Asked what the appeal of Doctor Who was, Jon Pertwee said that other science fiction shows will give you monsters on other planets, or on spaceships, but in this show you might find “a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec”. When Pertwee was announced as the Doctor, he took part […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #40: The Enemy of the World (1967-8)
The Enemy of the World is famously the odd man out in Season Five’s run of monster-driven stories. That’s true, but how unusual is it as part of the Second Doctor’s era in general? Troughton’s second story, after all, was the last of the ‘pure’ historicals, while it’s seldom noted […]
Doctor Who A-Z #39: The Ice Warriors (1967)
There’s a case you could make against the Second Doctor’s era, that it represents a retreat from the wide-open possibilities of the Hartnell years into formula. Previously, the series could and did go from telling a story about a planet inhabited by giant psychic ants to a sober drama about […]
Doctor Who A-Z #38: The Abominable Snowmen (1967)
Back in the William Hartnell days, Doctor Who managed to get around the world on the wings of audience expectations: people in the early 1960s didn’t mind if a television serial used a soundstage with a painted backdrop to represent an Aztec temple. Even by 1967, though, audiences were starting […]
Doctor Who A-Z #37: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967)
There’s a very slight oddity in The Tomb of the Cybermen which is all but ignored now, and which is hard to appreciate unless you’re watching these stories in order. It has to do with the Cybermats, the weird robot rat-bugs the Cybermen use as henchmen. This is their first […]
The Usual Suspects (1995): better left in the ’90s?
The singer/songwriter Ethel Cain recently kicked off a minor cultural debate by saying she was sick of irony. “There is such a loss of sincerity, and everything has to be a joke all the time”, she complained, making me feel deeply relieved for her: at least the 26-year-old Cain wasn’t […]
The Fisher King (1991): Robin Williams’s best role in Terry Gilliam’s most accessible film
Even now, at a point when the image of the buccaneering, risk-taking, out-on-a-limb male genius auteur is at a fairly low ebb, it feels taboo to say you like one of those artists’ more commercial works. Terry Gilliam, a man more buccaneering, risk-taking etc. etc. than most, made The Fisher […]
Doctor Who A-Z #36: The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
Episode one of The Evil of the Daleks sets up an entertaining and unique adventure. For the first time since the Hartnell years – maybe since The Ark? – we pick up directly from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous story as the Doctor and Jamie chase the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #35: The Faceless Ones (1967)
The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)
I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t […]