Colony in Space

Chapter The 185th, which features a group struggling for survival while facing strange phenomena that may be faked, there's talk of a group of others from the opposite side of the area, and there's secret bases with hidden entrances.

Plot:

The exiled Doctor finally thinks he's got his TARDIS working, but it's being remote-controlled by the Time Lords. They send him and Jo to the planet Uxarieus to find a kind of Wild West re-enactment society: a group of frontiers people are trying to scratch a meagre life from the soil while being wary of the native tribe, and a group of unscrupulous strong-arms from a mining concern (IMC) are making trouble so they can take the planet instead. The Doctor helps investigate recent monster attacks, which look to have been staged by IMC. He also finds a secret underground city where the natives live with a priest caste and a Guardian super-being. They are remnants from an advanced society that long ago developed a doomsday weapon. The miners and colonists jostle for the upper hand, with attacks and ruses aplenty. An external adjudicator arrives, but it's the Master using an assumed identity. He's scheming to get his hands on the weapon, and - seemingly just for the giggles - finds in favour of IMC. The Master captures Jo to induce the Doctor to take him to the underground city. Meanwhile, the IMC team force the colonists to board their dangerously old space rocket to blast off from the planet. The Guardian helps the Doctor to destroy the weapon, which also destroys the city. The Master gets away, and the colonists sneak off the ship before it blows up after take off, and wrest control from IMC. A real adjudicator is sent for, and the one nice one among the miners joins the colony.

Context:

March 2021. A year into the UK's Covid-19 pandemic response, and the family and I are locked down still. Just as the last Doctor Blu-ray Who box set was a diversion from Lockdown 1 - a time in the UK of Joe Wicks and Baked Potato songs and hours spent waiting for grocery webpages to load - the latest box set has provided entertainment for the last couple of weeks of Lockdown 3. The episodes in question are season 8, Jon Pertwee's second year playing the Doctor, which introduced the character of the Master. The blog has already covered four out of the five stories over the years; so, to add a random factor I flipped a coin. The coin came up heads, which is why I'm writing a blog post on the remaining story Colony in Space. This means that season 8 is the second full season of Doctor Who I have completed for the blog. The first was season 23, Colin Baker's second, the Trial of a Time Lord year; this, I rounded off when its box set came out (see the post on Mindwarp for more details). Comparing these two seasons, it's interesting to notice they both have umbrella themes. Though they're not as often thought of in this way, 1971's stories link together to form one overall story just as much as Trial or 1978's Key to Time season. The decision to include the Master in each one of the five stories of the year has been criticised since, not least by the producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks who made that decision, but who later persuaded themselves they'd taken it too far. After this most recent re-watch, I'm not so sure I agree with them.

The inclusion of the Master is certainly something that wasn't done half-heartedly: Letts and Dicks go all out, committing 100% to the concept. There isn't exactly a paucity of imagination either, with just enough variety injected to keep things fresh: introduce the character in a story where he shares joint billing with a returning foe (Terror of the Autons), give him a full-on story where he is the main villain next (The Mind of Evil), tease our expectations over the next couple of stories (in The Claws of Axos, the Master is a helpless captive at first, and later seems to be helping UNIT more than is the Doctor), and finally round things off with a climactic confrontation where the character is captured (The Daemons). Because it was part of a box set, and to put the story in context, I watched Colony in Space 'in situ' as it were. Over a couple of weeks, I watched all the episodes of the season in order from the beginning, getting out my notebook for the fourth one. In Colony, the twist is that the script holds back, keeping us waiting for exactly when the bearded villainous one will put in an appearance.

During the few weekday evenings on which I viewed the episodes from the Blu-ray, I was mostly on my own, but the youngest two of my children (boy of 11, girl of 8) wandered into the living room occasionally. The elder of the two said of Jon Pertwee's Doctor, after watching the scene where he distracts a native with a magic trick before lamping him, "He's the best Doctor at hitting people on the head". The youngest didn't say anything but did keep coming back in to catch moments of the story and Blu-ray special features when I was watching them later. Ultimately, she requested that we watch The Daemons together, after being intrigued by the trailer on the Colony in Space disc. Accompanied by both her brothers (the eldest a boy of 14), we watched the omnibus version that comes as an extra in the box set. The boys lost interest quite early on, but she stuck it out and gave the story a big thumbs up at the end.

First Time Round:

By the mid-1990s, when the regular monthly releases of the Doctor Who VHS range were firmly established, BBC Worldwide started to use the final release slot before Christmas for something a bit more special than the norm. It could be a boxset of contiguous linked stories (The E-Space Trilogy set in 1997) or stories in special new versions (The Five Doctors in 1995) or stories with which additional material was included (The Ice Warriors, which was accompanied by a documentary about Doctor Who's missing episodes in 1998). By the end of the decade though, with more and more of the Who archive plundered, things got a bit more desperate and they fell back on something that they'd experimented with before in 1993, the 30th anniversary year: sticking a couple of random video cassettes in a tin. In 1999, they paired up the final two previously unreleased Dalek stories; in 2000, the final two Cybermen stories. 2001, the third year of this mopping up exercise, with the end of the range in sight, saw the final tin of the two stories that had not yet seen the light of day featuring Roger Delgado as the Master. It was perhaps not surprisingly called The Master Tin.

It was unfortunate that these two stories - The Time Monster was in the tin alongside Colony in Space - happened to be the two stories consistently found to be the least popular of Delgado's Who work (at least based on all the polls I can find to check online). Not surprising that these should be left to last, but unfortunate nonetheless. Despite knowing full well their reputations, I dutifully purchased the tin on the day of release, 5th November 2011, from the MVC in central Brighton. I then proceeded to watch all twelve episodes as urgently as possible on my own, in order; so, Colony would have been first. It wouldn't have all been on one night, but probably no more than two. Then, I put the videos on my shelf in their correct place, based on chronological ordering by broadcast date, natch, and hid the tin away in a cupboard. All would have been done and dusted before the second week of November got underway. Merry Christmas!

Reaction:

Doctor Who fan opinions do tend to get engrained, or at least they did in the pre-social media days. As communication between fans across the globe has become easier, I now see a more healthy plurality of views abound. Even in the badder older days, though, stories could get re-evaluated that had been damned before. The Pertwee years have found and lost favour, and then found it again, over the many years since the years of Pertwee. Releases such as this season box set are good opportunities for a retrospective, and previous ones may have contributed to that waxing and waning. Certainly a lot of assumed classics or assumed turkeys had some reputational reversals once the episodes were out for all to watch, rather than just being a few photographs and memories. Watching might not be enough on its own, though. As I'll go into in more detail below in the Deeper Thoughts section, which reviews the box set as a whole, I think this is the first time I've ever been close to not just watching the episodes of this season but seeing them, as they were first made and shown and meant to be seen, such is the impact of the restoration effort applied. Of all of the five stories, Colony in Space is probably the one that benefits from this most, as the Beeb's master tapes only exist in 525-line NTSC standard; the process used to revert the pictures to something approaching 625-line PAL for the DVD, though very clever, ultimately was not wholly successful, and the version using different techniques done for the Blu-ray is much better.

One day, new technology might improve things further; if so, I'll no doubt fork out again. As of now, though, with the currently best available versions of Colony's picture and sound available, what is it there to see? The first thing that strikes one is the exterior work. Director Michael E. Briant always gives good quarry, and this is definitely true here, in his first ever directing gig for Doctor Who. The Old Baal clay pit in Cornwall, used generously throughout the six episodes, is a great location with lots of different rock formations and areas that give scope for interesting camera angles, including some high angle shots. The time of year that they filmed also brings some drama, with a waterlogged hand-to-hand combat scene; two fit young men wrestling one another in mud is not something you see in Doctor Who every day. The landscape's all a bit of a dull colour, alas, but that fits the narrative of the planet's soil being polluted by the doomsday weapon's radiation. My previous view of this story has been that its colour palette was a bit drab as a whole, but the latest Blu-ray restoration makes the colour that is there shine through. The lower caste Uxarieans have never been so bright a green, and even the world of the colonist's dome has unexpected flashes of colour in amidst the grey and tan. Briant and the creative team around him add a few nice little details - the vehicles, mining machines, viewing screens and the geodesic dome interiors - to add reality to the Doctor's first off-Earth trip in the colour era.

The story is also not as drab as I have previously felt it to be. Writer Malcolm Hulke's structure is a strong one, borrowing from the land claim subset of Western movies. There's not much in the way of nuance in the colonists versus miners plot, but this isn't a bad thing. Captain Dent and chief henchman Morgan are boo and hiss-able sneering baddies, lying, killing and intimidating their way to achieving their aims. Bernard Kay has a nice role playing the only one with a conscience. It's a neat comment from Hulke on capitalism perhaps that the Interplanetary Mining Corporation crew only has one miner amongst roughly two dozen brutal security staff. The colonists are perhaps less distinct than their opponents: the firebrand one, the earnest leader one, the plucky young girl one. The latter, played by a pre-Coronation Street Helen Worth (she plays Gail in the long-running UK soap opera) leavens the dourness somewhat; it's nice seeing her and Katy Manning in scenes together. It's a shame that Briant had his casting decision to have a woman play the sadistic Morgan vetoed by the sixth floor BBC execs. The other female colonists get killed off or written out early on, and then it's just one group of blokes having periodic shoot-outs or punch ups with another. The Master is brought in relatively late, and his superweapon subplot (teased in the first scene of episode 1) held back until later episodes to give the six-parter a chance to sustain its momentum; but, it doesn't quite manage it.

One problem is that there's too much to and fro between the colonists and the miners, with each group see-sawing in the power structure from low to high and back again, without any sense of escalation until towards the end. To power this, people have to do some idiot moves so the other side can have the whip hand again. Nobody locks their spaceship, or locks up their stash of confiscated guns; colonists trust the person who's clearly an IMC plant; Jo sets off a trip alarm that she's only just been warned about in order to make the entire climactic sequence in the underground city possible. If it weren't for that, the story would finish an episode earlier (no sarcastic comments now!). I wouldn't say, though, that there isn't enough enough here for the narrative to fill six episodes, as there are some scenes that should be here that ain't, scenes the dramatic question of the piece begs.

The first is a scene showing the comeuppance of the main bad guy, Captain Dent, whose fate is left unclear in the broadcast story. The audience has to assume that he's being held somewhere and will face trial when the real Adjudicator arrives. He's been shown to be wily enough that he could escape justice again, though, and could even get the upper hand for IMC once more (imagine that - a 7th episode of Colony in Space!). As such, leaving that loose end dangling damages the story. An even worse omission than that, to my mind, is not showing the self-sacrifice of Ashe. The leader of the colonists is a key character all the way through the story; in the last episode, he pilots the rocket alone, knowing it's going to blow up, in order that the other colonists can survive. The scene isn't shown, but is related later in dialogue, and his daughter - for whom he was the only living relative on the miserable rock that is their new home - doesn't shed a single tear. Another draft to beef those bits up a bit, and maybe introduce a bit more mystery early on (we pretty much know exactly what's going on and that IMC are behind it in the first few minutes of the first episode) and the story would have been much improved, and - dare I say it - could even have achieved some level of greatness.

Other points of note: though UNIT are not part of the story, it's good to see Nicholas Courtney as the Brig cameoing in the first and final parts. It's hard not to feel for the actor as he says the line "Doctor - come back at once..." as there's an implicit "...for the sake of my career!" tacked on the end. This story, only three on from the start of the 'UNIT family' era is the beginning of its end. In subsequent seasons, trips into time and space would increase in number, and stories featuring the Brig and his men would consequently decrease. As part of the same process, Katy Manning gets to travel in the TARDIS, so moves from just being a member of UNIT to being a fully fledged travelling companion, and has her own 'It's bigger on the inside!' moment and everything. Her regular pay cheque, unlike Nick's, was assured. Delgado is his usual charming self, the model work is okay for the most part, the music's good, there are a couple of good lines. "I want to see the universe, not rule it" is a nice distillation of the difference between our hero and the Master. The title of the story may well be stupid as well as bland - the colony is on a planet in space, anything could be said to be "in space" if it's on a planet in space, The Daemons In Space, anyone? - but is nonetheless amusing if one misspells it and it's auto-corrected to "Colonoscopy In Space" as I did in a WhatsApp group chat causing - ooh - sheer minutes of hilarity. Anyway, with everything taken together, this story has lots of interest packed in, and is nowhere near the bore-fest that I assumed it to be before this most recent watch.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature a wee fellah with surprisingly strong mental powers (George in Night Terrors, and the tiny Uxariean Guardian in Colony in Space) who are at risk of killing everybody towards the denouement. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adjudicator's Report: Season 8 Blu-Ray review (but no BFI event, alas). If it weren't for the pandemic, I'd undoubtedly be writing here of a trip to London's South Bank for a BFI showing of the updated version of Terror of the Autons from this box set. If I hadn't managed to get tickets, then one of the usual group - David, or Trevor, or Alan - would have. Chris, the other person who normally attends these events alongside us, also mentioned several times before on this blog, wouldn't perhaps have needed a ticket, and might even have been interviewed on stage by Dick Fiddy or Justin Johnson. For it was the same Chris (Petts) and his partner Sally Clayton that did the CGI and compositing work that made this new version of Terror of the Autons a truly special edition. Their work is perhaps most impressive when you don't notice it. There's lots of green screen backgrounds that have been improved or replaced altogether, and expert smoothing has been done on the 'fringing' joins between the actors in the studio and the image keyed in behind them. These subtle improvements collectively have a transformative effect on the story. The more obvious new material is also great too, of course. All the sequences where the Master's plastic troll doll moves have been replaced with a CGI version that blends in seamlessly with the footage - he's never been so cute nor so sinister. The model and movement for the Nestene creature that appears at the climax was probably an even greater challenge, and what's delivered is great for the few frames it appears, getting close to what those who first read the novelisation saw in their heads (before they were disappointed several years down the line when they finally saw the bit of tinsel that appears in the show as broadcast in 1971). I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the price of the set is worth it just for this version of Terror of the Autons on its own - it's like seeing the story for the first time anew.

A scene from the Season 8 Blu-ray box set trailer

The other episodes without the special edition treatment are nonetheless similarly transformed. Of all the colour seasons, season 8 is the one where the very fewest episodes survive in their original broadcast format. Only three episodes in all, parts 1 and 4 of Claws of Axos, and part 4 of The Daemons, no whole stories. As impressive as the bumper selection of special features included on the discs is, it's the restoration of the episodes that is the biggest draw here for me. As I mentioned above related to Colony In Space, but it goes for all the stories, the work done (not forgetting Mark Ayres' peerless audio work either) makes it as though a gauze has been lifted that previously was between me and the episodes. Technology will of course eventually make a fool of anyone making a statement that these are the best that they could ever be, but just as of right now I believe it is the truth. Every episode in full colour (something that's taken decades of work to achieve) with fluid movement on video and film. It's a veritable miracle, and down to the hard work of some very talented individuals. With minimal remaining issues and artefacts blocking my enjoyment, and watching the season in order as a whole, it has gone up in my estimation enormously.

Another scene from the Season 8 Blu-ray box set trailer

Of those special features, a couple deserve a mention upfront. Matthew Sweet's interview with Katy Manning is more than up to the standards set by his previous interviews for the Blu-ray box sets. I call myself a Doctor Who fan, and I have read and seen dozens of interviews with Katy Manning over the years, but Katy has done so much in her life so far that dozens of interviews couldn't possible contain it all. Hence, I learned a new thing every minute of the running time. I don't know how I'd managed to miss hearing about Katy's very special celebrity childhood friend before now, for example. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't yet watched the interview, and is similarly in the dark. The other big hitter documentary is Terrance and Me, directed by Chris Chapman. This sees Frank Skinner celebrating Terrance Dicks, covering his life and his work including Doctor Who in script and novel form. You won't think before you watch it that you could get a tear in your eye seeing a group of writers talking about their favourite Doctor Who book, or two men in a fish n' chip restaurant toasting using slightly cold chips instead of drinks, or even just a simple panning shot around a working cubby hole whose every wall and surface is covered in books. But you will, trust me. Chapman provides another couple of documentaries where actors or directors revisit filming locations, and they're both as informative and entertaining, but not quite as touching as Terrance and Me. One side effect of my time in lockdown though is that watching all of these I had the same two thoughts rolling round my head. Namely: 'When exactly was this filmed?' and 'They're never two metres apart, are they? Maybe it's the lens, but they look like they are standing too close - tell someone!'

A frame of Frank Skinner in Chris Chapman's Terrance and Me doco

To work through all the material will, as usual, take one about a solid week. Commentaries and special features from the DVDs are included as ever; one of these is Living with Levene, an earlier Chapman doco, where Toby Hadoke spends some days, Louis Theroux style, in the company of Sergeant Benton actor John Levene. It has to be seen to be believed. Warning: you may need to hide behind the sofa. Talking of Behind the Sofa, the ongoing feature of that name, where Doctor Who people do a Gogglebox, is present and correct with some Covid-related tweaks. Former Doctor Who cute couple Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan have to have perspex between them, but current Doctor Who cute couple Anjli Mohindra and Sacha Dhawan don't. The other watching duo, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton, have to have a blanket each rather than share one as they usually do. Elsewhere, there are examples of trails and/or continuities for every story, though they get more difficult to source the further back before the video age the sets go, so are spottily distributed - though nonetheless interesting - here. There's location and studio footage, linked archive material (a fascinating BBC Television Centre studio tour of the period, and a documentary on an archaeological dig that partially inspired The Daemons). My favourite of the archive extras is a convention recording from 1991 of Jon Pertwee doing an Ask Me Anything session; Jon's always a good interviewee, and this covered a lot that I didn't already know.

The first two of the standard edition Blu-ray box sets to be released later this year

My doing any review of these sets seemed pointless until recently, as by the time I'd have written it, the limited edition set would always have sold out. To be honest, that's been true of anyone reviewing or even previewing the sets before now, such is the apparent disparity between demand and supply. There have been reportedly people who pre-ordered the last couple of sets that have been disappointed. There's no chance seemingly of a copy being available after the release date. That's changing, though. The BBC have decided to re-release the sets as standard editions with less deluxe packaging. This has been a long time coming, and is a good move, as ebay scalpers were the only people who can have been happy about the situation as it was. The first couple of seasons originally released are going to be available again in the next couple of months. So, if you haven't got a copy of the Season 8 set, and you liked the sound of it from my review, then just remember that until 2024, and you can snap up a copy. Can't say fairer that that. I'm really performing a public service here, aren't I? Aren't I?!!  

In Summary:

Not perfect, but definitely more fun than a colonoscopy in space.

Terror of the Autons

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

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

First time round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity: 

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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


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

In Summary:

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

The Claws of Axos

Chapter The 120th, where the UK thinks it can go it alone to do a deal, but finds it's difficult and all the potential outcomes are disastrous.

Plot:

A UNIT monitoring station spots a UFO heading for Earth. Meanwhile, UNIT HQ has two visitors, a government official, Chinn, enquiring after the Doctor's immigration status, and Bill Filer from Washington, who's trying to track down the Master. Somehow both of them, even though they have nothing to do with it, end up involved in the UFO investigation alongside our favourite UNIT family: Doctor 3, Jo, Brig, Yates, Benton and the lovable rogue uncle of the family, the Master (who's already on board the UFO, Axos, having brought it to Earth in exchange for his freedom). Despite Chinn's attempts to blow it up, Axos lands in the South East of England. When our heroes enter, the inside is organic and plays psychedelic sounds and film clips on loops, like an alien version of a happening at Andy Warhol's Factory, and just as scary. A family of "Axons" appear and offer the Earth a rare element from their planet called Axonite, that can absorb and transmit energy and make things grow and such like. Despite this not seeming like that big a deal if you ask me, everybody's very keen to get their hands on Axonite (it was the 1970s, and people had to make their own fun, I guess).

Anyway, Chinn wants Axonite exclusively for the UK government, but the Master - released from Axos - leaks the information and it is sent out to various places around the world. It's a trap, of course: Axonite, the ship and the Axons are all part of one parasitic organism that plans to suck all the life out of the Earth, once the distribution of Axos material is sufficiently spread around the globe. With the Doctor and Jo now held by Axos, the Master helps UNIT to destroy the alien. It doesn't work, the Doctor and Jo escape, and the two Time Lords work together to stop Axos. It looks for a while that the Doctor is going to betray the Earth and escape with the Master, but that's just a bluff to keep the bearded naughty one engaged. The real plan is to trap Axos in a time loop. When the Master realises this, he makes a break for it. The Doctor also manages to break free, but finds that his newly working TARDIS can only travel back and forth to Earth, and his exile has to continue.

Context:

Haven't had a lot of time for watching Doctor Who recently, but did manage to find 25 minutes each Sunday, once a week across four weeks, to watch The Claws of Axos. Each time, I was accompanied by all three of the children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). My viewing companions were good value from the off, with the boys describing the funny looking Axos spaceship seen in flight at the beginning as a "flying bone" (younger) and "rubber chicken" (elder). My youngest was a little scared of the monster versions of the Axons, but happy with everything else. By far the most comment, though, was reserved for the character of Pigbin Josh, who stumbles across the ship early on, and gets zapped. It wasn't this that caught their attention, or the strange bumpkin language he mutters under his breath, or his hackneyed and possibly offensive characterisation in general. No, it was before his encounter with the ship, when he stops in the snow to scavenge in a pile of fly-tipped junk for a bike, when he's already got a bike. They talked about that for ages afterwards. It's strange what tiny things can fire their imagination.

First-time round:

Monday 11th May 1992 was a good day to be a Doctor Who fan, but might have been a bit hard on The Claws of Axos. After sporadic releases on VHS in the late 1980s, the turn of the decade saw a burgeoning interest in, and supply of, new titles. It didn't quite make up for the programme no longer being on TV, but it was great to have two stories released on tape every couple of months. And although they were not exactly new, most of them were new to me. On that particular Monday, though, we fans were extra blessed, as we had no less than three new releases to buy. One of them was The Twin Dilemma, yes, but that didn't take away too much of the excitement.

I snapped up all three on the day of release, but even as a layabout skiver with lots of time on my hands as I was then, I couldn't watch them all on that day. Obviously, the first of the three to be viewed was the recently discovered Tomb of the Cybermen. Colin Baker's debut was next in line, despite - because of? - its infamy. This left the final one of the three, which was The Claws of Axos, a little overshadowed. As I remember, myself and my friend Mike - the only person I knew who had a VCR in my first year - only got through the first three episodes of Axos before getting distracted by other things. Before long, the term and the academic year were at an end. I caught up with the final part at home sometime during the long Summer vac, but I don't know if poor Mike ever found out how it concluded.

Reaction:

The Claws of Axos might just be the most archetypal UNIT story ever made. For a start, the full extended family is in place: Doctor, Jo, Master, Brig, Yates, Benton. It's got an Earth Invasion with a twist - the invaders pretend to be nice; yes, it's not the most original twist, but it's there nonetheless! It's got a bumptious government type, a comedy yokel, a research centre with a scientist in conflict with the Doctor, freak weather conditions, and the regular army taking over and imprisoning UNIT partway through. It's only missing a hovercraft to complete the bingo card. It's also early enough - the seventh Pertwee story, and only the third of the "UNIT family" era that started with this season - that nobody wants to mess too much with the formula. One deviation is the inclusion of, presumably, an American UNIT operative (he's introduced as being from Washington HQ rather than a separate agency). This was a broadening out of UNIT to reflect its intended international nature that would not be tried again until Battlefield, over 20 years later. From this point on until then, while it may police global conferences (so many global conferences), we only really get to see the Home Counties England division of the UN's Intelligence Taskforce.

The script was the first from Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a duo of young writers without much experience at the point where they wrote Claws of Axos, but who would go on to become seasoned contributors over many years. Their first script, with no doubt lots of careful midwifery provided by script editor Terrance Dicks, is very strong. Apart from a few tiny moments (in the space of one short section, for example, we establish that the aliens have an intimate knowledge of chameleons, describing Axonite as "the chameleon of the elements", but don't know what a frog is) there's nothing to suggest this story wasn't created by the experienced hacks - in the best kind of way - that Baker and Martin would become.  The main issue is the scale of its ambition, which is a hard quality to fault. It had nothing to do with their being newbies either: right up until their very last scripts for the series, a Baker and / or Martin script could always be recognised by the sheer scale of the events it expected the poor production team to depict within a small studio in Television Centre.

Compared to their subsequent asks - a singularity in the centre of a black hole, say, or a new planet being formed around a spaceship, or the inside of the Doctor's brain - creating an organic space ship that bombards one's senses with technicolour imagery was relatively easy. It's achieved very well by director Michael Ferguson. The Axons in all their forms are very striking, whether appearing as the "golden family" or the very memorable globby tentacled versions that attack UNIT in a couple of sequences choreographed by the HAVOC stunt team. Tiny moments of action are unclear or rushed - at one point, someone does appear to get turned into an Axon-themed duvet - but mostly the visuals are very visual, and the effects are effective.

Another thing I've never noticed before, and which may have been a result of the inexperience of the writers, is that the opening of The Claws of Axos is pretty much a shot-by-shot recreation of  Spearhead from Space: a model scene of an object approaching Earth, then cut to a UNIT monitoring station manned by two uniformed staff, a local stumbling across the object as it comes to ground... It may be coincidence, of course, but there's lots of scenes throughout that also parallel Pertwee's debut (the fight between aliens and UNIT troops in an industrial complex is another good example). Perhaps the writers were reassuring themselves by emulating something that had worked well from the year before. Where the script breaks from that template, though, is where it is most successful: in the last couple of episodes, Roger Delgado's silky, amoral Master takes centre stage, working with UNIT as a substitute Doctor when the latter is trapped inside Axos. Then, he and Pertwee get the first opportunity to play a sustained sequence together in the later sections where we suspect that the Doctor might have gone rogue and aligned himself with his fellow Time Lord. Great stuff.

Connectivity: 

This is the hardest connection to make so far, I think. Because of the previous story's spin-off nature, they don't even have the Doctor or the TARDIS as a link. K9 and Company is set in a fictional village probably in the Cotswolds; The Claws of Axos is set in a fictional power station probably near Dungeness. Those areas, both with a strong Middle England Pertweeshire aura, are really not that geographically close, though, so I don't suppose that counts. That leaves me only with the desperate assertion that they both feature someone who knows the Doctor and UNIT. It'll have to do.

Deeper Thoughts:

Baker Bob and Oscar. One of the two writers of The Claws of Axos, Bob Baker, gained kudos later in his career for being in a different two man writing team. He co-authored with Nick Park the scripts for all the Wallace and Gromit shorts from The Wrong Trousers onwards (and also co-wrote the feature-length W&G movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as part of a larger writing team). Two of these shorts - Trousers and A Close Shave - won Academy Awards for best animated short, and Were-Rabbit also won in 2010 for best animated feature. A third short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, which has a cameo from an in-jokily named character called Baker Bob, was nominated but didn't win. Out of all the cast or crew of Doctor Who over the years, Bob Baker is therefore the person connected to the biggest Oscar haul. He isn't on any list of Oscar winners, though, as the categories mentioned are awarded to the producers of the films, but - you know - he was one of the writers, the people without whom the winning films would just be blank pieces of paper, so I'm letting him have it rather than get hung up on technicalities.

It's even more impressive for being so rare. Doctor Who is a long-running show that has been blessed with some very talented individuals both in front of the cameras and behind, but as a UK show it's perhaps not surprising that this hasn't translated into too many careers later gaining golden statuettes from Hollywood. Just under Bob Baker in the chart (or in the lead if you do want to get hung up on technicalities and somehow think that films write themselves by magic, grumble, grumble) is the mighty Jim Acheson, who has won the Academy Award for Costume Design no less than three times. He also designed some of the most memorable costumes for Who including the Mutts from The Mutants, the Giant Robot from Robot, and the magnificent Time Lord costumes from The Deadly Assassin (used and reused, but never altered, for decades afterwards). With no wish to slight Bob Baker, one probably didn't think watching his Doctor Who stories go out that the he'd one day be writing scripts for award-winning things. Acheson, though, always stood out as talented, and one might have forecast such future plaudits in his case. But everyone's go to start somewhere, and we fans are blessed to have had both their inputs into our favourite show.

Beyond that, though, there's not a lot. Many one-off guest crew and actors have gone on to be lauded stateside, but we can't claim any ownership of someone like Olivia Colman, say. She's been in everything, anyway, and her cameo appearance in The Eleventh Hour was not the best use of of her talents (Steven Moffat recently went on record as regretting not using her better). Of all stories, it is 2003 online animated curio The Scream of the Shalka that has the best record for regular cast with both Doctor (Richard E. Grant) and companion (Sophie Okonedo) being acting Oscar nominees. Derek Jacobi, who played the Master in that story, has had Golden Globe and International Emmy nods too. It doesn't really count, though, as Shalka was never developed into a regular series, so they're still essentially one-offs (though each member of those three has appeared as a different character in subsequent stories).

One final honourable mention goes to the person who garnered an Academy Award for best live action short with "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life" in 1993. Surprisingly, he was the writer and director rather than the star, as he was mostly known before and since for acting. The winner in this instance was a fellow by the name of Peter Capaldi. Now, whatever happened to him?

In Summary:

Ambitious, archetypal and very 1970s, but pretty good for all that.

The Mind of Evil

Chapter The 69th, which is miraculously in colour throughout.

Plot: 
Lots is happening simultaneously: a) the Doctor and Jo are visiting Stangmoor Prison for a demonstration of a new - and clearly evil - convict rehabilitation device that sucks all the criminal impulses from the inmates; b) the Brig is handling security for a London-hosted world peace conference; c) Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton are managing the convoy to take a dangerous missile off for decommissioning. Finally, d) the Master is planning to use (a) to capture (c) and use it to threaten (b). He doesn't pull it off, but along the way he does manage a prison riot and makes everyone hallucinate a pink dragon. Just an average day then for the men and women of UNIT: action, adventure, mind parasites. So, why not try out for a career in the army? Talk to a recruiter today, etc. etc.

Context:

The Mind of Evil is a rare treat in that, while it may not be spectacular (unlike the same writer's script from the previous year, Inferno, it doesn't exactly set the world alight - ho ho), it is nonetheless competently put together and entertaining throughout, and crucially - for this viewer, at least - has not been watched so regularly that it's become over-familiar. It's the equivalent of, say, Baby You're a Rich Man by The Beatles. She Loves You is more popular, and Strawberry Fields Forever is more interesting, but I've heard them each a hundred times, just as I've often seen, say, The Ark in Space or Kinda. But Baby You're a Rich man, a B-side slapped on a compilation, or The Mind of Evil - six episodes of previously black and white mid-season Pertwee - still have the quality of freshness. And this is even more so for the latter now that it has colour returned to it (more on that later). Because of this, and because it's six episodes, which the kids and the Better Half usually think is too much, I saved this for myself and watched the first few episodes from the DVD on my own. But everyone else popped in and watched later sections of it here and there, the Better Half and middle child (boy of 8) particularly enjoying what they saw.

First-time round: 

I first saw this story when it came out on VHS in May of 1998. It must have been around a bank holiday (probably Whitsun) as I remember not having anything else to do that day but watch two and a half hours of black and white seventies TV with my university mate Phil, who's been mentioned a few times before on the blog, and who by this time was living down South too a few years after we'd graduated, a short time after he'd finished his PhD. Because they were cheap, I bought a big box of Boddingtons Bitter for us to consume while watching, and because of this I always associate The Mind of Evil with the distinctive yellow cans and bloated feeling. Phil, a proud Yorkshireman, must have put aside prejudice for the sake of thirst in order to drink a Lancastrian brew for a day. This instigated a few years of our meeting up regularly for alcohol-fuelled Doctor Who and film evenings whenever a new DVD came out. Happy days. Happy bleary days.

Reaction:

The Mind of Evil is the story that seems to create single-handedly the impression that many people held and still hold that Jon Pertwee's is the James Bond influenced era of Doctor Who. Nothing of his before or after this, despite many a stunt or vehicular chase, is particularly Bondesque. Up to now, Pertwee's era has shared more ancestry with Quatermass, which I think is in many ways the antithesis of Ian Fleming's famous creation, despite them both being products of the 1950s. But the Master here, in his cigar chomping, wire-tapping saloon-car chauffeured, high-concept international scheming, is very much the Bond villain; there's also a femme fatale, and gadgets and explosions aplenty. The Chinese characters add some international mystique, but there's not much in the way of globe-trotting to glamorous locales (the furthest they get is a hanger on a deserted airfield near Stanham). But just like a Bond film, there's a lot happening to keep the audience from stopping to think how silly it is.

The Master never likes a straightforward plan, that became very obvious early on in my random shuffling adventures when I stumbled across any Master story for the blog. Here, though, he has two relatively (at least for him) sane plots, but he's clearly decided to do both at the same time to liven things up a bit. The first plan is to hijack a missile to threaten a peace conference and thereby take over the world; the second is to use a nasty alien disguised as a machine to infiltrate a prison and then, well, take over a prison. Why does he want to take over a prison as well as the whole world? It's not clear. It may be to use the prisoners as guns for hire, which he indeed does. Though, there's got to be risks there that his workforce will scarper; the Better Half kept shouting at the screen comments along the lines of "They've escaped from prison, why are they going back in to prison?!" and she has a point. Anyway, the Master has already hired a separate band of disguised mercenaries, so he doesn't need the prisoners. Pulling on this thread only leads one to the terrible conclusion that the Master doesn't need the Keller machine alien at all. He only needs the missile to achieve his goals, and he gets that using old-fashioned bugging not parasitic mind control. He seems only to have included a monster as he knows its expected.

One would want to rewrite to make sense of things better rather than get rid of the Keller machine from the story, of course - it's a wonderful creation, and shows that clever direction can get malevolence out of even the most static prop; the throbbing radiophonia that accompanies it is magnificent too. The script risks the machine's overuse, perhaps: many cliffhangers and interim climax scenes revolve around someone collapsing as it vision-mixes in their greatest fears (including a dragon for the US ambassador - sure it might be a metaphorical symbol of his fear of communism, but it does look like he's got a morbid fear of cardboard dragons, which is odd to say the least), but they just about get away with it.

Dover Castle is a good location for the prison exteriors, and the interior sets are good too; it gets noisy when all the inmates shout as they're affected by the machine, but it's very real. The cast is populated with believable characters played by believable character actors: Michael Sheard, Neil McCarthy and William Marlowe are all excellent doing their audition pieces for coming back in bigger roles in the Tom Baker era. The material's taken seriously, individual deaths are given weight, and the verisimilitude of details like the reading of rights to the inmate condemned to the machine treatment works to give it heft and import. The regulars all shine with lots of stuff to do, and there's only the smallest bits of smug Pertwee behaviour here and there. Jo is great, one story in: compassionate, solid and competent, and not doing idiot moves just to serve the plot. Like many a companion, she was only as good as whoever was writing for her that week.

Connectivity: 

Both The Mind of Evil and Robot are crash-bang-wallop UNIT extravaganzas; both feature as antagonists a group of people with a mechanical device that nonetheless has a mind of its own, who - though they have an ostensibly noble purpose - want to use it to hold the world to ransom. Plus, in both stories, one of the UNIT team does some intelligence work, but gets knocked out.

Deeper Thoughts:
I'm fairly sure that's Chroma. Yes, watching The Mind of Evil could be a prompt for an in-depth treatise on crime and punishment, and musings on whether justice can ever be obtained in a world of conflict. But I'm instead going to muse about Doctor Who on VHS and DVD. Again. The story's script anyway uses those lofty themes only as window dressing, it's not deep; that it, and all the Jon Pertwee stories, are available to view in colour is much more interesting. When I first became a Doctor Who obsessive and was reading Doctor Who Magazine in the early 1980s, it coincided with the news stories about the final lost Pertwee episodes turning up. Unlike his two predecessors, who still had dozens of episodes left to find at that point, and have only slightly less missing now, Pertwee was complete. Sort of. Though his era was represented with moving image from beginning to end, a lot of those images were still missing one key ingredient: colour. The majority of the Doctor Who episodes that have ever been recovered exist because copies were sold abroad, and black-and-white film was a much more portable and compatible medium to the foreign TV stations in the early 1970s, when those sales were made, than was either colour VT or colour film.

There were as such several greyscale gaps in the Third Doctor's spectrum, and that's how it stayed for a decade. These were, in transmission order, as follows: all of Doctor Who and the Silurians, most of The Ambassadors of Death, all of The Mind of Evil, most of The Daemons, and one episode each of Planet of the Daleks and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Now, even back then there were artificial colourisation techniques that vandals inflicted on old Hollywood movies never intended to be seen in colour. These were expensive processes, though, and out of the budget of BBC Video. But, a lot of people working at the BBC or in video technology are clever nerds who like Doctor Who, so it wasn't so long before new technology and techniques were being developed. The first breakthrough occurred with The Daemons. It involved taking an inferior colour video recording and merging it with the black-and white film, to produce a broadcast standard version. This was then subsequently applied successfully to Doctor and The Silurians, and bits of The Ambassadors of Death. The colour recording of the latter story didn't cover everything, so when it was released on VHS in 2002 (late on in the range's life, as the team working on restoring on the releases were probably holding out to see if they could somehow improve things), the picture went in and out of colour like The Wizard of Oz or my consciousness after too many cans of Boddingtons.

There wasn't any significant amount of recorded colour material from the missing bits of any of the other three stories, so the process could not be applied to them. Mind of Evil, as we have seen, was released on VHS in black and white, and the other two stories as a mixture. This was also the case for Planet of the Daleks when it was repeated on BBC1 in 1993 as part of the 30th anniversary celebrations: episode 3 was broadcast in black-and-white with a brief explanation beforehand, which seems amazing now. In time for its DVD release, though, another technological marvel had come about, indistinguishable (at least to me) from magic: they could pull the colour information out of the black and white film. Shazam!

It turns out, when the original monochrome film recordings were made, if the technician didn't do it quite properly, some slight interference was introduced, and burnt into the film forever. These are 'chroma dots'. And using some serious computer data crunching, and lots of remedial picture work afterwards, the clever nerds could derive and re-add the correct colour from these patterns. Isn't that cool? Planet of the Daleks was already planned for release with an artificially colourised part 3 (the technology had got cheaper by then, but it was still only possible due to the dollar exchange rate being favourable enough at the time to employ a US firm). In the end, the results of the chroma dot process were merged with the colourised version, and the result is near indistinguishable from the real thing. Invasion of the Dinosaurs episode 1 just had the chroma dot process applied and was less successful, but perfectly watchable. And Ambassadors of Death finally had its gaps filled in with the magic crayons of applied maths.

That left The Mind of Evil, which many had assumed would never ever get a colour release. With six whole episodes, it was a mammoth undertaking. Additionally, the first episode had no chroma dots - the technician had for once done his job properly. But colourisation was by then possible for an individual with the right kit and some more clever techniques (in this case, it was the supremely talented Stuart Humphryes - check out his youtube channel, he posts as Babelcolour). This meant that colour could be added to episode 1, while the chroma dot method was used to complete the remaining episodes. The DVD finally came out in June of 2013, Doctor Who's anniversary year. I love that it exists as a celebration of the cleverness and hard work of the artists and technicians that worked on it, and the sheer dumb prosaic happenstance of a no-doubt overworked guy in the 1960s not flipping the right switch on his console when making some recordings of that kid's science fiction programme. It seems like a perfect metaphor for all the ingredients, good and not so good, that make Doctor Who special.

In Summary:

Baby, You're a Rich Man with occasional slightly bloated feeling.