The American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics, but if you want some truly paranoid style – one which gives equal weight to the paranoia and the stylishness – you have to go to Italy. Late twentieth century Italy, in particular, saw a strange collision of […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #100: The Stones of Blood (1978)
It’s been clear for a while that script editor Anthony Read and producer Graham Williams are under strict instructions from the BBC not to delve too much into the horror territory that got their predecessors Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe into trouble. Williams did so a couple of times in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #99: The Pirate Planet (1978)
The history of Doctor Who is remarkably well-documented, and these reviews would be nowhere without the generations of scholarship that taught us all how our favourite show was made. Yet sometimes the history of a story can get in the way of appreciating what it actually is. We are told […]
Doctor Who A-Z #98: The Ribos Operation (1978)
Before I started this rewatch project, I always found it funny that Robert Holmes, Doctor Who‘s most beloved writer, wrote two Patrick Troughton stories nobody likes before suddenly becoming a genius as soon as the calendar flipped over to 1970. But actually sitting down and watching The Krotons and The […]
Doctor Who A-Z #97: The Invasion of Time (1978)
By Season Fifteen, Tom Baker’s Doctor is moving towards his most consistently anti-authoritarian characterisation – someone who, just two seasons ago, sulked at the idea of involving himself in Sarn’s politics now seems to hop out of the TARDIS and ask where the nearest workers’ uprising is. As such, there’s […]
Doctor Who A-Z #96: Underworld (1978)
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 […]
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, […]