The Massacre (of St Bartholomew's Eve).

TV How to introduce this? This review of serial five from the third season of Doctor Who was written three years ago for a project I was invited to pitch for but didn't ultimately receive a commission (and that's all I'm going to say about that). 

Ever since I've wanted to post it somewhere but constantly wondered if it could be repurposed for something else.  But as that seems vanishingly unlikely right now and since it's my birthday week and it's a Saturday, I've finally decided to let you be the joint fourth person to read it.  

Note that I have done some retrospective rewriting to adjust anything specific in terms of where it might have ended up.  For reasons.

With thanks to Graham Kibble-White for his suggestions and support (and proofreading!) at the time of writing.

The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve
Reviewed by Stuart Ian Burns

The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve is the epitome of what makes the process of revisiting the earlier movements of Doctor Who so compelling. Can you think of another series that, after transmitting 12 episodes of an expressively barmy space opera like The Daleks’ Master Plan, would plunge its regulars into an entertaining, albeit flawed, four-part chamber piece about one of the most tragic, yet important incidents in French history? Which would offer its lead actor the opportunity to play a completely different role?

A progressive dip in the ratings by two million across the tale suggests viewers were indeed bemused by the change in tone. This final commission for ‘pure historical’ specialist John Lucarroti, but heavily re-written by script editor Donald Tosh, makes few concessions to its potential audience.

The first on-screen title might be the epic sounding ‘War of God’, but what follows is an opening episode which cross-cuts the Doctor having a giddily fannish tête-à-tête with an apothecary, Preslin, about the religious intolerance of science, against an expositional free-for-all in which the various Huguenots and Catholics, who we’ll watch fighting for supremacy in 16th century Paris, enunciate their disagreements while consuming the contents of a tavern’s wine seller.

With a glut of glugging guards all introduced at once, it’s reasonably difficult to keep track of who everyone is, not aided 50 years on from transmission by only existing as audio. Even the telesnaps are missing.

With the Doctor “unavoidably detained” (more on which later), Steven is fore-grounded and typically bewildered by history, but not naïve due to the robust Peter Purves. When he exclaims, “I wish I understood what was going on,” although we know it is for our benefit, it’s a perfectly natural reaction to the complicated events swirling around him.

Slowly our ears become attuned to the action, the prosaic announcement of Christian names and surnames and statements of intent (a later trademark of the Coen brothers), and the results are generally enthralling, assisted by a cast enjoying the local colour. When Huguenot Gaston grumbles about the inferiority of what he’s supping - “Have you got no decent wine? Where are the Burgundies? Or even the German wines?” - actor Eric Thompson sounds like a disappointed lush in a 1970s Mike Leigh play.

The facts are these. Henri of Navarre is a Huguenot, a Protestant prince who’s married Marguerite of France, a Catholic. The Queen Mother arranged the union; Catherine de Medici was hoping it would heal the religious crack that's breaking France apart.

Predictably it doesn’t and the subsequent three episodes are about the results of this fateful decision, giant personalities scheming against one another as they seek vengeance for previous confrontations and consolidate their power within the city, first through assassination - the attempted murder of Admiral de Coligny, who supports the Huguenots and has the Prince’s ear - and then one of history’s most ferocious examples of ethnic cleansing.



Joan Young, whose stern surviving publicity shots suggest a disconcerting similarity with contemporary portraits of her real life counterpart, plays the Queen Catherine, the magnetic centre of the action, with steely coldness.

One of the great losses in no longer having the images for the story is the assassination attempt itself, as the hired gun Bondot lines his weapon up to take the shot at the Admiral, a scene which must have had a striking resonance for viewers just two-and-a-half years on from a tragically more successful gunshot in Dallas. To what extent did director Paddy Russell follow the clichéd visuals seen in similar television and film? What was she capable of producing on the Ealing set with this budget?

Dashing through all of this is poor Anne Chaplet, endangered like an unsuspecting office worker in a ‘90s conspiracy thriller because she happens to have heard the wrong piece of information (about the Catholic threat) at the wrong time. Introduced to earlier drafts as the potential new cohort for the Doctor but replaced late in the process, she’s reduced eventually to becoming the companion’s companion asking Steven functional questions whilst simultaneously contributing advice on local geography. But it’s to actress Annette Robertson’s credit that she is never a cipher.

As the story reaches its finale the dialogue becomes gradually more poetic and intense, conjuring vivid metaphors of what is to come. When the Marshal of France, Tavennes (played by Quatermass himself, André Morell), realises the scale of murder he’s just ordered - “We are to unleash the wolves of Paris” - he declares, “At dawn tomorrow this city will weep tears of blood.”

His words resonate right through to the TARDIS dematerialisation as the familiar wheezing and groaning is replaced with the terrifying reverberation of monotonous drums and the gramms of women screaming.

In other words, events proceed much as they would have done if the TARDIS hadn’t landed in Paris in the first place, which in a First Doctor story ranks as a major result.

But in narrative terms it’s a grave weakness because as readers who’ve been paying attention will have noticed, it’s achieved by the Doctor following the advice he would later fail to heed in The Gunfighters (1966), of apparently getting out of Dodge and taking no part in the action, which has the effect of fatally undermining its conclusion.

In most dramas dealing with doppelgangers, the storyline usually shifts between the two distinct characters until they convene and one of them orders, with fingers and pointing, “Kill him, Spock” either because they’re Captain Kirk himself, his copy, or ironically referencing Star Trek. Doctor Who would somewhat follow this structure during The Enemy of the World (1967), interweaving the title character with the dastardly Salamander.

In order to simplify the shooting of The St Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve and to accommodate a holiday for its star in the second week, the script instead has the two characters appear consecutively and introduce the possibility that they might even be one in the same.

After the Doctor leaves Preslin’s shop deep into the first episode, apparently with some task to perform (“Good luck, old man”) for much of the duration of the story we’re then meant to believe his destination is to pose as the Abbot of Amboise who’s been sent by the religious leader of the Cardinal of France to abet in the conspiracy to kill the Admiral. The process is aided by Steven’s conviction, thanks to the verification of his eyes, that this must be the case, for reasons he himself can’t comprehend.

In order to preserve the verisimilitude of Steven’s reaction on inevitably meeting him, Hartnell isn’t granted the latitude to perhaps play the Abbot closer to his own age or with altered speech patterns (any mannerism he might have utilised are consigned to history). He simply sounds like the Doctor in a sterner mood.

In retrospect, we know full well that the Doctor isn’t the Abbot. Every preview of the story mentions the casting opportunity and when releasing the yarn on audio cassette in 1999, BBC Audio felt confident enough that a purchasing fan would be aware of this spoiler that they put two images of the actor on the cover.


The script itself contains seeds of doubt. Roger Colbert, temporary secretary to the Abbot, reveals that he saw his new boss “at an encyclical meeting held by the Cardinal” and though he didn’t actually meet him, it was clearly long enough to recognise him. There’s also the chronology of the first episode in which the Abbot is well in-situ before the TARDIS arrives, and the quandary of exactly where the real Amboise has been stashed if the Doctor’s somehow replaced him.

Plus the only reason the traveller might be doing so is to sabotage the shooting, which would be against the moral code of this early incarnation.

As he explains to Barbara in The Aztecs (1964), "But you can't rewrite history! Not one line!"

So compelling is the action, and so convincingly does Purves portray Steven’s conviction that his friend has taken on this new identity which has ultimately lead to the Doctor’s demise, we simply don’t notice the title character is gone for much of the story and have to assume that a contemporary audience wasn’t meant to either.

But when the Doctor does emerge, his explanation for where he’s been is as thin as the Bordeaux being served in the tavern where Steven was stood up. “Yes, well, I was unavoidably delayed. Never mind that now. Come along, we must go. Come along.”

Which is pleasingly ridiculous, and leaves a gap wide open for Big Finish to jump into.

It also dramatically undermines everything that is to come.

After the Doctor interrogates poor Anne and then sends her off to her potential doom, we can only wonder how he hasn’t already acquainted himself with this information. He’s aware of the curfews, it seems, but hasn’t deduced anything about the coming horrors, which is a bit remiss of him.

If nothing else it means we entirely understand why Steven, who’s met those who are being affected by the horrors, decides to leave the TARDIS on its next landing. You almost expect, if not hope, him to offer an old soap opera stand-by. “You weren’t there! You don’t know!”

The Doctor’s ensuing speech is one of the great ‘lost’ moments in Doctor Who history, in which we can hear Hartnell’s rasping, emotional voice ruminating on all those who’ve left the timeship, poignantly mis-pronouncing Chesterton’s name, and how none of them could understand his burden of responsibility to the web of time.

“I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe.” He sounds genuinely old, as though his body is already wearing a bit thin.

But dramatically, it’s entirely unearned due to the character’s absence, because on this occasion the Doctor wasn’t there, he didn’t know and without apparently having those experiences, despite having enough intellectual knowledge to express the events to Steven, it lacks the weight of similar decisions by a number of his successors. When the Tenth Doctor is slumped over the console ready to leave in The Fires of Pompeii (2008), the faces of those he’s deserting are reflected in his features.

Admittedly some of this is clearly a result of the last-minute rewrite to excise Anne as a companion. But the scene designed to introduce her replacement is equally ruined by its portrayal of the Doctor’s thoughtlessness.

Even after having the massacre itself, 20,000 souls - including most of the characters whose lives we’ve just spent the four episodes witnessing - the closing moments of this story concentrate on a much smaller off-screen tragedy as the means of Dodo’s introduction to the series.

The little boy who’s been hurt in an accident.

When Miss Chaplet blunders into the TARDIS interrupting the Doctor’s ruminations, she explains that this is the reason she requires a telephone from a piece of street furniture purporting to have that function. It’s all we can potentially think about, not helped in any way by our hero’s apparent lack of concern for a member of the show’s core demographic. But the extent of his involvement stretches only as far as patronising this waveringly-accented stranger about the emergency services who may be required. “Oh well I’m afraid I can’t help you, no,” he says, “You must run along and phone the police somewhere else and at the same time phone for an ambulance.”

What did happen to the child? He’s quickly forgotten in the narrative requirement to keep Dodo in the TARDIS, the magical nature of which she’s notably unphased by, entirely accepting the Doctor’s unusually florid exposition its existence (“Well, my dear, I'm a doctor of science, and this machine is for travelling through time and relative dimensions in space.”)

In the 1999 BBC novel Salvation, author Steve Lyons rationalises that Dodo’s on the run from an alien force that has been keeping her hostage and is simply blurting out the first thing which comes into her head. This would certainly explain her intellectual dissonance on the topic. But the script and remaining audio do few favours to Jackie Lane, whose staccato delivery offers every indication of the actress knowing she has to do in about five minutes what her predecessors could across a whole story.

In more recent series, her explanation would probably have been a jumping off point for another adventure, with the Tenth or Eleventh incarnations quickly out the door and across the park to the scene of the accident, waving a sonic around to check on the youngster’s vitals, the driver of the vehicle guiltily looking on. Attack Eyebrows might have attended more grudgingly, but at least he too would have gone.

In the 1960s version, the Doctor’s quickly away, dematerialising the TARDIS at just the moment two police officers might also have expected to utilise its outer dimensional skin’s presumed services to help the child.

Another tragedy missed, the web of time preserved.

Doctor Who in the British Pathe Archive: William Hartnell.

TV Some silent footage of the First Doctor actor in a script conference with Stanley Holloway, Griffiths Jones and Clifford Evans, though I can't work out which film (the IMDb suggests nothing).



Billy also turns up briefly in this earlier footage of a garden party, shot in a way which makes him look like he's on a see-saw. Or in Mean Streets.



It's the 1947 British Film Festival and here he is with Joyce Howard, his co-star in Appointment With Crime.



He's in here too having a rather intense conversation with Richard Attenborough. They co-starred in The Lost People.

Dalek Invasion of Earth recreated.

Nigel Robinson’s Hunters of Earth.

Audio Destiny of the Doctor is the main trunk of AudioGo’s celebration of Doctor Who’s fiftieth year, with monthly releases, one per Time Lord, curiously co-produced with Big Finish with a vaguely connecting story. On paper, the paper being the preview pages in Doctor Who Magazine, the most enticing prospects come later in the year as we ponder what an AudioGo Eighth Doctor audio will sound like and the Ninth Doctor, thanks to the Byzantine intricacies of nuWho licensing, receives his first proper spin-off story since 2005 (not counting the odd flashback here and there).

With that in mind, releases featuring the more visible incarnations will need to have a similarly unique flavour and so it proves with Nigel Robinson’s Hunters of Earth, set in the mysterious few months before the Ian and Barbara stumbled into the TARDIS and became lost in time, a period only previously explored in short stories, Kim Newman’s old Telos novella Time and Relative, and on screen in other anniversary returns to Totters Lane in Attack of the Cybermen and Remembrance of the Daleks, which is actually less than it seems.

There are no great revelations. Susan’s having difficultly making friends and integrating at Coal Hill School. The Doctor’s shambling about town looking for components to repair the TARDIS. Inevitably a storyline intrudes, of the local teenagers population uncontrollably losing their temper at the slightest thing, much as youngsters tend to anyway, but in a way which stokes this early Doctor’s interest and in a rare instance of altruism, becomes involved because it risks exposing him and Susan for what they really are.

Hunters of Earth is a mood piece, expanding upon An Unearthly Child’s opening push-in past the policeman to reveal a London landscape still scarred by the Blitz, beatniks huddled in cafes listening to The Beatles and subconsciously awaiting flower power, general cynicism about technology, Robinson’s descriptions aided by sound engineer Simon Hunt’s percussive soundtrack conjuring a shadowy city fittingly more akin to Z-Cars or Dixon of Dock Green and the kinds of British films released in the BFI’s Flipside series which seem entirely alien to our eyes now.

Each of these releases will apparently evoke their respective programme eras, and Robinson captures neatly the slightly leisurely pacing, long on incident but short on plot. The focus is on Susan, who enjoys a little light romance with school friend, Cedric, who like her is from a different social environment and the writer pitches well the slightly ambiguous nature of a character who on the one hand is a genius in comparison to humanity but doesn’t quite understand their customs. Like the main story, it’s the stuff of The Sarah Jane Adventures (cf, Luke) played out within a different idiom.

Recorded in a style that crosses AudioGo’s nuWho exclusives with Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles, Carole Ann Ford reads much of the text with Tam Williams voicing Cedric. This is the sort of material which Ford probably wishes she’d been given during her time on the programme, and makes the most of the opportunity communicating the girl’s vulnerability without the shrillness that was sometimes the norm back then, as well as giving a good idea of her grandfather's mood swings. In his curious position of giving an acting performance within an audiobook, Williams blends well too.

But this is somewhat only the opening “episode” within a much longer story and there are plenty of hints towards the future as well as a few in-jokes that are entirely out of period but forgivably charming enough. Hunters of Earth works as a stand alone piece but there’s enough double meaning in consideration of an adversary to suggest where Destiny of the Doctor might be leading. The Doctor and Susan are at the beginning of their story, but they have a rich awareness of the wider Whoniverse surrounding them and of a darkness to come. Oooh-eee and indeed, oooh.

Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctor: Hunters of Earth by Nigel Robinson is out now from AudioGo.  Review copy supplied.

WHO 50: 1966: The Tenth Planet.

TV  One of the discussion points for the 50th anniversary special is whether we’ll finally see the regeneration between the Eighth and Ninth Doctors, from Paul McGann to Christopher Eccleston.

Apart from the fact this would require the casting of two actors who aren’t currently playing the Doctor and some kind of tricksy flashback structure to incorporate such a scene into the story and for Steven Moffat to think that it’s a good idea, it would also spoil one of the great new mysteries of the revived series.

It also ignores the fact that, to an extent, we can’t see the series’ first regeneration either.

We could once.  Indeed we did, at least those of us who are old enough.

On 29th October 1966, BBC One broadcast the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

Except since then, the tapes have been wiped and through a strange coincidence, neither that episode or the following one still exist the BBC’s archive, partly because episode four of The Tenth Planet was one of the least sold internationally so there were less copies lying around.

Not that this helped Marco Polo much.

Bits of it do survive.  A clip was utilised in an episode of Blue Peter.  The BBC kept that episode of Blue Peter.  We also have a short silent cine recording from episode one of Power of the Daleks so we can at least see Patrick’s first grin.

They were edited together and tacked onto the reconstruction of The Tenth Planet that was released on VHS at the turn of the millenium, along with the audio from some off-air recordings.

But it’s not the same, because it never could be.

Rather than film a regeneration which doesn’t need to be seen, perhaps the better way to celebrate the 50th would be for us to somehow find a regeneration which should.

You never know.

WHO 50: 1965: The Rescue.

TV Oh Koquillion.

You might look like some kind of all purpose wheel replacement device sold at Halfords, but you're also the best monster in Doctor Who history.

Across its two episodes, the otherwise unassuming The Rescue was responsible for a number of firsts for Doctor Who.

The first introduction to a replacement companion, the Doctor’s grand daughter Susan having been left behind in the wake of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth the week before.

I’ve always preferred Vicki to Susan, by the way. She's sassier and less prone to abject terror from the simplest of provocations.

The first episode to appear in the top ten most-watched programmes of the week, which really is quite something when you consider this was at the height of Dalekmania.

The first planet visited by the Doctor that he’s claimed to have, visited before. Apart from Earth.

The first occasion the Doctor explains how the TARDIS moves. We’re told for the first time that it doesn’t just land, it “materialises”.

Which isn’t bad considering its overall fan appreciation status. In Doctor Who Magazine’s 2009 survey, The Rescue came 127th.

Which is odd considering it contains one of the show’s best monsters and an amazing twist, which I’m about to give away so I’d urge you to look away now if you haven’t seen it yet. Yes, this is a spoiler alert for a 60s story.

WHO 50: 1964: Marco Polo.

TV  Every now and then an actor or director, journalist or academic says that one of the "missing" Doctor Who episodes, especially Marco Polo, “doesn’t exist” as though it’s entirely lost to history.

Sometimes in the extras on a dvd release.  Sometimes in Doctor Who Magazine.  Sometimes in the wider media.

Which is always disappointing, because they do exist, at least in some form, thanks to the tireless obsession of early fans making off-air recordings by cello-taping a microphone onto the speaker of a television during the original broadcast.

These multiple recordings have since been restored by Mark Ayres of the Doctor Who Restoration Team and released on cd with added narration by related cast member.  For Marco Polo, that’s William Russell.

That also to an extent means that these episodes have transcended television, afforded the benefits of radio and audio drama.

The version of Marco Polo which exists for me is in wide-screen with its director Waris Hussein afforded all the budget and technical innovation of a David Lean film, this despite the splinter which appears at the end of The Edge of Destruction, of Susan revealing the footprint in the snow, the photographic Plain of Pamir and the fake snow.

The title of the first episode “The Roof of the World” always gives me tingles and even some vertigo, especially with sense of wonder Russell gives it in his narration.

As Polo’s caravan ekes its way across the Gobi Desert (sic), it’s the golden wasteland, desolately glowing in Lawrence of Arabia I think of rather than the cramped silhouettes of the telesnaps photographed from the screen during broadcast.

When the TARDIS crew meet the mighty Kublai Khan, it’s in the technicolour high definition of the set photographs, Barry Newbury’s gorgeous sets reproduced with far greater clarity than the contemporary 405-line broadcasts would allow.

Perhaps it’s this version which I rank in my top five favourite Who stories of all time, though that’s also to do with Marco Polo’s epic scope, so atypical of the television series since, it’s atmosphere of strolling through deep time.

Disney were the first company to approach the BBC about adapting Doctor Who for the cinema.  But it wasn’t the Daleks which sparked their interest.  It was Marco Polo.

None of which is to suggest I wouldn’t be overjoyed if all seven episodes weren’t found next week in a Surrey basement or as is most likely the case given that the serial was sold to more countries in the 60s than any other, a Rangoon basement.

There’s a gap on the shelf where the dvd should be.

But to suggest it “doesn’t exist”, denies the efforts of our own imaginations.

WHO 50: 1963:The Pilot Episode.

TV When the first mounting of An Unearthly Child emerged as part of The Lime Grove Story themed weekend on BBC Two in 1991, it seemed like a message from across time, especially since I’d never seen Doctor Who’s real first episode.

This was the first time I’d seen the character’s origins and despite the obvious production problems this was mysterious, shadowy, sinister and in places genuinely scary and looking again recently on beginning a project to watch the whole of Doctor Who from the beginning I could see that part of that reaction was because of the production problems.

The shaky camera work means that we’re not always with the characters at key moments leaving us to imagine what they’re seeing and more spectacularly the faulty placing of a light leads to Barbara creating shadows on Ian’s face that sometimes look as through the darkness of the night could engulf him at any moment, just as the time vortex will later.

Sydney Newman was right to request a remake, of course he was.

The Doctor is too mercurial in attitude to sustain a series and Susan’s proclamation that they're from the 49th century is too solid a piece of exposition, even if the two teachers are supposed to be the protagonists at this early stage.

But nevertheless, this is a rare example (along with Midnight and Scherzo) of Doctor Who at its wrongest, in a form that is indisputably worrying.

And they're off ...

attempting impersonations of earlier actors like Roy Skelton

Books Present voice of the Daleks, Nicholas Briggs has become ubiquitous since he first began enunciating into his analogue moogerfooger for the earliest Dalek Empire series at Big Finish. So expert was he at bringing the requisite menace to those audios, it was inevitable that he should be asked to offer the same service in the television series, providing one of the best Dalek performances ever in the eponymous television episode. As he explains in an interview on the occasion of providing an alternative voice track for the Day of the Daleks dvd special edition, he does try to vary the sound, attempting impersonations of earlier actors like Roy Skelton, but the “Briggs Dalek” always exists underneath.

What this ubiquity means is that across the audios, because Briggs intimidating omnipresence is so familiar, it’s become a non-visual replacement for Raymond Cusick’s designs. On screen, a quick shot of the eye-stalk and straight away we know that the next (insert story duration here) minutes will be horrible. Now, on audio, Briggs’s guttural monotone, always so alien in comparison to whatever else is happening elsewhere in the sound design, sends chills even through the most seasoned fan, or should I say even this most seasoned fan. Which is probably why, when they’re combined on screen, even in the multi-coloured humped variety of Dalek, they’re now so utterly frightening.

It certainly elevates this audio book version of John Peel’s 1989 Target adaptation of the 60s Hartnell story, The Chase in which the Dalek Empire chases the Doctor and his companions across time attempting to destroy them through a series of convoluted plans. On screen, this a bit of a ragtag mess of a story, oscillating between charming and charmless, deathly slow in some places, zippy in others. But with Briggs’s impeccably scary performance threaded throughout Maureen O’Brien’s reading, we feel every moment of the TARDIS team’s peril, tensely wondering if they’ll survive as they’re separated from each other and reunited, the Daleks hot on their trail.

That’s one reason to listen to a story with a two and half hour screen time spread across twice the duration. The other is Peel’s adaptation which turns Terry Nation raggle-taggle selection of incidents in search of a story into the embarrassment of magical riches the television version aspires to be, more akin to one of Big Finish’s Short Trips audios or a collection of fairy tales about a mad man in a box. The patience trying Morton Dill incident becomes a quite melancholic meditation on a wasted life that goes out of its way to explain the character’s bizarre behaviour and the haunted house section, though perhaps slightly overlong, feels like being hit in the head with a Hammer.

Later on, during the nineties, Peel would try my patience with two continuity heavy eighth Doctor novels which felt entirely out of step with what the other writers on that line were trying to achieve. He’s in similar mood here in the late eighties, adding retrospective mythology to the story, but in this case it's rather charming as are his efforts to increase the complexity of the characters with Vicki in particular benefiting from the exploration of her internal motivation. Hopefully it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he manages to find the perfect textual analogy for one of my favourite scenes in Doctor Who’s history, the Chris Marker-like conception of Ian and Barbara's return to their own time.

All aided by Maureen O’Brien’s beautifully appointed reading which in the best traditions of these audio books has the qualities of a bedtime or fireside tale. As seems to the mode in recent AudioGos, the reader doesn’t attempt direct impersonations of the characters, but does access Hartnell, Russell and especially Jacqueline Hill, her now mature voice often quite uncanny. In places, it also sounds as though O’Brien's rewatched the television series as a reference; when she offers Steven’s sceptical “Oh come on …” late on, it’s almost exactly the same performance as Peter Purves in the role. But always, when she gives way to the Daleks, Briggs, aided by some faithfully sources mechanical whirs and buzzes, can't help but steal the show.

Doctor Who: Daleks: The Chase read by Maureen O'Brien with Dalek Voices by Nicholas Briggs is released by AudioGo is out now. Review copy supplied.

"No wonder Jacqueline Hill went on holiday - she probably saw it all coming."

TV I couldn't not share this. I was having a clear out today and found the following. When I first came back to the series in the late nineties, a relative (my auntie) recorded some of the UK Gold broadcasts. Being that kind of person, I put the tapes in proper video boxes and printed up inlays upon which I wrote some mini-reviews.

Eventually, those tapes were packed away (notice not thrown out) but for some unknown reason I kept the inlays along with these initial raw reviews written before I really knew anything about the show -- I don't think I'd even started buying Doctor Who magazine yet. I thought you might find them amusing -- although it's slightly worrying how little my writing style has developed over the years. I won't post them all at once, but here, to begin with, are Billy and Pat. Count how many times you think 'No it doesn't' or 'No it isn't'.

William Hartnell Era

The Plant of the Giants has to rate as one of the dullest hour-ten minutes of anyone's life. God it's Slow. It's annoying. It feels like a thousand years. Oddly enough, the last episode was edited together from two separate episodes - and its still slow. Things aren't helped by the fact that Barbara is reduced to running around like a feckless idiot, just so that Ian can look a bit heroic. It's an example of the schizoid nature of the show that ...

The Dalek Invasion of Earth, although exceeding flabby in places is also unbelievably intelligant at times. Alright, so everything still creaks and the pace is still from snoozeville (heh, heh) but there is some really intelligent character interaction, and genuinely scary moments, especially as the pepperpots fly through London like kings. Susan's leaving scne is also some kind of genius.

The Web Planet is probably one of the slowest, dullest stories Who ever produced. I mean the thing would have seemed long stretched over three episodes, but six!?! Some have tried to excuse it by saying what 'amazing' costume design there is for the period. Yeah - it's amazing the costumer designer managed to keep their job. All this really amounts to is a bunch of guys in fancy dress running around a studio for six weeks. No wonder Jacqueline Hill went on holiday - she probably saw it all coming. When the only exciting thing to happen in a story is one of the monsters bumping into the camera, you really know you're in trouble.

The Space Museum does have a quite good first epsiode, its just a shame that the programme makers forgot about logic, good characterisation and pace. This is the kind of story which probably gave Who a bad name all those years ago, somehow forgetting what the kids tuned in for each week. Only Hartnell seems to be making a good fist of it, as everyone else doesn't seem to care - and why should they when presented with material like this? Imagine you're making for fourth episode of this and you realise you've got six episodes of The Chase coming up - better conserve that energy guys ...

The Gunfighters. My word. Hmm. I'm sorry, but matter what anyone might imply, they must have done some really good drinking at the DW offices in the 60s. I know -- lets do a historical about the gunfight at the OK Coral and somehow shoe-horn the Doctor into the action. And lets build quite good set but shoot it really badly so that the whole thing looks like it was shot in a school hall somewhere. That'll work.

Patrick Troughton Era

Tomb of the Cybermen has a shockingly contemporary script which really sticks out because of its greatness. I mean how often was it that a companion talked about their life before her travels with The Doctor and at a moment which isn't driving the story along? The Cybermen are particularly menacing despite the rudimentary areas of the cast. That'll be a definite classic of the period then.

The Dominators. Yawn. Its stories like this which Who a bad name. Its starts slow and gets slow-er. Lots of bad acting ensues and then the whole thing slows to a halt in a more of boredom. Just awful.

The Krotons just shows how a lot of what's left of the Troughton era really begins to mass into one story in the memory. And which twerp thought that name Gond was a realistic and not funny at all name for an alien. And the confusing storytelling doesn't help. Want a glimpse into hell? Watch this and the Dominators back to back like I did.

The War Games is long, but the pace is quite frenetic and there doesn't seem to be too much padding. What strikes you is how it feels like the culmination of six years worth of build up. It has everything - the historical elements which made the Hartnell shows such a joy and the science fiction elements of the Troughton years. Everyone gets something to do - and if some of the acting is a touch wooden, the scope is a amazing. This is an action adventure movie years before its time, with a stangely more grown up feel than Star Trek was achieving at the exact same time, across the pond. Amazing.

The Web Planet.

TV My favourite moment in The Web Planet occurs during the opening episode. The Doctor and Ian are standing at the Tardis console discussing exactly what's gone wrong with the ship again.
"Somewhere, somehow we're being slowly dragged down." notices The Doctor.
"Dragged down? To what?" Ian asks.
Cut to a landscape. And the title caption.
"The Web Planet."

Is this is the only in the history of the series when a character's question is answered by the title? How very metafictional. Elsewhere it's all a bit tedious. Well, alright some of the interaction between Barbara and Vicki related to Rome and the futuristic National Curriculum is fun, but Ian mostly walks around as though everything is a surprise and The Doctor's acting like a pissed pensioner. Which he probably was. Welcome to a world of fantasy and adventure and subliminal education kids.

About the only other exciting moment is when The Doctor and Ian leave the Tardis after the malarkey with the whatnot. As they pass through the doors are wide open. And then they close themselves. Many is the episode when we've watched this happen from the outside and that big blue door has flapped there waiting for a passing Sontaran to get lost in the ship's innards. There's a particularly good example in Logopolis. Now we know that those doors are on automatic, like the ones in Tesco, and they'll swish close when you're not looking. Ship can't navigate itself properly, but at least it has this safety feature. I wonder if it was something The Doctor had to fit because of a regulation on his insurance policy.

You can tell the lesson about good narrative tension wasn't learned from any of the Dalek stories when the monster's being introduced to hardly any effect five minutes in and then doesn't return for the next fifteen minutes except in the shadows, and when it does appear, for all the comments in the commentary about how brave the design is, it still looks less like a giant ant and more like a studio runner in tights carrying a weirdly shaped canoe on his head. That's hardly going to strike fear into anyone other than psychologists wondering what condition the minds of the production team are in. You need to keep this stuff for the cliffhanger, which instead here consists of the stock maneuver from the Colin Baker era, a quick zoom into The Doctor's nostrils.

"My ship" he says, "My Tardis" Typical man. Cares more about his vehicle than its passenger.

An Unearthly Child.

TV The first time I saw An Unearthly Child was in its pilot form in the version which was broadcast during BBC Two's Lime Grove weekend all those years ago. In my memory it double billed with an episode of Quatermass and at the time I found that fairly dreary this was captivating. It seemed like a totally different programme. It was alien to me in every sense. It was closer in fact to The Twilight Zone than anything which I remember from the McCoy era which looked annoying and loud by comparison.

Which means, that in the same way everyone has their favourite Doctor, I'd choose the pilot version of An Unearthly Child any time. With the chance to rewatch both very close together on dvd recently I still believe that something essentially mysterious was lost in the remount. It might make more perfect sense story wise for Susan to be reading a history book but how much more exciting is the ink splot which seemed to me her attempt at creating a paper representation of the time vortex. Then there is the shot of Susan entering the junkyard seen from inside the back of the car that Ian and Barbara are driving, and the excellent attempts at noir lighting (even if in the case of that car scene they didn't get that quite right and Ian's face is obscured by a shadow created by Barbara's head).

The Doctor's an even grumpier old man but that would have meant that when he finally did warm to the TARDIS crew, the effect would have been sweeter. He's just plain shifty, the kind of man who should be visited by social workers let alone teachers. Susan too is slightly more mature and has an even greater ageless quality. Spot the moment in this version when Barbara bursts into the TARDIS and Susan is firmly working at the controls of the ship not randomly standing in the middle of the floor as she is in the second version. The former suggests that they've been travelling for years and this is her usual station. The attitudes of the teachers change far less between the two although the performances of Jacqueline Hill and Bill Russell are slightly more earthy I think, more real.

Something I've always done which tends to annoy people so I do it some more is treat An Unearthly Child and the following three stone age episodes as separate stories. To have the whole of the serial named after the first seems a nonsense since Susan is far from the suggested focus of the story -- caveman politics is. That way we can happily call the second story The Tribe of Gum or 100,000 BC or The Cave of Skulls or whatever we want to whichever week and the purity of the opening episode can be contained.