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
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, […]
Outside the Blue Box: TravelWise (2000)
TravelWise is a video drama produced for Key Stage 2 and 3 schoolchildren by Essex County Council in the year 2000. Across four short episodes, we witness a soap opera style drama play out involving families and neighbours living in a suburban street. This would then be followed up by […]
Outside of the Blue Box: Annette Badland
Saying ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Eastenders’ in the same sentence sends a shiver down old Whovians spines. While the debate rages over whether ‘Dimensions In Time’ in all its hard swipe cut aways and craggy faced companions’ glory is canon or not (I promise not to mention it again), the two […]
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 […]
Doctor Who A-Z #89: The Face of Evil (1977)
The longer Season Fourteen of Doctor Who gets talked about in hushed tones as an all-time pinnacle of the show, the more it’s worth rewinding back to its transmission and remembering that it wasn’t always one discrete block of nigh-on flawless episodes. The Face of Evil is the first story of […]
Doctor Who A-Z #88: The Deadly Assassin (1976)
There is a temptation when writing about classic series Doctor Who to treat all of its controversies as items in the fossil record, but the ones surrounding The Deadly Assassin are still live grenades. As evidence, I watched this on Britbox, where the original final shot of episode three – […]
Doctor Who A-Z #87: The Hand of Fear (1976)
By Season Fourteen, the style that script editor Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe have brought to Doctor Who has been so carefully refined that it’s hard to imagine any writer being at odds with it. Their first season saw them coax a gritty, sophisticated and original script out of Terry […]
Doctor Who A-Z #86: The Masque of Mandragora (1976)
The Masque of Mandragora is an interesting story, because everyone always forgets about it. I realise that implies it’s not very interesting at all, but consider the context. This is a story with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, the consensus favourite Doctor-companion pairing. It’s produced and script-edited by […]