Connectivity:

In both Exploration Earth: The Time Machine and The Interstellar Song Contest, the Doctor floats in space outside his usual craft, the TARDIS, with meagre protection provided by something else (a capsule or a bubble).

Deeper Thoughts:

The South Bank Shows. I couldn't attend the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event, but as there are very few stories left to blog, see Milestone Watch above, this felt like it could be the last time I get to write in the Deeper Thoughts section about the Doctor Who BFI events. They have become a regular treat and source of content during the years I've been keeping this blog (see the final three paragraphs for a summary). I chose Exploration Earth: The Time Machine to tie loosely in to the event, and hoped I could relay information passed to me by the group of fan friends with whom I often attend these events, as they were planning to go. Unfortunately, they couldn't get tickets. I adore everything about the BFI apart from its website: the functionality of this site when queueing for tickets that have just become available, selecting those tickets, putting those tickets in the site's shopping basket. and finally paying for those tickets - in other words, every step of the journey - is sub-optimal, and having to engage with the functionality is a stressful ordeal. This time it fell to Trevor, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on the blog, but it defeated him (as it has all of us at some point in the past) - the seats appeared in the basket, but had disappeared again before he could pay for them. By the time he tried again, the remaining tickets had all sold out. I'd been slightly more successful in getting a single ticket to a different September event at the BFI, so I will write about that instead. It wasn't a Doctor Who event, but it will be interesting to compare and contrast (plus there are no photos available related to Doctor Who's Exploration Earth episode, so at least I can include some visual material and not just have a big block of text here).

The event was a double bill of films featuring Pet Shop Boys music held on Friday 5th September 2025; first shown was It Couldn't Happen Here, the feature film they made in the late 1980s with writer-director Jack Bond; second, silent classic Battleship Potemkin with the score they wrote for it in 2004 (the score was performed live at a screening in Trafalgar Square that year). In between, there was a Q&A with singer Neil Tennant. The first thing that contrasted with a Doctor Who event was the very fact that I was able to get a ticket. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't ever been a Pet Shop Boys BFI event before (there was one planned in April 2020, but that had to be cancelled because of Covid); Doctor Who events happen several times a year, but of the two it was the Doctor Who event that sold out faster. Maybe Doctor Who is just a bigger draw (there is no monthly publication in newsagents called Pet Shop Boys Magazine after all); the band can still fill arenas around the world, though, so I think it's probably just that - because they have been happening with some regularity - the Doctor Who events have built up a reputation and a following. As soon as the event began on that Friday, another difference was immediately apparent: there was no Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The host introducing proceedings was John Ramchandani, the BFI's Head of Video Publishing & Online Programming (the event was tying in to the release of Potemkin on Blu-ray). Though Ramchandani gave a heartfelt tribute to Bond (who died late in 2024) and wished "All the West End Girls and East End Boys" in the audience an enjoyable evening, he couldn't match Johnson and Fiddy for repartee. There was also no quiz (the BFI presumably not having the budget to give any copies of their Blu-rays away as prizes).

John Ramchandani

PSB fans can certainly match Doctor Who fans regarding how critical they can be. It Couldn't Happen Here is not generally well regarded (I love it), and in the gap between the two films waiting for Tennant to take the stage, I heard a plummy voiced old gent say to a friend "Wasn't that tedious ... I think the phrase is: what have I done to deserve this?", then a middle-aged woman nearby said to her neighbour "It was like Christmas, there was so much turkey". Neil Tennant settled into his seat on stage addressing the audience with "Well, you all survived" (it's not uncommon for those on stage to take affectionate pot shots at the Doctor Who stories that they were involved in either). Tennant was interviewed by Paul Tickell, a filmmaker and friend of both Tennant and Bond; it was an informative, if short, interview, but wasn't quite as witty and irreverent as Doctor Who audiences have come to expect. During the chat, which was recorded and can be seen at this link, Tennant revealed an exclusive: he and bandmate Chris Lowe are finally recording A Man from the Future for commercial release. A Man from the Future is a piece inspired by the life of Alan Turing that was performed at the Proms in 2014, so fans have been waiting over a decade to get a copy for their collections. News like that about Doctor Who would have been up online within minutes on fan and entertainment news sites. At the time of writing, more than two weeks after the event, it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. In other ways, the fans were less restrained: Tennant got a standing ovation when he left the stage, which I've not seen for any Doctor Who guest. Audience questions tended to be prefaced with almost tearful paeans to everything the band had meant to the questioner; in one case, the questioner ended just by asking for an autograph, getting a slightly irritable reply from Tennant that they were supposed to be talking about the films.

Neil Tennant takes to the stage

All in all, it was an enjoyable event, but it did demonstrate that those arranging the Doctor Who events do put in a little bit extra. There have been screenings at the BFI (or National Film Theatre in old money) going back a long time, but the current versions emerged out of some special screenings that took place for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary in 2013. Fan friends David and Trevor attended a few of those (the website was terrible even in those days, but they managed to bag tickets to some of them). It went quiet for a bit, but then in 2016 there was an event to showcase The Power of the Daleks animation; about a year later, there was a similar event for the partly-animated Shada. Not long after that in January 2018, there was a screening of The Day of the Doctor accompanied by a panel including Steven Moffat. There's usually a product release to justify the sessions, but The Day of the Doctor was an exception; it formed part of a John Hurt retrospective season. The launch of the Blu-ray collections meant more product, which meant more events. A screening of Earthshock tied in with the season 19 box set launch (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post for details). There was a showing of Logopolis in February 2019 ahead of the season 18 set, but I managed to miss it being advertised - there's at least one write-up online if you google. Though they never gave away expensive limited edition box sets, the animation events included the story's DVD as part of the BFI ticket price up to and including The Macra Terror, which was showcased at the BFI in March 2019; thereafter, they stopped that.

(L to R) Neil Tennant, Paul Tickell

2019 was a busy year, with a Planet of the Daleks screening following in June (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post), Mindwarp in September, and The Curse of Fenric in June (see Deeper Thoughts section here) - these were linked to the collection sets for seasons 10, 23 and 26 respectively. Alongside The Curse of Fenric was also for the first time a separate screening of a feature-length documentary from the same set (this was Showman, about producer John Nathan-Turner). There were two screenings in the first quarter of 2020, The Faceless Ones animation in February (see Deeper Thoughts here) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang in March for the launch of the season 14 box set (which also included Exploration Earth: The Time Machine as mentioned above). The pandemic then meant a hiatus. Things resumed with a Covid-friendly screening of Dragonfire from the season 24 box set in June 2021. Two animation events followed later in that year, The Evil of the Daleks in September, and Galaxy 4 in November (see Deeper Thoughts here). There was also a City of Death screening in December to tie in with the season 17 set; I had a ticket, but had to give it up as I had finally succumbed to a variant of the aforementioned coronavirus. Friends went and guest Julian Glover was reportedly very good value. Season 22 set taster Revelation of the Daleks (see Deeper Thoughts here) followed in March 2022, and The Abominable Snowmen animation in September.

I couldn't attend season 2 set tie-in The Time Meddler in October of 2022, and this ushered in a short period where I always seemed to have a clash. I missed the Sea Devils / season 9 set and The Five Doctors / season 20 set events in March and September 2023. I might not have got a ticket to the latter even if I'd been able to go, though - it was much sought after, and sold out within minutes. Later in the year, I was able to see the animation of The Underwater Menace (see Deeper Thoughts here) in October, and an event about the TARDIS (see Deeper Thoughts here) in November. In February 2024, there was a screening of Horror of Fang Rock as well as a Graham Williams documentary (both from the season 15 box set, and both covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of this post). A month later, there was a showing of animated The Celestial Toymaker (see here). Later in the year, The Happiness Patrol infamously got two screenings - the as transmitted version in August (see here) and a new special edition version in September (see here). February 2025 saw both Spearhead from Space (see here) and The Savages animation (see here) showcased at the BFI. As an unfortunate impact of avoiding all social media I missed that there was a screening of new series story Father's Day in May 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary of Christopher Eccleston's season launching the new series era, only finding out about it after it had been and gone. That brings things up to the Terror of the Zygons screening. I'm sure there will be more events at the BFI (there are still eight seasons to release as Blu-ray box sets, and many stories left to animate), so I will no doubt be wrestling with that website for years to come, even if I probably won't be writing about it here.

In Summary:

Not quite distilled whippet shit, but not a very effective encapsulation of Tom Baker's Doctor and Lis Sladen's Sarah Jane. Well, except, I suppose, if one is pedantic, there's the part of the narrative where the characters are in a capsule - they're encapsulated quite well (and very literally) during that bit.

Saturday, 16 November 2024

The Seeds of Doom

Chapter the 314th, where confidence is a preference for the habitual collector of what is known as ... plant life!

Plot:

A three-man scientific team in Antarctica discover a large, green plant pod in the ice. They send word to the World Ecology Bureau, who bring in UNIT as the pod's presence is unexplainable. The Doctor and Sarah travel to the scientists' base. Not heeding the Doctor's warning not to touch the pod, the scientists examine it, and one of them is attacked by a shoot that whips out of it. He starts to go green and transform into a plant. Meanwhile, a civil servant from the Bureau, Dunbar, makes some money selling information about the pod to a millionaire plant enthusiast Harrison Chase. Harrison sends his Head of Security, a mercenary called Scorby, and nervy pet scientist Keeler off to Antarctica to fetch the pod. The Doctor knows all about the pod, and knows that there will be a second one buried in the snow, duly uncovering it. It is a Krynoid, a carnivorous alien plant creature that will kill everyone on Earth if it isn't stopped. The scientist transforming into a Krynoid goes on the rampage. Scorby and Keeler steal the other pod, escaping after setting a bomb on a timer. It blows up the base, destroying the Krynoid. Luckily, the Doctor and Sarah survive. They are picked up by a rescue team and return to the UK. They trace the second pod to Harrison Chase's estate and sneak in to the house. Sarah is captured, and Chase intends her to be the second victim of the Krynoid. The Doctor rescues her, and Keeler is instead the one attacked.

Keeler begins to transform, and the insane Chase - desperate to see what sort of plant he will grow into - imprisons him in a cottage in the grounds and has him fed raw meat. Dunbar, trying to make amends, enters Chase's estate to confront him. He is killed by the escaped Krynoid, which has now grown bigger than a human. The Doctor, Sarah and Scorby are trapped in the cottage with the Krynoid outside, now grown almost as big as the cottage. The Doctor devises a plan, and escapes to return with reinforcements. Scorby and Sarah hide in the main house. The Krynoid can now control nearby plant life; vines and ivy smash through the windows of the house. Chase has somehow developed a mental link with the Krynoid and wants it to succeed. The Doctor returns with UNIT troops who use weedkiller sprays to keep the plants at bay. Scorby makes a break for it, but plants drag him to his death in a pond in the grounds. Chase tries to kill the Doctor by putting him in his industrial-size compost maker, but ends up falling in and getting minced himself. UNIT contact the RAF who blow up the Krynoid (now the size of Chase's manor). The Doctor takes Sarah on a holiday in the TARDIS, but they end up back in Antarctica again.

Context:

Watched from the DVD with the individual episodes spread out a little bit (I watched one every other day, approx.) during late October and early November 2024. People from the household would drift in and out during my viewings, but nobody sat down and watched the story with me. The Better Half was in the room, if not actually fully watching, for a couple of the episodes. She commented at one point that Tony Beckley's velvety villainous performance as Harrison Chase - one of my all-time favourite turns in classic Who - was, quote "A bit like Dick Dastardly". I thought this was a mightily unfair assessment, but after that there were a couple of scenes where Chase rants about how he's "surrounded by idiots", so maybe there's a little truth in it. As it turned out, I made a good choice to watch from the DVD. Had I viewed the story on the BBC iplayer, the story would have disappeared halfway through my watch. Both The Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Zygons were taken down from the streaming platform on the 1st November 2024, a year after being made available as part of the wider 'Whoniverse' section. There are two things unique about those two stories in the Doctor Who canon - they're the only ones written by Robert Banks Stewart, and the only two scored by Geoffrey Burgon. Presumably an agreement with the estates of one of those gentlemen (most likely Stewart) ran out after a year.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, and not just any Doctor. Completing every one of the stories starring Tom Baker, the longest-running Doctor ever having been in the role for seven years, was a big milestone. I'll go into more detail to mark this in the Deeper Thoughts section below. Tom is the fifth Doctor completed so far (the seventh, eighth, eleventh and fourteenth Doctors having been completed before Baker). This post also marks the completion of another season, the 30th 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:

The obsessive detailing of every aspect of Doctor Who on the internet helps me to precisely date when I first watched particular stories. It works only if the first time I watched a story is when it was broadcast or repeated or released on a home video medium (the dates of which are freely available online for every story); there are a few, though, that are more difficult to pin down exactly because I first encountered them on a pirated video tape, the sort that was lent out or exchanged between fans in the 1980s and 90s. The Seeds of Doom was one of these: I know that my first glimpse of the story was on the Tom Baker Years clip compendium released on VHS in September 1992 (I was a bit bemused as to what was going on when watching a clip of various characters carrying pot plants from one place to another). So it was sometime after that but before the sell-through VHS release in August 1994. In that period, the only person who would have provided me stories that hadn't been officially released yet was fan friend David (mentioned many times before on this blog). I'd met David at university, but he was a few years ahead of me, and in 1992 had graduated. He did come to visit sometimes, though, so my guess is on one of those visits he brought a tape with him for us to watch. It was most likely early 1993 (I remember that Doctor Who was being repeated on BBC2 when he came back up to Durham in my second year). The reason why I'm particularly interested is that, given all the evidence above, I first watched The Seeds of Doom in my early 20s, but the one thing I can remember very clearly about that first watch is that the story creeped me out. I thought I was beyond being scared of Doctor Who by that age, but The Seeds of Doom still had the power to horrify.

Reaction:

Just as I started to write up my reaction to The Seeds of Doom, the final story I had to blog of the early and popular Tom Baker era produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and script-edited by Robert Holmes, the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 610) was sent out to subscribers and dropped through my letter box. It was momentarily disconcerting to flick through the magazine and find this era and in particular Hinchcliffe himself was being covered in unprecedented detail, taking up about a third of the magazine. I thought for a terrible moment that he'd died, but happily this was not the case. It seems that his reaching his 80th birthday was the prompt for an in-depth and lengthy interview on his years working on the programme. Because he is so ubiquitously lauded by fandom, I probably react against that and tend to underestimate Hinchcliffe's input into the stories of his that I've covered here over the years. Undoubtedly he made a huge contribution to The Seeds of Doom. The most obvious sign of this is that the story's roots are showing; as with many a story that he and Holmes elicited from writers for Who, there is an obvious monster movie inspiration, or inspirations plural in this case: the first two-episode section set in Antarctica steals like a genius from the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. The second four-part section is a mash-up of Quatermass and The Day of the Triffids. That innovative way of structuring a six-part story in two sections is also something Hinchcliffe and Holmes brought in, and writer Robert Banks Stewart makes the most of it. As the audience has seen the impact on a human attacked by the pod once, there's enhanced dramatic energy in the third episode as the anticipation builds about who will be the second victim, and then the next three episodes show the process happening again, quickly progressing beyond what had been seen before.

Although all of that input from producer, script editor and writer is significant, it's the contributions from director Douglas Camfield and composer Geoffrey Burgon that are most important - they provide the eerie atmosphere I felt on my first watch that is this story's defining factor. The same people worked on the beginning story of the season as well as this season finale. They achieved a similar atmosphere in that story at first, but as I'll mention in the Deeper Thoughts section below the drama and excitement couldn't be sustained in the Zygons story. In this their second attempt of the year, they almost manage to sustain it for the full six episode length. Only once the interesting villain and henchman are dispatched do things start to fall apart. The solution to the Krynoid monster, that has grown to the the size of a mansion, is simply to blow it up. This is disappointingly prosaic, particularly as the Doctor has been quoted earlier in the serial saying that "Bullets and bombs aren't the answer to everything". Then, there's a supposedly humorous coda where the Doctor and Sarah end up back in Antarctica because the Doctor has failed to reset the TARDIS coordinates. Not only is this a continuity error (they didn't travel there in the first place by TARDIS but were helicoptered in) but it is also obscure. They join in reciting "Have we been here before ... or are we yet to come?" portentously, and then burst into laughter. But it's not a joke and it's not a quotation, so what does it mean? It's a bizarre way to end both story and season. It's a shame that the only major negative aspects of the story are saved for the very end, as everything else is pretty wonderful.

There are some good action set pieces: another thing that Camfield regularly brings to stories is well-shot scenes where soldiers blow things up, and he doesn't disappoint here. The soldiers in question are a kind of zombie UNIT. Technically this counts as the final UNIT story of their initial era, but none of the regulars of Jon Pertwee's time are featured, all having bowed out in stories earlier in the run; as such, this lot may as well be any old squaddies. There's a couple of moments where the Doctor behaves quite violently for the time - a neck twist he gives Scorby is particularly nasty - but these are brief. A rightfully praised bravura moment sees the Doctor smash down into a room through a skylight, knock out a baddie, grab a gun, save Sarah and deliver a quip (when asked drily by Chase what he does for an encore, he replies "I win") then exit the room, all in about 30 seconds. The production design is great (the skylight that Baker breaks and the room he drops into look real. The effects are all of high quality; Some scenes creating Antarctica are more impressionistic than realistic, but they work. The model work is intricate and excellent throughout. The stages of Krynoid transformation are mostly good, with only the wobbly version that attacks Dunbar at the end of episode four looking a bit too Monthy Python to be scary. Small lapses like that don't matter too much, though, as all the actors are playing the material with utmost conviction, and the material is rich. Baker is at his most brooding; the line "You must help yourselves", when suggesting that one scientist amputate the other's arm to stop the infection, is a moment that shows the Doctor at his most alien. Lis Sladen gets to challenge the baddies in some emotive scenes too.

The three scientists in the first two episodes are good, particularly as two of them have to deliver their performances from behind awfully fake beards, but it's the main guest characters that feature throughout or in the last four episodes that make this story special. Tony Beckley is fantastic at the velvety villainy, and does a plausible take on a rapid descent into madness. His childlike delivery of the line "I could have had two pods" is telling and chilling in equal measure. To my mind, though, he is marginally bested by his henchman. John Challis's turn as Scorby is one of the all-time best performances in the classic era of Doctor Who. Even though he is at first glance a stock heavy, Challis takes Robert Banks Stewart's words, which already give the character more depth than usual, and adds more to make Scorby a living, breathing and three-dimensional creation, and every scene he appears in is lifted by his presence. That's not to ignore some other great character performances, like repentant sell-out Dunbar (Kenneth Gilbert) or nervy reluctant accomplice turned victim Keeler (Mark Jones). The scene where the partially transformed Keeler starts to rant at Sarah, chanting "You want me to die" over and over is one of the moments in Doctor Who that most scared me - and, as mentioned above, I was in my 20s before I saw it for the first time. Even a minor character like Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge) shines. It's a nice bit of writing that she looks like a one-scene comic relief character, then unexpectedly returns as a complication factor, threatening Chase's plans. Just when we believe that she's coincidentally blundered in to things, it turns out she's a spy, deliberately investigating. It's no coincidence that when all these characters have exited or been killed off, the story runs out of steam - a giant green monster just isn't as interesting.

Connectivity:

I don't think this has ever happened before, but the titles of this story and the last one on the blog rhyme. The Seeds of Doom follows Boom. Bada-bing, bada-boom! Apart from that, both stories feature soldiers and an explosive device with a countdown. There's a reference in Boom to sentient mud, which is I suppose not that far from sentient plants, though the mud in the Ncuti story turns out not to be sentient in the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

Milestone Watch Extra. As mentioned a couple of times before in blog posts this year, I have given up social media. As such, I have to get my news, including my Doctor Who news, from other sources. There's a certain obsessive fan flavour of FOMO - what if a box set was announced and I didn't hear about it to pre-order until the next Doctor Who Magazine arrived, and what if that was too late and they'd sold out, arrggh! - that compels me to regularly do an online search on the phrase 'Doctor Who' and check the News tab. There's very rarely any actual news, of course, but there are always hits. Nine out of ten of the hits will be clickbait articles on 'entertainment sites' speculating about something or other, or investigating some continuity error from a decade ago, or extrapolating a major character's return from something an old actor said at a convention. The tenth hit will invariably be an unconnected article with a headline along the lines of "Colorado doctor who slept with dozens of his patients jailed". I'd still rather get my Doctor Who news this way, though. This is because there's one thing I don't ever have to deal with using my approach: seeing Tom Baker trending, and having to investigate to confirm that the worst has not happened. My FFOMO, my fan fear of missing out, does not cross that boundary. The news that one day is sure to come, and may it be a long way off, that Tom has passed on is news that I'm happy to miss out on for as long as possible. I didn't grow up with Tom Baker's Doctor. I first watched Doctor Who when he'd just left the role, and the first story I ever saw of his was his swansong Logopolis when it was repeated in late 1981. Yet, such is the significant impact Baker had on the show in his time in the title role and ever since, that I feel it is required to take stock in the Deeper Thoughts section now I've completed blogging all his stories.

I promise I won't make a habit of this in posts to come (I'm near the end now, so most blog posts from this point on will be finishing some era or other). But, completing Tom Baker's era - seven years, 41 (or 42) stories, 170+ episodes, the exact numbers will depend on whether you count Shada or not - is the biggest mountain in the range I have had to climb, and is worth dwelling upon for a while. As I mentioned above, I only got into Doctor Who after Tom had left the role, so my experience of watching his stories was in a random order, which I then emulated in the way I've watched every Doctor's stories for this blog. After the repeat of Logopolis, the main way for me to watch his stories was when they came out on VHS as part of the official range. That range was slow to get going, but when tapes did start to be released the majority of them were for those stories starring Tom Baker. The first story of his I saw on tape was Revenge of the Cybermen, and the first one I bought was Pyramids of Mars. As noted in the First Time Round section above, there were eventually other ways to see Baker stories for the first time; I did see a few from pirated videos, and watched a few on UK Gold. The one thing I never did after Logopolis was catch a Tom Baker repeat on the BBC. This was mainly because the Beeb kept showing the same story (Genesis of the Daleks) whenever they repeated one of Tom's ones, and I'd already watched it on video. I worked out when I blogged it that the final Tom Baker I watched was The Sun Makers, when that story was released on VHS in 2001, so it took me 20 years to view every part of Tom's Who oeuvre (or Whoeuvre, if you will).

It didn't take 20 years to rewatch all the stories randomly for this blog, but it was getting on for half as long. The first one to come up was The Armageddon Factor - not an auspicious start - which I blogged in July 2015; nine years and four months later, the job was done. Tom stories came up with a reasonable regularity in the years in between. It didn't take too long (up to October 2017) for the blog to land upon Tom's first ever story, as the chronometer flies, Robot - the Deeper Thoughts section of whose post contains my tribute to the man behind the scarf, including mention of the time I met and had a book signed by Tom (a tale I think I may have told elsewhere on the blog too - apologies, I'm an old man who sometimes repeats himself). It took a lot longer before I blogged his last ever story (and the first of his I ever saw) Logopolis. I finally blogged it in December 2021. I had a few surprising reactions to stories over the years; the most disappointing watch was probably Terror of the Zygons. I'd always enjoyed viewing the story, never seeing - until the watch for the blog in September 2021 - that the story falls apart half way through. The same team (writer, director and composer) worked on The Seeds of Doom, and second time round they manage to put off the point where things fall apart until late on in the final episode, so it's overall much better. The Robots of Death maintains its high quality with every watch, including the one in December 2022 for the blog; Horror of Fang Rock gets better every time I see it, and might well turn out to be my favourite Tom in a couple of viewings' time. Underworld is nowhere near as bad as you might think. All in all, this body of work is a decent legacy for the great man. Seeing as they'll seemingly let anyone have a go at being president (twice, even) no matter how manifestly unfit and unqualified they might be, I'd say let Mister Baker do it. Tom for President!

In Summary:

It's got atmosphere, it's got pace, it's got engaging characters and a lot of incident... it just hasn't got an ending.

Wednesday, 14 February 2024

Full Circle

Chapter the 291st, where the Doctor artfully dodges having to return Romana to Gallifrey.

Plot:
The Doctor, Romana and K9 are in the TARDIS en route to Gallifrey, but things go wibbly when they pass through a highly-scientific (magic) portal that leads to another universe, e-space. Instead of Gallifrey, they land on Alzarius. This is seemingly a temperate paradise where people harvest fruits and swim in rivers and the like. Then, Mistfall comes - an environmental change every five decades or so caused by the planet's orbit in space. This is a time where the people must shelter inside the Starliner, a ship that crashed on the planet years before bringing castaways from another world, Terradon. The people are told the atmosphere becomes poisonous during Mistfall, but it's merely a time when homicidal creatures emerge and roam around. The authorities of the people on the Starliner, a three-person committee called the Deciders, are cagey about sharing any details of these Marshmen with the people. Why could that be? A few young rebels, the Outlers, are stuck outside the ship when it is closed up, and meet with the Doctor and Romana. Two of these Outlers are Varsh and his brother Adric. The Marshmen knock K9's head off, and a marsh spider bites Romana which puts her under the Marshmen's control. The Doctor meanwhile enters the Starliner. The Outlers are separated from Romana in the TARDIS, and accidentally materialise it inside the Starliner. Romana helps the Marshmen break into the Starliner.

The Doctor confronts the Deciders and discovers some truths: the ongoing Starliner maintenance work that the people are engaged in is pointless busy work: the ship has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it - the records that survived were all about maintaining the ship, but nothing survived about operating it. The other revelation is that the people on the Starliner did not come from Terradon, they are instead descendants of Marshmen who invaded the ship many generations before. As someone had gnomically pointed out early on, they've come "Full Circle". Although, if they'd come full circle, wouldn't they be evolving into Marshmen again? I'm not getting how they've come full circle. This is like people getting a 180 mistaken for a 360; the people of the Starliner have only come "Semi-Circle", if you ask me. Anyway, Varsh is killed fighting to hold back the invading Marshmen, The Doctor manages to cure Romana, repel the Marshmen, and to get the Starliner in the air to take the evolved Starliner dwellers off into the stars. When he, Romana and K9 leave, Adric stows away on board the TARDIS.

Context:

I watched this from the Blu-ray across two weekends in January and February 2024, two episodes at a time with a week between them. The younger two of my kids (boy of 14, girl of 11) were in attendance for some periods, but it didn't hold their attention throughout. The youngest was particularly enamoured of K9 and his adventuring around Alzarius accompanied by Paddy Kingsland's jaunty motif. She was very unhappy when he was beheaded and took no further active part in the story, as she thinks - quote unquote - that "K9 is the best!". I wonder that a lot of children watching thought the same when this was first shown; the production team appreciated the metallic mutt much less than the audience, and continually - and often brutally - wrote him out of stories, before finally getting rid of him altogether a couple of stories after Full Circle.

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 current stories being broadcast serially. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, classic series 18, Tom Baker's seventh and final run from 1980/81. This is the 20th season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

One of my earliest glimpses of Doctor Who ever was from this story, when I was changing channels on the TV. This was before I became a fan and regular viewer, but exactly how long before I cannot tell as I'm not certain whether this glimpse was during the original broadcast in the autumn of 1980 or the terrestrial repeat in Summer 1981. It was a moment with Romana under the influence of a Marsh Spider bite with tendril lines over her face, which seared itself onto young me's memory. I watched the complete story from a reasonably good tape-to-tape copy from fan friend David (mentioned many times before on the blog) in 1992; then, in the years thereafter, I collected it in incrementally better fidelity on sell-though VHS when it came out in 1997, then DVD in 2009, and finally Blu-Ray in 2019.

Reaction:

Famously, Full Circle was written by a teenage fan. Andrew Smith was 17 years old when it was made, 18 when it was shown, but he'd been pitching ideas to the production office for many years before this one was finally developed and produced. Smith is undoubtedly therefore responsible for making all teenage fans for the next ten years wrongly believe they could be in with a shot of getting their Doctor Who story made (and yes, I was one of them); more positively, a few of those young scribblers ended up creating Who stories for books and audio during the wilderness years when Doctor Who was not on TV, and this was one of the things that kept interest in the show alive such that it could eventually return. If Full Circle hadn't been made, maybe Doctor Who would not still be a going concern now, showing as it did that the writing of Doctor Who didn't have to be an old man's game? What's curious though, is that it's not exactly an idea bursting with youthful vigour. If you didn't know, you'd probably guess it was written by a middle-aged man, with its themes of indecision, impotence and fear of getting replaced by another incoming generation. This may be because Smith was a preternaturally mature talent (and he was), but it might also be connected to the script editor Christopher H. Bidmead. In every one of the three stories in the loose e-space trilogy that kicked off with Full Circle - for all of which Bidmead was screenplay midwife as he was for all the stories during the year - there's a spacecraft that can't take off, usually crewed by ineffectual men (often with beards). This is one of the more energetic of this type of story in season 18 - often the visuals during this season are aiming for operatic grandeur (The Leisure Hive, Warrior's Gate) rather than thrills and spills.

The vitality in the story, and the excitement in the visuals, comes mainly from the director Peter Grimwade's approach to the material. Grimwade had worked on Doctor Who in various capacities before, but this was his first director gig, and he would make his mark with Full Circle and a number of other stories over the next couple of years as either director or writer. The script gifts him one great sequence, where the marshmen arise from the depths and advance, and a couple of juicy story reversals. Grimwade gets the most out of these. The first of these reversals is that the Starliner has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it; the second, that the inhabitants of the Starliner are not the descendants of the original crew and passengers that crashed generations ago, but are instead descended from the hyper-adaptive Marshmen that broke in many years before. Again, this is satisfying as presented, but the lifecycle gets more confusing if one gives it any thought after watching. The main issue I think is the inclusion of the marsh spiders. If the idea is that they evolve into Marshmen, then why are both presented as existing in the same environment at the same time? Is the spiders' power to control people whom they bite significant to the evolution? Or is it, as I suspect, just to add another monster and create some frightening moments? To be fair, a lot of those moments work (one was so effective it stuck in my mind for many a few years - see First Time Round above), and it's good to give Lalla Ward the chance to do some possessed acting, which she almost never got to do (other companions would be hypnotised left, right and centre).

In general, Grimwade is better at getting effective sequences on location film than he is in the multi-camera studio (he'd get better at creating dynamism in the latter environment in subsequent stories he helmed). A few of the scuffles on the Starliner are a little messy. The performances Grimwade gets out of his cast are generally of high quality. George Baker, James Bree and Alan Rowe (the last of whom had previously been in many Doctor Who stories including Horror of Fang Rock - see Deeper Thoughts section for more on that story) as the Deciders do solid work; Tom Baker gets to do some nice righteous anger scenes confronting them. The younger members of the cast playing the Outlers all comport themselves well, even Matthew Waterhouse as incoming regular Adric, who was inexperienced with TV work. The character he's saddled with doesn't do a new young actor any favours. Initially conceived by the production team as a kind-of Artful Dodger in space, the scripts subsequently produced for him just don't present the character as anything like that. He's instead a precocious member of the elite, with intellectual skills, but no street smarts, who - one assumes from the scenes in Full Circle - will gradually learn during his travels with the Doctor (in other words, exactly the same arc as Romana when she was introduced). Adric isn't eventually developed that way either, and ends up as a character without a raison d'etre.

Adric is, though, the first new regular character of a new regime, and they would get a bit better at creating such characters anon. With these first signs of changes to the regular cast, bringing in younger actors, Full Circle feels like the first proper John Nathan-Turner story. The scripts for the previous two stories (The Leisure Hive and Meglos) would not have been out of place in seasons run by the previous producer, indeed the first was a script from the go-to writer of that previous era given a 1980s paint job. Full Circle, with a new young writer, a new young director and a new young regular was the point where things really started to change.

Connectivity:

Both Full Circle and The Caves of Androzani are four-part 1980s stories produced by John Nathan-Turner. In both, there is a plot point about the orbit of the planet on which the story is set periodically causing environmental changes (Mistfall on Alzarius, mudbusrts on Androzani Minor).

Deeper Thoughts:

From Alzarius to Ruta 3: Season 15 screenings at the BFI Southbank, 4th February 2024. Some milestones one passes without noticing. In July 2023, with the blog post for The Power of Kroll, and without any fanfare, I finally covered the entire Doctor Who oeuvre of producer Graham Williams. This write-up of a Williams-related BFI day has therefore to be attached to a Tom Baker story from after his time, albeit only the third story to be broadcast after Williams had left and the producer job had been taken on by John Nathan-Turner. The next story broadcast after Full Circle was a reworking of a Terrance Dicks script that Williams had commissioned to be his first produced story (eventually being replaced by Horror of Fang Rock). Despite some differences of look and feel where Nathan-Turner wanted to distance his stories from the previous era, 1980s Who generally builds on what Williams achieved. The three seasons where Williams was in charge, from 1977 to 1980, saw a widening out of the styles and tones of tales that could be told compared to Tom Baker's early stories, including more literary and lyrical styles. Chris Chapman, director of a new feature-length documentary Darkness and Light - The Life of Graham Williams made this point in his introduction to the doco, praising Williams's "intergalactic imagination". The screenings at the BFI were to tie-in to the latest Collection Blu-Ray box set, season 15, on which Darkness and Light was to be a special feature. But the day - and in particular the doco - also served as a long overdue tribute to everything that Williams achieved with Doctor Who.

Chris Chapman

It was almost a full audience in NFT1 hearing Chapman speak despite it being a 9.30am start on a cold Sunday. He explained that the project could only go ahead with the blessing of the Williams family; happily, when he approached them and explained his intentions they agreed to go ahead. The narrative of the documentary is propelled only by the interviewees and the lion's share of material comes from the family, Graham's window and three children, each with a subtly distinct perspective on a man who's been absent from their lives, but not their hearts, for over three decades now. Before the screening started, Chapman entreated us to avoid sharing too many details on social media, to better allow people to find out any new information provided within the context of the documentary itself. It was the right advice, which makes it difficult to share much more. I will just note two things: one is that Williams died in Summer 1990, which happened to be a point where I was re-embracing my fandom after a few years of more casual enthusiasm for the show. The tragedy coincided with my joining the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and re-subscribing to Doctor Who Magazine, so I saw a lot of detailed career retrospectives and other tributes to him then. Despite all that, I learned a lot from this documentary. Second, after it had ended - just like with Chapman's JNT documentary Showman (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) - I needed a moment or two to process it. Be prepared for it to provoke some emotion. As it was, there was a full 45 minutes before the next screening, a showing of a new version of Horror of Fang Rock with new effects, made for the Blu-ray box set.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

The hosts for this event were as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. They brought all the usual trappings of these events, including many a double entendre: talking about a recent podcast they did together that had done good numbers, Johnson said "Dick does always boost the ratings". They invited Mark Ayres up for a brief chat about the 5.1 mix we were about to hear (which was very effective). Then, Johnson read out some of the twitter activity connected to the screening. Someone was moaning that their train was delayed because of a trespasser at Slough, "Don't they know I have Louise Jameson to see". Someone else was wondering if "any cute boys" might be in attendance. "You're not going to find them in this audience" said Johnson, eliciting a chorus of Panto boos from the assembled. The quiz followed, with answers to trivia questions getting the person that could shout "Dick" first and loudest some swag. After that there was an impromptu chat with fan and comedian Frank Skinner, who is sometimes in the audience for these events and is cajoled onto the stage to give a fan's view, or to make the audience laugh, both of which he did on this day. He talked mainly about Terrance Dicks, his onetime neighbour, about whom was made the magnificent documentary Terrance and Me that Skinner fronted ("Though not one deemed good enough to be shown at the BFI" he added in mock hurt, though the Blu-ray set that the documentary was on never got a BFI screening as it came out in the middle of Covid restrictions). He also shared an anecdote about spending a night in what he thought was a disused lighthouse with his partner, that turned out not to be disused at all. This culminated in the punchline "Those glow in the dark condoms were a waste of money."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Skinner

The first two episodes of Fang Rock were then shown. My blog post on the story, form early on in the blog's life, can be found here. The new effects for the crash of the ship at the end of episode one are much better, but they still run as long as the original (which infamously holds on the model-work far too long). I'd have been tempted to trim it down, but that's probably impossible given the way the new effects are presented on the discs (as branching versions of the episodes rather than as a separate versions on their own). The main thing that stood out on this watch, though, was just how good the story is, with whatever effects. A slightly duff model shot notwithstanding, Horror of Fang Rock is top drawer Who, one of the best. It might get forgotten that it's quite so good, as it's never been in the top ten of polls, up there with Talons or Genesis or Caves; but, watching it again I realise, as the youth might say, that it slaps (more on slaps in a moment). Invited on stage in between the two halves of the story was the person responsible for the new effects Chris Thompson. Chris has worked on many of Pete McTighe's short films that act as trailers for the box sets (including the one for season 15 that was shown later on that day in the BFI). He had to view lots of footage of boats crashing into one another for research, which was "weirdly therapeutic". Apart from the boats, the first two episodes had a lot of subtle improvements of rotoscoping in the lamp room scenes, but the major contribution to the story had not yet been seen by the audience, as it featured only in episodes three and four: a new version of the Rutan creature. Thompson had successfully pitched to do the creature as a practical effect using puppetry, which I think was a great decision: the texture of the skin and the tendrils would never have been as easily achievable on a budget if it had been done CG.

Thompson (L) shows Johnson the Rutan puppet

The final two episodes were then shown, and the new Rutan looked great; it was also accompanied in the new sound mix by some farty, squelchy noises that amused a lot of the BFI audience. The only other major audience reactions were related to the (deliberately) irritating character of Adelaide - there was a round of applause when Leela slaps her during a hysterical outburst, and another when she died. The episodes being done, Thompson came back on the stage to display the model Rutan in all its green glory. Next up was a selection of clips from the Blu-ray box set's Value Added Material. We were shown excerpts from the new Making Of for Fang Rock, from Darkness and Light (for those that hadn't been around earlier), some funny moments from Behind the Sofa, and the short film / trailer depicting Leela on Gallifrey fighting Daleks during the Time War. This last one was then discussed by Pete McTighe and Louise Jameson, who both came up, one after the other, onto the stage. McTighe had wanted to right the historical wrong of Leela's (and Louise's) half-hearted exist from the series, and also take the opportunity to have Leela meet the Daleks (something she never did in her time in the TARDIS on TV). Asked about a spin-off featuring the older Leela, Jameson told the audience to "Ask Russell" as in T. Davies, and added that she'd be back "in a nanosecond" if she was asked. McTighe, when asked about the budget for this latest short film, which - from what was on screen - looked to be larger than usual, said it was "20 quid and a ham sandwich". He also attempted some expectation management, suggesting that people couldn't expect big productions every time, and that he might have to produce a more traditional clips-based trailer occasionally in future. This was over-excitedly reported online later with headlines suggesting the trailers were being "rested", but that wasn't what he was saying.

Johnson (L) and McTighe (R)

McTighe left the stage, and a couple of the guest cast of Horror of Fang Rock joined Jameson: John Abbott (Vince) and Annette Woollett (Adelaide). Jameson touched on some subjects she's covered many times before. Her difficult relationship with Tom Baker when making Doctor Who, which has come semi-circle since then to the point that they're now good friends (Johnson mentioned that in 2013, when they had BFI screenings for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, Baker only agreed to attend if Jameson was coming too), and her hasty exit from the programme. Graham Williams was hoping to persuade her to stay until the very last moment, so she didn't get the kind of ending for the Leela that she'd have desired, dying heroically saving the Doctor's life. Woollett confirmed that on her insistence Jameson gave her a full-on slap rather than use any stage fakery. She also thanked everybody for the work they'd done on the new version, which made it in her opinion a "completely different show". Abbott gave a shout out to the late Colin Douglas for his significant contribution to the story as Rueben and as the Rutan mimicking him, and for giving him acting advice during its making: "Always be doing something before they shout action". Woollett revealed that she'd played the sister of Abbott's character on Emmerdale Farm, many years after working on Doctor Who, but Abbott had no memory of this. Tom Baker seemed to have been challenging to work with for both these guest actors: he did lots of improvisations with Abbott in rehearsal, then suddenly threw them all out when it came to recording. He stood on the hem of Woollett's dress as she was entering a scene, as he thought it was funny.

(L to R) Johnson, Jameson, Abbott, Woollett

A discussion about Leela being one of the first Doctor Who characters to have an action figure (in the Denys Fisher range of the 1970s - Jameson's mother put it atop their Christmas tree) led to Jameson sharing a joke that a collector should say at her funeral, as the coffin comes in, that she's "worth more in the box". During audience questions, Woollett explained that she thought Adelaide was just as much of a pain as the audience did; Abbott thought that "Vince was lovely" and didn't deserve his fate. Nobody could remember a row documented in the story's production file between the actor playing Lord Palmerdale, Sean Caffrey, and director Paddy Russell - all remembered her as exacting, but sympathetic and open to ideas from the cast. Jameson was asked about any advice - or warning - she gave to Mary Tamm, who followed her in the companion role playing Romana mark one. Jameson and Tamm had both been in the same year at RADA. The first question Tamm asked her was "How much were you being paid?". Jameson didn't warn her off, and in the end Tamm got on very well with Tom, which Jameson put down to Tamm being more well-read than herself. She broke all our hearts when she said, with a crack in her voice, "I miss Mary". That goes for all of us too, I'm sure. Once the panel left the stage, the last treat was a brand-new clips trailer for the set, then it was off to the BFI cocktail bar for a drink with the fan friends that attended alongside me (the aforementioned David, plus Chris and Scott). I haven't been to a Blu-Ray event at the BFI for some time (I had clashes for the one at the end of 2022 and both of those that took place in 2023), and this refreshed my memory about how enjoyable they are. I look forward to trying to get tickets to the next one, whenever that may be.

In Summary:

Efficient, and a little bit showy; the first real salvo of the John Nathan-Turner era. Should be called "Semi-Circle", though.