AAll Doctor Who fans know that it’s canonically true that the Doctor knows Charles Dickens. After all, they defeated the Gelth together on Christmas Eve 1869. But here’s a question no one ever asked: I wonder what Charles Dickens would have made of EastEnders? Moreover, can comparisons be drawn between […]
Pop Culture
2024 in Review: A Mad Year For Cinema, and For Me
In 2022, I did a roundup of my favourite films of the year, even though I’d only managed to see a small handful of new films that came out. Last year I did the same, and I was fairly proud that I’d managed to see nearly 20 films at the […]
Classic Film Kid Revisited: Jaws, 8 Years Later (1975)
On November 6th 2016, I started my grand journey aboard The Geek Show with a review of the all-time classic Jaws. The ‘classic’ part was particularly relevant for me as I used to review films as the Classic Film Kid (those words felt nostalgic just to type), judging whether they […]
Doctor Who A-Z #36: The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
Episode one of The Evil of the Daleks sets up an entertaining and unique adventure. For the first time since the Hartnell years – maybe since The Ark? – we pick up directly from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous story as the Doctor and Jamie chase the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #35: The Faceless Ones (1967)
The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)
I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t […]
Doctor Who A-Z #33: The Moonbase (1967)
The Second Doctor’s natural habitat is the edge of the frame. In stories like Fury from the Deep he scurries around in the background, cheerfully letting this week’s guest cast underestimate him until the time comes to deliver the coup de grace. There’s a bit of that in The Moonbase, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #32: The Underwater Menace (1967)
The Underwater Menace is, by most estimations, rubbish. Patrick Troughton knew it when they were filming, and nobody has contradicted him since. In most of Doctor Who Magazine‘s occasional polls it ranks in the bottom ten stories of all time, which is almost impressive. The script, credited to Geoffrey Orme, is so […]
Doctor Who A-Z #31: The Highlanders (1966-7)
If, like me, you’re fascinated by the question of why Doctor Who abandoned ‘pure’ historical stories, The Highlanders offers something like the perfect test conditions to run an experiment. This is the last time pure historicals were a regular part of the series’ repertoire, rather than a decades-later experiment in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #30: The Power of the Daleks (1966)
So, here we are. The first Patrick Troughton story, an attempt to sell a “post-regeneration story” to an audience who, two weeks ago, weren’t even aware they were watching a pre-regeneration story. Persuading an audience that this completely different man is, in fact, the same man they were watching last […]