Looking back on the history of Doctor Who means looking back over the last sixty-plus years of British television. Along with a few other titans like Coronation Street and Blue Peter, it’s one of the few shows whose contemporaries can include anything from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? to Adolescence. The fact […]
Doctor Who
Doctor Who A-Z #76: The Ark in Space (1975)
With Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot, handled by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, this is the first story to be produced and script edited by the iconic team of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. The break feels sudden and immediate. Even the Troughton era was never this single-mindedly concerned with being […]
Doctor Who A-Z #75: Robot (1974-5)
Interviewed ahead of Peter Capaldi’s debut in Deep Breath, Steven Moffat said he’d already written his Spearhead from Space in The Eleventh Hour, so why not do Robot for the next Doctor? The comparison has to do with familiarity: Pertwee’s debut, like Smith’s, was a sudden, startling break with the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #74: Planet of the Spiders (1974)
I don’t know what I expected when I started this project – I don’t know if I was doing anything as vulgar as expecting something – but probably the last thing I was expecting was having my childhood love for the Third Doctor comprehensively reignited. And yet, despite a rocky final season, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #73: The Monster of Peladon (1974)
We’re at the penultimate serial of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, so it’s probably time to tackle the burning issue of his tenure head-on: is he a toff? The Third Doctor, his detractors say, is the establishment Doctor, “The Pompous Tory” in the words of seminal fan blog Adventures With the Wife […]
Doctor Who A-Z #72: Death to the Daleks (1974)
There’s a shift in Doctor Who towards the end of Jon Pertwee’s run which doesn’t actually affect much of what you’re watching, but it had a seismic impact on how people watched it. From 1963 to 1972, Doctor Who existed in an eternal present: the only recurring monsters were ones the average person in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #71: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974)
Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the final Doctor Who story to be released on VHS, implying that even late-in-the-range releases like a box set of Underworld and The Time Monster were considered a more desirable consumer item than this. This is a strange anti-accolade, and not just because of the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #70: The Time Warrior (1973-4)
It’s not always easy to judge which Doctor Who stories are important – not at the time, and not even in retrospect. A retrospective view, for instance, will probably pick Dennis Spooner’s The Time Meddler as being the story which set the template for all modern-day stories set in Earth’s […]
Outside The Blue Box: Jackdaw (2023)
Jackdaw is a film that’s interested me for multiple reasons, the first and perhaps most important one being that it’s the feature debut of director Jamie Childs – who cut his teeth on a handful of episodes during Jodie Whittaker’s first series as The Doctor. The 11th series made an instant […]
Outside the Blue Box: Casualty: Results by Ben Aaronovitch
To understand where Casualty was in 1990, we must first go back in time one year earlier, to 1989. The fourth season of the hit BBC medical drama, which had begun life three years earlier in 1986, saw the show undergo some changes. The original producer, Geraint Morris, had left […]