Mary Whitehouse v Doctor Who

Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday 5 March. Produced by me and brother Thomas, it’s presented by Samira Ahmed who has spent months researching Whitehouse’s diaries, now in the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford; Samira has written a blog post about it all. For our programme, we spoke to Whitehouse’s granddaughter Fiona, to critics Michael Billington and Nicholas de Jongh, and to actor / director Samuel West. Oh, and Lisa Bowerman is amazing as Mary Whitehouse.

I’ve spent weeks going through the BBC archives for suitable clips to use. The earliest surviving example is from 5 May 1964, a news report about the Clean-Up TV event held at Birmingham Town Hall, where Whitehouse was one of the speakers. The clip of Whitehouse is brief but quite well known:

“Last Thursday evening we sat as a family and we saw a programme that started at six thirty-five and it was the dirtiest programme that I have seen for a very long time.”

The consensus seems to be that this dirty programme was a Scottish sketch show, Between the Lines, starring Tom Conti and Fulton Mackay. On the edition of 30 April, Conti met an attractive woman at a dance and we then heard his internal monologue. Sadly, the episode seems to be missing from the archive, so we can’t tell how “dirty” it was. We can’t judge the language used, the tone of it, the general effect. 

Surely, one would think, a programme shown at 6.35 in the evening couldn’t be too rude. And yet there’s lots in old telly that was thought innocuous at the time but seems remarkable now. The Wheel of Fortune is an episode of Doctor Who written by David Whitaker and first broadcast at 5.40 pm on 10 April 1965. It includes a scene in which a man called Haroun helps companion Barbara Wright to hide from some soldiers. Haroun leaves Barbara with his young daughter, Safiya, while he goes to look for a safe route out of town. He gives Barbara his knife: if she thinks the soldiers will find them, she is to kill Safiya and then herself. Barbara protests, but Haroun persuades her:

You would not let them [the soldiers] take Safiya?
No, of course I wouldn’t!
Then I'll leave the knife. 

It’s an extraordinary thing to include in a family drama aimed at kids aged 8 to 14, and just one of several examples from early Doctor Who where Barbara is under threat of sexual violence.

Right from the beginning of Doctor Who, there had been questions about how suitable it was for children. Opinion on this was “strongly divided” at the executive meeting of the BBC’s Television Programme Planning Committee on 4 December 1963 - after just two episodes of the series had been broadcast. The following week it looked like the programme might be moved to a later time in the schedule, though this was over-ruled by Head of Drama (and co-creator of Doctor Who) Sydney Newman. 

Then, on 12 February 1964, at the same committee Donald Baverstock (Chief of Programmes, BBC-1, listed in minutes as “C.P.Tel”) thought one scene in The Edge of Destruction - in which the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan attacks a chair with a pair of scissors while in the grip of some kind of madness - might have breached the BBC’s own code on depictions of inimitable violence. Baverstock’s then boss, Stuart Hood, later wrote that the BBC’s code of practice on violence in television, drawn up in 1960, was.

“a remarkably sane and enlightened document, which acknowledged the fact, for instance, that subjects with unpleasant associations for adults will often be taken for granted by children and vice versa. ‘Guns … and fisticuffs may have sinister implications for adults; seldom for children. Family insecurity and marital infidelity may be commonplace to adults; to children they can be deeply disturbing.’” (Stuart Hood, A Survey of Television (1967), p. 90.)

That reference to guns is interesting in the light of Mary Whitehouse’s first-known objections to Doctor Who. Whitehouse believed that depictions of sex and violence on TV had a corrupting effect on the viewer, and led to an increase in sexual and violent crime more broadly. She gave some examples of this in an interview with the Daily Mirror on 29 November 1965:

“‘I know a 14-year-old girl who was so physically affected by a sexy play that she went out and offered herself to a 14-year-old boy. … And I know a boy who listened to a doctor expounding the virtues of of premarital sex and went out and got VD… I mean, where is it going to end? We've even got the Daleks in Dr. Who—a children's show, mind you—chanting 'Kill, kill, kill.' One day a youngster is going to go out and do just that…’ AT this point MRS. FOX said something that sounded like ‘twaddle.’”

That’s Avril Fox, “mother and Harlow councillor”, contesting Whitehouse’s claims. I found several examples of this in the archive, too: Whitehouse claiming to represent the views of ordinary people, and then ordinary people quickly saying she didn’t speak for them. (We use one example in our documentary, from an episode of Talkback on 7 November 1967 in which Whitehouse and other members of the public responded to Stuart Hood and the claims made in his book, not least that most people who write into TV companies are “cranks”.)

I also found several examples of Whitehouse conflating what are surely different issues, such as in this case undercutting her point about protecting children from sexualised content by equating it with the supposed effects of fantasy violence. Yes, children mimic Daleks - that’s part of the Daleks’ appeal - but they don’t then go on to kill people. Suggesting they do undercuts the whole argument; the serious point about sexualised content is also dismissed as twaddle.

There’s a third characteristic: that Whitehouse may have been complaining about something she’d not actually seen. The Daily Mirror interview was published two days after the broadcast of Devil’s Planet, an especially notable episode of Doctor Who in that it killed off a companion. But Katarina is not killed by Daleks; she is ejected from a spaceship airlock. The Daleks do appear, and execute a wicked alien called Zephon, but there is no chanting of “Kill”.

Famously, the Daleks don’t chant “Kill”, but prefer the term “Exterminate”. One Dalek does repeat, “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,” in the episode Flashpoint (broadcast 26 December 1964), so either Whitehouse was remembering that untypical sequence from a year before, or she invented the thing she criticised - perhaps repeating what other people said about the Daleks, rather than what she’d observed herself. (As we detail in our documentary, she consciously chose not to see The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre, but led a private prosecution against its director for a scene in it that she considered to be grossly indecent.)

In her later criticism of Doctor Who, Whitehouse was more specific - and effective. Since m’colleague Jonathan Morris wrote about this in more depth in his 2003 feature for Doctor Who Magazine, “Sex and Violence”, a wealth of press clippings have been posted on the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive relating to Mary Whitehouse. Planet of the Spiders (1974) had, she claimed, led to an “epidemic” of “spider phobia” in children. In Genesis of the Daleks (1975),

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975)

She was concerned about specific scenes in The Brain of Morbius and The Deadly Assassin (both 1976), and could vividly recall them almost 20 years later when interviewed, on 22 November 1993, for the documentary Thirty Years in the TARDIS. Director Kevin Davies kindly provided me with a longer version of that interview, though we couldn’t make it fit in our programme:

“Now, there’s one particular programme - and I can see it still in my mind’s eye - where Doctor Who, the final shot of the episode, was Doctor Who drowning. And these sort of images, the final shots of the programme, with the image that was left in the mind of the child for a whole week, not knowing whether his beloved Doctor Who or whatever would have drowned or not have drowned. And another programme finished with a girl who was with him, and she had a pincer put around her neck. And the holding of that pincer round her, again, was the last shot. And to me, I think it’s extraordinary that people with the brilliance, in many ways, in making a programme of that kind couldn’t have extended their awareness not only to their cameras or all the rest of it, but to the effect of what they were doing upon the children who were receiving it. That was almost as thought they were a bit dumb in that area.”

Back in 1976, and following her criticism, the last shot of the drowning scene was cut from the master tape of the episode by the programme’s then producer.  On the 30 Years documentary, a subsequent producer says he secretly hoped Mary Whitehouse would complain about his Doctor Who because it was always good for viewing figures; yet her complaints about violence in the series in his time overseeing the series were used as justification when the programme was then taken off the air. Today, Doctor Who isn’t shown so early in the evening and - I’d argue - is marketed much less as a show for children. I find myself wondering how much that sort of thing is in the shadow of Mary Whitehouse.

Going through her diaries, I found a number of other things. There’s the entry in the 1985 diary where she has two concerns about recent television: her discussions with Michael Grade, then Controller of BBC-1, about violence in the recent season of Doctor Who and the legal judgment on yet another private prosecution she’d brought, this time about the broadcast on Channel 4 of a controversial film set in a borstal. So the page is headed “Dr. Who - SCUM”

And another one I noted. On 18 March 1982, the legal case against The Romans in Britain was withdrawn. Mary Whitehouse was on that evening’s Newsnight to discuss the case, and spent most of her time correcting what she felt were errors in the reporting. Then, interview done, the cameras wheeled away to the other side of the studio for further discussion of the case, with Joan Bakewell speaking to Sir Peter Hall from the National Theatre and Sir Lois Blom-Cooper.

Again, Whitehouse thought what they said was wrong. In her diary, she says she asked the presenter who’d just interviewed her if she could intercede. The presenter checked with the producer who said no. So Mary Whitehouse heckled anyway.

“Whereupon the cameras came chasing across the studio, like a lot of Daleks, leaving Joan Bakewell and her guests in darkness! … I came fully onto the screen as I was saying my bit.” (Mary Whitehouse, diary entry for events of 18 March 1982, written on the page for 10 March 1982)

I was really struck by that moment - and that telling word. Alas, as the Daleks close in on Mary Whitehouse for this hero moment, she’s not clutching her lapels.

Time Lord Victorious timeline

The official Doctor Who people (praise the company!) have released a timeline of forthcoming multimedia jamboree Time Lord Victorious.

Among the books, comics, audio dramas, escape rooms, figurines and whatever else, there's a whole page devoted to my short story Lesser Evils, including the following sentence from the thing itself:

Death descended on the planet Alexis one bright and crisp, clear morning...

Lesser Evils is performed by Jon Culshaw and features the version of the Master originally played by Anthony Ainley. It's set on a planet I named after the amazing Alexis Deacon, author of Geis.

• Buy Lesser Evils from Big Finish

ETA: there's now a trailer for twin release Master Thief and Lesser Evils

Galactic Yo-Yo 86

Episode 86 of the Galactic Yo-Yo podcast features an interview with me talking about writing Doctor Who books and audios, and confessing my love for 1985 story Timelash.

"Simon likes Timelash more than most people do," as Molly says in her introduction. It is true.

Doctor Who Magazine 543

Doctor Who Magazine #543 is out in shops now, and features my interview with TV and radio presenter Stephen Cranford about his friendship with the late producer John Nathan-Turner.

Nathan-Turner died in 2002, and Stephen inherited his photos, tapes and paperwork relating to Doctor Who, which he's kindly shared with the clever lot working on DVDs and Blu-rays. We've been able to publish many of the photos for the first time.

Doctor Who Magazine special on Target books

This special edition of Doctor Who Magazine covers the Target novelisations and their proustian delights, and is in shops now. It's full of stuff I didn't know, plus lots about the greatest book related to the series ever - Terrance Dicks's The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975).

I'm also in it, speaking to magnificent Marc Platt about novelising his own TV serial, Ghost Light, and then novelising one by a friend - Battlefield, the scripts of which had been written by Ben Aaronovitch.

Last week, I listened to the audiobook of Doctor Who - The Invasion - one of my favourites of the Target series. This special has made me want to seek out more.

Chernobyl

I've finally caught up with the amazing HBO/Sky mini-series Chernobyl, a gruelling experience because the horror is so perfectly executed. No wonder it's up for all of the awards.

Everything about it - the writing, the realisation - is absolutely right. But I especially like The Chernobyl Podcast that accompanies each episode, in which writer Craig Mazin explains to host Peter Segal how much of what we're watching comes from primary sources or dramatic licence. It's full of insight into the real history, including more about the real people involved. But it's also fascinating to hear how judgments were made in the story-telling: what events and relationships to omit (such as Legasov's family) and how much of the stomach-churning detail to actually show.

I'd dearly love more of this: episode-by-episode interviews with the director Johan Renck, produce Sanne Wohlenberg or costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux on how you make this history, this whole world, so convincing. And I'd love it done for other drama based in real history: Russell T Davies on A Very English Scandal; Sally Wainwright on Gentleman Jack.

TV Years: Classic Children's Television

The new issue of TV Years magazine, from the makers of TV Choice, is devoted to classic children's television. I've written a feature on Play School (1964-88) and interviewed creator and first producer Joy Whitby and presenters Carol Chell and Carol Leader.

Costume design in Doctor Who

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition focuses on costume design - an often neglected aspect of a series that has otherwise been studied exhaustively.

Running through the special is a decade-by-decade history of costume in the series written by Piers Britton, co-author of the seminal academic study Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who (2003), and its full of gems like the way Sandra Reid had to find plausible ways to put companions from Earth's past into more contemporary clothes.

"Her solution for Victoria, in the character's second serial, The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), was especially clever. Details of Victoria's original crinoline, with its ruffled bodice, were echoed in a demurely knee-skimming mini-dress, made from a very similar sprigged material but embellished with knife pleats, rather than ruffles, running from shoulder to belt." (p. 8)

The special also includes interviews with costume designers and actors from the series. I spoke to four of the Doctor's travelling companions from contemporary Earth: Anneke Wills (Polly, 1966-7); Katy Manning (Josephine Grant, 1971-3, 2010); Sophie Aldred (Ace, 1987-9); Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri, 2005-6, 2008, 2010). I also spoke to fan Tim Wearing, who happens to own his favourite costume from all of Doctor Who.

This all dovetails with my ongoing work for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection, where I'm writing 1,200 words for each of the characters I'm assigned from the whole history of the series - as well as longer pieces for the Companion Set issues focused on Doctors and their companions. Here's a list of the issues of Doctor Who Figurine Collection I've written.

The Court Jester

Out now, The Court Jester is the latest volume of The Wife in Space series by Neil & Sue Perryman, in which they watch all of Doctor Who. This one covers the adventures of the Sixth Doctor (1984-1986).

I've written the foreword for this volume, which has given me a chance to revisit what it was like to watch these episodes first go out, and to confess my love for Timelash.

• Buy The Court Jester (Kindle edition)
• Adventures with the Wife in Space
• Me on being terrified of Doctor Who in 1985

"The Man With Two Brains" in the Lancet Psychiatry

"Me and my brain" is a piece I've written about 1983 comedy The Man with Two Brains, and the history of brain transplants in fiction more generally, for the new issue of the Lancet Psychiatry (vol. 4, no. 12, December 2017). You need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but the Lancet website boasts the opening paragraph:

"The Man with Two Brains (1983), the classic comedy starring Steve Martin, is about a love triangle. Beautiful but wicked Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner) is hit by a car driven by neurosurgeon Michael Hfuhruhurr (Martin). He saves her life and falls for her but, once married, Dolores delights in tormenting him. Then Michael meets someone else. He has a lot in common with nice Anne Uumellmahaye (voiced by Sissy Spacek)—not least an unpronounceable surname. The only snag is that she's a brain in a jar."

And the Lancet Psychiatry tweeted the following tantalising excerpt:

"Despite the jokes, fun, and adventure, there's something deeply unsettling about the idea of brain and mind transplants. It plays on anxieties about the distinction between our physical body and our identity, and the linked fear of our bodies failing us through accident, illness, or decrepitude, redefining who we are. It speaks to anxieties about our own uniqueness and autonomy, and the threat of personal annihilation. And then there's the ongoing concern of how scientific and economic change threatens our personal control. It's ripe for further exploration, not just in research but in comedy and horror, because it's a subject best met with nervous laughter."

Adventures in Space

Out now in shops - and digitally from PocketMags - is The Essential Doctor Who - Adventures in Space.

Among the delights, there are four things by me:

• Mission to Moscow
  David Whitaker's special assignment on behalf of Solzhenitsyn, at the same time he (Whitaker!) was meant to be writing The Ambassadors of Death (1970).
• Star Man
  Sid Sutton talks me through the Doctor Who titles he designed, used between 1980 and 1986. Plus, I speak to the person who used Sid's titles as the basis of the special Doctor Who 30th anniversary teaser.
• The Impossible Suit
  Costume designer Louise Page and big cheese Russell T Davies discuss making space travel seem convincing in The Impossible Planet (2006) and after.
• Fighting the Suits
  Costume designer Hayley Nebauer unpicks the spacesuits seen in this year's episodes, focusing on Oxygen.

You might also like to read my hour-long chat with current Doctor Who big cheese Steven Moffat, conducted at the Fairford Festival of Fiction earlier in the month and now up on Koquillion - my site of interviews with Doctor Who cast and crew.

Colin and the Carrionites

July sees the release of Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New Monsters vol. 2, and I've written the Sixth Doctor's encounter with the witchy Carrionites (last seen battling the David Tennant and Shakespeare on TV).

As I said for the news story at the Big Finish website,

"Matt Fitton asked me to write for Colin and the Carrionites. The Carrionites get their power from words, and the Sixth Doctor is the most logophile of Doctors, so I knew there was something potent there. David Richardson suggested the 1980s setting, invoking something of the Enfield poltergeist of the late 1970s, and I drew a bit on Hammer's To The Devil a Daughter, or at least my memories of being terrified of that in my teens. And I was keen to ensure that this was definitely the Carrionites, not just any witchy aliens, so I looked for something to link it firmly to The Shakespeare Code..."

The sleeper must awaken: inside the mind of Dune

I've written an essay on Dune for the new issue of the Lancet Psychiatry, which you can read in full online.

Further reading:

• Brian Herbert, Dreamer of Dune – The Biography of Frank Herbert (Tor: New York, 2003)
• Frank Herbert, Dune (Orion: London, 2007 (1965)
• Frank Herbert, The Dragon in the Sea (Nel Books: London, 1969 (1955))
• David Lynch (dir.), Dune (Universal Studios Blu-ray: 2010 (1984))
• Ed Naha, The Making of Dune (Target: London, 1984)
• Timothy O'Reilly, Frank Herbert (Frederick Ungar: New York, 1983) - full text online
• Chris Rodley (ed.), Lynch on Lynch (Faber and Faber: London, 1997)
• The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace - www.davidlynchfoundation.org/

Doctor Who: 1988

Episode 675: Silver Nemesis, part one
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, Wednesday 23 November 1988
<< back to 1987

Ace's newspaper
Silver Nemesis, part one

Gosh. When, later this year, The Day of the Doctor celebrates 50 years of Doctor Who, part one of Silver Nemesis will be exactly halfway. For this ancient dinosaur who still thinks of the Seventh Doctor as new, that is really quite boggling.

That first episode of Silver Nemesis is also one of just five of the 798 episodes in the series so far that is set on the day it was broadcast:

1. The Feast of Steven (25 December 1965)
   It's Christmas Day in Liverpool at the start of the episode, and there's nothing to suggest it's not 1965.
2. Volcano (1 January 1966)
   The TARDIS briefly stops in Trafalgar Square as the bells sound the new year, and again there's nothing to suggest it's not 1966.
3. Logopolis, part one (28 February 1981)
   Two stories later, in Four To Doomsday, we learn the date that Tegan missed her flight.
4. Silver Nemesis, part one (23 November 1988)
   Ace's newspaper gives the date and it's the day predicted for the return of the comet.
5. The Big Bang (26 June 2010)
   The date, given through the series, of Amy's wedding and the TARDIS exploding.

There are a few near misses. Ben says in The Faceless Ones, episode 6, that it's 20 July 1966 - “the day it all started” – but that's four days after the broadcast of The War Machines, episode 4. The Wedding of River Song says the Doctor dies on 22 April 2011, the day before the broadcast of The Impossible Astronaut.

Though the more recent Christmas specials are often set on Christmas Day, they're not set in the year they were first broadcast. The Christmas Invasion, broadcast 25 December 2005, must be set in 2006 because Rose has been away for more than a year according to Aliens of London, where the missing persons poster says she vanished in March 2005. The next Christmas special takes place a year later as it refers to the events of the previous Christmas, so is set in 2007 (but broadcast in 2006), and so on until The End of Time, part one. The last scene of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe (2011) is set, according to Amy, two years after she last saw the Doctor, on the day of his 'death' in April 2011.

What does any of this matter? Well, for a show that can go anywhere in time, the series rarely lands in the present day. The apparently 'present-day' episodes are often a few years in the future – which, as I've argued before, allows the programme more freedom to destroy famous landmarks, spread deadly plagues and generally create mayhem.

There's also an issue of scheduling: the makers of Doctor Who can't always be certain of the date an episode will be broadcast. It might be bumped for the football or Eurovision, or because of events in the news. The schedules are only confirmed a few weeks ahead of broadcast and anything might change.

I think it's fun that for a series about an erratic time machine that doesn't always go where it's meant to, it never quite lands according to schedule. And that, for a show that's often telling us about the relativistic nature of the 'past' and 'future', events rarely happen 'now'.

The Doctor can't remember
where and when he's meant to be,
Silver Nemesis, part one

(Thanks to Jonathan Morris and Jim Smith for letting me put some of this to them before posting it.)

Next episode: 1989

Doctor Who: 1987

Episode 654: Time and the Rani part 1
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, 7 September 1987
<< back to 1986

The CGI TARDIS
Time and the Rani part 1

The 1986 season of Doctor Who began with a thrilling special effects sequence: the camera panning across a vast spaceship as it catches the TARDIS in a beam of light. This model shot was some of the first visual effects work on the series by Mike Tucker – who is still working on Doctor Who today. (I hope to speak to Mike on this subject another time.)

The 1987 series of Doctor Who also began with a thrilling special effects sequence as the TARDIS tumbles out of control. But this was not a model shot: it was entirely computer-generated by Oliver Elmes and CAL Video – the same team that created the show's new CGI title sequence. Part 1 of Time and the Rani sees the Seventh Doctor's debut but it's also the first time the TARDIS appears as CGI.

I've been thinking a lot about the role of CGI recently, prompted by a comment made by writer Philip Reeve at the Phonicon convention earlier this year. Explaining how he came up with his extraordinary Mortal Engines, he spoke of trying to achieve “the Clangers aesthetic mixed up with an action movie”, and of how much he admired the “hand-made” feel of old children's telly.

On 20 August – 50 years to the day after the first studio session on Doctor Who had made wobbly bits of light for the title sequence – I asked Philip to expand on what he meant.

What sort of hand-made children's telly were you thinking of?
I grew up in the 70s so I'm thinking back to The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and things like that – quite simple children's television – and also Doctor Who in those days. In fact, if you look back at pretty much all television drama of that era, like Poldark or The Onedin Line, it's not trying to compete with film in the way that TV drama does now. It's theatre: filmed theatre. The scenes outside the windows are painted and it's very obvious that people are not sitting in real rooms but sets. That requires the audience to bring a certain amount of imagination to it, which is something that has gone from television now. It just tries to look real.

Is that the appeal of hand-made TV – that the audience is more active in watching it?
Hmm... Yeah, I think partly so. Of course, with children's stuff particularly there's an element of toys coming to life. Children do that all the time anyway with their toys, moving objects around and animating them in their own minds. So I think there's always an appeal to children of little things moving about as if by magic. They very quickly get across that barrier of thinking “This is made of plasticine but I accept it”. That is entirely good, using the imagination children have anyway.

So does CGI take away from that?
Lots of CGI stuff is great: the CGI animation is very good in something like Monsters Inc or whatever – as good as cell or stop-motion animation. It's just a different look. But I am tired of CGI stuff in science-fiction movies. Avatar, for all it's script problems, was extremely beautiful and the first CGI movie which actually convinced me. I just don't see where you go from there; I don't think there's much point pursuing that sort of pseudo-realism. Watching Pacific Rim made me think that I would much rather watch someone in a big monster suit trample nice models than see it being done in pixels.

Have you seen Moon, directed by Duncan Jones?
Yes, that's one of the few sci-fi movies of recent years that actually stands out – because he uses miniatures, I think. It's got this certain feel... When you look at the movies of my era – I'm thinking of Alien, Bladerunner and things like that – when the spaceships or whatever go by you know there's something there. You know it's a miniature but at least it's a real thing.

There's a tactile quality to it.
Yes, a quality of something actually being real. Of course, nobody watching the film thinks “Oh, that's really a spaceship going by”. You assume that some sort of trickery is employed. I just think that it makes it so much more visually interesting. Things like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies had a mixture of miniatures and CGI. I'm not entirely sure what they did but that explains why there's a certain grandeur to the cities and so on, a feeling of these being real things in front of you.

You talked about children animating things anyway, so how much did the tactile quality of old TV encourage you to write and draw stories yourself?
(Long pause) I don't know. It's hard to say, really, because you grow up surrounded by that stuff so I don't know how much it came from within and how much it came from inspiration. Certainly, if I rewatch something like The Goodies or Doctor Who I can see exactly why I thought I could go out and make movies on my dad's super-8 camera because they're very doable. There's a kind of feasibility about them. They haven't got casts of thousands or vast effects. I'm not talking about the special effects so much as the ordinary outdoor scenes of people doing stuff. It was all very achievable – or looked so to me at the age of nine or whatever. I was a movie-maker by the time I was 10 or 11 and I'm sure that was completely inspired by watching things on telly and thinking “Oh yeah, I could do that”. I couldn't – but I almost could.

So how much was your recent Doctor Who e-book, The Roots of Evil, written to have a hand-made feel?
I don't know. As a writer you simply describe things and you're never really sure what pictures will emerge in readers' imaginations. It's kind of a collaboration. I put down the raw materials and it's up to the reader to make it up in their mind. I'm not sure how good their special effects budget is. But in my mind, when I was writing it, I treated it as a nostalgia exercise. I tried to make it feel like the kind of story I would have expected to see in 1978. I tried to go for the achievable sets and effects of that era. I imagined it done with three old tree branches and not much else. But I don't know if that comes across and, to be honest, I don't think it matters. It's aimed at the children of today and I imagine they are brought up on far more sophisticated effects so have a far more impressive picture in their minds than I had in mine when I was writing it. (Laughs) That's fine.

Philip Reeve, thank you very much.

Next episode: 1988

Doctor Who: 1986

After episode 653 (The Trial of a Time Lord, part fourteen)
18 December 1986
<< back to 1985

The Doctor on trial again
Tomorrow's World, 18 December 1986

On 6 December 1986, the Doctor was found not-guilty by a jury of his peers in the final - and fourteenth - episode of The Trial of a Time Lord. Twelve days later he faced a new challenge on BBC One, the Tomorrow's World Christmas quiz.

Broadcast live in prime time, it pitted the Doctor, astronomer Heather Couper and Neil Cossons, then director of the Science Museum, against the studio audience, trying to guess the purpose of a bunch of new gadgets. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube but for a flavour of the tone, here's how presenter Howard Stableford introduced our hero:

HOWARD:
The nominated captain of our expert panel is Colin Baker, Doctor Who. Good of you to find the right time to join us.

DR. WHO:
It's nice to be back again because I was on the 50,000th edition when the TARDIS - the prototype - was shown.

HOWARD:
Was I still on the show?

DR. WHO:
No you were pensioned off.

HOWARD:
Replaced, was I?

This achingly BBC banter feels a bit odd when we know that Colin Baker was in the midst of being replaced. He'd been told that his contract as Doctor Who was not to be renewed some six weeks earlier on 29 October, between the broadcasts of parts eight and nine of Trial of a Time Lord. That news seems to have been reported in the press in early December, just before the quiz was broadcast (though I've not found a source).

Doctor Who's producer still hoped Baker would appear in one more story to hand over to his successor: four days after the Tomorrow's World quiz, he commissioned that story and the writers,

"were asked to write their scripts for the Sixth Doctor and include a climactic regeneration sequence ... Any hope of Colin Baker appearing in Strange Matter was lost on January 6th, 1987, when the first installment of an interview with the actor appeared in The Sun. In it, Baker expressed regret at his dismissal from Doctor Who, and spoke scathingly of BBC1 Controller Michael Grade."

Shannon Sullivan, A Brief History of Time (Travel) - Time and the Rani

The Tomorrow's World quiz was Colin's last appearance as the "current" Doctor.

Colin wasn't sacked but the decision not to renew his contract seems like a judgment on his time in the series. The show was in trouble - it had been taken off the air for 18 months in 1985, and then Trial was not brilliantly received by the public - but that was hardly his fault. As the star, he was just the most visible, recognisible person in the frame.

How much control or choice does a Doctor have over the show? We know David Tennant said no to a story set inside JK Rowling's head. Patrick Troughton battled the production team about the burden of the production schedule and got shorter episodes in his final season. Jon Pertwee had the original actress cast as Sarah Jane Smith replaced. In each case, that Doctor had been in the role for some years which gave their opinions more weight.

But generally, interviews with Doctors suggest that while they might have set the tone in the rehearsal rooms and while filming, and put cast and crew at ease, they didn't have the time or clout to affect the programme being made. They weren't involved in commissioning or editing scripts, or the tone or direction of the series. Perhaps their biggest say over their time in the progamme is what they wore as the Doctor; Colin didn't even have that. Few - the Second, Fifth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors - got to choose when they left the series.

That's not to say they were victims. The Doctors all clearly worked very hard to make the most of the material. Like most actors, they'd query their characters motives, reactions and dialogue. They might have rephrased lines, added jokes or asked what the emphasis should have been, or what their character knew or was thinking at a particular moment. Some incredible moments in the series are the result of an actor playing against the apparent meaning of the lines, or playing them in an unexpected way.

So I'm not arguing that actors should necessarily have more say and involvement in the material they appear in. It's not a bad thing in principle, just not always practical - or desired. Rather, I'm interested in the trust that has to exist between the lead actor(s) and those running a show. I've worked on productions where actors haven't liked or understood what we were making, but threw themselves into it anyway (usually after I'd listened to their doubts and tried to answer their questions). The key thing is the right kind of open, creative environment where people can ask questions and suggest improvements, but whoever's in charge has the final say and keeps everything on course.

That clearly wasn't happening at the end of Colin's time in the show: the producer and script-editor - the "showrunners" at the time - weren't talking, the latter left after an argument and the final episode he wrote was dumped in favour of something else. In the confusion, Colin was left asking fundamental questions about his final story - how much of what we see on screen is a lie, how much has the Doctor turned evil and is his companion really dead? It's bad enough that he had to ask, but I think the answers given in each case were the ones needing least effort to work in, not that made a better story.

All he could do - all any actor could do - was show willing and make the best of what he was handed. He did, and lost his job.

Doctor Who continued with a new actor in the lead, a new script-editor behind the scenes and a new, lighter touch. I've heard people wonder how the series might have been if Colin had stayed on. His work for Big Finish has been extraordinary, reinventing the Sixth Doctor, making him quite brilliant. But if he'd stayed in the role back then?

I think we can tell. Watch him in the Tomorrow's World quiz: smart, benign, trading terrible jokes with good humour. Making the best of it anyway.

Next episode: 1987

Doctor Who: 1985

Episode 630: Vengeance on Varos, part two
First broadcast: 5.20 pm, Saturday 26 January 1985
<< back to 1984

The Doctor rescues Peri - doesn't he?
Vengeance on Varos, part two

I used to be terrified of Doctor Who - or at least some of it. As I've said already, it was always (or always seemed) a serious, adult show full of things I didn't understand and content unsuitable for an impressionable small boy.

In 1982, after Kinda - and the Mara lurking in Tegan's dreams - I had nightmares. The following year, there were more, the result of the Mara returning in Snakedance and David Collings' chilling performance in Mawdryn Undead.

I didn't tell anyone: I feared if my parents knew they wouldn't let me watch the programme. And it wasn't that every story led to nightmares. Monsters, generally, didn't scare me - I've never been very squeamish. The death of Adric or the Black Guardian's control of Turlough were thrilling but not scary.

When I got through Season 21 (in 1984) without a sleepless night, I thought I'd achieved something, that I was growing up and out of nightmares. So it was a bit of a shock when the following year Vengeance on Varos utterly terrified me.

The whole story is deliciously horrid. Sil is a brilliantly grotesque creation, giggling as he orders yet more outlandish tortures. And yet the thing that really got in my head is the briefest moment.

Peri and Areta are subjected to an experimental process to amuse the viewing public. As Quillam is all too eager to explain:

QUILLAM:
The nuclear bombardment beams release all the power latent in the recipient's mind. If the changelings see themselves as unworthy, they can become serpentine or reptilian. [Peri], for instance, must wish to fly away from trouble as would a bird.

It's the word "unworthy" that really got me: as if transforming was the victim's fault. If you're not good enough, the machine finds your secret fears and then uses them to change what you look like.

But it wasn't the process that turned Peri into a bird that bothered me so much as the Doctor coming to her rescue. We see her change back to her human self and the Doctor rushes over:

DOCTOR:
I am the Doctor and you are Peri. Perpugilliam Brown.

PERI:
Peri.

DOCTOR:
It's a question of re-imprinting their identities, of establishing again who they are.

JONDAR:
Wake up, Areta. Come on!

DOCTOR:
Can you walk, Peri? Come on, try.

PERI:
I thought I could fly.

There's a hint that she's not back to normal, that for all it looks as if the process has been reversed, inside her head she's still a bird. That's what terrified me and led to nightmares - because the Doctor's too busy trying to escape to notice.

It was only when the story came out on video in 1993 that I saw it again and realised the moment that so terrified me, that I'd kept in my head for years, didn't really happen. Peri doesn't say "I can fly", only that she had thought that she could. She's fine, if confused and exhausted. There is no permanent damage.

I'd taken something in the story and spun it out into something of my own, as if just to scare myself further. The nightmares were a creative act. Once I realised that, I could see it was also true of the other stories that scared me. I'd invented new stories for the Mara, appearing in places I knew in real life such as my school and the fields where we walked our dog. With Mawdryn Undead, there's a brief time when Nyssa and Tegan think Mawdryn might be a regenerated Doctor and I fixed on the idea he had regenerated, in pain, on his own - something that's barely suggested in the episode.

I'm fascinated by how people respond to and take ownership of Doctor Who - telling their own stories, making films and documentaries, dressing up, or looking for work in the industry. David Tennant became an actor because of his love for Doctor Who. Though my favourite version of this is that Dr Marek Kukula pursued an academic career in astrophysics because he wanted to be Leela.

Oh, and that thing of Peri being transformed but the Doctor not noticing? In 2002 I used that as the basis for my first ever professionally published bit of fiction, a Doctor Who short story called "The Switching".

Next episode: 1986

Doctor Who: 1984

Episode 614: Resurrection of the Daleks, part two
First broadcast: 6.50 pm, Wednesday 15 February 1984
<< back to 1983

The Doctor and Tegan part company
Resurrection of the Daleks, part two

When Tegan - one of the longest-serving companions in Doctor Who - finally leaves the TARDIS, she says it's because something's changed.

TEGAN:
A lot of good people have died today. I think I'm sick of it.

DOCTOR:
You think I wanted it this way?

TEGAN:
No. It's just that I don't think I can go on.

DOCTOR:
You want to stay on Earth.

TEGAN:
My Aunt Vanessa said, when I became an air stewardess, if you stop enjoying it, give it up.

DOCTOR:
Tegan

TEGAN:
It's stopped being fun, Doctor.

Two things strike me about this. First, something was changing in Doctor Who at the time. After the fun of The Five Doctors, the new season began with Warriors from the Deep, where the Doctor is unable to stop a massacre. The next story, The Awakening, is fun but there's something unusually bleak about the human colony in Frontios, the last of humanity dwindling away on some distant backwater. And then there's the bloodbath of Resurrection - by some margin the highest bodycount of any Doctor Who story.

I've read quite a few theories about what's going on: that the Fifth Doctor was a feminised version of our hero, or it's the influence of Blake's 7, or the production team (and audience) were more keen on grislier stories (perhaps after the perceived success of Earthshock). The trend certainly continues after the Fifth Doctor's gone; the Sixth Doctor sometimes seen peripheral to the grotesque events on screen.

But the Doctor wasn't alone. In 1986, Alan Moore wrote an introduction to a grisly version of another children's hero:

"Whatever changes may have been wrought in the comics themselves, the image of Batman most permanently fixed in the mind of the of the general populace is that of Adam West delivering outrageously straight-faced camp dialogue while walking up a wall thanks to the benefit of stupendous special effects and a camera turned on its side."

Alan Moore, "The Mark of Batman", introduction to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, p. ii.

Moore doesn't mention Doctor Who, but cites criticism of other men - Tarzan, Alan Quartermain and James Bond - whose simplistic heroism no longer seemed quite to satisfy. He makes his own case for why that might be:

"The world about us has changed at and ever-accelerating pace. So have we. With the increase in media coverage and information technology, we see more of the world, comprehend its workings a little more clearly, and as a result our perception of ourselves and the society surrounding us has been modified. Consequently, we begin to make different demands upon the art and culture that is meant to reflect the constantly shifting landscape we find ourselves in. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.
We demand new heroes."

Ibid., pp. i-ii.

I don't think that's right. Quartermain first appeared in 1885, so why should he suddenly be found wanting 100 years later? Yes, I know, there'd been criticism of figures like this before then, but in the mid 80s there seems to have been a major shift in how we related to heroes.

I wonder how much it was history: how much did Vietnam and Watergate create anxieties about the traditional hero? (I'm thinking less of Rambo here as The A-Team). And how much was there also a crisis going on in the grand ideological narratives of the 20th Century once the East started cosying up to the West? The James Bond films were well ahead of the game in dealing with detente, but for all Bond is recast and redefined with a harder edge in The Living Daylights (1987), there's a sense that real-world politics are leaving him behind...

But there's another possible reason. Note that all these heroes are white men. So is this discomfort with traditional heroism the result of decades of agitation about sexual and racial politics slowing filtering through into the mainstream?

Adam West isn't necessarily the public's fixed image of Batman. We're now used to - indeed, expect - a psychologically complex Bond and Batman and Doctor, tortured by self-doubt and age and the loss of loved ones.

And if that's the case, how much was Bond and the Doctor both losing their broad appeal in the late 1980s less the fault of particular production decisions as a sign of the times?

Secondly, hang on: Tegan, of all the companions, who spent three years in Doctor Who complaining, is the one to say it's stopped being fun?

Next episode: 1985

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

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