Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 852: Final Overview

Dear diary,

”There are two things in life that I'm very bad at (look at that, I'm just thirteen words in, and I've already lied. Truth be told, there's lots of things in life I'm very bad at. Like trying to make flapjacks, or successfully remove an intruding spider from my flat. There's two things I'm very bad at, though, which are vital to this entry); keeping a diary and completing a Doctor Who marathon.”

That’s how I opened my very first post of The 50 Year Diary on December 15th 2012 - just an introductory post to establish the fact that the Diary would be tasking up residence on the pages of this here website from the new year. Deciding to take on this project was a huge task right at the beginning, and especially since I know what my attention span is like. I’m interested in something for a few months at most and then my attention wanders off to something else and I never give the original topic a second thought. Frankly, the only reason that Doctor Who itself has managed to remain on my radar for this long is because there’s so much of the thing that there’s always something else I can go and look at if one part of it is starting to bore me.

But the decision to set up residence on the pages of Doctor Who Online and pen a daily diary, watching every episode in order right from the start… well, yeah, that was a big commitment. And I dived into it with barely a second thought. Had I stopped to think8 about it for longer, I’d probably never have gone through with it. There would simply be too many reasons *not to do it. Instead, when the option came up, so close to the start of a new year - Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary year - I simply grabbed it and ran.

And if I’m honest, I’m frankly stunned that I’ve made it this far. I genuinely used to wonder at what point I’d give it up. In my head, I used to try and work out what the best ‘exit’ points would be. Maybe I could do to the end of Seres One, then stop? Or just the First Doctor? Just the 1960s? I’d have to end it at a suitable point to avoid people simply pointing out that I’d failed in my mission. Obviously, I still would have failed, but had there been a nice clean break, I might have gotten away with it a little easier. In all honestly, it wasn’t until somewhere around the middle of Tom Baker’s run that I realised I’d gone too far - it was all or nothing, and there was no way I’d not go to the very end.

Which brings us to where we are today! 852 bloody entries, all of them talking about Doctor Who! Actually, slightly more than 852, because I did the two Dalek films and bits of spin-off programming for the collected volumes of the Diary. I really don’t know how I’ve managed to find this much to talk about. there are several days - lots of them! - where I read back my entry and wonder how it’s possibly of interest to anyone but me, but there’s you lot! I don’t know how many of you have been reading along since the very beginning and how many have joined along the way, but thank you very much for doing so. It’s always lovely to get comments and encouragement, and knowing that people are actually reading these posts has been reason enough to carry on! Not that all the messages have been so pleasant - I particularly liked the email we received when I dared to suggest that I didn’t really care for The Evil of the Daleks, and it was rather strongly suggested that I should be replaced by someone ‘who actually knows something about Doctor Who’. Ho hum. I’ve got that email printed out and near the computer - I look at it and smile every time my opinion on an episode doesn’t match up with the norm!

So, for this final entry, I’m just going to go back over each Doctor and give you a few facts and figures. How did their era rate on average? What was their highest-rated tale? How do I feel about them in retrospect? That sort of thing…

Starting, as is traditional, with The First Doctor… I only have one regret with the ratings I’ve given episodes throughout the course of this marathon, ad it;s the score I gave the very first episode - An Unearthly Child. I was being cautious, you see. As this project has gone on, I’ve reached a point where I don’t really have to even think8 about the scores I’m giving - I reach the end of an episode and simply *know that it’s an ‘[x]/10’, based on the scores I’ve given all the other episodes. But I didn’t want to peak too early. I’ve always hated the way that lots of ratings seem to win between ’10/10, that was brilliant’ to ‘1/10, that was awful’, with very little grey area in between. Starting with a ’10/10’ simply felt wrong, so I played it safe. 

Oh, but of course that first episode is a 10/10! I think I even knew that at the time, deep down (well, probably not even that deep…). I’d like to go back and give that one an honorary ’10’, simply because you really couldn’t ask for a better first episode to this programme - still as effective almost 52 years on as it was first time around.

Across his run of episodes - including the one-part Mission to the Unknown, in which the Doctor doesn’t appear but is credited, but excluding the audio of Farewell, Great Macedon, as it was something of an early side-step for the project - the First Doctor averaged a score of 6.57/10. The story I rated the highest from this period was The War Machines, which scored a solid 8/10 for each episode.

Looking back on these first three-or-so years of Doctor Who now… Oh, I love them. There’s an inventiveness to the William Hartnell era that I don’t think the programme has ever quite recaptured since. The facilities and budget simply aren’t there for them to achieve everything they might want to, but they still dare to at least try stories like The Web Planet, or to stage an entire Dalek Invasion of Earth from a pokey London studio. These episodes may not rate the highest overall - though this period achieved very few low scores; only two 3/10’s and a handful of 4/10’s for the entire era - but it still sits quite fondly in my memory as one of the best.

Which brings us on to The Second Doctor! Before starting out on this project, I’d always confidently claimed that Patrick Troughton was my favourite Doctor, and that The Tomb of the Cybermen was my favourite story, and I’l admit that I was a little worried that taking on this marathon might challenge that view. If anything, it’s actively strengthened the point, because I simply fell in love with this little cosmic hobo all over again.

Something that did surprise me was just how much I loved the run of stories in Troughton’s first series. Because such a chunk of that period is lost, it’s one I was far less familiar with than some of the later stories. But there’s some real gems in there, including The Macra Terror, which was the first story to receive a glowing 10/10 score (for Episode Two).

The Tomb of the Cybermen still comes in top, with an average of 8.75/10 across the four episodes. It makes it not only my highest-rated story from the Troughton period, but also the top story of the entire ’classic’ era (I’m looking at the 21st century stuff a little differently, as I’ll explain when I get there). Now, I’ll be fair an admit that the score was probably just helped by the good vibrations I get from watching this story - I’ve thought of it so long as my favourite that I simply can’t help but to enjoy it… but that’s surely the whole point of a favourite story!

What was nice about doing this marathon at this point in time is that there’s been more Troughton episodes available to watch than ever before - and by quite a margin, too! The Underwater Menace Episode Two was provided to me early on to enjoy in context, and while The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear weren’t viable to watch at the right point in time, as we’d hoped, I dipped back to them a few months later, because the alternative would have been waiting until now to see them, and frankly that just wasn’t an option. Being able to see the episodes was great (and both of them improved their average score by a small degree - it’s their second average I’m using today to calculate overall averages), but I wonder if some of that excitement simply came from the fact that I was watching two long-thought-lost stories. It’ll be interesting to see how they hold up the next time I see them - will they still be as good as I think here, or will the novelty have worn off a little, leaving them as just ‘some other Doctor Who stories’… 

Their success this time around, though, coupled with the high score of The Tomb of the Cybermen propelled Season Five into the top spot for the 1960s, averaging a score of 7.23/10 - the only black-and-white season to break a 7/10 average. I’d been worried about this particular run of stories because it was lots of six-parters in a row, and so many of the episodes were missing, I really thought it could be the point where I’d crash and burn, so it’s heartening to see that I enjoyed it all the more in the end.

Overall, the Second Doctor averages 6.90/10 across all this episodes, a healthy figure, especially when considering that two of Troughton’s stories - The Highlanders and The Dominators - sit way down towards the bottom of the list, both with an average of 4/10.

If Troughton had always been my favourite Doctor, then his successor, Jon Pertwee as The Third Doctor had always been my least favourite. It’s not that I completely silkier him, but I’d just never connected with his era in the same way I had with all the others - despite him being the first ‘classic’ Doctor I ever saw, when picking up a copy of Invasion of the Dinosaurs from the library.

What I actually found is that this run of stories is consistently strong, and it helped to contribute to an average score of 6.63/10 over the five seasons. I think that the Third Doctor was helped by such a strong first series, which helped to put my doubts about this period to rest before moving on to view the rest of it - Spearhead From Space being available to watch restored to high definition on blu ray was the perfect way to kick-start the era and catch my attention, and it came out as the top-rated story for this Doctor, with an 8/10 average.

The era then continues to be of a fairly consistent quality from then on - it never quite breaks into a 10/10 in the way that several Troughton episodes had done (though it scored several 9’s across the run), but equally, it doesn’t get as many lower scores, either, with only The Curse of Peladon rating below a 5/10 average.

Pertwee’s era is particularly notable for it’s run of high-quality opening episodes - fourteen (out of a possible twenty four) of them score an 8/10, and there’s a run from The Three Doctors to Death to the Daleks which consistently scores an 8/10 for the first episode - the longest run of this type across the entire marathon. That winning streak is only broken by The Monster of Peladon scoring a 7/10 for Part One, before we’re greeted by another three with such strong starts, which moves us past the regeneration and into the era of…

The Fourth Doctor! Oh, everyone talks about Tom Baker as the ‘definitive’ Doctor (or, at least, they did until David Tennant came along to steal the crown). As soon as I took my first steps into fandom, I was told that the Fourth Doctor was by far the best. That was just an established fact, and you weren’t to argue the point. Within that ‘fact’, the Hinchcliffe era of Seasons Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen, were by far the peak of not just this Doctor, but of Doctor Who as a whole. I love to be a bit country and simply say what I think, even if it doesn’t subscribe to the accepted opinion of an era, so I was all ready to point out that the Hinchcliffe run is merely alright…

But then it was actually pretty darn good! On average, the episodes produced by Philip Hinchcliffe rate 7.06/10, which for the ‘classic’ series places him behind only Derek Sherwin (who’s helped by only producing two stories, one of which features three 10/10 episodes), and in the gran scheme of things places him third, just 0.01 point behind the Russell T Davies run. Sadly, this means that Tom Baker is on a generally downward trajectory from the off, with the Graham Williams run of Seasons Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen (including Shada), averaging a significantly lower 6.33/10, and Season Eighteen, under the eye of John Nathan-Turner only coming in with 6.14/10.

The highest rated story of the Fourth Doctor’s mammoth run is The Face of Evil, which comes away with an average score of 8.25/10, while over all, the Fourth Doctor rates 6.60/10, dipping him just slightly behind the Third Doctor. It’s undeniable that Tom Baker is brilliant in the role, and he’s often a joy to watch (for many different reasons - his closing around in the likes of City of Death is just as engaging as his anger and fury in Planet of Evil), but the latter half of his run really does suffer with some below-par episodes, and the lack of money being given to the programme at that point becomes cripplingly obvious in places. Wheres the Hartnell era managed to take its meagre budget and make the most of it, by putting the cash on screen, some parts of this era… um… doesn’t. In the end, I think it’s fair to say that Baker simply remained in the part for too long, and it’s telling that there’s a real breath of fresh air when the new chap comes in.

The first season to feature The Fifth Doctor, Season Nineteen, really is a shot in the arm, jumping up to an average of 6.69/10, and featuring the Fifth Doctor’s highest rated story - Kinda, with an average of 8.50/10. On top of this, the season also features the 8/10 Earthshock, which would have been a high enough score to win outright in other eras.

And Earthshock isn’t the last Fifth Doctor tale to score so highly - The Five Doctors and Frontios both also tip the scales at 8/10 on average, with The Caves of Androzani not falling too far behind, with a 7.75/10 average. On the whole, there was a lot about the Fifth Doctor’s era that simply chimed with me, and the presence of so many great stories really did help.

In the end, though, Peter Davison’s Doctor comes away with an average of 6.65/10 - only just scraping above Tom Baker and Peter Davison’s score by the tiniest of margins. He’s hampered by a weak second season, in which only two stories manage to hold a higher average than 6.25/10, and despite Season Twenty-One having a slew of better tales, it’s simply too late to make any real difference. Peter Davison has often said of his time on the show that if the stories of his third year had been the stories of his second, then he’d have stayed longer, and it’s really not hard to see what he means.

Ah, The Sixth Doctor. Doctor Who’s problem child. If it was made clear to me early on that everyone loved Tom Baker and considered him to be the best Doctor, then it was made equally clear that Colin Baker held the exact opposite position in fandom’s heart. And yet, I’d always enjoyed the Sixth Doctor - I’d seen all of his stories at least once before taking part in this project, and I’d always enjoyed them well enough.

This time around, however… well, no, I’ll be fair. the majority of the Sixth Doctor’s run is rather good. Not outstanding (no episode scores higher than an 8/10), but fairly solid, and at least on par with large chunks of his predecessors. The problem for me came in the form of both Attack of the Cybermen and Timelash, two stories which are consigned to languish right down in the bottom five of the list. They each averaged just 2.5/10, and were the first time I really appreciated just how bad Doctor Who can be when all the elements fall into just the wrong place. 

Colin Baker himself though is electrifying from the word go, and every bit the Doctor as any of the others. It’s a crushing shame that we didn’t get to see more of him, because in the right production atmosphere, I think he’d easily be considered equal to Tom in the popularity stakes. With a bit more creative force working behind the scenes, this period could have really shone. As it is, Colin’s Doctor rates only a 5.77/10 average, making him the lowest rated in this marathon, sadly, and the only incarnation to sink below a 6/10 average. His highest rated story - The Mark of the Rani - is a crowning jewel in his lacklustre first season, and while things do pull back together again for The Trial of a Time Lord season, it’s not enough to save him from the bottom of the pile. A real shame, and very undeserved for a man who not only turned in a flawless performance during his time on the programme, but has continued to be one of the greatest ambassadors for the show in the thirty years since. 

It’s perhaps for the best, though, that they didn’t give Colin Baker just one more season to prove himself in, though, because The Seventh Doctor’s debut run in Season Twenty-Four rates as the weakest season on average across the entire project, coming in with a measly score of just 4.93/10. I was so sure that I’d be a champion for these our stories. They were so often blasted as being terrible, and I was in a position to be a real spokesperson for the quality in each of them… but oh dear.

It’s not that they’re terrible - there’s lots of great ideas and concepts in there - but something seems to have just gone wrong with this season. It’s as though every department has been handed a directive from above that Doctor Who is a children’s programme, and that it needs to be treated as such. It’s very strange, and a real shift in direction for the show - probably the biggest change since the switch between Seasons Seventeen and Eighteen. After all the behind-the-scenes troubles of the Sixth Doctor era, it’s almost as though the team behind the programme simply don’t know what to do with it any more, and you can’t really feel John Nathan-Turner’s hand in this as well as you can elsewhere.

But it’s not the be-all and end-all, because this new creative team really pull themselves together for Season Twenty-Five, which shifts up a massive amount to an average across the run of 6.93/10! It’s here that you can feel Andrew Cartmel starting to take hold of the programme, and reinvigorating the entire thing. It’s Doctor Who starting to find its voice again, and that transformation only continues on into Season Twenty Six, which sits a million miles away from the low points at the start of this era - becoming my highest rated season of the entire marathon with an average score of 7.57/10! There’s something really rather marvellous about the fact that a single era can manage to straddle both ends of the scale like this, and it makes it even more of a crushing blow when the programme comes to an end at this point, with the final story - Survival - taking to top-rated spot for this era, with an average of 8/33/10. 

As the programme’s longest-serving producer, John Nathan-Turner comes in for a lot of flack. It’s fair to say that he didn’t always manage to make the best decisions for the show, but he held it together through a decade which would have, I suspect, always seen the end of the run. Overall, his time in charge of the show averages 6.36/10, which places him in around the same ballpark as many of the other producers across the programme’s lifetime - and he certainly did a lot more good for the show than he did bad.

It’s all change as we reach The Eighth Doctor, and it becomes a little trickier to compare story-to-story across eras. You’ll have noticed that there’s no great big list of how things stack up against each other with this post - and that’s because there’s no really fair way of doing it. I chose to give each episode an individual score out of ten, so that the ‘average’ score is a truer representation of the way I felt while watching. That way, the fantastic first episode of The Space Museum, for example, isn’t tarnished by the awful three episodes that follow it, but rather balanced fairly against them. That’s fine for the ‘classic’ series where all but two stories contain multiple episodes to balance, but when you reach the TV Movie and forward into the 21st century run, there’s so many ‘one-off’ stories that it becomes trickier to offset them against their predecessors.

Paul McGann’s Doctor is the perfect example of this - his Doctor average is 9/10, which places him way out ahead of all the other incarnations, but only because that’s being based on this one single episode! It skews the data a little bit, but we can at least still see how the Doctors stack up roughly from here-on out (and, in fairness, it’s really comparing the episodes that causes trouble - trying to compare the Doctors is only hampered by the one-off nature of McGann, and arguably John Hurt…

The Ninth Doctor heralds the start of the modern era of 8Doctor Who* - the first set of episodes that I’d watched on original transmission and had followed right the way through to the present day. I was looking just as forward to this version of the programme as I had been any part of the ‘classic’ run, because though I’d seen all these episodes before, many I’d not watched since their original transmission, so it was still like coming to them new in many ways.

Whereas Colin Baker’s short run had shown how so few episodes could lead to a lower score because there simply wasn’t long enough for the right episodes to come along, Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor shows that the opposite can also be true. His thirteen episodes average 7.31/10, and he’s the only Doctor to have two stories occupying the spot of ‘highest-rated’, with both Dalek and Boom Town sitting happily in a ‘9/10’ slot. The rest of his run holds fairly decent scores, with only The Long Game really letting the side down with a 5/10.

But in the blink of an eye, our fantastic northern Doctor was gone and replaced with The Tenth Doctor, who manages to become an icon for the programme to a whole new generation. David Tennant’s run isn’t a million miles away in trajectory from Sylvester McCoy’s - although he doesn’t start from such a low position, the seasons do tend to get better as they go along - with Series Two averaging 6.79/10, Series Three climbing up to 7.07/10, and Series Four soaring to 7.43/10 - far and away the highest scoring series of the 21st century. The Tenth Doctor’s final fun of specials drops way down to a 6.20/10 average (if added onto Series Four, as they were listed as such in production terms, the average for that season drops back to 7.11/10, putting the run second to Eccleston’s series), leaving the Tenth Doctor to bow out in a somewhat muted way.

The highest rated story of the David Tennant years is The Unicorn and the Wasp, coming in with one of only two 10/10 scores this side of Kinda. The Tenth Doctor on the whole rates a solid 7/10, and Russell T Davies as the architect of the modern era comes in with a respectable average of 7.07/10.

Things take a bit of a dip again for me as we reach The Eleventh Doctor era. On first transmission, I found that I simply didn’t enjoy this period of the programme. I’d tune in each week and find occasional gems, but overall I simply wasn’t fond. This time around, I think things have fared a little better - and getting to watch the era back-to-back over a couple of months like this has really made some of the links between stories stand out all the stronger. None of the Eleventh Doctor seasons manage to break past 7/10 on average (the highest is Series Seven with a score of 6.87/10), and the Eleventh Doctor rates slightly lower than his immediate predecessors, with an average of 6.80/10.

The Snowmen comes in as Matt Smith’s strongest story, with a perfect 10/10 score, while at the other end of the spectrum, both the previous Christmas special, The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe, and Series Six’s Night Terrors sit at the very bottom of my list, with a score of just 2/10 each.

And finally onto The Twelfth Doctor’s run. When this set of episodes first went out last year, I loved them. Was completely blown away by them. It felt like a real shot in the arm after a few years of not enjoying the programme as much as I’d like. On this second run through, I’ve found my opinions cooling a lot towards them, to the point that the entire 2014 run (up to and including Last Christmas) has only averaged 6.77/10, which places it in more-or-less the same ball park as any of the Eleventh Doctor’s seasons, although lower than both Series Five and Seven. I’ve explained some of my reasoning behind that in yesterday’s entry, but I’m hoping that as the era is still young, I can find a little more to love as I go along. 

Equally, it may simply be that these episodes have suffered by being the last ones. After two-and-a-half years of doing an episode every day, being this close to the end of the line has probably contributed towards the feeling of Series Eight being a bit of a slow to watch again - hopefully that feeling will abate when I see any of these stories again in due corse. Besides, it’s not all bad news, with the era’s highest-rater, Robots of Sherwood, scoring a healthy 9/10.

***

And so… that’s that, I suppose! Over the last two-and-a-bit years, I’ve often wondered how I’d feel about Doctor Who once I was done. Having sat through it all, would I find myself horrified by the thought of ever watching another one? Tipping my entire DVD collection into a big skip? Sick at the sign of a Dalek?

Well, I’m pleased to say that, no, none of those things have occurred. If anything, watching the programme in this way has given me a renewed respect for Doctor Who, and I can appreciate even more just how brilliant this programme is, for having watched it unfold in order. If anything, I have to admit, I’m keen to do it all over again, right from the very beginning. I’m probably going to give it a little while before doing so (I’m actually on holiday back home at the moment, and it’s going to be nice to enjoy the next week away without having to tune in to the TARDIS for a change!), but I reckon before this year is out, I’ll be back on the pilgrimage!

So finally, I just want to issue a few thanks. Thank you, of course, to Sebastian J. Brook, editor of Doctor Who Online, for handing over his website to me for two years to fill with all my ramblings and nonsense. Thank you to Nick Mellish for listening to me whine on about all these episodes as they come and go, and acting as a sounding board when I can’t figure out what on Earth to write about. And thank you to you lot, for following along with me on this journey, and keeping my interest there in the project. It really does make a difference when you know people are taking part!

Will

If by any miracle you’re still interested in me wittering on, you can find me over on Twitter, where I tend to post just as much nonsense as I have in this Diary, as well as snippets of artwork and projects that I’m working on. And if you’re eager for more of the Diary, you can find it all collected together in book form - both in physical format and on Kindle (UK/US). There’s occasional extra entries in the books, and on several posts I’ve gone back and re-written the bits that simply don’t make sense.

Doctor Who Online is pleased to announce the publication of Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: Volume Two 1970-1981.

In celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, Will Brooks sits down to watch every episode of the programme made between 1963 - 2013 at the strict pace of one per day.

Having watched each episode, Will records his thoughts in a daily blog for Doctor Who Online, and scores the episode out of ten, on a scale ranging from ‘Perfect, the absolute pinnacle’ to ‘Why am I doing this again?’

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: 1970 - 1981 collects together more than 300 entries of the popular blog, covering the complete eras of the Third and Fourth Doctors (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker), as well as a revisit to the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) stories The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear, episodes of which were returned to the BBC's archive in 2013, having been missing for many decades.

Speaking about the publication of the book, Will told DWO:

“The 1970s was the part of The 50 Year Diary that I was dreading the most. I'd always thought of Jon Pertwee as being my least favourite of all the Doctors, and while I knew Tom Baker was very good, I'd never quite understood the sheer love for that era of the programme.

Having now had the chance to watch through, I've realised that there's a lot to Pertwee's Doctor that I can enjoy, and the reason that the Baker era is considered to be such a Golden Age is because, in many ways, it is! I've found things to enjoy at almost every turn, although not everything was to my tastes...”

The book is released on September 25th 2014.

+  You can pre-order the paperback version of Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary 1970 - 1981 now from Pageturner Publishing for £14.99.

+  The book is also available for Kindle, and can be pre-ordered from Amazon UK and US. 

[Source: Doctor Who Online, Pageturner Publishing]

 a

“Hello! Happy New Year. 2013 - surely this is the year to be a Doctor Who fan? Anyway, resolutions made (same as ever, I promise to visit the gym more. I'll go later. Or maybe tomorrow.), and it's time to settle down to watch the first episode of my marathon.”

Well would you look at that? December 31st, 2013. Have we all been the subject of a bit of TARDIS travel, or has this year disappeared especially quickly? 

And what a year it’s been! For a start, it was Doctor Who’s big old 50th Anniversary. At one point, that was the Holy Grail. The end-point for my marathon. 50 years of the world’s best science fiction programme watched at the pace of one episode a day, in order, from the very beginning. But then Matt Smith announced his departure from the series, and it meant I’d be stopping one episode short of the end of an era. More than that - I’d be stopping one episode short of the final adventure in the Doctor’s original regeneration cycle! 

So, it’s worth telling you (because I’m not sure that I have before), The 50 Year Diary will be running up to The Time of the Doctor. But oh! That’s a long way off from now! There’s a whole 2014 to get through before I reach Trenzalore, and there’s so much left for me to experience. 

I’m not gonna lie - I didn’t honestly think that I’d reach this point. I’m fickle, you see. Proper fickle. Yeah, sure, it sounded like a great idea to watch through all these stories in order and write about them for Doctor Who Online, but I’d be bored before the William Hartnell years had finished. For a start, he was on pretty much year round. And a chunk of them don’t even exist any more! Truth be told, I really did think that I’d bottle out of the experiment sometime around Marco Polo. On the good days, I thought I might make it as far as The Aztecs.

But look at us now! Right in the middle of Planet of the Daleks, and having sat through every episode that preceded them - sometimes twice (How wonderful that The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear should crop up, but just too late for me to watch them the first time around...)! And you know what? I’d not have missed this journey for the world. 

I’ve always known that I love Doctor Who, but I didn’t realise just how much I loved it. Even in the dark days of The Dominators, I can’t help but enjoy this programme, and I’ve grown to really love writing my thoughts about each episode here in the Diary. It’s all because of you lot! Those of you reading now. Everyone has been incredibly kind about my blog taking over the DWO news page (apart from the one person who reacted badly to my dislike towards The Evil of the Daleks, who sent in a message to suggest they hire someone who actually knew what they were talking about), and I can’t believe the goodwill and support that you’ve all offered. 

Thank you very much. I can’t wait to share 2014, and the adventures of the next few Doctors with you. 

In celebration of the New Year, we’re offering 15% off the price of The 50 Year Diary - Volume One from Pageturner Publishing. Just enter the promo code DWO2014 in your cart to activate the discount, it’s valid until the end of January. The Kindle version of the book is also still available, directly from Amazon (UK / USA).

- - - -

You may have noticed that the Diary has been a little quiet over Christmas week. I’ve been taking a break from posting while I’ve been away visiting friends and family (also stuffing myself with turkey and tuning into the obligatory Christmas Special!), but I’ve stayed true to my mission - I’ve still been watching an episode every day to keep up. 

These entries have now all been added to Doctor Who Online under their relevant days, and you can catch up with them using the links below. 

Happy New Year!

Carnival of Monsters

One | Two | Three | Four

Frontier in Space

One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six

Planet of the Daleks

One | Two

Doctor Who Online is pleased to announce the publication of Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary1963 - 1969.

Doctor Who Online is pleased to announce the publication of Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: Volume 1 1963-1969.

In celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, Will Brooks sits down to watch every episode of the programme made between 1963 - 2013 at the strict pace of one per day.

Having watched each episode, Will records his thoughts in a daily blog for Doctor Who Online, and scores the episode out of ten, on a scale ranging from ‘Perfect, the absolute pinnacle’ to ‘Why am I doing this again?’

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary: 1963 - 1969 collects together more than 260 entries of the popular blog, covering the complete eras of the First and Second Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), and also includes exclusive entries for the two 1960s Dalek feature films starring Peter Cushing, and a foreword by Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts.

Speaking about the publication of the book, Will told DWO:

“I’m still a bit surprised that I’ve actually made it far enough to collect entries together! I’m usually really fickle with things, and I’m bored very quickly. Even when I first started out on the marathon - slipping the DVD of An Unearthly Child into the player - I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d probably give up by the end of that first season.

What’s kept me going is just how brilliant Doctor Who is! Not everything is perfect, and there’s one or two stories from the 1960s that I’m not likely to ever watch again, but it’s an era of the programme that’s constantly evolving, and it’s been a fantastic journey to experience it all in context.

Putting together the book has given me a chance to go back and update a few entries - just small changes here and there where I felt things could read a little better! - and it’s also been a chance to look back over the first six years of the programme as I prepare to move onwards into colour and get started on the 1970s...”

In his foreword for the book, Gareth Roberts describes The 50 Year Diary:

“[Will’s] observations are fresh and often startling - his is a unique perspective on Doctor Who. I thought I knew all this stuff back-to-front but Will's jumping-bean prose snaps me out of my jadedness and I see it with new eyes.”

+  You can pre-order the paperback version of Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary 1963 - 1969 now from Pageturner Publishing for £14.99.

+  The Kindle edition of the book is out now, and can be purchased from Amazon UK and US. 

[Source: Doctor Who Online, Pageturner Publishing]

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 141 Extra: The First Doctor Overview

Dear diary,

Well this feels strange. Posting two diary entries in one day. Am I not all written-out, yet? Those of you who've already read today's regular blog entry (which should be immediately below this post on the DWO news page) will have already seen me reach the end of the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who. I figured that it was fitting, at the end of this first stage, to take a look over the first 141 days of the marathon as a whole, and collate some of my thoughts, before I dust myself down tomorrow, and venture into the Troughton era.

In the sidebar to the right of this entry, you should see an image, with a little 'enlarge' button underneath it. If you click on there, you'll be able to properly ready a list of average scores for the First Doctor stories, listed from the lowest ranking (The Space Museum, in case you hadn't picked up on my natural lack of affinity for it) through to the highest (The War Machines, a fact which surprised even me, frankly).

Do note that on the list, I've omitted Farewell, Great Macedon and The Destroyers, because it wasn't ever actually broadcast, and I've lumped both The Destroyers and (controversially) Mission to the Unknown together as being part of a Dalek spin-off, so I've not counted either of those, either.

During the blog posts for the first season, I used to work out the story average and post it during the final episode of each tale. I stopped doing that from Planet of Giants, mostly because I didn't want to know. I liked the idea of reaching this stage, and seeing how the era rates as a whole. What surprises me is how much some stories I thought I'd really hated have actually averaged out with fairly respectable scores.

I think what's surprised me most is the way that the averages per season have worked out. At the time, it felt like Season Two was a real slog, and that I just didn't enjoy it. As it happens, though, it's come out with an average score of 6.4. That still places it in the last place of the first three seasons (I'm discounting Season Four, since we're only a few episodes in), but it's only barely behind Season One (6.5) and not all that far behind Season Three (6.8). When you throw The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet into the mix, the First Doctor's era averages out at a very respectable 6.5 - placing it smack-bang between 'Above Average' and 'Well Above Average' on the ratings chart I posted way back on Day Four.

Right from the start, the main thing that I wanted out of this marathon was a real connection to the classic series. Over the last ten years, I've found that while I really enjoy the early Doctors, I've never been able to develop any kind of meaningful relationship with either them or the companions of the era. The way I explained it to a friend recently is that when Catherine Tate returned to the series in Partners in Crime, and then remained with it for another twelve consecutive episodes, shown one a week, I built up a proper connection the the character.

When Donna leaves at the end of Journey's End, it's emotional because I'd grown to love the character over the course of that season. I really cared for her, and once she was gone, that was it. I'd seen all of her episodes. The classic series, though, possibly sue to the way that the DVD have been released over the years, has always felt a bit more… interchangeable for me. I know that Sarah Jane Smith joins in The Time Warrior and leaves in The Hand of Fear, and I can pick up any one of her adventures from between those two. But equally, I can watch Death to the Daleks, and then head off to watch Time and the Rani or something.

I wanted to see if watching the series at a set pace - a single episode each day - would help me to form the kind of connection to the old characters that I do with the current ones. Thankfully, the answer is that yes, it does.

It's not always in ways that I've expected, either. From dipping in and out of stories, I'd always regarded Ian and Barbara really highly. I thought the pair were fantastic, and rated them quite highly in my list of favourite companions. When it came to actually spending the time with them from their first episode to their last… I was sick of them! By the time The Chase rolled around, they couldn't leave quickly enough. Conversely, Steven Taylor - a companion I'd never really given much thought to - left before I wanted him to! I'd happily have had a few more episodes with him.

Perhaps the biggest success, though, has been William Hartnell as the Doctor. I'd seen enough of his era in the past to know that I liked the First Doctor, and that I enjoyed his era of stories. He was just one of the 'old' Doctors, though. I could dip in and out and mix his stories with any number of others. There wasn't time to form any kind of attachment. Having now spent 141 days with him, though, I don't really want him to go.

There's been a bit of a back-and-forth going on in my head this last week or so, as I alternate between excitement for Troughton's arrival (I've always thought of him as my favourite classic Doctor), and sadness for the departure of Hartnell. I think now, having reached the moment of the changeover, I'm back in the excited camp. The thing is, I never expected to find myself this attached to the First Doctor, and I'm thrilled, because I feel like I've gotten more from his era by experiencing it in this way.

On the whole, Doctor Who's first three seasons seem to be the most inventive, and wide-reaching ever produced. The budgets are tight, the studios are cramped, every episode tries to do something that they're just not quite capable of… but they pull it off. It's been a pleasure to watch through, and I've never thought higher of this era.

Now, though, it's time to pull out a recorder, don a large hat, and move forward into the Troughton era. I'm excited, for this stage of the blog, to see if he comes out as my favourite still, when I'm watching him in order like this. I don't doubt that it's going to be tricky - with this many missing episodes to wade through - but if it gives me anything like the appreciation for the era that the last 141 days have for Hartnell… I'm in for a real treat.

Now, though, it's time to pull out a recorder, don a large hat, and move forward into the Troughton era. I'm excited, for this stage of the blog, to see if he comes out as my favourite still, when I'm watching him in order like this. I don't doubt that it's going to be tricky - with this many missing episodes to wade through - but if it gives me anything like the appreciation for the era that the last 141 days have for Hartnell… I'm in for a real treat. 

 Day Thirty-Nine: A Change of Identity (The Reign of Terror, Episode Three)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Nine: A Change of Identity (The Reign of Terror, Episode Three)

Dear diary,

There's something of a conception of the First Doctor as being a bit of a fuddy-duddy. He's often thought of as a bit of a bumbling, kindly grandfather figure, who's not quite the Doctor, but fills the same role. It's not helped by the regular occurrence of 'Billy Fluffs', either.

Here, though, the First Doctor is absolutely fantastic. The way he handles himself in the clothes shop, and the way he them presents himself to the jailer, it's an image of a man who's in full control. It's easy enough, when looking at these scenes, to imagine the 'old man' stuff is little more than an act - a way to disguise a devilishly intelligent man, who knows how to manipulate the situation to get what he wants.

Of course, it all seems to have backfired come the final scene, in which the ring that the Doctor has bartered away comes back to haunt him.

It's also nice to see the series starting to make use of its new ability to shoot in TV Centre itself. Though a few episodes I've already been through were made there, this is the first time, really, that the full implications of this can be seen on the screen. An early scene of a busy French street, into which the Doctor enters is fantastic - it's grander than I'm used to seeing on the show, and really does help to make this story feel bigger than usual.

The shots of William Russell's scenes, still shot on film (he was, presumably, still in Spain!) continue to look like something from a production other than Doctor Who. In this episode, he makes an escape from his prison cell, and the more I watch it, the more I lament that fact that more of the show doesn't look like this. The film really does give these scenes a rich texture that's sadly lacking in other places. Mind you, they still remind me of early Eastern European cinema!

I'd not considered it when writing yesterday's entry, but a lot of that feel may come from the director himself. I'd forgotten that Henric Hirsch had directed the story, and was from Hungary. There could well be intention behind the style, rather than it simply being a side-effect of shooting these scenes early on. It's almost a shame that we'll be loosing this style.

Oh, and all right. I didn't want to mention it too much yesterday, but let's be honest; Susan is rubbish in this story, isn't she? I'm wondering, now, if this may be where my entire dislike for Susan had come from. All the way through this marathon, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I've taken to her - but here…!

All she's done so far is whine and moan… here, she nearly ruins their only chance of escape by complaining instead about her headache and her bad back and how tired she is… I'm hoping this is all leading somewhere, or there's no reason to be kicking up such a fuss! If she'd not been on holiday back during The Aztecs, I'd think they were getting ready to pack her off on one now!

Tomorrow is going to be interesting; I'll finally reach one of the new animated episodes! I've been excited to see them for quite some time, so I'm sure it's going to be a sleepless night, tonight. It's like Christmas Eve - I'm waiting for Santa to come!

Next Episode: The Tyrant of France

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Eight: Guests of Madame Guillotine (The Reign of Terror, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

All the regulars have managed a bit of a break for a trip to Spain, now, then! I'm surprised that I've never noticed it before, but the last four stories have each seen time taken off by one of our regulars. I think watching in order like this makes things more apparent, as does the shift between videotape and film. There was a time that I'd never really noticed the shift, but now I spend more time watching archive telly than modern stuff (I don't even own a television!), I've become more accustomed to it.

The absence of William Russell from the story is done in a slightly odd way; it's a mixture of the 'cutting right out of the story' that we had in The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites with a bit of the 'only there for pre-filmed inserts' seen in The Aztecs. I say this because Ian still appears in his cell, and during a brief shot early on, but there's some bizarre attempts to hide him in other scenes.

One particularly noticeable one starts with Ian having just been chucked in the cell, and not responding to Susan's calls. I'm a bit surprised they didn't at least play in a recording of William Russell reassuring her or something!

I think it's also quite noticeable simply because of how different the Ian bits of the story look. The fact that they're shot on film, combined with what seems to be an unusually high exposure rate make them look like Russian cinema of the 1920s (my specialist subject at degree level. That came in useful…). It's never more noticeable than when we cut to a reaction of Ian while they're trying to appeal - you almost expect it to cut away to a caption!

All of this sounds like I'm complaining, which I'm not, really. This has been another episode I've enjoyed, although I'm not overly sure that a lot has happened. In many ways, this feels like the second half of an Episode One - everyone is being moved into the right position, and the strands of the story are being introduced. On the one hand, we have Ian being given a mission to seek out James Stirling. Susan and Barbara are being carted off to meet the Guillotine (setting up, I'm sure, a daring escape for tomorrow's episode!), and the Doctor is making his way to Paris.

With the Doctor's part in the story, we're given the series' very first location footage - and it's really quite good! The shots linger on a bit, perhaps; there's one show of the Doctor crossing a cornfield that seems to hold on just to say 'look! It's not a painted backdrop! He can keep walking!', but they're all really effective. The locations chosen are great, and it's pretty easy to picture them as being in France. It helps that the weather seems to have stayed nice for the day!

A lot gets made of the scene in An Unearthly Child, where the Doctor considers using a rock to smash a caveman's skull. It's often cited as an example of the Doctor's callousness at the very start of the series. I even talked about it for this very blog about a month ago (and concluded that, actually, it's not as bad as people make it out to be).

Why, then, does no one mention this episode? The Doctor - in an attempt to escape from a captor and get back on with his mission - tricks him into bending down… then whacks him with a shovel! You could argue that he just knocks him flat on the back, but that doesn't seem to be the implication from the way its been directed. Crikey! This is by far the most violent we've seen the Doctor so far. I'm baffled that it doesn't get brought up more often!

Oh, and I don't want to dwell on it, but blimey, Susan must be driving Barbara mental.

Next Episode: A Change of Identity

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Seven: A Land of Fear (The Reign of Terror, Episode One)

Dear diary,

I love it when this marathon throws up odd little coincidences. The first recon I watched - for Marco Polo - came on the same day that I saw The Hobbit in its 48fps version. Coming home from that to a tele snap recon that was less than 48 frames per minute? Bit of a culture shock.

Today, I've embarked on The Reign of Terror having spent my afternoon in a cinema watching Les Miserables . It's a full on French Revolution Day for me! Thankfully, having spent two-and-a-half hours trying to stay awake in the cinema (the misses loved it, though, so that's something…), I've really rather enjoyed this.

I should say, before I discuss the episode itself, that I've been purposely avoiding the Reign of Terror DVD for quite some time, now. I started thinking about this marathon several months ago, before we had any preview clips, and so I've avoided them ever since. It's been a tricky ten days or so since the DVD turned up, because I can hear the newly animated episodes calling to me… Still, it's only another few days, and I'm sure I'll appreciate them more by watching them in context like this.

I didn't mention it yesterday, but the cliffhanger comes rather out of nowhere, doesn't it? I've just spent a while praising how far the Doctor has come as a character over the course of this first series, and how much he's bonded with Ian and Barbara, and then one slightly mis-stepped sentence, and the Doctor's throwing them off the ship!

It still feels a bit odd here, when he sets them down and tells them to be off. I'm not sure if it's all going to come round by the end of the story, with him announcing that he doesn't really want them to go (Ian muses early on that he's not really that disappointed that they're off on another adventure together), but for now it feels more than a little jarring. It seems like the Doctor has gone right back to his old self again. Still, i I like the idea that the faults we've witnessed with the TARDIS are quite recent, as is the Police Box look, and that the Doctor isn't used to not having control over his ship yet.

And then we're off! The first time I saw Reign of Terror (many years ago, on a poor quality VHS) I knew that it was the first time the series had done any location work - and I thought it was these opening scenes in the woodland! Looking at it now, on a freshly spruced-up DVD, and having spent just over a month looking at the show's sets, it's quite clear that this bit is only a studio, but it's still looking pretty good.

I was also a bit surprised to work out that this is the first child we've seen in the series since the kids at Coal Hill right back in the first episode. Coming at it from the Matt Smith era, where lots of stories revolve around children, it seems quite bizarre! I'm guessing from his panicked look towards the end of the episode that he'll be back to help the Doctor out during Episode Two.

The cliffhanger here is pretty good, and certainly better than the last episode's. Ian, Barbara, and Susan getting carted off to Paris while the Doctor remains stuck in a burning farmhouse is very typical of Season One - splitting the team up ready to get the adventure going - but it works well enough. I'm also quite keen on the model of the burning farmhouse; The effect of the roof caving in is particularly well done.

All in all, it's a good start to the story, as I've come to expect from historical stories. I'm looking forward to following it on…

Next Episode: Guests of Madame Guillotine

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Six: A Desperate Venture (The Sensorites, Episode Six)

Dear diary;

It's nice to have Barbara back, but this is the first time that one of the regular cast's absences hasn't really worked. In The Keys of Marinus, it didn't feel strange that the Doctor was missing, because the rest of the characters were busy moving from place-to-place anyway. In The Aztecs, Susan gets a few brief scenes in every episode anyway, even if she is separated from the rest of the group.

Here, we see Babs returned as a part of the plot - she's reading the letter Carol was forced to write - and it just feels wrong. The rest of the cast have been down on the Sense Sphere for two-and-a-half episodes, so Barbara feels out of place here. It's even more jarring to have her taking part in the story, which has shifted considerably since we last saw her.

As for the rest of the story; it's been rather good. The story changes route again, as much of the action is set down in the aqueduct, moving us away from the Sensorite city, where things have started getting desperate. When the (former) City Administrator starts making people write letters to explain their absences, it all starts to get a bit too much.

It's a shame, having seen him plotting and scheming for so long, that the entire subplot about his character is swatted away so simply at the end with a very basic 'The map proves his treachery. We'll sort him out'. I was hoping for a grander denouement.

It's something which has become something of a theme with these longer stories - both The Daleks and Marco Polo stretched on for a long time, but the final episode had me wanting more. It always feels as though five episodes are sent setting things up, and then 25 minutes at the end isn't enough to pay it all off. A shame.

Meanwhile, with the Doctor and Ian, I really enjoyed the stuff about the survivors of the previous visit to the Sphere. I'd (sort of) pieced together what was happening in the Aqueduct, so it's nice to see that coming to fruition. What did surprise me, considering my complaints earlier in the story about how obvious the script was (the whole water instance, for example…) is how well it all ties together.

We're told early on that the previous spaceship had blown up when it tried to take off and that they suspected the other humans had stowed away on board. Here, we find that they'd been hiding down in the Aqueduct, and the destruction of the ship was their doing.

The warfare angle is an interesting one, and again, it all ties in to the way we've seen the Sensorite's mind-reading powers affecting John early on in the story. The captain of the little group is particularly fun, and it's a bit of a shame that we only get him for the one episode.

On the whole… The Sensorites is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.

There are times - Episode Four, to be precise! - where I thought the reputation this story has gathered over the years was going to turn out to be entirely accurate, but then it manages to swing itself round quite well during the second half.

There's enough variation in the story to keep things interesting. The first two episodes are heavily focussed on the spaceship, before shifting to the city for episodes three, four, and five, and then to the Aqueduct for the final part. The dialogue is possibly the story's biggest failing, but even that improves as time goes on.

One thing, though… What was the 'monster'? Was it just the rebel group of humans trying to keep the Sensorites out of the Aqueduct? Why did they batter up the Doctor's coat if they'd been waiting for a 'human' as a sign that the war was over? That was a bit of a letdown…

Next Episode: A Land of Fear

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Five: Kidnap (The Sensorites, Episode Five)

Dear diary,

It's strange, really. We're back to a situation where not much happens in this episode, and yet it's held my attention throughout. It looks like the third episode really was just a blip - The Sensorites isn't half bad.

There's quite a lot to love in this episode, too. I enjoyed the continuing schemes of the City Administrator, and the way he turns the death of the Second Elder to his advantage, trying to frame the Doctor was rather good work. As soon as the jacket defence came up, I thought it would be a case of drawing it out a bit to fill some time, so I was glad to see it dealt with immediately.

The whole situation with the jacket is something to praise, actually. In so many episodes (and this isn't something that Doctor Who is uniquely guilty of), our heroes go through all manner of things, and then return to the TARDIS looking as pristine as the moment they stepped out of it. It's quite odd to see the Doctor's jacket torn to shreds, but it's effective.

The only other story to use this to such a good effect is right back in An Unearthly Child - the regulars are all much worse for wear by the end.

It's nice, too, to see them making plans for the return of Jackie Hill in the next episode - I'd worried that she'd either just appear from nowhere, or that she wouldn't turn up until somewhere near the end, when the rest of the cast make it back up to the space ship. I wonder what she's been doing up there all this time?

Something I've been meaning to talk about for a few days (but keep forgetting!) is the TARDIS' role in the stories to this point. In every story (with the obvious exemption of The Edge of Destruction), the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan all have to be forcefully separated from the ship in some way - the story is usually about them trying to get back to the TARDIS.

In An Unearthly Child, they're banged up in the Cave of Skulls. In The Daleks, they can't leave until they get the fluid link back from the Dalek City. Marco Polo has the TARDIS physically taken away from them, and the same is true of The Keys of Marinus, when Arbitan puts it inside a force field until they do his bidding. The Aztecs sees the ship shut away inside the locked tomb, and here the Sensorites steal the lock.

I've mentioned (lots!) how the Doctor has changed over the last month or so, but it's interesting to note how the others have, too. Ian and Barbara are a part of the adventure, now, not just looking to get home (though they do still have that ambition). Susan gives the impression that she's always quite enjoyed the adventures.

The point is; following the Doctor's announcement yesterday that he wasn't content just curing a problem if he could stop it at the source, the idea of having to take the TARDIS away from him is growing less important. We're at a stage, now, where the crew will get involved in the adventures because they want to, not because they're forced to. That's going to be interesting to keep an eye on as we move forward…

Next Episode: A Desperate Venture

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Four: Race Against Death (The Sensorites, Episode Four)

Dear diary,

It's not something you often see said, but actually, I quite like the design of the Sensorites. No, genuinely! I've been meaning to mention it for a few days now. There's one or two obvious flaws (those feet are very impractical. You'd better hope they never have to run anywhere…), but on the whole it's a good design.

It's quite well realised, too. There's one or two instances where the joins are perfectly visible, but as I've said before, I'm watching a VidFIREd version of this story on a 21.5" iMac screen. This isn't the natural format for this show. On the whole, I really like them.

Shortly before watching this story, I stumbled across a redesign of the creatures on the blog 'Mels Art Stuff'. I really liked it, and I've had it in mind while watching… but it's not a million miles away from what we've got here! It's this exact design with a bit more freedom of budget.

Now then, if that opening has sounded pretty positive, it's because I've enjoyed today's episode! I know! I resolved to go into it with a positive outlook, as assuming it would be like yesterday's installment was going to get me nowhere. It's a good thing, though, because this one's been rather good.

The Doctor very quickly deduces that it's the water infecting the planet, which is good. I'd worried that even after it was so spelt out in the last episode, they'd leave it running as a mystery for a while. The main complaint that I hear about The Sensorites is that it's dull, and I feared that would be because the solution was clear to us long before the characters arrived at it.

And once that deduction is out of the way, the story rattles on at quite a pace! There's even chance for a montage, with the Doctor working on an antidote, Susan caring for Ian, and the Sensorites testing water for the poisons. Part of the fun of watching the montage is seeing everyone get into position ready for the shot to return to them, as cutting was out of the question due to time and budget. Plus, Hartnell pulls some wonderful faces while trying to look as though he's concentrating.

Alongside this, we've got the thoroughly evil City Administrator trying to get rid of 'The Humans' as best he can. There's some interesting parallels to The Aztecs, here, but with the morality angle almost completely removed. There, Tlotoxl was desperate to show up the TARDIS crew as false (when they actually were being), while here, the City Administrator is trying to prove that Ian's 'illness' is false (though it's not).

And then there's the Doctor. His transformation into the character we know and love is pretty much complete, now. He's found the solution for curing Ian, and it can be scaled and applied to the rest of the planet, but that's not enough for him. To quote the Doctor himself; 'Why cure something when we can stamp it out?'. It's great to see him at this stage, finally.

Oh, and then there's even room for a cliffhanger involving a monster! Brilliant!

Next Episode: Kidnap

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Three: Hidden Danger (The Sensorites, Episode Three)

Dear diary,

Oh, all right, then. This one was a bit of a slog. I'm starting to worry that my desperate attempt to find good in a story usually considered to be terribly dull may be a tougher task than I'd anticipated.

I'm not even completely sure what the problem is. Plenty happens in the episode; they have another encounter with the Sensorites, they leave Barbara on the ship so that Jackie Hill can take a couple of weeks in Spain, we meet another group of Sensorites, and Ian falls victim to the disease that's been wiping them out, as we discover by the filling on of a lot of back story.

Actually, that's it. That's the problem. The 'filling in'. It's not the greatest writing of all, is it? There's a very real attempt to make the Sensorites seem like a three-dimensional race, but it's not done very subtly. Perhaps the worst offender is the scene where two of them set up a disintegrator machine to use against our heroes.

The dialogue between the two is along the lines of 'Is their hurt on the left, or the right? Or is it in the centre, like ours [because we're aliens! See? Aliens! Our hearts are in a strange position! Because we're aliens!]'. As if that wasn't clunky enough, they then decide to set it to the centre anyway. If they have no reason to assume that their hearts wouldn't be in the centre, then why bring it up? Poorly done.

And the disease is none-too-subtle, either. It's actually quite a nice set up, and a good way of shifting the focus of the story slightly for the remaining episodes; the first two were about encountering the Seonsorites, the other four are about curing their ills. Except…

When the Doctor, Ian and Susan are given glasses of water, a big point is made that they've been served the 'basic' water, which is filtered down through an aqueduct from the hills. The Elders don't drink this water, but Ian takes a sip. A few minutes later, a point is made that the disease affects all of the Sensorites. Except the Elders. Who don't drink that water. And then Ian suddenly starts to show symptoms of the illness. Shortly after drinking the water.

I know that Doctor Who is aimed at a family audience with a large number of children watching, but after we've sat through four episodes of The Aztecs, which is rich in history and very deep, this just feels… well. patronising.

The dialogue, aside from being so clunky, continues to be functional as in the last episode. There's even one exchange which goes along the lines of 'But how?' / 'I will explain…'. I think this is the main thing making The Sensorites a bit of a chore now.

Still, we're at the half-way point. Maybe things get better from here as Peter R Newman gets used to writing for the series? Once the world of the Sensorites is set up, he may be able to tell a decent story to keep me hooked…

Next Episode: A Race Against Death

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-Two: The Unwilling Warriors (The Sensorites, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

It's January 2008. I've recently moved out of home for the first time, and I'm living with a fellow Doctor Who fan called Alex. I don't know if Alex reads the 50 Year Diary, but I hope he does. Hi Alex.

Anyway, around the same time, I'd gained a new girlfriend, who when she was back from university on one occasion told me she wanted to watch Doctor Who. Hooray! Good times! What was even better is that she wanted to watch it from the start. Apparently, I was raving about the classic stuff so much, she wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

So the deal was made, we'd watch one story a week, during her couple of days back from uni. We started, of course, with An Unearthly Child, followed by The Daleks (Though I seem to recall skipping most of this one because it was boring!) and then The Edge of Destruction. We skipped Marco Polo, as a description of a recon had met with a stoney stare. For some reason, we ended up skipping The Keys of Marinus and The Aztecs, too. If I had to guess, I'd say that by this stage, she'd given up on wanting to watch them all, and decided to just go for ones she liked the sound of, instead.

So, The Sensorites was the next on the list. I was excited, I'd never seen it before! What's more, living with Alex meant that I suddenly had access to all the Doctor Who stories that I'd never owned on VHS or DVD. The whole library! In the same house as me! I remember setting up The Sensorites in the VHS player (having to take the plastic wrapper off first. Evidently, Alex hadn't ever watched it, either…), watching Episode One, thinking it was quite good, starting Episode Two…

And the tape cut out. The tracking went all weird, then the screen went to static. Fast forwarding back and forth brought some brief images of men in a sewer (I'm guessing that's still to come) and not a whole lot else. We more-or-less gave up on trying to watch the classic ones after that.

The one thing I did get to think at the time, thanks to seeing the first few minutes of this second episode before the tape cut out, has still held true today, though. Basically; 'How does the cliffhanger look so good at the end of Episode One and so stupid at the start of Episode Two?!'. The cliffhanger works so well because of the eerie way that the Sensorite is pawing at the window. Here, he just stands there like an over-familiar neighbour watching you eat dinner through the window.

Thankfully, standing around staring is still very effective when used in the right way - and John is pretty unnerving while he's in contact with the Sensorites. There's something about the way he stares right down the camera lens at us that really jars with what we're used to in the series, so it leaves you feeling a bit on edge. It's one of the things that's saving the story for me.

I can't say I've yet seen why it's got such a reputation among fandom. Sure, it's not the most action-packed of stories, but it's not bad (at least so far). If anything, I found that this episode held my attention even more than the last had. There's some unusual things in here, such as a full two minutes in which only two lines of dialogue are shared, while Ian and Barbara explore the ship looking for the Sensorites.

What does strike me as odd, though, it the way Ian reacts to them. He finds something to use as a weapon, and scares them with it if they try to move. Doesn't he even think to try talking to them? It seems a bit strange, especially given that they're perfectly willing to have a chat just a few minutes later…

So far: not as bad as reputation suggests. It's just bog-standard Doctor Who …

Next Episode: Hidden Danger

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty-One: Strangers in Space (The Sensorites, Episode One)

Dear diary,

The Sensorites has a bit of a reputation, doesn't it? It's the 'boring' story of Season One, and one of the most boring ever, supposedly. I've seen it said that many people give up trying to do a Doctor Who marathon while trying to get past these six episodes. A shame, really, because this first episode offers up a lot of promise.

Oh, now, don't get me wrong. Even in this first episode there were a couple of minutes when I noticed my attention wandering (Still, nowhere near as badly as during The Screaming Jungle*…). It's very much a *talking episode, isn't it? But although we've got all these characters talking to each other, none of them are actually saying anything. Whereas The Aztecs was full of lovely dialogue between the cast, this feels much more functional. It's all very much descriptive dialogue.

It's a good thing, then, that this episode sports some of the best direction that we've had in the series to date. Over Christmas recently, BBC Wales was singing praises to the heavens for the shot of Clara entering the TARDIS for the first time, in a camera move that takes us from outside the small box to the inside in one sweeping motion.

Here, though, we've got the opposite - a shot that follows the TARDIS crew from a discussion inside the ship, out through the doors and directly onto the spaceship. As if that wasn't a grand enough moment, Susan then turns back around… to face the police box exterior. It's very well done, so much so that I actively had to skip back on the DVD to watch it again and make sure that my mind hadn't just filled in some gaps itself.

The direction continues to be great throughout, as we see closeups of hands, with the Sensorite removing the TARDIS lock, and then John cutting out the door opening system so that he can stalk Susan and Babs around the corridors. It has to be said, John is one of the most disturbing things we've had in the series. Forget the Daleks, here we've a man staring solely down the camera lens in silence before clutching his head and breaking down. It's genuinely un-nerving, and the direction only serves to help.

And then we've that stunning cliffhanger, as a creepy figure paws at the window of the ship. I've seen that cliffhanger before, and it's still a bit off-putting now. The sheer weirdness of the creature helps to make it one of the best we've had…

…Which is certainly more than can be said for the cliffhanger to the last episode. The whole thing hinges on the fact that the TARDIS says that it has stopped, but is also still moving. The Doctor is stumped. Susan hasn't ever seen anything like it. It's Barbara who hypothesises that they've landed inside something, and then they're all surprised to find that it's a spaceship.

Coming at the same time as a scene in which our regulars reminisce over recent events, and the Doctor even talks of adventures he's had 'quite some time' before Ian and Barbara joined them, are we really supposed to believe that this is the first time the TARDIS has ever landed on a moving spaceship? Really? The Doctor even helps to fly it later on in the episode!

Still, it's a strong start to the story. Now fingers crossed that this is one which might surprise me. You see, I've seen this first episode before, but I've never made it to the end. But not because I was bored! That's a story for tomorrow… (how's that for a cliffhanger!)

Next Episode: The Unwilling Warriors

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Thirty: The Day Of Darkness (The Aztecs, Episode Four)

Dear diary,

The Aztecs is something of an odd one, morally. There's a moment in this episode where Autloc - the time traveller's only supporter among the Aztecs for some time now - declares that Ian and Susan 'serve a false goddess', and out heart really sinks. Their final friend has turned against them, and joined sides with the evil Tlotoxl.

Except… well… he's only stating the truth! Barbara is a false God! She is deceiving Autloc, and trying to deceive the rest of the Aztecs for her own reasons, however 'right' she may believe her reasons to be. It's an interesting stance for a Doctor Who story, when villains are often painted as far more black and white.

During Marco Polo, I commented on how Tegana was almost a pantomime villain. He was evil for his own reasons, planning to steal the TARDIS and use it to help wage war. The only reason that he was a part of Polo's caravan was so that he could assassinate Kublai Kahn. He was just pure evil, in the same way that the Daleks, or the Voord have been in this season, too.

Tlotoxl, on the other hand, while still being prone to a few pantomime outbursts, is only trying to seek the truth. He knows that Barbara is lying to them (even more so after yesterday's episode, where she specifically tells him she's fake!), and seeks only to prove this to the others. Oh, sure, he goes about it in something of a devious way (trying to get them all killed on more than one occasion is one way to deal with your problems!), but it's hard to dislike him entirely.

What's interesting is that the character's painted throughout as truly believing in sacrifice. After an attempt to halt one earlier in the story sees the intended victim throw himself from the temple, Tlotoxl claims that his death is still the cause of godly intervention. During this episode, though, it's made much more clear that he knows it's all a farce, commenting that 'the darkness will come and go! A sacrifice must be made!'.

While on the subject of Tlotoxl, I've been waiting until now to praise John Ringham's performance. He's simply fantastic throughout this story. He's genuinely chilling when he wants to be - never more so than during his stare to camera during the story's first cliffhanger - and great fun throughout. I'm going to miss him as we move on to a new time and place.

It's nice, too, to see the Doctor gently supporting Barbara, as he tells Cameca that the gods really do want sacrifice to stop. He knows it's all fruitless, but it's nice to see him siding with his companion when he knows how strongly she feels about it.

As the story's rating will attest, I've really rather enjoyed The Aztecs. I've always known that it's quite a good one, somewhere in the back of my mind, since the first time I saw it, but it's nice to have that confirmed here.

I won't go into much detail about the story as a whole, as I've done that through the various entries on the four episodes. It's lovely to see Barbara given a story that is so totally 'hers'; the series at this stage is still very much an ensemble piece, and it works so well as a result of it.

Next Episode: Strangers in Space

 Day Twenty-Nine: The Bride of Sacrifice (The Aztecs, Episode Three)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Nine: The Bride of Sacrifice (The Aztecs, Episode Three)

Dear diary,

There's some fabulously elaborate hats in this story, aren't there? Barbara's, Tlotoxl's, even Autloc's. If you're something of a hat fan, this really is the story for you.

But actually, the design of this story on the whole is really rather good. I spent a lot of time during the last story praising the design and the thought that had gone into the world, especially during the later episodes. A similar praise can be given to this story, as well. The temple, in particular, is a wonderful design, and there's a lot of great detail involved - occasionally, the camera follows characters as they roam from the inside to the out, and you can see the 3D effect on the patterns carved into the surface - it's all really effective.

Less attractive is the school they've got Susan shut away in. During the last episode I wondered why they'd shot Carole Ann Ford's scenes on film, when there were no fights or stunts involved. It was only today that I realised she must be on a holiday (and a quick check confirms that, yes, she was away for these two weeks, her scenes in the school being filmed alongside Episode Five of The Keys of Marinus), and so only just involved in the plot.

It's to the story's credit that I've never noticed this before. Just as the Doctor's absence was successfully explained away in the last story, they've managed to keep disruption to a minimum here. This feels much more like the 'Doctor-lite' episodes of the 21st century incarnation of the show - I'm thinking in particular of Midnight, in which Donna appears for a couple of minutes at the top and tail of the story, but you never realise she's not there.

What surprised me, when we cut to a pre-filmed insert of Susan during this episode was that I actually smiled to myself. I was pleased to see her! I stated a few weeks ago that I wasn't the biggest fan of Susan, and that I'd likely spend a lot of time complaining about her, but actually, she's nowhere near as bad as I recall. Oh, sure, there's a few moments of over-reaction and one or two instances where I'm less-than-keen, but I've warmed to her more than I'd expected. I like that.

The downside to all this, though, is that while I was glad to see her, I hadn't actively missed her from the plot. If you'd asked me before her scene what was missing from the story, 'Susan' wouldn't have been my first thought. I sung praises yesterday for Ian and Barbara as characters, and the pair of them with the Doctor is more than enough to keep me satisfied.

Speaking of which, we've another one of those moments where I praise how far the character of the Doctor has come! Oh, I know, I do it every few days, it seems, but we keep on getting these moments! I'll stop doing it at some point. Promise. Here, as he tells Ian of the secret tunnel into the tomb;

IAN

Where did you get hold of this?

THE DOCTOR

My fiancée.

IAN

I see. (beat. He realises.) Your What!?!

It's a great little moment, and it's beautifully played by both men. I couldn't let it pass without a mention…

Next Episode: The Day of Darkness

 Day Twenty-Eight: The Warriors of Death (The Aztecs, Episode Two)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Eight: The Warriors of Death (The Aztecs, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

There are several things about Doctor Who in the early days that are, quite simply, clever. The character of the Doctor, a mysterious old man from another world. That's clever. His bigger-on-the-inside time machine, that externally looks like a run-of-the-mill police telephone box. That's clever. A format that jumps back and forth between bug-eyed-monsters and historical tales. That's clever.

You know what my favourite bit of ingenuity is, though? It's the characters of Ian and Barbara. Two school teachers, one who specialises in history, to guide us through the stories set in the past, and the other learned in science, for the futuristic tales. Now that's clever.

And the magic of the pair is that they never feel like they've been shoe-horned in to satisfy those bits of the plot. Right from the moment that they first follow Susan home to the junkyard, they feel as though they're meant to be there. When they apply their respective areas of study to the situation they've found themselves in, it just works, because that's not their only function in the narrative.

No writer understands this quite as well as John Lucarotti. I commented on it more than once during the course of Marco Polo, but he takes the show's initial intention to be educational very seriously. He never makes it feel like a chore, but he's making you learn while you watch his episodes.

Here, it's being used by both the teachers in different ways. Barbara uses her knowledge of the Aztec period to answer questions put to her by Tlotoxl and Autloc, in an attempt to prove that she's really a reincarnation of their god. Ian uses his knowledge of pressure points on the body to win in a fight over his rival, Ixta. Well, he does the first time, anyway. By the time they get to heir big, climactic battle, he seems to have forgotten about that a bit…

Something else I enjoy is the way that the Doctor advised Ixta of ways to win in the fight, too. When the warrior first asked him for help, I thought the Doctor was going to show him the same trick that Ian had used, and in my head I was already thinking it a bit lazy that he'd have thought of the same way of winning. It's great, therefore, that he goes a completely different route, and uses scientific ideas in a completely different way, advising Ixta to drug Ian, while describing it as 'magic'.

Hartnell is on blazing form here - never more so than in his opening fight with Barbara. It's quite possibly the best performance he's given in the series to date (scrap that, I think it is the best), and he really goes for it. In many ways, this acts as a counter-balance to the argument they have during The Edge of Destruction, where Barbara berates him for not treating them with the respect they deserve.

I claimed that moment was one of the key turning points for the Doctor changing his character, becoming more affable, and closer to the character we watch in the series through to the twenty-first century. Here, we see an anger in him which isn't even close to the way he acted when we first met him. There, he was crotchety and unpleasant. Here, he's downright terrifying.

And yet, there's still hints of the more lovable Doctor we've started getting used to. Following the fight, he apologises to Babs, telling her he 'didn't mean to be so harsh'. People praise David Tennant and Matt Smith for the way their Doctor can go from 'Angry God' to 'Playful Child' in the blink of an eye, while forgetting that it's a part of the Doctor's character first developed by Hartnell, right back here toward the very beginning. It's a great moment, and one I've never appreciated quite so much before.

While I'm praising performances, I need to bring up Jackie Hill again. I've touched on her performance briefly in the past, but she's on top form here - as always. It's nice to see a story that gives her a chance to shine like this, because she really is a fantastic asset to the series. The highlight comes while she is being questioned by Tlotoxl - the way she delivers the lines is spot on. Casting her and William Russell as the teachers? That's another one of those clever things they did…

Next Episode: The Bride of Sacrifice

 Day Twenty-Seven: The Temple of Evil (The Aztecs, Episode One)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Seven: The Temple of Evil (The Aztecs, Episode One)

Dear diary;

Back in 2004, The Aztecs was the very first William Hartnell story I ever saw. I picked it up from what was then the BBC Shop in Norwich, along with a couple of other titles, excited to be delving right back to the very start of the series. At the time, this was the earliest Doctor Who story available on DVD. Shamefully (Fair warning, I'm about to make myself sound stupid), I completely mis-read the back cover of the DVD case, and mistakenly believed that the character mistaken for a God was an Aztec called 'Bar-Bara'. No, I don't really know how I managed it, either.

Now, I've not seen The Aztecs since that first occasion (all previous attempts at a marathon had fizzled out by around now), so I've been greatly looking forward to getting round to it this time. Especially now that I can watch it in context, knowing that the last John Lucarotti story was something of a gem. After a couple of off-putting episodes of The Keys of Marinus, it's nice to be back in history again.

The one downside is that, as I write this, we're about six weeks away from a shiny new 'Revisitation' of the story on DVD. Much as I'd have loved to wait and see it cleaned up to the standards seen on some recent DVDs, I'll be making do with my original copy. It's so old, there's not even artwork on the disc. Just a logo. Crikey, it seems like a lifetime back!

Right then! Where to start? You can tell instantly that we're back to the series trying to be educational again; we're treated to a couple of history lessons fresh out of the TARDIS, about the Aztecs and their way of life. Susan even not-so-subtly brings up the dates that the Spanish first came into contact with them, while taking an extremely one-sided view of the situation. I'm not going to go massively into the history of the period here (Aztecs for me are, like Barbara, an area of interest!), but I'll likely return to it before the story is over.

There's some great design work on display, here. The Aztec temple and the garden are both very well realised, and only serve to make me wonder what it would have been like had we seen the episodes of Marco Polo moving. I've seen people complain about the studio backdrops in some of the Hartnell stories, but actually, I think that they work quite well here. Certainly, it helps that the story isn't as polished as some of the ones I've seen lately (for the time being, at least).

You can't discuss this episode without bringing up another one of those lines that's become famous from the series' past - arguably one of the most famous from this early period; 'You can't rewrite history! Not one line!'. I think it's fair to say that this has become such a famous line because of how wonderful it is, and the way Hartnell performs it. The show has changed its stance on this matter over the years - especially since the Eleventh Doctor has been in the TARDIS! - but it's a great way of looking at the series here.

It also helps to highlight the difference between this story and Marco Polo. There, our heroes were caught up in events, with little opportunity to change things around them. Here, thanks to Barbara's position as a 'reincarnated God', they've got a chance to tell a very different story, and it's one that's caught my attention right from the word 'go'.

Next Episode: The Warriors of Death

(Incidentally, I understand that The Aztecs is being repeated today on BBC America. Do check it out if you've not seen it before - based on this first episode alone, it's a corker!)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Six: The Keys of Marinus (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Six)

Dear diary,

Ah, I've gone back to being a bit bored during this one, I'm afraid.

It's tricky, when I've not enjoyed an episode, to find a great deal to say about it here. When I've really liked one, then it's great - I can praise the performance, or the sets or the script. There's plenty to say when it comes to liking a story. In this case, though…

It feels like this episode only existed because things needed to be wrapped up before we can move onto the next story. We're given a little bit of time to finish up the events of yesterday's trial sequences, with the Doctor finally revealing who the culprit is (and, to be fair, hiding the key in the weapon was a great idea!), and then it's back off to the tower to return the keys and get the TARDIS back.

The problem is, much as I've liked that we have a new setting every day, it's been too long since we were last at the tower. It was a little while before I remembered that Arbitan had been killed right back in Episode One - and I only watched it a week ago! Imagine watching this spread out over a six-week period!

The final confrontation with the Voord fell a bit flat, too. They were supposed to be the next Daleks (after all, they are only the second evil alien race we've had in the series, and created by the same writer), but they don't actually get a lot to do. Here they mostly skulk around corridors with knives out, or badly hide under a hood pretending to be an elderly monk. Hm. Can't say I'm all that surprised they didn't catch on in the end…

On the whole, The Keys of Marinus is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there's plenty to enjoy about the story, but on the other, it's crushingly dull in places.

Let's start with the good, yeah? The idea of the quest is a great one; it gives the story plenty of variety, and it means that when I have been caught in an episode I've not enjoyed, it's only lasted for a little while before I'm off to a new location. It also means that we're able to lose the Doctor for a couple of days and it's not even noticed.

Much as I like the idea, it all seems a bit too simple, really. These keys are supposed to be hidden right across Marinus, but our heroes never really have much trouble getting hold of them. The hardest one to come by is probably the one hidden in the jungle. The rest they stumble upon with relative ease.

Still, can't complain much, as it gave a nice backdrop to get them moving around. I'm also fond of our two 'guest companions' for the story. They've been good fun to have around, though I'm not sure I'm actually going to miss them as we move to the next adventure…

Something I am going to miss is the well-drawn world of Marinus. I praised it yesterday, but it's worth repeating here, too. It's not often that we get a world so rich in the series, so it's great to have one here. In an extra on the DVD, Raymond Cusick complains that Terry Nation wrote his scripts without thinking about how achievable they were to film. It's a credit, therefore, that the design team do so well, here.

Now the bad. I've said it a few times today, even, but there's bits of the story that I just couldn't connect with. Once an episode had lost my attention, it seemed like it took a great effort of Will to get it back, or even to make it to the end. It's a shame, because we've not really had a situation like this in the series so far.

There was a point in An Unearthly Child which came close to me picking up my phone, but this story has had a couple of occasions where I've actively had to set my phone the other side of the room, just so I can attempt to concentrate.

Next Episode: The Temple of Evil 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Five: Sentence of Death (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Five)

Dear diary,

The best thing about The Keys of Marinus surely has to be thought that's gone into the world itself? I've complained that bits of this story feel like filler, or that they're simply rehashes of things we've seen before in the series, but there's a lot to be said for the depth they've gone to in creating the 'universe' of this story.

I first made a note during yesterday's episode that it's nice to have an alien world that's got distinctly different environments. We've the acid sea, the screaming jungle, the icy wastes… in this episode, they even mention the glass factories out in a desert. This feels like a real planet, with just as many varying regions as the Earth.

I didn't actually talk about it during my write up yesterday in the end (choosing to focus on other areas instead), but today's episode has given me cause to bring it up. Initially, I made a note about the very 1960s phone used in the vault, but then later on they switch to something far more obviously 'designed' as a futuristic phone.

They've got a whole legal system that's different to the Earth, with its own rules and conditions… even its own special hats for the judges! I should like a hat like that. The point is that this world feels far more real than many of the alien planets we visit in Doctor Who, so it's really nice to see that unfold.

As for the story of the episode itself… Well… I did enjoy it, and it's held my attention throughout, though I think I'm a bit saddened to be in the same place for the cliffhanger. I was just about getting used to all the travelling, and having now seen this city for a bit, I was looking forward to moving onto the next location.

The trial entertained me far more than I was expecting it to, and thinking back to a previous watch of the serial, I think this was the point I'd started to lose patience. There's certainly a lot in this episode that I'd not remembered from last time round, which is usually a sign that I wasn't paying attention.

It's nice to have the Doctor back, too. As much as I said yesterday that I'd not really missed him, it's still a great moment when he appears just in time, having been eluding his companions since their arrival. I seem to be saying it every few days, but the Doctor really is changing rapidly, isn't he? There's a great moment when he tells Ian to trust in him, and it's a really wonderful scene. These people are the Doctor's friends now.

One thing, though… they have a system that's more accurate than finger-prints, but they didn't think to install a CCTV camera in the vault?

Next Episode: The Keys of Marinus

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Four: The Snows of Terror (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Four)

Dear diary,

It seems fitting, in a week where I've had to cancel a trip home because the UK is being coated with a spell of bad weather, that I should be sitting down to watch The Snows of Terror. It's almost as though the show is sympathising with me. Or taunting me. It's definitely one or the other.

The good news is that I've enjoyed this episode much more than I did the last one. Looking back, I wondered if I'd been too harsh on yesterday's episode, but I really was just bored throughout. It seems a good opportunity for me to explain - briefly - my process for rating the episodes.

Having watched my daily 25 minutes, I type my entry up in 'Day One', a diary application for the Mac. The first thing I do is assign the episode a score. This is based purely on my gut reaction. How much have I enjoyed that day's episode? What does it feel like, score-wise? I then write my entry and transfer it over to Doctor Who Online, for you to see.

Up until the point that I hit 'save' on the DWO entry, I allow myself to change the score. Sometimes it changes during the writing of the day's entry, as I assess just what I've liked and not liked from the episode. Sometimes it changes as I input it to the website, and I muse over things.

After that, though, it's stuck. So The Screaming Jungle looks like it's going to be something of a blot on *The Keys of Marinus*…

Truth be told, I'm a little surprised that I've enjoyed today's episode as much as I have. In many respects, it's been something of a 'best of' compilation for the show. We've a snowy mountain (like the opening of Marco Polo), and several scenes set within cave, including a cavern that our heroes have to cross (That'll be like The Daleks, then!). With many elements calling back to things I've seen recently, I'd worried that I might just get a bit bored.

Thankfully, though, there's plenty here to keep me going. I love Vasor, and he's easily one of the nastiest characters we've encountered so far. The way he lusts after Barbara as Ian discovers he's not all that he makes out to be is fantastic, and genuinely creepy. Then the way he leaves them trapped in the cave, disconnecting the rope bridge… fantastic.

It's nice to see him get his comeuppance in the end, though it's great to have a character so richly drawn for a single episode appearance.

Then we've got the guards of the Key, all dolled up like medieval knights. It might help that I've spent the afternoon watching episodes of William Russell's Adventures of Sir Lancelot, but I really enjoyed the design… up until they start moving about. You'd hope that they'd be lumbering and slow, but they come across as a bunch of extras in armor.

It's never more noticeable than when three of them assemble on a ledge, the fourth member of the party having just fallen to his death with a half-arsed scream. They really don't look all that imposing. That said, their first appearance, surrounding the block of ice always makes me think of artist Daryl Joyce's rendition of the scene - which captured my imagination long before I first saw this story.

Something key about the last two episodes, though perhaps more prominently here, given that I've enjoyed this once far more, is how little you notice the absence of the Doctor. I've now not seen him for several days, but I'd quite happily go on watching our current team of travellers together, if the episodes are as fun as this one. As the 1960s go on, cast absences won't always be handled so well, so it's nice to see them getting it right at least to start with.

Next Episode: Sentence of Death

 Day Twenty-Three - The Screaming Jungle (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Three)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Three - The Screaming Jungle (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Three)

Dear diary;

This week, Doctor Who's friends take on the living jungle…

I'm sorry. I've been quite enjoying the episodes for a while, now. They've all been a fairly consistent quality. I've given out more 7/10's in a row than is perhaps reasonable. Today, though… there's just something missing. I was bored during this episode.

Truth be told, I'm surprised by this. We get to spend much of the episode largely in the company of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill. I've raved enough about them since the start of this project for you to know how highly I rate the pair, so I was looking forward to spending time with them.

About halfway through, Susan and our 'temporary regulars' (as I'll be calling them) are dispatched onwards to the next part of the journey, handily getting them out of the way to spend more time with my two favourites.

It's all just a bit like filler, though, isn't it? They find the kay relatively quickly once they arrive in their new location, and a bit of drama is injected when Barbara is kidnapped by a revolving statue. As if we then needed things to be dragged out further, it transpires that what they've found isn't the key, but a replica, so they'll need to journey deeper into the vegetation.

All the stuff then, with the booby traps and searching for the key based on a cryptic string of numbers and letters… It's the first time, really, that I've found myself wondering how much longer is left before the end of the episode. That's not something that you want to feel toward Doctor Who.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. I liked the design of the story - the jungle itself looked rather good, and the invasion of the plants at the end was pulled off better than I might have expected it to be.

It's just a shame that in a story I praised yesterday for being able to have a new location in every episode, being the complete antithesis to Marco Polo, which felt like it was bound in one place (despite being wonderful throughout), has left me cold in what should be a really interesting new environment.

It's a woefully short entry, today, but I really don't have all that much to say, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to leave this one with a;

Next episode; The Snows of Terror

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-Two: The Velvet Web (The Keys of Marinus, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

I complained on a few occasions during Marco Polo that it felt like no matter how far the travelers were supposed to have gone, it always simply felt like the same place. Being part of the caravan meant that even though the backgrounds changed, we never seemed to actually go anywhere.

The same can't be said of The Keys of Marinus. I've seen this story before, so I know that each episode gives us something new to feast on, but it's only when you start to watch like this that you really take note of how strange it is. I've grown used to being given a set up - a location, characters etc - and then spending a few days with them.

The setting for today's episode is a world away from yesterday's, and a fun story in its own right. It's fun to see the Doctor initially cautious, advising against opening the door because there's going to be something bad behind it. It's then strange to see the series turning this on its head so early in its run, confounding our expectations by showing us a paradise world, where Barbara has been given a life of luxury.

I'm not sure how long she'd supposed to have been there - but it's clearly been a while. She claims to have met their 'host' (presumably Altos), and she's gotten quite comfortable in her new surroundings. Perhaps odd, considering that we were told in the last episode that the dials would move them through space but not time. The Doctor, Susan and Ian left no more than a minute or two after, but more time has clearly passed here.

It's nice to see Ian suspicious for so long, too. They've been at this adventuring lark for a while, now, and he's used to the way it works. It also means we're given a great grounding point for when he's tricked into seeing the beauty and nothing else.

On the subject of which - it's a really rather well done effect, isn't it? Barbara waking to see the truth of the city, all crumbling and in an awful condition. The back and forth between the luxury world the others are seeing and the version through her eyes is directed very well. It means that by the time the Doctor and Ian explore the 'lab', they can pick up a dirty mug, describe it as a piece of fantastically high-tech equipment, and I'll buy it.

There's just a chance to praise the brain-creatures in the jars, too. I've little to add to that thought, but I just thought they looked pretty good.

And now, with Susan screaming madly once more, it's off to the jungle…

Next Episode: The Screaming Jungle 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty-One - The Sea of Death (The Keys of Marinus, Episode One)

Dear diary,

The start of a new story is always a bit exciting. Three weeks into this marathon, and I'm starting to appreciate how much that's true. When you watch Doctor Who as a set of DVDs, where you can watch a story in full from any era of the programme at any time, you start to forget the excitement of getting onto a new one.

When I first got into Doctor Who in 2003, I used to relish the chance, every other week or so, to visit the BBC shop in Norwich, where I was living at the time. There weren't nearly as many DVDs on the shelf then as there are now, but I used to enjoy choosing one at random (or, sometimes, based purely on how much I liked the cover art. I didn't pick up a copy of The Leisure Hive for several years, 'cos I thought the art was awful) and then excitedly getting home to watch it.

These days, I own a copy of every story in some form or another; DVD, VHS, audio… it takes some of the magic away from it all. I've really enjoyed Marco Polo, and as I said yesterday, I'd not have been opposed to another episode to allow events to berate a bit at the end, but all the same - it's great to be arriving somewhere new.

The first season of Doctor Who has a simple format, but it works really well. For the most part, it's Historical/Space Story/Historical/Space Story, with the exception of The Edge of Destruction, which is something of an oddity, anyway. It means you get to have a nice deal of variety to the stories, and as much as I love the historical settings, with rich dialogue and fantastic characterisation, it's lovely to be turning up on a world with acid seas and glass beaches.

Sure, this one may not be as polished as the story I've been watching for the last week (and while it's nice to be back to moving episodes again, it's a shame this one has more than a couple of production faults. Two stagehands are very noticeable, as is a boom shadow hovering over Barbara's head for some time while they hunt for the missing Susan), but it's good fun.

We open with a shot of the island itself, which looks rather good - especially when we pan in on the beach, and a tiny model TARDIS arrives. This is the first time we've seen the ship arrive in this way, and it works really well. While on the subject of the models, I'm going to have to mention the washing-up bottle submarines. They get a bad rep, perhaps rightly so, but in general it works quite well.

It also means, since I've got a few bottles of washing-up liquid released for the Jubilee last year, in the shape of these 'classic' versions, I'm going to playing 'Attack of the Voord' when I do the washing up in a bit.

I mentioned a few days ago, during a fight scene in Marco Polo that it was a shame not to actually be able to see it. It was represented in the recon by a series of blurry images and a lot of scuffling noise; not painting a great image! I also mused that it was perhaps for the best, as I could imagine the scene in my head to be better than it perhaps was.

I think this might well have been justified by the scene in this episode, in which a Voord attacks Arbitan and Ian intervenes. The fight is very stagey, and that somewhat let the scene down. It's lovely to have some movement on the screen again, but perhaps reckons are sometimes a good answer…!

Next Episode: The Velvet Web

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Twenty - Assassin at Peking (Marco Polo, Episode Seven)

Dear diary,

The downside to a seven part story is that… well… it's very easy to run out of things to say on the whole. Across the last week, I've praised the sets, the performances, the dialogue…

I've listed several reasons why I think this story is so high up people's lists of tales they want returned to the archive, and I've voiced constant surprise that I'm not bored by the fact that not an awful lot seems to be happening.

So forgive me if I'm reaching for new things to add here. In short; I've enjoyed this episode, too, but I'm looking forward to moving on with a new story.

What? You want more? Oh, go on then…

He's a late addition to the cast, but Kublai Kahn is a great character. he was used comically yesterday, puncturing a lot of bureaucratic and ceremonial nonsense with simply being rather down-to-earth. It's great to see him at the start of this episode, playing Backgammon with the Doctor, and the stakes being so high - yet so relatively small to him!

I've mused on the fact that the Doctor has been mellowing a lot over the last few episodes, and I think it's very much on show here, now. I can't imagine the Doctor of three weeks ago sitting down to casually play for the return of his TARDIS. The way he laughs about it as he leaves the room is just as great.

One thing that has bugged me a little, though, and this has been rumbling for a few days now… Marco really can't decide which side he's on, can he? It's used to great effect in a couple of places, almost painting Marco as the bad guy. In this last episode, though, it just feels muddled as he swings from wanting to help our regulars, to being against them, to feeling sorry for them, to wanting them kept locked up, to setting them free with a key to the TARDIS…

It's a shame, as he's a really interesting character, and his final thoughts in the story, wondering where the Doctor and Co might be are lovely, and a nice end to the tale. In all honesty, though, that's all I have to add, so I'll rate the episode and move onto my thoughts on Marco Polo as a whole…

I'd never really 'seen' Marco Polo before this viewing. I'd listened to the first episode a few times over the years, usually when I'm trying to complete a marathon, but I've never made it right the way to the end. As a result of this, I've always been a bit unsure of it when people list it among the stories they really lament the loss off.

Actually, though, it's really rather good. I still can't get my head around it - by all rights, I should have been bored out of my mind. I've complained on more than one occasion that the story is just a lot of walking and talking with the occasional 'event' to spice things up a little. Added to that, I've had to watch the whole thing as still images. Not a single clip to break it up!

But it's never let my attention slip. I won't go into the reasons all over again (they're listed at the top of today's post if you need a refresher). I've enjoyed all seven episodes to some degree, and it's my highest rated story so far.

What's odd, though, is that like The Daleks, I've reached the end of seven episodes and feel like I could do with a bit more time in this location. There's an awful lot packed into these last 25 minutes; the resolution to the cliff hanger, the Doctor's game with Kublai Kahn, Tegana trying to win on all sides, an army marching on the city, Tegana's death, the escape from the era…

The problem this causes is that some things aren't given enough room to breathe. The death of Ping-Cho's proposed husband comes out of nowhere and is glossed over in about a minute. It feels like a sad resolution to a story that's been bubbling under throughout these seven episodes.

On the whole, though, the average of my scores gives this episode a solid

Next Episode: The Sea of Death

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Nineteen: Mighty Kublai Kahn (Marco Polo, Episode Six)

Dear diary,

I can't quite get my head around this story. Let's recap; I've stated a few times over the past couple of days that I worry I'll get bored of it. I've mentioned that it's a lot of back-and-forth between the TARDIS crew and Marco Polo, with the occasional 'set piece' to keep the attention going.

I've also mused on more than one occasion that there's only so long it can go on for, before it gets boring. During yesterday's entry, I hoped that the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara getting back to the TARDIS would signal a turning point for the narrative, but it was very quickly put back to the status quo in this episode.

And yet, and yet… I just can't stop enjoying it. Much of what we have here, we've seen before - Marco is angry at the travellers for defying him, but he forgives them. Tegana convinces him that he should be more suspicious of them. William Russell gets plenty of opportunities to shine. The Doctor is more fun that he's been at any previous point in the series (his complaining of a bad back when being forced to kneel before the Kahn is especially well done).

We're given several new locations, but it all still feels like the same old caravan. Tegana is up to something evil and making dodgy deals… It's all very much same-old-same-old.

But it's not boring. Every bit of this episode has been just as entertaining as the last one, or the one before that. By all rights, I should have had enough of this story by now. Really, I should! Heck, but the fourth episode of An Unearthly Child, I was ready to run a hundred miles from another 25 minutes.

Another thing I commented on recently was the fact that the visual appeal of this story helps to make it a prime candidate for discovery. I wonder if the fact that it's also a very dialogue-heavy story means it's better suited to be left lost? By removing much of the visual element to the story, I'm left being able to focus on other areas.

I've praised William Russell already, but I have to say good things about everyone, really. Jackie Hill, Bill Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford… And it's not just the regulars, our guest cast are engaging, too. Even Tegana isn't as pantomime as he was being to start off with. There's a very real chance that because - for the most part - I'm having to rely on the performances to enjoy the story, I'm enjoying it far more.

It helps that there's some lovely dialogue floating around in today's episode, too. There are a few lines from this era of the programme which are rightly famous ('Have you ever thought what it's like…' 'A thing that looks like a police box…'), but there's a few here that should be as instantly recognisable.

'I come from another time. Our caravan, it not only covers distance, it can cross time!', and Marco's description of time travel as being able to 'defy the passage of the sun'. They're both lovely lines, and I'm surprised I've never heard either f them before.

Then there's the fun ones, such as the one Barbara used to set up the above conversation, when she's trying to convince Ian to speak to Marco; 'Oh, Marco? Ian wants a word with you. * yawn *, I'm feeling a bit tired, I think I'll go to bed…'. It's really rather wonderful…

Next Episode: Assassin at Peking 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Eighteen - Rider From Shang-Tu (Marco Polo, Episode Five)

Dear diary,

I've not mentioned it, but since Episode Two, I've been watching this story as a tele-snap recon, rather than by listening to the narrated soundtrack. It's perfectly acceptable, and it's just easier to follow the story this way, rather than having to manually look through the images and try to time them up with the audio.

The downside to this, though, is that things aren't always clear. At the end of yesterday's episode, when Ian is sent to distract the guard outside their tent, I assumed he'd knocked him out. There's no dialogue, just ambient noise and soundtrack, and then a shot of the guard on the floor.

This episode confirms that, actually, the guard was already dead. Stabbed. Ian just found the body. It's a shame it's not clearer, as it means I spent a few minutes at the start of this episode thinking back over to the events of yesterday, when I really should have been enjoying this one.

It's also a shame when you have big fight sequences, as in today's installment. It means there's a few minutes of blurry images and a lot of noise while the characters all fight, but you don't actually see any of it taking place. In some ways, this isn't too much of a loss. As with the sand-storm a few days back, in means things can look far better in my mind than they perhaps did on TV, but it would be nice to be able to see something, I guess.

I'm still enjoying things on the old Silk Trail, though this is another episode which uses a set piece (the fight, on this occasion) to break up lots of scenes set in the camp. Even when we reach the end of the episode, with the group settled down for the night, it doesn't feel as though they've really moved. It's another casualty of the tele-snaps that all the locations look broadly the same.

I'd imagine this story could have looked fantastic - the first episode featuring snow-capped mountains, then moving to deserts for Episode Two, caves for Episode Three, and now in this episode we've got a bamboo forest. It's a real pity that I can't really see any of it properly.

Many people seem to list Marco Polo among the stories they'd most like to see returned to the archives, and I'm starting to see why. For all the talking among characters, it's a terribly visual story.

And then we reach the end, with the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara back safely in the TARDIS. But, hold on! Where's Susan?! It's very reminiscent of the trick pulled to stretch out The Daleks for a few more episodes - 'We've made it back to the TARDIS, but we've left something behind!'. In The Daleks, they then came back from this point by spinning the story off in a different direction, which helped to keep me interested. I hope a similar thing is going to be happening here, as if they just carry on as they have so far, there's a danger that my patience will wear thin!

Next episode: Mighty Kublai Kahn

Next Episode: Mighty Kublai Kahn 

 Day Seventeen - The Wall of Lies (Marco Polo, Episode Four)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Seventeen - The Wall of Lies (Marco Polo, Episode Four)

Dear diary,

Do you remember, back in An Unearthly Child (The story, not the episode!), Ian told the tribe that the TARDIS travellers had no leader. At that stage, it was true. As the fabulous Wife in Space blog once said, 'They should have called the show Ian'.

Here, though, Tegana and Marco discuss the travellers;

TEGANA
Marco, which one leads them?

MARCO
The Doctor

TEGANA
And leaders are obeyed?

It's clear, to our guest characters in this story that the Doctor is the leader of the group, and actually, it's becoming clear to us as viewers, too. The show at this stage is still very much an ensemble piece - all four of our regulars are given their own chance to shine at one stage or another, be it Barbara sneaking out to follow Tegana in the last episode, or Ian distracting the guard here.

Still, though, the Doctor has emerged as the leader of the group. He is the only one with the power to fly the TARDIS, as we're reminded earlier this story. Ian, Barbara, and Susan's lives are all in his hands. It's nice that this has become so prominent after the events of the last story, which I noted as a turning point in his character.

He still has the ability to be crotchety, and to be manipulative, but he's a far warmer soul in this story that we've seen him before, and now that his companions are becoming his friends, he's much nicer toward them. What I'm particularly enjoying is the way that he's a short with those he distrusts as he was with the schoolteachers, once. I really love the way that the Doctor barks at Marco - “You poor, pathetic, stupid savage!”.

Our guest cast is interesting in this story. They're far more rounded as characters than we're sometimes treated to. Marco Polo seems to walk a fine line between being an ally of the group and an enemy. This is most noticeable here for the first time since The Roof of the World, when he initially took the TARDIS away.

The way that he barks orders, listening to the corrupting words of Tegana is totally believable. He wants desperately to trust the travellers, to make friends with them, but from his point of view, it's a no-go. They've betrayed him by sneaking into the TARDIS while no one is looking, and so he has to swap sides again.

It's nice, following on from the pantomime villainy of the first few episodes here, to have a character with a distinct grey area. Marco isn't evil, but he is an obstacle to the TARDIS crew.

I do have to wonder, though, why Tegana - and by extension, Marco - believe out far more likely that the Doctor uses magic to access the 'caravan', above the possibility that he may have a second key. While I could argue that Tegana simply uses magic to reinforce the idea of the Doctor as an evil spirit, Marco does seem surprised to find another key…

On the whole, I'm still really enjoying the story, and I'm actively looking forward to continuing on the journey. The only thing that troubles me is that we spend so much time in the 'camp'. I was really enjoying bits at the start of this story, with the travellers exploring the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes. Ian studies the face to realise the eyes do move, finds signs of a hidden door and…

Well, and then it's all over, and they're sent back to camp. Much as I'm enjoying the Doctor sneaking around, and our heroes trying to avoid detection as the ship gets repaired, it would have been nice to have some more time spent in the cave - it's a different setting and a chance to see something new with the story.

While I'm finding plenty to like in Marco Polo so far, I worry that over time, I'll grow weary of the story is it just carries on revolving around the camp. Interesting characters are only half the battle…

Next Episode: Rider from Shang-Tu

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Sixteen - Five Hundred Eyes (Marco Polo, Episode Three)

Dear diary,

This episode brings up some interesting questions about the TARDIS. A cold night, followed by a hot day causes condensation to form on the inside, to the extent that it's described as 'streaming down the walls'. Point One; surely the TARDIS should have a circuit that stops that? Is it one of the broken ones? It'll ruin all of the Doctor's furniture. Maybe that's why the console room is so bare by the 1980s?

Point Two (a more serious one, promise), is that this clearly treats the inside of the TARDIS to be situated within the four walls of the police box. Now, I know there's a couple of different schools of thought on this, but I've always been of the opinion that when you cross the threshold, you're transported to another part of space and time. Maybe even another dimension.

Couldn't tell you when I became sure of that, but it's been in my head for as long as I can remember. What's everyone else's thoughts on the subject? Is it a huge space fitting inside the (comparatively) smaller box, or a portal to somewhere else? Leave a comment or Twitter me with your thoughts - I'm genuinely interested to see what people think.

I'm pleased to say that I'm still really enjoying this story. Perhaps its reputation as one of Doctor Who's best is justly deserved? I'm not entirely sure what it is that's sucking me in. The story is good enough, I suppose, though it still feels like they need to insert a number of things just to fill out the journey (more on which in a minute), but I think it's just the characters.

There was a point, when the Doctor, Susan and Ping-Cho are exploring the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes, when it feels just right that Ping-Cho is with them. She almost feels like a part of the team. Equally, it seems right that Marco and Ian should pair off together to hunt for the missing Barbara, too. It's a real testament to the story that these guest characters have only been a part of the narrative for a few days, but they already feel fully formed.

As for what I'd call 'padding'… the tale of Aladdin is very odd - a few minutes of the story given over to be told another story. It's almost like story time at school, where you all get to sit cross-legged on the floor, and listen to a fairytale. It feels oddly out of place - especially given that a fair bit of time early in the episode is given over to setting up that Ping-Cho is going to be telling it.

It does, however, give us a chance to see Susan and the Doctor at their most relaxed. From the images in the recon, you can see Susan laying up against her grandfather, clearly they've known each other for a long time. I'm not sure why people go to such great lengths to deny that they're family - the image says it all! The Doctor is her grandfather, and that's exactly the relationship they share on screen.

The episode is still taking its duties to educate the audience very seriously - we're given a lesson via Ian about how condensation is formed (a great use of him as a science teacher. It really is a fantastic role for the series' early set up), and then later on as he tells Susan (in a completely un-forced way. Or not.) “Do you know that we still use the word ashshshn in English today?”

It's nice to see the series using this story as a chance to fulfil one of its initial briefs. It's not something that will last forever, and I'm looking forward to seeing how long it does before it gets fazed out in favour of 'Monster of the Week'…

I'll avoid saying too much about Susan's reactions at the cliff hanger (“THEY MOVED!”), but the rest of the episode is working very well for me!

Next Episode: The Wall of Lies 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day Fifteen - The Singing Sands (Marco Polo, Episode Two)

Dear diary,

One of the benefits of the missing episodes is that they give you the chance to let your mind fill in the gaps. Today's episode features a sequence in which Susan and Ping-Cho are caught outside during a sand storm. Now, on screen, this may (or may not…) have looked great, but in my head, it can look as great as I'd like.

In my head, it can be suitably epic and dramatic, the soundtrack certainly helps with that, and it's actually quite a brilliant scene. It injects a nice level of drama to the story, which helps to carry this episode. It doesn't hurt that for this installment, I've used a proper recon of soundtrack and tele snaps, mixed with some other photos taken on the set. There comes a point when you almost forget that things are supposed to be moving - just like yesterday, I'm caught up in the story.

An Unearthly Child doesn't really fit the format of the historical adventures (it set more in a fantasy 'stone age' than any easily definable period of history), which makes Marco Polo the first story that can be really pinned down. I can go and look him up and read about his travels to the East along the old silk trails, and see how this story might fit in.

It's a format that really works for the show, and it's a shame we've not had any of these 'proper' historical adventures in the revived series. While The Daleks was made interesting by the first appearance of the Doctor's greatest enemy, this story is given it's boost by interesting characters.

It's telling that I didn't really feel the absence of the Doctor during this installment; especially considering they go to great lengths to remind us that he's just off to one side, either sulking or sleeping. He turns up at the end, of course, but it really is little more than a cameo.

I'm too busy enjoying the story of Ian, Barbara, Susan, Ping-Cho, Marco and Tegana. The cast gel really nicely (though, really, Tegana is just a pantomime villain. I half expect Marco to turn up during the cliff hanger, as Tegana pours the water away, just so we can shout 'behind you!' at him…).

Something that I didn't tough on yesterday, but will here (and no doubt again at some point) is just how good the incidental music to this story is. You could quite happily give me a soundtrack of it to listen to as I drift off to sleep - it's some really nicely composed stuff.

I'm hoping that the story keeps up its current high quality as we continue on, though I worry that the further into it I go, the more it will need to resort to finding padding for the journey. It feels a little like each episode may just be there to fill time before Tegana can commit something evil…

Next Episode: Five Hundred Eyes