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 […]
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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 […]
Outside the Blue Box: Our Friends In The North (1996)
This series of reviews has led us writers down some very peculiar avenues, ones we perhaps weren’t expecting to take. Personally though, I’ve been using it as an excuse to explore my parameters and start ticking off things I hadn’t seen before (not that you’d notice since over on Patreon […]
She’s the He (BFI London Film Festival 2025)
The past few years haven’t been an easy time to be transgender (if there ever truly has been an “easy” time to be trans), not least in the United States, so it’s not surprising that the majority of films by trans creatives in recent memory have been on the angstier […]
Doctor Who A-Z #85: The Seeds of Doom (1976)
Doctor Who has existed for just under sixty-two years, and in all that time it has produced one (one) era which all fans agree is really good. That’s part of its strength: every stage of the show is someone’s golden age and someone else’s nadir. You would struggle, though, to find […]