My original plans to cover Dream Demon (1988) for “Outside the Blue Box” were made in the hope that it would coincide nicely with The War Between the Land and the Sea, which – at the time – was the only piece of Whoniverse media with a confirmed release date […]
Doctor Who
Outside the Blue Box: Doran’s Box (Play for Today, 1976)
When Channel 5 brought back the legendary anthology drama strand Play for Today in 2025, the anticipation was tempered by a fear that it couldn’t live up to the original run’s standards. “Standards”, though, meant different things for different people. Some were concerned a modern Play for Today couldn’t match […]
Doctor Who A-Z #108: The Horns of Nimon (1979-80)
I’ve seen good Doctor Who during this project, and I’ve seen bad Doctor Who too. But so-bad-it’s-good Doctor Who is trickier to pin down. It’s not just that the likes of The Dominators and The Space Museum are so-bad-they-annoyed-me, it’s more to do with an essential incompatibility between so-bad-it’s-good appreciation […]
Outside the Blue Box: The Divine Comedy (1989- )
The process of producing a television show as complex as Doctor Who is no mean feat. Once the scripts are written, the locations scouted, the sets built and the tea bags purchased, the actors begin their job of bringing the stories to life. Another aspect of production, arguably one of […]
Doctor Who A-Z #107: Nightmare of Eden (1979)
By 1979, Doctor Who had gone about as far into outer space as it ever would. Season Seventeen, which this is a part of, has only one story set on Earth; the season before it has half as much as that. In its opening scenes, Nightmare of Eden seems to […]
Doctor Who A-Z #106: The Creature from the Pit (1979)
The Creature from the Pit is the kind of story title that points so clearly towards a particular tone, a series as iconoclastic as Doctor Who is duty-bound to undermine it. Much as the revival series’ Mummy on the Orient Express turned out rather more grave than its tongue-in-cheek moniker, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #105: City of Death (1979)
Early in the first episode of City of Death, Romana asks the Doctor where they’re going. “Do you mean philosophically or geographically?”, he replies. It’s one of an overwhelming number of great lines in the script by “David Agnew” (essentially, Douglas Adams doing a page-one rewrite on a David Fisher […]
Doctor Who A-Z #104: Destiny of the Daleks (1979)
Mark Gatiss once said that when Doctor Who works for eight-year-olds, it works for everyone. Looking at Season Seventeen, it’s easy to see why Tom Baker’s clowning hit the mark with that age group, but there’s also plenty of humour targeted at other age groups. Students would have enjoyed the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #103: The Armageddon Factor (1979)
Classic Doctor Who comes from an age when the word “arc” did not fall confidently from television producers’ lips, and the Key to Time is mostly the kind of loose overarching plot that works in a show like this. It’s a MacGuffin, one that can affect as much or as little of […]
Doctor Who A-Z #102: The Power of Kroll (1978-9)
When faced with a Doctor Who story that is, to put it mildly, not very well-thought-of, there are three approaches you can take. The first is simply to say, yes, this is crap, which is often tempting but doesn’t make for good reading. The second, more analytical approach is to […]