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

Day 258: The War Games, Episode Eight

Dear diary,

...Bloody hell. That could possibly be one of the best episodes that we've ever had. I'd started to worry that the story was beginning to feel a little bit padded out, and the fact that the Doctor had cooked up a plan to save the day in Episode Seven (of ten) left me a bit concerned about what was left to come. While parts of today's episode could be described as padding (and there's a whole host of comedy accents back again, including a Mexican who ends each line with 'eh?'. It's almost as though they're celebrating every little bit of the Troughton era all in one!), it really is a perfectly crafted 25- minutes.

We get to see a bit more of the various War Zones (though they all seem to look suspiciously like other war zones...) as the Resistance begin their coordinated attack, and it works really well. It's strange how seeing them take out a couple of communication units, coupled with an increasing rate of telephone calls and little flags on a map can make things seem so large-scale, but it does! It perhaps helps that when they destroy these things, they do it with a real vigour. The smashing up of the Roman Zone's screen puts the prop well beyond repair, while the explosion in the Crimean Zone is one of the programme's best.

We only see seven or eight members of the Resistance in this episode, but somehow it feels like we've got a whole army building up, ready to launch the attack. The one thing that does seem to be a bit of a shame is the lack of Lady Jennifer. She departed a few episodes ago to look after some wounded soldiers, and I keep waiting for her to return to the story, but it's looking increasingly as though it's not going to happen. Excitedly, I seem to have forgotten all of this from my previous viewing, so I really have no idea of where things are headed from here.

I'm surprised that I can't remember very much about any of this stage in the story because the cliffhanger at the end has to be the very best we've ever had. I've already stated my love for the cliffhangers in this story on more than one occasion, but this one in particular is stunning. We know that the Doctor is being put to the test, and that he's being forced to bring the leaders of the Resistance to the Central Zone, but I was fully expecting him to have some kind of get-out plan. As it is, the episode ends with that wonderful shout; 'Stand still! Don't move! You are completely surrounded!'

You could almost be forgiven for thinking that the Doctor really has gone over to the other side. Everything here is played as though the War Chief is the first Time Lord that the Doctor's encountered since leaving his home world, and you could really believe that he's managed to tempt him into being a part of the plans. The whole scene in which they converse, each stood on opposite sides of the War Table (for want of a better term), is flawless - it's almost as though all the battles and planning and stuff is there to keep Zoe and Jamie entertained while the Doctor goes off to have a 'grown up' talk in the other room.

He was at his best earlier in the story when commandeering the use of a military transport and bursting his way into the prison, but here he's on the absolute top of his game once more, in a completely different way. We get confirmation that the Security Officer's suspicions have been right all along and that the Doctor is one of these mysterious 'Time Lord' characters, and Troughton plays the scene with a quiet reserve. The actual revelation is almost brushed under the carpet - simply slipped into the conversation along with so many other little things that have become such an important part of Doctor Who's mythology over the years (is this the first time that they explicitly state that the Doctor stole the TARDIS? I've just watched through all of the 1960s stories in order, but it's such an obvious part of the narrative to me in 2013 that I honestly couldn't tell you wether it's been brought up or not at this stage).

'I had every right to leave,' the Doctor points out, and adds that he had his own reasons for doing so. People talk a lot these days about 'story arcs' and playing a long game with plot threads, but this is one that's been running for six whole years, dating right back to the very first episode in which the Doctor tells Ian and Barbara that he and Susan are cut off from their own people. We get some more references to it around Season Three in the Doctor's beautiful speech when Steven storms out, but it's largely been in the background since William Hartnell left. We even get the first hint that the Doctor may try to contact the Time Lords and alert them to what's happening here, but we're told that he won't because he risks giving himself away, too.

And yet it's funny to think that all these revelations - things which will go on to shape the series over the next forty-something years - came in the lowest rated episode of the 1960s! Worse that that, this will remain the lowest-rated episode of Doctor Who as a whole until Battlefield Part One takes the crown twenty years later! It's bizarre, but almost fitting considering the way that the revelations are treated so casually in the story that they should enter the programme in such an understated way.

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

Day 257: The War Games, Episode Seven

Dear diary,

I like that we finally get the introduction of the War Lord this late in to the story. It almost feels like a shot in the arm when things were in danger of becoming a little stale. Philip Madoc turns in a fantastic performance here, and I'd completely forgotten that we last saw him only a few weeks ago in The Krotons. Maybe it’s the addition of a beard? Either that or most characters are just blurring into one as I watch more and more Doctor Who (is it telling that I can’t remember his name from that story?).

The downside to the addition of this character – the brains of the operation as it were – is that it really serves to highlight just how incompetent the War Chief and the Security Officer are. We’ve had several episodes in which the Doctor and his companions are able to run around, continually managing to overcome any attempt to suppress them, but seeing the War Lord’s reaction to the news really compounds the mountain of errors that have been occurring in his absence.

I think the best moment has to be the argument between the Chief and the Officer, as they blame each other for each successive problem, only for the War Lord to cut in an announce that if they can’t get along, they’ll simply be replaced. There’s something cool, calm and collected about him, and when he does lose it and shout at them it really cuts through.

Although I’ve been enjoying the last few episodes, it feels like today we’re finally starting to move towards some kind of conclusion. I’ve commented all along that the Doctor seems to know that this is too big for him to manage, but even here, just three episodes from the end of the1960s, there’s no indication of just how big the shake up to the programme is going to be. If anything, it looks like the Doctor has it all sussed out. Until the last couple of minutes, when the guards turn up and take him away, he’s completely in control of the situation. They’ve gotten together a fair number of the resistance group, the chateau has been secured in its own separate time zone so they can’t be attacked by the various armies gathering outside, and they’ve got the deprocessing machine, ready to convert any soldier from outside. Even on top of that, the Doctor is pretty sure that he can replicate the technology given enough time (how? It’s not like he can easily pick up parts from the 1917 zone!), so that it can convert whole groups of soldiers at a time.

It seems as if we’ve got our solution all worked out and ready to go. I can’t really remember what happens from here (until the cliffhanger to Episode Nine), so I’m hoping it’s suitably grand enough to justify the Doctor having to go all the way and call in the Time Lords for help.

Something I do have to mention today is the name of the alien’s time machines. All the way through these entries for The War Games, I’ve been referring to it simply as a ‘TARDIS’, but of course I know that’s not what they call it. ‘SIDRAT’ has always been the term used to describe them (see what they did there?), but the only mention of the name on screen is in this episode in which it’s pronounced ‘side-rat’. I have to say that despite that being their ‘official’ name, I’m just not that fond of it. I’m pretty sure that one of the novels even gives the description of what ‘SIDRAT’ stands for, but it just doesn’t work for me.

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

Dear diary,

It's strange how my priorities have shifted in the last six days. During Episode One, I was really glad to be seeing something akin to an old-style 'historical' story, with the minimum amount of science fiction involved. As the story has gone on, though, I've found myself enjoying the sci-fi more and more, and now I'm more interested in what's going on in the Central Zone than I am with any of the stuff in the Civil War area.

It's great to see the Doctor using the Sonic Screwdriver again here, and for an application other than unscrewing things. It's interesting to note that he struggles with another method of getting the wall panel removed to begin with (he talks of reversing the magnetic forcefield, but stops short of mentioning any neutron flows...), and it's actually Zoe who suggests that the Sonic Screwdriver might be of use here. Maybe my assumptions all along that the Doctor simply hasn't developed the device to the point that it can fulfil the magic-wand like qualities it's capable of these days are completely wrong? Could it be that he actually designed it simply to remove screws (that's what it's been used for in 50% of its appearances so far!) and it's not until now that he starts to think there might be other applications for it? I think it was the Doctor who thought to cut through the wall with it in The Dominators, so maybe it's a combination of the two? It's not quite there yet in terms of the 'software', for want of a better word, so he doesn't immediately think to use it when a situation arises?

Forget all that, though, because today's episode is home to a far more important moment - it's the first mention we've had in the series of 'Time Lords'. It's mentioned in passing, just as a single line in the middle of a greater conversation about the War Chief. It's chucked in as part of a reference to the fact that he's an alien to these people as much as he is to everyone else, and they're described as his people. There's absolutely no indication that there's anything important about the line, and that makes this one of the rare times that I'm glad to have former knowledge about the programme.

Usually, I'm complaining that knowing all about this stuff means that I don't get to experience events with the sense of excitement a new viewer might. Here, knowing how significant that line is, I can sit back and enjoy being ahead of the game, watching as they start to draw all the threads together, leading to the Doctor's capture at the end of the story. Like the references earlier on to the Doctor hoping his suspicions about what's going on could be wrong, it's great to know what's just coming up on the horizon. 

I'm also pleased to see Zoe being sent off back to one of the war zones, while the Doctor remains behind with Jamie. It's great to have him spending some quality time with both of his companions before they get separated, and having had several episodes in which he gets to interact with Zoe's superior logic, we end today with Troughton and Hines gurning as the ceiling presses down on them. It's like they're letting us enjoy the pairings one final time before they're so cruelly snatched away from us...

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

Day 255: The War Games, Episode Five

Dear diary,

When the Doctor and Zoe first stepped out of the ‘TARDIS’ and into the Central Control Zone, I was a bit... surprised by the decor. Obviously, I’ve seen The War Games before, so I know what it looks like once they’re out of the various wars, but a bit of time away from the story really hammers the design in. It’s almost like the story is screaming at you: ‘This is the last Doctor Who of the 1960s!’

And yet, I really like it! The room they take Zoe to for interrogation today, with it’s huge black-and-white circle pattern on the wall, looks really striking, and in hindsight, they could almost be making the most of the departure from the monochrome era. The rest of the Central Zone sets are pretty unique as well, and I think a particular favourite has to be the way that the corridors are arranged. The odd banks of shaped 'partitions' create a pretty interesting effect, and somehow they're making it genuinely feel as though we're moving down different corridors, even though it's clear that they're simply changing the position of the camera. I think it's simply that it's not a long, thin set, but a much wider one. The use of the ramp down to where their time machines arrive helps with this sense of scale, too, and creates more opportunities for dramatic shots. Adding the height to the sets in this way has become more and more common over the last few seasons, but the stories from The Seeds of Death on have made it especially clear, and it really does add something.

The style used for the Central Zone extends out across all the other areas of design, too. I’m a big fan of the futuristic guns (the way the different squares flash as the weapon fires kept me amused. I've got a simple mind at times), though the guard's uniforms are perhaps less successful... I'm not all that keen on the way that the controls for their technology work either. While it's a good idea in principal, it does somewhat give the effect of those felt art sets you can pick up in a pound shop...

It’s brilliant that we’ve got David Maloney back for this one, too, since he did such a great job with The Krotons. It’s like with the more recent series, when the director who impresses the production team the most during the regular run gets invited back to do the special Christmas episode. Much of this particular episode has been pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, direction-wise, but there's been some lovely visual flourishes throughout the story so far.

For me, the highlight of today's episode has probably got to be the Doctor himself. Troughton really is on fine form for his last story, and they're showing off as many sides to this incarnation as possible before we see him bow out for good. Both yesterday and today we're being shown the fiercely intelligent side to him, as he tricks his way into finding the information that he requires. Yesterday he managed to get a scientist to give him all the information needed to remove the 'programming' from a soldier's mind, and today he manages to get the same scientist - who even points out that there's a warrant out for the Doctor's arrest! - to help get Carstairs back to normal.

Aside from that, we've got Zoe's interrogation scene. It's a wonderfully written piece, and I love the way Padbury plays her responses to the questions, with a sense of real desperation that she just doesn't know the answers. In some ways, it's a shame that we don't get a proper date of birth pinned down for her, aside from the repeated statement that she was born 'in the 21st century' and that she comes from the 21st century (which, if nothing else, is another nail in the coffin for the idea that The Wheel in Space takes place in the year 2000).

I'm a little sorry that I've already mentioned just how great the cliffhangers are in this story, though, because today's provides another real blow - Jamie and the rebels emerge from the time machine and are instantly gunned down! They're really not giving the companions an easy ride on their way out...

a

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

Day 254: The War Games, Episode Four

Dear diary,

In June 1966, Peter Cushing went into a radio studio to record a 23- minute pilot for a potential Doctor Who radio series. This first episode - Journey into Time - serves as a brief introduction to the series as a whole, featuring a loose retelling of An Unearthly Child Episode One, complete with Susan baffling her teachers at school. The story differs after that and it's a boy from Susan's school who ends up stumbling into the TARDIS and being whisked off into time and space. The episode is written by Malcolm Hulke, one of his earliest contributions to the franchise, and ends with the Doctor, Susan, and Mike finding themselves caught in the American Revolution, surrounded at gunpoint by a group of soldiers.

It's not a million miles away from the American civil war that Jamie and Lady Jennifer have spent today's episode in, and the cliffhanger could be right out of The War Games, too. I'm surprised in some ways that we've never had this kind of setting in the series before now - it seems like such an obvious period of history to explore, and if The Space Pirates taught us anything, it's that the production team aren't afraid of filling six episodes with 'American' accents.

Sadly, Jamie and Lady Jennifer are relegated today into the role of filling out the episode. Their entire twenty-five minutes is spent being captured by and then escaping from different groups of soldiers. First they're tied up by the North, and set free by the South. Then the German commander turns up and uses his hypnotising monocle (that's not a sentence you often type) to have them tied back up again. A resistance fighter then sets them free, before they're rounded back up and brought back to the barn again. They just can't catch a break!

It could dent the quality of the episode that it's been reduced to such a runaround, but thankfully the Doctor and Zoe are given a far more interesting storyline to follow as they make their way into the headquarters of the war zone operation. All the stuff aboard the 'TARDIS' (look, I know it's not been identified as actually being one on screen, only being like one, but it's easier to keep typing than 'bigger-on-the-inside-space-and-time-machine') is fantastic, and the idea of seeing all the different soldiers lined up in their different compartments, waiting to be deployed, is a great concept. I'd love to see what a modern budget could do with this - a whole army waiting to be taken to the front line. I'm also glad that the Romans here make an effort to go round the back of the set and make multiple passes across the screen. At the end of yesterday's episode, when the American troops were deployed, Zoe commented on there being 'so many' of them, when only about five had actually turned up.

The real meat of the episode comes in the form of Lieutenant Carstairs' 'reprocessing'. I've never noticed it before now, but it's almost like a preview of what's going to be happening to Jamie and Zoe at the end of the story - he recognises the Doctor in the crowd, and then his mind is wiped leaving him with only memories of their earliest encounters, when he still believes the Doctor and Zoe to be German spies. I'm so glad that I've spotted it on this occasion, as it feels almost like the episode is foreshadowing future events, and really hammers home the fact that we're running out of time for this TARDIS team.

David Savile turns in a simply flawless performance as Carstairs in this episode, and really makes it sinister when he 'turns' on his friends. 'These are my brother officers,' he confirms, looking around the room of students, before fixing his gaze squarely on our heroes; 'Except those two people! They're German spies!' Even better is his simple exchange with Zoe during the cliffhanger moments - 'you're a German spy. It's my duty to shoot you.'

More and more, there's suggestions building that the Doctor really is out of his depth this time. Today's addition to that plot line is his response to Zoe's question as to who else could have a TARDIS-like machine, and he comments that there is an answer to that, but that he really hopes it's not the one he's thinking of. It's no wonder I'd always thought of this story as being some epic of the 1960s - it's fantastic, and treating itself as such...

Don't forget to 'like' the 50 Year Diary Facebook page - I'll be asking about your favourite Troughton stories this time next week!

8/10 

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

Day 253: The War Games, Episode Three

All the cliffhangers in this one are really good, aren’t they? The Doctor tied up before a firing squad as the first shot sounds. The ambulance emerging from the fog only for our heroes to be chased down by a group of angry Romans (they were probably still annoyed at the Doctor for burning down their city). Now we can add the Doctor and Zoe being swept off by a mysterious TARDIS-like machine, leaving Jamie and Lady Jennifer behind in the American Civil War.

If anything, I’d say that today’s closing moments need another couple of seconds before they cut, as it’s a little abrupt here, but the impact is still in tact. It’s another one of those times that I’m glad I’ve not seen this story in such a long time, because while I can recall the major plot revelations, I can’t remember each story beat along the way. I’d forgotten completely that the Doctor and Zoe were taken away in the ‘TARDIS’, so it came as a great surprise.

The thing that I’m enjoying the most at the moment is the very real sense that the Doctor is already a little out of his depth here. He’s soldiering on anyway and just carrying on with things, trying to investigate exactly what’s happening, but he doesn’t really have a clue. When the ‘TARDIS’ arrives in the barn, he looks so confused by what’s happening that it really sells the moment to me.

I’m also finding myself really dawn to Lady Jennifer and Lieutenant Carstairs. It really shouldn’t work giving the Doctor – in effect – four companions for his final story, but they’re such well crafted characters that you can’t help but fall for them instantly. All the business with Carstairs trying to distract another soldier while the Doctor blows up a safe is fab (and it gives a chance for Troughton and Hines to light up the screen again, too), and his sacrifice to help the others get away is actually quite moving.

The story is evolving at a nice pace, too. We’re barely a third of the way through, and yet nothing is feeling too stretched out at this stage. Episode One plays out as pretty much a standard historical, but with the addition of a mysterious hidden video screen, and with some handy hypnotic glasses. There’s something of a subplot about people forgetting chunks of time, and the court marshal is a bit suspect, but there’s nothing all that out there.

The second episode builds on the elements from the first and then adds in a redcoat out of his time, and then hits you with the Romans at the end. Today, we’re introduced to the map of all the war zones (though conveniently, they only draw attention to the wars that we’ve seen and the American zone that we’re about to visit) and then the Central Zone, policed by a sinister man answering to the ominous ‘War Lord’. In some stories, taking this long to reveal all these elements would be something of a slog, but everything else in The War Games is of such a good standard that I’m really enjoying the pace. If anything, I’m slightly sad to be moving away from the First World War setting – it’s so well realised and this TARDIS team suit it to a tee.

I do need to give a slight cheer for the return of the Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver, used here again to undo a screw. It’s telling that the device isn’t mentioned when he’s trying to break into a safe (though Jamie does make a joke about a tuning fork, referring back to The Space Pirates, which was a lovely touch), so it really isn’t built for breaking locks at this stage. If anything, it’s now making The Dominators look like the odd one out in terms of the Sonic’s uses, but I’m glad we’ve had one last appearance from it for the Second Doctor. 

a

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

Day 252: The War Games, Episode Two

Dear diary,

We've spent so much time lately stuck in scientific bases and out on alien worlds that you really do forget just how good the BBC are at creating a historical drama. Every detail of the sets and costumes in the last two episodes has been so spot on that it's a real treat to look at. It also means that when things do start to go a bit strange, and we find video screens built into the walls, they're all the more jarring and carry a much greater impact - because they look so out of place amongst all this period detail.

The locations for the story are lovely, too, especially the buildings around the Doctor's firing squad (of all the times to be admiring architecture!). I grew up on a farm with several buildings in a similar style, so it looks like just the sort of place I used to imagine Doctor Who adventures taking place. Were this a bad episode, details like the sets would be something to help bring it up a point or two in my estimations, but The War Games is still thundering along - the gorgeous design is just a bonus.

No sooner are we out of the cliffhanger to yesterday's episode (a real stunner, too, and another one to consider placing on a list of 'best ever'), than we get another shock reveal in the form of a TARDIS arriving in the General's office. It's key to remember that the last time we saw a TARDIS other than the Doctor's was during The Daleks' Master Plan, and that was over three years ago. It comes as a real shock even, I'm glad to say, to me. It's been so long since I've watched The War Games that I'd remembered these other time machines not turning up until the latter half of the tale. It came as a complete surprise, and that just made the whole thing better.

Then we've got the use of the General's glasses when he's hypnotising people. In yesterday's episode, when they're used to the very first time, it's done as he starts to read some papers. It's all framed as to suggest that the glasses just happened to go on before the need to hypnotise. As the story has gone on, it's become clearer that they're integral to the hypnotism process. It's also great to see Lady Jennifer and Lieutenant Carstairs start to break free of their own brainwashing, having seen it seeded in since their first meeting.

It almost serves to show the impact that the Doctor can have just by turning up somewhere. He's well aware that things aren't quite what they seem to be, but he's still piecing it all together. Meanwhile, his mere presence in this area has brought together two people who may never have met, and caused them to think differently. It's the great strength that this Doctor has displayed many times before and it's good to see it being used one last time before he bows out.

Elsewhere in the episode, Troughton is on absolutely blazing form. When he halts a car simply by standing in the middle of the road and shouting at the driver, it signals the start of one of his best ever performances as he smashes through the next few scenes with his volume control up to maximum. I often find myself quoting the Seventh Doctor when he says that you just need to 'act as if you own the place' to get through unquestioned (indeed, trying that once got me onto the set of a proper Doctor Who episode for a full afternoon as they filmed, but that's a story for another day), and it's this idea that's being shown at its best here.

Wendy Padbury deserves some praise again, too; she's really a brilliant foil for Troughton's Doctor, and after all my musing earlier this season that I'd like to see him traveling alone with her, I'm glad to see that the production team have obviously had similar thoughts, and keep pairing them off. If there's one thing I'm going to miss by the time this story is over, it's the developing relationship between the two.

After all that, we're sent on our way with another stunning cliffhanger, as the ambulance disappears into a strange void of smoke, and then reappears out in the English countryside, ready to be set upon by Romans. Obviously, I know what's going on, but I can only imagine how odd this must have seemed at the time. We've not had a historical story in ages and now there's two for the price of one (and there's even a redcoat thrown in for good measure!). 

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

Day 251: The War Games, Episode One

Dear diary,

It's May 2006, and I've taken my friend Ben with me to Holt out on the Norfolk coast, where they're having a big Doctor Who celebration. Later that evening we'll settle down to watch The Idiot's Lantern play out on TV, but for now we're stood in the middle of a high street taken over by an attempt to break the world record for the number of Daleks gathered together in one place. I don't think they quite managed it.

Truth be told, the day was a bit rubbish, I seem to recall. Someone had dropped us off there in the morning, and wouldn't be back to collect us for hours. An early highlight was meeting Colin Baker, who surely has to be one of the nicest people ever connected to the series in any way, shape, or form, but then everything else was just a bit naff. There were plenty of stalls selling tat, none of which appealed to me, and I remember spending about an hour sat on a step somewhere while we tried to think of something to do.

The day got considerably better when we found a particular stall that was selling Doctor Who video tapes. It's funny how some things stick in your mind so clearly, but this is one of them. It was quite a small set up, a stall bordered with a rusty metal frame and covered with a blue tarpaulin on three sides and the top. They had loads of tapes spread out on the front desk, with more piled up on those cheap shelving units you can pick up in Argos all along the back. It was heaving with people, and you had to fight your way through the crowd a bit to reach the front and look through the collection.

I'd pooled my money for a few weeks in the hope that I might be able to buy something on this day out, and so far it had remained firmly in my wallet. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to spend it ten times over. All these VHS tapes, all these stories that we're miles away from any kind of DVD release! I can't remember all the ones I looked at - I must have picked up loads while trying to make my decision - but then I caught sight of one particular set up on the top shelf at the back.

The Time Lord Collection. A sturdy cardboard box wrapped around The Three Doctors, which I already had on DVD so wasn't that exciting, The Deadly Assassain, which was supposed to be a really good Tom Baker story in which he fights the Master on Gallifrey, and... no? Surely not? It can't be... a double tape release of The War Games, the epic ten-part Second Doctor story which introduced the TIme Lords to the series and saw Patrick Troughton's departure?!?!

It's strange, in 2013, with only a few DVD releases left before everything is easily available to pick up for a few pounds on Amazon, to explain just how exciting this was. I'd picked up one or two video tapes of the old stories on Ebay over the years, but they were usually the ones that went cheap - and thus weren't the ones with the best of reputations. Indeed, I took a flyer for the company selling the tapes on this day and handed out a highlighted version to family members when they asked what I'd like for my birthday that year.

The War Games had been released in 1990, and then again as part of this box set in about 2002. I think it was a limited edition, but I just wasn't aware of that kind of thing back then. To me, it was simply a chance to own The War Games. This story - mores perhaps than any other - was like a Holy Grail. It's ten episodes long! It's the first introduction of the Time Lords. The Second Doctor regenerates. I could type on for a half a million words and I'd never be able to accurately tell you how thrilling the thought of owning this box set was.

But it was out of my price range. Only by about £10 or so, but still. Thankfully, it was Ben to the rescue. I'd successfully managed to get him into the stuff they were currently showing on TV with David Tennant and Billie Piper, but he had zero interest in any of the old stuff. Indeed, Ben is one of the pair I spoke of during The Tomb of the Cybermen, who'd had the audacity to laugh at the silver giants! Ben stumped up the extra cash (for which I'm still thankful, seven years on) and I purchased this magnificent set.

If anything, it made the last few hours of the day go even slower. Not only had we now been round everything there was to see at this particular day out, but now I was holding a copy of The War Games in my hands, and simply couldn't wait to get home and watch it. I explained to Ben just how important this story was to the history of the series, but I don't think he really cared. I decided that I would ration the story out; no more than one episode a day (that sounds familiar), so that I could really make the most of it. Of course, that all went out the window once I'd gotten it home and put it in the video player because it was fantastic.

And, d'you know what? It still is. I've tried something of an experiment with today's episode, because I happen to be visiting Mum's house at the exact point that I should be sitting down to watch this one. So often throughout the course of the 1960s episodes, I've commented about how different it would have looked on an old telly compared to being on my Mac screen, so today I've hooked up an old VHS player to an old telly (it's from the early 80s, but I think it's about as close as I'm going to get) and popped in the VHS. The DVD is waiting at home for me in freshly restored glory, using better prints than were available to the VHS release, but I planned to have something really insightful and fascinating to say about the process of watching the episode in this way.

And I've completely failed! Because apart from noting that - yes - Patrick Troughton's face does actually look terrifying when you see it emerging from the title sequence on an old CRT screen, I've just been entirely swept up in the story, and I've not made a single other note about the way it looks on this old screen. Typical. If you want, you can pretend that I've said something really interesting here about it all.

Oh, but it is brilliant, this episode, isn't it? Right from the moment we see the TARDIS' materialisation in the reflection of a puddle on the muddy battlefield up to the second the Doctor scrunches up his face before a firing squad and a shot gets fired... every single bit of this episode is sheer brilliance.

I'm surprised to find how pleased I am to see the TARDIS back in history. We've not been anywhere before the 1960s since way back in The Abominable Snowmen, and I didn't think I'd been missing travels back into the past, but actually it feels fresh and different. It's probably helped by being an era that's so close to living memory (even more so on the original broadcast) and it makes it all feel that much more real.

This is especially true of the threat running through the episode. When the Doctor parts company with Zoe to be taken to a cell, he gives her a gentle kiss on the head and mutters 'Goodbye, my dear.' It's a simple moment, but it's so touching. Forget being stuck inside the Kroton's ship, or fighting the Karkus in the Land of Fiction, this is real, and there's an honest sense of danger to it all. The same can be said for the moment that Zoe breaks in to steal the set of keys. It feels far more dangerous than anything else in Season Six has - perhaps more than anything else in the Second Doctor's era. Being somewhere as sombre as the First World War, and being the final story for all three of our regulars, it all feels far, far, more true.

I could rattle on for ages about this episode, and the Doctor Who Online news page would disappear under a wave of my gushing with praise, so I'll stop now. There's another nine days to go with this one, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of time for me to say everything I could possibly want about The War Games.

For now, I'll settle for saying that I'm so happy that the story can produce this kind of emotion in me, all these years later, and having sat through so many other episodes already this year. This one really is something very special indeed.

For now, I'll settle for saying that I'm so happy that the story can produce this kind of emotion in me, all these years later, and having sat through so many other episodes already this year. This one really is something very special indeed. 

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

Day 250: The Space Pirates, Episode Six

Dear diary,

And just like that, I've run out of missing Doctor Who episodes. It all seems so easy in retrospect, and actually 106 missing episodes doesn't feel like a massive amount when you think about just how many I've actually been able to watch. I sort of suspect that I should have a bit of a celebration or something to celebrate this key milestone, but it's The Space Pirates, so the era of missing episodes goes out with more of a whimper than a bang.

I think part of the problem I've had with the story is that I'm just not all that engaged with the situation. In The Seeds of Death, it felt as though the Doctor and his companions were willing to throw themselves into the line of danger in an attempt to help because they really wanted to do so. Here, the only reason that they're helping anyone is because they've been separated from the TARDIS, and have gotten swept along with events.

It means that when the situation is getting desperate and we're watching a (really long) countdown to an explosion, everything just feels a bit dull. I don't care about the situation, so I'm not that bothered by anything that's happening. It's an interesting feeling in some ways. I always know that the Doctor and his companions are going to get out of the danger (well, unless it's a regeneration story or something like Earthshock), but part of the fun is watching how they make their escape. It's about the Doctor being clever, or his companions being vital. Today, I know that they're not going to get blown up and I don't care how they get out of it, because it boils down to something as mundane (!) as diffusing a bomb.

As I've said before, I'm really disappointed by The Space Pirates. Based on the first couple of episodes, I was so looking forward to standing out from the crowd and proudly declaring a liking for the tale, but it's just not to be. I wonder if its reputation might be better had more episodes survived, or if more were to show up? The surviving Episode Two was rather good, and it gave me lots of little visual cues to enjoy. Because of the slower pacing throughout the rest of the tale, the audio just doesn't really help. Having something to look at (even if it is metal hair) would really benefit the tale.

It still doesn't deserve the title of the worst story of the 1960s, though, I don't think. The Dominators was much worse than this - and I could see all of that one!

Though I've joked about it above, this really is a pretty significant moment in the marathon for me. One of the things that's always been off putting about the idea of a Doctor Who marathon is the fact that such a large chunk of the early years is marred by huge gaps. I tiptoed into Season Three with a bit of a worry, because i genuinely didn't know how I'd cope with so many bits of the programme being missing, and getting stuck in a cycle of moving between the soundtracks, surviving episodes and back again.

As it is, I've really enjoyed it. The sheer quality of a lot of stories from this era has really helped to make the task more manageable, and in some ways it's gong to be a shame to leave behind the narration from the soundtracks. Season Six has been a nice way of easing back into actually sitting down to watch an episode properly again, which I have to confess has felt a bit alien so many days in a row!

Still, despite everything, I really do hold out hope that more will be returned to the archive at some point in the future - and I've absolutely no doubt that it will. These things always turn up in the strangest of places and just when you're not expecting it. Now that I'm ten episodes away from the end of the 1960s, it's sods law that some will be turning up any day now…

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

Day 249: The Space Pirates, Episode Five

Dear diary,

I can't seem to make my mind up with this story. Every so often, I think I've worked out what's going on, and then I change my mind and they do something different anyway. For much of Episode Two, I kept switching between believing that Milo Clancy was definitely not in league with the pirates, to deciding that he definitely was. Even now, when it seems pretty clear that he's on the side of the law (even if it's grudgingly), I keep expecting them to throw a curve ball and make him the leader of the pirates anyway.

Then you've got Madeleine Issigri and her metal hair (though, for some reason, as I listened through today's episode, I kept picturing her as Miss Kelly from The Seeds of Death). From the moment she first turned up in the story I'd decided that she must be working with the pirates, then I figured that was too easy so started to think otherwise. Now it would appear that she is working with them, but only because she's in too deep now to withdraw. I rather like that. I'd assume that she was in it simply for the money (we've been told several times that the old Argonite mines are all but dried up, meaning that she's head of a dying company), but it turns out that she entered this operation with the best of intentions, when it was a simple 'salvage mission'.

As if that wasn't enough, you've then got the reveal today that her father - a man we've been told is dead - is alive and… he isn't well, but he's a live at least, and locked up in his old study not all that far away. I have to confess that I knew he was going to be turning up at some point, because I read an article in Nothing at the End of the Lane a few days ago all about the costumes in this story, and there's an image of his in there. Still, it makes for a nice reveal, and adds yet another layer to everything.

The problem with all this is that I've sort of lost track of who's chasing who. I know that the pirates are planning to set Clancy, the Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, and Dom all free in the LIZ 79, with the intention of sending it up for the Space Corps to find, but I'm not now sure if the Space Corps are still after Clancy or not. They discuss it a lot today as they try to piece the puzzle all together, but I'm sorry to say that they left me behind somewhere along the route.

One of the things that I am really enjoying about The Space Pirates is that we've got Jack May in as General Hermack. May is often familiar for playing Simms the butler in Adam Adamant Lives!, a series that I've got a lot of love for (indeed, I watched an episode a few months ago during The Tenth Planet to see Patrick Troughton's last acting work before becoming the Doctor. How fitting that May should then turn up in Doctor Who so close to Troughton's departure!), and it's great to see him here. I also didn't realise until today that May was also the voice of Igor in Count Duckula, a series that I was only praising a few weeks ago during The Invasion! It's a small world, British telly, innit?

And I think that's one of the key things about this marathon for me. For man years, my interest in archive television only really stretched as far as Doctor Who. I'd make the occasional excursion into Green Acres, but in terms of British television, it was all about the TARDIS. When I watched an old episode of Doctor Who then, for the most part, the actors were only familiar to me from that story, and nothing else. In some ways, I rather liked that. I quite enjoyed the fact that all of the Doctors were simply the Doctor, for example. I didn't know them as anyone else (though it blew my mind when I realised that Partrick Troughton was the priest in The Omen).

Over the last few years, though, my tastes have changed and I've taken quite a liking to lots of archive telly. I'd say at least half of my shelf is made up of series made before the 1970s. It's meant that as we've gone along, there have been plenty of instances of people turning up in the series that I know better from somewhere else, and I've really enjoyed that. It's not simply confined to the actors, either. Verity Lambert was producer of the previously mentioned Adam Adamant Lives!. Sydney Newman was the creator of The Avengers. Many of the writers have turned up across a great many of these different programmes, and it's been fun to watch their style crop up in all these different formats.

In a little under two weeks, I'll be exploding into colour with Spearhead From Space, and moving onto the 1970s. It's an era of British TV than I'm far less familiar with. Of all the titles on my shelves only three were made in the 1970s - Whodunnit (hosted from Season Two by Jon Pertwee, so there is still at least one connection!), the 1970s volume of Coronation Street, and the Morcambe and Wise box set. I'm hoping to use the marathon as a chance to explore other television as I go along (though I'll probably not be keeping much of a track about it in this blog - you're here to read about my journey through Doctor Who, after all!), but I am going to miss being in an era which I have such a strong love for. It's been an interesting experience, and it's helped to make the marathon all the richer.

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

Day 248: The Space Pirates, Episode Four

Dear diary,

As anyone who's been reading these entries for a while will know, I'm really not the biggest fan of missing episode recons. For one reason or another, they usually fail to hold my attention, and the ticker-tape descriptions of the action move far too quickly for me to get me head around. With the odd exception for an animated instalment, or occasionally dipping my toe into the world of the recon (I couldn't actually get through Marco Polo without watching one - how times change!), I've experienced pretty much all the missing episodes in the form of the narrated soundtracks.

It's been a perfectly good way of going through the stories, and I really don't feel that I've missed out on my thing by going the purely audio route a lot of the time. They're all incredibly well produced, with fantastic linking narration (even if the script for The Space Pirates' narration really is going out in a blaze of glory. At one point today, Hines takes great delight in opening a scene with the words 'the Doctor is busily twanging his tuning fork…' Is he indeed!?), and they've been great to listen to on my way home from work each day, lasting just long enough to end as I step through the door, or thereabouts.

But last night, having not enjoyed Episode Three of The Space Pirates as much as I had Episode One, and realising that this really is the end of an important stage in the marathon, I felt all nostalgic. I decided that before I move on to the era in which everything exists in the archives, I needed to give reckons one last chance to prove themselves. I'll admit, there were one or two selfish reasons for it, too. The Space Pirates is one of the Doctor Who stories with the least surviving visual material, no tele snaps, and there's even a few characters we don't have any photos of. I wanted to see how a recon would cope with such a situation.

The answer, it seems, is 'pretty well'. I did have a moment, about three minutes in where I decided that it just wasn't going to work, so muted the recon and keyed up the right place in the soundtrack so that I could actually follow what on Earth was happening. I think I probably looked like a bit of an idiot sat in front of the computer screen with my headphones plugged into my phone, but there we go.

The reconstruction overcomes the lack of available images by creating plenty of its own, and pretty cleverly, too. There's several shots of the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe taken from the surviving second episode of the story, and some which I'm pretty sure are taken from elsewhere. One particular image of Milo Clancy came up so frequently that I worried the image may be burned onto the screen for good, but it did the job. For the actual space pirates themselves, the recon used CGI people. I have to confess that it's not a style of CGI that I've ever really liked, but it works pretty well in this instance.

Sadly, watching it in this form hasn't really helped me enjoy the story any better. I'm genuinely quite disappointed, because having enjoyed the first third after years of being told how rubbish the tale was, I was hoping to be all contradictory, stand proud and say how much I liked it. And there is an awful lot to like! Troughton is - of course - on fine form, and there's a wonderful moment after their fall in the cliffhanger resolution in which he moans in pain and produces a handful of drawing pins that he's landed on. When Zoe asks him what he's carrying the pins for, the Doctor replies simply; 'I like drawing pins!' If anything, it put me in mind of the Second Doctor we had back in Season Four, who is a little bit weird, a little bit 'kooky', but completely loveable, and totally 'the Doctor'.

It's a shame to see him using his tuning fork as a means to break out of their cell, as I was hoping the Sonic Screwdriver was here to stay after it had turned up for a second appearance in The Dominators. Maybe he still hasn't managed to work out all the kinks in the design, and it just won't work on locks yet? It's either that, or the door is made from wood (which, for all we know, it might have been).

Things seem to have gone off the rails a little, it's true, but The Space Pirates is still not as bad as everyone would have you believe. I'm hoping we can make it through the next two episodes relatively unscathed, and it might be able to redeem itself just a bit…

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

Day 247: The Space Pirates, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Something that I've always really enjoyed about the Troughton era is that it spends so much time looking at the future that's just within reach of the audience. Many of the adventures over the course of the last three seasons have taken us into the Twenty-First Century, which at the time must have felt remote and distant enough to really be 'out there'.

It's conceivable, though, that a ten year old watching in the late 1960s would be around to witness mankind's evolution into the type of world we see in these stories, in which the weather for the entire planet is controlled from the Moon, goods and people can be teleported across the globe in a split second, and we'd have all manner of high tech space stations in near-Earth orbit, just ripe for a Cyberman invasion.

Admittedly, it can be a bit tricky to tie everything together from time to time, and the dates given to these stories from years of 'fan wisdom' don't always make the task easier. The second volume of the About Time series makes a pretty good stab at it, and I've had their timeline in mind as I've moved through the last few months. It gives placements to stories such as The Enemy of the World, The Wheel in Space, The Moonbase, and stretching out beyond this era of the programme, Warriors of the Deep (placing them in that order, chronologically, starting from around 2030 and moving through the the 2084 stated on screen for Warriors).

It's in a more recent book - A History of the Universe in 100 Objects, by James Goss and Steve Tribe - that Milo Clancy and the era of Argonite mining is really slotted into the equation. It speculates that the political troubles of the 2080s are what gives rise to the era of lawless spacefaring we've heard spoken of in this story. Clancy likely left the Earth at about the same time the Silurians and the Sea Devils were teaming up to fight the Fifth Doctor, and then the Space Corps were set up far more recently, after the turn of the century.

While I'm not a fan who spends a great deal of time obsessing over making sure that everything 'fits' absolutely within the Doctor Who universe (for a programme that's lasted in some shape or form for half a century, with literally thousands of stories told in all different media it would be entirely impossible for everything to click), I'll admit that it's nice when there's a kind of internal consistency like this.

I'm sorry to report that this episode hasn't really grabbed me in the same way the first couple did, but there's still plenty to be going on with. I think the main thing I'm enjoying is the fact that Zoe is still being used as… well… Zoe. Back during The Wheel in Space, I considered that her character would probably have been washed down the TARDIS' waste system before long and we'd end up with Victoria in all but name.

Actually, though, she's faring pretty well on the whole. Her intelligence has been a key part of the plot in every story so far (with the possible exception of The Dominators, but you know what? That was weeks ago, and I can't actually remember anything other than the drilling scenes towards the end), wether it be in the form of blowing up an annoying computer or - as in today's episode - working out the best way to get the TARDIS back. It's great to see her coming across so well, and I'm finding myself really enjoying Wendy Padbury more and more. I'm so glad, as it's moments with her, Patrick Troughton, and Frazer Hines that really do help to perk up even the most lacklustre of episodes.

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

Day 246: The Space Pirates, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I believe that I'm going a little bit against the grain when I say that I really enjoyed today's episode! It turns out that the visuals to The Space Pirates really do help it. I'm eve so pleased, because when I put the Lost in Time disc into the drive today I had to really fight myself to not select The Web of Fear Episode One from the menu instead.

The first thing to note is that, despite my complaints about the effects shots of the beacons exploding yesterday (which are housed on the same DVD, as a special feature), the spaceship models on show here are actually rather good. I'm somewhat surprised by the clarity of the shots, too - I thought all the stuff on the Lost in Time sets was unrestored, but they look really sharp. The designs of the spaceships are nothing particularly unusual, they're your standard sci-fi fare, but they look fab and they're filmed very nicely indeed. My only real complaint is that the background to all these bits is just solid black. Would it have killed them to poke a few pins through the backdrop and create some stars? I think it would really add to the effect.

Elsewhere, we've got the introduction of Milo Clancy to proceedings. He comes in for a bit of stick amongst Doctor Who fans (as do many members of the cast from this story) because of the accent, but you know what? I love him, too! Haha! He comes across as totally normal amongst all the high tech spaceship stuff on display. It's highlighted in one very simple moment when he gets a call to his ship, and rather than moving his breakfast, standing up and walking over to receive it, he simply shuffles his chair closer to where he needs to be. It seems like such a ridiculous, insignificant thing (and it is, really), but it adds something very real to the character.

His dialogue is all tailored in such a way that you can't help but enjoy his presence in a scene, too. It must be the kind of thing people talk about when they discuss Robert Holmes' writing being so good. My personal favourite has to be when Clancy - mid conversation with his captors - asks if he can blow his nose, or if that's an offence, too. It's the kind of sarcasm that you'd expect to get in this type of situation, but which most science fiction takes itself too seriously to include.

I also love that they've dressed him simply as an old west prospector. In The Seeds of Death, they set out to show us that we're in the future by making everyone where the same style of 'futuristic' uniform, and then mark out the Professor as being a bit of a rebel by giving him a kind of futuristic cardigan to wear over the top. There's a shot in today's episode when Clancy is surrounded by the crew of the Space Corps, and he looks so out of place by being dressed so casually.

If anything, it puts you on his side at this stage; all the other characters look ridiculous, playing at space cowboys with their ridiculous collars and uniforms. Clancy looks like he's just milling along, trying to get by and enjoying himself. It's only in the cliffhanger that we really turn against him, even though by they stage we've had it more-or-less confirmed to us that he's working with the pirates. Thankfully it gives an already great cliffhanger even more impact, when he simply walks in to the beacon and shoots Jamie.

Yesterday, I made a reference to Revelation of the Daleks and mused that people often complained about how long it took the Doctor and Peri to actually get involved in the action of that story, meeting up with the rest of the cast and such like. I only brought it up because it took the TARDIS so long to arrive in this story, and it seemed an apt comparison. Truth be told, I almost didn't mention it, because I knew someone would pipe up and complain that in that story it took them until the second episode to actually interact with our main guest characters.

Well this one's an even slower burner! Although the Doctor and his friends find themselves shot at by members of the Space Corps in Episode One, and then encounter Clancy making his way inside the beacon at the conclusion of today's episode, they still haven't gotten caught up with the main characters here. It's going to be Episode Three now before our regulars are really caught up with events, making this surely one of the longest lead ins for the Doctor ever.

In short: this is brilliant stuff. There was even a point when I thought the episode might be heading for an 8/10, but I'm afraid that anything that includes a woman wearing a wig made of metal isn't going to reach quite that high. It had to be said, though, it's tricky looking at that costume without picturing the ivory headpiece from Community.

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

Day 245: The Space Pirates, Episode One

Dear diary,

I've often seen people complain about some of the Sixth Doctor stories, where it takes him a long time to actually get involved with the action. Revelation of the Daleks is the big one - the Doctor and Peri don't actually meet up with any of the guest cast until the second episode, having spent forty-five minutes roaming the snowy countryside and fighting zombies.

At least in that episode the Doctor is actually present, even if it is on the outskirts of the action! The TARDIS doesn't turn up in today's instalment until almost fifteen minutes in. I'm pretty sure that I'm right in saying this is the latest into a story that the Doctor ever arrives.

The time before the arrival of our heroes isn't all wasted, though, and you get the distinct impression that it may have been quite exciting. I know, that's not something that anyone has ever said about The Space Pirates. The thing is, if you're six years old and sitting down on a Saturday evening to watch Doctor Who, your disappointment at the lack of the Doctor is likely to be held off while you've got pirates roaming around in a space ship, blowing up all these beacons.

This is the point where I'd usually say 'and the tele snaps show us exactly how awesome/average/awful (delete as applicable) these sequences were', but by this stage, John Cura had finished providing his services due to failing health. Indeed, Cura died not long after this, between Episodes One and Two of The War Games. It means that The Space Pirates is one of very few stories for which we have absolutely no tele snaps, giving us little indication as to how things would have really looked.

Thankfully, we do have the destruction of one beacon preserved as a brief clip in the archives. It's not… well, it's not the best thing we've ever seen. There's something about the way that the station splits onto several nice, even chunks that puts me in mind of a wheel of cheese being cut, and that's probably not the effect they were aiming for…

Fittingly for our last story with missing episodes, the soundtrack feels like they're really going for it. Frazer Hines is back on narration duty and his opening line ('Far out in space, amongst the stars…') sets us up for a more richly detailed audio than usual. Not long afterwards, we get space described as a 'velvet, star-studded blackness', which sounds as much like a description of Hollywood than anything.

On the whole, though, it's a positive start. I'm not blown away, and the episode is little more than average for the programme at this point, but it's not the complete disaster that people always describe it. I imagine that things will go downhill before too long, but if it sticks like this all the way through, I think I can handle it!

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

Day 244: The Seeds of Death, Episode Six

Dear diary,

As has often been the case with stories like this, I've been making a note for several days now to mention the titles for the episodes. In The Seeds of Death, the title captions for sac episode are shown against a backdrop of the Earth and the Moon, hanging in space as the camera moves slowly across the scene to show us this view from a few angles. It's a lovely little shot, but it's the music that accompanies it which I've really liked.

The music to the entire serial is quite good, on the whole, although on occasion it feels a little out of place. There's a moment today when Troughton is creeping around with his new solar weapon and something causes him to jump. You assume that the (loud!) music will follow the same cue and perk up at this moment, but it's actually going through a more subdues phase at that precise moment.

It's only a minor niggle, though, as on the whole the work being down on this story has been rather good. I've already called out Michael Ferguson's direction for praise a few times, but I have to add that today he produces one of my absolute favourite shots, as Troughton stares down the Ice Lord (they're not actually called this on screen in this story. I'm assuming that it gets brought up in one of the Pertwee stories, or I've just made it up…) during their final confrontation. 'You have destroyed our entire fleet!' the Ice Lord (I'm sticking with it) hisses, to which the Doctor's reply is simple - 'You tried to destroy an entire world'.

In a story that's given Troughton a fair amount of chances to play his more comical side of the Doctor, this is a great moment, and it's one that I'm surprised doesn't get mentioned all that often. Maybe it's because his sideburns are still trying to take control of the programme?

Despite me just assigning names to the Ice Warriors that seem to sit right in my head, I'm rather impressed with the way that they're treated on screen in this story. The title 'Ice Warrior' was given to them by one of the humans back in, er, The Ice Warriors, and I worried that by this stage that's simply what everyone would be calling them. They actually only seem to gain this title amongst our new guest cast after the Doctor or Jamie has already used it, which is a lovely touch. I'm not sure if it's entirely intentional (Brian Hayles did create the creatures, after all, so you'd think if anyone would remember that the name was simply assigned to them, it would be him), but it works really well. Another one of those little things which makes me smile.

Speaking of which - Jamie manages to redeem himself with this episode! Hooray! Since somewhere around the start of The Krotons, Jamie has been the subject of a fair amount of abuse (yeah, yeah, including from me). His intelligence keeps being called into question, and he doesn't even seem to be the Doctor's favourite companion anymore. In Episode Five, the Doctor video conferences with his two companions at one point, but specifically only addresses Zoe. He doesn't even seem to notice Jamie stood there with him.

Much as I've started tiring of Jamie lately, I found it to be something of a 'punch the air' moment when he took Zoe to one side and asked her to send him up to the Moon to save the Doctor. Jamie may not be the smartest person currently travelling in the TARDIS, but he'd never let anything happen to the Doctor, and that's where his real strength lies. Fair enough, I guess he can stick around for now.

Right then! The next story should be interesting. The Space Pirates is the last Doctor Who tale with episodes missing, and was rated the worst of the 1960s stories during the Doctor Who Magazine 'Mighty 200' poll. To say that I'm not exactly thrilled to be synching the audio to my phone is putting it mildly…

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

Day 243: The Seeds of Death, Episode Five

Before we start, there's something that really does need to be addressed… just how big are Patrick Troughton's sideburns?! I know he's just had a week off, with plenty of time to grow them out and all, but come on! It doesn't help that we get lots of close up shots on the side of the Doctor's head (are there lots more than usual, or am I just noticing them because of the massive sideburns? Perhaps director Michael Ferguson was just really impressed by them, so kept trying to get them into shot?), and it's only highlighted by the fact that we cut very quickly from a side-on shot to one filmed several weeks earlier, in which the sideburns don't exist! Forget UNIT dating, surely this is the biggest controversy in the history of Doctor Who? The Time Lords' ability to grow huge sideburns at the drop of a hat!

Ahem. Anyway. Back to business…

Dear diary,

There was a time, way beck when, that I said I couldn't often spot the difference between film and video tape when it came to watching Doctor Who. Now, obviously, I'm not an idiot. I can see the difference between them in an instant, but I'd never really picked up on it before. It never impacted me when I sat down to watch a serial, it just happened to swap styles from time to time.

Watching through at the pace of an episode a day means that it's just become part of the visual language that I'm used to at the moment. Every so often, we'll cut to film and a little voice in the back of my head will note that an effect is about to take place. It's usually either that, or we've ventured outside. This has it's advantages, and one of them comes in today's episode.

We already know that the foam is spreading out across the world (or, since this episode seems to be playing on a smaller stage, we know that it's at least present in a park somewhere in England), and we've seen plenty of shots of a lone Ice Warrior walking through it as he makes his way through the trees to an unknown destination. Therefore, when we follow a sequence of the Warrior outside in a park and then the shot changes to him approaching a building, a little voice in my head told me that it was being filmed outdoors, just like the rest of the shots I've just seen.

It was only the more that I looked at the building, with its odd 'futuristic' twists on architecture that an alarm bell started to ring. Surely they hadn't gone and stuck bits onto a real building to make it look more 'space age'? Even if they had, surely they couldn't have done it so well, and made it look this good? But, by that same token, it's too big to have been built in the studio, and it's shot on film so it must be outside…

Having finished the episode, I immediately returned to the DVD menu and turned on the Production Subtitles, before finding that point in the episode again. Thankfully, the subtitles do draw attention to it, and confirm that the whole thing was shot on film at Ealing, as was our cliffhanger moment of Troughton turning into the foam (without his massive sideburns). It shouldn't impress me, but I like that my brain has become so accustomed to the way in which the programme is made in this era that it can so easily be tricked into thinking they've done an even better job on the design front!

Anyway, with Troughton back (and sporting those ginormous sideburns…), there is of course plenty that I could single out for praise. I'm only going to choose two, though, and neither of them are on the side of his head. The first is the way in which he comes around from his week off, rubbing his head and groaning slightly as he regains consciousness. As he tries to sit up, he mumbles briefly under his breath - 'Victoria…'. It's a lovely little call back, and so nice to see that she's not been completely forgotten. In many ways, we're deep into the era of 'revolving door' companions, so it's always good to have these tiny little references snuck in.

The other thing to notice is that Matt Smith must have watched this episode at some point in the past. It's well documented that he watched The Tomb of the Cybermen and, according to Steven Moffat in Doctor Who Magazine #450, spent '20 minutes on the phone just raving about how brilliant [it] was', but there's a moment in this episode which wouldn't feel at all out of place featuring the Eleventh Doctor.

Crowding into the T-Mat booth on the Moon, the Doctor smiles and exclaims the he thinks it will be quite fun to experience this kind of travel. Arriving back on Earth, he steps out of the machine completely deflated, complaining that there was no sensation at all. I can completely see Matt Smith playing this scene, with the same sense of schoolboy excitement and the crushing sense of disappointment that follows.

In that same feature from Doctor Who Magazine, Moffat goes on to say that Matt falling in love with Troughton's portrayal of the Doctor is 'just as every actor [to have played the part] since Troughton has done.' It's wonderful, as I draw towards the Second Doctor's final couple of adventures, to think of his spirit being so alive and well in the programme right up to this day, almost a half a century later. It really hammers home just how brilliant this incarnation is.

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

Day 242: The Seeds of Death, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Over the course of the last 242 days, I've complained more than once about six-part serials, because you simply run out of things to actually say about the story somewhere around Episode Four. Often it simply falls to me to enjoy the story, through the cast and the direction, but as Terrance Dicks notes on the commentary for today's instalment: 'that's another disadvantage of this episode - it's Troughton-less'.

I think that the lack of the Doctor in this episode (conscious, at least) is actually really effective. It helps to sell the threat of the seed pods even more as they start exploding all across the Northern Hemisphere, because we've already seen it take out the Doctor. Anything that can incapacitate our hero in such a way is sure to be a real threat to the planet.

We've then got the threat of the Doctor being sent out into space between the Moon and the Earth, killing him well and truly. The problem I have with all this is that I just don't believe it. We're told that the system needs to be tinkered with in order to allow transmitting to somewhere other than another T-Mat capsule, but that seems like nonsense. If you can T-Mat things just to anywhere with only a few minutes tinkering, then why does everything have to be sent via the Moon in these capsules? It all seems a bit daft. Yes, in a story where the Moon has been taken over by giant reptiles sending seed pods to take over the Earth, this is the thing I find unbelievable.

Thankfully, the aftermath of the seeds pods arriving in London is fantastic. I'm glad that I hadn't been imagining these shots as for a few weeks now, whenever I pass through a small section of trees on the way into Cardiff, I've had images of an Ice Warrior roaming about among similar trees and i thought I might just be going mad. As it is, they form some fantastic shots of the creature roaming around the countryside, wading through the foam. It's another one of those instances where I'd really love to see these stories upgraded for Blu-Ray, with their film sequences rendered in HD. It's a beautifully shot few scenes, and I'd love to watch them crystal clear.

The Ice Warrior isn't so successful when it's still inside the T-Mat control room, sadly. I really liked the shot of him smashing the front of of the cubicle to break out into the room, and it's very effectively done, but then he just seems to stand around in a bit of a drunken haze for a minute, shooting his sonic weapon only at people who aren't part of our main guest cast, and then stumbles out of the room to kill a few more off screen. It's not the Ice Warriors' finest moment…

That said, the direction throughout the episode is fantastic on the whole, and special praise needs to be saved for the parallel zooms we cut between as we build up the the Doctor being teleported out of the T-Mat cubicle. It's so unlike anything I'm used to, and it looks brilliant.

A tricky episode to really say much about, as it's caught in an awkward point of the story, but with the Doctor back tomorrow (yes?) and the invasion of Earth well and truly underway, I've got high hopes…

6/10 

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

Day 241: The Seeds of Death, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Increasingly, it seems as though Doctor Who's Sixth Season has a very definite visual style, and it seems to be right at home with no end of other stuff that was being broadcast on TV at around the same time. The Mind Robber is obviously the famous one with a bit of a 'weird' vibe to it, what with the big white void, the exploding TARDIS, a companion being turned into a cardboard cutout, and a forest of letters, but since then, we're seeing more an more examples.

The Krotons was littered with them during the scenes of our heroes being subjected to the Krotons' machine, featuring shots distorted by a fisheye and cuts to bubbling tanks of liquid and images of our heroes in pain. Today, we get the Doctor picking up a seed pod and watching it expand until it breaks, showering him in a powder. We also get lots of sequences of him running through what appears to be a hall of mirrors (every Moonbase needs one!) creating some pretty unusual results.

None of this imagery would be out of place in something like The Avengers or The Prisoner, and it's making for an interesting experience. It's almost as if they knew the stories from this period would survive, so decided to do something a bit different with them.

And yet, despite all of this, I'm a little disappointed today. I was really excited to see the Doctor's reaction to discovering the Ice Warriors taking control on the Moon (indeed, the first time that he turns a corner and sees a pair of the creatures, he pulls a fantastic face as he scurries away to hide), but it happens off screen! We cut to the Doctor and his friends still in the rocket as Zoe sets up a good old exchange of exposition; 'Doctor, these creatures he described…' followed by 'Yes, Ice Warriors. Jamie and I have encountered them before…'.

The only positive to come out of it is that I know the Ice Warrior's motives nice and clearly - Mars is a dying world, so they want to colonise the Earth. Good-o, that's fine by be. The Ice Warriors left be a bit confused as to exactly what their plan was (Even now, I'm only pretty sure that it was about trying to get their ship out of the ice and go home), so it's nice to have it spelled out for me this time around! It does deprive us of seeing the actual reaction, though, and I'd have loved it to have taken place after we'd reached the Moon.

I also have to take issue with the entire T-Mat system. I can understand why it's become so vital to the world (heck, if you can send things from place to place right across the world almost instantaneously, of course it's going to have an impact), but we've seen it stated a few times over the last couple of episodes that the system isn't quite there yet. Oh, sure, they boast about it being infallible, but even the Professor mocks this fact when the problems occur.

Why then, in a system with no back up plan, and no way to keep things on the move when the Moon control goes down, is the entire planet so dependant on it? We're told towards the end of today's episode that all major cities are experiencing major food shortages! Does no one stock up anymore? The implication seems to be that all transmissions have to be relayed via the Moon, so surely people don't have food T-Matted to them for every meal? I could understand supermarkets perhaps not receiving deliveries (and, yes, I can stretch to believing that they might be running short on stock. If you've ever seen the way people panic buy in the shops when they know they're going to be closed for a single day over Easter, then I can imagine some pretty serious panic buying occurring when rumours leak out that the entire system has gone down!), but it seems a little far-fetched to think that we're on the brink of starvation so soon!

I can't complain too much, though, because the Doctor does get to take part today in one of my favourite moments from the entire series, as a pair of Ice Warriors bear down on him. 'Your leader will be angry if you kill me!' he declares, desperately grasping for something to save him before adding 'I'm a genius!' It's actually the moment after this that I love, as the Ice Warriors hiss 'Geeenniiuussss…' back at him. It's one of those odd scenes that always seems to be stuck in my head, and I find myself thinking about from time-to-time, completely out of the blue.

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

Day 240: The Seeds of Death, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I'm starting to feel a little bit sorry for Jamie. I've not been all that kind to him of late, and I've shifted very quickly from considering him to be a vital member of the TARDIS team and thinking that it's really about time that he should be off. Worse than that, though, is that the Doctor and Zoe almost seem to be thinking the same thing! There's a look the Doctor gives his companion when they're preparing for the rocket to take off in this episode that I think I can only describe as 'disdain'.

Add to that the way that the Doctor and Zoe are said to have been invaluable during a meeting about getting the rocket off the ground, and a comment that they seem to know more than our resident expert on the subject. It's not long before the same crew members are wondering if Jamie has the same kind of expertise, and the Doctor's not sure that he wants Jamie to come along with him when he blasts off for the Moon.

In some ways, it almost feels as though this could be Jamie's final story in the programme, and that he's being set up for a departure before we're finished. Having spent much of The Krotons separated from his companions, he's not being left out again, or at least he's only being included somewhat grudgingly. It's like they're trying to set up an on-going narrative thread, but I'm fairly sure it's not going to actually go anywhere.

Steven Moffat has said before in interviews that he likes the Doctor to be travelling with two (or more) companions, as this gives him characters who can go off together and talk about the Doctor, rather than simply being there to talk to him. I think this point can be clearly seen in this episode, when Jamie and Zoe spend some time together discussing their options for helping a group of people we've only just met. They discuss the idea of using the TARDIS to get up to the Moon, but decide that they'll probable overshoot their destination in either space or time. Or both, for that matter. The Doctor does go on to join them in the conversation, peering through a hole in the wall as he chips in.

It's just one example of the great direction we're seeing in this story. Lately, it feels as though I'm constantly praising the work of the directors in the series. I'm not sure if it's just a side effect of suddenly having so many existing episodes to watch, meaning that I've got a stronger connection to the visual aspects of the series, or if the direction has genuinely gotten better since we could last see it regularly. I'm pleased to say that I think it's the latter - it feels like they've got some real professionals in at the moment.

There's some lovely shots of an Ice Warrior searching the Moonbase's solar energy room for an escaped crew member, and it's shot from a high angle which really does show off the scope of the set. There's also some interesting choices being made with the music, too, switching from loud, bombastic noise while the Ice Warriors invade the base to absolute silence as we prepare for the rocket's take off.

It really helps to up the tension as our heroes strap themselves in, unsure what to expect when (or if) they reach their destination. I'm not entirely sure why they're so keen to dive in and help these people, as they've only met a few minutes before, and although there's hints that the whole world could come into some kind of trouble with the downfall of T-Mat, it all feels a bit quick to volunteer themselves for the first rocket launch in decades.

It's very topical, though. I always thought it was odd that the programme returned to the setting of a Moonbase so soon after the last visit (we're only about two years on from, er… The Moonbase), but actually it's quite topical at the moment. As this story went out, we were only a few months from that first small step for man as Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Moon for real, and the fever for this kind of science fiction was ripe.

I'm finding it interesting that while we've known there's Ice Warriors pulling the strings for some time now, many of our major characters still don't. Our three regulars don't have a clue, and Miss Kelly, now up on the Moon herself, doesn't have a clue either. It's making for an interesting dynamic, as we don't always get to be this far ahead of the Doctor, and I'm looking forward to seeing his reaction, which I'd imagine will come pretty quickly once they've made it to the Moon.

One thing, though… how annoyed would you be to find out that after all that fuss, all the risk of the first rocket launch in all those years, the trouble with the systems crashing and the danger of drifting on forever through space, Miss Kelly has made it to the Moon in a matter of seconds anyway, 'cos they've fixed their teleport! It's typical, that!

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

Day 239: The Seeds of Death, Episode One

Dear diary,

I'm in two minds about The Seeds of Death. I know I've seen it before, but there seems to be conflicting memories fighting for space in my head. On the one side, I recall not really caring for it very much. On the other, I can remember really enjoying it. This one really could swing either way…

The thing that really stands out as we’re dropped into the new world for this story is how very familiar it all feels. You could quite easily mistake this for a story from Season Five – we’ve got the regulation high-tech base, with a crew wearing regulation ‘futuristic’ clothes, and then before you know it, we’ve been invaded by the regulation monster-of-the-week, and it’s even a monster from last season!

What’s quite clever about the introduction of the Ice Warriors to the story is just how they play it all. Obviously, coming to this story forty-something years later, I’m well aware that the Ice Warriors are the enemy this time around. As soon as we see the first member of the Moonbase killed, we can see quite clearly who our enemy is, as it’s the same effective ‘death’ effect that they had in their last appearance.

Just in case the effect of their sonic arm weapons didn’t give it away, you’ve then got that voice. The Ice Warrior’s way of speaking is one of the most distinctive of any alien from the programme’s history, to the point that when they returned in a story earlier this year I had work colleagues who don’t even watch the show mimicking their whispery tones in the build up to the episode.

And yet… they still try to build up the mystery. We get lots of Point-Of-View shots as the creatures lumber down the corridor towards the main control room, and our crew stare fearfully into the camera. Somewhere around the halfway point, we catch a glimpse of an arm, and then a few minutes later, we’re treated to the back of a shoulder, too. I have to admit that I was getting a bit frustrated by it all. It’s an Ice Warrior! We know it’s an Ice Warrior! Just show us!

The best thing is that when they do finally swing the camera round to show us the full creature, it’s not an Ice Warrior! Haha! The whole thing has been a game, tricking you into thinking you know what to expect, then completely pulling the rug out from underneath you. We do get the standard model of Warrior turning up within a couple of minutes to do some more killing, and to reassure you that you were right, to some extent, but it’s a great reveal.

The story isn’t afraid to set it’s cards out on the table early, either. The Doctor and his friends don’t actually appear for the first eight minutes of the episode, which gives us plenty of time in the company of our guest cast, getting used to the world in which we’ll be spending the next few weeks. It seems obvious that Osgood is being set up as one of the main characters for the story, and he heads off to the Moonbase and even blows Miss Kelly – another obvious main guest – a kiss from his T-Mat cubicle.

It feels like he’s going to be our point of reference for the group up on the Moon, but then he’s killed facing down one of our unseen Warriors before the Doctor has even shown his face in the tale. It’s quite brutal in a way, and perfectly in keeping with the kind of throwaway deaths we had in The Invasion, too.

It’s a good start for the story, and I’m actually quite excited top have the Ice Warriors back on the scene, which is always a good sign. It feels nice to have what I’m going to describe as a ‘traditional’ story (when what I really mean is that although the repetitive format of Season Five started to grow tired by the end, it’s nice to see it again after a bit of a break), and I’m eager to move on.

a a

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

Day 238: The Krotons, Episode Four

Dear diary,

As I've found several times over the course of this marathon, it really is best when you come to a story about which you know very little, and get to experience it fresh. I've already mentioned how I've spent years muddling up The Krotons with The Dominators and not really paying them very much attention (they're trapped in a period that's dominated by a large-scale Cyberman story and the return of the Ice Warriors, and the mere fact that they exist fully in the BBC archives makes them instantly less interesting than anything from Season Five), but once again, I've found myself completely bowled over.

I think it's fair to say that the thing to impress me the most has been the relationship between Patrick Troughton and Wendy Padbury. Just a few days ago I mused that I'd never really understood the love for the Season Six TARDIS team, but these last few episodes have really shoved it into a brand new focus. The pair are fantastic together - as good as Troughton and Hines at their height, potentially better - and it really does make me long to see the Doctor travel with Zoe just on their own for a while. I know I've said it a few times in the last few days, but the more we see of this pair together, the more it feels like the right move.

The absolute highlight has to be the way they bounce off each other while trying to stall the Krotons. 'You stand here, Zoe, and I'll stand there,' the Doctor suggests. 'But Doctor! I wanted to stand here!' she replies, and a minute of comedy gold follows on, including the Doctor trying (and failing) to put on one of the Kroton's brain machines. Brilliant stuff. I feel that I should also draw attention to Zoe asking to borrow the Doctor's braces, and snapping them back at him when he refuses. Brilliant stuff. EVen the Doctor admits today that he's forgotten all about Jamie - I think I fear a repeat of the Ian and Barbara situation coming on, where the character simply outstays their welcome in the TARDIS. A shame, perhaps.

It's not all songs and games, though. The more we see of them, the more I realise that the Krotons really do look bloody awful. Actually, I'm not sure that's entirely fair - from the shoulders up, they look alright (though there's a few shots of them with their heads spinning round, and I can't begin to tell you how much I was bothered by them spinning at different speeds!), but the more I see of the arms down, the less impressed I am. There's a shot of one exiting their spaceship today, and shuffling down the ramp towards the Gonds, and it just leaves me disappointed. Given some great robot designs, The Krotons could have become a real favourite.

It's always seemed like an odd choice for the Troughton story to be shown during the 'Five Faces of Doctor Who' repeat season in the early 1980s (though they didn't really have much of a choice - the usually longer lengths of tales in this period and the emptiness of the archives meant this was the only 4-part Troughton story in existence at the time), but actually, I can see it now as a great introduction to this particular incarnation. He's fun, he's intelligent, he's got some great companions at his side… what's not to like?

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

Day 237: The Krotons, Episode Three

Dear diary,

There's a real sense of everything falling into place as we reach this stage of the series, isn't there? Barry Letts made his directorial debut last season, Douglas Camfield is at the height of his skills, the Brigadier and UNIT have been introduced properly, and the script for The Krotons (by future script editor Robert Holmes) was something of a pet project for Terrance Dicks, who at this point is working as a sort of 'sub-script editor'.

The reason that I mention all of this is because this story is also directed by a man who goes on to have strong ties to Doctor Who, particularly in the mid 1970s - Daivd Maloney. It's not his first directing job on the series (that was The Mind Robber a few weeks ago), but it is the first time that his work has stood out enough to really make me sit up and take notice.

There's a lot to love in the design of the story, here. The quarry is working very well for the alien planet, and looks fantastic as the Doctor and Zoe make their way across it (though it has to be said that it's hard to avoid simply staring at how short Zoe's skirt is in this one! Blimey!), and there's several shots chosen which really do help to make it look all the more alien. The Point Of View shot of the armed Kroton being directed towards his targets is simply fantastic, and so unlike anything else we've seen in Doctor Who that it really does stand out.

The one real downside to everything, sadly, is the design of the Krotons themselves. I've never been all that bothered by them before, and in photographs they can come across like a fairly interesting design (I'm thinking specifically of the VHS and DVD covers to this story, and the cover to the Big Finish story Return of the Krotons), but when they're shuffling around on the set, complete with poorly hidden legs beneath what can only be described as a skirt… They're far from being the best alien creatures that we've had in the programme.

They're quite interesting as a concept, though. I like the idea that they're effectively grown from crystals, and that you can never truly kill them - they simply return to their base components, ready to be reformed when the time is right. It's the perfect idea for a Doctor Who monster (or, really, any monster), that can just *keep coming back. Maybe Davros has a similar built-in defence mechanism?

THe voices are possibly the best thing about the creatures, and I have to confess that for some reason when I was reading all those Quark comics a few weeks ago, I kept reading them in the booming South African tone of the Krotons. I'm not entirely sure why - especially when the Quark's child-like voices would have so suited a comic! - but I think it may be another one of those hangovers from all the years I've spent confusing the two stories. Sadly, the voice is less effective during long scenes of exposition with Jamie, but it's at its best when booming orders unseen from a speaker, or issuing out short, terse instructions to its comrade.

Today's episode also sees the arrival of the HADs to the programme. Until Mark Gatiss made use of the feature in this year's Cold War, I always wondered why it didn't turn up very often. The Doctor does give a description here (that he needs to remember to switch it on), but it strikes me as an extremely useful feature to have, when you constantly find yourselves right in the middle of danger. It's certainly far more useful safety feature than the scanner showing you tempting pictures of nice places in the hope that you'll fly off somewhere else instead of stepping outside!

a 

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

Day 236: The Krotons, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I've said it before, and I've absolutely no doubt that I'll end up saying it again before we reach the end of Season Six… but Patrick Troughton really is fantastic, isn't he? Funnily, enough, I think this episode might sum up why I love his performance, and the entire character of the Second Doctor, more than any other that we've seen.

He's usually on pretty good form, but today he seems to be particularly enthused. For the most part, I've spent today's episode swinging between laughing out loud ('Great jumping gobstoppers!') and being completely thrown by the weird psychedelic imagery (more on which in a moment), but the entire time I've simply been impressed by his performance. This episode is home to one of my favourite Second Doctor scenes, and the only bit of this story which I've seen before. It's the moment that the Doctor sits down at the Krotons' learning machine and tried to get started with the tests. 'Go away,' he tells Zoe, 'don't fuss me.' A moment later an he continues: 'No, come back, what's this?' Another beat. 'It's all right, I know'.

The whole scene is a masterclass in timing and it doesn't only show off Troughton at his very best, but gives us a chance to really appreciate Wendy Padbury's performance, too. The pair of them bounce off each other so well here - and, indeed, throughout the rest of the episode - that it really does make me long for the departure of Jamie. I know, I know, he's an important part of this period in the programme's history, but I really love the idea of seeing Troughton's Doctor given room to breathe away from Jamie, and I think that Zoe might be the perfect person to travel on with him.

It needs to be said that all the stuff inside the Krotons' space ship is simply mad. As soon as the Doctor and Zoe are put through their strange mental testing, I found myself leaning forward in my chair, simply captivated by what was happening. Suffice to say that I couldn't make any sense of it, and things started to go really triply once they kicked in with the fish-eye effect. Shots of the bubbling tanks of water served only to confuse me further, but it was the look of real pain and anguish on their faces that sold the scene to me. Just as the climax to The Abominable Snowmen worked by showing us the Doctor at his most vulnerable, this whole sequence operates on showing us two of our heroes, who have spent the last ten minutes really bonding, being put through agony. We've already seen the after effects of this machine with Vana, which leaves us genuinely fearful for the fate of our two friends.

But for everything that I've said, Jamie gets a fairly good innings here, too. His best traits - his loyalty to his friends and his bravery - get to shine as he tries anything to desperately save their lives, and he's put through the same trial once he's trapped inside the ship. The stakes are even higher here, since the Krotons tell us directly that his mind won't be able to sustain the force of the assault, and we get plenty of weird shots of Jamie in pain, too.

Ah, yes. The Krotons. I'll reserve my judgement for now until we've seen them operating a little more, but I think this story might actually turn out to be the opposite of The Dominators - I don't think this story needs good robots to hold my attention (thank goodness!)

a 

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

Day 235: The Krotons, Episode One

Dear diary,

Oh, I tip-toed into this one with a real sense of trepidation. For years - having never seen either of them - The Krotons and The Dominators have been pretty much interchangeable in my head. They both take place on a random alien world, they're both part of Season Six, they both introduce a new robot making their first and only appearance in the television series, and they both have something to do with how intelligent people are in relation to their potential as slaves. Having come close to tears trying to wade through The Dominators, I think it's fair to say that I wasn't exactly thrilled by the prospect of starting out with this tale.

I thought it was odd that the process of the TARDIS turning up on an alien world in The Dominators reminded me so much of a Hartnell story, but the same is true here. I wonder if it's just that the Troughton stories have so confined themselves to contemporary or futuristic space stations and bases that the sight of a quarry seems - excuse the pun - totally alien to me?

The establishing shot of the planet here is simply brilliant, and I was in the middle of scribbling a note about how well the scale of the rock face was done, when the TARDIS appeared even smaller than I was expecting! It gives a real sense of size to the proceedings, and actually makes this world work quite well. In many ways, the rest of the planet (or as much as we've seen so far) is simply standard fare, so it's nice to see things off to such a great start. I do enjoy the attempts to make this world seem different to anywhere else, in the form of Jamie's complaints about the smell and the Doctor noticing the two suns in the sky, but these points are thrown at you so quickly that they fail to make all that much of an impact.

That the similarities to a Hartnell-era tale are so clear shouldn't come as much of a surprise for today's episode, since it was originally submitted for consideration way back during Season Two. It marks Robert Holmes' first steps into the programme, and it's perhaps odd to think of him trying to get involved way back when Ian and Barbara were still a part of the TARDIS crew. There's a lot here that wouldn't feel out of place in that set-up, though, such as Jamie's spur of the moment fight with a guard (this sort of thing happened quite a lot to Ian, though I was specifically put in mind of his fight from The Aztecs). We've also got Zoe describing herself and her friends as being 'from another planet, another world', which is almost word-for-word the way Susan describes herself right back at the very beginning, in An Unearthly Child.

You'd think that it might feel like a real step back to see so much on display that was devised way back when, but it all holds together rather well. Certainly, I found myself far more invested in things than I did in The Dominators. It helps that the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are really gelling with each other now (I said during the last story that I've never really understood the love for this team, but if they carry on like this for the rest of the season, then I think I'll start to see what everyone else does!) and they bounce off each other brilliantly throughout.

We've also got a cast of guest characters who really should simply be there to fill the screen. They're typical generic Doctor Who characters who live on some far-flung world (though they're particularly susceptible to the Doctor's presence; having spent several generations being told that they can't go into the 'wastelands', the Doctor manages to convince them otherwise in a matter of seconds. Twice!), but I'm finding myself interested in them. They could well fall back into the trap of being simple ciphers before the story is out, but the idea of only having four episodes gives me hope - it's an absolute age since we last had such a compact story!

Don't forget to 'like' the 50 Year Diary Facebook Page - where I'll be asking about your favourite Troughton stories before long!

a 

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

Day 234: The Invasion, Episode Eight

Dear diary,

I think the biggest problem I have with a story like this is that after eight episodes, the ending still occurs in the blink of an eye. It’s an issue that I’ve been having with the series dating all the way back to The Daleks (which, incidentally, feels like a lifetime ago); you’ve got so many episodes building up, raising the stakes, and then they run out of time and the solution is all too simple.

Toady, it comes in the form of the missile launch. Around the halfway point, the Doctor declares that they have two options to stop the Cybermen from dropping their bomb – shut off the radio link at Vaughn’s complex outside the city, or blow up the Cybermen’s spaceship. The brigadier boldly announces that the Russian rocket won’t be ready for at least ten hours, which leaves them only the one choice.

Dutifully, the Doctor and Vaughn (now fighting against the Cybermen, not for the good of humanity but because he hates them; another lovely little touch) set off for the compound to knock out the radio signal. This mission accomplished, the Cybermen move their ship in closer to Earth, rendering the whole operation pointless. It’s ok, though, because the Russians have found a different way of preparing the rocket, so it’s primed and ready to go. Hooray! It hits the Cybership, defeats the ruthless, inhuman killers, and everyone gets back to normal, with Zoe pursuing a new career as a model.

Oh, I’m not complaining really. As much as the tension is dissipated in a matter of seconds, like so much of the story, it’s not about the payoff, it’s about the journey. So what if the Doctor and Vaughn’s trip to the IE compound is ultimately a waste of time? It looks gorgeous. Camfield’s direction really does seem to be at the best when he’s working outside on film, and it looks stunning for the whole sequence. The entire section takes up a fair bit of screen time, as we move into the big ‘UNIT Vs the Cybermen’ battle that I’ve been waiting for. Any disappointment at the lack of Cyberman action in yesterday’s episode must surely be made up for by the fight sequence here.

There’s plenty of behind-the-scenes photos of this filming, with cameramen sprawled out on the floor, shooting up at the Cybermen looming over them, so this scene is one of those which sits pretty prominently in my mind. If anything on this watch though, it makes me long to see the Yeti attack on Covent Garden from The Web of Fear. If it’s anywhere near as good as this, it would be a great treasure to see returned. The location really helps this scene, too – it’s that kind of industrial landscape that’s always fascinated me, and to see the two sides fighting surrounded by all the crumbling brick buildings and the huge metal girders is fantastic.

I think the main thing I’ll be taking away from The Invasion is how it’s altered my perception of what to come. I’ve mentioned it already during this story, but as regular readers will know, I’ve not been looking forward to reaching the Pertwee years. That early 1970s period has always been my least favourite ‘era’ of the programme, and as it crept closer I was beginning to wonder if it might be the thing that breaks me. In actual fact, though, I’ve found myself enjoying the slow evolution of that phase of the programme – the introduction of the contemporary Earth-based stories starting from The War Machines, the introduction of the Brigadier, and now UNIT turning up on the scene, too. Seeing characters like Benton arriving make it feel as though the programme really is evolving into a new style, whereas I’d previously always thought of it as being a massive shift in style right out of nowhere.

The only thing that does strike me is how much the UNIT we see here in this story differs from the organisation that works alongside the Third Doctor (or, at least, how much it differs from the version of UNIT in my head). The small number of soldiers present in the final battle here is explained away by not having enough ways of blocking the Cyber-signal – the Brigadier even explains that they’ve only got enough men awake to form a single platoon. As the years go by, though, they always seem to operate on a small number of personnel, with or without half the group put to sleep by the Cybermen.

It’s also a shame that we never again see UNIT’s aircraft base. It’s used well here as a means of getting from one location to another and drops all the right people off in all the right places as and when needed. This kind of funding just isn’t available to them in the 1970s, and that’s a shame. I have a feeling that it could feel like a bit of a step backwards when they start operating out of an old house in the home counties.

Overall, it’s an odd send off for the Cybermen, considering that they won’t be showing up – properly – in the programme again until Tom Baker takes over. Obviously, at the time, they didn’t know that we’d be seeing the last of them for now, but it’s still a bit of an unusual way to see them off. I’ve always loved that the Cybermen take over from the Daleks as the default ‘villains’ of Doctor Who once Patrick Troughton comes along, and I’m really pleased that, on the whole, I’ve rather enjoyed their stories. I’ve always found it a shame that they never made a Third Doctor and Cybermen story, but I think that The Invasion gives a good enough example of what that would be like that I’m not going to miss loosing out for a few seasons.

If I’m completely honest, this story hasn’t lived up to my expectations (or my memories), but it’s still been an enjoyable way to spend the last week, and it’s telling that I reached Episode Eight still not bored by the setting or the characters. There’s several things that I think I’d do differently, but it’s certainly doing an awful lot right.

Don't forget to 'like' the 50 Year Diary Facebook Page - where I'll be asking about your favourite Troughton stories before long!

ba 

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

Day 233: The Invasion, Episode Seven

Dear diary,

There’s a moment in today’s episode where one of our brave UNIT soldiers makes a dash for Professor Travers’ house, and bursts in the door exclaiming that there are ‘hundreds of Cybermen’ outside on the streets of London. And yet, despite them putting the human race to sleep and bursting out of every manhole cover they could find at the end of yesterday’s instalment, we don’t actually see any Cybermen in this episode outside of the cliffhanger reprise.

In some ways, it’s just continuing my complaint from yesterday. Whereas I couldn’t get the idea of a bustling city outside of these sets to sit right in my mind, I now struggle to imagine a city infested by the Cybermen. It feels like this story should be taking place against this vast canvas - The Web of Fear taken out of the underground and scaled up massively – but it all falls a bit flat. We seem to simply move through the same few sets, from Vaughn’s office (which is the same in both his London HQ and his complex outside the city, with the backdrop replaced behind the window), via the sewers, to Travers’ house.

The Invasion has always been down in my mind as the Troughton-era Cyberman epic; his equivalent to Hartnell’s Daleks’ master Plan. Actually though, it’s not really about the Cybermen, it’s all about Tobias Vaughn. In some ways, I’m quite pleased by this. Kevin Stoney puts in such a brilliant performance throughout the story that it’s great to see him given the space to really showcase his talents. Throughout, he’s been built up as the upper hand in the deal with the Cybermen, but it’s all beautifully undercut today when the Cyberplanner simply drones (and that voice really is a drone) ‘we no longer need you.’

It’s similar to The Wheel in Space that the Cybermen are kept in the background, keeping the attention of the kids while the story really follows a completely different narrative strand. It worked well enough in that situation, with the Cybermen finally making their real attack in the sixth episode, but here we’re stretched out another two. It’s not losing my interest yet (and since this is the longest story since The Daleks’ Master Plan, I did worry that it might), but I do hope we get some good Cybermen scenes in our final twenty-five minutes. As much as I love Tobias Vaughn, this is their final appearance for ages, and I’d love to see them go out in style.

Something else that’s carried across from The Wheel in Space is Zoe’s character in this episode. She’s been a little sidelined in places so far (trying on feather boas and posing for photographs while the Doctor and Jamie head off to do the real work), though she’s more than made up for it by charging out with Isobel and getting stuck in wherever the opportunity arises. Be it hunting for her friends at the IE building, or heading down into the sewers to catch a Cyberman, Zoe’s been willing to take part when needed.

Today, though, we get to see her intelligence shine through again. It’s a great scene when she asks for the missile launch to be delayed for just thirty seconds while she makes her calculations to knock out as many of the Cyberships as possible, and it’s very reminiscent of the Doctor bounding around the computers back in The Ice Warriors working out his own calculations. There’s a glimmer of her own arrogance turning up again, too when she’s told that she’d better be right with the numbers and she simply replies ‘I am!’

(But surely we could have had some Cybermats in the sewers? It seems so obvious!)

a 

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

Day 232: The Invasion, Episode Six

Dear diary,

A little after halfway into this episode, Ellie arrived at the flat. She didn't take a seat to watch with me, but couldn't fail to be at least a little invested in what was happening (mostly because every so often I'd point at the screen and excitedly exclaim 'Cyberman!'). With a couple of minutes to go, she joined me on the sofa and watched the end of the episode. 'Oh,' she spoke up, as the tips of the Cybermen's helmets began to appear over the steps outside St Pauls, 'Is this the really famous bit?'

I think it probably says something for this moment of The Invasion, that someone who has pretty much no interest in the 1960s era of the programme can identify 'The Cybermen at St Pauls' as one of those really iconic Doctor Who moments.

For me, though, it's not really all that. It's been years since I last watched The Invasion (probably not since the DVD was first released in 2006), and over that time, I'd built up the sequence of the Cybermen marching down the steps into this really big, bold thing. There's a brilliant photo taken on location of a silver giant stood on the steps, looking towards the sky with the dome of the cathedral in the background. It's an image that's so burnt into my mind that I was sure it matched a shot in the actual sequence, but it doesn't. If anything, the St Pauls moment forms just one tiny bit of that sequence, and it felt almost like an anti-climax for me.

Now, in part, this is all the result of forty years adding significance to the moment. As I say, if even Ellie can highlight it as an important bit of the programme's history, then it must be doing something right. Watching it without all that prior knowledge must be fantastic. And lots of the scene is - the moment that the manhole covers start to fly open and Cybermen start climbing out is brilliant, and it's odd just how right they look crawling out from under the streets. I think the feeling of disappointment at the ending has been added to by other factors, though…

The Invasion, as I've said before, is very much a follow up to The Web of Fear. Because of that, for some reason, I've got it in my head that London is deserted. Completely evacuated, like it was for the Yeti incident. It makes it tricky to panic when characters talk of the entire city being controlled, because I actively have to remind myself that there is a city full of people out there. When Watkins is told of Isobel's freedom, and Vaughn suggests that she's probably waiting at home for him, it felt odd to me - because it feels like the city should be deserted.

It doesn't help, then, when we get the establishing shots of the city in the seconds building up the Invasion. All the streets are completely deserted (that's the hazard of filming first thing in the morning, I guess!), and when we do finally get to see people falling under the Cybermen's control, there's only three or four of them, and we cut between them rapidly. Don't get me wrong, it's very effective, and I know that they don't have the budget for a whole host of extras being taken over by the strange noise echoing through the air, but it feels like as a key junction in an eight-part story… there should be more to it.

Oh, but it's not all complaints. There's loads packed into today's episode that I love - and 'packed' really is the operative word. When the Brigadier sends some men to intercept Vaughn's guards and free the professor, I was a little disheartened to see the action cut to after the battle, with its events relayed to Vaughn via Gregory. Knowing what Camfield can do with an action sequence, I was looking forward to getting to see it out on location, and it felt like a cop out to avoid showing it (I will say, though, that seeing the mini-battle between UNIT and the Cybermen in the sewers does make up for this a little. I love the clanging metal sound effect as a soldier batters a Cybermen's arm with his gun!). As the episode goes on, though, it soon becomes clear that it's cut to keep things moving - there's too much to get through!

It means there's one or two other places where the action cuts very suddenly, and it leads to a slightly disorienting effect (the one that springs immediately to mind if Jamie announcing that he's returning to his dream and then cutting to him being woken sometime later to carry on with the story. It's an effective way of letting time pass, but it feels very out of place to cut so quickly from one to the other), but it means we're moving at a pace rarely seen in the programme.

When we do slow down a little, it's for wonderful moments. The confrontation between Vaughn and the professor is perhaps one of my favourite scenes from the series so far - it's so well done on every level, from the writing, performance, and direction. Vaughn taunting Watkins with his charm is brilliant, actually handing the man a gun so that he can follow through with a threat of murder. The way he laughs when the bullets cut straight into his cybernetic body with no pain is simply fantastic: pitch-perfect in every way. The only thing that could have possibly made that better would be not finding out about Vaughn's partial upgrade earlier in the story, as it would have added a whole new layer to the scene.

One last thing, by the way: how right does the Doctor look, staring down a microscope in a UNIT laboratory? After everything I've said, I'm becoming a UNIT convert mighty quickly!

a 

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

Day 231: The Invasion, Episode Five

Dear diary,

As much as I loved the animation in yesterday's episode, nothing quite beats having the actual thing to watch. It's striking right from the off - the reveal of the Cyberman is much better when you can see it properly than it was in the animation. In the cliffhanger yesterday, the odd pulsating of the 'cocoon' just looked odd whereas now it's actually creepy. One thing, though… how do they hold those electrodes onto it? They don't seem to attach anywhere!

The sight of the Cybermen ripping their way out of hibernation is fantastic, and we get a few great opportunities to see it throughout today's episode. I'll admit that it doesn't always work (at one point, the recently burst cocoon gets caught on the Cyberman's handlebars, and the rest of the scene - shot from behind our metal monster - just looks odd because of it. In another instance, you can see where someone just off camera is trying to pull the cocoon away from another Cyberman), but when it does, it really does. The best ones are the shots where the Cybermen literally burst out from storage, ripping open their pods and stepping forward into the open.

It benefits from the fact that this design of Cyberman is gorgeous, too. There's no wonder that Big Finish tend to use them as the default model, because they're so brilliant. I've said before that the Tomb models are my favourite 60s version, but d'you know? I think it may be these ones. There's something about them - and the fact they look more like the 'standard' Cyberman model, with the addition of the 'ear muffs' - that just really works. The sight of one being inflicted with emotion and crying out in pain is pretty striking, and it relies on our former knowledge of the creatures. Admittedly, it doesn't look quite as effective in the closing seconds, when the creature lurches out of the darkness down in the sewers…

Some praise really does need to be reserved for the Cyberplanner: it's always been a slightly odd design, as though the leader of their invasion fleet has been built from assorted bric-a-brac, and even in this story, the Direction hasn't always done it the best of favours. When we see it in close up, it really does look cobbled together, and the effect is completely lost. Today, though, in a long-shot and towering over Vaughn, it works! We've got a few shots from behind the structure, too, which also make it look better than it has done.

I think one of the things that I'm enjoying most about this story at the moment is the fact that we've reverted to having three companions again. For a while, I was thinking about how much I'd rather Anne Travers turn up in the story than Isobel, but now that we're thick into the action she's fitting right in. I love that she and Zoe plot to go into the sewers and find the evidence the Brigadier needs, and then tempt Jamie into coming along, too. It makes for a nice dynamic, the likes of which we've not seen since Ben and Polly departed. I also love how normal it feels that a policeman thinks they're just a bunch of kids larking about in the sewers - the scale of what's going on is growing by the episode (especially now that the invasion has been moved up to tomorrow!), but for most people it's just a load of fantasy. No wonder the Brigadier needs to get hold of some evidence pretty sharpish!

The policeman is the second casualty of this story to come completely from nowhere. Back in Episode One, the poor driver that gives the Doctor and his friends a lift gets shot down in cold blood without the Doctor even realising (a few episodes later, he even muses to the Brigadier that the chap's probably fine), and here the policeman meets his fate simply by touching the outer fringes of the Doctor's life. The series has a gritty edge to it when we come back down to Earth, and it packs far more of a punch to see an innocent policeman meet his demise than it does some random scientist on the high-tech base-of-the-week.

a 

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

Day 230: The Invasion, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Oh, all right then. I'm a complete convert to the style of animation used in this story. For some reason, I'd always recalled it as being a bit ropey - almost like cheap flash animation that featured characters barely moving. Actually, it's completely the opposite to all that! I think I'm actually a little disappointed that Cosgrove Hall didn't get to make any more of the missing episodes - if they could all have been to this standard, then I'd be a very happy fan.

In some ways, it's also quite nice to have Cosgrove Hall connected with Doctor Who, even if it's only in a small way (and Scream of the Shalka, their other Who project, is seeing a DVD release next month too). For many people, it's a name that's synonymous with childhood and British animation, and is as much of a treasure to UK television as Doctor Who itself. Sadly, the company was wound down a few years ago, so chances of getting them involved with the Who range again are pretty much nil*.

It's interesting, though, that when The Invasion first came out on DVD, in 2006, we were told quite simply that the cost of regular animations were beyond the budget of the DVD line, and that we'd only managed to get hold of this one because of some complicated agreement with the Doctor Who website (I think I'm right in saying that these two episodes were commissions for the web, to follow on from their various other animation pieces, but that for some reason that plan fell through, too late in the day to cancel. Thus, we end up with these two episodes here on the DVD). Fast forward seven years and suddenly animations aren't just viable - they're plentiful!

This year already, we've had The Reign of Terror (I always found it amusing that the first two stories to be released with animated instalments were the second ever story with missing parts, and the second to last story with them. There's a kind of neat symmetry to that!), and a sneak-peak of The Tenth Planet on the Regenerations set, with a full release to follow later in the year. The Ice Warriors is out any day now, and then there's The Moonbase to come in a few months, too. Here's hoping that the last few stories with only two missing episodes (The Crusade and The Underwater Menace) can also be given the treatment - it's a lovely way of plugging the gaps.

And what a gap to plug in today's episode! Helicopters are simply becoming part and parcel of the programme's format, now, so it's nice to actually see one! Both their previous appearances have been in missing episodes, too, but here we get some idea of how the scene could have looked, and it's fab. I've no doubt that the animation takes one or two liberties (the shot of the helicopter flying away while Jamie dangles from the rope ladder, for example, probably looks a little better here than it might have actually done!), but it really helps to up the scale of the whole thing.

And yet, for me, it's still in the characters that The Invasion is really shining. Particularly in Tobian Vaughn. I've already said plenty of nice things about the performance we're being given here but the way that Vaughn's facade gently slips away throughout the first two thirds of today's episode, before he eventually snaps and begins to shout is fantastic. The best bit, however, comes a few minutes later, when he demands to be put through to a government minister. He snaps at the receptionist as she appears on the video screen, before remembering himself, and slipping back into his 'charming' persona. Characters are rarely as fully-rounded as this, and I think Kevin Stoney has to take a large amount of the credit, there.

And then the cliffhanger! We all knew it was coming, yeah, but you know what? I bloody love Cybermen, so it's all good by me!

*For the record, while everyone tends to list Danger Mouse as their favourite Cosgrove Hall production, for me it was always about Count Duckula. I still get the theme tune stuck in my head now and then.

a 

a  a

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

Day 229: The Invasion, Episode Three

Dear diary,

The Doctor and Jamie as they appear in this story are, for me, the 'definitive' versions. Whenever I think of the pair, it's as they are here: right down to the way that Troughton's hair falls. I'm not sure why it's like this as opposed to any other episode, but it's always been the version that's stuck in my mind. The scenes as the pair climb the lift shaft together and emerge onto the rooftop just looks absolutely right to me, as does their time sneaking along the sides of the trains and peeking inside to take a closer look at the supposedly 'empty' crates.

I think the fact that so much of Season Six is still available to watch as opposed to stuff from earlier in the Second Doctor's era (there's almost twice as many surviving episodes in Season Six than there are in Seasons Four and Five combined!) means that this has rather become the default version of Troughton's incarnation for many people. Take, for example, three recent releases of Second Doctor merchandise: The Wheel of Ice, an original novel released last year, and two 50th anniversary releases in the form of the second Destiny of the Doctor CD and the second issue of the IDW Prisoners of Time comic. All three of these feature the TARDIS team of the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe as opposed to the earlier set ups of this era.

I wonder if that might be why this version of the Doctor is so ingrained in my mind? Until undertaking this marathon, The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Moonbase were the only pre-Season-Six stories that I had any real knowledge of (though I'd seen bits and bobs from other tales, usually orphaned episodes), whereas I've seen a lot of Season Six before - merely by existing in the archive, it becomes far more accessible than his earlier stuff.

It's a shame, really, because I've noticed just how much Troughton's Doctor has evolved across his time on the programme. The Second Doctor - though still quite a fun character - gets to show off his darker side far more often these days than he did to begin with. He used to be a bit of a clown who secretly knew what was going on, but now he's maturing a lot. Even his look has moved on over time - compare the way his hair sits now compared to the way it was during the earliest stages of Season Four and there's a distinct difference. It's possibly something I'm projecting onto the character, but I think he looks older now far more than the three years that we've seen pass would allow.

It's another reason that I'd love to see him in a few more Jamie-less adventures, so we could get a real sense of time passing for this incarnation. I'd dearly love to have more to watch from his earliest adventures, so that this phase of the programme didn't feel so weighted to the late 1960s.

It's another one of those days where I could just wax lyrical about how brilliant Troughton and Hines are together, and a great instance of them really drawing my attention - I hadn't noticed that we were missing Zoe and Isobel until the pair clambered aboard the train carriage to take a look for them: I'm too busy caught up with them and their interactions with Tobias Vaughn.

Vaughn has always been hailed as one of Doctor Who's very best villains, and it's not hard to see why. Kevin Stoney turns in a performance that's pitch-perfect (he slightly over-plays it with the 'niceness' when face to face with the Doctor and Jamie, but this becomes a plot point when even the Doctor draws attention to it), and he's well suited to the part. He was just as good playing Mavic Chen back in The Daleks' Master Plan, but giving him a far more real character and placing him in a very real setting makes his performance all the more brilliant - we can really connect to the idea of this person existing behind the fake smiles of big business.

Perhaps worryingly, all my memories of his character come from this first half of the story, before the Cybermen actually make their appearance. Once they arrive on the scene, I can't really recall what happens to Vaughn. I'm hoping that it's more down to my own bad memory than the character being sidelined as the story goes on, as he's one of the greatest things to turn up in the programme…