Doctor Who - Planet Of The Daleks

Me And My Thal

Doctor Who
Planet Of The Daleks
Airdate: 7th April - 12th May 1973
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Six Episodes

So this isn’t a bad story in the Series Ten Doctor Who Blu Ray boxed edition. Following on from the last episode of Frontier In Space (reviewed here), Jo Grant (played by Katy Manning) has dragged The Doctor (played by Jon Pertwee) back into the TARDIS as he had been shot by The Master (in Roger Delgado’s swan song in that role). After instructing the Timelords to pilot the TARDIS to ‘follow the Daleks’, who were at the periphery of the last dastardly plot, he slips into a coma and the TARDIS lands on the planet Spiridon. Jo goes out to find help and gets embroiled with a group of Thals who have come on a suicide mission from Skaro (planet of the Thals and Dals... as they once were, although the Dals were later revised to being Kaleds) to try and find the new Dalek base on Spiridon and... well, do something to stop them. Meanwhile the TARDIS is covered in fungus but The Doctor recovers (due presumably to his Timelord biology) and, when he goes looking for Jo, he also gets embroiled with another part of the same group of Thals.

Jo, who is near death due to being sprayed with fungus, is rescued by one of the natives of Spiridon called... um... a Spiridon... and nursed back to health. The Spiridons are completely invisible, by the way, except when they are wearing their trademark, huge purple fur coat thingies. The Spiridon who rescues Jo is, naturally, the only Spiridon on the planet who is not helping the Daleks, who are keeping a huge army in cold storage, ready to unleash on that part of the galaxy. It’s soon up to Jo and The Doctor (who has been a legendary and mythical figure in Thal history, since the impression he made on them in the very first 1963 Dalek story) to infiltrate and stop the Dalek’s master plan... which also involves releasing a bacteria onto the planet to kill all life there before unleashing their army.

And, although it feels like it’s been padded just like an old 1930s - 1950s theatrical serial, the story is entertaining enough and, while not as good as the previous one, certainly doesn’t get boring at all.

One of the nice things which seems to be endemic in the DNA of the writing of the show at this time is that the story never feels hampered by the special effects. Occasionally those effects are very good but, for quite a lot of the time, they do also look characteristically cheap and awful, it has to be said. But, the writers never really let that get in the way. There seems to be a real ‘make do and mend’ attitude to the way in which the stories are crafted to the final visual production and, it never fails to amaze me how many things the special effects team try and tackle, knowing that it won’t look too great a lot of the time. For instance, there’s one scene where The Doctor and some Thals are trapped by the Daleks in a room with a big ventilation shaft leading to the surface. The Doctor organises a big bit of cloth and they heat up the air under it and the whole lot of them hold onto the corners and float up to the surface of the planet through the vent. To say this looks convincing would be less than the truth but, you know, it’s a fun solution and they did their best with the materials and budgets they had, for sure.

There are a couple of silly plot points that bother me though. For instance, the ‘weird science’ of the planet is such that water doesn’t freeze and turn into ice but, when it gets well below zero, instead turns into molten ice water. So, of course the way The Doctor and the Thals kill a couple of Daleks is to drag them into one of these natural, extreme cold molten ice pools. The Daleks die instantly because, we are told, they are extremely susceptible to cold.  However, The Doctor’s big plan is to flood the sleeping Dalek army with the icy water flow to kill them all. Ahem... this is the same Dalek army which have been frozen and placed into suspended animation to wake up later. So... they didn’t automatically die like the others when they were chilled out then? Kinda makes no sense, does it? Also, I’m pretty sure the miniatures used for the sequences where the army starts to thaw out before being flooded with thick, icy water are repainted versions of those old, little Dalek rollykins you used to be able to buy in the shops, mounted on magnets... or possibly even the old Marx branded miniature Daleks. Either way, they look noticeably different from their full size counterparts.

The other thing that bothers me is the part of the Dalek plan to kill everything on the surface. Honestly, the Spiridons are already a slave labour force for them and the only other people on the planet are a few Thals. Why in heck would you need to destroy all life there? This really doesn’t make much sense for a race who are supposed to be amongst the most intelligent, albeit evil and diabolically deadly, species in the galaxy. Mind you, constantly repeating phrases like “You will be exterminated!” and “We are defeated.” at the top of their Stephen Hawking-like voices doesn’t sound much like a highly evolved race of creatures to me either, truth be told.

Once again, the insides of a Dalek are scooped out so a human can fit in and masquerade as one. This is something which was not new to the show, in fact William Hartnell and Peter Cushing’s versions of The Doctor were encouraging that right from the very first Dalek story and its big screen adaptation but... bearing in mind the amount of blue prints and diagrams which have been published over the decades showing you just what is inside a Dalek (in the fictional Whoniverse), I still am amazed that there is any room left to fit a person inside it. With all that inner machinery there really is only room for the very small Kaled creature inside it, it seems to me.

Anyway, Planet Of The Daleks is not a great story but, even as perhaps the least interesting story of 1973, it’s still pretty entertaining and never really gets dull, as some of the modern variations of the show sometimes do. The next story in the box is the classic story The Green Death, which was the final story in the main show of Jo Grant and which I reviewed in its DVD incarnation here. The whole series has six discs loaded with extras and, on the last disc, the full two part story The Death Of The Doctor from the spin off show The Sarah Jane Adventures is included, which would, decades later, return Katy Manning back to the role of Jo Grant, for which she was best known. That story also includes Matt Smith as The Doctor and, of course, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. If you are a lover of Pertwee’s much loved stab at The Doctor, then I would, in conclusion, highly recommend this Series 10 box set.

Doctor Who - Frontier In Space

Master Plan

Doctor Who -
Frontier In Space
UK Air date: February - March 1973
Six Episodes
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

So Frontier In Space is the third story of the tenth series of Doctor Who, as reissued in the nice Blu Ray set of that season from the BBC. I was five years old when this story aired but I only seem to have hazy recollections of this one. Whereas, the next two stories in the box, I have a lot of childhood memories of terror. Looking back on it now, though, I have to say that it’s easily one of the best of the John Pertwee Doctor Who stories I’ve seen.

This one’s a six parter and involves The Doctor and Jo Grant (played by the always brilliant Katy Manning) getting involved with a cold war climate powder keg in the far future between the people of Earth and the people of Draconia (who are kind of a short hand version of ancient Japanese style lizard people, in terms of their manner and codes). The TARDIS is taken away from our two heroes more or less from the start of the tale and the majority of the first three episodes sees them being imprisoned by various people and spending a lot of time in jail cells, as the plot moves along without them in some areas. It sounds boring and padded but, well okay it possibly is padded but it’s nothing short of interesting and exciting since, you know there’s going to be some jail break or other set piece in each episode.

The plot is kickstarted by an outside party committing hostile acts of space piracy on the two species and using a sound based, hallucinogenic gadget to make the victims believe they are seeing the other race, humans or Draconians, committing these crimes, in order to start an intergalactic war. Fairly soon it turns out that the actual people committing these acts are the Ogrons, a race of quite dumb mercenaries for hire which were on a lot of merchandising such as jigsaw puzzles when I was a kid but were only actually in two stories in the Pertwee era (I’m not counting their cameo in Carnival Of Monsters, reviewed here and nor am I counting the 1990s Eastenders charity crossover, Dimensions In Time). The Ogrons, of course, are being directed by a higher power and it soon becomes evident that this is a master plan of... um... The Master, kind of. In the last episode it is revealed that he is working (although he plans to double cross them) with the Daleks, who only turn up in that final episode.

The story is absolutely superb and it has a great script. Katy Manning’s always watchable Jo Grant is given more to do here and there’s a wonderful scene where she is holding up a very long, one sided conversation with The Doctor to hide the fact from a security camera that he’s already escaped the cell... demonstrating that Jo Grant can talk the hind legs off a donkey with ease when she has to.

The Master is, once again, played absolutely brilliantly by Roger Delgado (aka Roger Caesar Marius Bernard de Delgado Torres Castillo Roberto) who, alas, died quite violently while shooting a television show in Turkey when the car he and two other crewmen were in plunged into a ravine, just a few months after Frontier In Space aired on television. It was a real loss and I think it’s probably why Jon Pertwee opted to leave the show a year later. Delgado’s last scene in this story is of him shooting The Doctor down, before Jo helps the wounded Doctor into the TARDIS at the end of the last episode. The Master would not return again until he was pictured as a kind of melted looking monster in the Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin in 1976. He’s been played a few times by different actors since then and, in at least two of the incarnations of this time lord, the actors have somewhat resembled the look of Delgado in the role.

The special effects in this one aren’t great as the story calls for things like space walks and so on but, it never really bothered us as kids. Even then, I’m sure, we could see those big cables holding the actors up but, you know, how else do you tell a story like this on a TV budget in the early 1970s. I look on them now as a kind of comforting presence in these things and count myself lucky that, unlike some other films and shows put out in high definition, the copyright owners haven’t tried to tart up the special effects and turn them into something they never were (although they have in some of these Blu Ray sets, it’s true.... but there's always the option to watch the original version). I like that the cell holding the prisoners here wobbles when they bash it and stuff like this should always be left in. It’s not just entertainment... it’s art and, as importantly, a historical document of its time. So leave it alone is always my view on the decision to intervene too much with modern technology.

The Target novelisation of the story, always a big winner with kids... I guess they were the Harry Potter novels of their day to some extent, when it came to promoting children’s reading... was one of the few of their adaptations not to use the name of the story for the book title. Instead of going on the shelves as Frontier In Space, the book version was called Doctor Who And The Space War. I probably enjoyed this one along with all the others... I certainly had a copy of this shelved with around 60 others at one point, I’m sure.

The next story in the series and on this Blu Ray set is Planet Of The Daleks, which I assume follows on directly from this story. I only remember a few things from it which haunted my nightmares but I also remember being disappointed with it when I watched this one again on a VHS tape in the late 1980s so... yeah, we’ll see how that one goes. Frontier In Space, though, is an absolute corker of a story and probably, it turns out and much to my surprise, the real jewel in the crown of this boxed set.

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 - The Three Doctors

Real 3D

Doctor Who
The Three Doctors
UK Air date:
December 1972 - January 1973
Four Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

And so it came to pass it was time to crack open the Doctor Who Season 10 Blu Ray box set and, the first story in the box is the much loved fan pleaser The Three Doctors. This show must have been a nice Christmas present when the first episode was first broadcast in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year in 1972 and it was the programme’s ten year anniversary story. Of course, only the last three episodes were in it's 10th year and in January... the show itself wouldn’t reach that 10 year marker until November but, nobody seemed to care much and it’s an entertaining story.

This one tells of the Timelords on Gallifrey trying to save themselves and the rest of the universe by teleporting in previous incarnations of The Doctor to help himself fight the threat of the famous, 'missing presumed dead' Timelord Omega, who sacrificed himself many centuries before to give their race the power to master time travel... and who now lives in a black hole of his own making, out for revenge.

This was the first time in the history of the show that two or more incarnations of The Doctor had met each other and, to date, this has only happened four other times (not counting CGI trickery of half glimpsed running feet etc). This marks the first time that Patrick Troughton’s wonderful second Doctor would appear in one of these crossover stories (also his first time in colour) and he would go on to do the same in 1983 and 1985 (although his 1985 appearance, reviewed by me here, is perhaps best left forgotten). Also, because of the failing health of first Doctor William Hartnell, a small ‘limbo’ set was constructed at his home and his few brief scenes, roughly one per episode, were relayed as communications to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors by video screen... the excuse being that the timelords didn’t have enough energy to fully transport him to rendezvous with the others.

And for an obvious, celebratory gimmick episode it’s actually quite well written, at least in terms of dialogue and the story isn’t too bad either. The show also features the then current Doctor’s companion Jo Grant, played by the inimitable Katy Manning (this would be her last season until she returned for two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor in the next century), Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart (played impeccably, as always, by Nicholas Courtney, who again made his swan song in a story from The Sarah Jane Adventures) and also a bigger part than normal for John Levene as Sgt. Benton (this is due to the part originally being earmarked for Frazer Hines to reprise his role as Second Doctor companion Jamie but, alas, he was busy doing Emmerdale Farm at the time... or Emmerdale as it seems to be known as today).

The chemistry between all the players is very strong and the humour coming from the dialogue is great. This one has probably one of my favourite scenes where, at UNIT HQ in the first episode, where the situation is already dire, the Brigadier asks The Doctor if there’s anything he can do to which Pertwee’s Doctor asks him to hand him a carbon rod. When the Brigadier does this, Pertwee uses it to stir his cup of tea... good stuff.

The really good decision the writers made in this was to not have the two primary Doctors, Troughton and Pertwee, who are present for all the episodes... get on with each other all that well. Just because you’re both the same person doesn’t mean you will agree on things and a great source of the humour and entertainment of this story is the constant bickering between the two of them, both put in their place by Hartnell at one point who calls his ‘replacements’ a dandy and a clown. Yep, there’s some good writing here. Such as the explanation of why so much stuff is pulled into the black hole when Omega is just after The Doctor... “Rather like taking a pill with a swig of water.” There’s even a joke reference in this, made by Katy Manning, to The Beatles song, I Am The Walrus.

I also liked the breakaway sets that were whisked away into the ‘quarry’ landscape of the planet in the black hole and the way bits of man made items are scattered about seemingly randomly in surrounding landscape... UNIT HQ even gets completely transported as the cliff hanger ending of one episode.

The special effects, though, are... not great. The electronic jelly that beams everything back to the black hole is a pretty rubbish looking video effect and the iconic gel guard monsters are actually quite awful and unconvincing suit creatures when you see them moving around. Quite disappointing for monsters who were never used again but whom everyone seems to remember (they even made it onto Weetabix cards, if memory serves).

Omega himself, a completely masked up figure, looks fairly impressive, a little like a golden pre-Darth Vader type presence. Alas, camera angles being what they are, especially when restored to Blu Ray, when the creature is revealed to have been eaten away with, as much of a surprise to him as to everybody else, nothing actually inside the suit, the illusion is ruined a little later on when you can clearly see the actors eyes behind the slits in the mask at one point.

About the Blu Ray... the transfer is pretty good but, for some reason the externally shot scenes, especially those at the beginning of the first episode, look fairly blurry and foggy still. I am guessing this is because the cameras weren’t quite in focus, maybe and, bearing in mind the way these episodes would have been received on first broadcast, probably nobody minded much. It wouldn’t look very different on those old TV sets compared to the rest of the footage, which on this new Blu Ray looks very sharp in comparison.

And that’s me about done on The Three Doctors. Omega would return in a different form for a Fifth Doctor story in the 1980s and the other thing that’s very important about this episode is that, as a reward for helping out the Timelords and saving the known universe, The Doctor is gifted with the components and memory needed to be able to control his TARDIS and travel in time again. His exile to Earth, brought in at the very end of the last Troughton episode and designed to make the show cheaper by not having to constantly make unrealistic looking alien sets, was over. Of course, this meant a very reduced role for the Brigadier and the rest of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (as it was in those days.. I’m not having any of this new Unified stuff, thank you very much) officers in the show but they wouldn’t disappear completely... not yet anyway. Overall, one of the more enjoyable stories and a cracking set of scenes with the Second and Third Doctors working together and bickering their way through the story. An entertaining celebration of a series which, I’m sure, had already run far longer than the show’s original producers had expected it to.

The House That Dripped Blood

Dwelling Point

The House That Dripped Blood
UK 1971 Directed by Peter Duffell
Amicus/Second Sight Blu Ray Zone B

The House That Dripped Blood is the third of the famous Amicus portmanteau style horror films, following on from Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed here) and Torture Garden (reviewed here). There had been a bit of a longer gap between this and the previous film but the format is more or less the same, we just don’t have Freddie Francis in the director’s chair. Instead, we have Peter Duffell working from a script by Robert (Psycho) Bloch, who had also written Torture Garden (for better or worse).

This one is kind of in between the previous two in terms entertainment value, I believe. It’s not quite as adventurous or intriguing in concept as Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors but it’s certainly not as dull as the first hour or so of Torture Garden. In the previous films you had linking stories consisting of a train carriage and a wax museum fortune teller respectively... this one has a story about a police inspector who is trying to find out why a big film star has gone missing from his home, the titular dwelling which, despite that title, doesn’t once drip blood and, indeed, was nearly awarded an A certificate from the UK film censors if the film makers hadn’t pleaded for a stronger rating, fearing that the lack of credibility of a movie which such a light rating would harm its chances with horror film fans.

So each story is of somebody telling the inspector about one of the previous inhabitants of the house and the demise which was visited upon them. Actually, the house seems to have absolutely nothing to do with things at all other than at the insistence of a policeman and the estate agent (a Mr. Stoker, if vampire fans are paying attention). I’m guessing that setting the vast majority of the action of each tale there, where the main characters of each segment found themselves back at the house between adventures, was appealing because you didn’t have to go to go out and shoot on other locations quite so much.

The five segments are Method For Murder, Waxworks, Sweets To The Sweet, The Cloak and the framing story... Framework. Here’s a quick run down of the stories as they appear:

In Method For Murder, Denholm Elliot plays a crime/horror writer who rents the house and moves in with his wife to give him the proper atmosphere to write his next best seller. Early on he devises a new character, Dominik, an escaped strangler from a mental asylum. Alas, not long after he creates him, he starts seeing Dominik around the house and grounds. I have to say, the 'gaslighting' plot is pretty obvious here and the final reveal is thoroughly expected. Perhaps that’s why, after this reveal, something else is piled on which, to be honest, seems a little hasty and somewhat of a clumsy attempt to add an extra bite to the proceedings. Not the best idea but the segment plays along nicely up until then.

The second segment, Waxworks, follows the adventures of Peter Cushing, who moves into the house for his retirement, looking forward to reading, music and gardening his remaining years away pleasantly. However, when he visits a local Wax Horror Museum, he is enthralled by the exhibit of Salome, who startingly resembles a woman he obviously once loved but lost. He is told by the owner of the waxworks that the model is based on his own dead wife, who was a murderess. Joss Ackland, a friend from Cushing's past and an equally unsuccessful rival for the same girl, it transpires, drops by on a visit and also discovers the enchanting Salome. Needless to say, with both gentlemen under the spell of the wax model, something is amiss and there are some violent (but in no way graphic) resolutions in store for certain characters.

Up until now, the stories feature killers rather than anything or anyone that would bring this film into the horror genre but, luckily, the next two segments do stray back into that classification, starting with Sweets To The Sweet, featuring Christopher Lee as a widower who moves into the house with his young daughter, who he won’t let have a normal childhood. Instead, he hires a new 'live-in' tutor played by Nyree Dawn Porter but, although the teacher and the little girl hit it off, the real villain of the piece is not necessarily who you think it might be. Well, okay, it was for me but I’m sure some people will not be expecting the way this one goes.

Finally we have the fourth segment, The Cloak... which dovetails also into the resolution of the framing story. This is the story of a famous star of horror films, played by Jon Pertwee not long after he started playing the lead role in Doctor Who. He moves into the house and is in a new movie with an actress played by the stunning Ingrid Pitt (who also played in Countess Dracula, reviewed here and The Vampire Lovers, reviewed here). The tale tells of the pompous actor who is working on sets that are not good enough for him and with costumes he doesn’t think will do. So he goes to a local shop to buy a decent cloak for his vampire character. And it’s nice that the owner of the shop, who sells Pertwee the cloak, is none other than Catweazle himself, Geoffrey Bayldon. Of course, less than a decade later, the two would be regularly starring opposite each other in Worzel Gummidge, with Pertwee as Worzel and Bayldon as The Crowman. Anyway, Pertwee gets more than he bargained for because, whenever he dons the cape he gets the urge to suck blood, casts no reflection and, in a scene which really pushes the comic nature of this last segment (horror and comedy have always been natural bedfellows), levitating and flying around his room. Pertwee really does a great job here and, as usual, relishes his over-the-top comic performance (which would sometimes come out in his Doctor Who work from time to time too). The end of the segment has a twist reveal and a case of vampirism that is then, more or less, repeated less than ten minutes later in the wrap up to the film, followed by the estate agent breaking the fourth wall and asking if, perhaps, a member of the audience would like to rent the house next.

And, it’s not brilliant but it is fairly entertaining and, with a cast that strong, a pleasure to watch. There were some nice little touches and references to both film and horror history and, strangely, a bit of unintentional future casting foreshadowing, as there is a scene where Christopher Lee is reading the exact same paperback edition of Lord Of The Rings that my father used to read and revisit again and again in the 1960s and 70s. Who knew at the time that he would, decades later, go on to play one of the main characters in that work.

There’s also some nice camerawork and shot design throughout. This isn’t brightly coloured with primaries like some of the films which it can name as its kin, instead relying on a mostly subdued colour palette throughout, barring a scene or two at the Horror Museum where it strays briefly into Italian giallo/horror territory. However, the director does do some nice things with the camera which offsets the lack of dynamic colour in the film. For instance, a shot of Christopher Lee’s head front and centre of the screen when he answers a phone call is contrasted by the big staircase and landing around the hall, which we can see up and above past Lee’s head as his daughter walks around it. Another really nice moment is where the Inspector is being told about one of the previous owners of the house and he is in extreme foreground with his head on the right of the shot and with his arm coming up from the left of the shot, holding a cigarette. The policeman telling the story is also in deep focus in the middle groove of the shot made by the negative shape of the foreground character and his arm. So, yeah, some great shot ideas here.

The music, by a guy I’d not heard of called Michael Dress, is serviceable and appropriate throughout most of the film, really coming into its own in the framing story whenever anyone goes inside the gloomy house, where he manages to weave a quite creepy and subtle atmosphere into the music. This matches a visual device of the director, who tends to sometimes cut around to sinister objects in the house by way of short breaks from scene to scene to imply a time transition. The composer seems to have died only a few years after this, at the tender age of forty years old, so I guess that’s why I’ve not come across him before.

And I don’t have too much more to say about The House That Dripped Blood, to be honest. I enjoyed this much more than Torture Garden and am really looking forward to watching the next film in this unofficial series of Amicus Portmanteau horrors. That will hopefully be sometime very soon as one of the segments also brings it into the realm of... ‘Christmas movie’.

Doctor Who - The Green Death: The Special Edition

For The Larvae The Professor

Doctor Who - The Green Death: The Special Edition
UK Airdate 19th May - 23rd June 1973
BBC DVD Region 2

Warning: Slight spoilers in this one.

I last saw The Green Death when it was first broadcast in 1973. I would have been five years old and I remember the giant maggots, which are a big feature of the episode, being a talking point around the house and a thing which would invoke both fear and playful memories of big, wiggly things coming to get ya! I wasn’t expecting it to be half as good as I remembered when watching it now on this special edition version of the DVD but... well... it surprised me in more than one way.

I’ve noticed over the past few years that the Doctor Who stories featuring Jon Pertwee don’t seem to age as badly as the ones starring Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy... I don’t know why it is and the special effects are still quite shoddy, though not as shoddy as the ones utilised in the programme during the 1980s and 1990s... I can say with some confidence. The stories and, certainly, the dialogue and scripts, are all pretty top notch and tackle issues in exactly the same way that all of the best science fiction does... head on and by exaggerating certain elements to be able to explore the issue to a degree it would be less able to do without a science fiction context.

In this one, the big issue is ecology and the environment. It centres on a computer who has taken over the employees of a global oil company which is dumping toxic waste... it’s seeping into a local coalmine in Wales. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) and the always brilliant Jo Grant (Katy Manning) go to investigate the deaths of people who come into physical contact the sludge, infecting them with a virus which turns them into a cheap 1970s TV effect... glowing green before claiming their lives. Jo declines going with The Doctor on a quick jaunt to the planet Metebelis 3, where he acquires a blue crystal which will cause him trouble later in the history of the show, because she believes the environmental work being done by Professor Jones and his group of ‘Eco Hippies’, combatting the global company who is responsible for the toxic sludge and the giant sized maggots who are breeding and infesting the coal mine, is more important... good for her. It also heralds the fact that this will be Katy Manning’s last TV adventure as Jo Grant until her brief return to the role in a two part story, The Death Of The Doctor, opposite Elisabeth Sladen and Matt Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures almost 40 years later (and reviewed by me here).

Now, although Jo Grant was always a well admired character by me, when I was a toddler, my recent rewatches of a few of the old Jon Pertwee stories have made me realise that her character wasn’t all that well fleshed out or given that much interesting dialogue. Here, however, it’s clear that by this point she is really being written in a more useful manner and the focus on her and the dialogue/scenes she is given are all absolutely marvellous. And, of course, Katy Manning really makes the most of it, displaying great chemistry with all her co-workers, including Stewart Bevan as Professor Clifford Jones (she was engaged to him in real life, at the time, although I understand that didn’t last too long) who she goes off with to get married and travel down the amazon at the end of the last episode here.

Now the show is not without its weak moments...

There’s a loose end of a character when one of the principal actors had to drop out of the show due to ill health. The special effects are quite good in some places (the miniature work of explosions is good although the white action figure driving the model of The Doctor’s car Bessie in one shot is hilarious) but utterly abominable in others when it comes to the blue-screen work. Whenever any of the characters goes down the lift shaft in the coal mine, for example, they are quite clearly standing against a superimposed piece of back projection footage. Similarly, although there’s a lot of location work in a fair bit of it, there are a fair few terrible shots when the people at UNIT are walking or standing around a studio, superimposed against a backdrop of the open country. Now I’ve got no idea why this was needed and all I can think of was there wasn’t enough time to get all the shots required and, instead of going back out on location to reshoot, the decision was made to go with a studio solution. In all honesty, it really is quite noticeable and surely hurts the scenes when this is done.

However, everything else in this story seems right on the money and it even involves some scenes of Jon Pertwee returning to his comedy roots as he dons two ridiculous disguises to penetrate the security at Global Chemicals... one is a “funny milkman” personae and the other is the old “dressing up in women’s clothing” routine where he impersonates a cleaning lady. This is all quite amusing, if a bit clunky, but I can’t imagine what young fans of the show might make of all this dressing up shenanigans these days, to be honest. That being said, the costumes Pertwee wears as The Doctor are, as usual, absolutely brilliant and I just wish I could get the crushed leather jackets and the frilly shirts that he got access to on these things... I’d be wearing them all the time.

Not too much else to say on this one. The score by Dudley Simpson is lively and typical of the show in that era, the giant maggots are actually fairly well done but when one of the larvae hatches, the resulting, dragonfly like creature is quite badly handled. However, when The Doctor steps off the TARDIS on Metebelis 3 and a tentacle suddenly whips out from the front of the screen and goes straight around his neck... I have to say that it was so effectively done that it actually made me jump. Something these kinds of shows don’t really do to me that often... at least not since I was a kid, at any rate. The end is quite poignant too and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the last scenes with Pertwee and Manning didn’t bring a tear to the eye. Overall, I’m really impressed that The Green Death has held up as well as it has and I think it’s certainly one of the best Pertwee stories and also, I would say, one of the best of the stories in the history of the show. Now I just have to figure out which Pertwee story to acquire next.

Doctor Who - The Daemons

On The Devil

Doctor Who - The Daemons
UK Airdate: 22nd May to 19th June 1971
BBC Region 2

The Daemons is the last story in the second series of Jon Pertwee’s stint on the show. It’s a much loved classic among fans and, I believe, it was Pertwee’s personal favourite of the stories he worked on for his run as The Doctor.

I didn’t remember much of this one from when I was a kid, I was two years old at the time,  but I have a fair few Doctor Who memories from before this so I must have seen it and I think I vaguely remember Bok, the stone gargoyle that comes to life as a servant of Roger Delgado’s character The Master in this particular five parter.

Seeing it now with fresh eyes, I can see why people like it so much and it’s very obvious that the influence on this particular story probably stems from Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking teleplay for the third of the four Quatermass serials, Quatermass And The Pit (my review of the movie remake of that serial is here). Like the Quatermass story, The Daemons uses supernatural belief and terrors as a way into a tale which eventually turns out to be rooted in science, cannily exploiting the “best of both worlds” scenario to elicit the fantastic curiosity of the supernatural, specifically in this case The Devil, with the “grounded in science” personality of this show’s lead protagonist. Both the Quatermass story and this one both use the idea of another race of creatures chaperoning the human race in some sort of experiment although, it has to be said, Quatermass And The Pit was far more intriguing than this exploration of that concept.

One of the things going for it is that you have a full range of regular characters in the line up for this story, which was in one of the “Doctor is exiled to earth by the timelords” series, due to budgetary restraints at the time. Here we have my favourite of the female companions, the hippyish Jo Grant (as played by Katy Manning) and you have a full compliment of UNIT characters, featuring Captain Mike Yates, Sergeant Benton and, of course, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who in this story utters his famous line, which actor Nicholas Courtney plundered for the title of his memoirs, Five Rounds Rapid. When faced with Bok, the stone gargoyle who is running around and disintegrating people, he casually turns to one of his men and barks the wonderful order... “Jenkins. Chap with the wings there. Five rounds rapid.”

This particularly story is a bit of a romp and includes a force field around the sleepy village of Devil’s End which is keeping The Doctor, Jo, Yates and Benton inside the village while the Brigadier and his team are trying to find a way in. It’s pretty much action fuelled with lots of running about, Jon Pertwee driving both a motor bike and his faithful car Bessie, and lots of explosions (including a helicopter explosion which was tracked in from the James Bond film From Russia With Love, which I reviewed here).

Roger Delgado is in great form as The Master in this one... he’s always a delight to watch. I was, however, surprised to find that the two trained soldiers, Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates, get beaten up and have to be rescued so much by people who wouldn’t be as trained in the art of hand-to-hand combat as they are. I was also disappointed that The Doctor tends to talk down to Jo Grant quite a lot in this one, constantly pointing out her shortcomings to make relevant plot points apparent. However, it is at least Jo who saves the day in the end when she demonstrates the human trait of self sacrifice to The Deamons... or Daemon in the singular, actually, since you only ever see one of them. The make up on the Daemon is excellent but, alas, the special effects which superimpose his gigantic form over the rest of the setting is particularly bad, which is a shame.

There are some sequences when the titular monster is rampaging about the countryside where he is never actually seen on shot and is just glimpsed by others as we see their reaction shots to let our imaginations fill in the blanks. I expect that’s probably a shrewd move on knowing the limitations of the special effects rather than an all out attempt to be subtle but, whatever the reasoning, it works quite well.

Despite the conclusion of a classic but, frankly, silly scene where The Doctor is captured by Morris Dancers and almost burnt on a maypole, the story has some very nice moments and, although I prefer stories like The Sea Devils in the Pertwee years, this is certainly a pretty good jumping on point if you’ve never seen one before... although three scenes rely on Jon Pertwee making use of driving Bessie by a remote control device... when seen as a whole that’s a little over done but it would certainly have made sense when the story was originally spaced out over the course of five weeks. Reminders would have been necessary so we can see why The Master finds himself returned to UNIT captivity at the end of the story.

The other big weakness on this one for me was that, although I can fully understand that the idea of a stone gargoyle coming to life as The Master’s assistant is a pretty scary concept, Bok has his stone tongue permanently stuck out of his mouth... which makes him look rather silly and unthreatening in my book... but I’m sure as a kid I would have been as petrified as this stone monster is himself, so I can understand why he’s become one of the iconic images of the Pertwee years.

Still, a bona fide classic Doctor Who story and one which is well worth a watch if you are interested in the third incarnation of the United Kingdom’s favourite science fiction export. Sometimes it’s better the devil you know...

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS

Fiddling While TARDIS Vernes

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS
Airdate: 27th April 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: New spoilers waiting to be discovered as you journey to the centre of this article.

For a long time now, Doctor Who fans around the world have been given occasional little audio and visual glimpses of other parts of The Doctor’s famous time and space travelling machine, TARDIS, besides the main console room which features in a lot, although not nearly all, of the stories. But rarely are we given a real chance to see what the rest of the TARDIS is properly like and even just the sound of the cloister bell, a famous chime in the Doctor Who universe, is enough to light up fans' eyes en masse (first used in Tom Baker’s last story Logopolis and still used in the Matt Smith series more than it ever was in the past, strangely enough).

So it was with much trepidation that I embarked on this episode with the Jules Verne inspired title of Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS... after 50 years of not having enough budget to show us much else of The Doctor’s good vessel (in spite of at least one Hartnell story taking place in its entirety on board this ship). I was really not wanting to see much else of it in all honesty.

Moffat does like to change things and tinker with the established myth of Doctor Who more than The Meddling Monk and sometimes that can get quite interesting (when confined to certain acceptable parameters) and other times that can just seem quite arrogant, unnecessary and, frankly, leaving a downright tragic aftertaste in the mouth. I’m dreading what is going to be revealed in four weeks time at the end of the current series, for example... he’s already made some horrible references to The Doctor’s name in some scenes that really didn’t work in the last series and onward and... well... let’s all wait and see.

So, did the episode which was advertised to be an exploration of some of the parts of the TARDIS we’ve never seen before prove to be an interesting and respectful look at the space/time vehicle of this beloved show’s history or... did it fall flat? My expectations were not really going too much in either direction, well... with the exception of aforementioned trepidation, that is... and I can say now that this episode proved to be...

Okayish.

There was, as I’m sure a lot of us were all expecting, a lot of running down corridors and some of the rooms (and you really didn’t get to see much more than the corridors for most of the running time) looked like cheap CGI backgrounds as opposed to actual sets... but the episode certainly wasn’t anywhere disrespectful to the shows of the past and, considering it was presumably the “bottle neck”* episode of the current series, it was mostly quite entertaining too (Bottle neck episode is a term for an episode of a TV show which is deliberately “written cheap” to allow money allocated to be used for other episodes when unexpected costs happen. These episodes frequently feature few sets and often a lot of flashbacks to previous episodes, to the extent that many people also refer to them as “flashback episodes”. Many shows have them and they’re often not very hard to spot.).

This episode offered a few tantalising glimpses of things every fan would want to explore further, such as a Gallifreyan library with a certain book charting The History Of The Time War which gave Clara a mini moment of epiphany in regards to The Doctor’s name and his place in the universe, so to speak. Unfortunately, the episode also managed to cop out on all these little things because the way our heroes got out of this week's story was, frankly, a big time and space reset button which erased the versions of our characters out of history after they’d saved themselves from earlier folly, thus rendering the majority of the characters (at least the important ones) without a memory of the episode. So that was a bit pointless.

And, yes... we got to hear the cloister bell again. Briefly.

Nevertheless, although there was some hellish imagery used in the story, there were also some wonderful, visual delights, with a very diverse set of colour palettes used from scene to scene... especially the moment when The Doctor and Clara went from running through orange and green lit corridors to the side of a “snarling” plateau which used colouring more reminiscent of the Pertwee era. Pertwee, in fact, was also heard in this episode... as were a few Doctors and companions, since the removal of a panel on the TARDIS console triggered a series of sound bytes from the shows past, starting with a sample of The Doctor’s grandchild Susan Foreman (as played by Carole Ann Ford) explaining the TARDIS acronym from the very first episode of the very first story, An Unearthly Child. 

And talking of children, and possible grandchildren, it was also nice to have a glimpse, once again, of Melody Pond’s (aka River Song’s) cot from the A Good Man Goes To War episode too. Nice touch and one is still wondering, or at least I am, if Clara will eventually be revealed as the daughter of River and The Doctor at some point... or is she a future incarnation of The Doctor’s Daughter perhaps, ripped from David Tennant’s DNA in his third series as The Doctor. That’s another of my many theories this week... I’m hoping Moffat’s got something a little more clever planned for his big reveal though.

It wasn’t a fantastic story, it has to be said, but it certainly wasn’t a big letdown like the five episodes which comprised the first part of “Series Seven” were either, so that’s okay. It kept me interested and it really feels like the producers of the show are working up to something big. Now I’ve been twice bitten by that already with this series over the last couple of years so I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet... especially with Moffat now threatening that this year will somehow change the show.

What I will do, though, is look forward to next weeks Victorian London shenanigans with the return of my favourite lesbian Silurian, my favourite Sontaran and Bond/Avengers gal Diana Rigg in it. Wish I could leap seven days into the future and check it out now.

Doctor Who: The Sea Devils

Devils In The Deep Blue Sea

Doctor Who: The Sea Devils
UK Airdate: 26 February to 1 April 1972
BBC Region 2

When I was three years old I watched this serial on my mum and dad’s old black and white television set with them. We all loved it. The iconic monsters that were The Sea Devils, rising up from the surface of the sea in their string vests and waving about their strange weapons was bound to create a certain sense of fear and left a memorable impression on me... and it didn’t help that my dad kept doing impressions of them at the time. I remember being disappointed by them when they returned, with their marine cousins The Silurians (see review here), in the era of The Fifth Doctor (and I’ll know sometime soon whether I still feel the same about that) but this original serial was a big hit with me and it’s taken too long, almost 41 years in fact, for me to catch up with it again.

I’m really pleased to say that this Pertwee era story is even more entertaining than I remembered it although, to be fair, I barely remembered any of it past the obvious iconic monsters and a scene I’ll describe in a little while. It’s well written, Pertwee is in complete control of his character, Katy Manning’s Jo Grant is absolutely adorable (and adorably written) here, complete with her trademark white suits which never get dirty even when she’s been crawling through a ventilation shaft, and Roger Delgado’s triumphant performance as The Master is up to his high standard.

The only thing that surprised me was that UNIT and The Brigadier were not in this story. UNIT is mentioned enough but outside of The Doctor and Jo, their presence is never felt on screen.

The other thing that surprised me was a sequence that I’d forgotten but which made a great impression on me as a kid, when The Doctor and Jo are trying to find their way through a minefield with The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, and then use said familiar implement to blow up a load of mines to frighten off a Sea Devil. I remember incorporating this scene into games I used to play in the garden as a kid... but I’d completely forgotten both the scene and my childhood games of it until I saw it again. Little tear brought to the eye their for sure!

There’s also some amazing stuff in the storyline, like The Doctor and Jo being stranded in a fort on an island with only a sick, surviving crew member and a Sea Devil for company. That’s a really good sequence where you wonder just how our two heroes are going to get themselves out of harm’s way.

And there’s another great sequence where Delgado and Pertwee have a sword fight at the end of an episode which is so good, the entire fight is repeated at the start of the next one. And when I say good, I mean corny and riddled with typical, Hollywood swashbuckler incidents and choreography which is bound to bring a smile to the face on anyone who realises that the two actors in question must have been having a really good time shooting this.

There are some other nice action sequences along the way in subsequent episodes and there’s also a heck of a lot of location work than you might expect from a Doctor Who story arc, especially in comparison to the show today. I have to say that this one knocks a lot of the latest season’s stories for six when it comes to sheer, all ‘round entertainment value. I was really pleased that the one memory I had of this show was not marked by disappointment on the re-watch... this one was a real treat for me and I whizzed through all six episodes in two sittings. Great stuff.

Oh, and the unusual synthesiser music by Malcolm Clarke is absolutely suited to Doctor Who and probably made a big impression on me as a child too. I wish they’d have let this composer loose on some of the other stories in the series because it’s quite forward thinking for it’s time. At the very least, I wish the BBC would have a think about releasing the score properly on CD, as a four or five minute suite really isn’t good enough for this music.

A short review, then, but a very positive one. If you’re a fan of the Pertwee era of the show then this one is definitely one of the best ones to watch, I reckon. Sun, sand and sea monsters are just what The Doctor ordered, it turns out.

The Silurians

The Cave And The Bold

The Silurians
UK Airdate: 31st January to 14th March 1970
BBC Region 2

Well... today marks the 49th anniversary of the broadcast of the first ever episode of Doctor Who, so I thought I’d better watch a story and write a review of it. Here we have Jon Pertwee’s second story as the Doctor and I’ve not seen this since I maybe glimpsed bits of it from wherever I was playing or laying when it was on when I was two years old, on a black and white TV set... until I revisited it now. I honestly don’t know if I saw any of this as a kid or not, but little flashes of imagery did keep coming back to me as I was watching it.

I wasn’t expecting much more than a clunky piece of whimsy out of this but, once again, the serial surprised me by being fairly well written, pretty well shot and really well acted. The key UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) team of The Doctor, Liz Shaw and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart actually does have a lot of chemistry... even though it was not long, after only four stories, that Caroline John (who played Liz) left the show because of pregnancy, although I understand the shows producer wasn’t looking at renewing her contract anyway. Which is a shame actually. I mean, I like Katy Manning as Jo Grant as much as the next feller, but I thought Liz was a pretty good companion too. Although she continued with the character in later decades in Who related video and audio productions, she was only seen once again in the show itself in a tiny guest spot in The Five Doctors... which is a pity. The last I heard of her was when she was reading the audio version of Elizabeth Sladen’s autobiography, as Sladen was no longer around to do that herself. Ironically, it wasn’t long before Caroline sadly passed away herself, earlier this year.

Anyway... back to The Silurians. The writing in this story, about a race of cave dwellers who are awoken and want to reclaim their planet, touches on some really interesting themes and moral questions and, in seven episodes, covers slightly different but ultimately the same ground as the Matt Smith two part Silurian story, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood... which I realise now was more or less a rewrite of this original story but with some short cuts taken for brevity. Although, when you compare the two stories, I’d have to say I prefer the Pertwee original a lot more than the 2010 version.

There’s a whole group of familiar actors who turn up if you like playing “spot the future famous person”, including a young Geoffrey Palmer and a slightly younger than I remember him Fulton Mackay, who took me all of the first episode to place without that white hair I used to remember him for in Porridge. Also on hand, as UNIT-Captain-who-slinks-around-in-the-background-firing-off-shots and, amazingly, surviving all the way through the whole serial without being killed, is a young Paul Darrow, who many UK TV watchers will mostly remember from his turn as Avon in the much loved British sci-fi TV show Blake’s 7. It was nice to see all these kinds of people on hand to give quality performances to a show which really made use of them.

Also, Who fans take note, this story marks the first appearance of Jon Pertwee’s (and later Tom Baker’s) old faithful yellow roadster Bessie. I remember everyone used to like seeing pictures and doing jigsaw puzzles of Bessie back in the day.

The special effects are, as you would expect, a bit iffy (although not as iffy as they got a decade or more later) but the silurian costumes themselves are really top notch designs and so much better than the almost fake “pass-for-silurians” costumes which we have in the show nowadays. The design features of these suits really do look “non-human” as opposed to the “people wearing make up and a touch of prosthetics” which producers of all modern TV shows seem to think is the way to go, and which gives the aliens on most TV shows produced today a homogenous, similar look. The lack of flexibility in these old costumes still triumphs, I think, over the advantages of a lighter application of make-up, although there is a very bad performance issue with one of the Silurians on this. The more militant silurian (pretty much the same kind of character as one in the Matt Smith two parter) is faced with the problem, which his fellow silurians also have, of needing to add some movement to himself when he is speaking to show that it is, indeed, he who is speaking. Unfortunately, the actor playing this part seems to go over the top and his silurian seems to have a permanent, jittery movement whenever he’s on screen, like he’s got Parkinson’s disease or something. This really isn’t a good look for the character and it’s such a shame that the story in general is cursed with, effectively, a “mad silurian on acid” performance when the rest of the race are portrayed much more sensibly by his colleagues. Of course, he might have been told to act this way because of the nature of that particular silurian’s character, I don’t know, but I was surprised the entire performance on this one is like it is.

That issue aside, though, it’s a great little story and doesn’t shy away from showing things happening on a much larger scale than I‘m used to seeing in the modern incarnation of the series. When the silurians release a plague on mankind, for example, they actually show it happening all over London in various location shots such as a busy station. I’m guessing a lot of the “extras” in some of these shots weren’t aware that they were being extras in a TV show at all, and I’m not sure you could get away with that approach today, but it certainly pays off in here, especially in a crudely edited but brave attempt at a montage sequence showing The Doctor attempting to discover an antidote and UNIT working “crowd control”, superimposed over scenes of people collapsing in various UK locations. Great stuff.

Not one of my favourite classic Doctor Who stories by a long shot but definitely an enjoyable romp with a very serious edge to it (even if Jon Pertwee keeps doing his “funny face” look from Worzel Gummidge whenever he’s zapped by the third eye of a silurian). Definitely recommended and a nice reminder of the origins of the creatures who are still with us in the show today (and I am looking forward to seeing the return of my favourite of the “modern silurians” in this year’s upcoming Christmas special). Next stop for this Doctor Who fan will be me revisiting a story that definitely had something of a terrifying effect on me as a nipper, although I can’t remember any of it except the iconic look of the monsters. Join me again with my Doctor Who head on soon as I delve into the classic story of... The Sea Devils... string vests n’ all!

K9 And Company: A Girl’s Best Friend

Dog to Who?


K9 And Company: A Girl’s Best Friend
UK Airdate: 28th December 1981
BBC Region 2

When I was 13 years old, the pilot episode of the proposed Doctor Who spin-off series K9 And Company, which would follow the further adventures of Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker companion Sarah Jane Smith (as played by the inimitable Elisabeth Sladen) and a brand new K9 Mark 3, played by the same prop as the previous incarnations of the character... was what my “Christmas 1981” was all about! I was in eager anticipation of the “television event” of the year, still in blissful ignorance that Tom Baker would soon be leaving the regular Doctor Who show just a few months after.

Conceived by uber-producer John Nathan Turner, the series was definitely pitched to run as a TV show if the ratings were good. I even heard that there was going to be a twist at the end of the first series when the audience finds out that the K9 Mark 3 sent to Sarah Jane in the pilot film (the Mark 1 K9 was left on Gallifrey with The Doctor’s companion Leela and the Mark 2 K9 was left in E-Space with the second incarnation of the timelord companion Romana) turned out not to have been sent by The Doctor, as it had first seemed, but by his arch enemy The Master. Interesting stuff.

Alas, the TV show never came to pass... but not for any critical reasons I might highlight in this review and certainly not for want of trying. My understanding is that the pilot certainly didn’t fail and that the ratings were quite high and on track for giving the show a regular time slot. But these were troubled times for the BBC... or at least for Doctor Who at the BBC. A new controller came in and I think this is probably when the bizarre agenda to clandestinely kill off Doctor Who, one of their most succesful TV shows, first started to raise its head and the lack of budget would finally take the show from our screens less than ten years later. We all know what happened after this and the woefully inadequate TV movie which aired between the demise of the show and the “sparklied up” (aka given an adequate budget) regenration of the show in 2005.

The K9 And Company show, however, never stood a chance in this kind of hostile, early 80s climate... although it certainly wouldn’t be the last we saw of Sarah Jane Smith, of course... nor her titular robot companion.

I have to say that, having watched this pilot show again the other week, that K9 And Company: A Girls Best Friend is... well... it’s just not very good. It doesn’t hold together at all well nowadays and I personally feel that both the script and the shooting schedule were to blame. Elisabeth Sladen said as much, if my memory circuits are not malfunctioning again, in her recent autobiography, published posthumously. To be honest though, you can kind of see all the problems right up there on the screen so easily. I’d have to say that, at the time of its original transmission, I certainly didn’t have any problems with it so perhaps the tolerance of the average 80s viewing public was a lot more robust and less sophisticated than the average viewer these days. I don’t think they could have gotten away with airing what’s in this episode on TV these days all that easily.

The dialogue in this one is really not so bad and Sladen, while possibly having a hard time with some of it (I don’t think there was time for rewrites) does a lot better than she subsequently gave herself credit for in managing to inject at least a little of the Sarah Jane Smith character into the written script. It’s not noticeably a vastly different Sarah Jane to the one we’d been so used to watching in the 70s... although I should probably point out that I haven’t been in a position to rewatch any of her 70s episodes in recent years. Maybe before the year is out.

The story, however, is an altogether different kettle of time travelling space fish. It... well... the set up is okay but nothing is ever that clearly established in the name of trying to preserve some sense of mystery over the 50 minute running time and it has to be said that... it kinda jumps around a bit. The transitions between time settings is bloody awful with the characters one minute running around in the scare laden darkness (well, not so scare laden actually) and the next scene you’re back in broad daylight before traipsing back into “night shoot” territory again. I’m not sure if it’s just bad transitioning between scenes that is to blame or slap dash editing or, more likely, a lack of getting all the necessary footage to make some of the scenes work next to each other and keep it down to the prescribed running time.

The acting from some of the cast is way over the top and pretty non-naturalistic, especially when it’s pitched in juxtaposition against some of the more noteworthy actors in the cast like veteran Bill Fraser and, of course, Elisabeth Sladen herself. Although, having said that, there is some really wooden work from Sladen in the title sequence, talking of which...

Wow. I remember that title sequence being really cutting edge and fantastic in the early 80s... unfortunately, it has to be said that the title sequence now looks very dated and reveals itself as a phenomenon contemporaneous to the good old days of the BBC Micro (I was a Spectrum kid myself but still). The “too long” held frozen expressions and other ridiculous shots of Sladen in this sequence look... well... lets just say they look the opposite of inspiring and it really buggers belief that re-shoots weren’t taken because I’m amazed anything this slap-dash was allowed to be broadcast outside of a non-terrestrial channel showing Topless Darts and The Spanish Archer. I believe Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography had a very good reason as to why she was looking so unenthused during these sequences but I can’t quite remember what they were (although I suspect she possibly thought she was doing test shots for focus etc at the time and didn’t realise the camera was running).

But... at least I still like the inane song with John Leeson’s familiar tones singing “K9” over the titles. A bit silly but it has a certain charm to it.

Although I personally didn’t have as good a time as I was expecting from rewatching this old episode, I am still dissapointed that the show was never allowed to get up to running speed with its own regular time slot. Of course, this would not be Sarah Jane Smith’s last appearances in Doctor Who related programming over the years (The Five Doctors is set sometime not long after K9 And Company by the looks of it) and when she returned, with K9s Mark 3 and 4 to make the first of a number of appearances in the regenerated Doctor Who show of recent years, her popularity ensured that she finally got to have her own regular TV series. A show which turned out to be a real corker at times, in fact.

I still miss coming home to see new episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures on TV in the void left by Elisabeth Sladen’s untimely death, but she will live on in peoples memories for generations to come and, clunky or not, it’s really nice to have this little piece of British television history preserved on DVD. I’ve just bought a copy for my firend’s daughter’s birthday as she loves The Sarah Jane Adventures. She’ll be a fair bit younger than I was when it was first aired and it’ll be interesting to see if she takes to this earlier version of the character as she does in her recent portrayals. I hope she likes it as much as I did when it first aired... and not through the cynical eyes of a more sophisticated viewership.

Doctor Who - Terror Of The Autons

Mastering The Doctor


Doctor Who - Terror Of The Autons
UK 1971
BBC Region 2

Okay... so here we have a Doctor Who serial that I’ve not seen in 41 years... I was three years old the last time I watched this one. It’s the second and final of the Jon Pertwee era stories to feature the Nestene intelligence and its deadly tools of the trade, the Autons. This is the last time this enemy would be properly seen again until they returned to the series (on more than one occasion) with the inaugural Christopher Eccelston story Rose.

As I began to watch this one, however, it became very clear to me that this story was a pretty interesting tale of Doctor Who “firsts” than I’d realised when I’d slipped the disc into the player. Lets take a little look at those...

My first clue was when one of my favourite all-time companions Jo Grant (played by the incredible Katy Manning) walked into shot and The Doctor was actually quite rude to her. What’s going on, I thought. Turns out these two characters had never met before. Yep! This is the very first story to feature the inimitable, long-standing companion Jo Grant, after Caroline John’s companion Liz Shaw (who featured in the first Pertwee story, Spearhead From Space, which was the first Auton story) had left the show. After accidentally causing trouble and mayhem in her first appearance, Jo Grant is kept on as The Doctor’s new assistant because, it seems, she’s just too nice for The Doctor to tell her he doesn’t want her around. Smart move Doctor!

The second “first” is that this is also the initial story of UNIT (United Nation Intelligence Taskforce) regular Captain Mike Yates on the show (Richard Franklin). He’s got pretty good chemistry with Jo Grant and one might almost feel that romance could possibly be on the cards at this stage. So this is, in fact, the first story to feature the full triumvirate of regular UNIT characters on screen together in the same story - Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates.

Lastly, and my no means leastly, this is the first appearance of The Doctor’s arch nemesis The Master, as played by the late, great Roger Delgado. Delgado made such a lasting impression with this role, mixing charm and ruthless villainy in equal measure... and right from the start he’s using his famous trademark weapon of a Tissue Compressor Gun which kills people by shrinking them down to the size of dolls. In just a couple of years, Delgado would find himself decapitated in a freak road accident in real life, but it’s a testament to the absolute brilliance of his performance that he is the one face you are always guaranteed to think of first (if you’re over 40) when the character of The Master is ever mentioned.

Okay... so this four part serial is one of those ones which got a lot of complaints from the parents of “scared silly” children at the time... and it’s easy to see why. The Auton’s trademark has always been death by everyday plastic objects which are usually harmless and this one has its fair share of ingenious deaths, aside from the trademark shop mannequins. These include a plastic blow up sofa which crushes a man to death by... well kinda swallowing him (it sounds better than it’s actually presented, believe me), a telephone chord that tries its best to strangle the life out of The Doctor, deadly plastic daffodils and a miniature doll that hurls itself on its victims to strangle them. All good stuff although modern viewers looking back at this one through the passing years may wonder what all the fuss was about, and I can’t say I’d blame them. The execution of these effects is so awful and crude (more so than in the previous Doctor’s black and white incarnations) that it’s hard to remember just how naive we all were to be taken in by this kind of thing at the time.  Even some of the effects that shouldn’t be effects shots, just actors in interior sets, are actually the actors standing on a projected backdrop of that interior... and they so look like it. The miniature doll death is particularly disappointing in retrospect, since it relies on an actor in a suit on blown up, projected backdrops lunging... followed by the victim attempting to sell the shot by gagging and trying to pull off a static doll from his throat. Comical death then but... the nation was in an uproar at the time it seems.

But, as typical of the Doctor Who stories in this period of the show, the bad effects work is just not really a problem because the dialogue, story and acting in these things is all top notch and the on-screen chemistry of the performers really helps to sell the story and distract from the sheer clumsiness  of the effects work (mostly due to budgetary constraints I would  guess... the effects teams on these things had to be pretty resourceful) and instead get the viewer caught up and involved in the events as they play out on screen. There’s some nice stuff here, especially when one of the guest characters fights the Nestene consciousness that has taken control of his mind and sacrifices himself for the good of the The Doctor and Jo. Perhaps a little rushed but it still manages to inject a certain amount of poignancy into proceedings.

At the close of the story, The Master helps The Doctor defeat the Nestene intelligence himself but when he escapes, The Doctor reveals that he has swapped out a crucial piece of The Master’s TARDIS with an older version from his own... leaving The Master as stranded on earth as he is. This new Moriarty for The Doctor was obviously expected to be a successful element of the show right from the outset and the chemistry between Pertwee, Manning and Delgado is a joy to watch at these early stages, as they always would be. These characters really hit the ground running.

So... all in all I would say that Terror Of The Autons is even more entertaining than Spearhead From Space and definitely worth a watch as an important serial establishing some long running elements in the show. Put this one on your Doctor Who play list, if you have one.

Doctor Who - Spearhead From Space

Things I Auton Know

Doctor Who - Spearhead From Space

UK 1970

BBC Region 2

Spearhead From Space is a little landmark of a Doctor Who story because it represents a lot of nice little facts that The Doctor’s audience of obsessive statisticians can collate and attempt to talk about interestingly at parties... and for statisticians I probably mean nerds.

For instance:

1. Spearhead From Space is the very first Doctor Who story to star Jon Pertwee as The Doctor.

2. Spearhead From Space is the first ever Doctor Who story to be shot and broadcast in colour.

3. Spearhead From Space is the first story to feature the alien villain The Nestene Consciousness and their harbingers of death, the plastic Autons!

4. The Autons and the Nestene Intelligence were the first villains to be featured when Russell T. Davies rebooted the show in his first episode, Rose, and have been in stories featuring the following incarnations of the Doctor... Jon Pertwee, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith. Indeed, they have become so embedded in recent years, since their initial two stories in the Pertwee era, that even the current companion Rory was turned into an Auton at one point and killed companion Amy Pond with the signature wrist opening “hand-gun” that is their primary attack when in their mannequin form.

The more interesting fact for me personally, though, is that it is also the earliest Doctor Who memory I have stuck in my head. That sequence where the shop window dummies come to life and start randomly killing people is lodged in my brain as a carry over from my 2 year old self. And I can guarantee you that when I saw it, I was watching it in black and white (there was no way we could afford a colour TV set in those days).

Revisiting it now as part of a DVD boxed set I got for Christmas, was something I was worried might be a bit of a let down after all these years. I’d recently rewatched a classic Pertwee era story The Claws Of Axos (reviewed here) and, though it was pretty good, I’d felt just a little less entertained than I’d been hoping for. This one though, I’m happy to report, is just brilliant and I was thoroughly enjoying the comedy element to the story which gave things a bit of a lift (perhaps a hangover from Troughton?) and I even managed to get through Jon Pertwee’s naked shower scene where he shows his tattoos without being too worried about where things were going.

The story is beyond simple and I won’t go into it really here... because the main story is actually secondary in some ways as to what this set of episodes needed to do. The shows makers had to set up a new Doctor, which they manage to do quite successfully by bringing back an old character from the Patrick Troughton days, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the irreplaceable Nicholas Courtney) and his United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (think alien-busters). Asides from The Brigadier, they also had to set up a new regular assistant for The Doctor, Liz Shaw (as played by Caroline John), who didn’t last very long as it happened... and they furthermore had to set up the concept that The Doctor had been robbed by the time lords of his ability to pilot the TARDIS and exiled to earth so the stories could all be made on a more manageable budget by the BBC.

This is, you have to admit, a pretty tall order to do, plus keep the momentum going on a “replace humans with evil plastic clones of death” story, I’m sure you’ll agree, but it’s a testament once again to those good old Doctor Who writers and directors that the story is nothing but thoroughly entertaining right from the word go. There’s always something sinister about seeing things that are supposed to be inanimate objects suddenly dancing to life and terrorising people that really gets under people’s skins and the fact that the Doctor Who writers of today are still using these creations who first appeared here, over 40 years ago, really says it all about the staying power of some of the top monsters in the Doctor Who canon.

If you’ve never seen a Jon Pertwee story before, and he was The Doctor who I grew up with, then Spearhead From Space is definitely a good show to jump on with. It’s entertaining and witty, slightly sexist but only so that sexism can be challenged by a strong(ish) new female companion and it has an iconic monster in it. All good stuff and the DVD is well worth picking up if you, or your children, are in the mood for a little of the “classic old days” of Doctor Who.