Night Terrors

Chapter The 184th, Little George Tenza's Night of Terrors.

Plot:

Answering a message, seemingly from a young child, that somehow travelled through the universe into the TARDIS and arrived on the psychic paper, The Doctor, Amy and Rory visit a block of flats in an unspecified area of the UK in 2011. They split up to knock on doors looking for the sender. Amy and Rory use the lift, but it malfunctions, lurching downwards. They wake up to find themselves in an odd mansion house, being chased by life-size peg doll creatures. They should have worked out that they're in a dolls' house quite easily, but it takes them ages to twig. Meanwhile, the Doctor has located the child that sent the cry for help, George, who's alone with his Dad Alex in their flat. George is afraid of everything and - because he's really an alien that's got god-like powers - this is causing issues for lots of people around, including Amy and Rory. George is a Tenza, a cuckoo-like creature that assimilated itself into the lives of Alex and his partner Claire responding to their need for a baby that they could not have themselves. The Doctor realises that George has attachment issues, so he gets Alex to hug him and love conquers all: all the nearby residents, plus Amy and Rory, are returned from the dolls' house in George's bedroom cupboard (where his adoptive parents had told the young Tenza to put anything that scared him). 

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) on a Sunday afternoon. I don't know what it would take to encourage the Better Half to rejoin us for these viewings but she's not interested at the moment. The media-savvy kiddos anticipated much of how the plot was going to play out, more or less, with comments such as "Is he, like, an alien?" referring to George (and that was before the opening credits), and "The monsters in his head are coming to life!" and "They're being pulled into his nightmares". The youngest, who's the same age as George in the narrative, astutely asked "If he's that scared, why doesn't he switch his light on?". This is a very good point, and reminded me that George is 'TV series eight years old' which doesn't really relate to how a child of eight behaves in the real world. They have more agency, in my experience at least, than is depicted here, with George not consciously doing anything for himself in the story except for whimpering. He's really an alien, though, and projecting back the expectations of adults who wanted but could not have a child, so if he doesn't get it quite true to life, it's somewhat excusable.

First Time Round:

I have trouble remembering watching most of the stories in the Matt Smith era. I would have watched this on or slightly after its initial broadcast in early September 2011, and - as best as I can recall - felt vaguely dissatisfied. Anyway, as I have started to do lately in such circumstances, let me tell an anecdote unconnected to a particular Doctor Who story. It's a generally difficult time for one's mental health living through the latest Covid-19 lockdown in the UK; I have to console myself  on occasion that I'm lucky to be here at all; this is the story of how - on New Year's Eve 1985 - I died. Whenever I told the tale thereafter, I would always make the beginning as dramatic as possible by wording it thus, as Russell T Davies later did for the beginning of Army of Ghosts. Like Rose in that story, though, I didn't really die. I stopped breathing for a while and was resuscitated in hospital. As I mentioned in a recent festive reminiscence, by 1985 my parents were divorced, and my sister and I would spend Christmas with Mum, and New Year with Dad; he was living in Bognor Regis, and in later years I would find a lot of VHS releases in the shops when going to visit him. At that point, though, I had only just entered the video age. In the late autumn, my Mum had purchased our first VCR, which had allowed me to catch both the big Christmas day shows even though they clashed: ITV's Minder of the Orient Express, and the BBC's Only Fools and Horses special, To Hull and Back.

Doctor Who wasn't on TV over the festive period back then; in fact, it wasn't on TV at all. December 1985 was in the middle of the so-called 'hiatus', the roughly 18 month period after Doctor Who had been very nearly cancelled, when the production team were scrambling to plan a slightly different version of the show. The most recent Doctor Who story had been in August of 1985 when a radio story, Slipback, was broadcast, but I'd missed that. The next season would start in the autumn of 1986, and I'd make full use of the VCR to record those episodes to keep for always. At the end of 1985, Dad didn't yet have a VCR, but New Years TV wasn't normally that great. The three of us had watched the 1970s film Willa Wonka and the Chocolate Factory go out on BBC2. I was feeling a bit under the weather, my asthma troubling me, and went to bed eschewing watching the Whistle Test end of the year jamboree that would have taken us on past midnight. My sister was worried about me, and read to me for a while as I lay in bed. She then saw my face was turning blue ("like Violet Beauregarde"). The next thing I remember was waking up on a gurney in a hospital in Chichester.

I was on my own at first. My Dad and sister weren't there, as they hadn't accompanied me in the ambulance. Mum - who also travelled to the hospital in a rush that evening but also hadn't yet arrived - later tore a strip off my Dad for not coming with me, but he'd thought it would be too traumatic for my sister, then only 10, who had nobody else to look after her. With no one around to talk to the hospital staff at that crucial moment, I'll never really know exactly how close run a thing it was, but I was well looked after, and a few days into the new year, I was home. With the single-mindedness of youth, all thoughts of my mortality were ignored and I instantly reignited that early flirtation with video, catching up on the things I'd set to record while I was at my Dad's. If things had gone a different way, though, I would never have developed the enduring relationship with recorded archive media that I've honed since, and would never have started the VHS collection that would help me to experience every Doctor Who story. And this blog wouldn't exist, which would be a terrible shame, wouldn't it? (Don't all shout at once!) 

Reaction:

Forgive me those who think it's not a subject that should be broached, but in order to talk about Night Terrors, I need to talk about Fear Her. As discussed in my blog post on the story in 2018, Fear Her is the fans' new series whipping boy, usually coming at the bottom of polls, and a watchword for the nadir that the show can produce (just as The Twin Dilemma is for the classic series). As I said three years ago, I think this is unfair. It's not a perfect story by any means, but it has some great moments, and got perfectly acceptable ratings and appreciation scores when it first went out. Night Terrors is a more forgettable but more respectable mid-table placement, despite being exactly the same story as Fear Her. An ordinary looking child going through family difficulties manifests this through alien superpowers, making people in their neighbourhood disappear; in order to stop this, the child needs to feel loved and protected by their parent. What went so wrong in Fear Her that Night Terrors supposedly got right? The child actor performance is stronger in Night Terrors; Jamie Oram does well. A bad performance from the person playing George would have sunk the story. But it's not so many light years away from what Abisola Agbaje managed in Fear Her in terms of quality. It's an incremental improvement not the difference between night and day, and there are still a few awkward moments in the 2011 story.   

The other major embarrassment for fans watching Fear Her is where it overreaches by going big. There are only a few such moments, but they certainly leave an impression: the attempt to convey an entire stadium of people vanishing, the Doctor grabbing up the Olympic torch and lighting the flame, the heavy emphasis on a universal love required at the end to save the day. Night Terrors plays it much safer, and smaller (metaphorically and literally with scenes of our heroes miniaturised in a dolls' house). Instead of a mass love-in, it's just one Dad and his son, instead of a global disaster scenario, we have chamber horror: scenes of characters creeping around a dark enclosed locale, pursued by strange monsters. It's a safer bet for Doctor Who, being something that is easier to achieve than the aforementioned scenes in the earlier story. Is it better, though, not to aim big? Essentially, Night Terrors is just Fear Her with the lights turned down. And, though this approach might avoid some issues, it creates a few more. Gatiss has gone on record that the germ of the idea for this story came from his fear of dolls, and peg dolls in particular. The horror subplot with dolly antagonists, though, doesn't gel very well with a more grounded tale about one family sorting out their issues.

The way the script links the two incompatible-seeming strands is through the interface of god-like powers. Tenzas are explicitly confirmed by the script as able to assimilate themselves into any familial situation, and create massive psychic fields to prevent detection. They also appear able to telekinetically hijack lift mechanisms, create some kind of creature or force out of bin bags, make a person sink into a solid floor, miniaturise people, forcibly move people against their will, and turn people into dolls. It's possible but not spelled out that a lot of those scenarios may just be induced hallucinations. Are Amy and Rory really in a plummeting lift and scary dolls' house, or do they just think they are? It would be more consistent with a creature able to manipulate people's perceptions that it would be the latter; if it is, though, where are Amy and Rory physically while this is happening in their heads? Still in the lift? Possibly. The trouble is that's very close to "it was all a dream" for the stakes to mean very much. If we assume the threat is real, and Amy and Rory and the others have been physically transported (and the scene of Alex and the Doctor being pulled into George's bedroom cupboard does suggest this), then it's just as bad: if George is so powerful, and can do anything, is there truly any jeopardy for him? And, if there isn't, why should we care? 

The story seems to be pushing us to care by reflection of a family, and family worries, a grounded concept with which most of the audience can empathise; most of us have families, and have family worries at one time or another. The tone is so unreal, though, that it gets in the way of this empathy. Unlike Fear Hear's attempt (and your mileage may vary as to the success of the attempt, but it is clearly the intention) to create a normal-seeming domestic suburban setting for the story, even the scenes in Night Terrors in the quote unquote real world are stylised and starkly lit. George's life, even when he's not traumatised with out of control powers impacting everything and everyone around him, is a horror film. The Doctor leaves pretending it's a happy ending, but the family still has money worries, with an aggressive Dickensian cliché of a rent collector ready to come round again and demand his money (played by Andrew Tiernan, by the way, who's so wasted in this that I forgot he'd appeared in Doctor Who at all, though the scene where he moans about Bergerac still being on TV is fun). If irony or brutal realism was the point, it would be acceptable in a 'life's like that' way, but it's not. The story is set up as a fairy tale, but it doesn't have a conclusive happy ending.  

Connectivity: 

This is a toughie. Both stories see the Doctor and his friends searching for a specific person around whom the story revolves (George in Night Terrors, Davros in Destiny of the Daleks); both also feature at least one mention of the word Dalek (Mark Gatiss riffing on Gallifreyan bedtime stories has Matt Smith mention "The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes"). That's about it 

Deeper Thoughts:

Bad Dad Syndrome. Now I'm almost as old as my Dad was in 1985 and a father myself, I wonder what I would do in the circumstances of that New Year's Eve (see First Time Round section above for more details). He didn't have a car, and was looking after two children, one of whom needed to go to hospital for emergency treatment. There was no neighbour that he could have left my young sister with, he didn't know anyone well enough (and they may have been out anyway, it being New Year's Eve). His choice was to accompany me in the ambulance, taking her too, or to leave me to the professionals, look after my sister and sort something else out. It's hard for me to put myself in his shoes, as I'm together with the Better Half rather than on my own, but I think if I were him I would have insisted on going in the ambulance, and taken my sister along too. She would have got bored overnight in a hospital, yes, but that's better than leaving someone on their own when they are being treated in a hospital as an emergency. He chose instead to contact my mother, who was on her own, though further from the hospital, and had a car. She came along urgently that evening (and Dad probably would have guessed that she would do just that). I was told for many years after the divorce by my Mum that he was a bad father, and this was just one piece of evidence to add to many others for her. I'm not here, though, to excuse or condemn him. Parenthood is just a series of decisions, and one can't get them all right. Like anyone, I'm far from being a perfect parent and have made lots of mistakes.

In Doctor Who, the challenges of parenthood, and particularly fatherhood, became a theme picked up on in the early years of the 21st century series, after never having troubled the writers in the classic series years at all. This reflected changes in the wider world of dramatic works, of course, but for a few years it did feel like 'Bad Dad syndrome' was the province of Doctor Who. As well as Night Terrors and Fear Her, there are a few other stories in the first few years of the new series, like Father's Day, The Idiot's Lantern and The Curse of the Black Spot. Every one of the Russell T Davies era female companions is shown to have a father who's feckless or ineffectual too. It was probably a coincidence rather than a deliberate theme, but it did get noticed. I remember it being picked up and debated online at the time. Though the stories for a while after 2011 seemed to leave the theme alone, it came back with a vengeance in 2018, with Ryan's issues with his Dad becoming an arc plot that took a whole series plus a special to resolve. An interesting factor, though, of the brevity of the storytelling in rounding off a story in 45 minutes or so is that fatherhood is reduced to grand gestures rather than that unending series of small decisions.

Again, this is not a flaw restricted to Doctor Who, but does seem magnified in my favourite show because it has to cram aliens and excitement into those 45 minutes too. The reality of parenthood wouldn't necessarily make good TV, certainly not genre TV, but the alternative approach is over- simplistic to say the least. In Night Terrors, Alex just has to hug his child and say a few words to make everything all right. It's maybe not so bad here as Alex hasn't actually done anything that bad in the first place. He's made a slightly careless remark that George has overheard and that's caused an unlikely and overblown trauma (the Doctor jokes about how George will cope with puberty; on this evidence it'll be seismic). The other stories, though, follow mostly the same pattern, and the difference is just degree - Ryan's Dad just has to get taken over by a Dalek in exchange for forgiveness. Even if we excuse any specific work, collectively and cumulatively these kind of stories in western media let male parents off the hook too much, I think. Again, this might be indicative of real life, where males do seem to be held to a less high standard. In parenting, and in all else, men have to try harder. Don't say "Not all men" either. No matter how good or not we already are, we can and should keep trying to be better. We just shouldn't use Doctor Who stories as any how-to guide for parenting, that's all.

In Summary:

I prefer Fear Her, if I'm honest.

Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.

Smith and Jones

Chapter The 182nd, where Martha loves the Doctor to the moon and back. Unrequitedly.

Plot:

Present day. Medical student Martha Jones goes to work at a London hospital while fielding multiple calls from her family about her brother's party that evening. A strange thin bloke in a long coat wearing sand shoes steps in her way on route and says something about his tie. When she arrives at the hospital for work, the strange bloke with the sandshoes is a patient, John Smith (actually the Doctor, but you knew that); he claims not to have been out of bed when Martha saw him that morning. Then, the rain falling around the hospital starts moving upwards and the whole building is transported to the moon, neutral territory where a group of rhino-faced alien police for hire, the Judoon, can search the hospital for an intergalactic criminal who's in hiding. This criminal is a Plasmavore, who is posing as a patient, a harmless looking old lady called Florence Finnegan. The Judoon are scanning everyone for non-human physiology, but as Florence has drained and assimilated the blood of a senior consultant, she registers as human. This leaves the Doctor in a difficult position as the only alien on the moon.

Avoiding capture by the Judoon, the Doctor and Martha track down Florence, who is upgrading an MRI machine into a weapon of mass destruction. The Doctor tricks her into draining his blood, meaning when the Judoon find her, and - at Martha's insistence - scan her again, she shows up as an alien and is executed. The Judoon troop off, not dealing with the out of control MRI machine or the lack of remaining air. Martha revives the Doctor with her medical training, and he stops the MRI. As everyone starts to collapse from lack of oxygen, the Judoon reverse the process and the hospital is returned to its original position back on Earth. Later, Martha leaves her brother's party to see the Doctor outside, standing next to a police box. He explains to Martha that it's a time machine, and pops back into her timeline and shows her his tie to demonstrate. Persuaded, she joins him for a trip...

Context:

Watched on a recent Sunday afternoon from the DVD accompanied by the whole family (Better Half, and three kids - boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). Everyone stayed for the duration and watched intently without a peep. The story clearly held everyone's attention, young and old, as it was built to do. This means I have no amusing sarky comments to reproduce here, alas. Later in the week, the Better Half and I were prompted by this watch to discuss Tennant, and how during this period he had a performance tic of gritting his teeth a lot to demonstrate anger, defiance, frustration, you name it, but he doesn't really display that in Smith and Jones, and he's got over this habit in more recent years. So, essentially, we can't fault this story (try as we might!).

First time round:

I first saw this on its debut BBC1 broadcast on the 31st March 2007. I was taking a brief career break from the day job to work on screenwriting at that time, so was probably more relaxed and energised through not having to do the punishing commute to London every day. A few months later, I would return to that routine. This was necessitated by my not having a laptop with which to work from home, as that was something still very new, culturally and technically, in 2007. Later in that year I would get my first work laptop, which I had to share with other people on the team, as there were only a couple to go round. It's worthwhile to remember these details when considering the Doctor Who of the time. In some ways, it feels like David Tennant stopped playing the Doctor very recently, but Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK when Smith and Jones was broadcast. I noticed that some of the CGI work of the hospital on the moon was a bit ropey, but I have to cut the story some slack: there were barely smartphones or broadband in 2007, and working at home with a laptop was seen as the futuristic bleeding edge. The gap between then and now is the same as comparing the production values of a William Hartnell story like The Gunfighters to a late Tom Baker one such as The Leisure Hive.

In a break from the recent tradition, Doctor Who's new series was being shown the week before Easter in 2007 rather than launching on Easter weekend itself. Nonetheless, we had people staying over at our place in Hove. The family at the time consisted only of myself, the BH and the eldest (who was not yet a year old at the time). We were joined by a few people mentioned many times before on the blog, Phil, Alex and Rachel. I was, even by my standards, inordinately excited. I showed everyone a red button extra on freeview of a long season trailer, which had some tantalising glimpses from later episodes in the run, and all day Phil and I, before the others arrived, had done a marathon watch of one story per Doctor from 1 to 9 to build up to the broadcast. The story was as generally crowd-pleasing for our 2007 group as it was for the family's latest watch. 

Reaction:

The end of Smith and Jones is a lovely example of action adventure writing, with multiple elements that have been established during the story coming together to create an climax of escalating obstacles - the Plasmavore is defeated and the Judoon are leaving the moon because of the Doctor's cleverness but it's left him almost dead; Martha revives the Doctor, but the hospital's MRI machine has been set to overload threatening the Earth; he manages to avert this and the Judoon take off, but the hospital is still on the moon and everyone in it is running out of air. Setting up all these elements - all of them fun and wonderfully realised, and I'll talk about them individually in a moment - and having them interact and play out satisfactorily to this conclusion would be more than enough to keep the audience delighted, but author of the story Russell T Davies also finds time in 45 minutes to establish a new companion and their family, and reiterates the format of the show for anyone tuning in for the first time. At no time, though, does the action seem too rushed or the elements too bitty and not coherent. Writing Doctor Who is a very specific skill, and is quite hard to pull off even for a writer Davies's calibre. Having written many episodes, including the series openers, for the last two years, he's clearly getting better at it, as some of the flaws of those earlier stories have been eliminated.

Probably the most enduring creation first showcased in this story are the Judoon. Since Smith and Jones they have become a recurring monster for the series, popping up most recently in a couple of episodes of the 2020 Jodie Whittaker series. They are visually interesting, in a deliberately immediate and obvious fashion: space rhinos! The mask and the facial movement are impeccably done too. Beyond that, they have an interesting motivation as police for hire. They aren't exactly bad guys, just a bit aggressive and heavy-handed. The nearest the series had come to such a monster before was probably the Ogrons, who featured in some Jon Pertwee stories, but they were mercenaries who just fulfilled the role of henchmen, a much more common genre favourite. The Judoon are something different, tapping into the fear - at least for Brits, anyway - of police from another country who have actual guns and follow slightly different rules. In Smith and Jones, a couple of UK character stereotypes you can imagine appearing drunk interacting with the local police in a documentary about Brits in Ibiza or the like - the slightly posh ineffectual man, the hot-head - fall foul of these cops from another galaxy. There's also scope for some nice jokes about bureaucracy, like Martha getting a form to claim compensation for wrongful arrest.

As the main alien monsters aren't exactly baddies, this leaves room for there to be other villains in the piece. The Slabs (solid leather creatures that look like black-helmeted motorcycle couriers) fulfill that Orgon henchmen role admirably - though the joke about them being from Planet Zovirax, based on a TV commercial of the time, has not dated well - but the Big Bad here is Florence the Plasmavore. Another of Doctor Who's many takes on a vampire creature, the script uses the blood-drinking in service of the plot to allow for a couple of reversals where Florence is able to pretend to be something she's not and avoid detection. What raises the role from just being plot device is a magnificent performance from Anne Reid. There's just so many great choices I couldn't list them all, but to pick one, there's the delicate and precise way she lifts her hand up to the light and admires the mark the Judoon has put there meaning she's in the clear. Any actor playing a genre villain in something like Who is treading a fine line, and it's easy to fall into something that is too broad or too camp; Reid walks the line, clearly relishing the challenge, and never strays too far from it. The other main guest star is Roy Marsden, who also does good work in a more thankless role, an element of misdirection. He's supposed to look like an imposing menace in counterpoint to Reid's little old lady, only to be revealed to be the victim. Before he dies, though, he gets a nice little moment looking through a window at the surface of the moon and musing on his life.

Other small roles are done well; the creature performers are excellent, and Tennant is on good form. The weakest link is unfortunately incoming new regular Freema Agyeman. She's a good performer, but just not quite strong enough to take on such an important role. The series had got very lucky with Billie Piper, and the following year would cast an experienced actor in Catherine Tate; the companions in this era are, like it or not, joint leads, and so the person cast has to be capable of carrying the show on their own. Freema is not. It's a shame, as the characterisation is interesting on paper. It might, though, have been hard for any actor to pull it off, as a questionable choice has been made to make the relationship between Martha and the Doctor one of unrequited love on her side, and complete obliviousness of his friend's feelings on his. It doesn't do either character any favours. Without having the time to establish a proper meaningful attraction, her feelings just seem to come out of nowhere. Without a confidant for Martha to talk to the Doctor about, the only way to keep foregrounding her feelings is for her to drop obvious hints to the audience. All told it's not one of the best decisions made during this period, and the pair of them are at their best when it's forgotten about as it mostly is in this first story; when Martha's being a resourceful person helping out the Doctor, auditioning for the companion role, it works. One other thing that you can level at the story is that there's no heft: it isn't tackling any weighty themes, but then that wasn't the intention. Davies always made his series openers light romps, and they're all the better for that.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature an alien race whose members are anthropoid versions of Earth creatures (rhinoceroses in Smith and Jones, scorpions in Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror) and each race's spaceship(s) visit a celestial body nearby to Earth (the moon and Mars respectively). It's a bit of a cheat, but Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror also features Judoon (in the trailer at the end for following story Fugitive of the Judoon).

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a Sin-gular achievement. At the time of writing this, Russell T Davies's latest TV mini-series It's a Sin has just finished its weekly UK broadcast run, and has just launched in the U.S. If you haven't already seen it, I thoroughly recommend giving it a go. The series is still available to stream on All4 (all five episodes landed on that service after the first had been broadcast on Channel 4 and broke all sorts of streaming records). I've watched the whole thing three times now, and I think it is the best thing Davies has ever written. It's a Sin (named after the Pet Shop Boys song) is the story of a group of young people sharing a flat in the 1980s, and how HIV/AIDs tragically impacts their lives. Davies is not a perfect writer, of course; there's no such thing. In previous work there have always been flaws - a tendency to favour emotional logic over real word logic, abrupt and somewhat arbitrary endings - but they are absent here. It's also a historically more important subject than usual (although in the last few years he has covered the dangers of populism, abuses or power, homophobic violence, and done a big Shakespeare adaptation, so he's not exactly been 100% focussing on the frivolous). As ever, Davies's strength lies in creating fun, funny characters and establishing an energetic dynamic between them, before letting the darkness poke through the colourful and happy surface.

He does this though while crucially establishing that the colourful and superficial are equally as important and real as the dark and dramatic. I think this is why some people - a very vocal minority online during his tenure as Who Showrunner and since, but also some more traditional commentators too - don't think his Who stories were any good, as they have this false impression that when things are fun or funny it means they can't also be serious. This may be a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the fact that they are online applying literary criticism to a daft family TV show (and I know I'm one to talk!) or it may be broader than that. It is a common mistake wider than Doctor Who to think dark = important. I can't see any other adequate reason, other than this dislike of a particular tone, for quite the level of criticism of Davies's work when he is demonstrably and incontrovertibly the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who. I don't think there can be any doubt. Every new project Davies creates is an event, and this was true before and after he worked on Doctor Who. He took a big risk with his career working on the programme, and it paid off for him and for us, but it wasn't something he needed to do. He could have gone on as he was creating big and bold authored series or adaptations like The Second Coming or Casanova, but he took an unprecedented decision in 2003. At that time, it was as if Stephen Poliakoff had stopped writing his own stuff to do a reboot of Terrahawks, or Paul Abbott bringing back Juliet Bravo.

Even though I think it's self-evident that Davies is the biggest and most important TV writer to ever work on Doctor Who, let's look at the competition. The people who script edited and wrote Doctor Who from 1963 to 1989 were very talented and produced some great work for the show, and a few of them (Robert Holmes, Terrance Dicks) are heroes to me and a lot of fans. They were, though, journeymen of the established episodic television of the time and outside of fan circles their names would not have been known, and they certainly weren't in a position to have an ongoing career authoring their own material. Terry Nation became a big name after working on the show, but wasn't established before working on it in same way Davies was; Nation was a genre man, so - rightly or wrongly - is seen as less prestigious that those working in the echelon of TV that Davies operates within. Similarly, Douglas Adams was a rising star at this time he worked on Who, but only became famous afterwards, and not for TV. There's plenty of objective evidence to suggest that Adams wasn't very good in a televisual medium. In the new series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were doing good work before contributing to Doctor Who, but hardly anyone would have known their name and it wasn't 'above the title'. It wasn't 'Steven Moffat's Coupling', for example. Again, both have subsequently become much more well known since contributing their first scripts to the series.

The only person who is in the same league as Davies is possibly Richard Curtis. His reputation, though, is built on work primarily outside TV. Besides, he only wrote one Doctor Who episode once the relaunched show was a firmly established hit, and, at least in the opinion of this reviewer, it wasn't very good. I think sometimes we fans get too close to our favourite programme and need to step back. Russell T Davies writing Doctor Who in the 21st century is the equivalent of Dennis Potter doing the same in the 20th (side note: it's long been a rumour, but may be apocryphal, that Potter did indeed pitch a story to the Doctor Who production office in the early 1960s). Even if you're not convinced, I do urge you to watch It's a Sin. There's some interest for Doctor Who fans in there. One of the main characters, Richie (played brilliantly by Olly Alexander) is an actor and one scene in the fourth episode shows him filming a Doctor Who story in the late 1980s, vaguely based on Resurrection of the Daleks. This isn't Davies putting in an Easter Egg from his favourite show (as he did with the glimpses of K9 and Pyramids of Mars in Queer As Folk for example), it has a real world resonance. As Davies told the Independent earlier this year, it is a tribute to Dursley McLinden, an actor who appeared in a Doctor Who story with Daleks in the late 1980s, and then sadly died aged 30 of AIDs-related illness. Davies: "He became very wonderful in his AIDS activism when he was ill. But to me, he was that boy from Remembrance of the Daleks. That's why I knew I had to write a Dalek scene in It’s a Sin."

In Summary:

Great fun, if a little lightweight (but everything weighs a bit less on the moon, of course).

Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror

Chapter The 181st, wherein the Doctor tours America with AC and DC.

Plot:

1903 America; the Doctor and fam are investigating alien energy emanations, as they always seem to be doing, and bump into Nikola Tesla who is being attacked by some scorpion-like alien scavengers, the Skithra. Escaping to New York by train, pursued by the aliens, they investigate Tesla's former employer Thomas Edison's factory as it looks like his men might be part of it, but they're not (it's just the aliens in disguise). The Skithra queen wants to scavenge Tesla to be their engineer as he's been clever enough to pick up their signals from space, and send a signal back. The Doctor manages to get Tesla back after he's briefly transported to the alien spaceship. The fam, Edison and Tesla's assistant Dorthy Skerritt work to keep the people of New York safe, and protect the Doctor and Tesla as they rewire Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower to turn it into a giant energy weapon. The tower zaps the spaceship and kills the queen, which in turn kills all the other Skithra. Edison offers Tesla a job again, but Tesla turns him down and continues with his rather tragic but ultimately influential life.

Context:

I did say last time that I'd try to engage the family in watching Doctor Who again if a story came up with lots of explosions and action. I didn't have to wait too long as Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror was the next random selection, and it fit the bill. Having watched it again, it doesn't have lots of explosions, etc. but those which it does have are judiciously sprinkled throughout enough to keep the attention of most of the family.  We watched on a Sunday afternoon, and everyone from the household were in attendance at the start (so, me, the Better Half, and three children - boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8). Right at the start, the eldest said "So, which one is Elon musk, then?" and not long after that the BH asked "Is that the doctor from ER?" about the actor playing Tesla. When I confirmed that it was indeed Goran Višnjić, she added "I used to fancy him back in the day". If you get the impression that they weren't 100% focussed on the story, you might be right; both of them bailed at around the half way point. The remaining three of us enjoyed the story enough to stay to the end. Middle child said that "the acting in colour Doctor Who stories is much better than in the black and white ones". So there.

First time round:

This most recent watch was only slightly over a year since the first time I saw Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, live on its debut broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 19th January 2020. The whole family and I were sat in the living room as it went out. It was only a short while since the big revelations and shocks of the opening Spyfall two-parter (I'd published the blog post for that story earlier on that same Sunday). The following week would bring even bigger shocks and revelations in the next story, Fugitive of the Judoon. Falling between those two, it is doubly overshadowed. It's not even lovably naff in the same way as the other story in that valley between peaks, the previous week's Orphan 55 ("Benni!!!!!"). It just seemed competent and a bit forgettable. As such, I have forgotten anything else about that first watch. What I do know, though, is that I'd have gone to sleep that Sunday night, then got up the next morning, dropped the kids off at school, cycled to the office, and done a day's work. I probably had a run round the neighbouring park during lunch without wearing a mask or keeping a particular distance from anyone. Remembering Doctor Who always sparks off some nostalgia for bygone days; I never expected time to be so condensed by the pandemic that I'd be looking back so fondly at such a different world and life, after so little time.

Reaction:

Nikola Tesla is a very interesting figure from history. He inspired the founders of the electric car company (neither of whom were Elon Musk, incidentally) to use his name; his appearance, played by David Bowie, in the film The Prestige, is indelible in one's memory after watching the film, and it's not exactly a film that's empty of incident. As the audience is told in Night of Terror, he had so many ideas and inventions that shaped the world even to this day. He was not just unappreciated, but positively vilified in his own time, creating the dramatic injustice Aristotle in Poetics thought was so important to a story. Night of Terror also includes Thomas Edison for good measure; two historical celebrities for the price of one. So, why does the end product fall so flat? It's got perfectly good characters and scenarios, a new alien race shaped like giant scorpions, some chases and explosions, but ultimately - for this viewer at least - it didn't quite come together climactically by the end. Goran Višnjić's performance is perfectly fine, restrained but with a little gleam of madness - he's not David Bowie, of course, but that glittery lightbulb of a performance in an extended cameo would not necessarily have worked over a 45-minute adventure tale. Višnjić is a less mysterious Tesla, but more fallible, a more grounded human than Bowie's electric wizard.

The story lets us as viewers witness some of the history of Edison (portrayed with gruff efficiency by Robert Glenister) and Tesla, but neither of them change as part of proceedings either in themselves of in relationship to one another. There's some vindication of Tesla, but no sign that it affects him. It's also a very localised and private vindication; in public, and in the story's finest moment for me, there is only damnation when Edison uses their fear of Tesla's inventions to galvanise the NY bystanders to clear the streets to safety. What should be Tesla's moment of triumph and heroism is just another dent in his reputation; it's a hell of a dramatic irony (Aristotle would no doubt approve). There's no sense at the end that this or any other part of his adventure defeating alien monsters has set him on a different path. It might be that the educational style of the historical productions in Jodie Whittaker's tenure means there's a bit too much reverence - or even hero worship - about its subjects. The Doctor and friends can't be seen to be influencing them in any way. That's correct for Rosa Parks' landmark actions, say, but interaction with Tesla and Edison could have been slightly more frivolous. A loosened up production could have had fun with the Doctor accidentally dropping a few hints to give these geniuses some ideas.

Everything else in the production is more than competent. The Skithra are realised well in both costume and CG forms, and former regular of The Sarah Jane Adventures spin-off Anjli Mohindra gives a good villainous performance as the Skithra queen. Doctor Who had never done Scorpion-people before, though some aspects of them were similar to the Racnoss spider creatures (from David Tennant Christmas special The Runaway Bride) to the point that many fans were speculating on a return based on a fraction of a second's glimpse in the trailer of Mohindra in close-up. Other performances are good too, the regulars all get something to do, though as ever there's not quite enough material for all four of them. The recreation of early twentieth century New York on the backlots of a Bulgarian studio, as well as in costumes, sets, make-up and hair, is faultless. There's some great monster moments, including a bit where Edison's entire staff is killed, which can't be historically accurate, and seems like something even he would find hard to talk his way out of, but never mind. There's a few nice lines of dialogue, with Graham's AC/DC joke being a stand-out. But the whole does not add up to the sum of these parts.

There's perhaps not quite enough incident in the script to fill up the running time. The early sections of dark creeping around with aliens in the shadows are effective. The appearance of the Doctor and fam in the midst of the action, with introductions happening at speed, also keeps up the pace. There's then some great action sequences fighting off the aliens on the train, followed by a natural respite period where some more details of exposition are laid out once our heroic band make their way to New York. This possibly goes on for a beat or two too long, and the elastic tension of the plot starts to slacken a bit too much, but that's a quibble, as we're back to action soon with the disguised Skithra attacking. It's more in the latter sections that things run out of steam. We've had a first confrontation between Tesla (and Yaz) and the Skithra queen on board the Skithra spaceship, we know what's at stake, and we know the aliens are going to be blown up using Tesla's electricity harnessed by the Doctor. But it seems to take ages before the final confrontations and zapping come about, during which there's just too much tinkering and talking. There's a great diversionary chase scene with Edison and Yaz (again, lots for her to do this time) but it doesn't last long enough to keep the excitement levels up during this final section. It's probably the curse of 50 minute long episodes. With five or more minutes cut, this could very much have worked as a more old school Saturday night 45-minuter rattling along and blowing stuff up.

Connectivity: 

Another story involving interaction with aliens in Earth history. Also, one of the disguised Skithra in Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, Bill Tallow (played by Robin Guiver) wears a long black coat / cape that looks a bit like a monk's robes, as seen in The Time Meddler.

Deeper Thoughts:

Repeats, repeats, repeats (part 2). In the first part of my potted history of Doctor Who repeats on terrestrial TV last post, I covered the regular reruns of recently broadcast shows that were shown when the main series was off the air, and one outing into BBC2 territory, The Five Faces of Doctor Who season in Autumn 1981. The following summer there was another repeat season, under the umbrella title of Doctor Who and the Monsters; this time only colour stories were used as it was broadcast on BBC1. Double length episodes were created by stitching two 25-minuters together for the Ice Warriors adventure (The Curse of Peladon) and the Cyberman story (Earthshock), and a heavily edited Genesis of the Daleks was presented as two 45-minute episodes to represent Skaro's finest. I completely missed any pre-publicity for this run and only found out about it afterwards from a school friend. Just under a decade later, the third and final curated BBC repeats season played out on BBC2 Friday nights from January 1992. The intention was to show one story from each of the seven TV Doctors to date. As mentioned last time, they started with The Time Meddler, followed by The Mind Robber and The Sea Devils; the first and last of these I taped to keep using my university friend Mike's VCR, as they hadn't come out to buy on VHS by then. There was then a six month gap before the season resumed. Another Jon Pertwee story was shown next, The Daemons, as it was newly colourised using a clever technique. There then followed Genesis of the Daleks (unedited this time, but already out on VHS), The Caves of  Androzani (also out already on VHS), Revelation of the Daleks and Battlefield (which I still had home taped from its first broadcast in 1989).

My fandom had slipped a bit at this point (spring 1993), and I didn't even arrange for the taping of Revelation of the Daleks, which was the only one I didn't have already. I was in the second year of university by then, didn't have a VCR, and Mike lived in digs that were a twenty minute trek away for me. I wasn't enthused enough to do that walk every Friday night. Luckily, the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who came along a few months later to kindle my interest again. By then, in my third year of university, I shared a student house in college with a group of lads, and we all chipped in to hire a telly from Radio Rentals. Another house-mate - not Mike this time - contributed an old toploader VCR from home too. After many programmes shown to celebrate the anniversary towards the end of 1993, the beginning of 1994 saw another couple of stories shown: The Green Death (taped every week after missing the first episode as they didn't advertise anywhere that it was coming), and Pyramids of Mars (already had it on VHS as it had only recently come out in episodic form). I remember sitting in the communal living area watching them go out on Sunday lunchtimes, and enjoying them. They seemed to be just a couple of random stories, though, not intended to be the start of a focused season or long running set of repeats.

The last hurrah of classic Doctor Who repeats on BBC2 started in 1999. This was very ambitious indeed. No curated selection from history this, it was instead to be every story from Jon Pertwee's debut Spearhead from Space onwards shown weekly, early evening on a Tuesday. There was no chance to miss this either, as it was launched in a blaze of publicity. Fans like me at the time who knew that soon there would be problems to overcome (stories that didn't exist wholly in broadcast standard colour in the archives, for example) mused on what would happen a few stories in; but, we never got to find out. The ratings were disappointing, so they panicked after two stories and put on Genesis of the Daleks (again). The ratings got even worse, so the Doctor Who repeats were pulled altogether. Since then, there have been no further classic stories or episodes shown on BBC2. In the new millennium, BBC4 became the classic Doctors' home, and there were no longer any grand plans to do Doctor Who repeat seasons, and certainly no whole era repeat runs. Instead, Who stories or episodes shown were part of wider themed nights or seasons. This had happened a couple of times previously - the pilot version of An Unearthly Child shown as part of a 1991 BBC2 Lime Grove night, and a couple of other episodes were repeated as part of a Doctor Who night in 1999 - but it became much more common on BBC4. Amongst other contexts, Doctor Who episodes or stories were shown as part of celebrations of the year 1973, the London underground, archaeology, and science fiction. They were shown as tributes to cast and crew, and as part of the 50th anniversary Doctor Who programming. The final repeat to date on any BBC channel was in 2015.

Since then, and all the way up to date with recent stories like Nikola Tesla's Thingummy Doodah, things have come almost full circle, except now it's a Bizarro World version. Instead of new episodes being shown most of the year round, it's the repeats that are constantly available, day in day out, courtesy of streaming services like BBC iplayer or Britbox (and the short-lived BBC Store before that). Instead of a brief few weeks of repeats every year, it's a brief few weeks of new shows, which thereafter get added to the stream of old stuff and can be watched and re-watched as often as you like. A repeat showing now - even if it were on BBC1 primetime - can't ever hope to have the power and interest that it had once upon a time.

In Summary:

Not quite as inventive or electrifying as its subject.