Doctor Who - The Carnival Of Monsters

Drashigs In Amber

Doctor Who
The Carnival Of Monsters
UK Air date: January - February 1973
Four Episodes
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

The Carnival Of Monsters was the second story of the tenth series of Doctor Who and, although I would have seen it when I was five years old, this is not one of the third Doctor’s adventures which stuck in my mind at that young age... as much as, say, the story introducing the Sea Devils or the Series Ten closing story The Green Death, with its giant maggots (reviewed by me on DVD here). Of course, I’d read the 60 or so Target novelisations I had at the time (on numerous occasions for many of them) and this was one I must have read at least a feew times. However, this one was very much fresher in my memory in 1981 because it was one of two stories chosen (the other being the previous serial, The Three Doctors, reviewed here) to highlight Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in the special series of repeats that year called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who... which was a bit of a cheat at the time because this limited the Tom Baker repeat to being his final story, Logopolis (the only one made to briefly feature the face of the fifth Doctor at the end of the last episode before his official, proper start on the show a month or two after the broadcast of this special set of broadcasts). I remember recording all the shows on blank audio cassettes so I could listen to them again for years afterwards... microphone crammed up against the television set (these were the days before video cassettes remember). Even so, it was still not that fresh in my mind as I re-watched the story on the new Blu Ray presentation from the BBC.

The story involves a carnival showman Zorg (played wonderfully by Leslie Dwyer) and his assistant Shirna (played by Cheryl Hall), who arrive on an up-tight planet of political unrest with their sideshow attraction, The Scope. This contains miniaturised living forms taken from their own environments without their knowledge and set to replay little dramas in replica settings of their native worlds, to be gawked at by those outside on a view screen. A bit like a mini zoo crossed with an old What The Butler Saw kind of attraction.

Meanwhile, if you’ll remember the events of the last story prior to this, for his help in the defeat of Omega, the Timelords had ended the Doctor’s exile on Earth and so this is the first time since the Troughton era that he was allowed to properly fly his TARDIS to other worlds (and, more to the point as far as the BBC is concerned... more expensive locations which had to be built to look like other worlds again). However, true to what would become form in the show, The Doctor is completely unable to navigate the TARDIS consistently or correctly and so, instead of taking popular companion Jo Grant (played by the lovely Katy Manning) to Metebelis 3 as he’d intended (he’d get there eventually), the two wind up on a ship in the 1920s in the Indian Ocean, just as it’s about to be attacked by a sea monster. Of course, after a while they realise, due to the repeat action resets of the brainwashed people on the ship, that they are in a peep show and break through the seal to the artificial environments in the scope, crawling from world to world as they try to find their way out of the machine. Also in the scope are some giant, hand puppet style monsters called Drashigs, which you are never really that worried about eating them because of the limitations of the special effects at the time and, seen briefly on screen only, the Ogrons (who were used as military enforcers by the Daleks in this era of the show, if I remember rightly) plus, in their only appearance in a Pertwee episode prior to his own reappearance in The Five Doctors, some Cybermen.

Also on the crew of the ship in the 1920s is one Lt John Andrews, who is played here by Ian Marter, who would just a couple of years later become a regular on the show for the first season or two of Tom Baker's reign, as co-companion Harry Sullivan (he would also write a few of the Target novelisations before his untimely death). He does very well here as a stubborn, blundering authority figure as he tries to imprison his stowaways every time his story resets itself.

Meanwhile, on the planet on which the Scope has arrived, the political situation with allowing aliens there for the first time could lead to an incident and blow up into a war. It’s just enough to bolster up a simplistic tale which, honestly, is one of the better stories of the show from those years. It’s fairly fast paced, even if it looks a little padded at times and, while the cliffhanger chapter endings are not exactly terrifying, it’s certainly very entertaining and I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed looking at this one again. It’s also very well acted and the costumes of Zorg and Zirna are definitely something to write home about and make Pertwee’s Doctor, wearing his green velvet jacket and proper frilly shirt (which we all should be wearing these days, I love these shirts) look positively under dressed. It also features Pertwee making prominent use of his sonic screwdriver to blow up clods of Earth in front of him in order to try and scare the Drashigs off, in one nice sequence. The sets look kind of cheap, for the most part but, you kinda expect that with Doctor Who and you may, by this point, be disappointed if they didn’t look like they were assembled by the Blue Peter team the night before.

Not a heck of a lot to say about this one, to be sure but, still, an entertaining slice of early 1970s UK science fiction tele-fantasy which certainly shows off the heroic and unquestionable authority of Pertwee’s version of The Doctor and perhaps this is one of the reasons why The Carnival Of Monsters  was chosen to be part of the ‘Five Faces’ celebration. There’s a certain quaint and comfortable vibe to the story and this is always a winner for this kind of show.

Doctor Who - Revenge Of The Cybermen

The Brave And The Gold

Doctor Who -
Revenge Of The Cybermen
Airdate: 19th April - 10 May 1975
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Four Episodes

Well... Revenge Of The Cybermen is another Doctor Who story from my youth which in no way lived up to either my memories or my expectations of it. That being said it’s still better than the two stories which preceded it.

Starting off with The Doctor (Tom Baker), Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry (Ian Marter) swirling in space and still holding the time ring they recovered at the end of Genesis Of The Daleks (reviewed here), the three arrive back at Nerva some thousands of years since they departed, when it was still a manned beacon. However, there is very little crew left because they’ve all died from a ‘plague’ which, in good old Cybermen style from a previous story, is really the little, sneaky, rat-like Cybermats biting and poisoning various crew members.

It doesn’t take long for Sarah Jane to get bitten so The Doctor sends her and Harry down to the planet Voga, where age old enemies of the Cybermen live in a cave system (actually Wookey Hole in real life), to unscramble her molecules and separate her from the alien poison. However, Sarah and Harry get stuck down there as prisoners of one of two opposing factions of Vogons while, on Nerva, The Doctor has to track down a human double agent and then try and stop a rocket full of Cybermen (allergic to gold, as always) from destroying Voga. So there’s lots of running around on stripped down versions of the Nerva sets from Ark In Space (reviewed here) plus the caves on the planet and... it’s fairly entertaining but it’s not exactly a roller coaster, to be sure. James Bond fans take note, the shoe brush transmitter that the double agent uses here is exactly the same one previously used in Live And Let Die... which Roger Moore sold to the props department more by accident than by design, since he was trying to just give it to them.

Okay, so there’s good, there’s bad and there’s ludicrous. The bad and ludicrous being the dead bodies of the plague victims that litter the floors of the corridors of certain sections of Nerva. I mean, I know I’m now watching this on a high definition Blu Ray but, surely, even then people could tell these were shop window dummies which were, it has to be said, badly placed with their faces turned away from the camera and the joints in the wrists, that hang from unnatural angles from their brittle limbs, clearly visible. Note to set dressers... dead people’s heads don’t raise up slightly from the floor because they are connected to a slightly angled torso. This is really not selling things guys... are extras really that expensive?

And if you want really bad... when a rocket is launched from the subterranean caves of Voga, directed at Nerva, the footage use of it taking off looks nothing like it and is, brazenly, stock footage of a clearly marked NASA rocket departing from Cape Canaveral (or Kennedy... or whatever it’s was called in the 1960s/70s).

The good is... the Cybermen themselves. Tom Baker was only the third of the, then, four Doctors, to find himself up against these creatures. Previously, only the first Doctor and, especially, the second Doctor had fought them in the 1960s version of the show, on a number of occasions. This is also the cybermen's only story from the 1970s, since they wouldn’t get another crack at The Doctor, with a shocking and unexpected consequence for viewers of the time, until the 1980s and the Peter Davison story Earthshock (note, the third Doctor did finally get to meet them many years later when he returned for the special anniversary episode, The Five Doctors). They were completely overhauled for Earthshock in terms of their design and, since the costumes from the Troughton years had not survived the ages, they were rebuilt for this story too, although they do look pretty similar to the versions seen in such stories as The Invasion. This was also the first time they were seen in colour but, with the interior set designs on the spaceships pretty minimal, they do look like they are being shot on black and white stock in some shots... which is nice.

There are also some nice little stabs at humour here including a typical see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil moment when The Doctor and two other prisoners are waiting to find out their fate. We also get to see The Doctor spinning his yo-yo when he is being trans-matted down to Voga. Plus... you know... the jelly babies make another appearance, once again.

One of the things I noticed on this story in particular is that, in the replay of the last few minutes before the previous cliffhanger at the start of each episode, some pretty hefty cuts and also additions make their way into the scenes... it’s almost like watching the old Saturday Morning Pictures serials again (not that I’m old enough to have ever seen those actually at the cinema... mores the pity).

Having discovered recently the basic plot of Gerry Davis’ original story for this, I have to say that... although this particular plot line would have been great with Troughton in it, I’d have much preferred to see the previous incarnation of the script filmed, where Nerva is basically a space casino. As it is, though, this would be the last time Davis would write anything for the show.

What this story does highlight, once again, is how good Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter are together. The dialogue for their characters is excellent and the chemistry between these particular ‘companions’ is strong. Something which wasn’t always a guarantee in the show, by a long shot.

And that’s me about done with Revenge Of The Cybermen, apart from perhaps making the comment that, for a race of cyborgs who have stripped themselves of all emotion... why the heck would they want revenge? They certainly don’t seem to here and that makes a kind of mockery of the title. Interestingly, the last episode finishes with yet another ‘lead in’ to The Doctor’s next adventure which, alas, isn’t on Blu Ray as yet, it’s sad to say.

Doctor Who - Genesis Of The Daleks

The Time Meddler

Doctor Who -
Genesis Of The Daleks
Airdate: 8th March 1974 - 12 April 1975
BBC 1 - Region A/B Blu Ray Six Episodes

Warning: Some spoilers.

Okay, so the next story in my re-watch of Series 12 of Doctor Who is the much acclaimed fan favourite Genesis Of The Daleks. Even Tom Baker cited this as one of his favourite stories but, I have to say, this one always left me a bit cold. Alas, any hopes I had that I might, with age, revise my reaction to this serial as anything other than having to sit through a dull story, faded very quickly as I watched.

This follows on from The Doctor and his companions Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry (Ian Marter) using the teleport at the end of The Sontaran Experiment (reviewed here) to return to Space Station Nerva after making the repairs to the system they promised in The Ark In Space (reviewed here). However, this is not to be, as their transmat beam is intercepted by none other than the Time Lords themselves, who have a mission for The Doctor. This is not unprecedented throughout the run of the show but it was with Tom Baker that the Time Lord culture and The Doctor’s place in it were explored a little more thoroughly than their brief mentions and appearances in the previous 11 years.

The mission is simple... The Doctor, Sarah and Harry have been transported to the planet Skaro, back to when the Daleks were first coming into being. Their mission, destroy the Daleks before they become the lethal menace that they become for hundreds of thousands of years (or more). As far as the Daleks are concerned it all starts here with their creator, Davros (played here by Michael Wisher), who we meet for the first time. Despite his ironic death at the end of the sixth episode, he would of course, return to face off against The Doctor many times over the years including Tom Baker’s second and final story against the Daleks four years later, in Destiny Of The Daleks. Out of the two, I’ve always loved Destiny Of The Daleks and not had much time for Genesis Of The Daleks so I hope, if the BBC get around to releasing the latter on Blu Ray at some point in the next few years, the experience of the second Davros story lives up to my memory of it.

Another thing I absolutely hate about this is it kinda changes the history of the Dalek race somewhat. Oh yes... I forgot... some people call it revisionism... I call it meddling with things the original Dalek creator (Terry Nation) should know better than to tinker with. The fact is, before this story the warring race against the Thals were called the Dals. However, from this moment on in Genesis Of The Daleks until the present day stories, their name has been changed into a stupid anagram of their future selves, the Kaleds. This is pretty weak and, frankly, unforgivable... you don’t mess with continuity.

Now, Genesis has some interesting elements and, for a family show airing before the watershed, it’s quite bleak and dark. We see the Thals and Kaleds at war with each other but, this earlier incarnation of the Thals are far from the race of blonde haired, blue eyed pacificistic hippies we meet in both the William Hartnell stories and the first Peter Cushing, big screen adaptation. Instead, they are virtually interchangeable with the Kaleds and, yeah, I did get confused a lot re-watching this as to which set of species I was looking at from one scene to the next.

The bleakness continues as the war combat scenes are very reminiscent of the trenches in World War Two and the Kaleds (and possibly the Thals as well, if I got this right) are all pretty much parodies, in uniform and attitude, of the Nazis. This whole World War Two atmosphere was touched upon again in the 2015 series of the show starring Peter Capaldi as The Doctor, with the early days of the planet Skaro maintaining that pessimistic vision. Here in Genesis, though, it’s a full on blatant set of references right down to a form of Nazi salute and even, in the first episode, Davros’ main henchman Nyder wearing something similar to an Iron Cross (it was ditched after the first episode for maybe spelling things out a little too clearly).

Something which really bothers me about the writing on this one is that, for an extremely intelligent Time Lord, The Doctor really doesn’t seem very clever in this at all. For example, in a typical case of the writers painting themselves into a corner for a dramatic situation, we have The Doctor using a detached Dalek gun to destroy some tapes made by Davros, containing information about future Dalek defeats which he was forced to give him in an interrogation. However, straight after this moment, The Doctor and Harry find themselves locked in the room and can’t do anything to shift the lock until they are freed later on in the story. Gee... it’s not like they even thought to use the same Dalek gun which was just laying on the table by the door to blast themselves free?

And... I honestly find the whole reason for Davros creating the Daleks for the good of the Kaled race, because they know what they will mutate into and so need sturdy exo-skeletons to look after them, somewhat ridiculous. Honestly, how can you predict what you are going to evolve into... especially since it’s made clear that The Doctor is the first Time Lord that the Daleks have come across. It just doesn’t make much sense and, good as all the actors are, I just find the action dull, the humour almost completely absent and, iconic monologues and exchanges aside, somewhat hard to sit through.  Maybe at six episodes it’s just too long and could have, perhaps, been better served as a four parter. The music doesn’t seem to help matters either and doesn’t, I believe, give the story the lift it needs to make its points. Maybe a full on military march may have been a better route to go down on this one.

Either way, Genesis Of The Daleks is a story that is much loved and so nothing I say will matter, thankfully. It so impressed people at the time that I remember an abridged LP record album of the show was released by the BBC with linking narrative sections by Tom Baker between scenes, not long after it aired on television. I remember borrowing it from the library at the time and, guess what? That didn’t do much for me either. However, despite the ‘revisionism’, it did give the series a new, villainous character in the form of Davros and people still thrill when he turns up in the show occasionally to this day. So it’s not all bad... just not my cup of tea in terms of classic Doctor Who. Still, I am, very much looking forward to perusing the last of the stories which make up this season soon, featuring what are probably, to this day, the show’s second best remembered regular villains.

Doctor Who - The Sontaran Experiment

Styre Beware

Doctor Who
The Sontaran Experiment
Airdate: 22nd February - 1 March 1975
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Two Episodes

So following on directly from The Ark In Space (which I reviewed here), we have The Sontaran Experiment. This was Kevin Lindsay’s second go at playing a member of the Sontaran race following their debut in the previous season opposite Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in The Time Warrior. It was also his last... as the costume apparently aggravated his heart condition, causing his death some months later. However, before he died he really established a performance and manner of speaking as a Sontaran which various actors continue on to this day.

This one is, it has to be said, a mostly deadly dull affair so, thank goodness it only lasts for two episodes. In fact, it’s one of only a handful of classic stories which last that short running time in the first quarter of a century of the show. It’s also one of the few which doesn’t feature the TARDIS in any shape or form since The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his companions are arriving at the future version of Earth (in the year 16087AD) via the matter transmitter on Nerva, so they can make some adjustments to get the crew safely recolonising the planet again.

Alas, a small team of people for a another colony are also roaming the planet trying to survive a lone Sontaran and his highly dodgy looking robot who is running an experiment on the ‘humans’ that he’s lured there, in order to see how they stand up to torture and pave the way for an invasion fleet. Nobody asks why the Sontarans want to invade an empty planet so... I shan’t either. There’s obviously an entirely good explanation of this that the show’s writers and producers decided not to share with the audience.

Sarah Jane was, of course, also involved in the previous Sontaran story so she is shocked at first because... well they all look alike to her and she thought that Linx had somehow managed to survive. Harry of course, played as always by Ian Marter (who also wrote the Target novelisation), has never heard of them which is unfortunate because, the three main protagonists actually spend most of the two episodes apart form each other and all doing different ‘side missions’, so to speak, to do their bit in defeating this lone Sontaran and eventually signalling to his superior officer in space, also played by Kevin Lindsay (it’s not like they’d made more than one Sontaran costume for this production anyway), that the Earth was not to be trifled with.

And it’s pretty boring, mostly. The dialogue doesn’t sparkle and, apart from some charming performances, especially from the well spoken Lindsay, there’s not a heck of a lot to recommend on this one. Also, despite being a family show, the amount of times torture comes up just makes it feel a bit unpleasant with definite shades of Nazi Germany being alluded to in terms of the experimentation of the title, despite the fact that it isn’t really that violent.

Tom Baker apparently broke his collar bone while making this one and, looking at the forest landscape filled with big dips in it (and I suspect it might also have been shot in a quarry too), it’s really not that surprising that somebody broke something. Out of all of the stories in this series, this one just feels like its padding, to be very honest, to help link up the overall arc of that season and bide time until the next, six part and much quoted story Genesis Of The Daleks.

The pacing isn’t great either. Yes, everyone’s got something to do but it all feels a bit lethargic and I did notice at least one or two scenes which kind of didn’t quite make sense and were almost non-sequiturs presented in the order that they were televised. I learned today that at least one scene was cut out after Tom Baker broke his collar bone so I have to wonder if that’s what caused some of the lines and character locations in this to be... I dunno.... slightly out of kilter with what comes before or after them.

Whatever the reason, this was certainly the last two parter in the show until Peter Davidson’s incarnation of The Doctor starred in Black Orchid seven years later. This makes it about as long as one episode of the modern version of the show but, even some of the clunkier episodes these days make this one look bad. Perhaps some of that is precisely because the actors playing The Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry all such have good chemistry together. Put them all on their own and they can’t bounce off each other the way they did in the previous stories. It really shows here and even Dudley Simpson’s musical score can’t liven this one up. So... sorry for the short review but this really isn’t a story I would recommend unless you are making a point of watching this entire series as one, fairly loose story arc. Certainly the least interesting story of this season.

Doctor Who - The Ark In Space

The Way We Wirrn

Doctor Who - The Ark In Space
UK Air date: January - February 1975 Four Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone 0

The Ark In Space was the second of Tom Baker’s Doctor Who stories to be broadcast, following on from his debut as the character in Robot (reviewed here). Already he seems very comfortable in the role and you can kind of tell from the on-screen chemistry that he really got on well with his two co-stars at the time, the companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen, continuing on, in Robot, from her first series in the role opposite Jon Pertwee) and Harry Sullivan (who joined the two for the previous story, played with great fun by Ian Marter). In fact, Ian Marter also wrote the Target novelisation of the story which was so popular at the time.

The plot is about the TARDIS landing on Space Station Nerva, many centuries ahead of our present time, where the last traces of mankind are in suspended animation and waiting for the Earth to become inhabitable again before recolonising it.

You may perhaps suspect, as do I, that Douglas Adams kind of half cribbed this idea for the ‘Golgafrinchans’ in the sixth episode of the first series of his famous radio show, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy... being as he was somewhat associated with writing for Doctor Who himself on occasion. That and The Bible, of course. However, where the crew of Mr. Adam’s ark were all the incompetents who then accidentally end up populating the planet Earth gazillions of years in our past, the few specimens of humanity already awake in The Ark in Space are reasonably intelligent but, alas, they are stuck in a craft which has been invaded by a race of space bugs called the Wirrn. The arachnid-like creatures have laid eggs which will soon be hatching to eat and absorb the knowledge of the last humans alive, before recolonising Earth with their own kind.

Which, obviously, is a problem for everybody. Well, everybody human, I guess.

The sets are cheap, being as it’s all set in the one Space Station and, as you’ll find out in another of my reviews (later this year) the set will be reused again in this same series, with a story twist which makes excellent use of the budgetary limitations.

The special effects are also cheap, it has to be said, with a still photograph of some stars and a plastic spaceship dangled in front of it to set the scene. Start as you mean to go on, I guess... this is not unusual for this show. The Wirrn creatures are quite a nice design but somewhat too childish and lifeless to produce the desired horror effect (even when I was a seven year old, watching this when it first aired). When the ‘operators’ try to make them walk it’s not far removed from somebody bouncing them up and down on a bit of string, to be honest.

Ditto for the laughable special effects in terms of the part of the story which is somewhat ‘inspired’, I would have to say, from the original serial The Quatermass Experiment (I review the movie remake of that one here). When the captain of the ship is stung by a Wirrn larvae, he starts transforming into one himself. Did I mention the Wirrn larvae is some guy or gal wrapped in a blanket, crawling along and further bundled up in bubble wrap? So I guess, in a way, it makes sense that when the Captain reveals his hand just like Victor Caroon did, more effectively all those years ago, it should also be wrapped in green coloured bubble wrap. And not a snap, crackle or pop to be heard.

And it’s a story which is, perhaps, a little too long at four episodes for the idea (it would have made a nice extended episode for one of the more modern Doctor Who actors, I think) but, the writers do find things for the main protagonists and the small crew of Nerva to do, involving dodging and deactivating the station’s own defence mechanisms, teleport machines, shenanigans with electrical cables and an ‘oxygen crisis’. So it does move along a bit and doesn’t really have time to get dull at all. And it also has the famous scene where Sarah Jane is stuck in a ventilation shaft and the Doctor hurls male chauvinist insults at her to play on her feminist nature, ensuring she’s angry enough at him to squeeze herself through the narrow tunnel to have a go at him. It’s classic Who and one can’t help but smile as the story unfolds.

And, of course, after the Doctor saves the day, we have an unusual ending with the show going right back to the Troughton days as it leaves it on something of a... well not a cliff hanger but a lead in to the next story. Instead of departing via the TARDIS, something is needed from Earth to ensure that Nerva is able to fulfil its purpose... so The Doctor, Sarah and Harry all exit the ship by dematerialising in a teleportation chamber, leaving the TARDIS on ‘the Ark’, to fetch the required implement from Earth. And I remember this first season has some very unusual ways of getting the characters into the settings of each story so... I just need to revisit them again soon as part of this Series 12 Blu Ray box set and give my memory a joggle. If unjoggled memory serves, the next three stories in the series, which take us through to the end of the season, all have returning villains from Doctor Who history. One set of monsters who had only made their debut in the previous series (and who are still going very strong today) would be followed by two very classic monsters in the next couple of stories after that... although one of them would meet Tom Baker’s Doctor only once, not returning again before the character’s next incarnation.

So, there you are... The Ark In Space is a classic story from Tom Baker’s first season and there’s much to be recommended in it. Next stop, the two parter The Sontaran Experiment... which I don’t have many memories of at all, for some reason.

Doctor Who - Robot

First Of The Fourth

Doctor Who - Robot
Airdate: 28th December 1974 - 18 January 1975
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Four Episodes

I would have been two years old when I first started watching Doctor Who. I know this because I remember being laid on a table, for whatever reason... and watching television as the Autons crashed through the shop windows in Jon Pertwee’s debut story Spearhead From Space. So when, in 1974, Pertwee had left the show in a situation which was mostly of his own making (and which I believe he regretted), Tom Baker wrote the BBC a letter and was soon employed, somehow, as the new incarnation of The Doctor. Now I had no idea, at the age of 6, that the character could regenerate and I had to have it explained to me when, at the end of the previous series, Pertwee dropped down effectively dead and regenerated into the new guy. All I knew was that I’d been watching Pertwee’s Doctor and been frightened by such creatures as The Sea Devils and Giant Maggots for, what was then, most of my life. Not to mention reading magazines about the character and doing jigsaw puzzles. So it seemed a bit strange but, I kinda warmed to Tom Baker from very early on. Even had the action figure and accompanying TARDIS (although, unfortunately, the budget didn’t stretch to buying any of the monsters for him to battle... I had to make do with using my Dalek shaped bubble bath). My dad hated him until, of course, he came to love him in the role but... he’s always like that with every new Doctor. He’s going through exactly the same thing with Jodie Whitaker now but, trust me, he’ll really miss her when she’s gone.

Baker’s debut story, Robot, is actually quite good and although he maybe seems a little arrogant at first (as perhaps every incarnation of The Doctor is to some degree) he is also confident and self assured and, I think it comes across very well that the little group of regulars working with him... Elisabeth Sladen as the legendary Sarah Jane Smith (in her second season in the role), newcomer Ian Marter as Dr. Harry Sullivan and, of course, Nicholas Courtney continuing as UNIT Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart... all loved doing the show and it does inject the series with a certain joy which, dare I say it, was somehow a little bit lacking on Pertwee’s last series (after Roger Delgado who had played arch nemesis The Master, had died in grim circumstances while filming in Turkey when his car went off a ravine, leaving all his colleagues heartbroken).

Baker is brilliant and, it has to be said, channeling Harpo Marx just a little bit as, being the youngest actor to play The Doctor at the time, he brings some much needed humour back to the role. Pertwee was , of course, very humourous but he was somewhat drier by the later episodes and Baker’s Doctor is much more harkening back to the days of Patrick Troughton, it seems to me.

The story here is not bad either, if unoriginal. It’s the tale of a political group of scientists who want to take over the world and, by using a big robot,  they steal plans to build a disintegrator gun and eventually take Sarah Jane hostage... the only one who’s been really kind to the robot previously... while they almost succeed in blowing up the world with nukes. And, although, as I said, it’s not exactly original, it does work in a nice tight manner with all the different plot elements and characters all doing things which enlighten certain story elements to the audience while advancing the plot in a way which... I dunno, just doesn’t seem as well done these days.

Of course, you’ve also got some really rubbish stuff too. The Robot itself looks pretty good for a ‘man in suit’ creation but when it finally grows to giant size (the Target novelisation of this one was called Doctor Who and the Giant Robot) the amount of bad, unmatted video screen backgrounds in the thing are really an eyesore. Then there’s the hilarious moment where The Brigadier says he’s got something that he thinks will stop it and the BBC attempt a ‘forced perspective’ shot as they wheel in what I’m pretty sure is an old Action Man tank, into the foreground of the shot. And don’t get me started on the ridiculous, plush puppet which we’re supposed to believe is Elisabeth Sladen, with it’s overly comical dangly legs wibbly wobblying all over the place when the robot supposedly picks the actress up in its giant hand. This looks pretty bad but Doctor Who has always had this home grown, ‘make do and mend’ approach to the special effects on the show and it’s one of the things that makes it so charming (even today, it’s not that state of the art, as regular readers will know I’ve pointed out on more than one occasion over the last decade).

Also, another good ‘I did not see that coming and certainly didn’t remember it from seeing it in 1974/5’ moment is the revelation that one of the ‘good guy’ characters is in league with the villains of the piece. It took me by surprise which, these days, is honestly hard to do. So in that way, at least, the writing is better than it is these days and, since this is Tom Baker’s version of The Doctor, the almost surreal, almost slapstick writing is in abundance and there’s some nice comic interaction going on with all four regular characters (and even with John Levene’s ongoing portrayal of Sergeant Benton of UNIT, too, who does a fine job here).

There is an attempt to inject a little King Kong style sympathy towards the robot at the end, when The Doctor finishes its ‘living metal’ body off with a metal eating virus and I’m not entirely sure this is successful but they do really go for it here and lead up to it throughout the series from the second episode onwards. The music is still very much what you’d expect from the Pertwee era too... which is not a bad thing, I guess.

All in all, Robot is not a bad attempt as the debut of a new and, after not very long, much loved incarnation of The Doctor. I think it would be fair to say that David Tennant is the only Doctor Who actor who has ever come close to enjoying Tom Baker’s popularity in the role and, to this day, Baker is the person most people will think of when they hear the words... Doctor Who. The already, blink and you’ll miss it, out of print Blu Ray set is loaded with extras too and the transfer is actually pretty good for a Blu Ray of a show which never really looked all that great to begin with. Really looking forward to watching the other stories in the season soon. If memory serves, the TARDIS is somewhat jettisoned for a bit and the remaining stories have a kind of thematic link to them after the next story... The Ark In Space. And also, a very budget conscious reason for that link in terms of two of the stories, if memory serves. I’ll get to it all soon. In the meantime... Doctor Who - Series 12 Story 1, Robot, is a good place to jump on if you’ve never seen any before.

For many more Doctor Who reviews, classic and modern, go to the index link top right and then scroll down to the TV section.

Now On The Big Screen

Whoniversal Pictures

Now On The Big Screen: The Unofficial And Unauthorised Guide To Doctor Who At The Movies
by Charles Norton Telos Publishing
ISBN: 978-1845839307

“Now you can see them in colour on the big screen...
closer than ever before. So close, you can feel their fire...”

Thus stated the original theatrical trailer to the 1965 movie Dr. Who And The Daleks, which is one of the many items under discussion in this, relatively, new book (2013/15) by Charles Norton. Which is what I found myself reading on Christmas Day this year since, for technical reasons, the new Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs novels had not yet found their way to me under their traditional, seasonal wraps. Don’t worry, said tomes were gifted to me a few days later once family members had been met and greeted so, if you’re waiting for my usual, annual review of the latest works by these two ladies... they will be coming soon (as soon as I get to finish them).

Instead, this somewhat marvellous tome given to me on Christmas morning gets to be my first book review of 2017 and, I have to say, it’s certainly an interesting project (as is often the way with unauthorised and, therefore, often more ‘honest’ editions). Writer Charles Norton not only attempts to document the origins, production and aftermath of the original and, to date, ‘only’ Doctor Who movies to be released in cinemas at the height of Dalekmania in the UK - the 1965 movie Dr. Who And The Daleks and the 1966 film Dalek Invasion Of Earth 2150AD (both starring Peter Cushing as scientist Dr. Who and Roberta Tovey as his grand daughter) - but he also, for the majority of the book, goes on to lift the curtain on all the various planned and aborted Doctor Who movies which have never made it to the screen in the intervening years. Some of these proposed projects came from names associated somewhat with the television history of the show itself and others, from less familiar quarters. And it’s a very interesting read for anyone who loves the colourfully depicted, distorted movie versions of the characters as played by Cushing and co as much as they do the television show.

The first two sections deal with the original motion pictures in quite some detail and even include, like I’ve seen done before in other important works that deal with British films of that era, some of the considerations of the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors, as the acronym more honestly stood for in those days) from the script submissions, before even a shot of frame was filmed. This is interesting in itself since we have an insight into some scenes which were scrapped and also some sequences which were shot and then later cut or modified, like the close-up shots of the Kaled inside one of the Daleks which the BBFC thought too disturbing to include in a family/children’s film (such as it was perceived back then). It also includes, as do all of the chapters dealing with other, more ill-fated productions, comments about the experience from various cast and crew culled from a number of credited sources over the years.

It’s good stuff and, as far as I can tell, the most definitive story 'behind the scenes' of the two Peter Cushing movies in print and, if it had just been these two movies that the book was solely about, then it would have still been a great read. As interesting though, are the next chapters which probably make up around three quarters of the book, which detail the likes of various projects by people who were trying to get another movie incarnation of the good Doctor to the screen... including a third continuation of these original two movies.

So we have a section, for example, devoted to Doctor Who Meets Scratchman, which was the long gestating brain child of the two writers who were also starring in the television series at the time the project was first mooted... Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor) and the late Ian Marter (who played the Doctor’s fourth assistant Harry Sullivan, for a while, as a preliminary to going on to write various novelisations of the series for Target books, before dying tragically young). There are some nice reminiscences to be found here including the time when Tom Baker and Ian Marter went to the Dominion in London in 1977/8 to take a look at that new Star Wars movie which had just come out... only to leave the cinema dejected when they realised the budgetary goal posts for any big screen science fiction projects had just been dramatically changed and that they really had no hope in hell of getting something like that financed.

Along with a whole host of projects in the book, two of which would have featured one of my favourite ladies, Caroline Munro, in their genetic make-up, the tome also covers Douglas Adams’ proposed film project, Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen. Now Douglas Adams had a history of writing some episodes of the show (including the infamous ‘lost’, half filmed due to TV strikes, Tom Baker story Shada) but he is perhaps more famous, world wide, as the man who created and wrote the legendary Radio Show, series of novels, TV show, theatre production, movie and audio recordings that constitute The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Now, as soon as I’d read the title of his proposed Doctor Who movie I think I’d figured out what eventually became of it and, sure enough, this book confirms that it did end up being the basis of the third of the five Hitchhiker novels... Life, The Universe and Everything.

Now On The Big Screen does, in places, get a little dry and perhaps just a little tedious in some chapters but it’s all done in the name of enlightenment and you can’t knock author Norton’s quite thorough approach to digging up all he can about the material in this volume. Indeed, a synopsis of the script usually running between five and eight pages long is provided for pretty much all of the detailed movie projects in this book, which is absolutely invaluable. What it did, however, make me realise is that, as much as I’d love to see another new Doctor Who movie at some point in the future (and, call it a hunch, but I suspect we’re all a lot closer to that prospect than we are possibly aware of until the marketing machine gets into high gear) is that I’m really thankful, in some ways, that none of the stories summarised here never made it anywhere near the big screen because, honestly, they do mostly sound quite awful (although there’s surely still time for Caroline Munro to be offered a big part in the regular TV show, perhaps?).

After the main book has concluded, with a little on the background politics of the BBC that ushered in the new Russell T. Davies era of The Doctor’s adventures in televisionland, we also get another invaluable, much smaller section telling a little bit about the various, unauthorised, straight to home video spin offs featuring some of the actors, actresses and characters from the series... some of which are written by people who work on the show these days, such as Mark Gatiss. So this is a good little guide for further, non-Doctor adventures with characters like Sergeant Benton, Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart, Sarah Jane Smith, Liz Shaw and even the likes of Professor Travers and Victoria Waterfield, it would seem.

All in all, the information contained in this tome is of great interest to fans of Doctor Who and I’m really glad to have Now On The Big Screen on my book shelves (such as they are... might be the floor at this point). Charles Norton has done a great service to fandom when pulling this research all together here and its an absolutely invaluable addition to any Whovian’s library. So glad to have this one.