WHO 50: 2002: Death Comes To Time.

TV Older fans of Doctor Who always seem to have war stories about episodes missed, stories for which they’d only know the conclusion after reading the TARGET novelisation or even watching it in some home format sought illicitly. Usually this was due to some family holiday, birthday party at an ITV watching household or power cuts, at a time when the show, at least in its complete form, would be shown once. So if you missed episode four of The Art in Space, you’d have little to no idea of how the Wrrn were defeated.

Death Comes To Time was my version of that. Still is, and moreso since I’ve never seen or heard the conclusion. When it first began streaming online, I was still accessing the internet via a very shaky dial-up connection via a telephone line I only had limited access to due to the vagaries of BT’s surftime package, but I still managed to work my way through the pilot episode, the one originally created for broadcast in Radio 4 by producer Dan Freedman even though it was pretty clear, pretty quickly, the commissioners didn’t want it despite the cast and format.

It’s fair to say, having just heard Storm Warning, my appreciation levels were low. This might have been called Doctor Who and had actual Doctor Who actors in it, most of the time it felt like the work of someone who’d fundamentally misunderstood what the show was about, or worse, was simply rewriting the thing to bend it around some other idea they’d had. Plus, as I noted when I sent a comment to the BBC’s website about the thing, what was the point now that Big Finish were already creating such wonderful things? Why hadn’t they been commissioned? They were later.

That was in July 2001. By 2002, the website had commissioned Freedman to complete his story and that was uploaded between February and May 2002. I didn’t listen. Having been unimpressed with the pilot and now full ensconced in the Eighth Doctor stories from Big Finish, plus working in Manchester so with even less free time due to commuting, somewhere along the line, rather like Neil Cross's attitude to nuWho at the start it seems (see this month's DWM), it fell to the bottom of my list of priorities. It doesn’t seem to have even ranked a mention this blog though oddly, I did post a link to it on Metafilter, more as a service than anything.

All of which is of course different to Terror of the Zygons, which until recently was the only televised story I hadn’t seen. I’d missed that first time around because I was only a one year old and not really interested in anything more than long periods of eerie silence, I hear, designed to frighten the life out of my parents, along with the usual baby stuff. I didn’t know what language was let alone that it could be bent around to create exciting adventures around Scottish lochs. I’d always wanted to see Terror of the Zygons but kept putting it off. Death Comes To Time is entirely dissimilar.

At a certain point, I remember thinking I’d come back to it, but unlike the other subsequent webcasts it was fairly quickly removed from the website and expunged from history, so I missed that window. Subsequent CD and MP3-CD releases (remember them?) passed me by too due to the expense. Part of me was, I think, gripped by that strange fan anger and loyalty that with Big Finish creating such authentic material, I didn’t want to support "whoever these people were with their distorted garbage".

Just as a side note, I wasn’t the only one purposefully not listening to Death Comes to Time. When Real Time, Big Finish’s attempt at a webcast was released later that same year, its writer director, one Gary Russell, gave a very diplomatic interview in which he admits to also only having heard the pilot episode for reasons of then not being able to comment on them either way. But he did hear the pilot episode, so he must have had some opinion of it. He doesn’t give it. Instead he talks about how it simply let him see how the animation was done (with due notation that he's less diplomatic in this month's DWM).

Ten years later, I’ve a cooler head about it, but it still doesn’t mean I’d want to hear it. I quite like the idea that, as with the older fans who for ages only had the Radio Times 10th Anniversary special and their imaginations as a way of accessing some of the older stories, that I only have the fragment I’ve picked up from reviews and Ahistory (which makes a broad attempt at trying to fit it into continuity), with their outlandish talk of Ace becoming some higher being, the Brigadier flying a space shuttle and the Doctor making some supreme sacrifice.

None of which really makes much sense when I’ve sat through all six episodes of The Ghosts of N-Space, another cautionary tale from the spin-off universe that’s even worse than Timelash, which did at least have Paul Darrow. Perhaps I do still have some deep seated, sub-conscious anger that anyone could even think about creating a Doctor Who continuation that disregards the many years of other continuity created in the meantime culminating the crime of apparently trying to write the Eighth Doctor out of existence.

Perhaps at some point I will, perhaps, if I see it randomly on sale in some charity shop or cheaper than the usual thirty pounds on ebay. In theory I should do it as part of my attempt to watch and listen to all of broadcast Doctor Who before the 50th anniversary, which will (time permitting) no doubt take in Real Time, Shada and Scream of the Shalka, especially since the latter is meriting a dvd release. I’ll be “doing” Dimensions in Time and The Curse of the Fatal Death as well, for goodness sake. Death Comes To Time? Death comes to sense, more like…

WHO 50: 1993: Dimensions in Time.

TV  One of Dimensions in Times's many unnovations was the multiple choice cliffhanger resolution.  Sort of.

At the close of the thrilling first episode, from the steps of the Queen Vic, the Rani and the massed ranks of whatever old costumes the production team could beg, borrow or borrow some more menace the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Peri.

“You can’t escape, Doctor” says the Rani, “Say goodbye Doctors,” she continues pressing the point home, “You’re all going on a long journey, a very long journey!”

Close up on Pete looking concerned. Or bored. Cue titles.

After that, although this has been cut out of the many YouTube uploads of the story, but not this one, the Children in Need audience, at the point watching Noels House Party, were offered a choice of people to “help the Doctor” from two Albert Square residents, Mandy Salter or “Big Ron” Ron.

In the event, Mandy was chosen (though it was a surprisingly close run thing considering Ron didn’t have that many major storylines and ironic Twitter campaigns hadn’t been invented) and in the following episode she’s shown saving Liz Shaw from the Rani’s clutches, which can be seen here.

It also wasn't, as I'd assumed, how the cliffhanger would be resolved, which was with the Doctor "summoning his remaining selves" to explain why he suddenly looks like Jon Pertwee and the Liz Shaw thing.  It’s a very strange programme.

Nevertheless, for years afterwards, I obsessed over how different the Big Ron footage was, and if the actor Ron Tarr was ever disappointed that his own return to Who wasn’t broadcast (after apparently being an extra on Destiny of the Daleks).

Now, again thanks to YouTube, we can finally witness this epic moment.

Click here to see the titanic struggle.

As you can see, it's almost exactly the same, no great choose your own adventure, crazy changes here.

Slightly more poignant perhaps because this mountain of a man has to withdraw when faced with a massive gun, a moment thematically pulsating with the crisis of masculinity.

Nevertheless it's another example of the rule that sometimes the version you've seen is never as good as what you imagine.

Which to an extent is also true of the whole first episode of Dimensions in Time at least for me.  I could never rewatch it because on the night it went out I accidentally had the video on the wrong channel and recorded BBC Two instead and so found ten minutes of a documentary about fishing (I think) when I decided to relive the magic.

For years, even with episode two on hand, I kept wondering if it was really that bad.  I mean really?

Then YouTube was invented and I can say, no it isn't.  In some ways it's worse.  But also in a lot of ways, it's glorious.

WHO 50: 1990: Search Out Space.

TV Even with my everything is canon attitude to Doctor Who, which is quite willing to accept the Doctor Who Quiz Book of Dinosaurs as a perfectly reasonable example of one of those interregnum stories which are just about sight seeing, has difficulty dealing with Search Out Space.

Almost the last vestige of broadcast Doctor Who before Dimensions in Time came along and destroyed all hope for at least a year, Search Out Space is an episode of the school science programme, Search Out Science in which for some unknown reason the Doctor presents an intergalactic gameshow with Ace and some hitherto unseen companion called Cedric as contestants. The Doctor offers his posers to camera while floating in a platform in a void and each of the questions is given a going over with his friends utilising props and stock footage.

It's available to watch in the special features of the Survival dvd.

Packed with information, K9 and a redesigned TARDIS interior (if you like) it’s nevertheless unfortunate that this was Doctor Who’s sole representative on television in 1990, and curiously so since if the show’s stock was so low, and apparently so little watched by a non-fan audience it’s bonkers that the education department thought this lot would be the perfect way to impart that information.

A similar device was employed a couple of decades earlier in Exploration Earth, in which the Fourth Doctor and Sarah explored the processes which formed the formation of the Earth. That had the distinction of being Doctor Who’s first radio drama, and actually being a real drama.

This, well this, well, in truth this is a bit sad. Both Sylv and Sophie are doing their best with the script, but it’s a presenting job, more akin to Corners, neither of them really allowed to bring much of their actual characters into it.

Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem during the run of the series perhaps but I can imagine what it must have been like for fans turning in whenever this was broadcast, desperate for whatever they can of the show only to be faced with what is just a schools programme.

Two sets of people entirely passionate about Doctor Who investing all they can emotionally into something which may well its last gasp. No wonder it can’t bare the responsibility.

There are some good elements. The special effects, provided by Mat Irvine are some of the best Doctor Who’s seen up until that point notably K9 floating in space, an image which would be repeated later in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Plus Leeson’s performance is pitch perfect, especially considering the length of time which had passed since he’d last played the role.

Nevertheless, oh dear, oh dear and oh dear. As you can see I’m slightly techy about it, and I didn’t even discover its existence until Mike Tucker and Robert Perry wrote a prequel, Storm in a Tikka, for the Short Trips and Side Steps anthology.

Now, what about Attack of the Graske? Does that count?

WHO 50: 1989: Survival.

TV A guest post from writer Mags L Halliday:

Survival should, probably, have been my last Doctor Who story. It was 1989 and I was at art college, living in a bedsit on a diet of jacket potatoes, and going to see American post-punk bands. My tv was a tiny black and white set with a hoop aerial and a dial you used to tune in manually. Presuming you'd put a 50p in the meter. Once a week, though, I'd head back to my parents for a real dinner and Doctor Who in colour.

I missed the first episode of season 26 in fact. Unsurprisingly arty shared houses did not buy tv listings magazines so I only realised after it was on. And my parents didn't have a video. By the time Survival aired, it felt like it was becoming time to put Who away in the box marked "childhood". Despite the season having contained two of my favourite stories, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, things like Hale and Pace and bad animatronic cats made me embarrassed.

Thematically, Survival is about conforming (or not) and working together to escape a doomed world (be that Perivale or the Cheetah planet). That chimed with me, as I partied with Anti-Fascist League members and protested the oncoming poll tax. In retrospect, Survival distilled the social and political tensions of the late 80s every bit as much as the more obvious The Happiness Patrol. But still...

Most fans think Survival has a melancholy air applied only afterwards, just as the Doctor's voice over at the end was dubbed on in edit. But for me that feeling was there as I watched it, and it chimed with my own feeling that something was coming to an end. Had there been another season in 1990, I suspect I wouldn't have watched it. My love of Who would have been boxed away along with my Bauhaus t-shirt.

Instead, I bought the first New Adventure. And Doctor Who became too broad and too deep for any TV set.

Mags is a contributor to Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who and Encounters of Sherlock Holmes: Brand new tales of the Great Detective, both out now. Her previous works include the Eighth Doctor novel History 101 (which I reviewed here) as well as for the Professor Bernice Summerfield and Faction Paradox spin-off ranges.

WHO 50: 1988: Remembrance of the Daleks.

TV Although Silver Nemesis was intended to be the 25th anniversary story for Doctor Who, celebrations began earlier in the season with Remembrance of the Daleks which, with its return to 1963, to Totters Lane and Coal Hill School is arguably the more celebratory of the two.

The acme of that is the announcer on the television in the living room of the boarding house, which at the close of scene is heard to say, “This is BBC television, the time is quarter past five and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series Do-“

The shot changes before the walls of this fictional reality entirely breakdown (ignoring previous asides to camera), but the intent is clear. Within an episode of Doctor Who we’re supposed to be nearly watching the broadcast of An Unearthly Child.

On first seeing this, I probably didn’t notice the implication. I was too young and well into my period of Transformers fandom.

On the second occasion, on video later, I was terribly excited because it suggested to me that as in the comics universes of Marvel and DC where superheroes spawned their own comic series dramatising their exploits, the BBC of the Whoniverse produced something similar.

Until it occurred to me that if indeed the BBC was producing a series called Doctor Who in the Doctor’s universe, whenever he turned up subsequently, people should be saying, “The Doctor’s a fiction character off of the television. Who are you really?”

But narrative abhors a vacuum and in the ensuing wilderness years, the Doctor Who universe did indeed get its own version of the series, thanks to Paul Cornell’s Virgin novel No Future with Professor X.

The TARDIS Datacore inevitably gathers together the ensuing references that have appeared in other stories to Professor X, spanning the BBC Books and Big Finish, of this television series which ran from 1963 to 1989 featuring “a mysterious scientist who travelled through time and space inside a TASID, a ship which resembled a pillar box on the outside.”

So perhaps this is the series being announced in Remembrance. Perhaps the announcer’s not about to say Doctor, but something else with that opening syllable. Perhaps.

Unsurprisingly for a franchise that has been rolling on for fifty years it has attracted a number of these internal references designed to comment on its existence, admittedly in the spin-offs.

Dr Who in the Head Games, a fictional version of the character based on the figure who appeared in the TV Comics.

Iris Wildthyme, whose own history runs as one long feminist or camper rewrite of the Doctor’s own (“But that’s me, I did that” as he’s often heard to say in the Eighth Doctor novels).

The One Doctor’s Christopher Biggins shaped imposter.

There’s also Robert Sheerman’s Unbound story, Deadline in which Derek Jacobi plays an old Juliet Bravo writer who has hallucinations about the Doctor and his companions.

But the Remembrance reference is arguably the most potent because it leaves so much unsaid (or at least two syllables), and so much to our imaginations.

WHO 50: 1987: Delta and the Bannermen.

TV  There’s much that can be said about the so-called stunt or celebrity casting which inhabited or for some inhibited the closing embers of Doctor Who’s first run but what isn’t generally noted is how these choices usually aren’t the worst things about their given stories. More often than not they're a strength.

When you mention to a not-we that Nicholas Parsons once played a priest in Doctor Who they’ll rolls their eyes, because it seems to them to be the epitome of what went wrong in the latter stages.

Except, of course, we know he’s really rather good in The Curse of Fenric, especially in the specially prepared dvd version where his character’s given a few extra “moments”, becoming a rather tragic figure as the foundations of his faith are challenged.

Then there’s Ken Dodd in Delta and the Bannermen. During the wilderness years, comedy shows and satirical articles, when attempting to explain why Doctor Who should not return they’d print a shot of Dodd as the Toll Keeper and Sylvester McCoy in his original jacket.

Doctor Who Magazine even put a version of it on their cover like a badge of honour.

What those still images don’t illustrate because they can’t, because you’d only know this if you bothered to watch the episode, is that he’s perfectly cast.

The Tollmaster is only a bit part. In nuWho terms, it’s Phil Cornwell’s stallholder in The Fires of Pompeii or Bella Emberg in Love & Monsters. Local colour.

The character calls for a flamboyant figure heralding passengers into an exciting space adventure (which just happens to be pointed at Earth but nevertheless).

Dodd’s perfect for this, not least because some of the DNA of his screen persona runs through Sylvester McCoy’s due to the connection with one of his great admirer’s Ken Campbell which leads to some excellent on-screen chemistry.

When Sylv later played the fool in Trevor Nunn’s King Lear, Dodd’s influence is tucked away inside somewhere.

But the arguable highlight of his performance, because this is an acting performance, is in his death as he’s dragged away by Don Henderson’s Gavrok, and the look of appreciation when he’s under the impression that he’s being set free, grovelling as he tries to get away as quickly as possible.

Then the guttural scream and whimper as he falls. It’s horrible. Pantomime, in its own way, perhaps, but horrible.

Now, Hale and Pace? They’re a different story …