The Nightmare Begins + Devil's Planet

Chapter the 346th, which features an unexpected return.

Plot:

The Doctor and Katarina land on the planet Kembel trying to find help for Steven, who's stricken with illness after he was injured during a violent tussle in Ancient Troy. Space Security agent Bret Vyon is also on the planet, trying to get word back to Earth that the Daleks are planning on taking over the universe. Bret has an altercation with the Doctor, and then bluffs his way into the TARDIS past the trusting Katarina. Bret provides some tablets that help Steven to recover and eventually they all realise they're on the same side. Later, having escaped in the spaceship of traitorous Earth politician Mavic Chen, the TARDIS team and Bret are brought down on the penal planet Desperus. They fend off the local convicts until they can repair the ship and escape, but one criminal has crept aboard...  

Context:

For my last couple of years of blogging, I regularly added a 'Milestone Watch' section to each blog post, counting down the few remaining stories as I watched them in random order. I had reached a point of completion at the end of 2025, having blogged all of Doctor Who's TV stories and many of its spin-offs and oddities. How wonderful then to find that only a few months into 2026, I would have to start counting up. I discovered about the return of these two previously missing episodes on the morning of Friday 13th March 2026. The sun had not long come up, but the Whatsapp group chat with my fan friends was already alight, the messages having started just after midnight when the news first broke. Three weeks later, on Good Friday 2026, the 3rd of April, it was another early start. I didn't manage to get up at 6am (the time the episodes first landed), but around an hour and a half later I sat down to watch episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan from the BBC iplayer while the rest of the family continued to enjoy an Easter lie-in.

First Time Round:

The 2018 blog post covering the full story of which The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet are part can be found here. As said there, I first experienced this story in increments over a number of years, seeing the orphaned episodes as they were discovered and released, and catching up with the full audio recordings separately. These two new episodes are a very welcome new increment, but do they constitute the end of the Daleks' Master Installment Plan? There are seven episodes plus a one-part teaser from earlier in the season remaining to be found, so the story is only 38% complete. It would be lovely if the missing episodes strongly rumoured to survive in other private collections, when returned - and I do believe now that they will eventually be returned - turn out to be more episodes of this epic tale. But it would be just as wonderful if they came from any other story that's wholly or partly missing from the archives. It's a win-win for Doctor Who fans, really, so a big thank you to Film is Fabulous!, the charity that was instrumental in ensuring that these episodes, amongst other finds, were preserved for future audiences to enjoy.

Reaction:

As touched upon in the First Time Round section immediately above, these episodes formed part of a  story that had a somewhat unusual transmission pattern when shown for the one and only time in 1965/1966. First, the story was about twice the length of the longest stories made to that point. Second, it had a teaser episode shown in advance that featured none of the regular cast, but teed up the story to come. Third and finally - and somewhat bizarrely - it had a completely unconnected story broadcast in between that starter and the main 12-part main course. This was The Myth Makers, another story that sadly has episodes missing from the archive (all of them, in its case). The title of that story took on a life of its own, though, when it was used for a decades long series of fan-made videos featuring interviews with Doctor Who alumni, both from in front of and behind the cameras. The appropriated title seems to be suggesting that the many people interviewed over the years from throughout Doctor Who's long history built up the mythology with the programmes to which they contributed. It's only when watching these two episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan that I suddenly felt the title of that video series was doing its interviewees a slight disservice: they contributed to something much better than myths. The real myth makers were those responsible for the policies, or lack of policies, that meant episodes were junked and gaps were created in Doctor Who's archive. The joy of watching The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet was seeing them turn in real time from things that were mysterious and to be revered to things that could simply be enjoyed, the intangible becoming tangible. The creatives of Doctor Who didn't set out to create myths, they set out to create stories (and stories are better than myths).

It'll sound silly or even hypocritical given that I'm watching and writing about TV that was made more than 60 years ago, but having moving images to accompany what was only available as audio before makes the action live in the now rather than in some distant past. Just as with previous returns during my time as a fan (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details) this creates a novelty around details that would seem irrelevant to the uninitiated (what's the exact moment in the narrative when Steven dons his corduroy jacket?) that have significance as they've previously only been available to one's speculation not one's eye. A wonderful part of the experience was watching in the knowledge that a time will come when I don't think about these and just watch the tale unfold. That's more than okay - it's right. I can now just about watch the second episode of this story, Day of Armageddon, some 20+ years after its return, without being startled by the interesting choice actor Kevin Stoney makes about how his character Mavic Chen grips a pen (how would anyone ever have speculated on such a thing before the episode was found?). The time will come when seeing that the costumes for the convicts of Desperus each has a 'D' on the back doesn't take me momentarily out of the narrative. That day's not today, but it will come. It's testament to the fluid story-telling of Douglas Camfield's direction that I was mostly engrossed in the action despite a succession of such moments. There's a great scene in the first episode (which was made available as an online clip a few weeks before the episodes landed), where the camera tracks across the Daleks to find the Doctor in the foreground, hidden from them; the camera frames William Hartnell in close-up (Hartnell knows how to work a close-up) and he exclaims "Daleks!". It's just one of many flourishes that Camfield creates.

The other big thing that having these two episodes back gives us beyond additional evidence of the director's expertise is more screentime for characters that had precious little previously. Temporary companions Katarina and Bret Vyon now appear in three times more material than before. All the nuances of both Adrienne Hill and Nicholas Courtney's performances are suddenly visible to us. This is also the case for more minor characters. The only part of Brian Cant's performance as Kurt Gantry available before now was a surviving clip of his death scene, where Gantry interacts only with Daleks. Seeing scenes of his interactions with another actor (Courtney) allows more character to shine through, and gives the moment of his extermination much more power when seen in-situ. There are some unexpected effects treats too: a shot of the Spar ship moving through space, and a long shot of the three criminals on Desperus approaching the Doctor and Co, seen as only three distant torch lights. Details like the Doctor's hair being messed up after his altercation in the jungle with Bret, or just how plasticky the wrench is that Steven uses in the TARDIS, are wonderful to see. Best of all, is that there's more of Hartnell as the Doctor to enjoy. He is magnificent in these two episodes; his every tiny adjustment to his performance depending on what size shot he's in is a masterclass in screen acting, even when he's getting the line completely wrong (the Daleks, according to the Doctor at one point, would "stop at anything" to prevent our heroes warning Earth). Now's not the time to find such fault, I know, but some joy comes from knowing that time will come. Instead of being abstract ideals impossible to criticise, these will in a while just be any old episodes of Doctor Who with all the flaws (how plasticky is that wrench?!) and all the magic that entails.

Connectivity:

Both the two found episodes of The Daleks Master Plan and The War between the Land and the Sea feature the return of top division Doctor Who baddies, and see characters escaping from some form of custody to go on the run. Both feature at least one person with a close-cropped do (Barclay in the 21st century story, the Technix in Master Plan).

Deeper Thoughts:

Many Happy Returns: a personal history of missing episode finds. Over the years, a handful of fans have been involved in the recovery of Doctor Who episodes missing from the BBC archives. For the vast majority of us, though, the experience of this activity has been from the outside-in. Many weren't even aware of the state of the BBC's archive holdings of Who until the publication of the Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special in Autumn 1981. This was the first time a mass publication had specified exactly what existed and what was lost. At the same time as the Special, there was a series of archive repeats, The Five Faces of Doctor Who, on UK channel BBC2. I was watching these, and rapidly becoming hooked on the show, but I wouldn't start buying the magazine or its special editions for another year. I also didn't know enough about the history of Doctor Who, unlike some fans watching those repeats, to wonder why they'd chosen the generally less than popular story The Krotons for Patrick Troughton's Doctor instead of one of his classics. If they managed to get a copy of the Special they had their answer: it was a series of four-part stories, one per Doctor, and there was then only one surviving four-part story for Troughton's Doctor. Based on many retellings in the years that followed, I know this was a great shock to many. One fan who wasn't shocked, one who was in the know from the inside-out, was DJ and music producer Ian Levine. In the late 1970s, he'd discovered the terrible state of the archives. This had come about because, as probably the first fan who had grown up with the show and also had significant disposable income, he wanted to watch old episodes and had the means to engage the BBC to obtain film copies. This led to his involvement in missing episode recovery, and the eventual return of a good few film cans plugging some of the gaps.

Levine wasn't the only person involved then or afterwards, of course. I mention him in particular because ultimately the drive for recovery of the old episodes was the desire to view them rather than for them to sit unwatched in a film library. In previous decades, a combination of factors had created the institutional belief that the episodes no longer held viewing potential for an audience. As they already weren't seen as worthy of a place in any film library, that did for them. This wasn't unique to the BBC or to Doctor Who, of course; it was a widespread belief, but it was changing. The Five Faces season and Levine's early private approaches to the BBC were both signals of that change. They were the early indicators that archive television programmes, even - or, damn it, particularly - frivolous ephemera like Doctor Who episodes, were of increasing value. Before this change nobody had particularly been interested in searching, but not too much time had passed since the initial junking of film copies. As such, the ground was fertile for the green shoots of recoveries. When I finally was reading Doctor Who Magazine, its news page regularly reported finds, and this continued through the first half of the 1980s. I remember at least one missive from the mag's letters page in that period, though, bemoaning the lack of access to these recovered episodes: what was the point of trumpeting the newly discovered existence of The Abominable Snowmen part 2 (returned in 1982) or the The Faceless Ones part 3 (returned in 1987), as just two examples, if they still remained unseen? Luckily, a suitable distribution medium was developing in parallel with these finds: by the mid-1980s, affordable sell-through VHS releases had become a reality and a Doctor Who range had begun.

I had not been too engaged with the subject during this period. I still had a supply of new Who programmes being broadcast annually on TV. Most of the show's history was new to me as well. I was doing my best to catch up by collecting Target novelisations and - as the decade wore on - the first videos, but there was more than enough of that history to exhaust my minimal funds. I remember reacting to the news of the 1988 recovery of four episodes of The Ice Warriors with little more than a shrug (forgive me - I was a teenager!). Four years later, the 80s having give way to the 90s, and things were very different. Doctor Who was no longer on the TV. The VHS range was increasingly covering black and white stories from the early years of Who in the 1960s. There had even been a couple of tapes released in 1991 that showcased some orphaned episodes within a wraparound documentary format. Then The Tomb of the Cybermen was found in its entirety. This was the most exciting recovery to date, as retold in the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post I wrote about Tomb. The VHS range was established such that the story could be rush released, and it sold more in the UK in its first week than many Hollywood movies. More than just the potential of purchasers of archive Doctor Who, there was now a demonstrable market. Thereafter, a pattern was established that any further finds would become available quickly afterwards on VHS, then - as the 90s gave way to the 00s - DVD (and even later as downloads or on streaming platforms). Finds started to become fewer and further between, though.

In a 1998 documentary about missing episodes that was an extra on a VHS release of the recovered Ice Warriors episodes, Levine was quoted saying that he feared that all there was to be found had now been found, though he hoped someone would prove him wrong. That did indeed happen a few times over the following 15 years, but only four episodes were returned in that time, each one an orphan. If anyone thought the days of finding multiple episodes from the same story were over, they were pleasantly surprised when - wonderfully and miraculously - the biggest haul ever was gathered up at the end of that 15 year period. In late 2013, the whole of The Enemy of the World, and all but one episode of The Web of Fear were recovered from a Nigerian TV station. The thrill of that find had to keep us going through almost 13 years of nada, zip, bupkis. The lucky-for-some Friday 13th in March of 2026 saw the situation finally change, when the discovery of the two found episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan was announced. With the 9-episode 2013 returns the only ones this century to come from an overseas TV station, finds from such sources look to have been thoroughly exhausted. Further missing episodes seem more likely to be found in private collections, where there isn't likely to be many found at a time. If anyone cared enough to collect a number of Doctor Who episodes - the collector who ended up with The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet wasn't interested in Who and got them as part of a job lot - they would know what they had and would have returned them before now. There are now 95 missing episodes of Doctor Who in total: nobody can know for sure if or when that number will drop down further, but still we fans live in hope - all things considered, it's a nice place to live.

In Summary:

It's good to have these episodes back so that they can cease being revered mysteries and instead become blissfully ordinary and everyday.

The Gunfighters

Chapter The 219th, which depicts a time when Doctor Who can truly be said to have gone west.

Plot:

A couple of days around the 26th October 1881, Tombstone, Arizona. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in the TARDIS, with the Doctor on the lookout for a dentist to fix his toothache. Luckily for him, Doc Holliday has also just set up his dental practice in the town; unluckily, the Clanton boys have come to town to kill Doc Holliday. The wily dentist / gunslinger spies a mistaken identity ploy as this other newcomer to the town is also called "Doc". Lending the Doctor his own monogrammed gun, Holliday sends the unsuspecting Time Lord off to the Last Chance Saloon where the outlaws wait. The Doctor is saved by the intervention of Wyatt Earp, who keeps up the pretence that the Doctor is the Doc to protect both men from the Clantons (and their extra hired gun Johnny Ringo who arrives in town with a score to settle with Holliday too). Earp keeps the Doctor safe in the sheriff's office, despite efforts by the Clantons to flush him out by threatening Steven. Holliday flees town, taking Dodo with him, but is persuaded to return with her. The Clantons kill Wyatt's younger brother, which prompts him - with another brother Virgil plus Holliday - to face the Clantons and Ringo in a gunfight at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday win, killing all the bad guys.

Context:

I watched this from the DVD one episode per night across four nights towards the end of January. A couple of surprises ensued. First, the Better Half joined me for the first part (she's been keeping clear of any Doctor Who watch, new or old, of late). She described the story cheerfully as "The one where Lynda Baron's singing a song over the top of it" and believed that I'd watched it only "very recently" (the last time was when the DVD came out for the first time in 2011, over ten years ago). She didn't walk out midway through the episode, but she didn't join me for the remaining three. The second surprise was that this marked another time that my random selections of stories have completed a season, which seems to be happening a lot lately now I'm in my eighth year of doing the blog. It was only after I finished watching and ticked off the story on my big spreadsheet (I'm a Doctor Who fan who blogs, of course I have a big spreadsheet) that I realised. Season 3 is the fifth season completed now after seasons 8, 17 and 23, and new series 13.

First Time Round:

My memory's never perfect when recalling my first watch of even recent stories, but I've got serious doubts about my recall with regard to The Gunfighters. I'm looking at the release dates for the Doctor Who VHS range, and the story came out as part of a boxset of collected Hartnell stories in November of 2002. (An aside: such is the poor reputation of the story that it has never been trusted to attract a home buyer on its own merits - it was clumped together with another story in a DVD box set too, and - assuming there is a season 3 box set sometime in the future - will not stand alone on Blu-ray either.) I purchased that first boxset on day of release, in MVC in Brighton, and so would have had The Gunfighters to watch for the first time then. I know I never saw it on a pirated copy before that (unlike The Sensorites, another of the stories in the VHS set) and I know it wasn't repeated on terrestrial TV (Unlike The Time Meddler, the final story packaged with it on VHS), so this must have been the first time I saw it. But looking back it's a story that I feel like I've always known, or at least for something like twenty years before 2002. Why would this be? Maybe it's memories of the novelisation that I read in the 1980s. I think, though, that the story was so infamous (more information on exactly how infamous in the Deeper Thoughts section below) that it just seemed like I'd already seen it multiple times before I finally caught up with it.

Reaction:

The very first moments of the first episode of this story set up The Gunfighters as something that's going to be shockingly innovative. A song (the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon) is playing from the off to accompany the action, which has never been done before. Cowboys ride in to frame onto a rather magnificent OK Corral set, filmed at interesting angles by director Rex Tucker. It looks expensive. Though it regularly depicted historical settings, Doctor Who had never done a Western story before. Whether it'll be good or bad (and the minute the outlaws on screen start to speak it does very much feel like it will be the latter), it will certainly be new. Dig just a little below these cosmetic aspects, though, and the story is very similar to an existing template: it is essentially a re-tread of writer Donald Cotton's previous story, shown earlier in the season, The Myth Makers. Just as in that story, the setting is a historical period that is a common one to be mythologised. In both instances, there is no effort at historical accuracy, but instead the story riffs on more modern presentations of the myths. The Myth Makers seemed based more on a radical 1960s theatre production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida than it was based on Homer, let alone a reflection of how lives were truly lived in Asia Minor over a thousand years BC. The Gunfighters, of course, is presented through a prism of the most lurid and unrealistic Cowboy movie tropes.

Almost all of the guest characters appearing in the story are real people from history (interestingly, this was the last time such a thing happened in Doctor Who for many years - the next time a Doctor met a specific historical personage, Colin Baker was the star of the show). One would be forgiven for thinking they aren't, though; Johnny Ringo, for example, sounds terribly made up, but he existed. He did have beef with Doc Holliday, but he wasn't present at the gunfight at the OK Corral, and he died the following year elsewhere. The gunfight as depicted on screen is slightly adjusted compared to the real events - in reality, more people were present, one of the Clantons survived, and Holliday and the Earps were injured. Historical detail is sacrificed to make for a more exciting narrative, and realism is sacrificed too. As wild as the West undoubtedly could be, it seems very unlikely that someone could gun down a saloon keeper in cold blood as Johnny Ringo does to the barman Charlie, then leave his dead body slumped over the bar and mosey on upstairs to stay in one of the rooms until the next morning. This sort of thing might happen in Westerns on TV, but the artifice and exaggeration does tend to distance one from the action on screen. The larger than life performances and the winking to the audience nature of the comedy both reinforce the effect that what is being shown is something confected and false; it reaches Brechtian levels of alienation. The trouble is that then the script appears to be expecting those watching to feel something at times, for example when Steven is threatened by a lynch mob, or when the Earp brothers discover that their younger brother has been killed. It can't have things both ways.

Another alienation mechanism is the song. I like the song, maybe more than most, it's well written and clever - sometimes acting as narration, sometimes as counterpoint; but, it is clearly overused. There are periods of the story where it's played every couple of minutes not giving anyone watching time to suspend their disbelief. Another similarly disruptive factor, but this time definitely not intentional, is the variability of some of the performances. Anthony Jacobs as Doc Holliday and John Alderson as Wyatt Earp are god tier, many others comport themselves with reasonable dignity, but a couple of the cast have much difficulty in maintaining an American accent, and unfortunately every time they talk the bubble of reality in the story pops. The regular cast are all great, but - in another parallel with The Myth Makers - they have very little to do. Peter Purves and Jackie Lane get to perform the song early on, but then spend the rest of the time being held captive by one faction or another. There are a couple of scenes and moments that allow William Hartnell to show off his flair for comedy, but he mostly acts as the stooge for the other characters rather than driving any aspect of the plot forward. By the climax of the story, it's all about cowboy versus cowboy shooting; two out of the three regulars don't even appear in the gunfight sequence, and Dodo appears only briefly to complicate things for Doc Holliday, who is much more the protagonist of the story than any of the three actual stars of the show.

At the micro level, there is much that is good and much that is bad. There are many witty, lines, and some great direction on film. The good guys at the end striding through a hail of bullets is implausible but very cool, and there are some great low angle shots used. On the other hand, there's moments where the Clantons chorus particular lines in a sign-song way like truly hardened killers probably don't. The resolution of the cliffhanger of episode 1 is a terrible cheat, worse than the worst excesses of the Saturday morning serials that partly inspired Doctor Who. The Doctor is walking towards the saloon where people are waiting to kill him, he's a couple of metres away at most, within grasping distance of the door; then, at the start of the next episode, he just doesn't arrive. Time passes, then somebody else arrives instead. Altogether, though, I don't think the negatives outweigh the positives, and it's still an enjoyable watch overall.

Connectivity: 

The trap street in Face the Raven has something of an old Western town about it, with desperate ex-outlaws living there now trying to make a straight living. Both there, and in Tombstone as depicted in The Gunfighters, a rough form of justice is in force, and the Doctor and his companions are brought under the protection of a figure of authority. There's even a couple of showdowns in the Capaldi story, though they are against the anthropomorphised force of death in the form of a black bird rather than any gun-slinging cowpokes.

Deeper Thoughts:

Critical Re-evaluation: A Case Study. The souvenir programme of the Doctor Who 20th anniversary celebration at Longleat (Doctor Who's version of Woodstock, and I was there!) featured an essay summarising the Doctor's adventures to date. This was written by Ian Levine, DJ, music producer and Doctor Who 'superfan'. At the time, Levine was working as an unofficial continuity adviser to Who producer John Nathan-Turner. It likely wasn't to give the fan perspective that he was chosen to write this essay over any journalist or writer, but instead for the same reason he worked in that unofficial role: he'd amassed a lot of research materials over the years, including many copies of episodes themselves. As such, he could be much more efficient in turning in something accurate than someone who'd need to do all that research from scratch. His is a fan perspective, though; the show is very important to him, and he has strong opinions about it. My guess is that - even though it was for a celebration tie-in - it would have offended his sense of integrity not to be honest about the programme's up and downs. Thus, the essay touches on periods of Doctor Who's first 20 years where, in the opinion of the essayist, there is less to celebrate. So it was that Ian Levine, in a professional publication, put it on record that The Gunfighters was the worst ever Doctor Who story. I read and re-read all his words so many times over the following months (it was difficult to get hold of affordable summaries of the whole of Doctor Who in those days, Doctor Who Magazine just gave tantalising glimpses) so I'm sure I'm right - there was no qualifying "possibly" or "probably" or "many people think" it was just there in black and white: The Gunfighters is the worst.

Levine was not alone in such an appraisal at that time of course. There was no access to vintage stories for the mass audience back then, so newer fans relied on the memories of longer term fans. It was a pervasive view in the 1980s amongst that small number of taste-makers that The Gunfighters was not just a duffer, but the ultimate duffer. This wasn't so out of line with the view of the audience in the 1960s to be fair: it got the lowest audience appreciation rating of the series to date, and the BBC Audience Research Report documented many negative viewer comments: "Third-rate story telling", "Hackneyed, ridiculous and dull", "A weak and puerile plot", "The script, even for a children's programme, was absolute rubbish". Lots of Doctor Who audience reports over the years garnered similar comments for other stories, though; and, is it really the script that's the issue? Did anyone comment back then on the accents or the song or the ambitious idiocy of trying to recreate the old west in a tiny British studio? Not that I've ever seen reported. Anyway, however fair or unfair, this was the accepted wisdom for the lifetime of classic Who. Fanzines of the 1980s back this up, as quoted in the first edition of the Television Companion, a 1998 compendium published by Virgin. The Companion's writers David Howe and Stephen James Walker summarise in line with the accepted position of the previous decade ("The story must be adjudged one of the least effective of the Hartnell era"), but this was already being challenged elsewhere.

In the 1990s, a new generation of fans became more involved in writing about Doctor Who (and many would go on to write Doctor Who too, in book or even televisual form); plus, the surviving vintage episodes were now more available, through VHS or repeat broadcasts on the UK Gold satellite and cable channel. There was less need to rely on the hand-me-down knowledge of the previous decade. A good bellwether of changing fan opinion at this point was The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, which Virgin published in 1995. This book unashamedly took some contrary positions to those held by the earlier fans; it says about The Gunfighters that it has a "great script", and is "A comic masterpiece, winning you over with its sheer charm". It's difficult to imagine a more different response to that of Ian Levine and Co. Though the book was clearly only supposed to be a personal take by the three authors, it nonetheless created its own wisdom that endured for a while afterwards. An interesting point is that the book lists as a goof an anachronistic line of the ballad of the Last Chance Saloon that mentions "earning your gunfighter's wings", a phrase not coined until WW1. The line, though, is "earning your gunfighter's fee". Cornell, Day and Topping did not as yet have access to a pristine digital copy of the story with restored audio.

When that pristine version became available in 2011, the person I'd judge to be the final fan taste-maker gave his opinion. This was Gary Gillatt, whose DVD reviews in Doctor Who Magazine around this period were justly valued and praised. He says that The Gunfighters was "rather marvellous" in its way, and was "produced with care and conviction" but ultimately leaves its audience "feeling unmoved". It would seem that fan wisdom regarding this musical Western tale had in thirty years gone right through the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; it was the worst, it was fantastic, it was a bit of both. Why do I think that there have been no more taste-makers in the last ten years and there won't be any in future? Post Gillatt's time reviewing for the official magazine, social media has become more and more mainstream; in parallel, the across-the-board availability of all of Doctor Who to consume has become a reality. That any fan could subscribe to a service to watch any surviving classic Who story, even The Gunfighters, at the touch of a button without having to rise from the living room sofa would have seemed like science fiction in the early 1980s, let alone when this story was first broadcast, but it is nonetheless true. Any of those fans also has an instant global platform to share their thoughts as soon as they've finished watching (or - let's face it - probably before they've finished). The era of one collective view of a story that gradually develops over time is over; now there is a democratic explosion of a million different views at once. This means no consensus, but the consolation is that there is no orthodoxy either; I think that's a fair exchange.

In Summary:

It has flaws, but is not as bad as its reputation: a mixed saddle-bag.

The Myth Makers

Chapter The 209th, has two for the price of one, covering the newly animated Galaxy 4 as well as the Doctor and friends' subsequent Trojan trip.

Plot:

[The plot of Galaxy 4, as well as lots of other details about the story and my reaction to it as an audio / reconstruction is already available in the blog post on the story from last year. For the write up of the BFI event, and the animated version, scroll down to the Deeper Thoughts section below.] Immediately following their adventure on an exploding planet near but possibly not in Galaxy 4, the Doctor, Steven and Vicki arrive outside the besieged walls of the city of Troy around 1184 BC. The Doctor, followed shortly by Steven, ventures out; both end up captured by the Greeks and taken to their camp meeting Achilles, Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Meanwhile, the TARDIS is found by the Trojans and - with Vicki inside - taken in to Troy where she meets Priam, Paris and Cassandra. The last of these believes Vicki to be a spy or a witch or both, but Vicki is able to charm Priam for a while. He doesn't like the name Vicki, so dubs her Cressida. As Vicki has taken a shine to another Trojan, the young Troilus, that renaming is pretty handy in a dramatic irony type of way (dramatic irony in an Ancient Greek Tragedy, whatever next?!).

Odysseus puts the Doctor to work on a plan to break the siege; Steven disguises himself as a Greek soldier and engineers a situation where Paris can capture him and bring him into Troy. His plan is to rescue Vicki, but unfortunately he just ends up getting both of them imprisoned. Meanwhile, the Doctor - after trying to avoid the inevitable for a while - gives the Greeks the idea for the Trojan Horse. When the Greeks appear to have fled the field, the Trojans - apart from Cassandra - put this down to Vicki / Cressida bringing them good luck and she is released (and she then secretly frees Steven). Paris brings a giant wooden horse - in which Odysseus and the Doctor, as well as many Greek soldiers, are hiding  - into the city. The Greeks sneak out, open the gates and let the rest of their army in. Troy is sacked and almost all the Trojans massacred. Steven gets injured, but escapes in the TARDIS with the Doctor and one of Cassandra's handmaidens Katarina. Vicki decides to stay behind with a similarly injured Troilus.

Context:

Sunday 7th November 2021 was a crisp, bright autumn day, and I was travelling by train to London for the BFI Southbank screening of the animated Galaxy 4 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I had anticipated that the event and the animation itself would be worth blogging about, but had already covered Galaxy 4 last year; so, I overrode the random selection of stories and selected this neighbouring story to blog next, so that I could cover both here. Despite the one episode in between where the action cuts away, if you will, to some Dalek shenanigans, The Myth Makers follows on directly from the Drahvin / Rill dust-up for our heroes (Vicki's ankle, twisted at the end of Galaxy 4 is still injured when the TARDIS lands outside Troy). I listened to the first couple of episodes of the BBC audio version of The Myth Makers, with narration by Peter Purves, on my journey up. The trains were a bit disrupted by engineering works that day, though, so I saved my phone's battery on my way home, and didn't finish the story that day. The following Monday saw me back at the day job until the afternoon, then making the kids their tea, then watching the latest episode of Flux that I'd missed while at the event. After that, I was too knackered to listen to any more of The Myth Makers, and went to bed. I finished my listen on the Tuesday. It would be good for the BFI events to return to Saturdays, so exhausted oldsters like me can get a day to recover from the excitement!

First Time Round:

I was a somewhat sickly child, and lazy. There were four different times that I had a multiple night stay in the children's ward of a local hospital, as my asthma was very bad. But, as I could never maintain the keeping of a diary for more than a few weeks during childhood, I have scant detail of when they exactly were. I have a clear memory, though, of one stay (I think in Southlands Hospital in Shoreham-by-Sea) having the Target novelisation of this story to read, which cheered me up no end. The novel differs from the televised story quite a bit, as it features Homer - the poet, not the Simpson - getting involved in the action, and is framed as his retelling of the events sometime afterwards. It's my favourite Target book, wittier and more interesting than the TV version, with a striking cover illustration by Andrew Skilleter. This must have been after September 1985 when the book was first published. I went into hospital after an asthma attack a few months later in December of 1985 (see First Time Round section of the Night Terrors blog post earlier this year for details), and I'm almost 100% sure that wasn't the stay where I read The Myth Makers  - I was in a Chichester hospital that time, and was rushed there in an ambulance; I didn't have the book with me, nor do I remember asking anyone to bring it for the couple of days I was kept in. I don't think I went into hospital twice in quick succession in the autumn / winter of 85 either. As such, I suspect that I read it sometime in 1986 when ill again on a different occasion. This would fit with the normal lag time after a book was published before I could obtain it. I didn't have a huge amount of pocket money, and access to the books in shops immediately after their release was not a given, as distribution could be erratic. Many years later, I would have listened to the audio version (probably very soon after its release in January 2001 - distribution and my finances being much better by then), but the prose version is the default in my heart.

Reaction:

In a clip that went viral recently of UK quiz show Tipping Point, two contestants both answer a question about what Homer described in his epic poems as "the food of the gods" with the answer "Donuts". The social media reaction to the clip in some quarters felt to me to be a bit sneering and downward-punching; if one watches the longer clip, the male contestant is read the question again and realises that he jumped to the wrong conclusion in the heat of the moment, with the stress of being on a national TV show. It does demonstrate, though, that the myths and legends of the Ancient Greeks are not necessarily leaping to the forefront of people's imaginations these days. I wasn't alive to know whether that was different in 1965, but my feeling is that these things had a bit more currency then, perhaps, but not much more than now. Doctor Who in the 20th century never had another full story set as far back in history as The Myth Makers (it had dabbled with pre-history in its first story, and had very brief interludes set in ancient Egypt and Atlantis later on, but that was about it). In the 21st century too, the show has shied away, with only a trio of visits to ancient Rome or its empire outposts, and these all set in years Anno Domini, more than 1000 years after the events of The Myth Makers. The reason is probably the obvious one: how is anyone watching to identify with these characters? One approach would be to play it straight and depict the characters as per the legend; this would risk being a bit po-faced. The other option is to do what The Myth Makers does, in the same way as a later historical comedy Blackadder was to do, and depict the characters with modern manners and mores.

It's a fun idea on paper, and individual character moments amuse, like the bored Menelaus who doesn't particularly want Helen back, or the cowardly Paris always trying to evade any danger. Every performance is on the large side, though. The initial scenes are a hell of a jolt as one hears the guest characters start speaking. It is very stagey, and in the case of some characters (e.g. Ivor Salter as Odysseus) declamatory to the point of shouting out each line. This was clearly a stylistic choice, but the level of artifice is so high that it detracts from the intent to humanise / modernise these age old characters. If one reimagines Blackadder as a very loud panto, you get close to the tone of The Myth Makers. This is doubly a problem when it comes to the climax of the story when everyone starts getting killed. Am I supposed to care or not when many of the characters I've been smiling about (I don't think the script is going for laugh out loud funny) are suddenly being massacred? Am I supposed to be shocked when characters I've been watching lark about for three episodes are suddenly plunging swords into people? Or it could just be a theatrical flourish to round off the action: la commedia e finita! The almost Brechtian alienation of the staging and characterisation, and the tonal shift between lighter and darker material brings to mind some kind of experimental 1960s theatre production. This might not be a coincidence.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is similarly known for tonal shifts, and there are little nods to that play (biggest amongst them that Troilus and Cressida appear nowhere in the works of Homer, but also smaller things like Troilus being jealous of Cressida's behaviour with Diomedes / Steven) in writer Donald Cotton's script. Was this then not a modern take on Homer at all, but a televisual pastiche of the Bard's Trojan play instead? This would almost make it a pastiche of a pastiche, so it is not surprising that it keeps one at a distance as one listens. Of course, I am making these judgements only based on the soundtrack. It's possible that with the visuals the piece would work differently, have more subtleties when one can see the actors' expressions and movements. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to be sure, as The Myth Makers is one of the missing Doctor Who stories with very little evidence to help us imagine what it would look like: there are no-off screen photos, not many production stills, and the fragment of cine footage taken by a fan that exists just shows Vicki in a nice frock, nothing more. There is a photo of the model of the Trojan horse, and it is a fine design - perhaps all the production design was up to this standard, and perhaps that made a big difference. Perhaps.

The regulars don't sparkle as much in this story as they did in The Time Meddler, or even Galaxy 4. Quite a lot of the running time they are kept apart from one another; there's a nice sequence when Vicki is in a cell with Steven, but that's it. The many larger-than-life characters of the story dominate at the expense of the two companion regulars, with only William Hartnell given enough to do to stand out. This is particularly tough on Maureen O' Brien as Vicki as this is her swansong: the sequences where she's using her wiles to get the better of the Trojan men are great, but it's not the sort of big ending plot that an actor could relish. There's the romance with Troilus of course, but it feels so perfunctory: they only share a half a dozen short scenes together. After Verity Lambert left as producer, and John Wiles had a brief tenure in that role (The Myth Makers is his first credited story as producer) before also handing over to someone else, the series entered an era of near constant chopping and changing of the regular cast to fit the views of the person in charge and/or capture some elusive chemistry. Some actors' exits are handled better than others. Vicki's isn't all off-screen like later companion Dodo's, but she still doesn't get to say a proper farewell to the Doctor and Steven, and that is a great shame.

Connectivity: 

Both The Myth Makers and Time Heist see the Doctor putting together a plan to break into a seemingly impregnable area; in both instances, there's someone within that place who needs rescuing; also, there are characters in both stories with psychic abilities (unless Cassandra is just making lucky guesses).

Deeper Thoughts:

Rills' Planetary Survey Results: BFI Southbank Galaxy 4 screening and Peter Purves Q&A, 7th November 2021. Justin Johnson of the BFI took to the stage at the start of the event and set the usual tone right up front saying "Those of you who have been to these events before will have noticed that I've got no Dick today". The Dick in question was Dick Fiddy, Johnson's usual co-host, who was unwell. Get well soon Dick. The opening trivia quiz with prizes still can't be reintroduced to these events because of Covid restrictions, but there were further relaxations compared to recent screenings, with audience Q&A allowed again. Instead of a roaming mic, audience members queued by a couple of static audience mics near the stage to ask the guest of honour, Steven Taylor actor Peter Purves, questions (but more on that in a bit). Johnson took the opportunity to pay a brief tribute to Doctor Who writer Bob Baker, who recently passed away, and to jokingly apologise for the BFI's and Blu-ray range exec Russel Minton's lack of precognition powers, failing to anticipate three months ago when it was booked in that the next Doctor Who event (a showing of City of Death to tie in with the Season 17 Blu-ray box set) would clash with the finale of the latest Jodie Whittaker story Flux on the TV. They've obviously had some complaints. Then, the lights went down, and a short filmed introduction by Maureen O' Brien, who couldn't be with us in person, was shown before the animated story started. The pattern was the usual one: the first two episodes were shown, then there was a panel of people interviewed related to the animation, then the final two episodes, followed by the main Q&A.

The animation is created by the same team that did Fury from the Deep last year (which was reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Galaxy 4 blog post coincidentally). The character designs and backgrounds used are in a similar style to Fury from the Deep, a little more stylised, with slightly cleaner visuals, less lines and shading, compared to the approach of the team that animated Evil of the Daleks earlier this year. The difference with Galaxy 4 compared to Fury - which Gary Russell confirmed later when speaking on the panel was a deliberate choice - is that the Patrick Troughton story was gloomier with overcast skies and cold British sea, whereas Galaxy 4's palette is colourful and bright. It really works. The surface of the planet where most of the action takes place is a vibrant red-orange (based loosely on a area of the Australian outback we were told later), the Rill's ship is a vast pop-art labyrinth, the rusted Drahvin ship a nice contrast. There are some beautiful battle scenes set in space too (some - or maybe all? - of which have been added and weren't in the original script). The characters are uniformly good: the Chumblies seem to have been made for animation, and for once economy serves the narrative, as drawing the cloned Drahvin drones to an identical template is better than the original production where they were portrayed by various actors of different heights. Touches like replacing the sneakers that they wear with long boots are subtle but add up with the other improvements to create a visual feast.

As always when watching with a big audience, the comedy comes more to the fore; this is doubly so with an animation of a missing story where previously we've been robbed of the body language and facial expressions that sell the humour. Galaxy 4 also got some laughs that may not have been intended to be there: Steven's lascivious appreciation on first spotting the Drahvins, for example, and some fluffed lines by William Hartnell (but animated Billy fluffs are the cutest Billy fluffs). The sad little movement and noise of an attacked Chumblie made the whole room go "Awwww!". The destruction of the planet at the end is a great sequence too, and it also got a reaction from the BFI crowd. It's not as epic a visualisation as the work done for The Evil of the Daleks, but that's appropriate to the story. When I reviewed it as a recon last year, I thought that Galaxy 4 was quite a small scale narrative for a season opener; Gary Russell was more frank, describing the story as "cheap". And though the new visuals do a great job opening it out, they can't solve that problem completely. The other main issue with the story is that there just isn't enough plot to fill the running time. Again, the animation improves things greatly, making some moments much more entertaining to watch, but it can't work miracles. The cut-down recon of Galaxy 4 that was an extra on a DVD excised loads of material, but the story remained coherent. Fan sacrilege, I know, but I'd love to see a cut down version of the animated story as it would zip along and look fantastic. There's no such version provided as an extra on the imminent disc release of the story, I'm sure, but from what we heard at the BFI, it still sounds like a great package, and on the strength of this screening I'd recommend everyone to buy it.

(L to R) Ayres, Morris, Russell, Johnson

The panel held in the middle of the screening of the episodes saw Mark Ayres (Audio Restoration), Ioan Morris (Concept Design) and Gary Russell (Executive Production) take to the stage. Another relaxing of the restrictions previously seen at recent screenings is that all the panellists were allowed to sit down this time. Once settled, there was a lot of information and a lot of fun from these three gentlemen. Russell stated that the intention was to give Galaxy 4 a bigger budget than it had originally, and to make an alternative version, rather than an improvement per se. Morris was asked to explain exactly what his role entailed; other than, as he jokingly put it, "doing everything Gary tells me to", he explained that he created the blueprint for the animators to follow. The biggest departure in that blueprint from the original was the Rill's spaceship, which was just a "sheet of polythene" in the original according to Russell, but was now - in Morris's opinion - like the rest of the piece - "lurid in a good way; it really pops now". One maybe surprising inspiration for the look of the animation was Star Trek Original Series episode Spectre of the Gun. Ayres reiterated that the quality of the soundtrack is one of the biggest factors in deciding which stories will be animated, and talked about the young fans in the 1960s that taped the show onto reel-to-reels allowing these stories to survive in some form after the BBC junked the videos and films.

Ayres with the home audio tape of Galaxy 4

Galaxy 4 is rare in that its best surviving audio copy is not the late Graham Strong's (Strong wired his TV's audio output direct into the tape machine so got a very clean sound compared to those that set up a microphone by the TV's speaker).  The recording used to accompany the animation was made by David Holman, and he was in the audience. Ayres encouraged him to stand up, and he got a big, warm round of applause from the assembled throng, with Morris adding "Thanks for getting me a job, David". Even better than that, Ayres had - in a plastic shopping bag he brought on to the stage to everyone's bemusement - the original tape with him. He held it up for all to see. Russell confirmed that he sees the soundtrack as sacrosanct and does not want any part of it to be excised in the animated version, which creates a challenge - and some detective work - to find appropriate visuals to accompany every second. Some of the detective work was helped by Peter Purves, who has a great memory for the details of so long ago, down to the colour of the costumes. The info was coming thick and fast in the conversation, and something was given away that happened in the final part of the animated version, which I think - and the people on the panel who didn't talk about it also seemed to think - is best left as a little surprise, so I won't mention it here, but you will see if you get yourself a copy of the Blu-ray.

(L to R) Purves, Johnson

After the final episode, Peter Purves came up onto the stage. He got a couple of laughs out of the audience before he'd even sat down, joking about needing a new knee, and commenting on the extraordinarily long extension cable that's used in the last episode to feed power from the TARDIS into the Rills' ship. Johnson had an easy job up there next to him, as Purves didn't need to be asked any questions, and went straight into a stream of thoughtful and amusing chat, with anecdotes old and new. He got the story in quick of how dissatisfied he was with the script, hastily rewritten giving him inappropriate material originally intended for Jackie Hill as the recently departed companion Barbara. He added, though, that he likes the story now: "It's given me a fair bit of work over the years". Recently, this work included a making of the story to go on the Blu-ray, which features Toby Hadoke and a real life Chumblie. He talked about getting the role for the first time in the 1960s. He had tried out for a Menoptera (man-size butterfly creature) role in the 1965 Doctor Who story The Web Planet for director Richard Martin, but it just so happened that a TV play that he'd appeared in had been repeated just before the audition. Martin saw this and realised that Purves was too good for the Menoptera role, but told him he'd be considered for something apt that came along in future. When Martin was making The Chase later in the year, a little comic turn playing confused US tourist Morton Dill fit the bill. Purves aced it, and also got on well with Hartnell. Someone - Purves thinks it was Maureen O' Brien - noticed this and seeded the idea with Hartnell, who was concerned about the imminent departure of original companion actors William Russell as Ian, and the aforementioned Hill as Barbara, that Purves would be good to play the replacement character. A few weeks later, after having grown a beard, he was back in the rehearsal rooms, and later the studio, with them again.

Purves talked about Galaxy 4 director Derek Martinus, coincidentally the same director as the last story to be animated The Evil of the Daleks. (As an aside, an amazing 14 episodes of lost Martinus-directed Doctor Who have now been animated; as well as those two full stories that includes odd episodes of The Tenth Planet and The Ice Warriors for DVD.) Galaxy 4 was Martinus's first ever directing gig, and according to Purves he hadn't quite got the hang of it. During episode one, recording had to have an unscheduled stop - almost unheard of at the time - as the cables of the cameras and sound equipment had got tangled. A helpful crew member explained to Martinus that the best way to avoid this was to make a cardboard model of the studio and use string for the cables, which he did for the second episode. When that next episode was recorded, everything ground to a halt again as the cables of the cameras and sound equipment had got tangled again. Purves, as he told it, asked his director how it had gone wrong once more when he'd planned everything on the cardboard model, and Martinus replied "Well, you see, the strings kept getting tangled up...". Purves added that he liked Martinus a lot and later employed him as a director when he had his own production company, as he did Chris Barry, who directed his final Doctor Who story The Savages.

Another person that Purves was keen to talk up was William Hartnell, who he said had taught him so much about screen acting. "Without him," he said, gesturing around NFT1, "There'd be none of this", meaning Doctor Who's longevity leading up to things like the Galaxy 4 animation and the day's event. This didn't mean that it was always easy working with Bill, who "fluffed his way through", and who often reduced the work to "Standing around waiting for Bill to get back on script". Purves told what I imagine was a well worn tale, though it was new to me, of Francis de Wolff as Agamemnon in The Myth Makers, a bit frustrated with the standing around and waiting for Bill, who when he had the line to the Doctor "Come on in and have a ham bone", actually said "Come on in, ham, and have a bone". That led to a call of "Cut!" and a retake, but Bill's later fluff "I am not a dog... I am not a God" in the same story stayed in. (It's hard to be sure on the soundtrack, but I think I disagree with Purves here and that the actual words Hartnell says are "I'm not a Doc, I am not a God" which makes perfect sense as a reply to Katarina's line in that moment.) Talking of the Trojan adventure, it was one of the stories that Purves would like to see animated; his first choice would be The Massacre (though he'd rather they actually found it). He talked about his happiness in seeing the recovered episode three of Galaxy 4 when it turned up in 2011, "Because I'm so good in it". He talked of his joy reprising the role of Steven for Big Finish. You may already have noticed that he covered a lot of material; he's such a pro. And afterwards, he signed autographs. I didn't have time or space here to squeeze in everything he covered in an entertaining session that was definitely value for money (as I think will be the Galaxy 4 release itself).

In Summary:

The Myth Makers is like an experimental 1960s theatre production of Troilus and Cressida spliced with Blackadder spliced with a Panto. Galaxy 4's animation is well worth your time and money, but the source material can only be spruced up so much when the story is two episodes too long!).