Doctor Who stuff you might want to buy

Stuff you may want to buy....... It's a good few weeks for those interested in the missing episodes of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who: The Aztecs (Special Edition) is out which includes the recently recovered Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock. We wrote about it here.

Then Telos publishing released an updated edition of Wiped! Doctor Who's Missing Episodes. The original was an essential reference work when writing the first year of the Blog and the updated version is even better. I've got one of the Hardback versions and love it.

The today Panini released Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #34: The Missing Episodes – The First Doctor collecting all the existing Telesnaps for the missing First Doctor episodes in a format much larger than they'd previously been presented in. here's a sneak peak inside. Get this, it's fab! Yes I know some of them are available on the BBC website but this special includes the 6 surviving Marco Polo sets and Tenth Planet 4 which aren't.

From the other end of the original run of the program you might also be interested in a copy of JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by former Doctor Who magazine writer/Blue Peter editor Richard Marson. You can read advance reviews at SFX and Starburst who also interview Richard about it here. I suspect we may be hearing more about this book as it gets closer to publication.....

Oh and we've got a new blog running a weekly look at Blake's 7. You can read it at http://blakesevendays.blogspot.co.uk/.

No I've not forgotten the New Series Doctor Who episodes.......

084 Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock (again!)

EPISODE: Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 084
STORY NUMBER: 018
TRANSMITTED: 25 September 1965
WRITER: William Emms
DIRECTOR: Derek Martinus
SCRIPT EDITOR: Donald Tosh
PRODUCER: Verity Lambert
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: The Aztecs (Special Edition) including Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock

Hang on didn't we do this before on Valentine's Day 2011 ? Yes we did. But since then there's been a development! To Wit this episode, which only existed on audio at the time, has been found and is now out on DVD! So it's only right I sit down and watch it. Here's the summary from last time:

The Doctor & Vicki are being watched by alien eyes. They are pursued by Chumblies: Vicki is captured and taken to the Rills while the Doctor tries to sabotage the device the Rills use to convert air to ammonia which they need to breathe. The Rills speak with Vicki telling her they offered to take the Drahvins with them and they did not kill the Drahvin warrior as claimed. Maaga killed the injured soldier not them. Vicki flees the spaceship to stop the Doctor's sabotage. Steven attempts escape but finding a Chumblie outside is trapped in the airlock. Vicki convinces the Doctor that the Rills are friendly and he enters the ship to confer with them. They are drilling for power, but all they have found is a gas they are unable to use. The Doctor offers to give them power from the Tardis. Maaga starts pumping the air out of the airlock and gives Steven a choice: Surrender, die in the airlock or be killed by the waiting Chumblie. The Doctor & Vicki rush to the Drahvin spaceship to rescue him but the pressure difference has sealed the outer door preventing his escape.

and what I thought:

Top stuff again. Lovely ominous sound to the disembodied Rills voice coming from the Chumblie. We've also got some other familiar noises as several Dalek effects are used: the Dalek city door noise is the sound of the Drahvin airlock opening & closing while the Dalek control centre noise is heard in the Rill ship. The whistling noise made when the Chumblies communicate with the Rills sounds awfully like the noise made by the UFOs in the eponymous Gerry Anderson series.

There is a crucial error in this episode betraying that it was previously written for a different set of companions: Stephan does not know that he can be harmed in the airlock by pumping the air out. Now given that Steven is a trained astronaut this is unlikely. The original draft of Galaxy Four was written for The Doctor, Ian, Barbara & Vicki where Barbara would be the companion held hostage. Instead Steven takes on the role meant for Barbara but as we see it gives rise to this small but important error.

So how's that changed now I can see it?

It hasn't, I still think it's a really good episode. What it has brought home is how much the audio doesn't tell the entire story. How Maaga's speech is delivered straight to camera, how the Rills' story of how they came to be there and their first encounter with the Drahvins is partially told in flashback and how the astronaut being trapped in the airlock doesn't look half as ridiculous on screen as it sounded. Actually being able to see the Chumblies move, with the lights in them and, in at least one case, an inactive Chumblie just sitting there at the back of a scene. All these details would be lost in an animation though I'll admit if I'd been in charge of animating the episode I'd have shown the encounter between the Drahvin & Rill ships as well as the on planet encounter as a flashback, but would have known they wouldn't have shown all that on screen. In fact.... is this the first time we get a Flashback sequence used in Doctor Who? Some of Derek Martinus' direction really leaps out particularly the shot from above, but I'm not sure about the wall design for the Rill area.... I say area cos I'm not 100% sure if this is meant to be showing the inside of the Rill ship or a base that's been built round .... anyway the wall panels used don't reach the floor. So I'm guessing that it's a deliberate design decision.

We also get to see the Rills, for many years the most obscure Doctor Who monster (quite apt really for a race that spend their time hidden behind walls & glass) No photos were thought to exist of them at all until two old photos were identified as being Rills. The site linked to there says they remind them of the Guild Navigators in Dune but there's something else a lot closer to home that they remind me of: The Face of Boe!

Speaking of the Rills.....

The cast for Galaxy Four features fewer recognisable names and faces than most Doctor Who stories and very few cast members that appear in multiple Doctor Who stories. The most famous person in the cast is Angelo Muscat, who's hidden in a Chumblie here. He later finds fame and recognition as the Butler in the Prisoner. I looked Stephanie Bidmead, who played Maaga leader of the Drahvins, up to see what else she'd been in and discovered she died in 1974 at the age of 45.

I missed some details on the cast first time out. Robert Cartland who provides their superb voice returns as Malpha in the next story Mission to the Unknown. Malpha in turn is thought to return in the Dalek Masterplan but is played by a different actor there (Brian Mosely later famous as Coronation Street's grocer Alf Roberts. Inside the Rill we see is Bill Lodge later to return as a UNIT Soldier in The Silurians Episode 3 and a Villager in The Dæmons Episode 3. I mentioned Chumblie Angelo Muscat's role as the butler in The Prisoner (Is Commander Straxx now a homage to the Butler?) but I didn't know he's been an Oompa Loompa in Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory as had fellow Chumblie Pepe Poupee. When the modern Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was made all the Oompa Loompa's were played by just one may - Talons of Weng Chiang's Mr Sin actor Deep Roy. One of the other Chumblies does return to Doctor Who: Tommy Reynolds was (uncredited) in Terror of the Autons: Episode Two as the Auton Troll Doll. Finally the actress playing one of the Drahvins Lyn Ashley went onto marry Monty Python member (and the voice of Wreck Gar in Transformers the Movie) Eric Idle!

During the afternoon of Sunday 11th December 2011 rumours began spreading on the internet that some Doctor Who episodes may have been returned to the BBC. Then fans looked at their diary and spotted that it was the second day of Missing believed Wiped at the BFI. And then we looked at the program and saw: 15.45 NFT1 Session 1: Miscellany .... BBC Sci-fi footage (Title TBC) (BBC 1960s). Finally a little after 4pm the announcement was made that two episode of Doctor Who had been recovered: Galaxy 4 episode 3 and The Underwater Menace episode 2, bring the missing episodes count down to 106 with 90 Hartnell episodes and 57 Troughton episodes known to survive.

So where had they been? The Radio Times has a decent account of how they had been found:

“Through me,” says Ralph Montagu, Radio Times’s head of heritage and a lifelong Doctor Who fan. “I occasionally meet up with a group of film collectors and retired TV engineers at a café in Hampshire.

“A few months ago I spoke to Terry Burnett, who used to be an engineer at TVS [the former ITV franchise based in Southampton]. Somehow Doctor Who was mentioned in passing, and Terry said, ‘Oh, actually I think I’ve got an old episode.’

“I thought it was bound to be something we’ve got already,” says Ralph. “I tried not to get too excited, but he came back the next day and brought this spool with him. It had no label, so I had a look at the film leader and it said ‘Air Lock’. I thought, ‘What’s that?’ I checked online and saw that Air Lock was an episode of Galaxy 4 - a missing Hartnell serial. So then I got very excited.”

Ralph met Terry again a couple of weeks later, “And he said, ‘Guess what I’ve got.’ It was another episode of Doctor Who! Again not labelled on the can, but it turned out to be The Underwater Menace part two.”

We know for certain that the Underwater Menace 2 print was a returned one from the Australia because it has cuts to the start which precisely match material retrieved from the Australian Censor some years ago. It thus seems likely that Galaxy Four came from the same source. According to the film print appendix in my copy of Wiped the ABC in Australia confirm they no longer held their Galaxy 4 prints... Meanwhile there's a misprint on the entry for the Underwater Menace that duplicates the purchase date so we don't know what the ABC think happened to their print - hopefully the error is fixed in the new edition of Wiped due now!

Galaxy 4 episode 3 also has some material missing (again quoting from The Radio Times with Paul Venzies of the restoration team commenting)

"Even more of a challenge is a film break right at the cliffhanger, where companion Steven (Peter Purves) is suffocating in the eponymous air lock. “We’re missing 27 seconds of action completely, as well as the closing credits,” says Paul. “It’s a few shots and one line of dialogue from Maaga. But luckily we have the soundtrack and by using other visual material within the episode, we can re-create it.”"

How they've done it is quite clever: Lots of shots of the pressure gauge falling interspersed with brief sequences from the last few moments as Steven is in the airlock repeated. Work well, if you didn't know something was wrong with the print then you wouldn't spot it.

Airlock doesn't appear by itself it forms part of a larger Hour+ long reconstruction of the entire story. I won't look to closely at the episodes in the recon here because they are cut down and, like the recent animations, are someone's interpretation of what's going on rather than actual Doctor Who. Should you with to know what I think of the rest of the story then look at:

082 Galaxy 4 Part 1: Four Hundred Dawns

083 Galaxy 4 Part 2: Trap of Steel

084 Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock

085 Galaxy 4 Part 4: The Exploding Planet

Originally intended for The Time Meddler DVD, the story that precedes Galaxy 4, the recon is a triumph especially considering that no telesnaps exist for the story. In all probability none were ever taken because by this point John Wiles was effectively producer and he didn't have any taken for any of his stories - none exist for Mission to the Unknown, The Myth makers, The Dalek Masterplan, The Massacre or The Celestial Toyroom, all missing or partially missing from the archives. (see the Nothing at the End of the Lane Omnibus for more details on what telesnaps were taken when) There's an off air clip from episode one, and a long six minute sequence from the same episode integrated into the recon. The six minute sequence has a bad record on DVD: It was missed off the clip package in the Lost in Time DVD only appearing in the Missing years documentary. This time round it's still impossible to access the clip directly and indeed the recovered episode as well! I'd have made both accessible separately from the menu, instead they can only be found by fast forwarding through the disc. At least the episode starts at a chapter point (7), I'd have stuck chapter points at the start and end of the clip, but no: chapter 2 starts right in the middle. I'd have also had chapter points at the start of episodes 2 & 4 - both have points positioned too early. It isn't as if the chapters are at regular intervals:

Chapter	Time
2	00:05:53
3	00:09:14
4	00:15:31
5	00:21:13
6	00:25:55
7	00:28:12
8	00:31:39
9	00:39:15
10	00:43:18
11	00:48:22
12	00:51:52
13	00:52:34
14	00:57:42
15	01:02:42
16	01:03:46

Now episode 1 ends as 15:47... Episode 2 Starts at 28:12 and Episode 3 ends at 52:32..... Just off the chapter points. But having a quick listen to the Galaxy Four CD it seems the chapter points have been positioned at the start of the material repeated in the next episode. An odd decision: I'd associate the repeated scenes with the episode they were first broadcast in and especially given the positioning of the chapter just inside the end of episode 3.

I don't know.... I just don't think enough fuss has been made about the Galaxy 4 stuff on this release. Barely a mention on the packaging, just a line in the special features, for something that for me was THE major selling point for this release. The recovered episode is stuck in the middle of the recon with no way of getting to it directly. There's no production subtitles for it. No commentary. No documentary of any sort, nothing even to explain how the episode came back. For me any missing episode of Doctor Who that's recovered is special. Dalek Masterplan 2 & Tomb of the Cybermen hugely so but I can specifically remember the recoveries of Abominable Snowman (read about in Doctor Who Magazine), The Ice Warriors, Evil of the Daleks 2 & Faceless Ones 3 (in Celestial Toyroom the DWAS magazine), Tomb of the Cybermen (newspaper while a guest at the University health centre) and Dalek Masterplan 2 (via the much missed Restoration Team forum). As the material is presented here the feeling is amongst many fans that it was bunged on just to make people buy the Aztecs Special Edition DVD. Hopefully at some point in the future they'll be the opportunity to "go again" on this release, maybe with a full recon of the other three episode and the features I've mentioned above. I hope that Underwater Menace 2 gets better treatment than this: rumours abound that it will be paired with episode 3 and animated. I'd have been happy with the two Underwater Menace episodes and Airlock stuck in a Lost in Time 2 package with new commentaries, production subtitles and associated clips.

Doctor Who: The Aztecs (Special Edition) including Galaxy 4 Part 3: Airlock was released Monday 11th March 2013 (Today as I write this).

702 Doctor Who - The Movie

EPISODE: Doctor Who - The Movie
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 702
STORY NUMBER: 161
TRANSMITTED: Monday 27 May 1996
WRITER: Matthew Jacobs
DIRECTOR: Geoffrey Sax
PRODUCER: Peter V. Ware
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Philip Segal, Alex Beaton & Jo Wright (for the BBC)
RATINGS: 9.08 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: Revisitations Box Set - Volume 1 (The Caves Of Androzani / The Talons Of Weng-Chiang / Doctor Who - The Movie)

The Doctor is summoned to Skaro to collect the Master's remains after the Daleks try & Execute him. The container holding the remains cracks and slime oozes out as the Tardis malfunctions and is set on course for Earth. The Tardis materialises in San Francisco on 30th December 1999 and is immediately shot down by a gang. He is rushed to hospital, while the Master takes over the body of an ambulance driver, where the efforts of surgeon Grace Holloway to save his life cause him to regenerate. The Doctor is initially bewildered but slowly gains his memory. The Master gains access to the Tardis and enlists the services of Chang Lee, a teenager who stole the Doctor's belongings to help him obtain the Doctor's body. Chang Lee gives the Master access to the Eye of Harmony that powers the Tardis which allows the Master to deduce the Doctor is half human. They come for the Doctor at Grace's house and take him to the research institute which is using a new atomic clock. They realise the ambulance driver is the Master and escape in a traffic jam, borrowing a police motorcycle to get to the institute, The Doctor steals a piece of the clock and they flee the scene returning to the Tardis where the Master is waiting for them. Doctor uses clock piece to repair Tardis. He needs to travel back in time to stop the Eye of Harmony being opened but finds the Tardis power drained. While trying to jump start the Tardis Grace is possessed by the Master and attacks the Doctor. Chang Lee starts to believe the Doctor so the Master kills him and uses Grace to open the eye so he can seize the Doctor's body, but causing chaos throughout the world as the eye's energies are unleashed. Grace activates the Tardis console, aborting the transfer of the Master into the Doctor's body, but Grace is killed by the Master before he is sucked into the eye. The Doctor takes the Tardis back in time bringing Grace and Chang Lee back to life before returning them to Earth and leaving to continue his travels through the universe.

Things that are good about the Movie: Sylvester McCoy. The Tardis set. Paul McGann. And I've got reservations about two of these. McGann is fab in this but he doesn't appear on screen until 20 minutes in and when he does he's playing the usual bemused/disorientated post regenerative Doctor. Yes it's great to see McCoy again but his stint at the start as the Seventh Doctor eats into his successors screen time. The new Tardis set, owing a debt to the Masque of Mandragora secondary control room and "Jules Verne" designs.

There's some interesting use of imagery throughout: eyes keep cropping up from the Master's (still Cheetah Planet affected?) eyes at the start through to the eyes giving away to Ambulanceman Bruce's wife that all is not well with the husband, to needing a retina scan to open the Eye of Harmony, the Eye of Harmony itself being shaped like an eye and the Doctor's eyes being forced open as the Master attempts to take his body. Then as the Doctor regenerates we get Frankenstein playing in the background as the Monster comes to life/Doctor comes back to life followed by some biblical Christ like images of the Doctor walking from the Morgue wrapped in a shroud which is continued later with the "crown of thorns" in the attempted possession by the Master sequence mentioned above.

Reaches for the hatchet.....

Right the Master's on trial by the Daleks and has requested the Doctor is going to collect his remains after his execution? Hmmm. Now I could maybe get the Daleks being a bit miffed with the Master over the failure of the Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks invasion but any Dalek action in retaliation against that would have begun & ended with the word "EXTERMINATE!". And if the Daleks are putting anyone on trial it's Davros we want to see post Revelation of the Daleks. Even if we allow them the conceit that they might put the Master on Trial surely the first thing they're going to do when he shows up is Exterminate him good and proper. We'll let the trial taking place on Skaro, destroyed in Remembrance of the Daleks, pass because it could quite easily have happened prior to the planet's destruction. I suspect the answer actually is that this is a huge trap for the Doctor set by both the Master & the Daleks, who've given the Master the ability to turn into this slime monster thing that can take over other people's bodies - cos he certainly wasn't able to do that before. yes, he could take over other people's bodies, there's form there in Keeper of Traken, but the slime monster thing? That's there because someone in special effects has gone "we can do this really cool moving liquid thing just like they did in Terminator 2" and someone else has gone "woooo, yeah, that'll be really cool!" and we've all gone "You've just ripped off Terminator 2".

That's not the only Terminator 2: Judgment Day rip off in the film either: the chase with the ambulance and the police motorcycle owes a lot to that film.... far more than it does to Doctor Who, Ambassadors of Death & Planet of the Spiders not withstanding.

The Doctor is half human now..... do you know what, out of all the things the Movie did I can probably cope with this the most. Yes it goes against all the ideas presented in the New Adventures that Time Lords are "loomed" (don't ask) rather than born, which rules out the possibility of the Doctor having a human mother. But it does neatly explain his fondness for Earth. The kiss between him and Grace is more of a shock as the Doctor has taken very little interest in affairs of the hearts before. But I suppose he might suddenly.....

The Eye of Harmony: OK when we last saw the Eye of Harmony it was located on Galifrey as the source of the Time Lord's power but yeah I can go with each Tardis having one, tapping into that power. It was a little less literal in the eye department the last time we saw it though. And needing a human to open it? That's not going to prove useful in most Time Lord Tardises is it?

Then there's the ending. Oh dear. Right from the very start the Doctor has been you don't go back and reverse events that have already happened. In Earthshock he doesn't go back to save Adric. And yet here time gets wound back to bring Grace & Chang Lee back to life.... It's not as if the Doctor goes back in time to make it happen either, the Tardis going back in time a bit seems to do it which is just mad.... Time flows normally inside the Tardis no matter what direction it's travelling. Any situation where we see something that has already happened on screen undone sits very *VERY* badly with. "And with a click of their fingers it never happened". Doctor Who has one previous example of changing what has already happened: Day of the Daleks. But in that instance the Doctors actions, in preventing the Dalek invaded world from coming to pass, are undoing interference with Time the Daleks have already committed.

I think in many ways the Movie serves as a lesson on how *NOT* to bring back Doctor Who. McCoy's twenty minutes at the start are a fan pleaser but they don't help to establish the new Doctor as a character at all, quite the reverse in fact by eating into his screentime. Then a considerable proportion of the rest of the film is taken up by the bemused post regenerative Doctor. Contrast this, when we get to it, with how Russell T Davies did things in Rose.

Cast: Being an American production you wouldn't expect the cast to have any prior or future links to the program. Sylvester McCoy obviously served as the Seventh Doctor, though according to the information text on Doctor Who - The Movie Revisitations DVD the BBC had been keen for the past Doctor part to have been taken by Tom Baker. This, along with Tom's proposed prominent part in Dark Dimension does tend to show the BBC's lack of faith in the incumbent Doctor. Replacing him is Paul McGann, famed for his appearance in Withnail and I. He has several brothers, all of whom are in the acting profession. Grace Holloway is played by Daphne Ashbrook an actress with a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine credit to her name as the title character in the season 2 episode Melora. The Master/Bruce the Ambulance Driver is played by Eric Roberts, the brother of film actress Julia Roberts. His wife Eliza Roberts plays his on screen wife Miranda.

Location filming for this story, and the studio recording, took place in Vancouver, Canada, which is rather flatter than the San Francisco setting for the story. At that time Vancouver was a popular area for TV series to be filmed in with genre series The X-Files being filmed there.

The Movie was the brainchild of executive producer Philip Segal who'd carried it with him through employment with several TV organisations including Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, hence the origin of the "Steven Spielberg does Doctor Who Movie" rumours. Indeed American interest in the series may have played a part in the initial 1989 cancellation and certainly helped to spike the proposed Dark Dimension 30th anniversary story. Both Director Geoffrey Sax and Writer Matthew Jacobs was English: Jacobs had even visited the Doctor Who studios when his father Anthony Jacobs appeared as Doc. Holliday in The Gunfighters.

Although well received in the UK, the movie didn't do so well in the US and didn't lead, as hoped, to a series being developed. As I said at the top I like the two actors playing the Doctor and I like the Tardis set but much of the rest of I'm not that fond of. However I've heard about some of the proposals for doing Doctor Who for a US audience and what we got is far, far better than some of them believe me. And if you don't check out the documentary on Doctor Who - The Movie Revisitations DVD which lays out in full the story behind this production. I think for me personally it marks a point in the years following Survival where Doctor Who passed from "It could come back" to "that's it, we're done with TV Doctor Who". It turned out I was a little bit wrong....

Doctor Who - The Movie was novelised for BBC Books by Gary Russell, former The Famous Five actor (he was Dick Kirrin) and Doctor Who magazine editor (1992-1995). The Video release of this story, (20th May 1996 iirc - the Internet is vague, but I can recall buying a copy on my first day working for Bacon & Woodrow), caused some controversy: In February, three months before, all existing Doctor Who videos were withdrawn from sale. At that point Hand of Fear, released 05/02/1996, had only been on sale for two weeks making this a hard to find item. The video contained more footage of Sylvester McCoy being shot than was show on UK television. The video, by nature of it's early release, is also missing the caption shown before the UK broadcast dedicating it to Jon Pertwee who died May 20th 1996.

The first DVD release of this story occurred in the UK on 13 August 2001 with a commentary track by director Geoffrey Sax. A clash of dvd distribution rights between the BBC and Universal, who produced the story in the USA, prevented it's release there. Doctor Who - Revisitations was released in the UK on 4th October 2010, adding new special features and a Sylvester McCoy/Paul McGann commentary to the restored film and releasing it with new versions of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang & The Caves Of Androzani. A US DVD release of the Movie finally followed on 8th February 2011.

Interregnum 1: Adventures & Dimensions

In many ways the early 1990s was a great time to be a science fiction fan@ Star Trek: The Next Generation ruled supreme in the USA and eventually, three years after it started, came to the BBC. TNG begat a number of sequels (DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) but it's also the catalyst for the televised science fiction boom: Babylon 5, Stargate, X-Files, Sliders, Space: Above and Beyond..... during the 90s everyone got in the act. Really the only thing missing was Doctor Who.

Not that the early 1990s wasn't a good time to be a Doctor Who fan! The videos swung into a regular pattern of two every other month and were *finally* in episodic format and moved away from the Pertwee/Baker stories they concentrated on. Target continued to novelise books and when they ran out of TV stories they, under new owner Virgin Books, followed the successful Star Trek book line from Pocket Books (and reprinted by Titan in the UK) and started producing original fiction for the Seventh Doctor continuing the series in New Adventures from June 1991 and later with the Virgin Missing Adventures from 1994. The New Adventures started out in trusted and well known hands with John Peel, lauded for his recent adaptations of Hartnell Dalek stories, writing the opening book. The second was written by Terrance Dicks and you can't get a book more authentically Doctor Who than writing "by Terrance Dicks" on the cover. Incidentally his book, Exodus, is probably the closest to the TV version and the easiest to turn into a television production. Former Target editor Nigel Robinson produced the third book, Ghost Light script writer Marc Platt the fifth and script editor Andrew Cartmel the sixth with Ben Aaronovitch contributing later. But new names started creeping in as well, and they're names you might recognise too: Paul Cornell wrote the fourth book, Revelation, and became the first person to be repeat commissioned on the range. Mark Gatiss wrote the eighth book, Nightshade, with references back to the Quatermass series. Gareth Roberts writes the 11th book, The Highest Science, and later found his niche on the Missing Adventures line writing season 17 Tom Baker stories. Gary Russell & Matt Jones both provide later books as does one Russell T Davies already gathering a following for his cult children's series Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). All these names will reappear later..... And while we're on the subject of Children's television it's worth mentioning that on ITV a series called Press Gang was airing, also gathering decent reviews, by a young writer called Steven Moffat....

By that point we'd had a repeat season which started in January 1992 featuring The Time Meddler, The Mind Robber & The Sea Devils. In February of that year Tomb of the Cybermen was found in Hong Kong and returned to the archives while towards the end The Restoration Team showed off the first of many pieces of technological insanity to marry colour from an off air US NTSC video to sharp b&w film picture to produce a colour version of the Daemons which was repeated followed by Genesis of the Daleks, Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks & Battlefield, concluding in May 1993.

Rumours were then flying around about a planned 30th Anniversary special: It would reunite all the surviving Doctors in a script written by Adrian Rigelsford, a fan turned writer who at the time was producing reference works which are now viewed as somewhat dodgy due to the providence of interview material used, and under the trusted eye of director Graeme Harper. However this project was cancelled on orders from on high (for reasons which wouldn't become clear until much later). It's a shame because they were planning to film at Royal Holloway College, University of London while I was there doing my degree.

What we got instead was a documentary, Thirty Years in The Tardis, aired on 23rd November that year covering the show's history directed by fan Kevin Davies. Davis had worked on the animation sequences in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, produced the game graphics end title sequence for Terrahawks and produced the much lauded Don't Panic documentary on Hitch Hikers. Here he married interviews with specially shot footage recreating key scenes from the show's history. An extended version would be released in 1994 on video as Doctor Who - 30 Years in the Tardis which is due to get a DVD release shortly alongside Shada and many assorted oddments that couldn't be included on previous DVDs.

But what you won't see on Video or DVD is Dimensions in Time, a two part special made for Children in need uniting the casts of Doctor Who and EastEnders. Returning from Doctor Who are Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor & Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor with (deep breath) Sophie Aldred as Ace, Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman, Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Richard Franklin as Mike Yates, Caroline John as Liz Shaw, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, Louise Jameson as Leela, John Leeson as K-9, Lalla Ward as Romana, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush and Kate O'Mara as Rani. For all bar McCoy, Courtney, Sladen & Leeson it would be their last appearance as these characters.

The show was filmed using a new 3d process relying on motion that would be invisible for those watching without glasses but give added effects for those who had them hence some of the odder effects like the heads of the first two Doctors flying round the room.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your point of view: I take the latter) the contracts for the actors for this show stipulated that this was a production for charity and as such was not for commercial release so it has never been released on Video and will never be released on DVD. Even more fortunately my video copy has gone missing! Sadly YouTube came to my rescue. I watch this so you don't have to....

..... and that was excruciatingly bad. Blipvert scenes cut together so rapidly you haven't a hope of telling what was going on if the plot made any sense whatsoever. Dire.

And what's worse is that the vote, for which Eastenders character would help the Doctor, went the wrong way. It obviously should have been Big Ron, instead of Mandy, because the actor that played him had been an extra in Destiny of the Daleks. One of the other then current members of the Eastenders Cast with Who form, Mike Reid (The War Machines) gets a brief moment on screen and the experience obviously didn't put Louise Jameson off the soap because she joined the cast a few years later.

To think we got this (mercifully) brief rubbish instead of a new feature length Doctor Who episode!

And then the rumours about an American TV Series remake/pilot movie started rumbling loaded and louder.....

701 Survival Part Three

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."

EPISODE: Survival Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 701
STORY NUMBER: 156
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 06 December 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

Karra comes for Ace and calls for her to go hunting. On Earth the Master struggles to reduce the Cheetah planet's influence on him. The Doctor worries how far Ace has changed and whether she can be brought back. Ace is found by the Doctor who reduces the planet's influence on her. He warns he of the dangers of allowing the influence to spread but she agrees using the power to bring them, Patterson and the remaining youths back to the Tardis in Perivale. The Doctor knows that the Master has been brought to Perivale by Midge so they start searching at the flats where he lived, where they find a dead cat and young girl. Ace lapses under the Cheetah planet influence detecting Midge at the youth club. Midge turns on Patterson when he arrives killing him. The Doctor & Ace track him to the top of the hill where she lapses again. Midge moves to attack them on motorcycle and Ace has to be dissuaded from fighting him. He and the Doctor charge at each other on Motorcycles and Midge is killed in the explosion. Ace believes the Doctor has gone too and is attacked by the youths but Karra appears from the Cheetah planet and drives the youths off. Karra confronts the Master but is slain by hi,. The Doctor wakes up on a nearby rubbish pile. Karra dies in front of Ace transforming back into a human as she does. The Doctor corners The Master as he tried to steal the Tardis, but the Master's feral nature takes over transporting them back to the dying Cheetah planet where they struggle. The Doctor realises they musn't fight or it will destroy the planet but the Master attacks him. As he goes to bring the rock down on him the Doctor teleports himself back to Earth and the Tardis. One of the Cheetah people comes for Karra's body leaving Ace alone on the hill where the Doctor finds her. She tells the Doctor that she wants to go home, home to the Tardis and they leave together.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."

And that's it. The original Doctor Who series is finished and I concluded my viewing of the original series at 14:19 on Tuesday 19th June, a little ahead of schedule.

Yeah it's a good episode again. The Motorbike thing is a little pulled from nowhere: we don't see motorbikes until just before the scene and it all looks a little staged with the bike being left there for the Doctor to ride on. Dramatically it serves a purpose: it temporarily removes the Doctor from the action and gets rid of Midge but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It also caused problems during production: stunt manager Tip Tipping walked off the production after a disagreement with Eddie Kidd, brought in to help stage the motorbike stunt, over it's safety.

The story itself is good: Ace brings the Doctor home, albeit at a cost to herself. If I'm reading the story right Ace still has the Cheetah people influence inside her but it's sleeping as their world was destroyed. The Cheetah people have moved on somewhere else so there's the possibility that she's moved on somewhere else..... We don't know how the Master got to the planet and although we see him trapped there at the end he's escaped from similar situations before. Which leads me to the Doctor: how does he manage to escape from the planet? Is he too coming under it's influence?

In case you miss it there's an important point made about Ace in this episode, and emphasises again by dialogue art the end: When she brings the surviving humans and the Doctor home yes she does bring them to Perivale, but she brings them to where the Tardis is in the town. Perivale's not her home anymore, the Tardis is.

One new location this episode: The Medway estate is the council estate shown. The child that appears at the flat there (named Squeek) is a young Adele Silva now better known as a model and actress on Emmerdale.

This is the last episode of the Twenty Sixth season of Doctor Who, and is it turned out the last episode of the original run. The possibility that this would happen arose in post production and Sylvester McCoy was summoned to provide the voice over speech that closed the episode to give the series some sense of closure, over a forlorn and mounrful version of the middle eight from the theme music. The reasons the show were cancelled are myriad and it's not 100% clear what eventually tipped the balance. Yes it was doing well ratings wise but it had been scheduled up against Coronation Street and nothing is going to do well there. A popular theory is that the BBC didn't like Doctor Who (and science fiction in general) backed up by the BBC still not having bought Star Trek: The Next Generation despite it now being in it's third season. When they eventually did the following year it got slotted into the teen programming slot at 6pm on BBC2 previously occupied by repeats of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. And then rumbling in the background were rumours of movies and American versions..... I've just sat down and watched Endgame on the Doctor Who - Survival DVD and virtually everyone there has a different theory/reason for why it ends without any definitive answer being given.

Script editor Andrew Cartmel was headhunted to script edit Casualty in 1990 while producer John Nathan-Turner was finally relieved of the producership when the production office was closed in 1990. At that point he was one of only two remaining staff producers working for the BBC as a system of independent production was adopted. JNT still continued to be involved with the program, producing special releases for BBC Video & Audio as well as helming the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. John Nathan Turner died on the 1st May 200s. Sophie Aldred went on to work in Children's television, which led to a career in voice over work. Both she and Sylvester McCoy would return for the Dimensions in Time in 1993 and McCoy would later appear as the Seventh Doctor for the US TV Movie version of the show in 1996. This was Anthony Ainley's last television appearance as the Master but he later reprised the role for the Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors CD-ROM video game in 1998. He passed away on 3rd May 2004 and became the first Doctor Who actor to get his obituary in Wisden.

Survival was adapted as a Target book by it's television author in October 1990. It was released on video in October 1995, and on DVD on 16th April 2007

700 Survival Part Two

"Do you know any nice people? Y'know, normal everyday people, not power-crazed nutters trying to take over the universe?"

EPISODE: Survival Part Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 700
STORY NUMBER: 160
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 29 November 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.8 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

The Doctor & Patterson escape on horseback and find Ace & her friends. The Master sends one of the Kittlings to find the Doctor as he struggles to maintain control of himself. The Kitling on Earth brings a Milkman to their planet which is attacked by the Cheetah people provoking battle between them and the humans causing Ace to be separated from the Doctor. The Doctor & Master meet as the Doctor realises the planet is heading for destruction. The Master needs his help and explains that if they stay there they'll become more like the Cheetah people. His eyes glow yellow and he bares fangs at the Doctor. Ace helps an injured member of the Cheetah People bringing her some water. The Doctor finds them and they decide to look after the creature. The Doctor tells her they need an animal who's home is Earth to get back there. Patterson gathers the surviving human youths together to try to survive. Ace starts to feel like she belongs on the alien world. They find the humans but Midge has begun to transform into one of the Cheetah people and runs away. The Master catches him and uses Mitch to return to Earth.The Doctor explains that one of them must change to return to Earth as Ace's eyes becomes cat like and she begins to change too.....

Good stuff again this episode, almost entirely confined to the alien world with the alien race, how they work and the planet's difficulties being laid out clearly before us. Patterson's philosophy is to survive but the Doctor is thinking beyond that, how to get home, and there's indications quite early on that he thinks Ace may be changing and represents a possible route back home.

A big hurrah for Anthony Ainley returning as The Master for the first time in three years for his first appearance against the Seventh Doctor. He's the only member of the Survival Cast to have been in Doctor Who before or since, but Lisa Bowerman, as Karra the horse riding Cheetah Person we've seen, later found Doctor Who fame voicing the Seventh Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield. Bernice was introduced in the novels and later starred in a series of audio stories for Big Finish. Outside of Doctor Who she's best known for playing paramedic Sandra Mute in Casualty (partnered with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood's Robert Pugh) where in 1987 she became the first regular character in that series to die.

The spot the Milkman is taken from is Medway Drive in Perivale, close to the other Perivale locations..... and looking at the map on the linked page I've just realised I've driven past these locations loads of times on the A40 journeying out towards Aylesbury (and the Logopolis lay-by location)! Meanwhile the location for the Cheetah People planet is Warmwell Quarry in Dorset, used the previous year during Greatest Show in the Galaxy and close to locations used this year for Curse of Fenric & Ghost Light. Quarries used in Caves of Androzani, Death to the Daleks & Destiny of the Daleks are all close by.

This is, if you count the cancelled story Shada, the 700th Doctor Who episode. It's also the penultimate episode of the original run of Doctor Who. Join us tomorrow to find out how it all ended and what happened next.....

699 Survival Part One

"I though you were dead! That's what they said, either dead or go to Birmingham"

EPISODE: Survival Part One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 699
STORY NUMBER: 160
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 22 November 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

In a suburban London street a man is washing his car observed by a cat when something leaps on him, vanishing in a burst of light just before The Doctor & Ace arrive. They have brought Ace home to Perivale so she can see her old friends. Elsewhere the cat is observing some children playing, a sight also observed by it's master who comments on what he sees. They visit a youth club she used to go to where she finds martial arts classes being run by former army sergeant Patterson who tells her most of her friends have moved on. He remembers Ace's Mum had listed her as missing and tells them four more children had vanished that month. The Doctor takes an interest in the local cats and buys some food to tempt them. The shopkeepers he buys from find their pet cat dead. Ace meets her friend Ange out collecting money for charity who tells here that all her other friends are gone. The cat finds one of the youngsters from the youth club for it's master. The youth is stalked & vanishes. While the Doctor tries to lure a cat to him Ace finds one in a playground before being confronted with a catlike humanoid on horseback which stalks her. She shouts for the Doctor but by the time he arrives she is gone, transported to a desolate alien world where she finds the body of the man seen cleaning his car. The Doctor finally finds a cat, but is grabbed by Patterson, acting for the neighbourhood watch, allowing it to escape. Ace is stalked by the cat person who id distracted by the youth which she kills. Ace is found by her friend Shreela and taken to her other friend Midge as the Doctor chases the cat but is pursued by Patterson. The Doctor finds the cat as Patterson finds him and both are transported to the alien world where they are cornered by a number of the cheetah creatures who take them to their village where The Doctor finds his old foe The Master waiting for him.

That's good stuff there. Straight forward to follow: there's something odd going on with the cat and it turns out it's linked to the cat like people (Cheetah People in the script) on the alien world who in turn are being controlled by the Master, who we got see in the shadows with weird glowy eyes but only is unveiled right at the end. Script Editor Andrew Cartmel moans about both the animatronic cat and the Cheetah People in his book as being effects that spoil the show but both work for me, as does the effect of suddenly getting higher as the victim is stalked, presumably insinuating the moment where the cat is replaced by the Cheetah Person on horseback. And there's a nice little tip of the hat with the teleport effect from Earth to the Cheetah planet: the circular white flash used is in the McCoy title sequence.

In a way there's some nice thematic stuff going on here: in the last two stories Ace has confronted her fear of the haunted house in Perivale and her feelings towards her mother: now she suddenly wants to come back home. She says she wants to see her friends but you wonder if the encounter between her and the baby Audrey has made her want to seek her mother out. But there's not just the Ace stuff going on here: this is the first episode of the final televised story in the original run and also contains the 700th episode of the series. It started with the Doctor taking two people away from their London home in an Unearthly Child comes to an end as he brings a lost girl back home to London. There's some evidence that this idea was floating around with the production team as the idea of getting home keeps popping up throughout the serial.

All of Survival is filmed on location and in fact many of the locations for the story are in Perivale, the town in West London where the story is set, rather than somewhere else substituting for them lending the story an extra element of realism. Colwyn Avenue in Perivale serves at the street where the car is washed while Bleasdale Avenue is where the Tardis lands. Horsenden Hill provides the high ground overlooking the town seen in the story, while Woodhouse Avenue is one of the other streets The Doctor & Ace walk down. The David Lloyd Centre in nearby Greenford stands on the site of the EYC Martial Arts Centre, part of the North Ealing Sports Centre, which was the youth centre in the story. Medway Parade provides the shops with number 20 Medway Parade forming the interior of the shop. Avenue West Ealing provides the pub that Ace goes in while Ealing Central Sportsground is the playground where Ace is attacked by Karra. Finally Colwyn Avenue Alley is the alley that the Doctor chases the cat down.

I'll be honest: casting comedians Gareth Hale & Norman Pace as shopkeepers Len & Harvey looks rather like stunt casting designed to attract a few column inches to the program. In 1993 they made their only other notable venture into straight acting staring as the police detectives Dalziel and Pascoe in a dramatisation of a Pinch of Snuff. When the Dalziel and Pascoe TV Series started three years later they found themselves replaced by Warren Clarke & Colin Buchanan who are now firmly associated with the roles in the minds of the viewing public whereas Hale & Pace's version is long forgotten!