Doctor Who - The Evil Of The Daleks

Victoria Spun

Doctor Who
The Evil Of The Daleks
UK Air date: 20 May - 1 July 1967
Seven Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Exterminating spoilers.

The Evil Of The Daleks was ‘the last in the present series’ of its particular season of Doctor Who back in 1967. After famous actress Pauline Collins turned down the BBCs offer to continue her character from the previous story as a new, regular Doctor Who companion, the script was rewritten to introduce a new addition to the TARDIS crew, Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield. She would join The Doctor (as played by Patrick Troughton) and Jamie (as played by Frazer Hines) after the death of her fictional father towards the end of the seventh and final episode. The next series would start off with the much loved Cyberman story, The Tomb Of The Cybermen.

And, well this is a first time watch for me but, unfortunately, due to the much hated policy of the BBC wiping all their master tapes to reuse sometime after broadcast, this serial suffers largely from the ‘missing presumed wiped’ status in that only the second episode, rediscovered on a copy tape at a car boot sale, has survived... which is a lot better off than most of the Doctor Who serials from before 1971, although I am still optimistic that versions of these will turn up in places like Australia or South Africa, pried from the clutches of the black market private collectors who I believe still have many of them, at some point in the future.

However, unlike the visuals, the BBC retained most (perhaps even all?) of the audio tracks to the stories so, this three disc set gives three viewing options. A third disc is extras (which I haven’t watched yet at time of writing and the second disc is the seven episodes with an animated cartoon in colour to accompany the original audio (goodness knows why anybody would want to see a black & white Doctor Who story in colour but I guess there are some strange people out there). The first disc in the set is the same 7 episodes in glorious monochrome with, if you desire, the option of watching the original surviving episode as part of that mix (for some reason relegated to the extras section). So, obviously, I watched the first black & white animated episode for this review, followed by the surviving episode, followed by the monochrome versions of 3-7. And I’m glad it shows up this way because, in comparison to the actual footage, it really shows up just how bad and limited the animations are, it has to be said.

I’ll declare that, as regular readers may remember, the Patrick Troughton version of The Doctor was my favourite incarnation of the character and this story, had I seen all the original live action versions of the episodes, may well have been one of my favourites. Alas, it has to be said, the combination of the original recordings with less well researched animation really takes all the enjoyment out of things.

The story is simple... the TARDIS is kidnapped from Gatwick Airport and The Doctor and Jamie track it down to an antique shop selling ‘brand new’ Victorian antiques. It turns out that the proprietor is using his own time machine to bring them to the present day (1967) for reasons not totally made clear but with the aim of bringing The Doctor and Jamie back in time to the Victorian era, for the Daleks to use for certain aspects of their plan to instil their race with the human factor (although that’s not the complete version of their plan). He does this because the Daleks have his daughter, Victoria and, of course, once The Doctor and Jamie arrive, the former pretends to work with the Daleks in order to defeat them while Jamie tries to rescue Victoria, unwittingly giving the Dalek’s the ‘human factor’ which is ultimately part of their plan.

And it’s probably nice stuff but it’s hard to tell by only having episode 2 to go on, as far as the visuals go. What I can say... and I know a lot of people like it, including my cousin in Australia... is that the animation is really not very good for a number of reasons. It’s a little flat and lifeless, to be honest. It’s like watching an old 1970s Filmation cartoon where you are on tenterhooks to find out if the animators are going to remember to make one of the characters blink every now and again (if you want to have a good shot at surviving the Weeping Angels then manifest yourself as a 1970s TV cartoon is my best advice). Yes, I know these are brand new state-of-the-art animations and there is obviously a fair amount of artistic expression going on but... well, even that is playing fast and loose with the brief in my opinion. Because, in addition to the lack of emotion on the actors faces which you can’t get just from sound itself (The Doctor comes across as particularly ruthless at some points during the middle section of the serial... you can’t see the worry which was presumably etched into his face in the live action version), the animated sections don’t even seem to be trying to match what originally might have been there.

Now that last statement could easily have been relegated to the ‘sheer conjecture’ department if it were not for the fact that we have the surviving middle episode as a comparison piece... with the top and tail of the cliffhanger in that episode seen as something which should surely be matched in the new animated footage. Alas, it’s clear when you see those moments in comparison that there have been huge liberties with what has been animated as opposed to whatever was originally seen. The angles are completely different and, in the animated version, show details like a person’s face which was clearly not visible on the real version. Also, little details like a Dalek’s arm pointing up instead of, in the original version of the scene, pointing down are also in evidence. 

Not to mention the fact that famous actors in roles, like Windsor Davis, look absolutely nothing like the actors in question... not to mention the bizarre way that the animated version of Victoria looks somehow permanently surprised. And was their really a coat of arms on the wall in the original labelled Whitaker, presumably in homage to the writer of this one being David Whitaker... or was it an in-joke added in only for this new version? And don’t get me started on why the scenes originally broadcast with The Beatles song Paperback Writer playing at the bar have been tracked in with a different song... good grief BBC, this is history, pay the money for the license!

So, as a facsimile stand-in for the original... which is what I would hope the brief here would be, I’m not interested in visual reinterpretation, just accuracy... then the cartoons here are absolute codswallop, it has to be said. And so I’ve not got too much more to add about this Blu Ray release, to be honest. For me, the newly animated cover version of The Evil Of The Daleks gets filed under the heading of ‘interesting’ rather than ‘good’ or ‘entertaining’ it’s sad to say. If you are a fan of Troughton’s Doctor then, obviously its a no-brainer to take a look at this but, yeah, don’t expect a faithful reconstruction of the original story because, as you’ll notice, it’s fairly clear the animators had absolutely no idea as to what was going on in some of the scenes and, yeah, they aren’t the best at improvising, it would seem.

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World

Two By Two

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World
BBC DVD Region 2
Airdate: 23 December 1967 - 27 January 1968

2013 was a relatively good year for Doctor Who fans. After the initial disappointment that an alleged cache of “missing presumed wiped” episodes of the show had possibly been mostly ransacked and sold off to private collectors, the good news was that, as part of that cache, all but one episode of the missing 1967 story The Web of Fear and all of the serial that preceded it, The Enemy Of The World, were now once more amongst us. The BBC more or less rush released the two stories onto DVD with pretty much no extras at all at the end of the year and, from what I can remember, both stories languished at the very top of the DVD charts for a week or two. Not a bad chart performance for a couple of black and white Patrick Troughton stories almost 50 years old.

This marks my first screening of this story, although I had the novelisation of this one, adapted by Fourth Doctor companion Ian Marter. I remember when reading that novel as a kid, wondering how they'd managed to be able to use a word like “bastard” on a family viewing, British TV show in the 1960s and, as the existence of this recording confirms... they didn’t. Marter was adding his own dialogue to the mix and gave it a far more adult tone than it had originally, methinks.

This is a good story to have back with us, though. There are, sadly, very few Second Doctor stories surviving and this one is a particularly interesting one to have because it features my favourite Doctor, Patrick Troughton, in a dual role. Yes, I know it’s the old ‘jump the shark’ doubles plot but, already in the, then, short history of the show, this wasn’t the first time that a doppelganger of The Doctor had cropped up and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Here it’s done pretty tastefully and, believe it or not, there’s only one scene right near the end of the last episode where the two characters actually come face to face. So you don’t have to sit through too much of that split screen stuff here.

Why this is a good story to have had recovered though, is because of the versatility of Troughton’s standout performance. Yes, we’re all aware he was good as The Doctor and even non-Doctor Who fans will remember him, I’m sure, as being an outstanding character actor in films such as, for example, the original version of The Omen (reviewed by me here), where the priest he is playing gets impaled by a church spire. However, although he is a double for the title character, Salamander (the titular 'Enemy of the world'), he is only his double in appearance. The evil Salamander speaks with a kind of Mexican accent and this gives Troughton a chance to show off how he handles dialects. He also does some much more subtle stuff than this with the dual role, though. For instance, as The Doctor is working on perfecting his impersonation of Salamander so that he can find out if the tyrant of a future time in the Earth’s history, the far off year of 2018, is actually what his enemies are saying he is... he comes over as something like a cross between the two roles. Pulling it off enough to fool Salamander’s chief of security but still being different enough from his performance as Salamander throughout the serial that you can almost see The Doctor going through a learning curve.

The companions in this one are two of my favourite ones, Jamie and Victoria and, of course, age old unrealised sexism raises its head again when, to help The Doctor, Jamie makes it appear that he is saving Salamander’s life so he can get a job as one of his personal bodyguards. He asks Salamander to sort out a job for Victoria and she gets... cook’s assistant. Well, it is ‘of it’s time’ I guess and I’m not too worried about those kinds of gender stereotypes, especially when some of the episodes have smart performances by Mary Peach as a resistance fighter and Carmen Munroe as a food taster, the latter being an extremely strong role with no clear black and white division on the character who finds herself working for Salamander, even though she hates him, before eventually switching sides and... well, I’ll leave you to discover the final fate of her character here.

The music in this one is quite prominent in the mix in some places for a show of this nature in the era it was broadcast and the plot itself, while a little reminiscent of an old Flash Gordon serial in its twisty/turny revisiting of terrain and locations backwards and forwards as the narrative continues, is still quite entertainingly told... even if it doesn’t have an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of The Doctor and his companions, as many of the shows had.

As usual with the Troughton stories, there’s a lot of humour involved and one of the things that got me chuckling was when someone mentioned they should rendezvous at the old, disused jetty. “Disused yeti?” proclaims The Doctor, slyly referencing the robotic creatures from the, now sadly lost, story The Abominable Snowman. The creatures were quite popular and had made their debut only two stories prior to this one. They would make their second appearance, in updated and perhaps a bit less appealing costumes, in the very next Doctor Who adventure, The Web Of Fear (reviewed by me here).

As a lot of the earlier Doctor Who serials did in those days, the end of each story would directly cliffhanger into the next story and this one is no exception. At least, however, we are able to watch the other side of the cliffhanger in this case. At the end of the sixth episode of The Enemy Of The World, the TARDIS is in flight in space and time but the doors are open and The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are trying to hold on for dear life in case they get sucked out and scattered in time and space (I won’t tell you why... "spoilers sweetie"). Luckily, we now have the majority of the episodes recovered for The Web Of Fear and after the prologue of that adventure, we once more rejoin The Doctor and his companions in this predicament until Jamie can get the TARDIS stabilised once more. So, in that regard at least, it’s nice that running stories were rediscovered and restored.

The Enemy Of The World is quite a nice, pacey Doctor Who adventure and it’s also better for the fact that not everybody is what they seem. The bad guys and good guys aren’t as clear cut until the final episode and doubts about the intentions of certain characters do rear themselves right from the onset. If you’re a fan of Doctor Who and the Second Doctor in particular then The Enemy Of The World should definitely be on your ‘watch list’. If, however, you are new to the programme then I suspect a more ‘monstercentric’ episode might be a better jumping on point than this. Still, hard to go wrong with Troughton in such fine form and, once again, this charming actor doesn’t disappoint. And with Donald Trump voted in as the president of the USA at the moment, the idea of a dodgy dictator such as Salamander ruling the world of 2018 with an iron fist doesn’t seem like a million miles away from the real world, to tell the truth.

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear

Where Snowman
Has Gone Before

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear
UK Airdate 3rd February - 9th March 1968
BBC Region 2

I’ve wanted to see this serial for most of my life and certainly never expected to see the bulk of the episodes that are on this BBC DVD release from the end of 2013. You might remember the news story at the time? Five out of six of the episodes of The Web Of Fear and all of the complete serial to Enemy Of The World, two Patrick Troughton Doctor Who serials which had been, like many, purposely wiped out from the BBC archives in the early 1970s, were found and quite quickly released onto DVD. There are no extras on the discs (apart from a reconstruction using the original sound recording and surviving stills for the missing third episode on The Web Of Fear) but the DVDs still managed to hit the top of the DVD charts for weeks and there was a lot of excitement about the releases.

This is an important story for two reasons... the first being that this is the second appearance of the Great Intelligence and his robot servants, the Yeti. This is actually the sequel to the original Doctor Who adventure The Abominable Snowmen but we only have one surviving episode, to date, of that first Yeti story. The Great Intelligence was later to return a few times in the form of Richard E. Grant during the Matt Smith era of the show but the only other time the Yeti were seen after this was, of course, the anniversary story The Five Doctors, when Patrick Troughton’s second incarnation of The Doctor and Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart briefly took one on although, if memory serves, not much more than an arm was seen on that occasion.

And talking of the Brigadier, although this is not actor Nicholas Courtney’s first appearance on the show (that was in a part in the William Hartnell story The Daleks’ Master Plan), it is the first appearance of him playing his most famous character, Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart... although this is before the character was the Brigadier of UNIT and was, at this time in his chronology, a Colonel in the army.  Unfortunately, and as luck would have it, the third episode of this serial, marking his first appearance, is the one missing episode which has been “reconstructed” using stills so, alas, you can hear his first episode but you can’t see it. He is in the next three episodes too, though, so at least we can get a proper look at Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in his earliest story.

So The Web Of Fear starts off with Professor Travers, played by Jack Watling, and it must have been strange for audiences who remembered the character from the previous year to see him playing the part in “aged up” make-up at the start of this serial because, in the 1967 serial The Abominable Snowmen, he’d played the character as he was 40 years before this second adventure takes place. He is seen at the start arguing with his daughter and a private collector, who has the one surviving Yeti robot shell in his personal museum. However, Travers has been doing some experiments and the Yeti control sphere he is working on has disappeared. We see it break into the museum and activate the Yeti which, because of the impracticalities of the original costumes (if I’m remembering rightly), suddenly transforms before our eyes into the Mark 2 Yeti which, in all honesty, don’t look all that great compared to the original creatures but... hey, I’m really not complaining.

The Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Victoria, arrive some time after this in the underground system in London, which has been locked down and is one of the places where the army is holed up because the Yeti have taken over London. Once The Doctor and his companions arrive, after some fair amount of shilly shallying back and forth among the tube tunnels for a couple of episodes, they lend their assistance to the Army, Travers and Traver’s daughter Anne. However, while his on screen daughter is played here, very nicely, by Tina Packer, this serial is also noted as being the second time that Jack Watling has also played opposite his real life daughter on Doctor Who (the first time being the aforementioned serial The Abominable Snowmen). Victoria is, of course, played by his daughter Debbie Watling and, towards the end of the serial, she shares a fair few scenes with her father. This, of course, wasn’t the last time a parent and child actor would be playing opposite each other on Doctor Who... the Matt Smith era story The Crimson Horror (reviewed here) also featured Diana Rigg and her daughter... but it’s certainly interesting to see how the chemistry between father and daughter works here.

All in all, I had a lot more fun with this serial than with the one I’d watched a few weeks before (The Ice Warriors, reviewed here) as it’s very much a fun romp typical of serials which use a few locations and lots of running to and fro between them as new plans to conquer the alien menace are introduced and tried. The writing continues to be more interesting than a lot of modern era Doctor Who stories in that the B-characters are more fleshed out, even when they have only a very subsidiary role to the plot, and the actors playing those kinds of parts have more to do, with the writing allowing them to bring more of their personality out in the roles. Of course, this is partially because the story and characters have more room to develop in a multi part serial, rather than trying to cram everything into 45 minutes in one hit like they usually have to today, so I guess I’m comparing intergalactic apples to Gallifreyan oranges here... but either way you cut it, the minor characters also have room to leave their mark in these shows.

The Yeti are still a great creature, even if they’re not as pleasing to the eye as they were in the more cumbersome costumes of the previous serial, making nice growling noises and being quite lethal and dangerous, despite suffering from ‘they’re moving so slow they’ll eventually catch up with you through sheer will power of plot function’ syndrome for most of the time. The ending of the story is cool too, in that things don’t quite go as The Doctor had originally planned and, to cap it off, you have everyone running around in what look like genuine sections of the London Underground like Covent Garden, Holborn and various Circle Line locations. I’ve always kind of liked the idea of stories set on and around the London tube system but they’ve mostly managed to let me down. The studio sets on this one are so well done that apparently the BBC received complaints from London Transport at the time, saying they’d filmed in their tunnels without their permission... so the sets are that good.

One thing, however, really puzzles me and it’s something I am hoping one of you readers might know the answer too. As Troughton is running around in a station in the last episode, he passes a movie poster which says it’s starring Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier and it’s definitely the same graphics from the advertising for In The Heat Of The Night from the previous year (although The Web Of Fear itself is set in the ‘future’, in the early 1970s... which makes me wonder about the continuity between this story and the UNIT stories later in the show... up to and including the Brigadier character’s last appearance as a cyberman in the Peter Capaldi story Death In Heaven - reviewed here). However, instead of being called In The Heat Of The Night, the film is called BlockBuster... which makes no sense to me because I can find no record of In The Heat Of The Night being retitled to that in any international territories and, definitely, not in the UK. Now it may have been that the BBC, who wouldn’t be seen to have any advertising on their channels at that point in time, had changed the title to avoid advertising the film. Even the cartoon show Top Cat was always announced on air and listed in the Radio Times as Boss Cat to avoid having the same name as a recognisable brand of cat food. However, if that’s the case, why use a clearly recognisable and famous movie poster and leave the actors’ names on it? And why change it to a term like blockbuster when, to my knowledge, that particular generic term for an extremely successful film hadn’t slipped into usage yet in the late 1960s, when this thing was written? I’d be interested if anyone has got the definitive answer to this unusual “guest appearance” and, if you do, please leave it in the comments section below.

Despite suffering a little from not having a proper third episode... which is a great shame but, you never know, it may turn up some day... The Web Of Fear is a really nice little Troughton serial and I’m delighted to be able to finally watch the thing at last. Fans of Doctor Who, and the Second Doctor in general, will love this one and, with so few of the Troughton stories surviving the whole “missing presumed wiped” scandal, it’s one of the few stories we have to remember this Doctor and these specific companions by. Definitely a nice addition to the Doctor Who library and I’m very much looking forward to picking up the preceeding serial, Enemy Of The World, sometime in the course of the next year.

Doctor Who - The Ice Warriors

Ice To See You

Doctor Who - The Ice Warriors
UK Airdate 11th November - 16th December 1967
BBC Region 2

Okay, so this is a first time watch for me of the first Doctor Who serial to feature the title creatures of this story... The Ice Warriors. I was looking forward to seeing this one because Patrick Troughton is my favourite of the many incarnations of The Doctor throughout the show’s lengthy history and I don’t remember having ever seen this one before. The titular menace, however, are not exactly one of my favourite species of Doctor Who monsters, although they’ve always, since I was a kid, seemed to have been the third most popular monsters of the entire programme, coming in just behind the Cybermen and then the Daleks (although I suspect the Weeping Angels and the Silurians may be a little more popular than the Ice Warriors these days, since they’ve only appeared in the new incarnation of the show once, to date, in 2013).

For me, they’ve always been a bit of a clunky villain and, before they were brought out of cold storage for Matt Smith’s final season as The Doctor, they were really only used in stories opposite Troughton and Jon Pertwee, so they’re not the monsters they used to be in the 1960s and 70s... so to speak. Unfortunately, in this story, they’re exactly the monsters they used to be and... yeah, I’m still not that impressed by them as such... even if their leader is played by Bernard Bresslaw (well I only arrrrrsked).

Another thing which I wasn’t all that impressed with was the story on this one. There’s a nice idea that, in the far future, after the ice caps have risen and are about to claim the entire planet due to various problems, the Earth is split into two factions...Scientists, running the show and standing in for the last remnants of civilisation... and Scavengers, who have abandoned the treacherous ways of science, to an extent, because it was the scientists who got the Earth into this situation in the first place. However, in terms of the problems to be solved and how those final solutions are realised, it seemed to be a much more standard plot than a serial six episodes in length would have called for. It’s not that far off from an old 1950s Republic serial in terms of going back and forth between the same three or so sets trying to find new things to do, to tell you the truth. Add in a subplot taken directly from The Thing From Another World to introduce The Ice Warriors into the plot line and there you have it. So I was a bit disappointed in that aspect of the show, I have to admit.

However, that being said, the acting in this one is very strong. You have the usual regulars being Troughton’s Doctor, Frazer Hines’ reliable Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield played by Deborah Watling. They are all very good, of course, but its some of the other actors in this, and what they bring to their characterisations, which makes this particular story worth watching. First of all you have a character called Penley, an ex-Scientist turned Scavenger, played by Peter Sallis as a relatively young man (that‘s Clegg from Last Of The Summer Wine and the voice of Wallace from Wallace And Gromit, to name a few things he’s known for), playing against type as the cleverest and most grounded of all the characters in the serial other than The Doctor himself. He takes control of a situation just when he needs to and is quite helpful at propelling the story, what little there is of it, along.

We also have Peter Barkworth as Clent, the leader of a group of Scientists trying to push back with technology against the ice. Now he’s very interesting because he kind of starts off as the human villain person of the piece, the guy every other rational human has to overcome to be able to do the right thing when it comes to saving the planet, but he is fleshed out so well that you actually begin to empathise with him. Because of the way Barkworth plays him, you totally understand where he’s coming from and it’s a fact that he’s written in such a way that he isn’t totally unreasonable and comes off more like a bad manager who learns a lesson and helps out when thrown a bone... as opposed to an out and out villain. This works really well and you feel, by the end of the sixth episode, that he has kind of redeemed himself a little. This is a well written character, well realised by the actor who portrays him and you’d be hard pushed to find better, these days, than the level of depth he brings to what is, lets face it, a token “sci-fi character of the month” role for the show. Really fantastic stuff.

It’s trying to be a bit of a romp of a serial, this one, but it’s dreadfully slowed down and made more sluggish in some respect by the Ice Warriors themselves... I was getting kind of tired of their ‘hissing’ speech patterns not long after they started. Since Vicky and Jamie are rarely in the same sequence in this one - Victoria spends most of the serial as a hostage and Jamie spends most of the time paralysed, unable to walk, after falling foul of an Ice Warrior weapon - there’s not much in the way of seeing how the two assistants get on with each other in terms of on screen chemistry. I still kind of prefer Zoe over Victoria, to be honest, but that might change when I see more of Vicky as a companion (I’ve not seen Enemy Of The World or reviewed The Web of Fear yet). I find it kinda strange that Vicky just gets sent to the TARDIS for most of the last episode (apparently she was unable to film that week) and also find it strange that their are some unusual continuity errors in this... given that they had a whole six episodes worth to address the issues. For instance, the TARDIS lands on its side but, when it takes off at the end, it has suddenly righted itself again. Similarly, Jamie has a lucky escape from death, as I mentioned before, courtesy of an Ice Warrior’s sonic gun but, after all the fuss, he’s walking around with no problems at all during the final episode with no apparent explanation as to his miracle recovery. So I wondered what had happened to the scripting there.

All in all, although The Ice Warriors is maybe not as fun as most of the Troughton stories I’ve seen, it’s certainly one of the best acted and it’s never quite too sluggish that you lose interest in it. Episodes Two and Three of the Six episode run are, unfortunately, missing presumed wiped, but the sound recordings do still exist... so the episodes have been animated to the original soundtrack. The animation is a bit over stylised/simplified and lacking in much movement (apart from the constant blinking of the characters, for some reason) but it’s watchable enough and certainly one of the better solutions they could have gone with to bring us the entire story... so it’s not too terrible. I’m sure most fans of Troughton will love this story but, it’s not a jumping on point for the Second Doctor if you’ve not seen any of his other, better serials, I would have to say.

Doctor Who - The Krotons

Kroton Torpedoes

Doctor Who - The Krotons
UK Airdate: 28th December 1968 to 18th January 1969
BBC Region 2

I remember exactly when I first saw The Krotons on television... and it was a really big deal.

My earliest, haziest recollections of Doctor Who as a two year old were of the Autons smashing their way out of shop windows in the Jon Pertwee classic Spearhead From Space (reviewed here) and Jon Pertwee was the Doctor I grew up with... along with, um, Tom Baker and Peter Davison. However, I was aware of all of the Doctors at the time from various publications... the 1973 10 year Radio Times anniversary magazine, The Doctor Who Book Of Monsters and, of course, the numerous Target novelisations of the stories which I started reading when I was fairly young. And my favourite of these last were always the ones with Patrick Troughton’s incarnation of The Doctor in them.

Flash forward a little to November 1981. We were already past the great purge of the BBC's stupid destruction of what was then the majority of their Doctor Who back catalogue and, as a result, they only had the one Patrick Troughton story left in their vaults at the time (a few more have thankfully resurfaced over the years but the majority of them are still lost). The story was The Krotons but, since they rarely showed repeats of Doctor Who related stories on television at the time, barring the odd rerun of The Brain Of Morbius or The Deadly Assassin, it seemed unlikely that I would ever see a Hartnell or Troughton story in my lifetime (or so I thought then and, in the days before commercial video recorders, this was actually a very reasonable conclusion to reach).

Then something wonderful happened. To bridge a gap between series 18 and 19 of the show, the BBC ran a series of repeats, screening old stories in the winter of 1981, before Davison’s first full series as The Doctor. The stories they ran, shown as part of a season called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who, were Hartnell’s first story An Unearthly Child, Troughton’s The Krotons, Pertwee’s The Carnival Of Monsters, Hartnell,Troughton and Pertwee’s The Three Doctors and Baker’s recent swan song, Logopolis.

And so I had occasion to finally see  Troughton in action in, not only a Troughton era story, which had started its original first episode broadcast right towards the end of the first year of my own birth, but also a Pertwee era story which I didn’t really remember from the first time it played back in 1972. And they were great. I really loved Troughton in the role of The Doctor and from pretty much that point in my life he became my favourite actor in the role. Still is to this day.

The Krotons may not have been the one the BBC would have shown if they’d have had any kind of choice in terms of repeating from Troughton’s back catalogue, but it was certainly a good one, depicting the somewhat clichéd Doctor Who story chestnut, the ignorant enslaved by the technologically advanced.

In the case of The Krotons, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe accidentally stumble on a race of primitive humanoids called The Gonds who are educated by The Kroton’s machines throughout their lives. The brightest and best are picked each year to be “companions” of the unseen Krotons and disappear into the Kroton’s machine, never to be seen again. The Doctor and his companions already know why they’ve not been seen again.. because they are disintegrated by the Krotons as, it turns out, The Krotons convert smart brain energy into something they can use to finally ‘take off’ after centuries in their broken spaceship... the repairs to which are conveniently just reaching completion. It’s up to The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to rally the Gonds against the Krotons and also defeat the superior new faction of Gonds who want to attack the Krotons straight away with no chance of winning. It’s all pretty standard stuff for a Doctor Who story but, since it is a 1960s Doctor Who story, that means it’s still pretty good at what it does where many other shows or movies might fail.

The camerawork is kinda cool and there are some interesting POV shots from the ‘camera-as-Kroton’ vision with some establishing shots, too, which border on the surreal and maintain interest without worrying about not filling the soundtrack with the constant drone of dialogue, like most shows these days try to do.

The score, such as it is, is interesting too. It’s just been released on CD earlier this year by Silva Screen but it’s not a traditional score rooted, or indeed anywhere near, melody. Instead it’s a load of electronic sounds and atmospheres which allowed the BBC Radiophonic Workshop a chance to show off its technical brilliance and imbibe the story with sound tonalities to create the tension and atmosphere required when the villains are, indeed, a robot/crystalline species themselves.

The acting and scripting are all pretty much pitch perfect and you do care about the various characters and the antics they get up to on screen, although some of the cliffhangers are not exactly as worrying as you might want, to be sure. The personalities of both The Doctor and his companions come to the fore, re-enforcing the character types and flitting between the comedy that the Troughton era was best known for and the sense of imminent danger that has always been a big part of the show.

The DVD print fares pretty well for a Troughton era story, not that surprising since they’ve had the original of this one for a while, and the transfer seems as good as you could expect from the BBC at this stage of their admirable contribution to the home video format. Certainly an entertaining time for Troughton fans and, if you’ve never seen a 'Second Doctor' story before, this one would make a great jumping on point, seeing as how the character dynamics are all well on show and it’s all wrapped up in a charmingly entertaining story. Definitely one to watch.

Four hearts beat as one...

Doctor Who: The Two Doctors. 1985. UK.

Directed by Peter Moffatt. BBC DVD. Region 2.

Patrick Troughton’s last appearance in a Doctor Who story teams him and his assistant Jamie (the always brilliant Frazer Hines) with the sixth Doctor as played by Colin Baker and his assistant Peri (Nicola Bryant).

Although there’s a lot of things in these three 45 minute episodes that should have ensured a very successful story, I’m afraid to say that this is actually quite a weak set of episodes. The wonderful Jacqueline Pearce as one of the lead villains is, unfortunately, not given as much glam and autonomy as a character to best show off the dominatrix-style treachery that made her run as Servalan in Blake’s Seven so memorable. And the make up on the Sontarans in this story is unbelievably bad compared to what came both before and after it... like they’d gone to a toy store and bought the masks for a fiver.

Troughton and Hines are always a pleasure to watch but Troughton is just not given nearly enough screen time in this adventure and is almost relegated to the role of “damsel in distress”. Worse still, there is absolutely no explanations given for the lack of temporal continuity which this episode throws up. If this episode is set between the Troughton episodes Fury From The Deep and The Wheel In Space (as this episode starts the second Doctor has just said goodbye to his companion Victoria) then he was certainly not on good terms with his fellow Time Lords (who Jamie wouldn’t even know about yet). They were still trying to catch him at that point... not send him on missions. And Jamie wouldn’t know what a regeneration is (all this is quickly and ineffectively glossed over). Similarly, there is no explanation given as to how Peri knows who Jamie is. Nor how the second Doctor would recognise a Sontaran for that matter (if you want to get really picky).

There are a few nice one liners in this one... but they don’t compensate nearly enough for this mess of a story.

The wealth of extras included on this release are generous in terms of quantity but not so great in terms of quality. In addition to the nice tribute documentary on Robert Holmes, the only other slight curio of any interest... if you really want to watch it... is an episode of Jim’ll Fix It with the Sixth Doctor, Tegan (as played by Janet Fielding... although her character had never met that incarnation) and the same, badly realised Sontarans.

All in all, not a great deal to recommend this release... other than the fact that it was the incomparable Patrick Troughton’s final farewell to the character.