The decision to spend two episodes of Peter Davison’s debut season trying to revive the “pure historical” – a subgenre of Doctor Who where the Doctor and the TARDIS are the only science-fictional elements, which hasn’t been attempted since Patrick Troughton’s sophomore story – is usually regarded as a baffling […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #119: The Visitation (1982)
So here we are, the first serial to bear a screenwriting credit for Eric Saward. To say his rise was meteoric would be an understatement; not yet forty and without a Doctor Who story to his name, he’s already the script editor at this point. The happiest thing to note […]
Doctor Who A-Z #118: Kinda (1982)
Kinda doesn’t make it easy for you. Normally even the most intricately plotted classic-series Doctor Who story will at least work superficially as an adventure story, but – even with a ticking clock, a giant monster and a madman in charge of a colonial base – Kinda is clearly more […]
Doctor Who A-Z #117: Four to Doomsday (1982)
Terence Dudley makes his screenwriting debut with Four to Doomsday, but he’s been around for a while. I’m not just referring to him directing Meglos last season, although it is an odd quirk that Season Nineteen contains no less than two writers who started out as directors the year before. […]
Doctor Who A-Z #116: Castrovalva (1982)
One of the morbid fascinations of looking over old Doctor Who is assessing all the moments when the series could have ended – the 1989 cancellation, obviously, and the 1985 hiatus. It could have stopped when William Hartnell left the role, and conversations about the wisdom of keeping the show […]
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974): emotional violence transcending the limits of documentary form
Some directors are primarily famous for one scene, and in the case of Kazuo Hara it’s easy to pinpoint which one it is. Hara’s 1987 documentary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is notorious for a moment in which the film’s subject Kenzo Okuzaki, a Japanese World War II veteran […]
New Directors from Japan: Takashi Ono (2016-2023)
Every now and then you see a film where the only viable response is: where did that come from? The beauty of Third Window’s new Takashi Ono collection is that it answers that question. As collections go, it’s modestly-scaled stuff; three shorts and a feature, and the feature’s only just […]
Doctor Who A-Z #115: Logopolis (1981)
Like so many generations of fans, my road into Doctor Who fandom was paved with Target novelisations. During the 1990s there were almost no repeats on terrestrial TV, the videos were often expensive or hard to obtain, and the idea of the whole “Whoniverse” on iPlayer was a madman’s dream. Those little […]
Doctor Who A-Z #114: The Keeper of Traken (1981)
One curiosity of the Tom Baker years is its reluctance to use old villains. After the understandable caution of his first, continuity-packed season, the show settles into a groove of one previously established threat per season – sometimes, in Season Thirteen and Season Sixteen, even fewer than that. This sparing […]
Doctor Who A-Z #113: Warriors’ Gate (1981)
I’ve tended to interpret Doctor Who stories through an authorial lens during this project, which raises the question of how we decide authorship in television. The cliche is that it’s a writer’s medium, and Doctor Who‘s format – the ultimate procedural, where every week involves a different location, set-up and […]