We Doctor Who fans like to pretend we’re a special breed, unswayed by the fancy special effects that buy the affections of other SF and fantasy fans. To some extent this is true. Nobody has ever argued that The Caves of Androzani is not a classic story just because it briefly features a ropey […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #95: The Sun Makers (1977)
I dunno, they’re making it too political these days, aren’t they? Making all the villains capitalists, and all the companions have to be “woke” and empowered. I prefer the good old days, when the Doctor and his cheerfully murderous friends landed on a planet owned by a mining corporation so […]
Doctor Who A-Z #94: Image of the Fendahl (1977)
It does go slightly against the principle of this series, but sometimes it’s worth taking a Doctor Who story out of the context of its season or era and looking at it in isolation. Image of the Fendahl is a case in point. The most consistently overlooked of Chris Boucher’s […]
Doctor Who A-Z #93: The Invisible Enemy (1977)
The American conceptual artist Marcus Rakowitz has a piece called The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which honestly seems a bit harsh. If you lost The Invisible Enemy you’d lose one of the precious few stories with the Fourth Doctor and Leela, one of the show’s most fascinating, rewarding and […]
Doctor Who A-Z #92: Horror of Fang Rock (1977)
There are some eras of classic Doctor Who – notably the very first and the very last Doctors of the classic era – which lend themselves surprisingly well to being watched from a modern perspective, where main characters are expected to have multi-season arcs. Then there’s the Tom Baker years, […]
Testimony (2025): sensitively reopening the case on Ireland’s darkest secrets
The Magdalene Laundries were never really a secret. The official McAleese Report into the institutions claimed that around 11,000 Irish women were held in these institutions after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Aoife Kelleher’s documentary Testimony, released in UK and Irish cinemas this weekend, draws on […]
The Maiku Hama Trilogy (1994-6) Film Noir through a Vividly Japanese Lens
Anyone mourning the recent cancellation of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face might find a more than acceptable substitute in the form of Third Window Films’s new Blu-Ray release, The Maiku Hama Trilogy. They may be a series of films rather than a television series, but they have exactly the right stand-alone […]
Pocket Money (1976): joyful, humane, ripe for rediscovery
François Truffaut’s empathy for, and skill at directing, children stretches all the way back to his first feature The 400 Blows, which launched the career of Jean-Pierre Leaud and is frequently cited as one of the all-time great directorial debuts. Pocket Money, released on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films, is rarely […]
Doctor Who A-Z #91: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977)
In a lot of ways, The Talons of Weng-Chiang is the culmination of Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s vision for Doctor Who. It had to be: the furore over The Deadly Assassin would see Hinchcliffe forcibly moved on after this, while Holmes stayed on for just half of the subsequent […]
Doctor Who A-Z #90: The Robots of Death (1977)
The Robots of Death is one of those Doctor Who stories that’s become a perennial favourite among fans because – and I hope you’ll forgive the lapse into lit-crit jargon here – it’s really, really good. Every aspect of it, in fact, is good, and every aspect is good from […]