For all that Doctor Who is famously a show that changes continually, its core tone, themes and concepts are remarkably durable. The show’s bank of ideas are often added to but rarely subtracted from: whereas there are many things in Ncuti Gatwa’s first season that wouldn’t happen in a Patrick […]
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Doctor Who A-Z #09: Planet of Giants (1964)
If nothing else, Planet of Giants allows you to reflect on Verity Lambert’s pioneering genius. Doctor Who‘s first producer was pitched the idea of the TARDIS crew being miniaturised by C.E. Webber and Sydney Newman, who thought it would make a good first episode. Lambert thought it would be too […]
Doctor Who A-Z #08: The Reign of Terror (1964)
And so Doctor Who‘s first season ends as it began, with one of two “pure historical” stories not written by the subgenre’s mainstay John Lucarotti. The Reign of Terror is instead written by Dennis Spooner, who will soon take over as script editor from David Whitaker. As a script editor, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #07: The Sensorites (1964)
One of the questions this rewatch has made me reconsider is this: when did Doctor Who start to make its monsters complicated? In the new series, it’s commonplace: Peter Capaldi’s final season kicks off with five back-to-back episodes where an apparent monster turns out to be merely misunderstood. The trope […]
Doctor Who A-Z #06: The Aztecs (1964)
There’s a notorious moment in Timewyrm: Genesis, the first of Virgin Books’s New Adventures – stories marketed as “too broad and too deep for the small screen”, remember – where the Doctor scolds Ace for not wanting to be sexually assaulted by a paedophile. “Ace, these trips of ours are […]
Doctor Who A-Z #05: The Keys of Marinus (1964)
The Keys of Marinus is the first Terry Nation story. I know, I know he’s already done The Daleks, and any analysis of the show’s history will rightly record that serial as being more of a landmark than this one. But The Keys of Marinus is the first one that […]
Doctor Who A-Z #04: Marco Polo (1964)
Watching Marco Polo as part of a chronological rewatch of Doctor Who means confronting three oddities of the show’s 1960s incarnation for the first time. The first, and most glaring, is that this story no longer exists in the archives. During the 1970s the BBC had a crisis of storage […]
Doctor Who A-Z #03: The Edge of Destruction (1964)
For its third story, Doctor Who attempted a character-driven bottle episode, a bold move for a show whose characters didn’t have much to bottle at this point. The series needed a quick two-parter in order to complete its initial order of thirteen episodes; the decision to set it entirely on […]
Doctor Who A-Z #02: The Daleks (1963-4)
In a parallel universe – the one where John Lumic creates the Cybermen, perhaps, or the one where we all wear eye-patches – the second Doctor Who serial was Anthony Coburn’s The Masters of Luxor. Script editor David Whitaker held it back for reworking, then cancelled it when the problems with Coburn’s script […]
Doctor Who A-Z #01 – An Unearthly Child (1963)
Nobody comes to An Unearthly Child cold these days. The only reason anyone knows about it is bound up with what happened next: it launched a series, a series which, barring accidents, ran for the next sixty-one years and counting. Yet one of the pleasures of the opening episode is […]