William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s Doctor Who: Now You See It…

Shamefully, I never thought I’d get back to this. And maybe I still won’t (my reviews elsewhere have fallen off rather, too). But just in case you’ve happened to come by this way, here’s a little bit of Bill Hartnell fun. I was so utterly delighted to see him in prime time, palely colourised and all, in The Name of the Doctor a fortnight ago that I popped on An Unearthly Child straight afterwards. Then The Daleks (Richard being away for the weekend). And I enjoyed them enormously. The Edge of Destruction, too, and Marco Polo since.

Marco Polo, though, is something very different to those three.

It’s the first Doctor Who story that you can buy on CD.

You know, you can buy two-thirds of all the William Hartnell stories on CD – and all but three of those in which Patrick Troughton stars as the Doctor. So what, you might ask, has the BBC got against those left out, and especially those first three stories that I’ve told you are so brilliant?

Well, if you’re reading this obscure blog, you almost certainly know the answer already – that it’s nothing the BBC has against those three terrific stories I’ve already written about here, but that it’s got next to nothing of many of the rest of the Sixties. More than one in eight of all Doctor Who episodes made to this day – specifically, nearly half of those made in the ’60s, and more than half of those starring Patrick Troughton – no longer exist in most meaningful senses, which is why you can buy the first three stories on DVD but the fourth is primarily available on CD instead.

There were 253 episodes of Doctor Who made and broadcast in the 1960s. Only 148 still exist as TV episodes. Out of the six Doctor Who seasons starring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, three are almost but not quite complete; three are skeletal wrecks with the vast majority of their episodes “lost”. Accounts of this distressing phenomenon tend to use the euphemisms “lost” or “missing”, particularly accounts from the BBC, when more accurate words might be “burnt” or “taped over”. In fact, the original video of every single 1960s episode was taped over, though that’s marginally less appalling than it sounds. For a more in-depth account, I recommend Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition 34: The Missing Episodes – The First Doctor, which was released a couple of months ago and copies of which can still be found in some shops (or, inevitably but less visually, Wikipedia). For my partial account of the strange and wonderful ways of experiencing what’s left, read on.

On sale now. Pretty.

Why 1960s Doctor Who Was Destroyed

It wasn’t just Doctor Who. The BBC’s archiving policy with many pieces of great television from the 1960s was literally to toss them into a skip and burn them. Film was thrown away or torched, while video was wiped over. In the days when there were just three TV channels, an actors’ union dead-set against repeats and videotape highly expensive (and long before home video), as well as many TV bosses seeing their medium as an ephemeral one of no lasting artistic significance, it’s easy to see why so much early television was destroyed, though to understand the terrible mixture of snobbery, false economy and lack of foresight that led to such mass vandalism is not to excuse it. The simplest way was just to re-use the huge and hugely expensive videotape spools again to record new programmes. And that’s why no Doctor Who episode from the ’60s exists in its crisp, first-generation original format. It wasn’t until Tom Baker’s first season in 1975 that every episode’s master tape was kept.

The good news is that a surprising number of other formats – official and unofficial – mean that a surprising number of episodes survive, even if none survive precisely as they started. The biggest reason is that the BBC made film copies of almost every episode for overseas sales. While these didn’t quite capture the full picture or frame rate of the originals, there were a great many more copies struck: film was the international standard, and Doctor Who was successful enough to be exported to more than sixty countries. These copies were also in black and white – most countries’ TV stations not switching over to full colour until well in the ’70s – which is why for many years several episodes starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor could only be seen in monochrome, despite all of them having been made in colour. Thanks to finds, technological advances and sometimes painstaking and expensive hard work, now all of them are back to at least watchable if not perfect colour: on Monday, the last of these, The Mind of Evil, will be released on DVD and those like me who weren’t born when it was broadcast in 1971 will be able to see it in colour for the first time.

Many episodes were “lost” for a second and final time when the BBC helpfully insisted that all export copies were destroyed once the rental period was up. Thankfully, some were kept in the BBC’s own film archive and others have since turned up in TV stations and far more peculiar places all over the world. Since the BBC changed their policy and started keeping rather than destroying their television archive in the late 1970s, more than thirty episodes have been recovered, though with fewer than ten of those turning up in the last twenty years, each discovery seems like it might be the last.

If you know any film collectors with mysterious cans of any pre-1970s television programmes, the hunt is still on: this Radio Times article tells you how to get in touch in the unlikely but blessed event that you think you’ve found any “lost” Doctor Who or other piece of TV history.

The Survivors and the Ghosts: From CDs To Censors, Reading To Recons

When I was growing up, you got to see Doctor Who once – perhaps twice, with a couple of lucky stories from each year repeated the following summer – and that was it. The only two ways to experience a story again were, as I’ve written before, nightmares and Target Books, both thrilling if only partially reliable recreations of Doctor Who on TV. Almost every TV Doctor Who story from the original 1963 to 1989 run was novelised, which immediately put the series way ahead of most television. But even without the filmed copies held, or not, by TV stations which were as far as anyone knew never to be seen again, there were strange underground multimedia alternatives.

By the early 1990s, at last we could read novels of every 1960s Doctor Who story, including the “lost” ones. More surprisingly, by the early ’90s we were able to start hearing them, too. Doctor Who had so gripped the imagination of some viewers from the very first that they wanted to experience it again and again, and these home entertainment pioneers put microphones to their tellies and recorded the soundtracks. Between several different people’s collections later supplied to a BBC that decided it did want them after all, every single story exists at least in sound from – again putting Doctor Who in a far more fortunate position than many other TV series of the period. And over the last twenty years, all those soundtracks have been released.

There’s a curious crossover between the first and second waves of mainstream, purchasable versions of the missing stories, and it’s for me the best of all “lost” stories – The Evil of the Daleks. It was the final Target novelisation, released in 1993; in 1992, it was also the joint first release of a complete “missing” soundtrack. I recently wrote about The Evil of the Daleks on my main blog, having guest-reviewed it for a friend; by an odd quirk, the other soundtrack released with it was The Macra Terror, which also became a firm favourite and which between them are arguably the series’ most strongly Liberal stories. And it’s as part of my review of The Macra Terror that I first wrote about its rather fabulous Reconstruction and just what that phenomenon means, of which more shortly.

The first commercial soundtrack releases from the BBC were of ropy quality, on cassette, and were given both sparse and eccentric linking narration to explain what was going on in the absent pictures. I still have a great fondness for them, though I can no longer play my dusty cassettes – if anyone has decent MP3s of 1992’s first four cassette releases, please do get in touch – but today’s comprehensive CD collection is of far greater quality. The soundtracks have been painstakingly restored by cross-matching multiple sources and remastering each of them; the narration is considerably more precise, if sometimes intrusively verbose; and the discs themselves are a far clearer listening experience than the cassettes ever were. Though most of them are available as single releases, I recommend the five-box series Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection, which collects all the missing stories into boxed sets (shop around for the best deal).

Though the soundtracks are the most accessible and comprehensive representations of the 106 “lost” episodes, they’re far from the only ones. A man called John Cura made a living by photographing early TV programmes and selling them on to the likes of BBC directors so they could have records of their work – as a result, around 60 Tele-snaps per episode rather than 25 frames per second exist for the majority of the Doctor Who stories where the moving pictures were junked. You can see Tele-snaps assembled into perfunctory photonovels on the BBC website for stories such as, again, The Evil of the Daleks and The Macra Terror.

At the less officially sanctioned end, a few tiny film clips exist from people with wind-up cine-cameras, though no full episodes (or even full minutes!) were recorded in the same way that the soundtracks were. Most ironically and hilariously, some of the ‘scarier’ scenes survive because the censors in New Zealand cut them out before stories were transmitted over there, but being good bureaucrats, carefully stored the ‘unsuitable’ bits. So all we now have of some stories are the bits they didn’t want us to see. One DVD release, Doctor Who – Lost In Time, is entirely a collection of ‘orphaned’ episodes, film clips and censored fragments where some but not all of the story exists.

The most ambitious recreations of the missing episodes are cartoon animations paired to the soundtracks, now available on DVD to supplement the existing episodes of The Invasion and The Reign of Terror – expensive and exciting, these return the complete stories to moving pictures, and there are more on the way.

The next most ambitious recreations of the missing episodes are back to that less officially sanctioned end – the Reconstructions. These fabulous labours of love match the soundtracks to the Tele-snaps, and more recently film clips, CGI and anything else to hand, with occasional explanatory captions, for a strange but compelling experience somewhere between the audio drama of a soundtrack alone and a TV show. Some Recons are essentially slide shows; others mount ambitious CGI sequences, such as highly effective animated Daleks or unintentionally comical juddering Yeti. And not only are these available for free, they must be available for free: the BBC appear to turn a blind eye to them as long as they don’t use the remastered CD soundtracks and as long as no-one makes a penny from them, so don’t let anyone charge you for them.

The best and most comprehensive range of Recons are made by Loose Cannon, and you can find their website here. Their work offers increasingly ambitious approximations of missing sequences and a remarkable array of extra features, particularly interviews with actors and others who worked on the stories they’re aiming to reconstruct.

To finish by returning to my opening flipped point of view, there are other Doctor Who CDs available than just the “lost” adventures. Quite a few stories which exist in their entirely have also been released on narrated soundtrack CD, particularly as the DVD range has taken a long while to bring everything out, not least by painstakingly restoring each story to the best quality they can. As a result, the audio range jumped ahead to make several stories available on CD before they were out on DVD, with the result that even though there are still a handful of DVD releases to come, every ’60s Doctor Who story has now been available for quite some time on at least one variety of shiny silver disc, and most of them on both (last year’s DVD release of Planet of Giants, perhaps ignored on CD for its very visual nature, belatedly completing the decade three years after all the others). The colour episodes from the ’70s on have taken slightly longer to catch up but, excitingly, after Monday’s release of The Mind of Evil, there will be only one story broadcast to date from 1970 to 2013 still to come on DVD, either*.

The most recent new form of making Doctor Who stories available combines two of the oldest: talking books of the Target novels, available on CD and download. Most of them are rather marvellous, and taken with the soundtrack releases mean that many stories from the “lost” decade of the ’60s are now officially available in three quite different formats (and, for many missing stories, two official ones and the Recons that you’re not supposed to mention). Taking the audiobooks of the Target novels into account, only one Patrick Troughton story is so unloved as not to be available on CD so far – The Seeds of Death does, however, have two separate DVD releases (and, way back in the 1980s, one of the first videos) to its credit. At present, four William Hartnell stories are in the same boat, though as this is an ever-expanding range, it was announced last week that one of them is on its way later this year. The very first story, An Unearthly Child, is to have an audiobook release to celebrate the series’ fiftieth anniversary. It will also be only the third Doctor Who story to have two separate official novelisations, as this will not be a reading of Terrance Dicks’ 1981 book but of a newly commissioned one by Nigel Robinson. Perhaps if demand for Doctor Who CDs continues, one day for completism’s sake there will not only be a narrated soundtrack but a reading of the ‘retro’ novelisation, so you can enjoy it not only on DVD but on CD, CD and CD. I’d buy them.

Next Time…?

For me, the most marvellous Recon I’ve yet seen isn’t quite the two much-adored stories I’ve mentioned several times above, but one made up only of old-fashioned photographs and text captions, and not even any Tele-snaps… Yet they’re photographs with a difference. They’re not in pale, fuzzy colours but bold, glorious colour throughout, and it never fails to excite me to see the only story starring William Hartnell as the Doctor that doesn’t exist in full… But does exist in full colour.

Should I ever return here properly, it’s on next. Should I not, I’ve just enjoyed it all over again and by going to this site, so can you.



*The sole Doctor Who story which, after Monday, will still not be available on shiny silver disc is 1975’s Terror of the Zygons, which despite a recent reissue of its novelisation (a massive childhood favourite of mine for personal reasons) hasn’t even had its own audiobook yet. Except… That it does have the esoteric distinction of having been among only a handful of Doctor Who stories to be released on each of two other sorts of shiny silver discs that I’ve not mentioned yet. No, not Blu-rays. We have in our obsessively completist collection not the soundtrack in the sense I’ve used it above – the complete sounds originally broadcast along with the visuals to a story – but in the more conventional for a movie but unusual for a Doctor Who story sense of the Doctor Who – Terror of the Zygons Official Sound Track. Yes, it has a music CD. Still more rarely and improbably, as well as being one of the first video releases in the ’80s, it was one of the only laserdisc releases. So we have it on silver disc that is not only shiny, but enormous.

Doctor Who Magazine’s Golden Treasure

If you’re like me, you’ll probably need cheering up after the European Elections (though the locals were pretty good). If you’re even more like me, one way is to dip into Doctor Who Magazine’s latest special, 200 Golden Moments, featuring absolutely wonderful scenes from every single Doctor Who story. It is, quite simply, a joy. It answers the question I wish fans would ask more often – ‘Why is this brilliant?’ – across the whole TV series from 1963 to this Easter, and rivals the Radio Times’ legendary Tenth Anniversary Special as the most marvellous Doctor Who magazine ever printed.

Strike a pose! 

Back in 1973, years before Doctor Who Magazine began, before any of the mass of guidebooks (still less websites) naming every Doctor Who story were published, the Radio Times celebrated ten years of the series with a special glossy full-colour magazine, back when the Radio Times itself was printed on loo-roll. It boasted a mini-guide to every story (sometimes accurate), plans to build your own Dalek (with the measurements wrong), a Dalek story by Terry Nation (who decided it didn’t count, so used the same idea for a Blake’s 7 episode) and, above all, it was packed with thrilling photos, both from the stories themselves and specially staged ones with many of the actors who’d played the Doctor’s companions. I probably wasn’t walking yet by then, still less watching Doctor Who or arguing with other fans, but a few years later a family friend gave me the slightly battered copy he’d bought at the time, and it instantly became (and has remained) one of my most treasured possessions. For many years, it was a window into the series’ prehistory – anything from before I started watching was, of course, ancient, and anything from before I was born practically mythological – that you simply couldn’t get in any other way. It still looks terrific today, and is so iconic that drawing a variation of the cover (starring the two of us) was the natural choice for Richard and my tenth anniversary.

So in terms of affection and excitement, and with well over 400 Doctor Who Magazines since then, the bar is set pretty high. Well, 200 Golden Moments pretty much clears it. It’s the ideal celebration, and if I were you I’d go out and buy a copy before they all sell out. Though I’m half-American I’m incapable of a convincing American accent, so it’s a good job I’m only writing a booming advertiser’s voice: ‘If you only buy one Doctor Who magazine, make it this one’.

My scanner doesn’t like the gold foil, but it’s prettier in real life 

I love reading – and writing – in-depth articles on Doctor Who, something thought-provoking and with a bit of punch. I love laughing at the bits that don’t work (though – as with any tribe – only with another Who-lover, defending the series against all comers from ‘outside’). And I love watching some stories an awful lot more than I love watching certain others. But, above all, I love Doctor Who, and sometimes it’s a little wearing when all a particular fan or book or site seems to do is be negative. Four or five years ago, Richard and I were reading a particularly in-depth, insightful and comprehensive book on the series and greatly enjoying its ideas, its turns of phrase, and ganging up on it together when we thought it had got something hilariously wrong. But although it and its companions are probably the best set of books ever written on the series, we often felt that at times they lost sight of why they were into Doctor Who in the first place. So from then on, when Richard and I watch Who together, even a story we really don’t think much of, we’ve always tried to ask that question that was missing from these books – why is this story brilliant? Whether it’s a chorus of praise or just a saving grace, the idea of the series is so magnificent that every part of it has something worth treasuring. And that’s why I love this new special: at last, someone’s produced the very thing I want to read to cheer myself up about any of Doctor Who you care to name.

Why Is This Brilliant?

It’s immensely readable. It’s made up of a couple of hundred little nuggets, all beautifully illustrated, by dozens of different authors in dozens of different styles and finding something memorable for many dozens of different reasons. It focuses on great drama, funny one-liners, special effects wonders, scary cliffhangers, gorgeous music, fantastic acting, long, short, sad, happy, old, new… Like the series itself, each piece is something new. If you know every story, you can look at it through someone else’s eyes; if you’re a more casual watcher, it’s like 200 trailers or bite-sized insights, something that might make you think, ‘Ooh, I’d like to try that one’. You can read it from cover to cover, or back to front, or pop in and out at your leisure – it’s ideal to dip into, and like a particularly good chocolate selection box, you can just take one at a time, or you can swallow 200 at a sitting.

Now, obviously I’m a Doctor Who fan, so naturally I could pick at this. I could point out that, as some stories get more than one “golden moment,” there are actually not 200 but 222 of them here. But what sort of pedant would you have to be not to see that as a bonus? I could complain that when I picked out 46 stories to illustrate Why Doctor Who Is Brilliant last year I roamed across the whole glorious panoply of Doctor Who, from TV to novels to comics to radio plays, and this sets its sights too narrowly to do the whole marvellous concept. But then, I only picked one story from each year, and they’re doing the lot – just how many pages would it take to cover “A Few Thousand Golden Moments”? So, you know, they’ve got it as near to just right as it could ever be. And, like that fabled Tenth Anniversary Special, open it up and it looks gorgeous.

A Peek Inside…

I’m not going to offer a critique of every single piece in there, because – well, obviously, because I don’t want to take up 146 pages (and probably 146 days to write). But I’d like to pull out a little of the best of it, and raise the odd eyebrow. The first thing, of course, is that they haven’t – they can’t have – chosen all the same moments that I would. So with some stories you turn the page to find exactly the famous scene that’s always praised, while with others there’s an iconoclastic focus on something you wouldn’t expect at all, with the one everyone raves about suddenly missing. I set myself to scribble down the half a dozen scenes from the entire series that I thought were the most indispensable, and when I flipped through to check, they had three of them. But, you know, most of the time it’s just as joyous to find yourself looking at a little-thought-of scene in a new light as it is to bask in the comforting glow of something you’ve always ‘known’ was magnificent. And if you’re too upset about your favourite being ignored, Philip MacDonald’s evocative introductions for each Doctor pick out a brace of brilliant moments each sketched in a few words, just a selection of some of the bits they didn’t choose, and chances are you might find it mentioned there anyway.

I’ll take you on a trip through my favourite Doctor, then skip more swiftly through the others. The magazine starts perfectly – the first choice, for the first story, is exactly the one I’d have made, as Ian, Barbara and all of us first enter the TARDIS. I look at my scrawled six and, yes, that’s just about the most indispensable of the lot. And when I wrote the other week about why The Edge of Destruction was brilliant, the moment quoted here is one of the scenes that gripped me, too. We come to the earliest-broadcast story I don’t think too much of and, hurrah, Jonny Morris has gone for exactly the nightmarish moment I always think of as its finest. Matt Michael picks a scene that I wouldn’t for The Sensorites, but captures it beautifully, and links the marvellous William Hartnell all the way to Christopher Eccleston in a flick of a phrase – then his next choice includes the lines I used when, ten years into making political speeches, I first flourished a quotation from Doctor Who to a packed room. Andrew Pixley, known for his learned, detailed archive work, is a revelation, making me smile throughout with sheer, infectious joy, then Gareth Roberts – known for his fine comic writing – leaps in with one of the most searingly dramatic arguments the series has ever known, even if he falls for the Earl of Leicester’s spin-doctoring. Jonny Morris reveals Billy’s lolcats; Nev Fountain thanks the stars that Doctor Who always managed to avoid (sometimes by a whisker) such ghastly sci-fi clichés as the Planet of Women. Paul Cornell shares the “sheer magic” of Billy’s most moving soliloquy; Mark Wright picks out what, if Bill Hartnell was the star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – what a marvellous, marvellous idea – would be his ‘hero moment’ for the titles. And Patrick Mulkern picks out some eye candy, then later on plays what I’m certain is a Hampstead euphemism. I know where he’s coming from.

Rob Shearman, ah, the lovely Rob Shearman, superb writer, incisive critic, swoops in on just how utterly brave and brilliant was the way they changed the Doctor for the first time. Stuart Manning takes a minor scene from one of my favourite little-known stories to illustrate in a couple of hundred words exactly the ideological point I made in several thousand. Philip MacDonald, in The Tomb of the Cybermen, hits on another of those magic six I’d scribbled down, and makes a lovely case for The Abominable Snowmen – and he’s right, you know. Between them, on one of those stories that get two golden moments, Keith Topping and Jonathan Morris capture exactly the most horribly memorable scenes… Though I’d have been torn in making it three, and added the terrible, fearful, hideous glee that comes in torturing a Cyberman.

Probably the biggest shock in the entire magazine is that a scene so memorable it’s been remade three times in Doctor Who TV, for pop videos and even for Pringles, killer shop window dummies smashing through the high street in Spearhead From Space, is ostentatiously missing as a scene I’d never have thought of takes what everyone would assume was its place. Which is why it’s so perfect that the pull-out quote for the scene which every fan will frown at for being the wrong one is, “Is this someone’s idea of a joke?” Priceless! Then, for the sequel, Scott Handcock makes me see the brilliance in a cliffhanger that, I’ll confess, I’d always thought a bit rubbish. And Dave Owen nails the relationship at the heart of The Three Doctors, while Philip MacDonald treasures a tiny, exquisite moment from the next story along.

After an ad for Big Finish’s Short Trips books, now at the end of the line and flying off at half-price – you know you want to – there’s Tom Baker. Gosh. What a lot of Tom. And every little bit marvellous. There’s a lovely little moment by Paul Vyse from The Sontaran Experiment, then Gary Russell and David A McIntee between them zero in on the central drama of Genesis of the Daleks (even without the scenes I’d have picked – the Doctor and Davros’ philosophical debate for sheer electricity, and Ronson’s screaming death for memories of boyhood bloodlust). But while Gary’s piece nails Davros’ fatal flaw, I have a problem with David’s. Even though (thanks, Jennie) he did vote Lib Dem in the Euros. You see, he’s both absolutely right and dead wrong on the Doctor’s moral quandary over whether to destroy the Daleks. Where David goes wrong is in his shortcut to answering the Doctor’s question, where he rephrases Sarah’s comparison of the Daleks to a virus into “a genetically modified mould in a dodgem car” and that, because of the dehumanising words “genetically modified,” it’s fine to kill them… Which, rather than listening to the Doctor’s argument that this is an intelligent species, ironically takes the Daleks’ side that you can say another form of life isn’t like us, and so destroy it. Where he’s right, and impeccably liberal, is in seeing what’s so important about a hero that asks questions:

“This is a hero, a role model, who, when faced with a difficult decision and unpleasant options thinks about them… The nature of the question, or the answer, doesn’t matter; it’s the concept of asking that’s so fabulous.”

Nev Fountain then earns incredible brownie points for pointing out just what an incredible cliffhanger Part One of The Deadly Assassin has – yep, it’s my favourite cliffhanger, and my favourite story. So I’ll ignore the choice he makes for one later story of one of the few scenes in the special I still think’s rotten… Love to Philip MacDonald again, too, for finding a moment in The Face of Evil that says exactly how vitally important Tom Baker could be. Readers who know The Robots of Death well will understand just why it’s disturbing that “David Bailey” writes about it, and hooray for Marcus Hearn, who spots one of the most marvellous things about Robert Holmes’ writing, as well as Kate Orman, who knows exactly why the last Doctor Who story to really, really scare me was so scary.

You can tell I love this period, can’t you? Because I’ll never finish at this rate. I’d better skip most of Tom and tell you just to get the magazine itself, which is much more fun to read, after all. Look out, along the way, for top Gary Russellness on The Invasion of Time, Peter Anghelides hitting one of the tiniest, most perfectly crafted things about The Androids of Tara (albeit making the mistake that everyone makes about the story, and not picking the line I borrowed for a certain blog), Gareth Roberts filling me with enthusiasm for The Power of Kroll, which is no mean feat, and Dave Owen, hurrah, knowing that the music is the most gorgeous thing in City of Death. Plus lots and lots of Jonny Morris (and more for free), who always comes up with something new – even if I don’t think he gives enough credit to the brilliantly talented David Fisher.

Rob Shearman doesn’t write many of the pieces here, but they’re some of the best. He’s spot-on – and, unexpectedly, very funny – for Full Circle, and supplies two brilliant moments for the early Peter Davison era. Also unexpectedly, that period gets perhaps the most impressive run of nuggets in the magazine; if you want quality writing, the middle’s a good place to start. Scott Handcock again sees right into the Master in Castrovalva, Gareth Roberts finds a premonition of death, and Rob, again, takes an opening scene I’d always thought of as perfunctory and shows the unsettling effect it’s there to create. It’s probably the most memorable moment in the magazine for making me see a scene from an entirely new angle. Jonathan Morris gets it right again and again on Snakedance and Frontios, Ian Farrington summons up Sgt Pepper, and Matt Michael has a marvellous moment of childhood terror – a piece of personal memory that even beats Gareth Roberts and Bonnie Langford.

I know David Darlington, but I can assure you he’s not bribed me to say that I loved his celebration of Colin Baker in The Twin Dilemma. Oh, it made me smile. And at the other end of Colin, Cavan Scott picks something way cool. New Grand Mekon of All Doctor Who Steven Moffat writes about Dragonfire; you know, I don’t really agree with him, but he writes it jolly well. And Mark Wright’s dead right on Paradise Towers. I know Joe Lidster a bit, too, and when I saw him on Saturday I really should have told him how perfectly he conjures a moment of The Curse of Fenric. I don’t know James Moran, but I also met him on Saturday and he seemed terribly nice; I should have told him, too, that he was lovely on Survival. Because I knew, of course, it had to be that scene, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone evoke it so well. Bless Kate Orman, next, for what she says about kissing, and Dave Owen on just how funny the Master is. He is, you know.

Gosh, only nine paragraphs into the three I meant to write about the magazine itself, and I’m into this century. Yay for Matt Michael on The End of the World; I love it too. There’s Jonathan Blum on Doctor Who making you cry – the story he writes about did for me, too – and Scott Handcock, on it scaring you all over again. Then David Tennant thunders into Doctorness with a fabulous scene brought to us by Peter Anghelides, and it’s that Jonathan Morris again, not making the choice I’d have made but drawing me into his view of New Earth. And what scene’s a Dalek’s favourite? I’ll let you read it and find out, but it’s brilliant, too. And thank you, Gary, for hitting what might just be my favourite David Tennant moment in one of his finest little stories, while Jason Arnopp picks probably the mesmerising “moment” I’ve watched more than any other from this century’s Who. Though he lifts out seven minutes, and I just can’t stop before I’ve watched the episode’s whole last sixteen. And what could be a better end – to the beginning – than Andrew Pixley making me utterly thrilled when reading about Planet of the Dead?

Go on, go on. Buy it. Their snippets are much better than my snippets about their snippets.

Other Marvellous Moments

The lovely Tom Spilsbury’s Editorial opening the magazine mentions the inspiration for it all, DWM’s 1996 article 20 Moments When You Know You’re Watching the Greatest Television Series Ever Made. That evocation of Doctor Who’s That Certain Something stirred a lot of imaginations at the time, followed by ten more suggested by readers, another ten of the best cliffhangers – bizarrely excluded from the ‘main’ set – and one ‘best moment’ each for the Master and the Cybermen. That’ll be 42, then. Strangely, given that those were DWM’s indispensable moments for the series thirteen years ago, only 19 of them made it into the 222 (the ‘extras’ suggested by readers turn out to be the most successful). Then the flurry of favourite snippets died down until DWM published its list of the series’ greatest deaths last year, and even the top one of those doesn’t make it here. Inspired like many people back in 1996, though, and by my childhood marvelling at clips and comment documentary Whose Doctor Who, I edited together my own 50 favourite scenes – don’t worry, I won’t list them all – of which 20 appear in 200 Golden Moments.

I’m going to finish by writing about just one scene I’d like to pick as a magic moment. In the spirit of the special magazine, it’s finding something absolutely glorious nestling in a story that’s perhaps not one of the best. 40 years ago yesterday, a BBC press conference presented Jon Pertwee as the new Doctor. My feelings about his Doctor have been complicated over the years, and I’d say now that, while I love him, he’s the Doctor I find it most difficult to like. Slight update: I was getting rather sleepy by this point in the article (having had just two hours’ sleep amidst grumbling at the election results the night before) and entirely forgot that this was the point at which I meant to unmask the identity of the outstanding but aggravating book series about Doctor Who alluded to above, one volume of which inspired my whole ‘Why is this brilliant?’ concept through being detailed, thought-provoking but persistently sour. It is, of course, Lawrence Miles’ and Tat Wood’s About Time collection. By a stroke of serendipity, Tat’s vastly expanded second edition of Volume 3 (covering the Third Doctor, though that’s less of a given than you might think) has just been published, and I started reading it yesterday. I had no idea until I read in that very book, 40 years to the day later, of the date on which Mr Pertwee’s casting had been announced. Then, irresistibly, another anniversary presents itself today, this time serendipitously chiming in with the blue giant spider on the cover of About Time 3…

Skip forward, and 35 years ago today his Doctor suffered fatal radiation poisoning and regenerated into Tom Baker, at the end of a story that was something of a Pertwee megamix, flourishing many of the era’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Planet of the Spiders is even one of those few Doctor Who stories which I have major ideological arguments with. With all that, you wouldn’t think I love it, but I do – and a large part of my love for that story, and the love I have for Pertwee’s Doctor too, comes with the climactic scene from 35 years ago today.

Back when I was five years old, I wasn’t allowed to stay up for Melvyn Bragg’s Arena arts special Whose Doctor Who, so my Dad recorded the sound from it on open-reel tape. Though now the whole thing’s easily available on the marvellous The Talons of Weng-Chiang DVD, for several decades I pored over the soundtrack, taking years to identify where some of the clips came from. Among them, though, there were three scenes that I could always identify and which I absolutely adored and always held me spellbound. The one which I hadn’t seen on TV on first transmission (and didn’t until the story was released on VHS in the early ’90s, with a fantastic cover based on this very scene) was taken from the final episode of Planet of the Spiders, a story where the action centres on – as you might guess – giant spiders seeking a blue crystal with the power to expand your mind to an incredible degree. Yes, it was made in 1974, since you ask.

“Now listen to me. Listen. I haven’t got much time left. What you’re trying to do is impossible – if you complete that circuit, the energy will build up and up until it cannot be contained. You will destroy yourself.”

At the story’s climax, the Doctor walks into the heart of the Spiders’ domain, facing his fear and the Great One, the huge, demented god-empress of the Spiders. Knowing that even to walk into her crystal-powered cave will kill him, he still goes in and offers her the final crystal in the hope that she’ll leave the humans alone. Maureen Morris voices the Great One in a tour de force of power and madness, confronted by Pertwee’s bravery and desperation. The blazing blue of it all, and the giant spider, socks you in the eyes, but the most striking ‘effect’ aiding this extraordinary face-off is the huge, eerie music. It might just be composer Dudley Simpson’s finest moment, and probably Jon Pertwee’s, too.

What’s so magnificent about this scene isn’t just the performances, or the music underscoring them. It’s that the Doctor sacrifices himself to bring the ultimate villain the crystal – but still begs her not to take it. His desperation isn’t for himself, and his pleading isn’t for himself; it’s initially for the people he’s dying to save, but during this scene it changes to a desperate pleading to save the villain. He holds off actually giving her the crystal out of fear for her – and she uses her mind to snatch it out of her hand, thirsting and aching to impose her will on the entire Universe, believing that the last crystal will give her limitless power. He’s aghast not for the Universe, but because he knows she won’t be able to contain it. He pleads, he protests, and is quite frantic to save her even as she’s crying her triumph. The Doctor with the biggest ego confronts the very personification of ego and, dying, tries desperately to save even an evil megalomaniac. He fails. The Great One’s terrific gloating power becomes agonized screams, and they’re the most chilling sound ever heard in the series.

The giant spider thrills the boy in me, the awesome music makes my spine tingle and the dying screams make the hairs on my neck rise, but what really makes this a golden moment for me is the sheer Doctorishness of Pertwee risking his last minutes of life to save his enemy. He’s heartbreaking.


Cross-posted to Love and Liberty, my main blog.