Doctor Who: 1983

Episode 602: The Five Doctors
First broadcast: 10.30 pm on Wednesday 23 November 1983 (US); 7.20 pm on Friday 25 November 1983 (UK)
<< back to 1982

The Raston warrior robot decapitates a Cyberman -
for Doctor Who's birthday.
The Five Doctors

A lot of our response to Doctor Who is informed as much by how we first see it - who we're with at the time, the mood we (and they) are in, the stuff going on in our lives - as the programme itself. A wise chum told me he'd realised this about a recent season: his least favourite episodes were all the ones he'd watched on his own.

So a lot of the warm, cosy love I have for The Five Doctors is personal and from context. That first evening it was shown was a big event. I was allowed to stay up late to watch it with my siblings, and they drew the curtains and turned off the lights to make the experience more like a cinema. It was the last Doctor Who story we all watched together as it went out.

When I watch it again now, I still feel a thrill of memory for that long-ago evening, that particular, personal circumstance. But it's not just that. As I've grown up, become a writer and tried typing my own Doctor Who stories, I am ever more in awe of the script.

First, consider the brief given to the poor writer. Imagine you're the one that script editor Eric Saward came to.

You have to write a 90-minute TV movie extravaganza, with five leading actors all playing the main hero - so they get 18 minutes each. They all need to drive the plot, be heroic and have the best lines, and you'll need to consider the potential clash of egos on set. Oh, and the fact that one of those actors is dead.

In addition, the story should feature lots of old monsters and companions. The production team can't confirm availability of some of those companions until very late in the day, but each Doctor will need pairing up with a companion from their time on the show. And lastly, it needs to thrill a broad, general audience tuning in for the special event, as well attempting to satisfy fans. (PS the script editor especially likes the Cybermen.)

Bloody hell, that's a lot to cram in - once you've assembled the cast there's hardly room for a story. In fact, it seems to have defeated Robert Holmes, generally regarded as one of Doctor Who's best writers - if not the best. "The brief was too heavy," Saward later admitted of Holmes' involvement. "He didn't think it would work."

Saward is speaking on Terrance Dicks: Fact & Fiction, a 2005 DVD extra on Horror of Fang Rock. The documentary covers Terrance's time on Doctor Who but especially his ability to step in when things went wrong. When two stories collapsed in 1969, he co-wrote the 10-episode The War Games and saw the Second Doctor off in grand style. He then script-edited the next five years of the show - all the Third Doctor's adventures - taking a series facing cancellation and returning it to rude health. In 1977, when the BBC objected to his Doctor-Who-meets-vampires story (because it would look like it was mocking their big adaptation of Count Dracula), he quickly knocked out one of my favourite stories, Horror of Fang Rock. Basically, he's a good man in a crisis.

Terrance himself is modest about his contribution. He says on the Fact & Fiction documentary that he's often asked:

"'Were you aware you were making classic television?' Our main plan was not to have have to show the test card."

He's rightly proud of this unshowy professionalism and recalls a moment from his time as script-editor. A director called from the rehearsal hall to say there was some problem with the scripts. Terrance called back and spoke to the director's PA.

"I said, 'Tell him to ring me when he's free. And tell him not to worry because whatever it is I will fix it.' ... That just came out and I thought that sounds bloody conceited. But I thought after five years, having hit most of the problems on Doctor Who, I'm fairly confident that I can fix it."

When given the brief for The Five Doctors, Terrance's solution was simple, effective and brilliant. He treats the problem as a sort of game, and makes that game the plot. Just as he has to gather Doctors, companions and old enemies, so does the villain in the story.

I've been discussing this with my chum Jim Smith, who says that "Terrance talked once about a game where you have to take objects out of box and extemporise a story around them. The story does that, with all ingredients brought out like the prestige in a magic trick. He also (perhaps unconsciously) works that image into the story, with Borusa's gloved hands pulling the figurines of the characters out of the box and putting them on the board."

But - without disagreeing with Jim - it's far more clever than that simple game supposes. The Doctors all have their own plots to follow and don't meet up until the final scenes (and a single day's filming) which provides a neat structure for the story but also avoided potential spats between the leading men. There are even separate entrances to the Dark Tower so the Doctors don't bump into one another early.

More from Jim: "I love how the Third Doctor recounts an establishment view of Rassilon, the Dark Times and so on ('old Rassilon put a stop to it') while the Second, a more anarchic and less establishment figure, regales the Brigadier with conspiracy theories of how Rassilon invented and played the game before he banned it and how he may still be alive inside his own Tomb. At least some of which turn out to be true."

The Five Doctors is packed with brilliant moments: the Doctors being chased by black triangles; the fizzing insides of a Dalek; the Doctor running away from his own people at the end. There are nice continuity fixes, too: the fact that a Time Lord can be given a new regenerative cycle when his first one is used up; the Third Doctor meeting the Cybermen (the only Doctor at that point not to have done so). And so much of the dialogue sparkles: I particularly love “I am the Master – and your loyal servant”.

Jim says: "I love that the Master takes his mission seriously. When he rages at the end that 'I came here to help you Doctor, a little unwillingly but I came. My offers were scorned! My help refused!' he's actually telling the truth and no one - not even the audience - believes him."

"Then," Jim goes on, "there's Terrance's use of imagery from Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came - see from versus XXXI. This seems like a stretch until you remember Fang Rock's indebtedness to The Ballad of Flannen Isle."

Terrance dodges round one of the Doctors being dead by having an actor stand in for William Hartnell - but also, tastefully, starts the story with a perfectly chosen clip of the man himself. Midway into the story, the replacement First Doctor is paired up with the current Doctor which again works structurally as well as practically (there's less of a potential clash with a for-one-night-only Doctor). All the Doctors have great moments of wit, intelligence and courage and get some brilliant lines.

Then, after a draft of the script had been completed, one of the Doctors decided not to be involved. That should have spelt disaster but Terrance fixes things deftly, again using archive footage to fill the gap and also reworking the other Doctors' roles. Watching it that first time, I wished Tom Baker had been in it more but never suspected he'd not been there at all.

If the Doctors get the best bits, the companions are less well served, just tagging along in his wake, asking questions that prod the plot along. I wonder how much that's due to them still being swapped round at the last minute, or to the constraints of squeezing in so many people.

There's an effort to mark out their characters but it's all a bit sketched in and glib. Susan sprains her ankle as if that's something she always did (it isn't; she did it once in The Dalek Invasion of Earth). Jim: "Which was, of course, one of only two First Doctor stories Dicks had novelised. Did he flick through it for research? Or just remember novelising that moment?"

Poor old Turlough fares worst, getting very little to do: he draws a picture, worries in the TARDIS then has to stand still not talking. Jim: "I like his 'Die, it seems' gag. And 'Big, isn't it?' about the bomb. Black humour is key to Turlough, I think. So we get that if nothing else."

There's no mention at all of Kamelion, the robot companion introduced in the previous story.

Other things niggle. It's a shame that the Eye of Orion is clearly the same location as the Death Zone (though that's not an issue with the script). A thrilling scene where the Third Doctor rescued Sarah from the Autons was changed to a cheaper one where she falls down a steep slope; a good fix on paper but the way its shot doesn't make it look very perilous (and again not an issue with the script).

Jim drew my attention to one odd script thing in the scene at UNIT HQ: the sergeant doesn't know who the Doctor is and won't let him in, whereas Colonel Crichton tried to have the Doctor invited to the reunion and failed. So he certainly knows of the Doctor. When the Doctor gets into the office, the colonel dismisses the sergeant and lets the Doctor stay because either he knows who this Doctor is by sight (they've never met, but he may have seen pictures or whatever) or he accepts Lethbridge-Stewart's recognition of him as reason enough. Then at the end of the scene the colonel says:

CHRICTON:
What the blazers is going on? Who was that strange little man?

SERGEANT NOT-BENTON:
The Doctor?

CHRICTON:
Who?

Which, as Jim said, completely reverses their positions/knowledge. On the DVD commentary at this point, Terrance says the joke wasn't his but Saward's. And it's not in Terrance's novelisation of the story, either.

Whatever the case in that scene, Saward clearly helped improve the story overall. He suggested that it was too obvious if the villain turned out to be the Master. He also thought the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane needed to face one more obstacle before reaching the Dark Tower. To answer that, Terrance came up with the one new monster in the story, in a scene that typifies what makes The Five Doctors so brilliant.

The Raston warrior robot is a budget-conscious creation - a non-speaking actor in a simple costume. Its sensors are primed to detect any movement, on which it fires arrows and bladed discs. Again, it's making a game of the problem: the Doctor and Sarah Jane end up playing Blind Man's Bluff.

DOCTOR:
Freeze, Sarah Jane. If you move, we're dead.

And then a troop of Cybermen arrive...

Cor. No wonder this scene was most often used to promote the story. Simple, cheap and thrilling, it is perfect Doctor Who.

Next episode: 1984

Short breaks in Elizabethan England

I loved Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England when it was on the telly a few weeks ago and have finally made an effort to read the book, which I got for my birthday almost exactly a year ago.

Mortimer's idea is brilliantly simple: to present the past as if we can walk round it, scouring sources for details on food, accommodation, manners and everything else. He's good at detailing the smells and textures of the period as well as the dry facts, and writing it in the present tense really helps to breath new life into an age that's been well covered before.

This vivid conjuring has a slow-burn effect: you notice it long after reading the words on the page. On Sunday morning, as I wandered round my old home-town of Winchester, I found myself picking out details I'd never seen before - Tudor beams and windows above the shops in the high street, the plan of the backstreets, the medieval buildings that would have seemed old even to the Elizabethans.

A lot of the book is devoted to ordinary life - the limited flavours and colours, the wealth of ripe odours. But he's also good at making sense of the politics, too. Why, for example, did Elizabeth have such a long and successful reign?

Mortimer makes the case that, unlike her predecessors in the Middle Ages, Elizabeth had few relatives - siblings, cousins, those related by marriage - in contention for the throne. She was the last of Henry VIII's children and he was the only surviving son of Henry VII. Even so, Elizabeth had Mary, Queen of Scots, executed and Lady Catherine Grey imprisoned.

But Elizabeth was also careful to establish and underline her authority. Mortimer details her "mannish" behaviour, her progresses round the country so her subjects could see her, and the ways she dominated parliament. Parliament was, for example, banned from discussing the question of who would succeed her, and she called only 10 parliaments anyway in the 45 years of her reign (rather than the customary one a year).

"Like her grandfather Henry VII, Elizabeth has a policy of not creating any new earls, marquesses or viscounts, and she creates very few barons. The reason is to limit the power of her subjects and thus strengthen the authority of her government." 

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (2012), p. 46.

What's more, a traditional rival to the English monarchy had been done away with by Elizabeth's father: bishops no longer served the Roman Catholic Church but answered directly to her.

"Elizabethan England is thus devoid of private armies, royal dukes and political bishops. Those considering revolt against Elizabeth have no one to turn to for leadership ... After the execution of the duke of Norfolk [in June 1572], the highest rank in the peerage is that of marquess. Never a common title, there is just one in 1600 (the marquess of Winchester), plus a dowager marchioness (the widow of the last marquess of Northampton, William Parr, who dies in 1571). Third-highest in rank are the earls; there are eighteen of these in 1600. Next come the two viscounts, Lord Montagu and Lord Howard of Bindon. The lowest rank is the baronage: there are thirty-seven barons in all. In total, just fifty-seven peers are summoned to parliament at the start of the reign and fifty-five at the end (underage heirs are not summoned)." 

Ibid., p. 47.

Given my day job, it was interesting, too, to learn that peers could not be imprisoned for debt, and other privileges included "the right to be judged by his peers, paying very little tax and freedom from torture" (p. 48) - though Mortimer explains Henry VIII got round that last one by having peers summarily executed and Elizabeth locked up some nobles for years in the Tower without trial.

Doctor Who: 1982

Episode 572: Earthshock, part 1
First broadcast: 6.55 pm, Monday 8 March 1982
<< back to 1981

"Ah! We're not the only ones to have a facelift!"
Earthshock, part 1

The return of the Cybermen for the first time in seven years! The producer of Doctor Who would surely want to shout about that. Their return would thrill fans and entice more casual viewers to tune in, ensuring a bumper audience. Wouldn't it?

Yet in 1982, producer John Nathan-Turner declined an offer to put the Cybermen on the cover of Radio Times so as to maintain the surprise when they showed up at the end of part one. That might seem an odd thing to do: rewarding the fans already watching instead of trying to draw more punters in front of the telly. But rewarding your audience isn't a bad thing, and I suppose there's an argument that they will generate excitement, so more punters will tune in to see what they're missing - in time for the shock ending of the story as a whole.

(At least in theory. The audience dropped slightly from 9.1 million for part one to 8.8 million for part two.)

Teasers and spoilers are a tricky business. There are those who try to avoid all details of any forthcoming episode; their are those who devote every spare moment to deducing what's to come. Even when we don't try to find things out, details get out anyway.

Unless we've been extremely diligent, we already know some of the guest cast of the 50th anniversary Doctor Who which won't be on for another five months. We probably know the name of a monster that will be in it, might have seen pictures - even video - from the filming. The darker regions of the internet can probably furnish us with elements of the plot of whole lines of dialogue. There are leaks, errors... and even carefully mounted publicity.

The producers of the show walk a difficult line in wanting to keep the surprises secret but knowing that a tantalising hint of what's to come will build interest in this creaky, long-lived series and ensure people tune in. They have to assume scenes shot on location will get papped and put on the net. But they also need to think about what to reveal in publicity and trailers - and how close to transmission to show them.

Even now, with the internet and what seems a whole industry devoted to ruining surprises, there are still some brilliant shocks. For a week in 2009 it seemed the whole nation was thrilled by the ending of The Stolen Earth - when nobody seemed to know if the Doctor was going to regenerate (and those who knew kept silent). For that week, there seemed no distinction between "fans" and ordinary people who watched the show.

Things were different in the early 1980s. There was no internet to share insider gossip quickly, while the producers of the show were only starting to get their heads round an organised fandom that was getting much better at finding things out. I wondered how much the return of the Cybermen was a surprise to those who were very involved in fandom at the time.

So I asked three of my friends.

Nicholas Briggs:

Ah, well, you see, the surprise got spoiled by the fact that the Cybermen were featured in a small comic strip thingy at the back of the Radio Times, which came out in the week before the episode was aired. I didn't know before that, though.

Cyber-spoilers in the Radio Times

Even so, not everyone knew. Peter Anghelides says:

I saw that episode in a university student hall of residence. Much grumbling from the non-fan student audience (still watching it, of course) about how the show wasn't as good as they remembered it. Me sitting quietly watching, not making a fuss but slightly aggrieved that they were TALKING DURING THE BROADCAST!! And then the big surprise at the end. The next day in the hall dining room, the non-fan conversation was all about "the Cybermen are back!"

I may have heard a rumour in fan circles that the Cybermen were returning some time in that season. But I certainly wasn't expecting them in that particular story. So it was a delightful surprise for me as a viewer, and as a fan seeing the reaction from others watching the show.

Gary Russell:

I knew but for a while thought the silly Androids were the Cybermen while watching that first ep. I was therefore very pleased by the cliffhanger, simply cos I realised that was the new Cybermen!

That night I went to my drama school and everyone was talking about it. That was the point I realised how disappointing being an in-the-know fan could be. The Sontarans in Invasion of Time and Davros in Destiny had been such brilliant surprises for me, and although I knew about the Master in Traken, I had assumed he was Tremas (not just the anagrammatic name but because I knew Ainley was him in Logopolis). So the Melkur thing was a surprise. But Earthshock was my first experience of seeing a group of peers genuinely shocked and excited, and me realising I wasn't – that I was missing out on that thrill because I was "in the know". This year's 50th anniversary special will be the first time since Season 17 where I'll be completely unaware of what the story is beforehand.

Next episode: 1983 

Telegraph Avenue

I was spellbound by Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon but find it difficult to say exactly why. It seems effortless, even breezy – I suspect because it's so carefully, expertly wrought.

Two friends struggle to keep their record shop going despite mounting debts and the threat that a new mall will be built nearby with a lavish music store inside. Meanwhile their wives face a crisis in their midwifing business because the medical establishment doesn't take them seriously. At the same time, their sons dream of working with Tarantino.

There are lots of other characters and stories – we learn one old man's tragedy in a single sentence shortly before he dies. It's a rich tapestry of human life, comingling and complex, funny and sad, full of telling detail and characters we feel we know; sort of west coast Dickensian.

Threads run through the disparate lives. Many characters hanker for the past – music, traditions, the way it looks in old films. The book is full of references to pop culture, used as analogies to explain behaviour or events. Things from Star Trek or Star Wars illuminate the every day. (I recommend Matthew Sweet interviewing Michael Chabon on Night Waves last year, where they discuss Chabon's fascination with Doctor Who and the illness of nostalgia.)

There's a compelling sense of the benefits of change: racial politics and empowerment better than the old days, an acceptance of fluid sexualities. Set in 2004, there's a surprise cameo from Barack Obama, offering the hope of change – rather than change to be scared of.

But again, it's more complex than that: characters aren't set free by letting go of the past, rather forms warp and shift and people just sort of deal. Decisions are made, battles fought, there are moments of sudden violence... and life rolls ever on.

It's this good-natured languidity that makes the book so appealing. The setting and laid-back feel reminded me a lot of Philip K Dick’s Mary and the Giant. There are clever lines and observations, and in the middle of the book a single sentence lasts 12 pages. It's clever – and deserving of a second read to pick up on more of the tricks. But the lasting impression is one of ease. A great, smart, feel-good book perfect for lazy-day reading.

Doctor Who: 1981

Episode 553: Logopolis, part 4
First broadcast: 5.10 pm, Saturday 21 March 1981
<< back to 1980

The death of Doctor Who
Logopolis, part 4

I was four when Logopolis was first on TV, five when it was repeated. I didn't see it again for a decade and yet this story, in which Tom Baker's Doctor dies, haunted me for years.

Watching it again, I'm struck by how complicated it is. Logopolis is all about the heat-death of the universe being held back by pure mathematics - numbers so powerful that they warp reality and can't be processed in a computer. It's about as high concept as you get, and I'm still not entirely sure how much it makes sense (I struggle with physics at the best of times).

But that never bothered me as a child. I never expected to understand Doctor Who anyway. It was a grown-up show, watched by my elder brother and sister (who seemed part of that grown-up world though they weren't yet in their teens) that I was allowed to sit in on so long as I didn't speak. If it presented a strange and dangerous universe, governed by unfathomable rules, that was how the world seemed to a child anyway.

Then again, what do you actually need to know to follow the story? That the Master is a baddie and up to something bad, and the Doctor is trying to stop him. Everything else, all the natter about block transfer computation and the properties of bubble memory, were - to this child, anyway - so much hand-waving between the running around.

Yet it was still compelling. Doctor Who rarely addresses the TARDIS itself in any great detail, and Logopolis makes the experience deeply unsettling. It is full of extraordinary moments that linger long in the memory: the TARDIS landing inside itself, with the police box prop stood inside the control room; the ivy-shrouded cloister room where the Doctor can brood; the TARDIS shrinking with the Doctor trapped inside; the radio telescope looming over an alien town. The TARDIS's cloister bell, warning of disaster, works so well it's still used in the series today.

My chum Matthew Michael has written intelligent things about Logopolis and points out the best of cliffhangers is a striking visual moment: the Doctor shaking hands with the Master. The Doctor siding with his mortal enemy is all the more disturbing because the Master here is a monster, not the softly spoken charmer as played by Roger Delgado. His monstrousness is underlined by him killing close relatives of two companions (Nyssa's dad Tremas and Tegan's auntie Vanessa). He chuckles to himself as the Doctor falls to his death.

There are oddly silly bits, too, like the plan to open the doors of the TARDIS while it's under water, or Tegan's getting lost in the ship being played for laughs. But the general tone is muted, and that's largely down to Tom Baker. For all the apparent hard science in the script, the story packs a punch because of how it feels. The Doctor's weary resignation as events unfold is so out of character, it feels so wrong, that it utterly enthralled this small boy.

Next episode: 1982

Doctor Who: 1980

Episode 534: Full Circle, part 1
First broadcast: 5.40 pm, Saturday, 25 October 1980
<< back to 1979

My earliest memory of anything:
K-9 and the Doctor, Full Circle part 1

This is where I come in. My earliest memory of anything at all is the Doctor crouched with K-9 in the reeds, watching the Marshmen emerge from the swamp – and then the scream of the closing credits.

It's still a brilliant moment, beautifully shot and directed. Years later, when the Haemovores rose up from the sea in The Curse of Fenric (1989), I assumed it was a homage. Then, as I watched my way through all of old-skool Doctor Who, I assumed both were nicked from The Sea Devils (1972).

But – as this blog has been making quite evident – what do I know about anything? So I asked Full Circle's writer Andrew Smith whether that was intentional, and also about how he came to write Doctor Who on TV while still in his teens...

SG: Hullo Andy. So, as I've told you, that scene is my first memory of anything ever.

AS: Wowza.

How much of it was nicked from The Sea Devils?

None it it! (Laughs) The cliffhanger of them coming out of the marsh was one of the first things I thought about when I was writing the story. That was the standard at the time, which people have forgotten now. The usual thing was that your main monster would turn up as the cliffhanger of episode one. It's kind of what I did with [2012 audio story] The First Sontarans, too. People complained that you don't hear a Sontaran in that until the end of the first episode – but that's classic, godammit!

A lot of old stories would start with what I like to call a “Stuart Fell sequence”, which is some hapless person being killed by something we don't see. And then we see what it was at the end of the first episode.

Yeah, and in Full Circle it was actually Stuart Fell! He gets dragged underwater by a wire. Yeah, the whole thing is set up for the monsters and then there they'd be at the end. Of course [director] Peter [Grimwade] and [film cameraman] Max Samett just did it fantastically well. It's quite a daring way to film it, all in silhouette, really. I was so glad to see Max Samett interviewed on the DVD. I meant to mention him on the commentary because I remember him very clearly on location. The stuff that he did was incredible. We were lucky with the weather and everything else as well. I was really impressed with it when I saw it broadcast, even having been there.

[Andy's kindly provided me with this scan of a polaroid photo taken by Continuity when the Marshmen were being filmed emerging from the lake. “I scanned it to send it to you, so it's previously unseen,” he says. Yes! An exclusive!]

Continuity shot from the filming of Full Circle
Care of Andrew Smith

How old were you at the time?

That was filmed four days before my 18th birthday, so I was 17 when I wrote it.

It's quite a thing to have written Doctor Who in your teens.

Yeah.

You talked to Toby Hadoke in his podcast about writing to the production team and being a fan, but did you know other people who were writing and sending stuff in? Was there a gang of you?

No. I wasn't a member of anything. I don't think I even knew local groups existed. I was in the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, which I joined after I'd been to the Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool in I think October '75 – Planet of Evil was on, so whenever that was – where I discovered the Target novels. That was when the fandom stepped up a gear. It would have been fairly soon after that that I joined the Appreciation Society. I think their details were in the novels at the time and that's when I found out about them. But I wasn't aware of any groups. I was still at school – and then university, later in the year. But I wasn't associated with anyone else who was writing, I was just getting on with it and not really aware of my age.

It's funny, I was interviewed by Radio Free Skaro and they asked if I ever mentioned my age when I wrote in. I'd never been asked that before. I thought about it and no, I didn't, but then I can't think why I would have. If you were 22 or 38 or 52, would you mention your age? I didn't. I think I was 14 or 15 when I sent the first one in. I didn't mention my age because you just wouldn't. At what point do you say, 'Oh, by the way, I'm 14' or whatever? You want to write, you've written something and you want to see if people like it so you send it in. The mental process is... Well, I never thought I'd be too young to do it.

So when did they realise how old you were?

I really don't know. (Laughs!) I came down to see Douglas Adams and they were filming The Creature from the Pit – so whenever that was, sometime in early '79, I think. He'd have met me and realised but whether we sat down and discussed my actual age I don't know. It was never an issue really.

After Full Circle I did a play for television. We were in production when the series it was part of was previewed in TV Times and they talked about me and the other writers. It said 'Andrew Smith, 23, blah blah blah'. I spoke to Robert Love, who was the Head of Drama at Scottish Television at the time and who'd given the interview with my age in it. I said, 'Where did you get the idea that I was 23?' He said, 'Oh they asked your age and I said that was about right. Was it?' I said, 'Actually, I'm 18.' He went: 'Oh!' As I said, we were in production at the time – and from that point on I was patronised by the director. Not by Robert; he was really good. But the director, no question, patronised me, didn't buy me another drink (laughs) and wasn't sure about letting me in the bar. It was really odd.

So Doctor Who wasn't the only show you had pitched to? 

Yeah, because I pitched to things like Shoestring and other shows and even got some feedback. I remember feedback from Robert Banks Stewart where he talked about stuff he'd done on Doctor Who and other programmes he'd written. I remember he was quite impressed that I knew about a daytime series he'd written called Rooms. So there was that and there would have been a couple of other things. I wanted to write, it wasn't just writing for Doctor Who. Doctor Who was always there.

The first thing I had on telly wasn't Doctor Who, it was a quickie on Not The Nine O'Clock News. I'd written comedy sketches for Week Ending before that. I was 15 or 16, I think, when I had my first sketch performed on Week Ending. So yeah, I was pitching around a few places. It took about three years, I think, to get to the point on Doctor Who where they said, 'Okay, we'll ask you to write a script and see what we think'. Whereas of course on other programmes they'd have finished their run before you got to that point.

You've talked elsewhere about writing more Doctor Who and one of your unused stories became The First Sontarans last year. But at what point did you decide to stop writing and join the police?

It was about four years into it. I was always really interested in joining the police and wanted a bit of excitement: it was that positive thing of wanting to do it. With the writing as well, there were a few things: the insecurity of it worried me, especially projecting very far ahead and knowing it would be a constant gamble. I knew other writers, older than me, and saw what they went through. And I just liked the idea of the excitement and the security of the police.

It's a mug's game being a writer, that's what you're saying.

Well, no, it was great. But it would have been a real leap in the dark and I recognised that if I carried on doing it, I'd probably have a feast or famine existence. It would have been a gamble with no guarantees of anything. I'd really enjoyed it but what I also found was that there was almost no time off. That thing of holiday? No chance. I'd think, 'I'll go on holiday but I'll take the typewriter with me anyway'.

In those four years I always had a commission for something until I had to begin turning things down as I approached the start date with the police. There was always that constant pressure of not having a working day. I just felt guilty. Again, sometimes I do now. I've decided to stop, sit down and watch TV with the family or whatever and I think, 'Should I be back there continuing?' You'll know this: sometimes you can't stop. Sometimes it's a little like pushing a bus. It takes a bit of effort to work up momentum but once it's going it's difficult to stop the bugger.

Last thing: Full Circle is all about evolution. Lalla Ward (Romana) has since married Richard Dawkins. Is it right that he's seen it? What does he make of it?

I have no idea! In fact, we didn't discuss it, I don't think, when she recorded The Invasion of E-Space (2010). We chatted about a lot of things but I don't think we talked about Full Circle. We never did a thing of 'Oh, do you remember when...' It was more just a chit-chat and what have you.

Do you think the story would stand up to his scrutiny?

(Long pause) To be honest, I don't really know. I'm aware of him but I've not read his books. I don't think I've ever seen an interview with him. About the only time I've ever seen him speak was when he had that cameo in Doctor Who. (Laughs).

Well, that's no help at all, is it? Andrew Smith, thank you very much!

(Postscript: when Dawkins was interviewed by Benjamin Cook for Doctor Who Magazine in 2008, he mentioned his wife being in the series:

“I didn’t watch it at the time, but I’ve loved seeing many of her episodes on DVD...”

But which episodes?!? I must know!)

Next episode: 1981

Who are you calling clever-clever?

Due to a holiday plus some regular commuting in the last few weeks, I have read a few books for fun and not solely to steal from for work (I've also done that, too). To remind myself in ages to come and to break up my ongoing Doctor Who project I shall endeavour to blog my thoughts on these books. First off:

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
I’d meant to read this for some time but Steven’s accolade as one of Granta’s Young Writers To Stalk (sort of like Springwatch for typing) prompted me to get on with it. It’s exciting, smart and ridiculous (as I tweeted him), taking the high-concept wheeze of a man who’s memories are being eaten by the abstract idea of a shark, and then seeing what happens next.

“'This is so crazy I'm not even going to ask.'

'Probably for the best,' the doctor said. 'It's easier if you just accept it.' 

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (2007), p. 317.

Mark Haddon calls the book “The bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The da Vinci Code” - on a genuine post-it note stuck rather than printed on the title page, itself an achingly trendy conceit. The book ought to so drip with its own clever-cleverness that I’d have given up early on. The 52-page interruption in the prose where the image of a shark composed of individual letters heads towards us as in a flickbook ought to take us right out of the adventure – as similar textual gimmickry did, I felt, with Philip Palmer's Debateable Space. I want – I love – to be lost in a story and resent the author waving from the margins.

But Steven contrives to make this sequence and the book as a whole enthralling, with twists and characters and digressions on the nature of language that kept me reading on. Bother him, I found it very difficult to put down, right to the last page. I look forward with feverish anticipation to his next one. (There's an excerpt from it in Granta #123; and also he's written some knock-off Doctor Who.)

Doctor Who: 1979

Episode 516: The Creature from the Pit, part 3
First broadcast: 6pm on Saturday, 10 November 1979
<< back to 1978

The Doctor, er, greets Erato
The Creature from the Pit, part 3

Most DVDs of old-skool Doctor Who include a documentary about how the story was made. Not all stories have a making-of, and The Creature from the Pit has something a little bit different. "Team Erato" is a rather good 15-minute analysis of what went wrong with the design and construction of the monster.

It's got plenty of insightful detail on the way BBC Visual Effects operated at the time, and the problems of translating ambitious scripts with only limited time and resources. It's essentially about why the monster in the story, Erato, was not realised especially well. The implication, if only because there's no making-of to address the rest of the production, seems to be that the silly-looking monster ruins the whole story.

I don't mean to criticise either the documentary or the story. I like The Creature from the Pit, in part because it is silly and fun. But I also wonder how much a Doctor Who story lives or dies on the quality of its monster.

Many of Doctor Who's most acclaimed old stories have shonky-looking monsters: giant clams in Genesis of the Daleks, a fluffy giant rat in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the smiley dragon in The Caves of Androzani. So what makes The Creature from the Pit different? In those stories, the monsters only play a minimal role, while the real villains - Davros and the Daleks, Li H'seng Chang and Magnus Greel, and Sharaz Jek - are terrifying, grotesque creations that linger in the memory. In The Creature from the Pit, Lady Adastra is a perfectly serviceable tyrant. So it isn't that.

The Wirrn in The Ark in Space are also not entirely brilliantly realised - and for a lot of the time, the only evident villain is a man wearing bits of green bubblewrap. And yet that story is a chilling classic while The Creature from the Pit is not.

It's not as if Erato is indicative of a general lack of visual pizzazz in the story. The scenes of jungle and tunnels shot on film at Ealing really impress, the stakes raised by this being one of the few times we see the Doctor ever break a sweat. This is a dirty, grimy planet - bearing the influence of Star Wars in its grubby realism.

It's not just that the stuff shot in TV Centre on video looks a bit flat. (Again that's not unusual for Doctor Who - and I'm told a general audience usually couldn't tell the difference between video and film, though I've never met anyone that was true of.)

And it's not as if David Fisher's script isn't full of real jeopardy or doesn't tackle sophisticated ideas:

"To revise his climax, Fisher sought the assistance of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University -- a process made easier when it was discovered that some of the faculty were fans of Doctor Who. They offered a neutron star as a potent weapon, and suggested that one way to avert the threat would be to encase it in aluminium."

Shannon Sullivan, A Brief History of Time Travel - The Creature from the Pit

But there's something about the tone of the story that suggests we not take it too seriously - a silly monster in part 3 only compounds that feeling.

This won't come as much surprise to many old-skool Doctor Who fans. In 1993, Douglas Adams was interviewed about his time as script-editor on the show, which include The Creature from the Pit.

"Cause when I was working on Doctor Who, inevitably quite a lot of humour was in the programme and some people liked this and some people didn't. I have to say that in fact the way the humour went into the programme wasn't exactly the way that I intended it to ... A danger one runs, and I kept on running into this problem, is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks, 'Oh, well we can do silly voices and silly walks' and so on. And I think that's exactly the wrong way to do it ... I think that Doctor Who is at its best when the humour and the drama work together and that however absurd a situation may be it is actually very, very real and has very real consequences. That's the moment at which something that's inherently absurd actually becomes frightening." 

Douglas Adams, speaking on More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS

What he's talking about is tone, and I think tone is the secret of successful Doctor Who. This is something I've a personal stake in and I think about it a lot, so here's my current thesis:

The most successful of the Doctor Who spin-off stories I've written have each had a recognisble tone: Home Truths is a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas; Shadow of Death apes the TV Doctor Who story The Seeds of Death; The Pirate Loop is a manic, free-wheeling comedy from the first sentence. They work, I think, because they create a definite tone in the first scene and maintain it to the end. That helps an audience immerse themselves in the world of the story, and gives them cues as to how to respond. Other stories, despite great performances or plot twists, despite the best or worst structural tricks or special effects, seem not to satisfy to the same degree because the tone is inconsistent.

Sometimes Doctor Who on TV uses inconsistency to achieve a dramatic effect. The first half of the very first episode, An Unearthly Child is a kitchen-sink drama about a school girl who behaves oddly; then her teachers push their way onto the TARDIS and it becomes something completely else.

In fact, I think the TARDIS travels less in time as it does in genre. One week it might land in a slightly knowing Midsomer Murder, the next it arrives in the midst of the movie Outland, the next a classic serial with the best in BBC facial hair. Two stories set in the same calendar year can be completely different because they have different tones.

The problem, I think, with The Creature from the Pit, is that the tone is inconsistent. It ought to be dirty, sweaty space opera in the style of Star Wars, and sometimes - especially early on - that's exactly what it is. Or, it ought to be a light entertainment comedy, like the previous (and far more effective) story, City of Death. Being both, we never know quite how to respond to what we're shown, and that takes us out of the story. That's when we start to notice problems with the design or the way the story's been shot.

The Doctor's first meeting with the vast, uncommunicative Erato, played for laughs rather than as high-concept SF, is the worst moment of this mismatch of styles. So I'd argue that it's not the monster that's at fault, but the inconsistent way that he's spoken to.

Next episode: 1980

Doctor Who: 1978

After episode 491 (The Stones of Blood, part 4)
22 November 1978
<< back to 1977

Frank Bough interviews Tom Baker
Nationwide, BBC1, 22 November 1978

In the early evening of 22 November 1978, the BBC's live news magazine Nationwide (basically, The One Show but without the view out the window) celebrated the 15th birthday of Doctor Who. It was, in the best traditions of a show about a rackety time machine, a day early.

Nationwide spoke first to the show's original producer, Verity Lambert, and then to actress Carole Ann Ford, who'd played the Doctor's first companion (and granddaughter), Susan. Then presenter Frank Bough spoke to Mary Tamm - the Doctor's current companion, Romana. Finally, he turned to Tom Baker, who sat brooding beside him.

What happens next is fascinating. You can watch it as an extra on The Stones of Blood DVD or, ahem, on YouTube. Tom seems in a garrulous mood, or bored, and his answers brusque, even combative.

Frank:
Of course, you are Doctor Who aren't you?

Tom:
Well, yes I am. I am.

Frank:
I mean, all the time - aren't you?

Tom:
Well, I mean I'm not as benevolent as... Doctor Who is not really an acting part but I mean I'm not as benevolent as the character and as kind as the character and even-tempered as the character. But yes, it's just me. That's all I suppose.

Frank:
But you have to be Doctor Who all the time, I'm told. People regard you totally where they see you as Doctor Who and nothing else. Do you see that?

Tom:
Well I don't have to be Doctor Who any more than you have to be Frank Bough!

Frank:
Yes, but I am Frank Bough!

Tom:
Yeah, I know you are. I'm Doctor Who because I only have a fictional image.

Frank:
But I don't have a fictional image. I am me.

Tom:
Of course you do. People don't really believe you exist. They only see you on the television. I mean, I see you at cricket games and things like that. But it's true, people have a televisual impression of you as they have of me. In my case, of course, I play a heroic figure whereas you're associated with rather terrifying -

Frank:
They want to talk to me about sport but they want to regard you as Doctor Who. Now, can't you stop being Doctor Who and become Tom Baker occasionally?

Tom:
Well, of course I can. I do that at home or I do it in the bar with Mary Tamm or somebody like that. But the point is when I meet anybody who's interested in Doctor Who there's no point in presenting Tom Baker because they find Tom Baker very dreary.

Frank:
Tell me a bit about how people regard you and the effect you have on the audience, who are convinced you are Doctor Who. What sort of way do people behave when they see you?

Tom:
Well, I mean mostly the reaction is one of cheerfulness and happiness because they associate me with the children being vastly amused by me or interested in what I do as the character of the Doctor. And they also ascribe to me - such is the gullibility of the public and the potency of television – they ascribe to me all the virtues of Doctor Who. For example, I don't need anything boring like a bank card, for example. I don't even need money now because people make the assumption because I play this benevolent fictional character that I am, you know, that my probity is totally beyond question.

Frank:
So you have to work very hard – if you're not very nice as Tom Baker then you have to be very nice as Doctor Who when the occasion demands it.

Tom:
Ah ha! Yeah, it's not difficult. I get on all right with people – superficially.

Bough failing to appreciate the difference between his real self and his televisual image would ultimately cost him his career. Wikipedia quotes Paul Connew, formerly of The News of the World, saying that the 1988 sex and drugs scandal,

"caused a sensation at the time, given Bough's public image as the squeaky clean frontman of breakfast and sports television."

It's fascinating to see Tom address the power that television gives him over members of the public in the light of the awful revelations about other TV stars of the time. Television was much more influential back then - with fewer channels, fewer alternatives to telly, and bigger, less media savvy audiences. Tom clearly saw the impact of that influence in his daily dealings with the public - and he took his responsibilities to them seriously.

He was certainly no angel - his autobiography is candid about booze and sex and being difficult on set - and yet he tried not to let children see him with a cigarette or beer, or being ordinary and dreary. Even when adults spotted "the Doctor", he tried not to disappoint them by merely being himself. It's striking that Bough seems amazed he'd make that effort.

Playing the Doctor is more than just an acting job, it also involves a public-facing role: you're expected to charm and entertain children off-screen as well as on, there are conventions, signings, charity things. Even years after you leave the role, it's the first thing people will mention. There are all the many people who, thrilled by your adventures, feel kinship, ownership, entitlement (look at how I blithely refer to my childhood hero as "Tom", when I've met him fleetingly a handful of times...).

Is it different from other leading roles? I suspect the presenters and stars of children's TV are the ones most likely to cause offence by not appearing as they seem on screen. But I'd love to know from David Tennant, for example, how much his dad's job as Moderator of the Church of Scotland, served as a model for how to conduct himself as the Doctor. Tom, after all, was once a monk...

Next episode: 1979

Tell me of your homeworld, Usul

I've just finished rereading Dune, having first got through it in my teens. In my head, the book is rather overshadowed by the 1984 film - which I adore - and more importantly by the stickerbook that I and my classmates devotedly filled up because of/despite being far too young to see the film.

As before, I was struck by the richness of the story, the wealth of memorable characters, the complexity of the court politics and the worlds created. The desert planet Arakis is an extraordinary creation, with sounds, smells and language, and a whole ecology, that feel tantalisingly real.

It's not perfect. A lot of the dialogue is horribly clunky, and I can see where the film has cut down or modified examples to make it work more smoothly. Early on, Herbert constantly tells us what's about to happen, which initially adds to the suspense and then just gets annoying. It's at its best when we're left with more work to do as readers, spotting the gaps between what people think they're doing and what they're seen to be doing, or being able to join up the dots of future history. Quotations by Princess Irulan discuss events we're yet to see, placing them in a context of an as-yet-unknown future and adding a scale and importance to the most minor scenes of intrigue. It's a thrill when we meet her in person towards the end of the book, as if we've entered some new age.

Nosing through the web, I've found analysis of the book's links to drug, ecological and countercultures, the islamic influences and so on. I've also found plenty of criticism, such as Samuel R Delany taking

"offense that the book's only portrayal of a homosexual character, the vile pervert Baron Harkonnen, is negative."

Wikipedia, Dune (novel)

At least as objectionable is the simplistic gender binary that runs through the book, with hero Paul fulfilling a prophecy to be the only man capable of doing something normally the province of women. When he succeeds and fulfils the prophecy, it seems to prove the truth of this strict binary division between men and women.

"Paul said: 'There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman the situation is reversed ... The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.'"

Frank Herbert, Dune, p. 505.

That certainty sits oddly at the end of a book so otherwise - brilliantly - caught up in doubt, counterplot and pragmatism, where characters die brutal deaths suddenly and without warning.

I found myself wondering how rare it is in sci-fi for a prophecy not to come true, or a young hero turn out to be not the messiah... Yes, I'd welcome examples.

Doctor Who: 1977

Episode 455: Horror of Fang Rock, part 2
First broadcast: 6.15 pm, Saturday 10 September 1977
<< back to 1976

Leela threatens Lord Palmerdale,
The Horror of Fang Rock, part 2
(image swiped from Doctor Who gifs)

As wise Jonny Morris puts it in the most recent Doctor Who Magazine,

"this story is the third in what has to be the most impressive run of stories in the show's history."

Part of the strength of The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Horror of Fang Rock is how well written the new companion is. Leela is a brilliant character: bold, brave and never stupid, she's grown up as a "savage" (the word the series uses) on an alien world where life is very hard. She's a sci-fi twist on Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, but for all the Doctor is Professor Higgins, teaching her about science and manners and getting her to put some clothes on, he never quite tames the savage within. Leela's best moments are when she doesn't behave like a lady.

Yet there's something troubling about a companion so comfortable with killing, who'll reach for a weapon whenever there's a problem. Tom Baker objected, too, insisting that when Leela kills someone in her first story that the Doctor replies with cold fury:

That wasn't necessary. Who licensed you to slaughter people? No more Janis thorns, you understand? Ever.

After that, she tends to wound not kill people (aliens apparently don't count).

Why is it a problem? It's not as if the Doctor hasn't previously had companions who are ready to fight and kill. All the male companions until Harry were called upon to fight and kill baddies, usually brawling with bare hands as if that's morally better. Sara wanted to kill the Doctor the first time she met him; Zoe was skilled in martial arts (as was Jo, though she rarely used it). The Doctor and his friends are frequently caught up in battles that leave their enemies dead.

Leela, though, is unlike any other companion before or since because of her relish for killing. As I said, we rarely see her kill after her first story so it's all in her words. There's her response to Palmerdale that I've chosen as my image:

Silence! You will do as the Doctor instructs, or I will cut out your heart.

There's more in part four, as she taunts the Rutan:

Enjoy your death as I enjoyed killing you!

Later, the Doctor's chides her again - but she won't be chided.

DOCTOR:
Been celebrating, have you?

LEELA:
It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy.

Most brutally of all there's the moment she thinks she's been blinded right at the end of the story.

LEELA:
Slay me, Doctor.

DOCTOR
What?

LEELA:
I'm blind. Slay me now. It is the fate of the old and crippled.

This response to disability is foreshadowed in the opening episode, where Leela misunderstands a reference to Reuben "killing himself" with work, and asks if he is crippled. It's a shocking idea to put into the mouth of our main identification figure in a family show on at Saturday tea-time. Yes, it helps that the Doctor tells Leela quite clearly that she's wrong - but I'm not sure quite enough.

Part of the problem is the strength of the imagery. It's not just Leela's death we conjure in our minds but also that of the old and crippled. I spoke before about how the language used can make Doctor Who more vivid and horrible than anything we're shown on screen.

And yet, I think it's important that when Leela says these things she's not dressed as a savage: she's in ordinary jeans and a jumper. It's a brilliant juxtaposition: the words she uses cut against how she appears. She might look like an ordinary young woman but inside she's something wild. It's very rare in the old show to get inside a character's head and see the world as they do - but with Leela we do.

It's a shame that, from the next story, Leela takes a retrograde step and puts her animal skins back on. Actress Louise Jameson has said before that it's almost as if those in charge could (unconsciously) only allow such a strong female character if at the same time they took her clothes off. But I'm not sure I agree, because when they take Leela's clothes off her again the writing stops being as strong.

With the one exception of The Sun Makers - where Leela gets lines like,

You touch me again and I'll fillet you.

- for the rest of Season 15 she is written as rather a generic companion, chasing round after the Doctor to ask him what's going on. How much more brilliant and rich and rewarding if she had worn ordinary clothes? The writers would have had to remind us in dialogue and action that she wasn't what she seemed, and that would have meant more compelling stories and better served the character.

For all she grew up on another planet, Leela is a human - the last human companion in the series for some time. But when she's written well, with such bloodthirsty imagery, she's the most alien best friend the Doctor ever had.

Next episode: 1978

Cast and crew of Graceless 3

The splendid fellows at Big Finish have announced the cast and crew of Graceless 3, what I wrote. Their announcement goes like this:

Champagne celebration for final Graceless

The third – and final – series of Graceless will be released at the end of June, bringing an end to the adventures of time-travelling sisters Abby and Zara. The three-part series, written by Simon Guerrier and directed by Lisa Bowerman, reunites Ciara Janson as Abby and Laura Doddington as Zara – along with a guest cast of new and familiar faces to the Graceless universe.

“It’s sad to be saying goodbye to Abby and Zara, but after three series, we felt that the story of Graceless was coming to a natural end,” says producer Mark Wright. “It’s been such a happy creative time working with Simon, Lisa, Ciara and Laura over the last few years, and I think that the scripts Simon has come up with for this last series really do the characters justice. And it’s been a real privilege to work with a fantastic guest cast, and to welcome back some old friends to the series for the final episode.”

Part one, The Edge, resolves the series two cliffhanger, which saw Abby and Zara lost in the vortex, with Abby washing up at a strange hotel on the edge of a cliff in search of Zara. But will she want to be found? Tim Bentinck and Sunny Ormonde – better known as David Archer and Lillian Bellamy in BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers – guest star as Albert and Miss Simone, along with Joe Coen as Kurt and Paul Copley as Dennis. Joe recently appeared in the TV mini series The Bible, and for Big Finish has recorded the Doctor Who audios The Elite and Binary. Paul Copley’s extensive CV includes The Lakes, Downton Abbey, the Bafta-winning Last Tango in Halifax, as well as the acclaimed Big Finish Doctor Who audio Spare Parts.

Part two, The Battle, takes Abby and Zara to the Battle of Maldon in 10th century Britain, where they discover the true consequences of their actions throughout space and time. Can they convince a historian in the far future to help them put things right? Critically acclaimed actress Geraldine James guest stars in The Battle as Chi. Amongst her many credits, Geraldine has starred in TV drama Band of Gold, as Mrs Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films with Robert Downey Jr, and most recently in Channel 4’s Utopia. Tim Chipping (Troyand the Big Finish Companion Chronicle The Wanderer) joins the cast as Burtnoth, with Joe Coen as Olaf.

With a universe and history against them, Abby and Zara find they have nowhere else to go – apart from the one place they nearly called home. But what will they find there on the day they choose to die? Consequences, the final episode of Graceless, sees the return of Michael Cochrane and Joanna Van Gyseghem reprising the roles of Brondle and Wing, first seen in series two’s The Flood. They are joined by another old friend to the series in Fraser James, who once again plays Marek – but is it a Marek that Abby and Zara will recognise?

“Lisa Bowerman has assembled such a brilliant guest cast for this third series,” says Mark, “and to be able to welcome back Michael, Joanna and Fraser for the final episode was the icing on the cake. We’ve loved every second of making Graceless over the years, and we hope our listeners enjoy the finale as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.”

Graceless III is available to pre-order now as a three-disc CD box set for the special pre-order price of £22, or as a digital download for £17.

Doctor Who: 1976

After episode 427: (The Seeds of Doom, part six)
July 1976
<< back to 1975

Doctor Who and the Fish Invasion of London

You can establish the credentials of a Doctor Who fan with a few quick questions. Who is their favourite Doctor? What was the first story they ever saw - and do they know the name of it and when it was broadcast? What episode was first broadcast closest to the day they were born - and do they have to work it out or do they already know?

I was born in June 1976 in the gap between the end of Season 13 (The Seeds of Doom, part six, was first broadcast on 6 March) and the start of Season 14 (The Masque of Mandragora, part one, was first broadcast on 4 September). So I like to think that my birth story is the LP Doctor Who and the Pescatons, released that July.

It was the first Doctor Who story produced in the audio format, and starred the two leads of the show at the time (Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen recorded an episode of the educational radio programme Exploration Earth a few weeks before they recorded The Pescatons, but that episode - "The Time Machine" wasn't broadcast until October).

It's a daft old story - a giant space fish invades London before the Doctor and Sarah Jane can defeat it using special sound. Writer Victor Pemberton reused elements (i.e. the whole plot) of his Second Doctor story Fury from the Deep (1968) - which had itself reused elements of an earlier radio play.

Listening to it again, I realised how similar the format is to a lot of the Doctor Who audio adventures I write now for Big Finish. It's two episodes; it's a mixture of narration and dramatised scenes; there's one guest actor; and it tells an ambitious story that the TV show probably couldn't afford to realise while still trying to emulate the feel of the TV show of the time.

The Pescatons has clearly been written with Tom Baker's Doctor in mind - it's full of his eccentricity and strangeness, and the action scenes are more violent than anything from the Second Doctor's time.

But for all it stars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the Doctor and Sarah Jane, their characters don't quite ring true. The tone is really peculiar. The Doctor's narration is oddly jokey delivery, such as in this scene from episode 2:

The creature reared up; its long, pointed teeth moving in for the attack. For one moment, it looked as though the creature was going to ignore me and claw straight into Sarah Jane and the baby. To regain its attention, I had to do just about everything except turn a cartwheel. Thinking about it, I'm not too sure I didn't even do that. Anything I could lay my hands on I threw at it: stones, dustpan bins, milk bottles, even an old boot somebody had discarded in rather a hurry. But still the creature ignored me and slid closer and closer towards Sarah Jane and the baby.

It might have his voice but this doesn't sound like the Doctor. Today, that sort of thing would usually be picked up and corrected by the script editor and producer, or caught by the unblinking eye that we refer to, in hushed whisper, as "Cardiff". I suspect the Doctor making jokes while a baby was in danger would also be cause for concern.

I don't mean this as any kind of judgement on The Pescatons, just to note the historic moment and show how things have changed. After all, how can you not love a story in which the Doctor saves Sarah Jane and a baby from a giant alien fish by singing "Hello Dolly!"?

Next episode: 1977

Diegesis, fabula, synergy and syuzhet

A few weeks ago, Brother Tom and I were asked to speak to some AS and BTEC students about making short films. We basically told them, "Don't listen do us: go and make stuff".

I was fascinated by one of the teaching rooms, the walls covered with technical terms the students needed to know for their exams. Here's just a small selection:

Doctor Who: 1975

Episode 408: Pyramids of Mars, part 3
First broadcast: 5.45 pm, Saturday 8 November 1975
<< back to 1974

Sarah Jane takes aim
Pyramids of Mars, part 3

This blog thing of choosing one moment from each calendar year of Doctor Who has taught me a new fact! Until I started thinking about what I'd do for 1975, I'd never noticed that that year boasted a whopping 35 new episodes - from Robot part 2 (4 January) to The Android Invasion part 4 (13 December). I wonder how much showing a season and a half in one year helped cement new Doctor Tom Baker in the public mind? We can but dream of such riches today. Anyway, this plethora of episodes made choosing one moment quite tricky.

I've chosen something from Pyramids of Mars - a story I'm especially in love with. It's a very good story to show people who don't know old Doctor Who (see an introduction I wrote to it for some students). That's why it, of all Sarah Jane's 18 adventures with the Third and Fourth Doctors, was included on the DVD of The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Fourth Series to thrill a new generation of viewers. In 1998, readers of Doctor Who Magazine voted it the 4th best Doctor Who story ever; in 2009 they voted it seventh best of the then 200 stories.

It was also the first old Doctor Who story I - or rather my brother Tom - owned. My elder brother and sister bought the video as a Christmas present for him in, I think, 1990. We watched it endlessly and it's the Doctor Who story I know best of all. Yet I still spot new things each time. Watching it again recently I was struck by how often our heroes depend on the most extraordinary good fortune.

In her first scene, Sarah just happens to have rummaged through a wardrobe in the TARDIS and put on a period dress before the TARDIS crash lands in the year 1911 - where the dress fits in just right. This coincidence isn't helped when the Doctor says the dress was worn by his former companion Victoria: she was from 1866, nearly 50 years earlier.

In part 3, when the Doctor explains the history of villainous Sutekh and the ancient Egyptian gods, Sarah already knows some of it, referring to,

The seven hundred and forty gods whose names were recorded in the tomb of Thutmoses the Third.

That's quite a precise bit of egyptological knowledge. As I discovered when I visited the Valley of Kings in early 2012, the tomb of Thutmoses III is not one tourists usually see. It's an earlier tomb than the rest, the wall decorations (which do indeed name 740 gods) simpler, less striking, so tourists are often disappointed. It's conceivable that Sarah has been to the tomb or had read about it somewhere, but it's still quite a thing to be able to recall when needed. (Presumably, it's from whatever reference book the writer used as a basis for the story.)

Later in the same episode, Sarah also just happens to be a brilliant shot - though she and the Doctor never mention or use this skill again in any other episode she appears in. There's something striking and cool about Sarah Jane in an Edwardian frock pointing a rifle at an alien spaceship but it's completely out of place for the character. (I'll talk about companions wielding weapons another time.)

It's not just Sarah. In part 1, the Doctor congratulates Laurence Scarman on conveniently,

Inventing the radio telescope forty years early.

In part 2, Laurence shows Sarah a good hiding place in the house - a priest hole he and his brother found when they were boys. The Doctor isn't impressed when Sarah mentions this priest hole.

In a Victorian gothic folly? Nonsense.

But pointing it out as nonsense doesn't excuse it being there. In part 4, two things that help the Doctor outwit Sutekh - the TARDIS controls being isomorphic so only the Doctor can work them and the Doctor's respiratory bypass - have never been mentioned before.

These things suggest a script rewritten in some haste, and it's a mark of the quality of the setting, characters and dialogue - as well as the design and performances - that I'd never spotted them before. Brother Tom reckons that we only notice continuity errors or poor design and performances when we're not caught up in the story. This period of Doctor Who, under producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, is often brilliant at ensnaring us, the stories so shocking and thrilling, the characters so lively, that we rarely notice the joins.

See also: my friend John J Johnston, vice-chair of the Egypt Exploration Society explains a bit about Sutekh's love life.

Next episode: 1976

Doctor Who: 1974

Episode 370: The Monster of Peladon, part 6
First broadcast: 5.30 pm, Saturday, 27 April 1974
<< back to 1973

"Anybody would think you would prefer me dead."
The Monster of Peladon, part 6

In December 1973, during production of Death to the Daleks, Jon Pertwee gave notice to his producer that he would leave Doctor Who. He would leave at the end of the season, so with 12 episodes still to be made that effectively meant three months' notice. But those 12 episodes broke down into two stories, one just about to start filming.

We don't know the exact day that Pertwee tendered his resignation. The script for the season finale, Planet of Spiders, was not officially commissioned until 5 December 1973 - perhaps after Pertwee had given his notice or with a suspicion that he would. The story had been in development for some time before that (though I couldn't track down it being announced in Radio Times earlier in the year). Elements of the plot may have been carried over from the story originally planned to end this season, The Final Game - which would have written out the Master had the actor Roger Delgado not sadly died.

But once the production team knew Pertwee was leaving, Spiders becomes all about writing him out - and does so very effectively. My chum Gary put it all much better than me, saying the

"story weaves together the warp and weft of a whole era ... Planet of the Spiders sends the Third Doctor off in style; buried like a Pharaoh with all the symbols of his glorious reign. This is a story with much lingering power, and has a greater influence of modern Doctor Who than any other. "

Gary Gillatt, review of Planet of the Spiders, Doctor Who Magazine, 2011.

That ought to be more than an enough of a send-off for the magnificent Third Doctor. But I love the fact that the previous story includes some nice foreshadowing of the death to come, added to the script at the very last minute. In part 6 of The Monster of Peladon, Sarah finds the Doctor seemingly dead and there's a poignant close-up on her tears - before he opens her eyes and tells her not to be silly.

It's especially brilliant because it's so similar to the same scene between them six weeks later, when the Doctor really does die. The audience also knew that Pertwee was leaving (it was announced to the public on 8 February) so might even have thought this was it. The scene plays on what we know in addition to what's happening on screen, and the lightness of the Doctor chiding Sarah for her tears is doing what so many production teams have tried to do since in the lead up to a finale. It teases us, "Keep watching: there's something big to come."

But best of all is Sarah's reaction as she follows the Doctor out of the room to get on with things. That resigned shrug to the madness of it all is one of my favourite things in Doctor Who.

Next episode: 1975