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

Day 398: Planet of the Spiders, Episode Four

Dear diary,

While, as we discovered the other day, the vast majority of the guest cast in Planet of the Spiders is made up of Pertwee-era veterans, I think the standout performance has to be from newcomer John Kane, in the part of Tommy. He’s been great to watch since as far back as the first episode, and when I’ve mentioned this story to people over the last few days, several of them have said how much they love the character.

It’s a very strong performance, and one which is very sympathetic. It’s a role which is quite rare within Doctor Who, and a subject such as learning difficulties could be potentially a very dangerous area for the programme. It’s hard not to fall in love with Tommy right from the off, though, and I’m really intrigued by how well his character has been woven into events. We’re given a few episodes being shown how much he loves to collect ‘beautiful’ things, and the point is highlighted when both Sarah and Mike give him gifts for his collection. It therefore feels perfectly natural when he becomes obsessed by the Metebilis crystal and takes it for himself.

Even today is nicely led up to - with him being unable to read the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and then returning to his little cupboard room to read his children’s book. Once he’s looked into the crystal and had his mind changed, it really is a lovely shift in performance, and I’m very impressed by how subtly it’s all been handled. Watching him stock up on books in the library is a lovely touch, and I really can’t wait to see where we go with the character from here.

I’m finding myself less concerned with all the events on Metebilis III. There’s something about the sheer 1970’s-ness of the two-legs that I’m finding really distracting. The fact that I’ve been catching up with a few episodes of The New Avengers lately means that Gareth Hunt is really standing out for me. It’s not what you’d call an understated look, is it?!

That said, I really am enjoying the background to the planet being filled in. I said yesterday that the idea of a crashed spaceship leading to a more ‘historical’ society was so ubiquitous in 1970s Doctor Who that it could fail to hold my interest, but actually they’re doing something really interesting with it. I love the idea that the spiders have come from Earth alongside the colonists, and it’s not something I ever realised about the creatures. It’s such a lovely idea, and that we should find out about the crystals’ special powers at exactly the same time we see them put to work with Tommy is rather well done.

My only question now… if the spiders fled to the mountains where the blue crystals enlarged both their minds and bodies, then am I to assume the same thing happened to that giant chicken that attacked the Doctor during his last visit in The Green Death? I think the whole story might lose some impact if it were a race of super intelligent giant poultry trying to take control…

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

Day 397: Planet of the Spiders, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Fair warning to those of you out there who - like me - aren’t all that fond of spiders. Today, I’ll be examining what made me scared of spiders, and there’s a few anecdotes about them involved. The first five paragraphs of today’s entry are solely confined to the story itself, but after that, I’m a bit ‘off-book’…

It shows how little I know about this story that I didn’t realise the Doctor or Sarah Jane spent any time with the ‘two-legs’ on Metebilis III. I knew that the Doctor wound up on the planet at some point (that image of him stood before the huge Queen Spider is another of those well-known ones, and in case I was in any doubt, it’s replicated on the DVD discs), but I assumed that he just took the TARDIS right to the… spider cave? Centre of the web! (Hah!)

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this strange race of primitives that occupy the surface of the planet, or indeed, what I make of the planet’s surface. The implication from The Green Death and the way the Doctor speaks of it during Carnival of Monsters, I’d always assumed that the rock of the planet was simply blue, thus making it ‘the famous blue planet’. Here, we’re told that it looks blue in the moonlight, but the rest of the time it just looks a bit like a dodgy CSO Utah.

And yet, I am keen on the idea that the spiders are treating humans as a kind of slave race. It’s good to see that they’re used to this kind of relationship with us two-legs, and it informs a lot of the way they act during their exchanges with Lupton back on Earth. I get the impression from a few lines of dialogue about travelling in spaceships the way their ancestors did, that this will be one of those typical 1970s Doctor Who plots, in which they’re the decedents of a human space mission, several generations on. Similar ideas come into play during stories from The Face of Evil to The State of Decay, but in those instances, I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to come as a surprise to the primitive society, whereas here they’re fully aware of this fact.

Today, we get our first opportunity for a really good look at the eight-legged-enemies in this story. We’ve had a single spider knocking around since the cliffhanger to the first episode, but she’s spent much of her time invisible up to now. Here, we get to see a whole room full of the creatures for the first time. On the one hand, I’m not scared by the sight of it in the way I thought I may have been (I vaguely knew the design of the set from a model in an episode of Blue Peter), but on the other hand, the models are very well done.

I’d say that the problem is how static they all are. During the ‘conference’ scene, in which a floating ‘holographic’ Lupton head converses with the council of spiders, only one of the models is capable of movement, but it’s by far the most effective model in the room. The way it wiggles and moves is very convincing, and - yes - even a little un-nerving. Later, when the spider on Earth is caught in a battle of the wills with her captive mind, the way the model writhes in pain is very effective. And yet, when that same model is required to sit perfectly still a foot or so from a doorway… it’s perhaps the most effective that it’s ever been. I think it’s because I can sympathise with the idea of having to edge my way around a particularly large spider to get out of the room, and I was thinking how much I’d have not wanted to be acting with that prop!

I think I’m going to have to admit… the story has given me a nightmare. I think it’s the first time that this has ever happened to me through Doctor Who. In fairness, it’s not directly related to the story, it was just vaguely spider-related. Last night in bed, for the first time in a few years, I recalled an encounter with a spider that I had when I was very young. Truth be told, I’m almost entirely convinced these days that it wasn’t even a real event in the first place, but rather a nightmare that I had when quite young that has just lived on as a memory in my head.

In this ‘memory’, my parents are away on holiday and I’m staying with my grandparents. Growing up, we lived on this farm out in Norfolk. I lived with mum and dad in the farmhouse, while my grandma and grandpa lived in a converted barn across the yard - literally thirty seconds between the two doors. Mum and nan still live there, although both dad and my grandpas have since passed away. Anyway, I must have been about four or five years old, and I can remember my grandmother taking me over to the farmhouse to get something I needed. Probably a toy or something. I can vaguely recall seeing something unusual as we entered the kitchen, but thinking nothing of it, but then on the way back out of the house, I noticed it clinging to the wall about four feet from the ground - the biggest spider that I’d ever seen.

You see, this is why, over the years, I’ve started to doubt my own recollection of the event, and wonder if it may have all been a nightmare some twenty years ago. Because to this day, I can clearly recall what this spider looked like. I was about ten inches across, and had a body… in the shape of a jelly mold. You know the kind: three-tier, getting smaller towards the top. I can distinctly remember that being the shape of the creature, but it wasn’t until many years later that I realised that - realistically - spiders just don’t come in that shape. Suffice to say, my grandmother has no memory of the event, and you wouldn’t forget a big, jelly-shaped spider in a hurry.

A few years ago, my good friend Nick Mellish and I wrote a book, in which we listened to all of the Eighth Doctor’s audio adventures in order from the beginning. Before staring work on The 50 Year Diary, it was the only Doctor Who marathon I’d ever undertaken. The finale to the Eighth Doctor’s third series of adventures with Lucie Miller is a direct sequel to Planet of the Spiders, and during the audio I shared the above spider memory with Nick. He then admitted that he, too, had a rather horrible memory which left him scared of the creatures:

”When I was around four-years-old, a large, big-legged, fat spider fell off the ceiling in my bedroom, onto my face. I was terrified, screamed, and fled the room. I ran to my parents' bedroom, in tears, and spent the night there. The following day, I was still too scared to return to my bedroom. My Mum told me that it was clearly a nightmare and that spiders don't do things like fall onto people's faces, so she bravely went into my bedroom and pulled back the duvet… to reveal the large, big-legged, fat spider. I can still hear her scream now in my ears; I think it was the first time I'd ever seen one of my parents vulnerable"

With all these various spider fears around, I’ve simply had no real desire to ever check out this story (though ,admittedly, I loved the audio sequel to this story. Well worth checking out!), but I’ve always been vaguely aware of what the spiders look like. I’m not sure when I first saw them, but I know I was testing myself. I was so relieved to find that - in pictures, at least - they looked clearly enough like models that I wouldn’t be scared by them. When the DVD came out, I can remember seeing a few clips posted around here and there (we used to play the new Who releases on a loop in the shop I worked in at the time, so I caught snippets now and then), and while they still didn’t freak me out, I really had no desire to check them out any further.

What really put me off, though was the original design of the Queen Spider. I think there’s only the one image of it floating around out there now, of the model set up in the visual effects department at the BBC, but it terrified me. The only way I can think of to describe it is in the same way I’d described the Mirkwood spiders in the Hobbit concept art - ‘rough’. It looked scary, and a bit ‘butch’ (as as much as a spider can look butch) and it really, really, scared me. It’s probably grown and evolved in my head over the years to the point that I don’t really want to even go and find the image to link to in this entry. Chances are that it’s actually not all that more scary than the ones which have made the final version of the story, but It freaked me out enough at the time, and I could easily see why Barry Letts decided that they needed to be toned down before they could be broadcast..

Oh! And there you go! I’ve just been mentioning to my mother on the phone that I’m watching a Doctor Who story called Planet of the Spiders. She commented that I must be loving it before pointing out that ‘it was your grandmother that made you scared of them’. Now, this isn’t the grandmother I’ve mentioned above, it’s my other grandmother. As mum told me the story, I could actually remember it - every fragment of the tale coming back to me a few seconds before mum recounted it.

I’ll not bore you with all the details, but it boils down to this: Until very recently, my other grandmother lived in an old house which was - for all intents and purposes - right in the middle of the woods. The only house for miles around, and falling down from a lack of repair since its construction several hundred years before. The house was made of flint and other stone, and I can always remember it being cold.

There was only one shower in the house itself, but it was quite a recent addition (I say ‘recent’, it would have been put in about thirty years ago, but this story does take place when I was very young!). Before that, they used to use an old shower in the little outhouses. I never used to like that shower. It was old and rusty, and it was a bit scary, in the way that children’s minds make strange old things like that scary. I can remember my grandmother used to use it as a way of keeping my behaviour good when I went to stay: ‘be a good boy, or you’ll have to use the outside shower tonight…’

One time, my grandmother told me about why they’d decided to get the shower installed inside the house. She told me that the outside one used to draw its water directly from the well (I remember always thinking that this was strange, but the new owners of the house are dismayed to find that there’s no mains water and it all comes from the well - so maybe that was the one bit of the story I should have believed!) and sometimes you’d get bugs come through in the water.

This one day, she went to take a shower, and only a few drips came out. She tried knocking the pipes to remove any blockages, but nothing happened. And then, it started to make a noise as things began to move. She looked up at the shower head… just in time for a shower of tiny spiders to come raining down all over her.

This story used to terrify me as a child. it’s no wonder I’d managed to pretty much block it out! No quirky jelly-shaped arachnids in this nightmare! Anyway, I look forward to going into tomorrow’s episode with this image now firmly re-established in my mind…!

Last summer, Doctor Who Online asked you to submit your ratings for all the televised Doctor Who stories from An Unearthly Child to The Name of the Doctor, and you responded in droves! We received hundreds of voting forms, and now we’re pleased to reveal the results.

Below, you’ll find all 239 stories ranked by their placement in the poll. Entrants were asked to rank the stories between ‘1/10’ and ’10/10’. From there, we worked out the average score for each story to present a guide to the way people saw the series in 2013. The lists below also contain - where relevant - the previous score achieved by the story during the 2009 ‘Mighty 200’ poll in Doctor Who Magazine, so you can see how much opinion of these stories has altered in the last four years. Obviously, we asked you to rate almost the entire Matt Smith era, too, which wasn’t around during that previous poll.

You’ll also find some commentary for each of the sections, pointing out anything that you may find interesting about the results. While you’re likely to find some of more common answers hanging around at the polar ends of the scale, you may well be surprised by some of the placements… 

The bottom ten is made up of stories which aren’t likely to come as a surprise to many readers - sadly unloved tales such as The Twin Dilemma and Time-Flight were always going to come in with lower scores! 

More of a surprise might be the appearance of a Tenth Doctor story taking the lowest spot - with 2006’s Fear Her pulling in an average score of just 40.11%, down massively from almost 49% four years previously!

On the whole, there’s been a decrease in popularity for most stories. 144 adventures received a lower average score this time compared to 2009, while only 56 managed to improve upon their earlier result. That said, the voters of 2013 were generally more favourable towards the programme - no story rated below 40%, whereas in 2009 The Twin Dilemma scraped the barrel with 38.44%

The rest of the bottom 40 is packed out with the lowest ranking stories for every Doctor bar the Eighth - who only appears once on the poll in The TV Movie. 

(The lowest-rating stories for the other ten Doctors were;The Smugglers, The Space Pirates, The Time Monster, Underworld, Time-Flight, The Twin Dilemma, Time and the Rani, Boom Town, Fear Her, and The Rings of Akhaten)

The results for stories 199 - 150 contain a mixture of stories that - while not entirely unloved - rarely appear high on people’s lists of favourite stories. Tales such as 1989’s Battlefield, 2010’s Victory of the Daleks, and 1967’s The Wheel in Space all find themselves confined to these middle-grounds of the results table.

Interestingly, 1967’s The Enemy of the World finds itself placed at number 191. The poll was conducted before its recovery to the BBC was widely known, and long before Doctor Who fans were able to watch the story for the first time in 45 years. All of us at Doctor Who Online are keen to see how that story might place now that it’s complete and back in the archives!

Another lost classic, 1964’s Marco Polo has seen a significant drop in its approval rating since 2009 - tumbling almost 15% to place at just 184 on our poll (in 2009’s ‘Mighty 200’ listings, it was at a much more healthy 65th place). We wonder if this story’s fortunes may take a turn for the better were it to appear back in the archives sometime soon?

Just missing out on a spot in the top 100 Doctor Who stories of all time are a number of stories which seem to generate no strong emotions at all. 1976’s The Android Invasion, 2005’s The End of the World, 1988’s The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and 1965’s The Chase never seem to draw much negative opinion, but they don’t seem to court a lot of positive reactions either. 

The Eighth Doctor’s single full-length TV outing finds itself sat at number 144, placing it just inside the lower half of all stories, while the very first Doctor Who story - 1963’s An Unearthly Child - just manages to slip into the upper half, sitting comfortably at number 112.

As we move into the top 100 stories, we’re still in a land defined by those so-so tales which never seem to attract a great deal of fuss. The final story of Doctor Who’s original 1963-1989 run, Survival, sits at number 76… making it only one place higher than the first story of the 21st century revival Rose, coming in at number 77.

2013’s The Bells of St John is the lowest-placing appearance of The Great Intelligence on our list at number 84, though the creature’s first appearance also falls within this section of the poll, with 1967’s The Abominable Snowmen falling at number 68, and its return to the programme in 2012’s The Snowmen coming in slightly higher in position 54. 

Another 1960’s creation - The Ice Warriors - find four of their five stories confined to this period of the list with their 1969 appearance in The Seeds of Death being rated as their best adventure, and placing at number 78. 1967’s The Ice Warriors doesn't fall far behind (number 80), with the first of their two 1970’s adventures on Peladon coming in at number 81. Their 2013 return to the series in Cold War rates slightly lower at number 95, while their second outing in the Citadel on Peladon lags way behind at number 217.

Entering the top 50 means that we’re starting to see some familiar names cropping up - stories which are considered to be among the very best that Doctor Who has to offer. 1976’s The Brain of Morbius, 1970’s Inferno, 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks, and2006’s The Girl in the Fireplace have long geld their position as ‘fan favourites’, and defend that status well here.

We’re also seeing the Eleventh Doctor rating rarely well here, too, with the two highest new entries to the list coming in at numbers 16 and 15 - representing The Name of the Doctor (2013) and 2010’s debut for the character The Eleventh Hour. 

Also missing from the 2009 poll were the Tenth Doctor’s final two adventures, and both of these stories take their places here, with The Waters of Mars gaining a respectable place at number 30, and the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration story - The End of Time - coming in at number 41.

Last but not least, we’ve reached the final nine - those stories which are considered to be the absolute pinnacle of Doctor Who. 

The list is likely no surprise to fans who remember the ‘Mighty 200’ poll, and several stories crop up here which also graced the top spots back then. 1977’s The Robots of Death, 1984’s The Caves of Androzani, and 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks are always considered to be winners, but it’s 2007’s Blink which takes the number one position, pulling in a massive 92.81%.

In one of those perfectly neat little Doctor Who moments, this means that you’ve voted the Tenth Doctor into both the top and bottom places on the poll - there’s a neat kind of symmetry to that! 

We want to thank everyone for voting - it's been really fun to see all the results come in as stories jostled for their positions. The top spot seemed to be on a rotation every day, with each of the top five stories occupying the position at some point before the final list settled into place. Over all, though more stories have dropped in popularity than grown, the scores on average are slightly higher than they were for the 2009 poll, with both the lowest and highest rated stories sporting a higher score than they previously held - we love Doctor Who now more than ever!

[Source: Doctor Who Online]

Will there be a new favourite Doctor Who story in time for the programme’s 50th Anniversary? There’s only one way to find out - get voting! 

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

Day 396: Planet of the Spiders, Episode Two

Dear diary,

After a great start to the story in yesterday’s episode, it suddenly feels as though they’re not really taking this very seriously. Half of this episode - half - is given over to a chase, which seems to simply be a way to let Jon Pertwee drive a few different vehicles before he gives up the role. I’ve always known about the extended chase scene in this story (a similar sequence during Invasion of the Dinosaurs felt like something of a precursor to it), but I had no idea that it was quite so… silly.

It starts with Lupton stealing the Whomobile (sigh, thankfully making its last appearance in the programme), and the Doctor instructing his friends to drop him at the airfield before they give chase in Bessie. He then takes to the skies in a little gyrocopter, relaying directions to the Brigadier at the wheel of his little yellow roadster. After a while, a police car joins the action, and eventually all the vehicles end up parked in one place. Lupton flees, but then when everyone has their back turned, he hops into the gyrocopter and takes to the skies! Never fear, though, because it turns out that the Whomobile is capable of flight (‘well ‘of course we’re flying), so they continue to keep right on his tail. After a while, Lupton runs out of fuel, so has to land. No worry, though, we’ve made chase on land and in the air, so he may as well steal someone’s boat and give chase across water, too! You can’t have the Doctor follow in another boat, though. Oh no, that would be too easy. There’s not enough spectacle in that, so Pertwee gets his hands on a hovercraft, and we get to watch him drive it over land and sea - and tramps - in pursuit of his enemy. After around twelve minutes of this, the spider on Lupton’s back gets a bit bored, and so teleports him away to safety. It seems to take a lot of mental energy to do it, but surely taking that action right back at UNIT HQ, leaving the soldiers to run around after thin air, would have been a bit more practical? We do however get another element to add to our growing list of ‘Pertwee-era Stalwarts’ turning up during the chase - one of the junctions involved previously appeared during The Dæmons a few years ago!

I shouldn’t really be all that bothered by it. This is, after all, Pertwee’s last outing, and we all know he has something of a love for chase scenes. He loves to get his hands on all kinds of new vehicles (heck, the only reason we’ve even got a Whomobile is because he personally commissioned the design and construction of the thing), so I suppose I can overlook it taking up such a large portion of the episode. It all just takes me out of things a bit. Episode One set up a really interesting story, and it feels at times like this second instalment is washing it all down the drain.

Still, it has to be said that the brief appearance of a spider at the very beginning is rather well done. Oh, I know, people mock the spiders in this story, and yes, I guess it’s not the most brilliant model in the world, but it would have freaked me out at 8 years old. I love the idea of it jumping onto Lupton’s back and then turning invisible as their minds meld, and there’s something really quite un-nerving about him explaining that the spider hasn’t gone anywhere, but is there with them all the time. I think keeping their appearances to a minimum is working wonders for the story - as I said yesterday, I’m not a big fan of the eight-legged creatures, but even I’m getting quite excited to see them arrive in the narrative properly…

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

Day 395: Planet of the Spiders, Episode One

Dear diary,

Throughout the course of The 50 Year Diary, I’ve been keeping a track of various loose ‘Story Arcs’. There’s quite a few of them in hindsight - The Doctor mellowing from the character seen in An Unearthly Child to the man we know now, the evolution of the Sonic Screwdriver, the Doctor being on the run from his people before getting recaptured, and later his attempts to escape his exile before being set free after the events of The Three Doctors. What we’re seeing in this story, though, is Doctor Who’s first real attempt to resolved an arc, by drawing together various elements from across the last few years.

Obviously, we’ve got another return for UNIT in the form of the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton. Mike Yates has called up with something possibly worth them following up, and reference is made to him leaving the Taskforce and seeking some kind of new life for himself. Jo’s involved by sending back the Metebilis crystal last seen a year ago in The Green Death, and there’s even a reference to the fact that they’ve not found their toadstool yet during their travels in South America.

Even the cast is a throwback to Pertwee stories of old. Aside from Cyril Shaps, who shows up to play the shot-lived role of Professor Clegg (having previously appeared in The Ambassadors of Death), there’s also John Dearth (The voice of BOSS during The Green Death), Christopher Burgess (Terror of the Autons), Terence Lodge (Carnival of Monsters), Andrew Staines (who’s appeared in both of those last two stories, Terror of the Autons and Carnival of Monsters), and Kevin Lindsay (The Time Warrior). Those are just the names from this single episode, but there’s a few more connections to other tales before the episode is out, including Pat Gorman, Terry Walsh, Stuart Fell, George Cormack, Walter Randall, Max Faulkner, Ysanne Churchman, and - even though she herself had never been in Doctor Who before - Roger Delgado’s widow, Kismet Delgado. The thole thing is a great big Third Doctor fest.

I’ve always avoided watching this story before now (even when I bought the DVD, it went on the shelf with only a few of the extras being watched), mostly because of the title alone. I’m not all that fond of spiders, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m completely arachnophobic, and I can handle spiders (little ones, just), I’m not that keen on the idea of a whole story dedicated to a race of giant spiders. I’m glad that’s put me off for so long, though, because this story seems to very much be the end of the Third Doctor’s era. It’s a proper summing up and sending off from what I can tell, and I’m glad that my first experience of this tale comes having just watched all of Pertwee’s other adventures before it.

It’s very much being set up to prepare us for the regeneration, and some of the Buddhist ideas seem very fitting for the idea of the Doctor being reborn. It has to be said that one line in particular seems perfectly in tune with a regeneration story; ‘The old man must die, and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed…’

And I’m already hooked into the story. I love the idea that Mike finds himself caught up in these events and that’s what brings the rest of the group in, and I really love that his way of making contact is to suggest it as a story to girl reporter Sarah. We’re a season on from her debut now, but her job is still being brought up and made important to the plot, and that’s rather nice. I know it gets mentioned a bit in Robot, but after that as far as I can recall it’s mostly forgotten about, so it’s good to see it being given a final stand here before Barry Letts bows out from the programme shortly.

The setting that Mike brings her to - a large country house - feels like just the type of location that’s right for a 1970s Doctor Who story, and there’s something genuinely creepy about the chanting that echoes down the halls. The set design is particularly nice, too, and a great example of how well the BBC do with something like this. I love the detail of the cobwebs lining almost every surface in the basement, and it works as something of a signpost towards what’s coming through from the meditation.

There’s also a lot of fun to be had with the episode. Sarah and Mike spark off each other nicely, each teasing the other when they do something particularly clever or manipulative. The highlight has to be the Doctor and the Brigadier off to see the shows at a gentleman’s club. I love the way the Brig’s attention perks up when they announce the ‘Exotic Turkish Delight of the East’, and his enthusiastic applause for the performance later on. Nick Courtney is a real source for humour throughout this episode, really, and his reaction to the story of his watch is great fun, too.

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

Day 394: The Monster of Peladon, Episode Six

Dear diary,

Poor Sarah Jane isn’t half being put through the wringer at the moment, don’t you think? A few episodes ago, she was told that when the Sonic Lance self destructs, anyone in the area (including the Doctor) will be killed instantly. She then watches in horror as the machine goes up in smoke, and the Doctor’s unconscious body vanished behind the fallout. For half of the next episode, she believes her friend to be dead. She cries, she mourns for him, she foreshadows his ‘where there’s life…’ speech from the next story… and then she finds out that he is, in fact, alive and well.

Today, she finds that he’s succumbed to the Refinery’s alarm system and is lying back in his chair, somewhat lifeless. She hurries down to see him and once again the tears start as she mourns the death of her friend. There’s a lovely shot with the Doctor’s body in the foreground as Sarah looks on through the hole in the door, and then she slowly enters the room and approaches her friend… just in time for him to wake up! Now it’s his turn for some foreshadowing, as he comes round, looks at Sarah, and questions: ‘tears?’

And then in the next story, she’ll have to go through this roller coaster of emotions all over again when she actually does watch him die! Crikey. It’s lovely to watch Elisabeth Sladen’s performance during her mourning - especially this time around, where the whole thing is played far more as though it were really the end of the Third Doctor. The shocked face she pulls when he starts to come round is hilarious and brilliant, and it really helps to shift the tone of the scene. Impressively, Sarah Jane doesn’t worry about the fact that she’ll be stranded on Peladon if the Doctor dies, that thought doesn’t even seem to cross her mind. It’s all about mourning her friend, the most alive man she’s ever known.

Something I quite like about the Doctor and Sarah’s relationship is that - at least for now - she’s not a full-time companion. ‘Come on, Sarah,’ the Doctor says as they enter the TARDIS, ‘it’s time I took you home…’. There have been earlier hints towards this, too, but it’s quite nice to see. In a way, it’s the same model that Liz Shaw and Jo Grant set up, although by the time the Doctor had gotten the TARDIS working again, the implication was that he’d been dragging Jo around the universe for longer and longer stretches at a time, and she was longing to return to Earth by the end of Season Ten.

With the TARDIS in (almost) fully working order by now, there’s no need for the Doctor’s companions to spent their every waking moment with him, and it’s a model that Steven Moffat seems to favour with his companions: the Doctor arrives, scoops them off for some adventures, then pops them home again so they can carry on with their normal life for a bit. I know that some people really aren’t keen on this way of TARDIS travel, but for me it feels like the most natural and realistic way to depict the Doctor’s various friendships. I’ve always thought that if I were traveling round in a battered old police box, I’d have a revolving set of companions whom I could take on various adventures most suited to their interests - you’d surely get the most fun from that! Maybe when Matt Smith’s Doctor isn’t picking up Clara for her Wednesday adventure, he’s got another few companions? One for every day of the week?

In all, I’m actually rather sorry to be leaving Peladon. I know, I never thought I’d say that, either. Our first trip here a few seasons ago wasn’t my favourite story (indeed, it averaged only 4.5 in my ratings, which places it towards the bottom of my list overall), and I’d been somewhat dreading this return journey. Several people had warned me that this was the worse of the two tales, but I’ve found myself going against the grain. Sure, there’s bits of this story which have left me a little cold, and without much to say, but then there’s that fourth episode, which was so close to perfect and had me completely hooked. It’s almost a perfect metaphor for how I’ve found the Pertwee era as a whole - better than I was expected, with one or two moments of near-perfection.

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

Day 393: The Monster of Peladon, Episode Five

Dear diary,

It’s a bit of a roller coaster this week, isn’t it? Some days, I have loads and loads to say about a story, and other days I’m left not really knowing what to talk about. Yesterday, for example, completely knocked me for six. I couldn’t believe how good the episode was, and I filled up a whole page with notes on things to talk about. Today, I’ve only written two things down.

They’re both in relation to the Doctor being ‘killed’ in the explosion at the end of yesterday’s episode. Sarah Jane is completely stunned by it, and refuses to believe that he’s dead. It’ her description of him that really got me, though, when she says that he was ‘the most alive man’ she’d ever met, so it was just impossible to think of him as being dead. She then goes on to tell us that the Doctor often told her that there was hope ‘where there’s life…’. Now, I don’t know if this is a conscious foreshadowing of his regeneration in the next story (after all, those are some of his final words), or if it’s just a lucky fluke, but it’s rather moving all the same. The only downside is that we’ve never heard him extolling this advice - I’m wondering if it would have given us even more of an impact?

I’m a bit concerned about the way in which Sarah notices the Doctor still alive and well, and it’s because the whole security set up on Peladon has been bothering me for a few episodes now. I know Eckersley is working as an undercover agent for the Ice Warriors, and as such it’s wise for him to keep an eye on events around the Citadel, but he seems to have a security camera everywhere that it’s needed. Sarah informs them all that the sonic lance is being held over in a remote cave across from the Citadel… so they’re able to check, because there happens to be a CCTV camera in that very cave*.

Later, when flicking through the various camera feeds, Sarah happens upon a couple of them from inside the Refinery! If there’s a direct feed to the place, why has it taken so long for anyone to check if it was empty before now? I’ll give you that Eckersley might simply have been skipping over that feed when he was looking through, to keep his secret safe, but surely my beloved Alpha may have looked? Or the Doctor? Or even Sarah, since she seems relatively proficient with the technology!

On the whole, this episode feels like a step back from yesterday. I’m under no illusion, again, that I’m watching an episode of the TV series Doctor Who, being filmed in a studio with a good cast. Yesterday, I was so caught up in the drama of it all. A shame, but fantastic episodes always make the next in line feel a little sub-par…

*Mind you, I am willing to award points for it cutting to a previously-unseen high-angle shot of the action in the cave. So often, with things like this, the security footage would cut directly to an angle that we’ve already been watching, which does somewhat take you out of events. Here, at least, it feels like they’re trying.

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

Day 392: The Monster of Peladon, Episode Four

Dear diary,

You know the stakes in a story are pretty dire when the Doctor regenerates! I was as shocked as you. For years, I’ve always thought that the Third Doctor dies at the end of Planet of the Spiders, but here, during the fight against Ettis, Jon Pertwee hangs up his frilly shirt, and a new actor takes on the part of the new incarnation…

TERRY WALSH IS THE DOCTOR!

Oh, ok, I’m being unfair. I think Jon Pertwee’s back problems had a pretty major impact on his final season in the role, so it’s no great surprise that we see Walsh jumping in to help out during this final battle. That said, it is a pretty clear shot we get of his face, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time we got such a full-on view of a Doctor’s stand-in.

Still, that’s a minor quibble really because - and make sure you’re sitting down, because you’ll need to be - I bloody loved this episode. Literally, right from the start I was gripped. I try usually to give my full attention to the episodes when I watch them (long term readers may recall that in the early days of the Diary, my getting distracted away from an episode was a sign of it being a bit poor), but sometimes they’re on while I do other things. Today’s plan was to set up the episode on the computer and watch it while I folded some washing. Both things were chores, I thought (although Monster of Peladon is turning out to be far less of a chore than I’d been anticipating), so it made sense to do them together.

As I sit down to type out this entry, I’m only a few minutes from the end of the episode. Sometimes I’ll muse over what to write for some time - hours in some cases! - and other times, I just can’t wait to get sat down and start spilling all my thoughts out. Somewhere behind me, a single bit of washing has managed to get folded, because I’ve been too caught up in the events on Peladon to really care about anything else that needs doing.

It’s just so tense all of a sudden. It’s as though the Ice Warriors have turned up and made this into a proper drama. Of course, I knew that they’d be arriving in the story at some stage - though I was surprised to see it be so late - but it still made a nice surprise for me at the end of yesterday’s episode when they emerged from behind a door to confront the Doctor. I’d assumed, the first time Sarah saw something hiding in the refinery, that it was an Ice Warrior. ‘Ooh, clever,’ I’d thought - largely sarcastically - ‘this time the Ice Warriors are back to being the bad guys!’

But then all the stuff had cropped up about calling in some kind of peace-keeping force from the Federation and it rapidly became clear that these would be the Ice Warriors. Ok, I thought, so it’s a rebel faction on the planet? Or maybe it wasn’t an Ice Warrior at all? But no, it’s far more interesting than that. All these Ice Warriors seem to be in league with each other, and it’s all part of some greater scheme, which I’m not entirely privy to yet.

And then you’ve got Azaxyr. To say that he’s rapidly become my favourite Ice Warrior to ever appear in the programme would be an understatement (he even has to compete with the surprise cameo appearance of Big Head Ice Warrior later in this episode). He’s cold and calculating, he’s got some of the greatest dialogue in the story so far, and Alan Bennion is turning in a fantastic performance. Bennion was also under the mask of Slaar in The Seeds of Death, and Izlyr during our last excursion to Peladon, but I can’t remember him making such an impact during either of those stories as he does here.

Some of his dialogue should really be considered quite clichéd, but I’m lapping it all up. A particular favourite has to be ‘’You forget, Doctor, I am your judge. Your jury and your executioner, too… perhaps”. Rubbish, yes. In any other situation I’d probably be complaining about just how typical that line is at a time like this… but I loved it. So beautyfully delivered, and his later channeling of Judge Dredd (several years before 2000AD) is just as great.

But even aside from Axaxyr, the rest of the story has taken a very dark turn. The Miners taking control of the Federation’s weapons has - until now - been the biggest threat in the story, but then they’re gunned down by the Ice Warriors moments after storming the throne room. We’ve reverted to the 1960s style of Ice Warrior weaponry, too, so we get a nice ‘pinch’ effect when their hit by a shot. The whole thing is done so quickly, and so emotionlessly, that it makes a real impact. Until now, the Miners haven’t really been more than a group of characters that all merge into one beneath their wigs for me, but suddenly I actually care that we’ve lost so many of them.

They get their revenge, though. The idea of turning up the heat and then overpowering the Warriors has been going on for as long as they’ve been a part of the programme, but here the Ice Warrior guards aren’t just overpowered, we actually get a shot of the Miners beating one to death! Oh, of course, that’s not made explicit, but the way the creature lays on the ground as a group of men crown round and attack it with various primitive weapons leaves little other alternative to the imagination.

And then you’ve got Ettis becoming a terrorist. I’ve mused before that the Peladon stories are more political than many Doctor Who tales, but dear god! The way he explains his plan to turn the high-tech mining equipment on the citadel and destroy everyone - which, we’re reminded, will include all the women and children as well as the Queen and the Federation members - is terrifying. The man’s gone completely mad, and it’s a very dark theme for the story to bring in. That he then tries to kill his friend in an attempt to stop the information leaking out just makes it even more gloomy.

People often talk about the rapidly-approaching Hinchcliffe and Holmes era of the programme being ‘dark’ and ‘gothic’, and while I’m sure that’s of evidence throughout their time in charge (I’ve not seen enough to comment yet), this is the first time that I’ve ever seen Doctor Who do something quite so dark, or quite so close to reality. Of course, we’ve got the wigs and the Warriors and the Hermaphradite Hexapods, but there’s a real undercurrent of 1970s politics in all this that makes it genuinely quite scary. I never thought I’d say it about an episode from a Peladon story, but this is one of the very best bits of drama that the programme has ever given us.

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

Day 391: The Monster of Peladon, Episode Three

Dear diary,

You tend to find, when undertaking a marathon like this, that all sorts of strange coincidences are thrown up. A few years ago, when listening to all the Eighth Doctor audio plays in order for Memoirs of an Edwardian Adventurer, it was often the case that events in the stories would correspond oddly with things happening in the news, and both Nick Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen passed away just a week-or-so before we were due to reach their appearances in the stories for the marathon. With a programme that’s run as long as Doctor Who, there’s connections to pretty much anything you care to mention, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sometimes things tie together in a slightly unusual fluke.

Today, for example, I found myself having a conversation with a client about radio series The Archers. I can pin-point exactly where the conversation came from – I was trying to sell them on some Big Finish audios! They’d mentioned about listening to radio plays, citing a lot of the old Paul Temple productions from the BBC, and I’d recommended them the fab new Avengers lost episodes collection, because it sounded right up their street. From there, the conversation shifted to the fact that they’d been an avid listener for the last 40 years of The Archers, and the conversation went on from there.

Because I’m a fan of archive telly, I’ve got a vague idea about archive radio, too. I’m by no means an expert (heck, It’s generous to even call me a novice!), so I find myself falling back on the few things that I do know if I find myself in a conversation about such things. For The Archers, the only thing I really know is that the night ITV launched in 1955, was the same night that the radio serial killed off Grace Archer, one of the main characters. I only know the fact because it’s been a topic of some contention since – was it a clever move by the BBC to overshadow the opening night of their first rival? For all that it matters, in my opinion, of course it was a clever trick!

It was only later on today that I remembered the actress who’d voiced Grace Archer was Ysanne Churchman – who appears in The Monster of Peladon providing the voice of Alpha Centauri! She’ll be back in the next story, too, voicing some of the spiders. As I say, with a programme as long-running as Doctor Who, it’s not great surprise that there’s connections to another long-running BBC programme (there’s loads more, too. Perhaps most famously, 1980s Davros actor Terry Molloy has voiced a regular character in the soap for over 40 years), but it is one of those odd coincidences that I should find myself discussing the work of Churchman while I’m watching this story – and completely out-of-the-blue!

I have to admit, I do love Alpha Centauri. How can you not? The voice is a real highlight (I could listen to it all day long! Time for an audio spin off?), but the whole character is just entirely watchable. Thinking back to The Curse of Peladon, Centauri was high on my list for praise then, too…

””I’ve always assumed that it was a fairly basic creature, with everything pieced together as best they could. Actually, it’s really well made. There’s a few moments when the head has to turn, and it just looks good! Usually things like this would leave me complaining that it doesn’t quite work out, but no! Hooray! I think if this story wants to do better in my estimations, we need more of Centauri!

More Centauri is something this story is giving us in droves, and they’ve even made a few modifications to the costume, so it’s even better here. I think the cape is different, for example, and spending so much time in the creature’s company means that I’m getting to enjoy all the little movements and gestures, too. The blink of the eye, to way the claws pinch and move in unison when gesticulating (an effect achieved, I presume, by the very basic application of a bit of string between the various appendages!)… it really is hard not to love this Hermaphrodite Hexapod, isn’t it?

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

Day 390: The Monster of Peladon, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Since picking up on it again during The Time Warrior, I can’t help but keep noticing just how great scenes shot on film look in this series. There it was sequences of soldiers storming a castle. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, it was the Doctor watching two dinosaurs battle it out on the streets of London. In Death to the Daleks we had that lovely shot of the pepperpots taking command on the planet’s surface. Today… well, today isn’t anything quite as exciting as all that. It’s a simple scene of the Doctor stood in a tunnel, talking to a couple of the miners.

It’s not a particularly thrilling scene, and there’s very little action involved – there’s only a couple of alternate shots, for example – but it’s remarkable how it makes everything look so much richer. Even down to the Pel’s rather distinctive wigs, it looks like there’s more money being spent than there really is.

Not that I’m able to complain all that much, though. No matter how much I can moan on about the Peladon tales being far from the most thrilling of Doctor Who adventures, they do look very sumptuous. Everything from the look of the caverns, to the throne room, the costumes, and the rest of the Citadel is beautifully designed, and there’s a real cohesion to all the elements: You really get a sense of this as being a society which has developed over time as opposed to simply being erected in TV Centre for a few weeks every couple of years.

Indeed, the area where the design lets me down is the more high-tech Federation area, which comes across as somewhat bland and completely lacks the character of the other sets. It’s the same kind of design that you see in many ‘futuristic’ sets from this era, and we’ve seen one or two too many in recent weeks for it to make much of an impact here.

Perhaps my favourite piece of design, though, is Sarah Jane’s costume. I really like this one, and thinking about it, this may be my favourite of all her outfits. It’s a look that wouldn’t be out-of-place today, and there’s echoes of it in some of Jenna Coleman’s first publicity shots for the programme. When people talk about Sarah’s clothes, it’s usually to mention things like her Hand of Fear Andy Pandy outfit, or the one she rocks in The Five Doctors, and they’re usually brought up because they’re a bit more… out there. For me, this look doesn’t get enough of a look in – and it really should!

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

Day 389: The Monster of Peladon, Episode One

Dear diary,

As ever, wind and rain lashed at the walls of the Citadel of Peladon. Perched high on the side of a mountain, the fortress had stood the onslaught of such weather for centuries. Today we different, though, for today, there was another sound echoing around the large, grey halls. The wheezing, groaning of the TARDIS engines died away as the Doctor stepped out of the battered, blue police box. His new companion, Sarah Jane, followed close behind.

“The Citadel of Peladon, Sarah,” he announced, gesturing out into the room. “One of the most interesting…”

Before the man could finish, Will sat bolt upright, and stared at the screen in utter disbelief. Interesting? Interesting!? The last time the Doctor had visited Peladon, a couple of seasons ago with companion Jo Grant in tow, it had been far from interesting…

I don’t think it’s especially hard to guess that I’ve not really been eagerly anticipating this one. The Curse of Peladon left me completely cold (Indeed, it holds the lowest average rating that I’ve given to any Pertwee story), and the prospect of returning to the planet in a story that I’ve seen described as ‘a remake, but a third longer’ hasn’t especially been filling me with a great deal of excitement.

That said, I was actually quite pleased to see the Citadel again in our opening shot, being attacked by the weather. I’ve mused before that I like the Doctor having a few friends throughout time and space that he can drop in on now and then, and the idea that he’s been meaning to pop back in and catch up with things here is great – as we’re reminded several times throughout the episode, the Doctor is one of the key reasons that Peladon joined the Federation in the first place, so it makes sense that he should call round and make sure that everything is ok.

I think I’m actually surprised by how pleased I am to see all these elements making a return – the Throne Room, Aggador, there’s even mention of characters and situations from the first story, and it all creates a rather nice sense of nostalgia.

It also means – make sure you’re sitting down for this one – that I’m actually quite enjoying things! I know! Don’t get me wrong, I’m expecting this feeling to wear off by the end of the story (I’m already dreading this plot being stretched out over six whole episodes), but for now I’m actually engaged in events, and I’m interested to see where they go from here. I’ve always known that the first Peledon tale involved them debating whether to join the Federation, and that the second is more to do with the miner’s strikes of the time, but I don’t know where the story goes from here. I don’t know if Peleadon stay in the Federation, or opt to leave again, and I’m quite keen to find out.

Things are helped by the fact that the Doctor and Sarah’s relationship is growing better with every new episode. I love the way that she teases him here (the way she playfully calls him a ‘name dropper’ when he refers to the king as his good friend is a real highlight!), and the relationship reminds me somewhat of the one between Clara and the Eleventh Doctor, where she won’t take and of his grand ‘Time Lord nonsense’, and just cuts him down to size with a few well placed words and a smile. People always talk about the way Sarah Jane acts with the Fourth Doctor as being that of absolute best friends, but I think it’s clear that she’s pretty fond of the Third incarnation, too.

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

Day 388: Death to the Daleks, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Somewhat ironically, just this afternoon at work, I was telling a college about the way I used to melt polystyrene. We’ve just been doing a rather large re-build of some sections, and we’ve amassed quite a big pile of polystyrene waiting to be crushed into little bricks for recycling. I was explaining how - when I was a kid - I used to cut up chunks of polystyrene to make shapes (usually castles, complete with cocktail sticks to put bars over the windows) and then allow drops of glue to melt away at the material. It used to fascinate me, the way that it simply ate at the polystyrene until there was little remaining.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I reached the end of today’s episode to find that they’d used pretty much that exact same technique to depict the city collapsing in on itself! It’s well done, and even though we get a shot of the beacon being blown up (one which, I’m sorry to say’ doesn’t really work for me. That entire part of the structure breaks off in one, which just makes it look more like a model), it’s nice to see that they’ve gone for something other than simply blowing up one of the main settings for the ending of this story. Makes a nice break with tradition.

It’s a shame that the city has somewhat bored me today. Having been impressed by the various logic puzzles at the end of the last episode, the ones here become increasingly dull - essentially boiling down to ‘spend some time in this empty room without either going mad or killing each other. And, of course, we’ve got the resolution to that bizarre ‘floor tiles’ cliffhanger from yesterday, too, which boils down - after some careful examination from the Sonic Screwdriver - to simply ‘don’t stand on the red tiles, now there’s a good chap.

That’s not to say there aren’t nice bits - the person watching on the screen adds a nice, sinister edge to the proceedings, and I rather like the idea that he’s been sat there so long that he turns to dust the second the air in the room gets to move again. The only downside is that all the tension the appearance of this mysterious figure is dissipated almost instantly, and then the Doctor simply has to fiddle with a few wires before making his way back out of the city once more! It’s even worse for the Daleks, who trundle along, getting a bit beaten up by the various tests along the way, are attacked by the ‘antibodies’, and then spin round and leave again! They’re not even the comedy Daleks from stories like The Chase, which is a pity, because I rather like the idea of a Dalek double act trying to make their way through a series of logic tests in a hyper-intelligent city!

You may have noticed that I’m not being all that warm towards today’s episode, and I’m sorry to report that it just hasn’t grabbed me. After such a strong start a few days ago, I’ve really gone off this story, and it’s turned out to be simply the slightly bland four episodes that I’d been expecting. Even the Daleks don’t really need to be there. The fact that they can’t use their weapons means that they’re not really all that integral to the plot, and the story might actually be more interesting were it to be a group of humans acting as the bad guys, who wish to take the minerals with them to spin a profit.

It’s a real pity in most ways, because that first episode showed some promise, and I thought that we might be in for something of a hidden gem with Death to the Daleks. I think I’m reduced to simply being glad that it’s only a four-part story, as opposed to six episodes long - I’ve little doubt that Terry could have stretched out the city’s many puzzles for another 23 minutes!

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

Day 387: Death to the Daleks, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I realised today that, despite not knowing much about this story, there was something else I was aware of from it – Belal. The design of this particular Exxilon (and his friend, I guess) has always struck me as a little bit rubbish, and when he first emerges after the cliffhanger resolution, I was a bit downhearted by it. I mean, of course I didn’t like it. The whole thing is an ill-fitting rubber suit, with an obvious join at the neck (a similar problem that beset the original Silurians). I’d always vaguely known of this costume – probably via a clip in something else – and I’d always thought it was rubbish, but when I was less than impressed by the alien creatures from Colony in Space, I assumed that I’d just mis-remembered one of those creatures as featuring in a later story.

I made a note about how rubbish the costume was, and continued to think it through the rest of the episode… until I started to quite like it. Yes, it is ill-fitting. Yes, it is ridiculously rubbery. Yes, the neck join is painfully obvious (and actually, that’s still the thing that niggles the most). And yet despite it all, it’s hard not to row fond of the creatures. I think it’s the huge eyes that do it, which would make sense if they mostly confine themselves to these caves (and in Episode One we’re told that the creatures only usually show up at night), and they’re quite cute in a way. The cloaks worn by the majority of them hide some of the costumes’ other flaws, but I can’t help but think that they just don’t look like a Doctor Who alien.

And actually, I like the idea that these people used to be highly advanced, space travellers. It’s even stated that they must have visited Earth and taught some of our own ancient civilisations how to construct huge structures in the style of their own city. It makes a nice change from the usual races where they’ve yet to develop any kind of technology of their own, and I love the idea that they became victims of their own success, creating an intelligent city so powerful that it takes over and becomes a kind of deity to the species.

In some ways, I even quite like the design of the city. The glowing wall decorations are very well realised (it’s using the same technique applied to the bow in Sliver Nemesis, I can recall that much from the documentary on the VHS for that story), and the whole tough-sensitive idea is very ahead of its time. It’s the kind of effect that you think they’d probably not do as well these days as they did back then – I get the feeling that if they were to design a futuristic, intelligent city now, it wouldn’t be quite as… streamlined… as this one.

I’m less keen on the city’s ‘roots’, though. I think I quite like the idea that it has these various tendrils that reach out and gather both knowledge and power (is that actually what they do? I may have just filled in that bit of detail in my own mind), but it seems strange that they turn up in the cave system and under some muddy water on the planet surface, acting more like animal life than technology. The various battles between the tendrils and the Daleks aren’t as exciting as I’d like them to be, but they do feel very much like something I can imagine the TV Comic stories doing – and I do love seeing a destroyed Dalek tumbling down into the water.

In all, the Daleks look better here. There’s a couple of shots towards the end of the episode, where they’re in a formation of three, shot from a slightly lower angle, and the sun appears to be setting somewhere in the distance. The combination of elements makes it quite a nice shot, and it’s surprising how much I like having the Daleks back in silver again – it makes them look so much better than the flat grey versions more familiar from other recent stories. The only real downside is having all the ‘bumps’ in black – they just look very dull, whereas the silver/blue versions used in the 1960s have always felt far more appealing to me!

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

Day 386: Death to the Daleks, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I’ve been wondering today about Doctor Who and ‘Jumping the Shark’. I’d imagine that several of my readers will be aware of what this means, but for those of you who aren’t, allow me to quote from TV Tropes;

””The moment when an established TV show changes in a significant manner in an attempt to stay fresh. Ironically, that moment makes the viewers realise that the show's finally run out of ideas. It's reached its peak, it'll never be the same again, and from now on it's all downhill.

It’s something of a contentious issue among fans of any number of TV shows, and there’s only a handful of programmes where the majority of people can pinpoint - and agree on - a single moment when their show has made the jump. For example, I’ve seen a lot of talk in recent weeks that the third series of Sherlock may have ‘Jumped the Shark’, while I’ve also seen plenty of people confirm that it was their favourite series of the three. The longer that a programme runs, the higher the chance that it will actually end up going off the boil somewhere, which surely makes Doctor Who a prime candidate?

Now I know what many of you are thinking. There’s a loud group of fandom who think the programme ‘Jumped the Shark’ during the 1980s, and depending on your age, the exact point you think it all went wrong can vary from the casting of Davison/Baker/McCoy (delete as applicable), or the introduction of the question marks on the lapel/that coat/question marks on a jumper, or even when Tegan/Peri/Mel/Ace joins the TARDIS as a new companion. There are even some of us who don’t think there’s any thing wrong with most of the above options, and have no issue with any of them.

You see, I think because of Doctor Who’s unique nature, it’s either not possible for it to ‘Jump the Shark’, or it’s constantly jumping it… and then jumping back again. Doctor Who changes too often for it to run out of ideas - it can go anywhere, do anything, and just when you’re getting bored of the regular cast, they go and change them. Take the latter half of Season 21, for instance, where in the space of four episodes we lose two companions and a Doctor, and gain a new one of each.

All that being said, I think that certain elements within the programme can become stale and - yes - ‘Jump the Shark’, and today I think we’ve witnessed the Daleks doing so. You probably know the moment that I’m thinking of. The Daleks have come to Exxilon in search of a rare mineral. The mysterious power drain on the planet which has stranded both the TARDIS and our guest cast’s spaceship has also rendered the Daleks’ weapons useless. Not to worry, though, because they’ve got a back up, using more conventional guns in place of their usual attack. So, off the Daleks pop to their convenient shooting range, where they test these new weapons… by taking pot-shots at a model TARDIS.

I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be funny. As in, genuinely, I just can’t tell. I think that it might be, but I spent more time wondering if the Daleks had stopped off at Toys’R’Us on the way to Exxilon and picked up one of the Character Options toys! It’s a tiny little scene, and it shouldn’t bother me so much (well, I’d not say it bothers me, as such, rather it just took me completely out of the story), but I think it’s a very definite moment when the Daleks ‘Jump the Shark’. We’ve had the pepper pots back once a season for three years, now, so I think I’m just starting to tire of them again. Their constant reappearance in the 1960s saw me growing to love them, but the more they turn up in colour, the less bothered by them I’m finding myself. Thankfully, they’ve only one more story before taking another extended break, and it’s supposed to be the ‘best Dalek story ever’, so I live in hope for next season…

I wonder if I might also be a bit put off by the fact that this episode feels like a distinct step-down from yesterday. I mused that the ‘daylight’ scenes at the tail end of Episode One weren’t anywhere near as atmospheric or beautiful as the night time ones had been, and seeing today’s episode entirely in daylight seems to have confirmed that to me. The scenes out on location is a quarry are just that - scenes out in a quarry. There’s no attempt to hide it at all, and the more I look at it, the less I like it. There’s some lovely direction on display, still, as we look down at our heroes, and up at the Exxilons, but they’re not a million miles away from similar shots in the last Dalek tale, but re-enacted in a smaller quarry with less scope.

Even when the Exxilons attack, and there’s arrows and spears being thrown everywhere, there’s not real tension or pace to the proceedings. It all feels a bit flat, and when we go from there to scenes down in the Exxilon’s sacrificial chamber… frankly I was just left cold by things. No wonder the sight of a Dalek shooting a toy TARDIS has me wondering if the show’s gone ‘past it’!

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

Day 385: Death to the Daleks, Episode One

Dear diary,

Over the last few seasons, there’s been plenty of examples of what I call ‘black spots’ in my Doctor Who knowledge. These represent stories which I know next-to-nothing about. As far as the Pertwee era stands, this is the last of these such stories, and in many ways it’s the last overall. The only things that I can tell you about this story is that it’s got Daleks in (as ever, the clue is in the title), and one of the cliffhangers has something to do with a tiled floor. Supposedly, it’s a rubbish cliffhanger.

Indeed, I think it’s the knowledge of that cliffhanger which has tarred my opinion of this story before I’ve even had a chance to watch it. You see, I’ve been dreading Death to the Daleks, because I’ve spent a number of years believing that it’s probably rubbish. I’ve not ever played the DVD, not even to look at the special features, because of a sense of general apathy towards the story.

Which, it turns out, may have been a huge mistake! This opening episode is pretty fantastic on the whole, and I’ve found myself completely caught up in it. I love it when this happens, and it’s why I always enjoy getting to stories I know so little about - there’s always the possibility that it can surprise me.

Now, of course, it’s the return of Terry Nation, which means the return of some age-old Terry Nation tropes. We’re left solely in the company of the Doctor and Sarah for the most part (we glimpse a hand about six minutes in, and some cloaked creatures 90 seconds on from that, but it’s a full fifteen minutes before any other humanoid characters actually turn up - until then, the only dialogue in the tale has come from one of our two regulars), there’s a small group of desperate military personnel (and, as in Planet of the Daleks, it’s not the regular leader who’s in charge), and then the Daleks turn up in a surprising cliffhanger that absolutely no one saw coming when the title was shown at the start of the story.

And while it seems that I’m complaining again about the reoccurrence of all these things, they’re done very well once again. The Doctor and Sarah being left to their own devices for so long is great fun, and I’m glad to see them in the TARDIS. I was trying to work it out in my head the other day - I knew that we wouldn’t see Tom Baker in the TARDIS console room until Season 13, and wondered if it would take that long for Sarah’s first shots in there, too, so it’s good to see that it’s not the case. My only slight disappointment is that the set is looking a bit tattier than I’d like - it’s far from the gleaming white space of The Three Doctors - and the Doctor seems to be collecting various bits of old fashioned wooden furniture to stand around as storage. As much as I mocked the flat-pack cabinets last time we were in here, this just feels like overkill.

It’s out on the planet’s surface that things really appeal to me, though. I got my first inkling that the story may not be as bad as I’d assumed from the DVD menu, which plays the shot of the TARDIS materialising on a dark, barren, smokey planet. Yes, of course it’s another quarry, but the way it’s shot and designed makes that look very different to the other recent examples. Even the studio-bound sequences on the planet’s surface look really good, and it’s got an atmosphere that I simply wasn’t expecting.

I think that a lot of it comes down to the lighting. Describing the episode to someone earlier, I could only settle for calling it ‘atmospheric’. Right from the start, as power is drained from the TARDIS, through to the eerie green glow on the planet, and the fact that some scenes are shot in what looks like near-darkness, it adds a level of threat to the proceedings that I’m not used to seeing in this series. If anything, it’s certainly one of the better-designed planets the show has seen. In the ‘daylight’ towards the end of the episode, things aren’t quite as effective, but I’ll wait and see more before I make my mind up on it.

So, yes, a great start that I wasn’t expecting. I love that - even after so long - this programme can still throw up surprise gems for me to enjoy!

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

Day 384: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Six

Dear diary,

I don’t know if it’s just me, but the film sequences in this episode look particularly impressive. It’s noticeable early on, when the Doctor watches two dinosaurs fighting in the street - there’s some great close-up shots of Pertwee’s face in more detail than I was expecting - and it’s repeated again later on, with some close ups of Nick Courtney. More and more it’s shots like this that make me impressed by Paddy Russell’s work on the programme, and for the first time I’m somewhat sad that we can’t actually watch The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, as I imagine that her work in black and white would have been stunning.

Unfortunately, such beautiful shots of the regulars on film don’t help the models when we cut back to them. I think I’ve worked out what my biggest problem with them is, though: it’s not so much the dinosaurs themselves as the sets that they’re being filmed on. Everything around them is just so flat. There’s one particular shot about halfway through, where from the angle we’re looking, you can clearly see that the wall behind the creature - windows, doors, and all - is just printed onto a flat piece of card. These sets are then lit very blandly all over, which doesn’t really help the effect. Add in a couple of not-great dinosaur models and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

It’s telling that the best looking model shot today comes i the form of the triceratops in the tube station. Shot in near-darkness, both the set and the dinosaur look pretty convincing, and even the introduction of the brigadier being CSO’d into shot doesn’t ruin the effect too much. Again, though, I think that the story is let down more by the use of colour separation overlay than anything else, and it’s a real shame.

On the whole, I’ve rather enjoyed Invasion of the Dinosaurs. I couldn’t really remember all that much about it from my previous viewing a decade ago, but there;s an awful lot to like in here. The plot strand of people being held underground put me in mind of The Enemy of the World, though I think the similarities are only evident because I’ve so recently re-watched the former tale. I’m glad to see Sarah churning them up and leading the revolution against professor Whittaker, as it feels like her character gaining another piece of that puzzle which will make her a fully-fledged companion.

As if we needed that fact to be cemented for us, there’s that beautiful end scene, in which she tells the Doctor that it’ll be ‘a long time before [she] gets back in that TARDIS’. The whole scene is played as two good friends, and it’s clear from the way she says it that she does fully intend to take another trip with him. The Doctor’s response, to tempt her with the description of a beautiful world, is great fun, and put me in mind of the scene in The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor becomes something of a schoolboy asking out Amy on their first date. It’s a beautiful way to end the episode.

It’s also a nice send off for Malcolm Hulke, who makes his final contribution to the series with this story. Although he co-wrote two stories for the Second Doctor, I always think of Hulke as being very much a Third Doctor-era writer, and he’s penned several stories that have shaped the last few years. The Silurians and The Sea Devils have contained ideas about preserving the Earth that crop up again in this story, and his futuristic tales in both Colony and Frontier in Space have been key to creating that shared vision of the future for this era which I’ve banged on about enough times since October. He’s always felt like just the right kind of writer for the Barry Letts period of the programme, so it’s perhaps fitting that we should see him bowing out just as the rest of this phase is changing, too.

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

Day 383: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Five

Dear diary,

I’ve seen it said that the thing which lets Invasion of the Dinosaurs down - even more than the titular monsters - is the story involving the ‘spaceship’. The general consensus seems to be that this entire strand of the plot lets the story down somewhat. It’s perhaps true that it’s not where you’d expect this story to go having watched that brilliant first episode, but at the same time I’m not sure that I take any issues with it.

For a start, I really do like the design of the spaceship itself. It’s very 1970s in places (and Emma, sitting in on this episode with me, was quick to point out that being kidnapped was the last of Sarah Jane’s worries, and that she should be more bothered by the double denim outfit that they’ve clothed her in. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how much I actually liked the costume…), but it works. It’s a nice design, and it stands out well from the other sets in the story. They’ve very cleverly kept the colour pallets for the ship and the underground base at opposite ends of the spectrum - you really do feel as though you could be somewhere else.

And it’s a chance for Sarah Jane to put her reasoning to the test again. I loved her during The Time Warrior, as she tried to work out where she might really be, and it’s good to see her doing a similar thing here. It’s clever that the injury on her head leads to her realising so definitely that something is wrong here, and her daring to use the airlock to escape is rather fun, too. It’s not all good news for her, though, as she heads right back to UNIT’s temporary HQ and admits that she knows everything to General Finch, before confirming that she’s not spoken to anyone else. Oh, Sarah…

Though, in fairness to her, there’s really no one that you can trust in this story, is there? Finch… is working with the bad guys. Sir Charles Grover… is working with the bad guys. heck, even dear old Mike Yates (who Sarah’s only known about as long as she’s know the other two men, but we’ve known for a few years by this point)… is working with the bad guys! It’s not often that the Doctor and his companions find themselves in such a tight situation, but it’s great fun to watch.

It also means that we get to watch as the Doctor’s friends are turned against him. We’ve known for several episodes now that Yates is working for the other side, but seeing the revelation from the rest of our regular cast is wonderful. The Brigadier is helpless to act (cleverly, we’ve been reminded in every episode that Finch is in charge and can over-rule any of the Brig’s decisions), and watching Yates be so stern with the Doctor is somewhat heartbreaking. Thankfully, it’s offset by a lovely scene in which Benton allows the Doctor to overpower him and escape (and that scene sets up a fantastic line when the Brigadier has been ordered to arrest his Seargent: ‘Well, Benton. Go and put yourself under arrest!’).

The fact that so long is given over to - essentially - a prolonged chase sequence should irritate me. Nothing’s really happening, it’s just filling time, but it feels somehow so right. Chases down country lanes, a helicopter… I know they’ll be doing something similar by the time we reach Planet of the Spiders in a couple of weeks, so it may not fare so well with me that time around, but it’s great for now. It also gives us some beautiful shots of the Third Doctor hiding in the woodlands. Though I’ve seen the story, I’d completely forgotten these images, but they’re stunning. Some great direction here.

And now… well… I can’t remember where we’re going, either. I can’t recall what actually happens at the end of this story. Do they blow up the base? Arrest everyone? I really can’t remember, and I can’t wait to find out…

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

Day 382: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Back during The Ambassadors of Death, I vaguely mused on part of that most contentious of all Doctor Who issues, the UNIT Dating Problem. I decided that – broadly speaking – the stories were set pretty much when they were broadcast in the early 1970s. Since then, there’s been a whole raft of additional information, and while this era of the programme is disassembled around me, I thought the time was right to have another think about it and see if I’m still of the same mind-set, almost one hundred episodes on.

To tell the truth, this train of thought was kicked off by Sir Charles’ comments in yesterday’s episode, about the hidden underground base being built ’20 years ago’ when the Cold War tension started to build up, and commenting that plans for other, similar, locations were shelved when the Cold War cooled down and came to a close. In the real world, the Cold War period stretched on throughout the rest of the 1970s and only really died off towards the latter part of the 80’s and the early 90’s. To me, these couple of lines seem to imply a mid-1980’s setting, by which time, presumably, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks assumed we might be in the clear.

You also have to wonder about the technology on show here. Sarah has been taken aboard a ‘spaceship’, but she doesn’t seem all that surprised that such a ship exists, and the other residents we see fully accept the idea, too. This is a universe in which Britain had sent several manned Mars missions by the early 1970s, so I suppose it’s just about feasible that such technology as this could be on show by now, too. To be honest, I still think we’re sat broadly at the time of broadcast - making Invasion of the Dinosaurs mid-70s. The About Time books suggest a date of late 1974 for both this story and The Time Warrior, with Jo’s departure from UNIT coming a few months earlier.

About once a week, I get a message asking me if I’ll be tackling the UNIT Dating Problem fully in The 50 Year Diary, but for now I think this is as far as I can go with it. I’m choosing to entirely ignore Sarah’s ‘I’m from 1980’ comment (though, I’m sure, there’ll be some discussion of it when I reach Pyramids of Mars), but the real issue doesn’t really come into effect until Mawdryn Undead, and I’ll not be hitting that story for a good long while yet. For now, I’m simply going to reaffirm my belief that the UNIT stories of the Third Doctor’s era all take place - roughly - at the same time they were first broadcast, and I’ll be ignoring anything that messes up that train of thought.

Besides, there’s something else that I want to talk about today - we’ve got our first appearance of the Doctor’s new wheels in the form of the Whomobile. I’m not sure what the general consensus among fans is about this particular vehicle (although my friend Nick summed it up quite well when I’ve just posed the thought to him: ‘It’s ****’), but I have to say that I’m not the biggest fan of it. I’ve never really been all that bothered by Bessie as the Doctor’s car, but it’s always felt far more fitting than this one does.

The Whomobile strikes me as a cheap gimmick (in some ways, it is. Jon Pertwee commissioned the vehicle himself in part to capitalise on the fact that he was playing TV’s most famous alien), and it’s always felt a bit… silly. There’s an interview somewhere where Pertwee talks of K9 as being such a stupid idea that he would have simply refused to have anything to do with - but I’d rather see the Doctor with K9 than with this particular car. It just takes me right out of the story seeing him drive it around London - suddenly I’m not watching a good drama, I’m watching ‘Doctor Who’. I’m sure there’s a bit in the next episode where the Doctor is driving one of the UNIT jeeps around, and that seems far more fitting to this incarnation than the Whomobile does - though at least here it’s confined to travelling on the ground…

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

Day 381: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Three

Dear diary,

It can’t have escaped your attention that – until now – I’ve made barely any mention of the key selling point in this story: the dinosaurs themselves. Invasion of the Dinosaurs received quite a late release on DVD, not appearing until early 2012. For years, therefore, people assumed that when it did finally see release, it would have some shiny new CGI dinosaurs to replace the effects created in the 1970s. It was a fair bet – several stories over the years had seen optional CGI enhancements, and in the later years of the range we were seeing more and more elaborate examples of this, with some stories seeing entire re-edits, and Kinda receiving a fantastic new CGI Mara.

When it was announced that the story wouldn’t be getting this kind of feature, some people almost took it as something of a personal slight against them. There were cries that they could have ‘simply’ used the CGI models from Primeval, or Walking With Dinosaurs, and the fact that it hadn’t been done was lazy. It was pointed out that for a number of reasons, it wouldn’t have been a simple task, and that they wouldn’t have been able to create a finished product that was good enough.

So, we’re left with the original dinosaurs. For as long as I can remember, fandom has considered them one of the worst special effects in the programme’s history, and it has to be said that they are a mixed bag. Early on in today’s episode, we get a shot face-on of the T-Rex, and it’s far from being the most effective image in the world. But then, barely a minute later, we get another shot of the creature shot from another angle and as – what appears to be – a different model. It’s suddenly far less plastic-looking, the eyes blink, and it’s not half bad.

Sadly, a minute or so after that, UNIT succeed in bringing down the creature, and we watch on as the model is simply left to drop to the floor. It almost works, but then it might just be me being charitable. We’re caught in this same situation for the rest of the episode – sometimes the dinosaur looks quite good (when it’s ‘sleeping’ in the warehouse, it moves slightly in the background of the shots giving the effect that it’s breathing), but then other times, such as when it’s forced to smash through a brick wall and wobble out of the hole, it’s far less effective, and actually takes away from the story.

I’ve never thought of the models as being that bad, so I’d obviously chosen to remember the more effective examples of the creatures. I can’t remember how much of an impact they make on the rest of the story (Indeed, the T-Rex in the warehouse was the only big dinosaur sequence that I could clearly recall from first viewing), but I don’t recall anything standing out as particularly awful.

I think what bothers me more in this episode is the dodgy use of CSO scattered throughout. When people head into the warehouse to interact with the dinosaur, you don’t have much of a chance to think about how the model looks, because you’re too busy focussing on the fact that this person is missing some of their face or body! The yellow fringing is also an issue when the warehouse is superimposed behind the windows of the Doctor’s make-shift lab, and sometimes is hugely distracting!

In some ways, this is probably one of the worst examples of CSO that we’ve seen in the programme, and it’s a shame, because it only emphasises some of the less impressive shots.

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

Day 380: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Two

Dear diary,

For all that I said yesterday about the episode really suiting the black-and-white look (the cliffhanger reprise today simply serves to prove my point - the shot of the Doctor and Sarah peering out from the back of their transport doesn’t look half as effective and moody in colour), I am glad to be back to colour now. The blue outfit that Pertwee wears in this story is my favourite of all his ‘colourful’ costumes, and I’m still holding out hope that one day we may see an action figure in this scheme.

There’s a lot more going on in this episode than I remembered. For a start, Sarah Jane is now well and truly cemented in as the new companion, and the Doctor even announces that she’s ‘currently acting as’ his assistant, to ensure that she won’t be evacuated from the city while he’s off building his dinosaur stun-gun. For me, the highlight is watching her speculate on where the dinosaurs come from. It’s great to see her character being given a mind of her own, and I love the way that the Doctor simply watches on as she debunks her own theories. He’s several paces ahead (though still no closer to the truth), but he’s enjoying watching her settle into this lifestyle as much as I am. I’m keen to see how they act together at the start of the next story - although he has an opportunity to get rid of her here, they’re still technically only together because she happened to stow away in the TARDIS. I want to see at what point the Doctor starts to treat her as a traditional ‘companion’.

You’ve also got Mike switching over to the dark side! Because it’s been so many years since I last saw this story, I’d completely forgotten just how early you discover that he’s working with the ‘bad guys’. I spent much of today’s episode making notes to the effect that ‘once you know Mike is working with them it seems so obvious’, but then I think it’s supposed to be! I’m glad to see that he references the events of The Green Death, and even states that he had to take some time off after them, during which he got himself caught up in all of this. It feels like a real evolution of the character to have him being affected by things that happened some time ago, and it’s helping to make this feel lilt the early Pertwee years, in which the stories all tied back to each other, if only very slightly.

It’s also nice to see that you’ve got the full UNIT team back together again here. I worried that now Jo has left the programme, it could feel like UNIT wasn’t quite the same anymore. The early season with Liz, for example, was missing Mike. It’s only after Jo has joined that we get the so-called UNIT ‘family’, and now one of the key members is gone. Thankfully, though, the others are on top form, and they’re even being played more for comedy than usual. ‘That’s yer actual pterodactyl’ may well be my favourite Benton line ever, and there’s an amusing scene in which the Doctor keeps getting interrupted by various members of the team - much to his growing frustration.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s nice to see this format can still keep going strong, even with all the changes that are occurring around the programme at this time. I think there’s almost a loose link between these final few Pertwee UNIT tales - The Green Death, this one, and Planet of the Spiders, as the group is slowly broken up. Jo left in the last one, Mike will be leaving (technically) with this one, and the Doctor is off in the next. It’s almost as though they’re trying to dismantle the era piece-by-piece, so that it’s not too much of a shock in a season or two’s time, when UNIT simply aren’t there anymore.

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

Day 379: Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode One

Dear diary,

And here I am – full circle. You see, Invasion of the Dinosaurs was my very first exposure to proper, telly, Doctor Who. I’d seen Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD once before when I was younger, and despite growing up (mostly) during the ‘Wilderness Years’, I had a vague idea of the programme - it’s a part of British cultural heritage. These days, I think you’re almost born with knowledge of what a TARDIS and a Dalek is, but back then it was a combination of older family members making jokes about the series, or episodes of Blue Peter produced by Richard Marson which made reference to it. Through general osmosis, I had a vague idea that it was about an alien who travelled through time and to alien planets fighting monsters.

So, let me set the scene. I’m in the local library, trying to choose a VHS to rent (remember those days?). I’m picky when it comes to watching things. I don’t really like films, you see. Unless it’s something that I’m really invested in, I just don’t have the patience for them. I much prefer a TV series, where you can watch the story unfold over a number of episodes, and see the evolution of the characters and the situation over time. I’d always choose series over film, and it’s telling that my collection of titles (on DVD and Blu-Ray, now, as opposed to tape) is somewhere around 85-90% television.

Anyway. Having spent an age trying to pick something, I finally noticed a Doctor Who tape in the ‘new releases’ section. Knowing vaguely that it was a TV show, and checking the number of episodes, I picked it up and took it home. Now, as many of my readers are likely to know, Episode One of this story only survives in the BBC’s archive as a black-and-white print. The other five are in full colour, but this first instalment is presented monochrome. The back cover to the tape even makes note of this: Episode One is in black and white. Due to the archive nature of this material, the sound and quality may vary occasionally..

That night, I took the tape next door to my grandparents to watch it with them. I was keen to see it in the company of someone who would remember the programme. Confidently, I told them that this was the very first Doctor Who story to be shot in colour – but that they’d only started with the second episode. I’m not sure how I’d managed to interpret that blurb text in this way, but for the next few years, I seriously believed that the series had been black and white until Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Episode Two.

I can’t actually remember when I realised that this wasn’t the case. It was probably sometime around the programme’s return to TV in 2005, when I started to take a greater interest in all things Doctor Who. I remember thinking that it was an odd decision. Why not just start a week earlier and do this whole story in colour? Still, I didn’t really care, because the episode looks great in black and white – it really suits the story. For the DVD release a couple of years back, they were able to partially recover colour for this episode, though it wasn’t presented as the default as there wasn’t the time nor resources available to recolour it in the same way as we’ve seen for The Mind of Evil or Planet of the Daleks.

I gave that version a watch when I first picked up the DVD and - while it’s not perfect - it’s watchable. It’s nice to see the episode presented in a format closer to the original transmission, but for me the black-and-white remains the default for these 23-and-a-half minutes. The episode just looks so good presented in this way. The best examples come during the pterodactyl attack in the warehouse, where a great use of shadow is really given depth by the lack of colour, and it’s almost as though you’re supposed to watch it this way.

This first episode aside, I’ve not actually seen this story again in full since that initial viewing, though I can recall enjoying it a lot at the time. It’s not hard to see why based on this beginning. Things hit the ground running, with some beautiful shots of a deserted London. It’s often noted that director Paddy Russell took out a small skeleton crew some weeks (or months) before shooting officially began, because she knew that this wads the only way to get the required shots. It’s completely worth it, though, because in the space of the opening 60-seconds, we’re brought right up to speed that all of London is deserted.

We move from shots of recognisable tourist spots - the Embankment and Trafalgar Square - to more suburban areas, where the shot of a lone dog scavenging for food could almost be direct from a zombie film. The shots are hugely evocative, and it’s the first time in a while that the Pertwee era has felt so real. When we’re running around with UNIT sometimes, it can still feel somewhat devoid of reality, because they’re investigating strange going-ons in a high tech scientific establishment, or a prison, or a fair ground. It’s good to get some link to very well known places to remind us that all of this is taking place against a back drop of the real world.

And from then, it doesn’t let up! As with The Tomb of the Cybermen being my favourite story, this episode being my first means that I’m probably being a little bit more lenient with it than I perhaps should be, but I really do love it. The Doctor and Sarah searching the empty streets is great. The comeuppance to the first looter we meet (and the shot of the ruined car!) is great. The Brigadier having to stand up to his superiors to make sure that UNIT can handle the situation the way he intends to is great. Basically, it’s all great.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane are up and running, now, too. I worried that this time around it would feel odd for them to simply continue on into another adventure, but I can’t actually imagine them being separated. They work too well together, and the scenes they share after being captured are great.

One thing I don’t really get, though, is the ‘surprise’ of the dinosaurs. They leave the latter half of the title off this episode (presumably to keep it a surprise), and the cliffhanger, in which the Doctor and Sarah peek out the back of the jeep to see a T-Rex towering over them is written and shot as if we’re supposed to be shocked to see a dinosaur… but we’ve already seen that same one smashing its way through a house earlier in the episode! Equally, the Brig and UNIT refer to ‘creatures’ and ‘incidents’, they all distinctly avoid saying the word ‘dinosaur’, but by that point we’ve seen the Doctor under attack from the pterodactyls! It’s an odd decision, and I’m not entirely sure what they were hoping to achieve…

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

Day 378: The Time Warrior, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Over the course of the last few series, I’ve spent a lot of time being impressed by the model shots in this era of Doctor Who. The ones that have been the most impressive are occasions when buildings blow up (and it always seems to fall in the final episode - The Dæmons, Day of the Daleks, The Green Death, Letts and Dicks like blowing the setting up when they’re done with it!). It seems fitting then that we end today’s episode with the castle blowing up. It’s been heralded for ages now, and the threat of the castle exploding when Lynx manages to fix his ship has been one of the key threats throughout the story, so it was clear based on past form that we’d be getting some fireworks in this episode.

Sadly, it’s nowhere near as good as the prior occasions that they’ve pulled the same trick. We see the Doctor, Sarah, and Hal dash away from the castle, giving us plenty of opportunity to enjoy the beautiful location, before we cut away to what appears to be an explosion in a quarry. It could almost work as a close up spliced in with footage of a model castle blowing up, but as the only representation of the explosion… it’s rubbish, frankly. And it’s a huge let down after the quality of everything else in the story.

Having finished the episode today, I decided to take a flick through the special features on the DVD (I try to avoid them until after watching the full story if I’ve never seen it before), and noticed that this is one of those stories to contain optional CGI enhancements. I didn’t bother to check out anywhere else that the effects might have been tweaked (on the whole, the story is fairly effects-light in ways that CGI could ‘improve’), but skipped right to the end of this episode again.

To begin with, I instantly thought ‘well that’s better’, as we cut from our location shots to a new image of the castle gates. It’s nicely framed, fits in well with the footage around it, and seems like a good starting point for an improved climax. Then the CGI flames turn up and… Ah. Well. You can’t win them all, I guess! I’m not sure I can say whether I preferred the original version or the CGI one – they’re both rubbish in different ways!

Elsewhere in this episode, the filmed segments have the effect of making me wish that all Doctor Who had been made this way. I’ve been saying that since as far back as the Hartnell years, but incidents like today’s ‘swinging on the chandelier’, where you cut from the set being shot on tape to the same set, actors, and action, all being mounted on film, really does highlight how much better the series could look. We’ve not had a cut this noticeable in a while, and I think that’s why it’s made me so keen to see an increase in film work again. Even the final shot, in which the Doctor and Sarah depart in the TARDIS looks great – the prop still looks quite tatty, but in an effective way!

Speaking of the pair, I’m really impressed by the way that the Doctor and Sarah have been handled in this story. It’s nice to see a more ‘traditional’ companion introduction (both Liz and Jo were forced on the Doctor, no matter how much he grew to enjoy their company), and I loved that she didn’t trust him completely right from the start. It adds a great dimension to the relationship, but by the end they’re completely smitten. The Doctor’s parting quip that he’s not a magician is nicely shot through by Sarah’s response, and they’re really clicking well. I know she’s around for a good while yet, and if it’s as lovely as this throughout, then I’m in for a real treat. Just as the arrival of the updated title sequence heralded the beginning of the end for the Third Doctor, the arrival of Sarah Jane Smith marks the start of what many fans call the ‘Golden Age’ of Doctor Who…

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

Day 377: The Time Warrior, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Mark today’s date in your own 50 Year Diary (surely you’ve all got one by now?), because today I realised… I quite like Jon Pertwee as the Doctor.

I know.

Let’s be honest, I’ve been vaguely suspecting as much since as far back as about Season Seven, when I was surprised at just how much fun I was getting from watching him in stories like Doctor Who and the Silurians or Inferno, but over the last few seasons I’ve been back and forth on my opinion like a bit of a yo-yo. If I were to draw a graph to represent my feelings towards this Doctor since Spearhead From Space it would generally bit a bit luke-warm, with sparks of love.

But there was a moment in today’s episode – I can pin-point it exactly, it’s when he’s throwing the ‘stink bombs’ over the castle battlements and has such a happy look on his face – where I just realised that actually, yeah, I do like him.

Now, that’s not to say that I’m suddenly revising my opinion of him as my least favourite Doctor, I’ll not really be able to analyse that until I’ve finished the marathon next year sometime. In actual fact, his current story average is sitting slightly above Hartnell’s, and yet I think I still prefer the First Doctor on the whole, in my heart.

Besides, Pertwee is probably taking something of a boost from the fact that today is the third episode of another very strong story for him. He’s being given a load of great dialogue, his spark with Sarah Jane is just right (At first, I was a bit disappointed that he’d managed to talk her round to his side so quickly, but actually it seems entirely fitting that he should do just this – he’s the Doctor! Of course he can bring her round!), and he even looks the part. I was never all that fond of his green jacket (like the purple one from last season’s Dalek story, it’s always felt a bit too bold), but it looks great against the medieval backdrop.

Speaking of the backdrop – how good does the time period look? It’s been a while since the production team have had to provide this kind of historical setting (I can’t think of any since at least Season Three), but it merely reinforces that old adage about how good the BBC are at the historical stories. The Time Warrior signals the start of several stories using locations like this – not necessarily historical tales, but ones set in a Middle Age society – over the next decade, so it’s good to see them mastering it so well.

And when Irongron goes to storm a neighbouring castle… we’ve sat through two and a half episodes of him boasting about the number of men currently in his employ, but now we actually get to see them! It’s quite small by some standards, but there’s still quite a lot of extras involved in the attack. The only downside is the one extra who seems to be having far too much fun as the explosions go off around him!

I’ve already touched on the Doctor’s brilliant dialogue in today’s episode, but it really does bear coming back to. It seems to be a running theme in Robert Holmes stories, and once again it’s becoming something that I can’t avoid drawing attention to. Today’s highlight is the Doctor explaining the Time Lords to Sarah, even if describing them as ‘galactic ticket inspectors’ does somewhat rob them of their mystery! This kind of stuffy bureaucrat image will go on to be typical of the way that Holmes sees them during his own time as Script Editor on the programme, and will characterise them for the rest of the ‘classic’ series.

This same scene also includes Sarah Jane growing to understand more about the Doctor’s character when she asks why he doesn’t simply just leave if he’s not behind all of this trouble, and he explains that he has to stay because he’s got ‘a job to do’. It’s the first time that this incarnation has towed the party line, as it were (it’s this statement which leads him into explaining how the Time Lords try to stamp out unlicensed time travel), and it’s a great way of looking at the Doctor.

He’s got the freedom to leave Earth whenever he pleases now, and Jo’s departure cuts another tie to the planet, but he continues to stick around with UNIT because he’s grown some affection for them. It’s quite sweet, in a way, and it’s the perfect end-point for the evolution his character was experiencing during Seasons Seven and Eight.

It also puts me in mind of a similar scene between the Doctor and Rose during Bad Wolf, in which they discuss how easy it would be just to hop in the TARDIS and leave the Gamestation to its fate. It’s the Doctor who makes the suggestion to Rose, telling her that it is another option, but she replies that he’s never do it. It’s not hard to see the correlation between that scene, and this one here. If you’re going to borrow from Doctor Who’s past, then borrow from the best!

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

Day 376: The Time Warrior, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I’m going to start today by saying ‘ooh, look, new titles sequence!’. Not because I have anything particularly interesting or profound to say about it, but simply because it debuted in yesterday’s episode, and the longer I go without mentioning it, the more it’ll look like I’ve simply not noticed. For many people, this is the dawning days of the Doctor Who title sequence, the blue vortex and the diamond logo. I’m going to have to be honest, though, and say that I don’t really care that much for it. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s never been my favourite (I prefer both of the 1960s versions, for example. Or the 2005 – 2010 one. I think I prefer the current one, too). Of course, it doesn’t reach its most iconic style until the start of the next series, with the inclusion of Tom Baker and a TARDIS, but you can clearly see the through-line from here to there – they just update it to reflect the new Doctor!

Anyway! To business! I was surprised today, watching the cliff hanger reprise, just how rubbish Sarah Jane comes across. She’s being dragged inside the castle, events totally out of her control, ready for the Doctor to swoop in an rescue her… I made a note about how disappointed I was by how much of typical ‘companion’ figure she was being portrayed as, when things suddenly turned right on their head.

Suddenly, she’s brought before Irongron – lord of this castle – and she’s on fire. She snaps, and shouts. She wanders around the room, devising various scenarios for where she might be before dismissing them for logical reasons. There’s a way of watching this scene which sees her cast almost in the role of the Doctor, and you can’t help but love her. She proves her worth completely in this scene, and I felt a bit silly for complaining how ineffectual she seemed in the opening moments. She even manages to work in some funny lines about the ‘realism’ of this castle taking things a bit too far and making it far too grotty!

And then, as if that wasn’t interesting and fun enough, they turn her entire relationship with the Doctor on its head. I mused yesterday that they were clearly made for each other right from the word ‘go’ – though I countered this by saying how easy it was to think that with 40 year’s worth of hindsight. Today, they’re on opposite sides, and she’s actually suspecting the Doctor of being the man behind the kidnapped scientists, and plotting an attack to capture him. It feels like exactly the reaction that you’d expect someone to have, and you can easily see how she’s pieced all of this together;

Scientists go missing – They turn out to be trapped in the Middle Ages – The Doctor is there when one goes missing – He also happens to have a time machine in the same room – Also, he’s a bit odd.

Looking back, it’s almost the same kind of situation in which we’re first introduced to the Brigadier. There’s something odd going on, and the Doctor just happens to turn up at the right moment. Someone who will become hugely important to the Doctor in the future is initially very suspecting of him. It’s a brilliant dynamic to see again, and I had no idea that it was even here. It’s uncovering little gems like this that make the whole marathon worthwhile. And who can fail to love Sarah’s description of the Doctor: ‘He’s no magician! He’s just an eccentric scientist!’

The Time Warrior is another one of those pivotal stories in Doctor Who history. Yesterday saw the introduction of these new titles, Sarah Jane Smith, and the Sontarans. Today we get our first mention of the Sontaran-Rutan war, and the very first mention of the Doctor’s home-world, Gallifrey.

In the same way that I’m always surprised that the Sontarans don’t make their first appearance until the Eleventh Season, I’m really surprised that we don’t get a name for the planet until now. Heck, we’ve even been there more than once! It’s exciting, in a way, because all these little bits of the Doctor Who tapestry that we take for granted are starting to fall into place now. When the Doctor says it, it even in the style of the speeches David Tennant gives in the role: ‘I’m from Gallifrey. I’m a Time Lord’. It marks yet another milestone in the programme’s evolving story.

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

Day 375: The Time Warrior, Episode One

Dear diary,

It always surprised me that the Sontarans were considered to be such a major Doctor Who monster, considering that they only appear in four stories from the ‘classic’ era. They don’t even turn up until Season Eleven – almost half way through the series’ original run. Even recently, they didn’t join the Big Finish stable until very late into the audio’s run. And yet, they’re always grouped up there with Who’s ‘Second String’ monsters (not as popular as the Daleks or the Cybermen, but fondly remembered all the same, like the Ice Warriors).

It has to be said, though, that we get off to a great start here with Lynx. Kevin Lindsay turns in a great performance that manages to be captivating even when he’s hidden away under a helmet for almost the full running time of today’s episode – and when we do get a look at his face in the closing seconds, it’s filled with character. They’ve clearly been taking lessons from the Draconians last season.

People often sing the praises of Lynx the Sontaran – he’s one of the few characters that breaks out from the generic ‘monster’ role – and I’m starting to understand why. If he keeps up such a strong performance for the rest of the serial, then we’re in for a treat. It’s a great introduction to him, too. The first six-and-a-half minutes focus on the adventures of Irongron and this ‘Star Warrior’ before we even catch sight of the Doctor and the present day. It’s not even a brief introduction to the setting and the time period – at least a few days pass (though the implication seems to be longer) during which the two characters are forced into an unlikely alliance. We’ve the beginnings of a great Holmes double act here, and of particular highlight is both characters chiming in to say that if they didn’t need the other… It’s great fun.

A less unlikely alliance here is the Doctor and Sarah Jane. Oh, sure, forty year’s hindsight and all that, but they’re already made for each other the very first time they meet. They spark off each other, and they’re both as intrigued by the other. There’s a hint in the dialogue that you could read either way – is the Doctor annoyed by Sarah Jane, or is he simply teasing her? It’s clear from the direction Pertwee has taken it that he’s having a lot of fun with Sarah around, and even his musing about how she wound up in the middle ages is played with the same kind of interest the Eleventh Doctor takes in Clara.

That said… Sarah finding her way back in time raises two points for me. For a start, why does he find it odd that she should be there, when he’s just followed the trail of a disappearing professor to the same location? Secondly… just where does Sarah hide in the TARDIS so that the Doctor can’t see her? I know it’s supposed to be near infinite in there, but the Pertwee TARDIS has always seemed to be little more than the console room (it’s even where he keeps an emergency pop out bed just a few stories back), and she finds her way back out again pretty quickly, so she doesn’t seem to have gotten herself into a Tegan situation where she’s wandering the corridors for hours!

I love that the two of them are stuck back in time together – it’s a great way for them to bond. I know that Invasion of the Dinosaurs begins with them returning to their rightful time, so I’m assuming that they’ll be spending the rest of this story running around castles and courtyards!

Thankfully, we’ve got the Brigadier keeping an eye on things in the present, in a lovely surprise appearance from Nick Courtney. I didn’t know he was in this story, so seeing him come round the corner with the Doctor raised an instant smile from me. It helps to ease that transition from Jo leaving, because the rest of the team is clearly still carrying on. I wondered – briefly – if we’d get mention of Jo’s travels (the Brig does refer back to the Doctor’s jaunt to Metebilis III, after all), but I’m rather hoping now that we don’t. Now she’s arrived, I’d love the focus to be squarely on Sarah Jane – there’s a new girl in the Doctor’s life!

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

Day 374: The Green Death, Episode Six

Dear diary,

There’s a commentary on the DVD for this episode which features Katy Manning and Russell T Davies discussing the departure of Jo Grant from the series. During this, Russell describes The Green Death as featuring ‘the first great, sad, departure’, and I think he’s right. He goes on to clarify that when you’re eight years old, and you’re watching the series through, and the Doctor’s companion leaves, it always feels sad - but that this is the first time the series really lives up to that feeling.

It’s hard to disagree with him. I’ve made plenty of notes for today’s episode, ranging from the giant fly attack, to the use of the fungus, to the realisation that - really - the BOSS storyline and the maggot storyline barely overlap, and while I’ve been interested in both separately, they don’t really gel that well together for me… but after those final few minutes, all I can think about is Jo leaving the Doctor. It hits you quite hard, and it’s not always the case when someone gives up their place in the TARDIS.

If we go back to the middle of October and Jo’s introduction (and doesn’t it feel like longer than that?), I said:

’Making less of a great first impression on me is Jo, I'm sorry to say… I found that the Doctor and Liz worked well together, and everything just clicked for me. Suddenly, I was dreading Season Eight, and the introduction of a companion who - as the Brigadier puts it in this episode - is simply there to pass the Doctor test tubes and tell him how wonderful he is.’

Well, suffice to say that all this time on, my opinion of Jo has been completely over-turned. I’ve grown to really love having her as a part of the series. A large part of that has been thanks to Katy Manning, who turns in such a beautiful performance in the part. In hindsight, I can even appreciate all the things in her first episode that I wasn’t all that keen on to begin with - they’ve become a part of the character, and as Katy herself points out in the commentary, we’ve watched Jo grow up and change over the course of three years.

After everything that she’s been through, I’m genuinely sad to see her go. I’ll even confess that there was a bit of welling up during those final moments where she and the Doctor say their goodbyes, and then he turns to leave while he thinks she’s not looking.

Part of the charm comes from the fact that it’s just as clearly Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning saying their goodbyes, too. You can hear their voices starting to go, and it’s not just good acting - it’s true emotions bleeding through to the surface. I love that he gives her the Metebilis crystal as a wedding present - a nice parting gift and the real pay-off to the ongoing joke.

That said, the marriage proposal comes somewhat out of nowhere, doesn’t it? Cliff tells the Doctor that they’ll be leaving for the Amazon just as soon as they’ve picked up supplies and gotten married! Even Jo seems somewhat shocked by the suggestion! I’m almost a bit put out by the abrupt nature of this - it’s the only bit of their relationship that I’ve not truly believed - but everything around it is so perfectly crafted that it would be churlish to grumble.

And then the Doctor is gone. Slipping off into the night, with a final shot of him driving away as the theme music sting quietly fades up and into the closing credits, another thing that we’ll be saying goodbye to in this episode (and - for some reason - being played upside down. Well, it’s nice to go out in style, isn’t it?)

It’s a good job that Sarah Jane is coming up next - one of the most popular companions of all time. Jo, and indeed Katy, is a hard act to follow, and anything less than perfect would be something of a let down. Her departure also signals another shift in the programme’s style, as we move into the final run for Jon Pertwee, and it’s all change once again…

And with huge apologies for the delay, we've now amended The Web of Fear Episode Five (Revisited) to contain the right text. All is explained in the entry!

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

Day 373: The Green Death, Episode Five

Dear diary,

Let me start by saying that - once again - I’ve really enjoyed this episode. There’s loads in here that’s really great, and I’ll come to all of that in a few minutes. Sadly, though, I’ve had to actively knock off a point for some dodgy CSO. I don’t think I’ve ever been moved to actively mark an episode down because the Colour Separation Overlay has actually offended me, but when I’m enjoying a story as much as this and the return to it keeps jolting me right out of things… It can’t be easily forgiven.

If you’ve seen The Green Death, I’m sure you’ll know what I mean. We’ve got plenty of nice filmed footage of UNIT out on location in Wales. Look! There’s Sergeant Benton chatting to Professor Jones out on location! And look! There’s Jo, scrambling her way off up the slag heap out on location! Over there, look! It’s a helicopter coming along to bomb the maggots (if there was one thing missing from Jo’s final story being a proper return to the UNIT of old, it was a helicopter) out on location. Notice the trend?

And here’s a shot of the Brigadier and Benton watching the helicopter’s approach, out on… oh. No. Sorry. That’s not ‘out on location’ at all. It’s Nick Courtney and John Levene stood with a couple of extras on a CSO background. Hm. Odd. Ok, not to worry, it’s not the worst CSO we’ve ever seen the series attempt, but I can let it slide for now. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It really isn’t the worst we’ve seen from the series, but equally it’s far from the very best (which is on display elsewhere in this story when it’s employed to help move the maggots around).

No, what really bothers me comes later in the episode, in which the Doctor drives up and has a bit of a chat with Benton. They’re back out on location by now, and it’s back to looking lovely. We cut away to another shot, and when we return, the Doctor and Benton are still having a conversation… only now they’ve moved to CSO, and it really doesn’t work. We then proceed to cut between shots of Bessie being driven around on location interspersed with shots done back in the studio some time later. The whole effect was so distracting that I really couldn’t pay much attention to what was going on.

I figured - in the usual way - that they’d simply run out of time to film everything they needed on location, so had to improvise when they got back to London. A quick check of the DVD Information Subtitles after the episode had finished confirmed that this wasn’t the case, and that they’d always intended to shoot it in this way. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, because it looks awful. Such a shame, when the location work in this tale has been so strong up until now.

Still, it’s not the end of the world, and there’s so much going on elsewhere in today’s episode that losing a point from the score due to bad CSO doesn’t harm it all that much.

John Dearth turns in a great performance as the voice of BOSS - he’s been brilliant all along, but today is the first opportunity we’ve had to hear lots from him, and it’s definitely a highlight of the episode. A shame that I’m less fond of the ‘sound wave’ effect when it’s being transplanted onto the big red disc than I was of it on the smaller TV screen in the earlier episodes, it seems somehow less creepy when it’s made into something this large, and taken away from the more ordinary device.

The maggots continue to look fantastic, and it really is no wonder that so many people recall them so fondly when thinking about Doctor Who monsters. The close-ups of them hissing really are quite scary - they look incredibly real. I’ve only ever encountered maggots properly the once. When I lived in Norwich, I had a cat (called ‘Wolsey’. I’d named him after Bernice Summerfield’s cat, but if anyone else asked, I’d say he was named for Henry the Eighth’s cardinal). For a while, I thought that the cat food was depleting rather quickly, but I couldn’t figure out how. I thought of the obvious - that he was somehow working his way into the stash and eating it when I wasn’t around, but I couldn’t see any evidence of this.

It was only a few weeks later, when I found that he’d - rather cleverly - admittedly - dragged the full pouches to the back of the kitchen, behind the fridge, before ripping into them and eating what he could, when I found a scene from this story waiting for me. It was the smell that I’d noticed first, and followed it to the point where I stuck my head round the back of the appliance. It really could have been a scene from this story. A pile of half-open cat food pouches, crawling with maggots. The worst bit was trying to get the place clean again. Not nice.

Perhaps my favourite thing about this episode, though, is that the blue crystal comes in as vital to saving the day. I’d been assuming that the Doctor’s trip to Metebilis III was simply there to illustrate that Jo was moving on from him (both in choosing not to go with him to the planet, and her lack of interest in the Doctor’s souvenir once he’d returned), and a pay-off to a running joke from Carnival of Monsters. Seeing that there’s actually a point to it makes the scene all the more richer, and it means that when the planet comes back to haunt the Doctor next season, it feels all the more important.

We also get the start of what I’d call out next loose ‘story-arc’, in Captain Yates being brainwashed. I’m not watching these stories in a vacuum - I know that Yates will be turning traitor in a few stories time - but here we’ve got the first hints of it. Sure, he;s acting under orders from the BOSS, but seeing him spring up, point a gun at the Doctor, and declare that he ‘has’ to die is quite striking all the same.

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

Day 372: The Green Death, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Now this feels like Jo’s proper send off! The Brig’s back in his UNIT attire, Benton’s arrived to help contain the situation, and there’s a group of soldiers running around an industrial location in film footage. It’s like being back in the early UNIT era, and I’m surprised just how excited I am by this. As if that weren’t enough, the Doctor gets himself backed into a corner, about to fight his way against a man from the government… when it turns out to be Yates working undercover! The Brigadier seems quite pleased with himself for having organised all of this, and quite right too – it comes as a brilliant reveal, and it’s another one of those moments when the series causes me to actually laugh out loud.

As if to really rub in the nostalgia-fest for UNIT, we get to see the Doctor fighting against the Bring (and the rest of UNIT, plus Global Chemicals) in an attempt to stop him from blowing up an underground hideout for this story’s ‘monster’. It really is just like old times. I love that blowing the mine up (in another impressive model shot; if there’s one thing this era does very well, it’s blowing places up!) has some very real consequences, in that it forces the maggots to the surface. Until now, the threat hasn’t seemed all the great because people had to actively go to the maggots (or, at the very least, to the slime) to get infected – now that threat is above ground, and seemingly unstoppable! I also need to draw attention to the Brigadier’s fab line today ‘I never thought I’d fire in anger at a dratted caterpillar…’, to me it should be much more famous than the much-quoted ‘five rounds rapid’.

Considering that I didn’t know they’d used any real maggots in the production of this story, they turn up en masse here today. And don’t they look really effective? Even the moment where one falls at some speed down the side of a muddy bank can’t stop the scene from being effective.

Of course I’m going to need to discuss the Doctor’s series of disguises today. His intention is clear from the second he sees the milk-truck, but I didn’t anticipate just how funny it would turn out to be. His turn as the milkman’s father recalls many of his radio performances, and then when he gets inside and switches into the guise of a (female) cleaner…!

As soon as I saw the cleaner earlier in the episode, I remembered that he’d be stealing the outfit at some point. I’ve never seen this story before, but it’s another one of those moments that you just know about simply by being a Doctor Who fan. It’s absolutely fantastic – hilarious! – and Yates’ reaction is priceless.

THE DOCTOR

You say one word…

YATES

(indicating the Doctor’s bucket) I like your handbag.

Though now, for any complaints I made the other day about knowing about this story taking away some of the effect… I don’t have a clue where we’re going from here. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the computer on the top floor could be WOTAN (don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting them to actually say that it is, but in my head if there’s nothing to contradict it, then I’m taking it as fact), especially as it expects the Doctor to know him (it?). Aside from the fact that they will presumably get rid of the maggot problem and disable the computer, I really have no idea what’s still to come, and I really rather like that.

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

Day 371: The Green Death, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I used to work in a shop in Norwich, where Doctor Who products formed a large portion of the stock. The five of us who worked there at the time were all big fans of the series, so we were always excited to have signings in store with members of the cast. Over the years we had numerous guests (a personal highlight was answering the phone to John Leeson and acting as his remote sat-nav as I guided him to the store - any time he followed a direction, he would reply ‘affirmative’ to me), and exactly five years ago this month, Katy Manning was in store, doing a signing with Richard Franklin.

The shop was busy (it always was on signing days), but about lunch time a man strode through the crowd and right up to the desk. I greeted him and he responded quite simply: ‘I’m here to see my wife.’

I didn’t get much time to process the slightly odd statement before Katy jumped to her feet and exclaimed loudly across the crowd of people there to see her ‘Stuart!’ You’ve probably all pieced this story together by this point - yes, the man in question was Professor Jones himself Stewart Bevan - but as I’d not seen The Green Death before, and some 40 years had passed since recording, I couldn’t have told you that I was watching the reunion of Jo Grant and her one-time husband.

He didn’t stay long - only passing through when he happened to spot Katy’s name on a poster up in the window - but it was lovely to see the pair of them together, and the fans there for a signing enjoyed chatting to the two for a few minutes.

Even though I’ve never seen the story before, I’ve always known how Jo departed the series. Just like Susan being left behind on a Dalek-torn future Earth, or Sarah Jane being left behind when the Doctor was called home, it’s one of those departures that’s famous, and it seems to be justly so. I’ve already mentioned that the ‘falling in love’ of the pair may be a bit flat after the bubbling feelings between Jo and Latep in the last story, but it’s striking just how real this relationship feels.

If I was impressed by the way the pair met in Episode One with almost an identical sequence to her first scene in the programme three years earlier, then today pushes that to a whole new level. At first, I thought cutting from a scene in which a character commits suicide to one in which the Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier, and the Professor laugh and drink and smoke was ill judged and somewhat upset the pace of the story… but then you realise that it’s actually vital to the plot, and it gives a chance to stop and take stock of the situation. It’s all laughing and joking until the Doctor returns from a phone call to tell us that another character - and a particularly likeable one at that - has died, at which point the scene and the tone of the episode shift again.

Suddenly, that scene has become a chance to see Jo and Cliff happy together, before seeing the way in which he comforts her. A close up of their hands as he takes hers and gives it a little comforting squeeze says more about their evolving feelings than any line of dialogue does, and I spent much of the next scene in which he consoles her longing for them to actually kiss… before it’s interrupted by the Doctor. It puts me in mind once more of Susan’s departure where I was sure we’d not see a kiss or any true emotions until the end, but then they start creeping in early just to surprise you.

It’s terribly exciting, if I’m honest, I’m only now half-way through the story, and yet already we’ve seen the seeds sown for Jo’s departure at the end. The idea of travelling up the Amazon has already started to take hold, and the beautiful moment where to Doctor tries to excite her about Metebilis III by showing her the crystal he’s managed to obtain - only for her to brush him off and return to a book about the adventure she could be having is magical. The Doctor knows that she’s leaving soon, and I can’t wait to watch how he reacts over the next few episodes as the end draws ever closer.

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

Day 370: The Green Death    The One with the Maggots, Episode Two

Dear diary,

‘The One with the Maggots’ is often brought up when I speak to people about Doctor Who. You know the type of situation - as Who fans, we’ve all been there. You’re introduced to someone new and whoever is making the introduction makes a point of saying ‘Will’s something of an expert about Doctor Who. The conversation from here goes in one of three ways;

1) They instantly make a point of telling you that they don’t like Doctor Who, and change the subject (or, in one case, when I was being introduced to a member of the crew, the person introducing me told them I was ‘something of an expert’ before adding that they didn’t like the show, and thought it was rubbish).

2) They mention how they really liked David Tennant, but don’t really care much for ‘the new chap’. Smith seems to have remained ‘the new chap’ to people I’ve met over the last three years who aren’t what you’d call fans.

3) They tell me how they remember watching Doctor Who when they were younger. You know, the original Doctor Who with Peter Troughton and the Daleks made of tin foil. If the conversation takes this direction, ‘The One with the Maggots’ seems to crop up more often than not.

Which is odd, in some ways, because this particular story achieved the lowest average ratings for the entire Tenth Series (no fault of the story, really. The last story in three of the five Pertwee seasons was always the weakest, ratings-wise). This was one of the stories to get an omnibus repeat later in the year, though, during which it scored almost 3 million more in the ratings, so perhaps that’s where the fond memories come from?

Because there’s no doubting that you would remember this story if you’d seen it as an impressionable eight-year-old. The first shot, with the live maggots crawling around is genuinely quite a shock (partly because I didn’t realise they’d used live maggots at all in the story), and even some dodgy CSO cutting around Pertwee doesn’t let it down. Then in the closing moments when the models of the giant creatures start to show up… well they’re bloody well done, aren’t they?

And yet, the story having this big selling point often used to describe it - it’s got giant maggots in! - robs it of some tension. Had I not known they were going to be in there as the monster, and had The Green Death been one of my ‘blackspots’ from this era of the programme, I’d have been trying really pretty hard to work out what’s going on here. For the first time since perhaps as far back as Fury From the Deep, there’s lots of things that make me think a previous foe could be making a reappearance.

The look of the tunnels couples with the overalls and hardhats recall similar scenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians. The idea of pollution being so central makes me think of the Autons. There’s a mysterious green slime, similar to (well… identical to) that from Inferno. We’ve got a mysterious computer controlling things from behind the scenes and brainwashing innocent people into working for it, just like in The War Machines. I’d love to come to this story after all the previous ones, but with no knowledge of what’s coming up in these six episodes - I’d love to see the reaction.