Ice can burn, sofas can read, it’s a big universe…

…Big and often pretty scary. Here, Andrew presents his top eight Doctor Who scary moments. Rather than in order of scares it’s in chronological order, cos they are all just as scary.

An Unearthly Child: The TARDIS scene and its arrival on a strange rocky plain.                                        

While all of An Unearthly Child is a bit scary in a ‘what’s going on?’ way, the moment Barbara barges into the police box is when everything changes. Forget everything you have watched before, this is special and totally boggling. A bright, big SPACE SHIP! A scary man from another world! One of our heroes gets electrocuted; panic and confusion. Now the scary aliens are fighting over the controls, anything might happen, and it does! What’s that NOISE?? It’s the TV equivalent of the ground disapearing from beneath your feet – topped off with a police box standing in the middle of nowhere, covered by a menacing shadow. This is tea time in 1963, telly isn’t meant to DO that! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRsfKK34SFY&feature=related

The Daleks, The Expedition: The whirlpool effect

Our heroes are camped near a large lake on their way to find a way into the Dalek city. They hear a scream, and rush to discover Elyon, one of the Thals, has been dragged into the lake by a mutant. What the viewer actually sees is a massive whirlpool effect. It’s big and defies the brain’s attempt to make sense of how it was achieved. Must have been a huge monster! Gahhh.

…now fast forward twelve years to Andrew’s time. Tom Baker! Philip Hinchliffe! Robert Holmes! Scary!

The Seeds of Doom: End of part two

This one I don’t remember watching, but saw it in my dreams for days afterwards. They were awful nightmares, and I never forgot them. Years later, imagine my surprise when watching the video release of The Seeds of Doom, to find myself watching my recurring nightmare on telly.

It’s set in an antarctic research base, where two alien plant pods have been found. Some baddies have got wind of this and turned up to get the pods, but not before one of the pods turns someone into a big green tentacled plant with horrid rasping breathing. The baddies get the other pod, and tie the Doctor up in the base and Sarah in the power room with a time bomb. Meanwhile, scary-green-tentacles monster is on the loose. . . the Doctor gets free and saves Sarah, just as the scary green fella bursts in on them. They get away, or do they? It’s all a bit grim and ends with a great big explosion. I wake up terrified.

The Hand of Fear: Sarah finds the Hand

My first ever memory of actually watching Doctor Who. And it’s scary.

The Doctor and Sarah arrive in a barren rocky wasteland, and the Doctor declares with marvellous irony – nodding to a back catalogue of years of alien quarry landscapes – ‘We’re in a quarry!’ So far not scary. Then it goes bonkers. The quarry blows up – that’s an amazing sequence. Sarah is nowhere to be seen. Oh, that’s worrying. Sure she’ll be fine, though – the Doctor’s on the case. More toasted teacake please, Mum. The Doctor finds her – she’s in some space under a great big boulder, coughing in that inimitable Sarah way. Then she spots a stone hand. It’s creepy. She screams, and Dudley Simpson’s music does a uniquely big Dudley-Simpson-scary-moment. Toasted teacake everywhere.

The Deadly Assasin: That clown!

Part three of The Deadly Assassin is brilliant. I’m sure you know. It’s the one in the Matrix, the Time Lord Matrix that is. Oh, it’s amazing. Evil train drivers, a Samurai warrior, a scary surgeon, First World War imagery. The Doctor is on the run from all of the above, and is pretty thirsty. He hears running water from somewhere, but where? Is there a stream hidden beneath the sand perhaps? He bends down and sweeps away some sand, to find himself face to face with a blimmin clown! The clown laughs at him. It’s a scary derisory laugh that stayed in my poor head and no amount of toasted teacake would distract from it. How on earth could a clown be beneath that sand? Why, what, gahhhhh! Year’s later a Doctor Who magazine interview with David Tennant revealed that this was one of his all-time scariest memories of Who too. Well, how about that.

The Stones of Blood: Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom.

Big stones that can walk and suck your blood. And when they are thristy they make a scary sound: Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom. More nightmares. Gahhhhh.

The Power of Kroll: The Doctor nearly gets eaten by a great big scary squid.

This one genuinely terrified me and is the Doctor being his heroic best. One of his many Last Chance Saloons – testing a theory, and if he is wrong he’ll be no more, and if he’s right he’ll save everyone and they’ll all have the opportunity to make good on their mistakes and get a chance to live good lives.

There’s an enormous great big scary squid called Kroll. Kroll is more than a mile across and lives in a swamp. In a tale of science and so-called progress versus indigenous swamp dwellers the nasty exploitative scientists have been drilling for gas and using the swamp dwellers as slaves. Problem is they’ve inadvertently woken up Kroll. The swampies think Kroll is going to protect them from the nasty scientists, but Kroll has other ideas. Actually, he doesn’t have any ideas really. He’s just cross and hungry. And has got really long tentacles that pick off swampy and scientist alike. And even the Doctor. That was really scary. The Doctor in the grip of that tentacle, being dragged slowly towards that massive THING. I held on to my dad for dear life – and why was the sofa so blimmin close to the wall?? Fortunately Kroll was the fifth segment of the Key to Time, and the Doctor was jeeeeust able to convert him into his true form before becoming a tiny morsel. Pheeeewww. The thing was that I went nowhere near the deep end of a swimming pool for weeks. Or anywhere that a mile long tentacle could appear from.

Just recently, the Kroll prop was on sale at the Doctor Who props auction at Bonhams. If I’d had the money (haha, yeh right) I would have bid for it, set it up in my living room and pointed and laughed, going ‘Ner ner ne ner ner, not so scary now are you?’

City of Death: End of part one

Doctor Who is so clever at mining genres. Here we have a creepy inversion of body horror. Instead of someone inexorably turning into a big green tentacled plant or something, the villain of the story reveals that he’s not only a millionaire art criminal, he’s a ONE-EYED MONSTER! It was such a shock that there was probably another toasted teacake incident. This had just got bogglingly interesting. Doctor Who is good at being boggling. Wow. Scary green one-eyed monster with the technology to manufacture a well fitted convincing human mask that can blink, eat, drink, talk and everything. I’m not being sarcastic by the way, that is what I thought – we are up against something pretty amazing in this one. And isn’t the incidental music good. Shame you can see the actor’s nose through the green skin… 

The “Whoniverse” is a complicated place.  Ever aware of this, and the confusions that can arise, your friendly Oodcasters present the beginning of the end of your confusions…  The Oodcast Guide.  Each entry in this weighty online tome will be compiled using the very best of what remains of the Oodcast’s collective memory, and therefore absolutely and thoroughly under-researched.

So, let’s get cracking.  First up, we’ll take you through the most important part of the series…  The Doctor.

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The First Doctor __

The Doyen of doctors, the original was a crotchety old man who insisted on surrounding himself with young people and wearing a hat the shape of a fur-lined cone (which, combined with his white hair gave him the appearance of a time travelling Mr Whippy…)  He also chose the TARDIS with the broken chameleon circuit, presumably, so we can’t assume his judgement in travelling methods was any less flawless than his fashion sense.

He travelled with teachers, space pilots, resistance fighters, rescued spaceship passengers, secretaries and sailors before collapsing and regenerating for the first time.

Tremendously knowledgeable on scientific matters, but curiously awful at flying his own time machine, was the first to encounter Daleks and Cybermen, as well as taking jollies to Mexico, Ancient Greece, China and revolutionary France, met cowboys, cavemen and the Celestial Toymaker.

Oh yes, and he had a library card (see Vampires of Venice).  Eventually, old age took its toll and he regenerated for the first time, into a time-travelling bad-hair-day.

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The Second Doctor __

Slightly shambolic and unpredictable, the second doctor had the appearance of a tramp that wandered into Mr Benn’s favourite costume shop: with a shaggy pudding-bowl haircut, the occasional massive fur coat and Rupert Bear’s favourite trousers.

But there was more to him than fashion statements.  He was mercurial and fascinatingly clever, while clumsy and caring towards those in distress.  He also established the formidable team with Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, and was the first to openly (and shamelessly) use a sonic screwdriver on screen.

Surrounded by frightened Victorian teenagers, certain UNIT officers, hot-headed Scottish warriors and stupidly intelligent young women, he took on the cybermen and daleks again with nothing but his intelligence and a recorder, is still the only Doctor to take on the Ice Warriors as enemies, guided his friends through an attempted mind robbery, faced creatures from the deep and Yetis in the London Underground before being forced to become Worzel Gummidge by the Time Lords.

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The Third Doctor

Geriatric jujitsu exponents everywhere raised a cheer – for this was their doctor…

Beginning as a victim of friendly fire, and then becoming a confused clothing and vehicle thief as well as saviour of mankind in a plastics factory was something of a rollercoaster of a first day.  If it was possible for a Time Lord to have a mid-life crisis, this was it: fast machines, short-skirted female companions and more action than is seemly for someone of advancing years, this doctor was a kind of Budget Bond.  With his own Blofeld too: enter… the Master.

During the course of his careering about, he encountered the daleks again, the Master, daemons in Bronze age barrows, the Master, giant green poisonous maggots, the Master, fascist versions of reality, the Master, two sets of underwater cousins (who’s idea of “self-defence” is creeping aboard sea forts and murdering people), the Master, mind control machines, the Master, lost aliens, the Master, potato-headed warrior Sontarans, the Master, and the giant spiders which would ultimately be his end.  And the Master.

Did remarkably little travelling around his immediate environs for someone with itchy interstellar feet confined to just the one planet.  He did, however, reverse the polarity of more things than any other doctor.

Radiation brought his dashing about to an abrupt halt, and he regenerated soon after into that one-legged sailor in Blackadder II that drank his own wee and wanted to marry Nursey.

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The Fourth Doctor

Described as looking like a “Space vagrant”, the fourth incarnation was eccentric both in action and dress sense (although not quite as much as the previous doctors, it has to be said).  He pioneered the use of scarves as weaponry (see Hand of Fear), the use of confectionary to calm agitated beings, and the construction of jacket pockets from Mary Poppins’ old carpet bags.

Superbly intelligent, witty and fond of jelly babies, this doctor would stick around longer than any other and inspire thousands of children to beg mothers everywhere to get knitting.

In the TARDIS, which gained a glorious oak-panelled look for a time, he entertained journalists, (oddly clumsy but very likeable) UNIT medical officers, savage warriors, Time Ladies, robotic dogs, one rather annoying stowaway boy genius, an aristocratic brainbox and, just before his end, a loudmouth air hostess.

His battles though, were many and varied – taking on all manner of robots (giant ones, servile mining ones, mummified ones, half-human pirate captain ones and reproduction human ones), ancient alien powers, criminal time lords, Sontarans again, female radioactive creatures conveniently buried for centuries under a quarry, disturbing scary mannequins, amphibious lifeforms hiding in lighthouses, art-dealing monsters and – perhaps most famously – the daleks.

His end came when he met the Master again, and fell from a radar dish.  Thus becoming the chap off of All Creatures Great and Small.

Next time…  Doctors 5 – 8…

Here’s a question. Whose were those faces in the mind-bending battle in The Brain of Morbius? Were they the Doctor’s, Morbius’, or some red herring thingy that either the Doctor or Morbius or both were introducing into that battle of Time Lorderyness?*

Anyway… I really like the Beginnings boxset** and felt like writing a blog about it. Just because I love it so. I think it’s a treasure trove of truly awesome telly, and that everyone should see it.   

But first a bit of background. I was always of the school of thought that suggests black & white Doctor Who is not all that rewarding to watch. It’s black and white for goodness sake. And doesn’t have a stereo option. There’re no effects beyond wibbly split-screen or positive-negative gun-rays. The music was played in live and, when a scene ends, often stops wherever it’s got to. Time itself sloooowwwws down meaning that each twenty five minute episode actually takes a day or so to sit through. Spaceships clearly started life as Fairy liquid bottles*** and the sink plungers really were sink plungers. But what do I know? I used to assume that Masque of Mandragora was dull and tedious, and Carnival of Monsters was a daft run-around. Having found myself to be quite wrong about both of these I decided to have a go at watching the Beginning boxset. At the time I had just finished some studying that had eaten up loads of my spare time and left me wanting to chill out with some decent telly for a weekend. Hmmm, reading back this paragraph makes me wonder quite why I bought the boxset. I think it’s because there was nothing else that I wanted in HMV that day, and … it was on offer at a frankly staggering knockdown price. I think I just thought, yeh, let’s just try…

So what did I make of it all…? Well, my preconceptions were dashed.

I’d seen An Unearthly Child before but, blow me down with a feather, it’s good. It’s actually bullet proof in all regards, and still achieves the staggering feat of shifting without effort from a tale that could have been something like Cathy Come Home into something utterly extraordinary. Ordinary folk finding themselves hurtling through the space-time vortex with aliens in a police box! The suddenness and panic in the TARDIS scene and the first dematerialisation will always be an utterly breathtaking sequence. The only comparison I can think of is the equally wonderful opening episode of Life on Mars.

Then we go to the meet the cave folks, and while it might drag here and there it’s still a striking, memorable adventure. Politics, battle of wills,  survival, fear and hope. It’s memorable rather than dull. Here’s one thing I definitely picked up – it doesn’t feel safe. Doctor Who’s opening adventures each exude a sense of ‘maybe they won’t get out of this alive – the scenario is so far removed from everyday life that it actually wouldn’t surprise me. The Doctor can’t be trusted – look, he nearly killed a caveman. There is no safety net here. Yikes.’

Amazing. Next! Now before you all say ‘what do you mean you’d never seen The Daleks before??’ let me just say I’m actually glad I hadn’t seen The Daleks before. It was a revelation to my now rather set-in-my-ways view of telly. It’s very long, but it’s never dull. It’s a superb piece of writing, production and acting. Oh, and a shout out for Tristram Carey’s music – it’s incredibly evocative, and it sounds like he used some bits from the Torchwood theme. No. Hold on. That’ll be other way round won’t it. The alien planet scenes are superb, it just seems so… alien. And I had to remind myself that nothing like this had been seen on Saturday teatime telly before. Epic, scary, and pretty thought provoking. I’m not really a fan of the daleks, but in this one they are totally dalek-y.

Edge of Destruction is the first of Who’s occasional ‘woah, what’s going on?’ stories. It’s unsettling and weird, and leaves you thinking it through – and the revelation at the end takes the viewer even further into the realm of wondering ‘who are these strange alien people, what is their ship capable of, and are our heroes (Ian and Barbara) ever going to be safe with them?’

All through these adventures I got reminded of the initial coldness of the ninth Doctor as the first Doctor mellows in the companionship of Ian and Barbara. I wonder if he and Susan used to get into such scrapes before An Unearthly Child and had the Doctor always been such a selfish maverick up till then? We meet him on the run, a scared man ‘cut off from his own people’ and terrified of losing Susan, which makes me wonder how much truth there is in his later protestations that he ran away from Gallifrey because he was bored. Fascinating questions, which the series has never explored.

Doctor Who began with such fearlessness in its story lines and characterisations and in the sheer scope of what it set out to achieve that this was a golden era of ‘Anywhere in time and space, where d’ya wanna start’? I wish we could see Marco Polo…

Awesome.

*Answering ‘Members of the production team’ doesn’t count.

**Note to self: work on one’s links.

***Other detergents were available. Actually, I don’t know if there were other detergent brands in the 1960s?

So, Love & Monsters.  I said I’d go back to it, and after putting it off for several weeks, I have.  It’s an episode that I loved and hated in equal measure when I first saw it… so what would I think this time round?

I will be entirely open about my initial issue with it: Marc Warren.  I can’t stand him.  He was OK in Hustle, although then he was playing an over-confident, self absorbed crook and was surrounded by seriously good actors.  Here, presumably, he’s meant to be likeable.  But I’m afraid that if you want a likeable character, you shouldn’t cast a man with a ridiculously smug face.

But looking past that, there are plenty of things I like about the episode.  For instance, I love the way that Elton’s life has been framed by encounters with the Doctor (the ending, when he finally finds out what the Doctor’s connection to the death of his mother is particularly good… very poignant) – and the way they used flashbacks to show his part in unbelievable events (the spaceship crashing into Big Ben, the Auton invasion from Rose).  It’s something that came up very obviously in the latest series – why doesn’t anyone remember any of these things?  Well, here’s a group that do, and let it all bind them together.

Having duly noted RTD’s slight obsession with referencing his own show by having human characters obsessed with the Doctor and tracking him down, I have to say that every time there’s been this kind of meta-textual plot, it’s been from a separate angle.  And in this case, the L.I.N.D.A angle on the story is pretty endearing, and the characters are likeable.  They’re a little like an enlightened resistance. That have a bash at playing ELO songs to make them happy.

Peter Kay is pretty good as Victor Kennedy, precisely the right mixture of camp and creepy.  But not as the monster.  Don’t get me wrong here, I love the concept of the Abzorbaloff – it’s the kind of great idea that could only have come from a Blue Peter viewer.  I’m just not keen on the way they realised it on screen.  The idea might be funny (a green slobbering blobby thing trundling after Elton while threatening him in a digitally-treated mancunian accent), but it was those last couple of scenes that spoiled it for me completely.  It’s a completely underwhelming resolution to the mystery that’s been set up.  Having said that, I like the fact that it’s not the Doctor that defeats Abzorbaloff, but the people he’s eaten that do.

But my main gripe is with the comedy.  Comedy and Doctor Who can go well really well together, but there’s a certain pitch you need to hit, and certain performers it works with.  The scenes in Partners In Crime where Donna finally finds the Doctor are brilliantly performed, but there was an obvious comedic spark between David Tennant and Catherine Tate.  The scenes in the warehouse in Love & Monsters, with the Benny Hill style chase involving Rose, the Doctor and the Hoix, are awful (in my opinion) – it works in Scooby Doo, but not really here…   I’m just not convinced Billie Piper is suited to funny things.

But contrast that with the “bit of a love life” line at the end… and the almost-sweary line Abzorbaloff dies with (which, admittedly, made me laugh again).  My problem isn’t the slapstick or the ruder references, but that it never found a balance between the two, and they just can’t sit together.

My view of Love & Monsters then, is the same as when I first saw it.  I like it a lot, but the ending – with the comical Northern green blob and the pavement love – kind of ruins it.

This post was supposed to be sticking up for a Who that I wasn’t at all sure about the first time round, or have acquired a reputation for being a bit, well, rubbish.  But having got hold of Silver Nemesis over the weekend, I’m on a bit of a 7^th Doctor fest, so I’ll write about “Love & Monsters” next time.

So this one is about a story that I hadn’t seen since 1989.  One that used to make me cringe and bristle with irritation.  Not because I didn’t like it, but because it was the end.  I mean, of course, Survival.

A bit like Bjork, it’s a curiously beguiling little package, this.  Mysterious disappearances in Perivale, an abundance of stray cats (that can only snarl at people under remote control), a mouthy Scottish chap giving self defence classes, Cheetah People, and the Master…  It’s all rather spooky.

I remember feeling really rather uneasy about it when I saw it – but watching it again, I’m not sure why.  Maybe because it was pretty sinister.  It certainly wasn’t about the special effects particularly: although the Cheetah People’s costumes were alright, actually.  And the cats eyes effect on the humans – Midge and Ace particularly – were really good touches.  The robotic cat is a little obvious, though, and I can’t imagine even a 10 year-old me not noticing that.

The Doctor in this is an altogether darker being too – which I suppose is well known as the way the character was going.  Much more brooding that the clown-like Doctor that had graced our screens in season 24 (“Delta and the Bannermen”, anyone?).  Ace is great in it, confused to be back in her old haunt, and the story makes good use of her youth and energy.  She gets to do a lot of running in this – and its proper running, not the totter-away-from-the-strange-latex-shape-as-fast-as-my-high-heels-will-let-me kind of running that Tegan seemed particularly suited to.  There’s more development here for her too, even at the end of the series, with the bond she makes with Karra.  It all holds up pretty well after so long.

And I love the last speech.  It’s a bit obviously dubbed over after the shoot, and Sylv delivers it a little fast for my liking, but it’s lovely.  And a bit sad.  The last two seasons of the classic Who are still wonderful to me.  I know the shortcomings, and the failures of it, but I love the ambition, the restoration of the mystery when the character had started to become either a grumpy, grumpy sod or a fool.  And best of all, it is fun to watch.

But the extras on the DVD are brilliant too.  For a start, the continuity announcements from the original broadcast are on there, which helped me recreate an evening as a 10 year-old (Doctor Who at 7.35 followed by Bergerac at 8 – marvellous…).  Then on disc 2 there is a documentary about Ace (the first companion I followed from start to finish) and “Endgame” – a longer documentary about the cancellation of the series and what was planned for season 27 (The Ice Warriors would have been back!  Ace would have been trained as a Time Lord!)…

It all fills me with nostalgic intrigue – and a bit of regret at not having read more of the Virgin New Adventures when I had the chance…

I hated my memories of Survival.  But I’m glad I returned to it 20 years later – it’s not half bad, and certainly an exception to the reputation of 80s Who.  If Hale and Pace couldn’t spoil it, then it had to be quite good, after all.

Here’s one I like. Fear Her. The one with the girl possessed by the Isolus who got lost and just wants some friends and can make reality out of drawings, including a great big doodle-y scribble that hides in a garage - the scene where Rose finds it is geniunely wierd and creepy. C’mon – it’s genius! A monster that can be rubbed out! Pictures that come to life! The Doctor getting trapped in a picture-dimension-er-thing. An entire Olympic crowd disappearing live on-air while Huw Edwards gets lost for words. A joke about the TARDIS materialisation. A global threat. It’s perfect Doctor Who – the extraordinary in an ordinary street. Awesome imagination. It has some pretty thoughtful stuff about love and friendship. It even has the Doctor eating straight from a marmalade jar, much to Rose’s horror. It’s a creepy, thoughtful, moving classic.

When I was at school, Doctor Who was cancelled.  I tried to replace it for a while – I desperately wanted something to plug that gap.  Several things nearly did – cricket only lasted through the summer months though, and “Escape To Victory” was only ever on at Easter.  It was hopeless.

For a while, the discovery that my local library stocked a small clutch of Target novelisations and a couple of battered Make-Your-Own-Adventure books with Colin Baker’s permed noodle on the front cover had kept me going.  But they soon ran out.  I did read the Target novel of The Awakening four or five times though.  Each time, absolutely transfixed.

Then, one afternoon, I walked into a tiny (and otherwise pretty rubbish) bookshop near where I was living then, and I spotted the words Doctor Who printed on a thin-ish navy blue spine of a book on the top shelf.  I pulled over the little steps that were in the shop for customers, and clambered up to reach it.  It was, apparently, the first in a new series of Classic Script books.  The Talons of Weng Chiang.

I’d seen Talons before – one summer, my best friend at the time had broken his leg playing football, and spent the summer holidays inside with his leg up, watching endless videos of Doctor Who.  Partly to keep him company, and partly to see a lot of Who I’d never seen, I spent a lot of my time there.  That’s when I saw Talons.  And Pyramids of Mars.  And The Hand of Fear.  Three of my favourite stories to this day.

Anyway, back to the bookshop.  I bought the script and took it home, thinking it would keep me going for a couple of weeks.  Maybe by then the BBC would have resurrected the show.  Well, they didn’t… and I finished the book in less than two days.  By the end of those two weeks, I’d read it three times in all.  Not very long after that, I found myself sketching out small scenes from the start of my own story in script form.  That’s where it all started for me.

But Talons is still a story I go back to time and again.  Reading the script definitely helped me through the first viewing, although like Andy’s view of the audio taped episodes, reading the script left the worlds completely to my imagination without limitations of budget or film cameras.  So nothing prepared me for the close-up footage of a rat…

The story fed my other interests too, which helps.  Sherlock Holmes was one of the things that did manage to fill the gap between Who stopping and returning (and if you’re interested, you can find my views on Moffatt and Gatiss’ “Sherlock” over on my own personal blog here).  London and its history (and mysteries) has always been a place that fills me with wonder.

This period (I think) is the zenith of Robert Holmes’ time as script editor.  Don’t forget, this story came hot on the heels of the absolutely brilliant Robots of Death, and was followed by the wonderful Horror of Fang Rock.  I sort of think of them as a mini detective trilogy, although it doesn’t take too much of stretch to make a case for most Who adventures to be thought of as detective stories, at least on a very basic level.

And this starts a bit like a faithful reassembling of the elements to be found in many a Holmes story, I think – enigmatic foreign hypnotist showmen, Chinese heavies murdering strangers in back streets, horrific giant rodents stalking the sewers…  And then, Robert Holmes throws in a 51^st Century despot, who arrived on earth in a Time Cabinet that was then taken away by the Chinese Imperial Army who is draining the life-force from people to keep alive.  If that isn’t genius…

There are a number of Sherlock Holmes connections, aside from the deerstalker that the Doctor wears.  The Giant Rat of Sumatra is one of those cases that Watson famously mentions but never expands on, like The Abergavenny Murder and the Camberwell Poisoning.  Even Leela is a sort-of connection… (was going to say semi, but that would have led to all sorts of unintended embarrassment) – “savages” aren’t all that rare in Conan Doyle’s originals… in The Sign of the Four, for example.

The characters in Talons are full, rounded and colourful – it’s a masterclass in character writing.  Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Litefoot are lovely (and gloriously brought back to life by Big Finish this year) – but Li’Hsen Chang is creepy and Magnus Greel himself is hideous…  and a distant ancestor to the Moff’s stories, maybe, Mr Sin is absolutely terrifying.

There are lots of longer stories in the classic series which drag their feet and look obviously spun out to fill more screen time, but in my opinion this one doesn’t.  It’s marvellous, and not just to the sentimental fool in me.  Go back and watch it again, you’ll not be disappointed.

Anyone go to the Doctor Who prom? We didn’t unfortunately but have caught up with it on BBC iPlayer. It was great, eh, and wasn’t Matt Smith brilliant in that sketch?!

I particularly enjoyed Mathew Sweet’s piece in the interval regarding the history of incidental music in Doctor Who. Back in the early 80s I bought the cassette Doctor Who: The Music. In those days this was as near as it got to BBC video releases. . .  Goodness, how things have changed. The cassette consisted of two sides (hang on, remember those? You actually had to turn the tape over halfway to hear the whole thing and spool through using guesswork to get to a particular track. Life was clunky in those days) of Doctor Who incidental music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. To my ears it was the sound of other worlds, strange situations, terrible events, awesome resolutions.

At about the same time some schoolmates started lending me audio copies of actual stories. Anyone else remember that? This was a pre-video age, unless you lived in the posh part of town or went to the grammar school (note for non-UK readers - it really was like that here in the early 80s). Listening to Doctor Who adventures on audio was good and bad. It was bad that you couldn’t see Tom Baker’s grin, or Lalla Ward. It was good that the sense of scale was left unrestrained. When there was incidental music all sorts of visual possibilities appeared before you, all with the most astonishing production values.

So the incidental music was key to the audio experience. Dudley Simpson. Ahhh, Deadly Dudley (as he was quite unaccountably called). His music was part of the soundscape of my teenage years – mock me, I shan’t care … If for some reason you need reminding of the man’s genius, I need only mention this entirely random selection: the original Master theme, the Wirrn theme in The Ark in Space, the jungle scenes and the Sorensen transformation in Planet of Evil, the mummies chasing Ernie Clements in Pyramids of Mars, The Deadly Assassin part three, and all of City of Death. Rather like Matthew Sweet I still hum the City of Death Paris theme, generally whenever I arrive somewhere on holiday (including on the Paris metro, haha), it’s so joyous. Dudley Simpson’s sense of drama and humour and his endless inventiveness with a piano, a cello and some carsprings gave the endless variety of Doctor Who a coherence and identity.

Malcolm Clarke, though. Unsung hero. His Sea Devils music was the first track on Doctor Who: The Music and I played it over and over. It’s amazing and beautiful. Apparently some people don’t like it and I can’t work out why might that be. It’s an astonishing example of a genius at their creative best. A soundscape, which often consists of recognisable tunes but is also often pure sound. That and his Earthshock music, his eerie cybermen theme seemingly emerging out of the sounds of a dripping cave, building in structure until it reaches a corporeal form marching along with the metal meanies themselves.

Try this. Play a Doctor Who DVD and nip to another room and listen to it.

In the last few months, we’ve seen not just the new series of Who, but plenty of views expressed about the series.  I talked about Stephen Fry’s comments in my last post, but there was also Sir Terry Pratchett, saying that the show wasn’t so much as science fiction, but fantasy.  To be honest, I’m sort of with him there.  Neil Gaiman, for what it’s worth, pointed out (quite rightly) that the show has never pretended to be hard sci-fi – and I’m rather proud that it’s not.

When other shows like Star Trek have a writing team dedicated to making up mumbo-jumbo fake science language, it’s nice to have a traditionally British kind of show.  One that cannot be bothered to get up and switch the TV over, it’ll just wait on the sofa till someone else comes in.

But it’s not as if it matters a great deal – it’s still all wonderful escapism, right?

Or is it?  I’m not sure there’s ever been a time when this “children’s show” has ever reflected society so astutely and with such brilliant timing.  I mean, this year, we’ve had riffs on elections and decision-making the weekend before a general election.  And spitfires – albeit in space – the same year as the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.  And a football connection on the opening weekend of the world cup.  A finale planned and shot using specific dates.

That’s pretty impressive planning on behalf of Mr Moffatt, I would say.  It’s almost unbelievable to think that he’s been doing that while also teaching

Guy Ritchie how you update Sherlock Holmes without including Jude Law…

When RTD ran the show, I always got the feeling it just sort of, you know, rambled on – like it didn’t really belong in the same world.  Nothing real was allowed in and nothing out.  But I love the little connections.

I love watching things like Survival and remembering that Hale and Pace were once famous in this country.  I love seeing Stephen and Jamie on the screen and remembering that one was a Blue Peter presenter, the other spent years as a farmer on Emmerdale Farm (because it was still a farm then.  Oh how the reality hurts these days…).

But these days, we’re in the hands of someone taking us away from the soap opera in space style and back towards the show’s roots, finding writers who are able to grasp this, no matter how far removed they normally seem.  If Richard Curtis’ episode proved anything, it’s that the unexpected source is often the richest.  And if Chibnall’s proves anything, it’s that we should really try and avoid that again…

But I’m thrilled…  THRILLED that filming on Neil Gaiman’s episode is starting filming next month.  Gaiman’s writing has always been consistently great, he has an amazing ability to draw spectacle from something normal, unobtrusive  as well as the unknown and fantastical (very Who), and I think he’s always been counted as the dream writer fans would like to see working on the series.

I was convinced it was a cruel joke when it was announced he’d be writing for the next series, but it’s real, and there was apparently a photo on his twitter feed last week showing him, the Moff and Richard Curtis at a read-through.  I can’t find it on there, but then asking me to find something on Twitter is a bit like putting someone in a round room and telling them to stand in the corner…

(To one side, what was Curtis doing there?  Is he writing more?  I’ll be delighted if he is.)

But what excites me more than anything, is that Gaiman GETS Who.  Properly.  And this proves it beyond even the most unreasonable doubts:

“At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem…”

Roll on next April!

Pocket explanations

If you’ve ever wondered why we’re almost always universally positive about whatever Who throws at us, I think I have a shortened way of explaining it.

Last week, I watched the 1982 story, Time Flight.

How can you complain about the effects or storyline of the new series when you’ve seen things like that?

Incidentally, despite its obvious (and brightly coloured) flaws, I really enjoyed watching it…  I know I have a natural bias towards the vegetable-wearing Edwardian cricketer, but I expected it to be awful.  And it was, I suppose, but nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.  I’ll be more than happy to watch it again.  Anyone else?

Why I don’t hate what Stephen Fry said

We didn’t talk about this on the podcast at the time, so I want to just have a go at tackling this.

Not very long after my birthday (it was very nice, thank you), the hulking great genius Mr Fry said this:

“The only drama the BBC will boast about are Merlin and Doctor Who, which are fine, but they’re children’s programmes. They’re not for adults.  And they’re very good children’s programmes, don’t get me wrong, they’re wonderfully written … but they are not for adults.”

I think he’s kind of right, although I think his comments are slightly tongue-in-cheek and pointing to a completely separate issue which then got almost lost behind the overblown storm that followed him mentioning Doctor Who…

If it is a proper complaint, however, it doesn’t quite follow.  I say that for 2 reasons.

First, Doctor Who and Merlin are not children’s programmes – these days the term for it is “family entertainment” – there’d never be children’s stuff on BBC One that time of day…they have their own channels, and so on that basis I disagree with him respectfully.

But I also think what he’s saying is not a terrible thing.  If it means I’m a fan of a children’s programme, I can live with that.  Especially seeing as how “adult drama” appears to mean Eastenders, Casualty and the like.

Second, his speech complained about two things – too much family entertainment, and also that scheduling is too polarised into specialist areas.  Which is a bit too much of a contradiction to make sense to me…  You want something with more general appeal, but you’re also convinced that we already have too much of that?  Head.  Hurts.

And even besides all that, he’s complaining while desperately ignoring “Kingdom” – the nice, but marvellously mediocre series he starred in on Sunday nights.  Hardly your obvious example of a “grown-up” drama which is made to “…surprise us, to outrage us.”

People in glass houses, Stephen, people in glass houses…