Doctor Who in the British Pathe Archive: Jon Pertwee.

TV There's nothing I could find for Patrick, so it's straight on to Jon.



Not the last time Pertwee will wear a coat like that. Or a Doctor would have a scarf like that.




Blink and you'll miss a waistcoated Pertwee early in this clip, but he reappears later comparing styles with Michael Pertwee and Jean Marsh.




A year later, here they are again in colour attending a fashion show for women's waistcoats. "This is something new. Geraldine Smith wears an embroidered waistcoat for the beach." Bonus appearance for cinema's Dr Who, Peter Cushing.




"A films stars gala organised by the Variety Club of Great Britain in aid of children's charities." "Jean Marsh, Jon Pertwee, Jean Kent and Tony Wright are feeling energetic."




The premiere for Woman in a Dressing Gown. "Jon Pertwee chats with Liliane Sottane."




Another variety club event, this time at Battersea. "Panning shot of Jon Pertwee and Eunice Gayson riding on round-about on the same horse."




Billy Smart lights Jon's cigarette while he's dressed as a cowboy. A cornucopia of 50s talent in aid of charity (Bygraves, Baker, Butlin and Cooper).




Premiere of Hancock's The Rebel. "Freddie Mills and Jon Pertwee"




Back in the big top. "Actor Jon Pertwee encouraging baby elephant to stick its trunk into a drink."




With the Carry On gang at Christmas in Petticoat Lane.




Back to Battersea for the eleventh year. The modern equivalent of this would probably be the London Film Memorabilia Convention or some such. Charles Hawtrey feeds Jon a cream cake. Jon's unimpressed.




Years before it became Compo's signature mode of transport, Jon tries his hand at driving a tin bath.




More nauticalia. Jon attends the Boat Show at Earls Court and has his eye on 'A Speranziella', the winner of the 1963 off-shore power boat race.




Silver anniversary of the Children's Film Foundation and the premiere of Lionheart. Jon's here with his two daughters and "Mrs Pertwee". He looks like he's just on the edge of becoming the Time Lord (assuming film wasn't already under way...)  As for Doctor actors, this as far as the Pathe Archive stretches.

WHO 50: 1974: Planet of the Spiders.

Magazines  Whenever I meet proper fans of the series, the kind who'll laugh at jokes about Monoids and know what a death defying role down a small verge looks like, I'm always slightly surprised when they tell me they don't read Doctor Who Magazine.

Um, but, I'll splutter, it's Doctor Who Magazine.  You're a Doctor Who fan.

Yes, they'll say, but there's in the internet.  It's a fiver a month.  It's just a load of old marketing.

At which point I realise there's no reasoning with them and begin to explain again why the Eighth Doctor's the best or some such.

Really, if you're a Doctor Who fan, oldby or otherwise, why wouldn't you buy Doctor Who Magazine?

The cost perhaps, it has just gone up to £4.75.

But for that £4.75, even though admittedly Gallifrey Guardian now reads like Yesterday’s Times, this month there's a long lost interview with John Pertwee full of stories even hardy convention visitors might not have heard before, Steven Moffat lists his favourite Who stories of all time, a Valentine's Day inspired article listing all the show's great romances (including Thara and Vana from The Krotons), an attempt to find the essence of Doctor Who via the TV Movie, the Eleventh Doctor meeting Ian and Barbara in the comic strip, a column about Christmas in a fans household and Gary Gillat’s blistering review of the dvd release of The Reign of Terror (yes, I agree, the animations are a disappointing failure).

And in the middle of all that The Fact of Fiction which this month, in case you were wondering, covers Planet of the Spiders.

When archivist Andrew Pixley’s archive features drew to a close, The Fact of Fiction arrived to fill the gap with a much more trivia based approach to Doctor Who’s stories, expanding out of the show itself into tangential material including general knowledge and spin-off media.

It’d be wrong of me to simply type up a list of my favourite facts because that would just be plagarism and writer David Bryher did all of this hard work.

But it is a classic of the form.  The authors of these articles, usually Alan Barnes but as we see here there are others, usually attempt to find material which hasn’t been in a Pixley archive or in one of the dvd production commentaries.

Sometimes there’s an element of wondering if they’ll mention this or that titbit or just how thorough, for example, regular boxouts about featured actors or the reuse of elements in novels will be.

Bryher folds some of that into the main text for a change.  Room is made noting the previous adventures of Gareth Hunt and for a jokey reminder of the effect Lawrence Miles’s Interference has on the story.  It is indeed complicated.

I don't expect I'm stealing anything if I mention that it reminds us that Planet of the Spiders has the longest chase scene in the show's history and one of its most pointless since one of the participants could have transported out at any opportunity.  Never mind the TV Movie, its Planet of the Spider which really captures the essence of Doctor Who.

The picture of Mike Yates on page 59 is almost worth the cover price of the magazine on its own.

But the magazine itself is genuinely worth the cover price, even in the internet age, even after all these years.

WHO 50: 1973: The Green Death.

TV For a split second, UNIT Captain Mike Yates gapes at the revelation of his colleague Jo's upcoming marriage, drops his head, pauses, then gazes towards the happy couple grinning.  At a time when we should really be sad to see the back of a popular companion, for a moment, just a moment, we think about someone other than the Doctor that she'll be leaving behind and someone she's entirely oblivious to.

Richard Franklin's performance is beautifully understated and it's interesting how few people have ever noticed it amid  The Green Death's bigger story issues of a companion leaving and the Doctor's silhouetted drive into the end credits, the Time Lord being replaced by Miss Grant with someone whose apparently a younger, hipper version of himself.

The actors continues his good work into the following scene, where the romance of Yate's loss is etched across his face, each new bit of exposition from the research grant onwards wounding him, a pat on the back from the Brigadier only helping a little bit.  Yates has been given a heart blow and he's showing it.  We've all been there, I think.  Me more than most.  Um.

After three years of apparent infatuation with Jo, she's grabbed out of his clutches at the last minute by some flash scientist with long hair who grows fungi. Typical. Meeting girls is probably one of the reasons Mike Yates gave on his application for joining the army. Then after presumably channelling all of his efforts into the Doctor's assistant, the one girl of his dreams, she goes into the jungle with some hippie. And unlike his army colleagues, he's inadvertently wearing a suit just to symbolically demonstrate how grey he is in comparison. Again, typical.

Before The Green Death, nowhere has Mike's love for Jo been signalled this brightly, and indeed before this moment in The Green Death he and Jo are barely in the same room together.  There's been no subplot, as might be the case in later decades, in which Mike watches the love of his life fall into the arms of another man.  Amid the mad computer and viruses and giant maggots this has been Jo's story, about her "flowering". Mike simply hasn't been in the frame.



That the Brigadier is the one to console him, revealing that behind the gruff, the cap and the moustache is a man who is actually paying attention to the lives and feelings of his officers also gives Lethbridge-Stewart a dimension that wouldn't be apparent again until Mawdryn Undead some years later. These are Mike's final scenes on screen embedded part of the UNIT family.  He's a traitor in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and in seclusion in Planet of the Spiders.  This would also be the last time we witness their mutual respect. From this moment on, everything would change.

WHO 50: 1972: The Time Monster.

TV The Time Monster is one of my favourite Doctor Who stories of all time.

Glancing across season nine, which also has the first of the Peladons, The Sea Devils and Day of the Daleks with its epoch defining first use of the phrase “Blinovich Limitation Effect”, most would suggest that the only reason The Time Monster has any merit is because at least it’s not The Mutants.

What they fail to notice is that it’s also one of the most expressively bonkers of stories, that its virtue is that it lacks any kinds of logic, its determination to ignore anything like a coherent story and instead provide us with yet another explanation for Atlantis’s destruction just one year after The Daemons.

It thinks the acronym TOMTIT is a good idea and has most of the actors saying it with a straight face. It has the Chronivore, a man in a brilliant white helmeted chicken costume that couldn’t be convincingly studio lit for videotape in any decade. It has Benton being turned into a baby. It has pre-Star Wars Dave Prowse playing a Minotaur.

There’s also the element of the Doctor making things, like the Time Flow Analogue which he knocks together from a Moroccan burgundy bottle, spoons, forks, corks, keyrings, tea leaves and a mug. It’s a beautiful object and potentially buildable by children at home.

What also of one of the show’s best TARDIS interiors, the only seen once due to fire "washing up bowl" design, a design so good the Master adopts it for his TARDIS at exactly the same time?

But such things are window dressing for one of Roger Delagado’s best performances as the Master, flirting with Ingrid Pitt’s Queen of Atlantis. Whenever anyone complains about Eric Roberts’s interpretation for being “too flamboyant” they’ve entirely failed to notice that this is the character at his most charming.

It’s also the story which features Jon Pertwee’s ultimate moment of charm or in this case moment of Zen, the Buddist-themed story about the Time Lord guru who influenced him as a boy. That remarkable glint in his eye.

Plus there’s the climax, the naked Benton climax, which is hilarious and embarrassing in equal measure.  Remember that next time you're tutting your way through Bad Wolf ...

WHO 50: 1971: The Daemons.

TV One of my favourite stories about the public reaction to Doctor Who concerns the ending of The Daemons. So if you haven’t seen it, look away now.

As those of you who’re left will know, the story climaxes with the destruction of a church,  and apparently what looks to contemporary eyes like a pretty obvious model was good enough to fool some viewers into phoning the BBC’s switchboard to complain about the demolition of what must have been in their opinion a much loved heritage object.

For these viewers at least, the BBC had destroyed the real St Michael's of Aldbourne for the sake of sci-fi drama.

What I love is that it disproves the lie that in those days, viewers were making just as many allowances for the less than convincing special effects as we do now.

While that’s probably the case, and it has to be in relation to something like the Myrka, this demonstrates that while kids were readily able to suspend their disbelief, some adults could too.

Now, I suspect, audiences are more savvy. If we see buildings being destroyed on television and in film, we always assume they’re not real, that a computer has to be involved when weirdly they’re also likely to be more photo-realistic.

Do we still suspend our disbelief in the same way?

I think because we don’t know what’s real any more, we just assume none of it is and having accepted that just to allow ourselves to be swept up on the drama.  Still.

WHO 50: 1970: Inferno.

TV The raised eye brow which greets me from people who know I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, or devotee, or whatever I am, when I tell them I’ve never been to a convention in my life is always amusing.

“You’re never been to convention?” They say, as though being a Doctor Who fan and sitting a large room listening to anecdotes from actors before becoming terribly drunk with some old friends are mutually exclusive.

“No.” I say.

“Why?”

My reasons are well rehearsed.

The cost. Conventions tend to be quite expensive, between the travel, the entrance price and the train travel and since I’m a perennially poor person I’ve never really been able to afford it between the other fan trappings (the merchandise).

Geography. Conventions tend to be held well away from Liverpool, often in a hotel on some inconvenient A-road inaccessible for those of us who use public transport.

Time. Conventions usually happen at the weekends and in Winter months and since 2007 I’ve been working Saturdays and Sundays.

But the other reason is, I’m not really interested in meeting people related to the making of Doctor Who.

I should qualify that by saying I’m not generally interested in meeting celebrities in general.

The reason’s pretty straightforward but let me phrase it as a question.

What if they’re arseholes?

Thought Catalog has done a pretty good job of listing the reasons you shouldn’t meet your heroes.

You’ll be in awe, they’ll never be as impressive as you expect, and forever after that you won’t be able to enjoy their work without it impacting.

As infamous recent examples have indicated, such encounters are fraught with difficulty.

Of course if it was my job, please god, and I didn’t have a choice, I’d probably get over it. And myself.

But yes, that if not the whole reason, a large part of it.

I simply love Doctor Who too much to have it ruined by personal experience.

Which isn’t to say I don’t mourn not having the opportunity to hear the one about the eyepatch joke live when I had the chance.

The Green Death.

TV Poor old Mike Yates. After three years of apparent infatuation with Jo, she's grabbed out of his clutches at the last minute by some flash scientist with long hair who grows fungii. Typical. 'The Girls' is probably one of the reasons Mike gave on his application for joining the army. Then when he channels all of his efforts into Jo, the one girl of his dreams, she goes into the jungle with some hippie. And he's inadvertently wearing a suit just to symbolically demonstrate how 'straight' he is. Again, typical.

These are the forgotten moments of a scene whose emotional effects are usually attributed to The Doctor. For a series that often had a reputation for running rough shod over human feelings, here are Letts and Dicks giving time to something which has simply been an undercurrent in a few previous stories, and making Yates something of a tragic hero (presumably to aid the justification of his rail falling later).

This is just one of the many moments which can be quite happily thrown, flan like, in the face of anyone who perpetuates the myth that classic Doctor Who lacked sentiment. Some of the praise that greeted the new series included pleasure that for the first time ever it plucked the heart strings, with the Dalek's demise in Dalek being cited as an example. It's something that is relatively evident in every story in both new seasons, as people die usually in fairly horrific ways.

The difference in the 'old' series is that the best of such moments are unexpected. Yes, there were the events, Sarah-Jane leaves, Tom regenerates, Adric smacking into a planet, in which tears were positively encouraged but arguably just as effective, if not more so, were the quiet times, mid-story when a companion, would all to rarely give lip surface to actually how they were feeling long term about something.

In The Tomb of the Cybermen for example, although the image of the defrosting hoard arguably sticks in most memories, there is also a lovely scene in which Victoria reflects on the loss of her father in previous story; it has little to do with much of anything else happening in the story but it feels real and human, and as a side note Troughton, often remembered as being a but of a shouty clown, was for once able to present some understand and subtly, something that the programme at the time predominantly failed to tap into.

This a similar pattern to The Green Death, as nowhere has Mike's love for Jo been signalled -- indeed this is one of the rare occasions when they're even in the same room together. The point is that for the purposes of the drama, Mike needn't be wearing his heart on his sleeve. The rest of the story, amid the mad computer and viruses and giant maggots has been about Jo falling for Cliff and vice-versa. Mike simply hasn't been in the frame.

For a split second, and Yates gapes and drops his head then looks up grinning, and there is genuine sorrow for him, at a time when the audience should really be sad to see the back of a popular companion. It continues through the rest of the ensuing scene until the Brigadier's pat on the back, which is a pleasure. Watch Franklin - Yates has been given a heart blow and he's showing it, each new bit of exposition from the research grant onwards wounding him.

That the Brigadier is the one to console him, revealing that behind the gruff, the cap and the moustache is a man who is actually paying attention to the lives and feelings of his officers also gives Lethbridge-Stewart a dimension that wouldn't be apparent again until Mawdryn Undead some years later. What's usually forgotten too is that this is Mike's final few moments as part of the Unit family - he's a traitor in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and in seclusion in Planet of the Spiders - so this would also be the last moment we witness them in a moment of mutual respect. From then on, everything would change.

Freedom

Books This is one of my favourite ever Doctor Who stories. It's not a television story, a Big Finish production or even a radio play. It is a short text story but in an audio adaptation and it's one of the most epic narratives the series has ever produced in any media, featuring nothing less than the destruction of Earth's timeline and the possibile betrayal of the human race by The Doctor. And it's just twenty minutes long.

Freedom was written by Steve Lyons and originated in the BBC Short Trips anthologies which were published by the BBC in the late 90s. Somewhere along the line, as audio books became more popular, BBC Audio decided that a talking version of some of the stories should appear and hired no less that Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred to read them. Around this time, before Big Finish, they were experimenting with the format. Other works included Paul McGann reading other Short Trips and the novelisation of the tv movie and Out of the Darkness, a cd with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as The Doctor and Peri with sections which were dramatised and as close to new recorded Who as anyone could have imagined.

Freedom's different. It's weird.

In Courtney's whispered brogue we're introduced to a construct, a prison in space. I imagine it looks something like the cube in the film Cube. Within The Third Doctor and Jo Grant are prisoners and have seemingly been there for quite some time. Slowly a series of flashbacks reveal a series of miscalculations and a trap set by, oh yes, The Master to lure his foe and Jo into captivity. As the story is meticulously revealed, it sounds entirely mad.

The listener is meant to believe that The Master, just in case he is ever captured whilst he'd noodling on Earth, set up a corporation called 'Freedom' some thirty years before as a front to create a time machine or weapon and develop a cloned body for him to inhabit so that he can lure The Doctor into his trap. It's totally ludicrous and illogical but make sense within the structure of the story and importantly sounds like exactly the kind of mad scheme he would develop, and no less bonkers than most of the things which happened during the Pertwee era.

Being a Steve Lyons adventure, it smells entirely authentic. There are scenes when the pomposity of The Doctor and autocracy of The Brigadier clash perfectly as Jo looks on with a mixture of confusion and boredom. You can almost see the balsa wood paneling of the room in which a press conference takes place. Even the aforementioned moment when The Doctor is placed in the situation of having to choose between Earth and freedom seems plausible -- and the Third Doctor is I think the only incarnation were we aren't quite sure of his motives.

All of which sounds like it could make a really good short story, which begs the question of why I've selected the audio. Because it's atmospheric, soothing and more importantly unique. During the scenes in which The Doctor and Jo are trapped in the prison cell the prose takes a back seat and the story becomes a mini-play with Nick Courtney essaying the role of the Doctor and, good lord, Sophie Aldred playing Jo Grant. And it's uncanny.

There's a certain weirdness because all over the rest of the story Courtney reads in Jo's dialogue with a slightly feminine inflection, but it's the only place in the whole audiobook in which this happens. Worth highlighting because, although I've never been a big fan of Aldred's work, here she actually gives a great little performance with the few lines she's given to read, including the moment late on when we hear an internal dialogue with herself about whether she believes the Doctor can throw out his principals.

I can't wait for the audio releases of the next group of Nu-Who books because it'll allow the experience of David Tennant doing his Rose Tyler (perhaps I should rephrase that) but I don't think that will be as interesting or unusual as Freedom or the other stories on offer here. My second favourite is Stop The Pigeon, in which Sophie gives Sylvester McCoy's accent her best shot or Glass which is a sequel to Shada of all things read in first person mockney.

All of these stories are now available on the Tales from the Tardis cds with Freedom on Volume One.

The Claws of Axos.

TV One of my insane rules has always been that I won't mix Doctor Who stories. What I mean is that if I've started watching, reading or listening to a story I won't dive into another one at the same time. It's confusing and something gets diffused along the way. My only exception is the strip in Doctor Who magazine, because waiting three months or whatever until I'd worked my way through fifteen pages of story is too long.

So here I was tonight with a dilemma. In the middle of a two part tv story, before me sat The Claws of Axos on shiny disc. Would watching the third betray the ninth? I watched the supplementary documentary about 'Reverse Standards Conversion' and saw all the clips of The Master and spaghetti monsters and caved. This was the classic show -- the new series is a different thing. Besides there might be a retro clue to what the whole Bad Wolf scenario was.

It's a great story, and actually a perfect choice to counterpoint the new series -- set on Earth with The Doctor fighting a universal threat to the globe. The pace is also extra-ordinarily fast with very little flab or room for pointless sitting around chatting about what to do next -- everyone just does it. And for all the people who say the new scripts have too many one-liner's witness the government's treatment of token official buffoon Chin and the final line of the story (which I won't spoil for anyone who hasn't seen it, but is a doozy).

But funnily enough it seemed to lack the spirit of occasion of the new series. Has time dissipated the need to find out if Jo Grant gets out of this or that scrape, or was it there before? Was it really like this in the old days? The week seems awfully long between new episodes and the anticipation is blinding. Perhaps because we're used to the ability to put the next episode on straight away after years of videos, dvds and Big Finish, this wait to see what happens is excruciating, even if partly its to see if the next part makes sense of the first. Or to find out why The Doctor would say, "I can save the world but I could lose you..." which is certain something you'd never hear from Pertwee. Well not out loud.