WHO 50: 1984: The Caves of Androzani.

TV One of the more interesting elements of this remarkable story is how familiar, from the opening sequence onwards the Fifth Doctor and Peri are, and indeed how relaxed Peri is with the whole process of being his travelling companion.

Such is the format of Doctor Who, this isn’t an unusual occurrence. When the Doctor explains the TARDIS's dimensional transcendentalism to Leela in Robots of Death, there isn’t much continuity from the Face of Evil, the companion’s newbie status barely referred to, other than in the subtextual sense of him explaining why the ship is bigger on the inside.

Yet in The Caves of Androzani it feels different, as though this Doctor and this companion have been travelling together for far longer than a quick trip from Lanzarote.

Partly it’s the performances, the chemistry between the two which flourishes across the story. But Robert Holmes’s writing also creates a comfort and respect between the two of a kind which would ignored for much of the ensuing years when Peri had to endure the Sixth Doctor. Bicker, bicker, bicker.

Peri refers to the desert making a change from lava flows, but she also chides the Doctor for his behaviour and he admonishes her as though her rubbish sarcasm is something he’s had to endure before. But she’s not insulted. She smiles. The Doctor’s being the Doctor again.

How did contemporary audiences interpret this? Did they even notice?

Of course subsequently spin-off licensees and writers have seized on the gap between this and Planet of Fire and filled it with dozens of stories about the Fifth Doctor and Peri, Big Finish even introducing a further companion, the Egyptian princess Erimem and separating the pair for a period and giving him a completely different friend, Amy, for another search for the Key To Time.

Read or listen to any of that material and as usual our expanded universe reinforms and changes how we experience the original series as we retrospectively imagine the characters remembering all of those experiences as they’re walking around in the sand.

When the Doctor says later that he doesn’t know her all that well, but he’s willing to sacrifice himself for her, we now have to wonder if it has a double meaning.

WHO 50: 1982: Time-Flight.

TV It’s sometimes difficult to remember how we enjoyed Doctor Who as children.

Everyone but everyone says they hid behind the sofa, but I didn’t. I have a definitive memory of not hiding, perhaps because it was stuck up against the wall in the sitting room.

But I do recall being terribly excited about Time-Flight.

Time-Flight is rubbish. It’s badly co-ordinated, poorly written, has some spectacularly wooden performances and any residual menace the Ainley Master is sapped away to such an extent it’d be the end of the decade before he became relevant again.

But the tweenie version of me adored it because it was about Concorde.

Timeflight’s often thought of as one of John Nathan Turner’s follies. The added value on the dvd comes across as a kind of televisual autopsy, cutting into its rotting corpse endeavouring to discover what went wrong.

JNT's culpability is annunciated at length, how his publicity imperative overpowered narrative requirements, the chance to be the first television series to film at Heathrow and say so.

To have Concorde in the programme.

It’s something difficult to remember just how exciting Concorde was in the 1980s.

When I was living in Speke, my Dad used to take me to both the old and later new airports just so that I could see Concorde take off. I didn’t know where it was going and I wasn’t even all that interested in planes, but there was something about the fascinating way the nose cone shifting position as it taxied along the runway.

I have dozens of old photographs of what looks like just an overcast sky, but look closer and there’s a speck. The speck is Concorde flying over the city, which it did during the Grand National.

Luckily, someone has taken some better ones.

My young mind didn’t notice the deficiencies in Time-Flight's script, the acting or the Master’s nonsensical disguise. It would simply have enjoyed seeing the Doctor, his companions and the TARDIS cramped into interior of the plane.

So whenever I revisit Time-Flight, I try to do it in that spirit. It’s Concorde, not just travelling faster than the speed of sound, but travelling in time. How cool is that?

I miss Concorde.

1001 Nights.

Audio As I’m sure you’re tired of hearing, one of my favourite Doctor Who moments is from Paul Magrs’s novel The Scarlet Empress. The Doctor’s captured by alien birds and to keep them busy while other shenanigans are afoot, he tells them stories of his exploits, but as their clamour for more adventures reaches its apogee, he invokes Vladimir Prop’s study into Russian fairy tales, and just as those feature roughly the same elements across their otherwise diversity (the hero, the princess, the mentor, the rest of the plot of Star Wars), he gives them a set of locales, some monsters, a companion, a story genre and explains how they can write their own.

Big Finish’s latest portmanteau audio riffs on a similar idea, if not exactly plunging into such metafictional depths. Perhaps. Inspired by another piece of socio-mythological literature, a Sultan (Alexander Siddig), having captured the fifth Doctor challenges Nyssa to keep him amused with stories of their adventures as a stay of execution. If she amuses him enough, he may or may not put the Time Lord to death. This is a different approach to previous anthologies which lacked as strong an umbrella story which means that to an extent it’s a richer experience as it soon becomes apparent each of them is inspired by its themes and aren’t simple, stand alone, short trip delights.

Between them, the collected writers Emma Beeby, Gordon Rennie, Jonathan Barnes and Catherine Harvey bring us a psychiatric horror set within a isolated alien prison, some metropolitan demonic possession and what happens on a planet in which stories really are the currency. As with all short fiction, they’re so slender that to provide much more in the way of story information would be to ruin their pleasures, except to say that they all contain a fairly good twist that makes the most of their medium. My favourite, if I must, is the last of the three, which explores its hook in surprising ways. If only a limerick could pay for a round in the pub …

The fourth part brings the wider story to a close and it’s here that the strength of the cast shows itself with Siddig breaking out of what is initially a pointedly stereotypical portrayal of the Sultan to reveal a more angular antagonist. He appears almost exclusively with Susan Sutton in the rare position lately of playing the younger version of Nyssa again during the timey-whimey storytelling of the reunion plays with Turlough and Tegan, which also has the benefit of giving her more to do. Peter Davison offers another floorless performance as his Doctor, avuncular even in the company of the Old Man he meets in the prison played by Nadim Sawalha.

As I think I’ve implied it’s a story best listened to than written about. There isn’t anything spectacularly new here and at a certain point I did begin to wonder if the writers were making a point similar to the Doctor with those blasted birds, that as with fairy stories, there is only a limit to the ways in which his adventures can play out, that they are simply a series of functions. Then in the final few moments the play becomes an investigation into the nature of the Doctor himself and his importance as a protagonist in effecting the narrative of those adventures and 1001 Nights offers its final twist. But you’ll just have to listen yourself to find out what it is.

Doctor Who: 1001 Nights from Big Finish is out now.  Review copy supplied.

Time Crash.

TV As soon as it started I felt privileged to be a Doctor Who fan. Sir Guy of Gisbourne was stalking menacingly around Nottingham Castle again and it was all to do with whomever Maid Marion has been spending her time with. Strangely the appearance of Pudsey Bear was less anachronistic than it might have been considering everyone else in that version of the twelfth century seems to have been to the John Lewis sale for their make-up and costumes. You do have to feel sorry for the Robin Hood fans who have to content themselves with a non-canonical skit, albeit with a cute wink from the lovely Lucy Griffiths and the sight of Guy almost hanging a stuffed bear.

Not for them a musical lead in from Myleene ‘full of’ Klass and John ‘full of’ Barrowman (far preferable to the Jordan and Andre suck fest from last time which some of us still have to endure if we want to hear the proper cloister bell). Not for them a Radio Times cover and mention in the listings, a canonical story which brings back a well loved incarnation from the past, written by the man who brought us the best episode of the last series. Not for them a whole five minutes dropped in to the mayhem, instead their mini-episode wrapped around some shambling on some stairs with Wogan menacing a school boy for some cash. Kind of makes you feel like tv fan royalty.

The script for Time Crash was vintage Steven Moffat; funny, exciting and touching and enveloped around a time travel related conceit. In fact, it was the same kind of paradoxical causality loop we saw in Blink, in which the Doctor could only follow the plan that Sally had already passed on to him in the folder. And so Tenth knew how to fix the Tardis because he’d already seen it as Fifth, even though neither of them had experienced the brainwave. Of course it does beg the question how he then forgot about telling himself about the return of the Master (and his wife) but that information was probably lost in one of the Eighth Doctor’s several spells of amnesia so we’ll forgive him. That should sort out problems with The Five Doctors too. Oh how we wish that the series had been this well written back then.

I think Time Crash was about as good as we could have hoped it would be, ultimately ignoring many of our expectations and doing something better. Whereas I’d expected some veiled reference to Dimensions in Time and the emotional journey being the fact that Tenth couldn’t tell Fifth about the time war (which I do hope they’re saving for the extravaganza with the Eighth Doctor which my fan gene expects this was a precursor to) this was about what is to be a fan, in an even more direct way than Love and Monsters (Fifth’s heard of LINDA! Yay, LINDA!), and more specifically a fan of David Tennant’s generation for whom Peter Davison was their Doctor and who we (because he was really – I just say Paul McGann because I like looking at raised eyebrows). Even the title must be a riff on a certain story recently released on dvd featuring a supersonic aircraft and the Master in a rubbish, sorry, rubber mask).

All of the continuity references! As well as affectionately ripping the piss out of the Peter Davison era, with its synthesiser music (nice one Murray 'err um' Gold), spectacles, the hands free, rubbish beards, funny hats and decorative vegetables, David got to say things like Nyssa and Tegan and the Mara (but not Adric or Turlough) as though remembering when he was pulled out of history and we remembered with him (even if it suggested a placement for Fifth as just after Snakedance which means we’re remember Martin Clunes in make-up (boxset with Kinda due next year then).

And wasn’t Peter Davison good? When the new show was being cast, way before we were waiting for Christopher, I suggested that Pete should be given another go at it. I can see why that didn’t happen (see Russell's comments on older actors from Project Who), but he’s really grown into the role. Often maligned because his television era only really brought us about four unequivocally good stories, he himself has admitted it wasn’t until Caves of Andronzani that he really understood how to play the Doctor and that certainly shows in his Big Finish stories from which I think you can see some continuity here – the grumpiness is definitely a carry over as well as the gruff.

Davison's was a very gracious performance, essentially providing something for the current incumbent to bounce off. Tennant was certainly at the apogee of his Tennantness, but that just heightened the differences between them even as he listed the similarities. For all Russell’s bluff about taking Terry Dick’s opinion that the Doctor stays the same and it’s whatever the actor brings to the role, he does spend a lot of time making observations, making fun, turning on a dime in a crisis and shouting which are things that Davison’s Doctor rarely did. Not that he had much time with all the bickering.

It’s a shame that Graham Harper didn’t receive an on-screen credit here since his work here was superb, never once letting the camera rest too long anywhere – loads of energy and whatnot, always keeping the two Doctors in the same frame underlining their connection. Tucking the story into the end of The Last of the Timelords worked well too and unlike the Pudsey Cutaway, you really couldn’t see the join, well not with these old eyes. Except the colours in the Tardis seemed much richer to me, the lighting emphasizing the yellows and greens highlighting the two costumes.

Were they really Peter’s old cricket whites? That stick of celery looked far too healthy …