702 Doctor Who - The Movie

EPISODE: Doctor Who - The Movie
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 702
STORY NUMBER: 161
TRANSMITTED: Monday 27 May 1996
WRITER: Matthew Jacobs
DIRECTOR: Geoffrey Sax
PRODUCER: Peter V. Ware
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Philip Segal, Alex Beaton & Jo Wright (for the BBC)
RATINGS: 9.08 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: Revisitations Box Set - Volume 1 (The Caves Of Androzani / The Talons Of Weng-Chiang / Doctor Who - The Movie)

The Doctor is summoned to Skaro to collect the Master's remains after the Daleks try & Execute him. The container holding the remains cracks and slime oozes out as the Tardis malfunctions and is set on course for Earth. The Tardis materialises in San Francisco on 30th December 1999 and is immediately shot down by a gang. He is rushed to hospital, while the Master takes over the body of an ambulance driver, where the efforts of surgeon Grace Holloway to save his life cause him to regenerate. The Doctor is initially bewildered but slowly gains his memory. The Master gains access to the Tardis and enlists the services of Chang Lee, a teenager who stole the Doctor's belongings to help him obtain the Doctor's body. Chang Lee gives the Master access to the Eye of Harmony that powers the Tardis which allows the Master to deduce the Doctor is half human. They come for the Doctor at Grace's house and take him to the research institute which is using a new atomic clock. They realise the ambulance driver is the Master and escape in a traffic jam, borrowing a police motorcycle to get to the institute, The Doctor steals a piece of the clock and they flee the scene returning to the Tardis where the Master is waiting for them. Doctor uses clock piece to repair Tardis. He needs to travel back in time to stop the Eye of Harmony being opened but finds the Tardis power drained. While trying to jump start the Tardis Grace is possessed by the Master and attacks the Doctor. Chang Lee starts to believe the Doctor so the Master kills him and uses Grace to open the eye so he can seize the Doctor's body, but causing chaos throughout the world as the eye's energies are unleashed. Grace activates the Tardis console, aborting the transfer of the Master into the Doctor's body, but Grace is killed by the Master before he is sucked into the eye. The Doctor takes the Tardis back in time bringing Grace and Chang Lee back to life before returning them to Earth and leaving to continue his travels through the universe.

Things that are good about the Movie: Sylvester McCoy. The Tardis set. Paul McGann. And I've got reservations about two of these. McGann is fab in this but he doesn't appear on screen until 20 minutes in and when he does he's playing the usual bemused/disorientated post regenerative Doctor. Yes it's great to see McCoy again but his stint at the start as the Seventh Doctor eats into his successors screen time. The new Tardis set, owing a debt to the Masque of Mandragora secondary control room and "Jules Verne" designs.

There's some interesting use of imagery throughout: eyes keep cropping up from the Master's (still Cheetah Planet affected?) eyes at the start through to the eyes giving away to Ambulanceman Bruce's wife that all is not well with the husband, to needing a retina scan to open the Eye of Harmony, the Eye of Harmony itself being shaped like an eye and the Doctor's eyes being forced open as the Master attempts to take his body. Then as the Doctor regenerates we get Frankenstein playing in the background as the Monster comes to life/Doctor comes back to life followed by some biblical Christ like images of the Doctor walking from the Morgue wrapped in a shroud which is continued later with the "crown of thorns" in the attempted possession by the Master sequence mentioned above.

Reaches for the hatchet.....

Right the Master's on trial by the Daleks and has requested the Doctor is going to collect his remains after his execution? Hmmm. Now I could maybe get the Daleks being a bit miffed with the Master over the failure of the Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks invasion but any Dalek action in retaliation against that would have begun & ended with the word "EXTERMINATE!". And if the Daleks are putting anyone on trial it's Davros we want to see post Revelation of the Daleks. Even if we allow them the conceit that they might put the Master on Trial surely the first thing they're going to do when he shows up is Exterminate him good and proper. We'll let the trial taking place on Skaro, destroyed in Remembrance of the Daleks, pass because it could quite easily have happened prior to the planet's destruction. I suspect the answer actually is that this is a huge trap for the Doctor set by both the Master & the Daleks, who've given the Master the ability to turn into this slime monster thing that can take over other people's bodies - cos he certainly wasn't able to do that before. yes, he could take over other people's bodies, there's form there in Keeper of Traken, but the slime monster thing? That's there because someone in special effects has gone "we can do this really cool moving liquid thing just like they did in Terminator 2" and someone else has gone "woooo, yeah, that'll be really cool!" and we've all gone "You've just ripped off Terminator 2".

That's not the only Terminator 2: Judgment Day rip off in the film either: the chase with the ambulance and the police motorcycle owes a lot to that film.... far more than it does to Doctor Who, Ambassadors of Death & Planet of the Spiders not withstanding.

The Doctor is half human now..... do you know what, out of all the things the Movie did I can probably cope with this the most. Yes it goes against all the ideas presented in the New Adventures that Time Lords are "loomed" (don't ask) rather than born, which rules out the possibility of the Doctor having a human mother. But it does neatly explain his fondness for Earth. The kiss between him and Grace is more of a shock as the Doctor has taken very little interest in affairs of the hearts before. But I suppose he might suddenly.....

The Eye of Harmony: OK when we last saw the Eye of Harmony it was located on Galifrey as the source of the Time Lord's power but yeah I can go with each Tardis having one, tapping into that power. It was a little less literal in the eye department the last time we saw it though. And needing a human to open it? That's not going to prove useful in most Time Lord Tardises is it?

Then there's the ending. Oh dear. Right from the very start the Doctor has been you don't go back and reverse events that have already happened. In Earthshock he doesn't go back to save Adric. And yet here time gets wound back to bring Grace & Chang Lee back to life.... It's not as if the Doctor goes back in time to make it happen either, the Tardis going back in time a bit seems to do it which is just mad.... Time flows normally inside the Tardis no matter what direction it's travelling. Any situation where we see something that has already happened on screen undone sits very *VERY* badly with. "And with a click of their fingers it never happened". Doctor Who has one previous example of changing what has already happened: Day of the Daleks. But in that instance the Doctors actions, in preventing the Dalek invaded world from coming to pass, are undoing interference with Time the Daleks have already committed.

I think in many ways the Movie serves as a lesson on how *NOT* to bring back Doctor Who. McCoy's twenty minutes at the start are a fan pleaser but they don't help to establish the new Doctor as a character at all, quite the reverse in fact by eating into his screentime. Then a considerable proportion of the rest of the film is taken up by the bemused post regenerative Doctor. Contrast this, when we get to it, with how Russell T Davies did things in Rose.

Cast: Being an American production you wouldn't expect the cast to have any prior or future links to the program. Sylvester McCoy obviously served as the Seventh Doctor, though according to the information text on Doctor Who - The Movie Revisitations DVD the BBC had been keen for the past Doctor part to have been taken by Tom Baker. This, along with Tom's proposed prominent part in Dark Dimension does tend to show the BBC's lack of faith in the incumbent Doctor. Replacing him is Paul McGann, famed for his appearance in Withnail and I. He has several brothers, all of whom are in the acting profession. Grace Holloway is played by Daphne Ashbrook an actress with a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine credit to her name as the title character in the season 2 episode Melora. The Master/Bruce the Ambulance Driver is played by Eric Roberts, the brother of film actress Julia Roberts. His wife Eliza Roberts plays his on screen wife Miranda.

Location filming for this story, and the studio recording, took place in Vancouver, Canada, which is rather flatter than the San Francisco setting for the story. At that time Vancouver was a popular area for TV series to be filmed in with genre series The X-Files being filmed there.

The Movie was the brainchild of executive producer Philip Segal who'd carried it with him through employment with several TV organisations including Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, hence the origin of the "Steven Spielberg does Doctor Who Movie" rumours. Indeed American interest in the series may have played a part in the initial 1989 cancellation and certainly helped to spike the proposed Dark Dimension 30th anniversary story. Both Director Geoffrey Sax and Writer Matthew Jacobs was English: Jacobs had even visited the Doctor Who studios when his father Anthony Jacobs appeared as Doc. Holliday in The Gunfighters.

Although well received in the UK, the movie didn't do so well in the US and didn't lead, as hoped, to a series being developed. As I said at the top I like the two actors playing the Doctor and I like the Tardis set but much of the rest of I'm not that fond of. However I've heard about some of the proposals for doing Doctor Who for a US audience and what we got is far, far better than some of them believe me. And if you don't check out the documentary on Doctor Who - The Movie Revisitations DVD which lays out in full the story behind this production. I think for me personally it marks a point in the years following Survival where Doctor Who passed from "It could come back" to "that's it, we're done with TV Doctor Who". It turned out I was a little bit wrong....

Doctor Who - The Movie was novelised for BBC Books by Gary Russell, former The Famous Five actor (he was Dick Kirrin) and Doctor Who magazine editor (1992-1995). The Video release of this story, (20th May 1996 iirc - the Internet is vague, but I can recall buying a copy on my first day working for Bacon & Woodrow It wasn't, it was 22nd May two days later, with thanks to m'learned colleagues and Doctor Who Toybox), caused some controversy: In February, three months before, all existing Doctor Who videos were withdrawn from sale. At that point Hand of Fear, released 05/02/1996, had only been on sale for two weeks making this a hard to find item. The video contained more footage of Sylvester McCoy being shot than was show on UK television. The video, by nature of it's early release, is also missing the caption shown before the UK broadcast dedicating it to Jon Pertwee who died May 20th 1996.

The first DVD release of this story occurred in the UK on 13 August 2001 with a commentary track by director Geoffrey Sax. A clash of dvd distribution rights between the BBC and Universal, who produced the story in the USA, prevented it's release there. Doctor Who - Revisitations was released in the UK on 4th October 2010, adding new special features and a Sylvester McCoy/Paul McGann commentary to the restored film and releasing it with new versions of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang & The Caves Of Androzani. A US DVD release of the Movie finally followed on 8th February 2011.

Interregnum 1: Adventures & Dimensions

In many ways the early 1990s was a great time to be a science fiction fan@ Star Trek: The Next Generation ruled supreme in the USA and eventually, three years after it started, came to the BBC. TNG begat a number of sequels (DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) but it's also the catalyst for the televised science fiction boom: Babylon 5, Stargate, X-Files, Sliders, Space: Above and Beyond..... during the 90s everyone got in the act. Really the only thing missing was Doctor Who.

Not that the early 1990s wasn't a good time to be a Doctor Who fan! The videos swung into a regular pattern of two every other month and were *finally* in episodic format and moved away from the Pertwee/Baker stories they concentrated on. Target continued to novelise books and when they ran out of TV stories they, under new owner Virgin Books, followed the successful Star Trek book line from Pocket Books (and reprinted by Titan in the UK) and started producing original fiction for the Seventh Doctor continuing the series in New Adventures from June 1991 and later with the Virgin Missing Adventures from 1994. The New Adventures started out in trusted and well known hands with John Peel, lauded for his recent adaptations of Hartnell Dalek stories, writing the opening book. The second was written by Terrance Dicks and you can't get a book more authentically Doctor Who than writing "by Terrance Dicks" on the cover. Incidentally his book, Exodus, is probably the closest to the TV version and the easiest to turn into a television production. Former Target editor Nigel Robinson produced the third book, Ghost Light script writer Marc Platt the fifth and script editor Andrew Cartmel the sixth with Ben Aaronovitch contributing later. But new names started creeping in as well, and they're names you might recognise too: Paul Cornell wrote the fourth book, Revelation, and became the first person to be repeat commissioned on the range. Mark Gatiss wrote the eighth book, Nightshade, with references back to the Quatermass series. Gareth Roberts writes the 11th book, The Highest Science, and later found his niche on the Missing Adventures line writing season 17 Tom Baker stories. Gary Russell & Matt Jones both provide later books as does one Russell T Davies already gathering a following for his cult children's series Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993). All these names will reappear later..... And while we're on the subject of Children's television it's worth mentioning that on ITV a series called Press Gang was airing, also gathering decent reviews, by a young writer called Steven Moffat....

By that point we'd had a repeat season which started in January 1992 featuring The Time Meddler, The Mind Robber & The Sea Devils. In February of that year Tomb of the Cybermen was found in Hong Kong and returned to the archives while towards the end The Restoration Team showed off the first of many pieces of technological insanity to marry colour from an off air US NTSC video to sharp b&w film picture to produce a colour version of the Daemons which was repeated followed by Genesis of the Daleks, Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks & Battlefield, concluding in May 1993.

Rumours were then flying around about a planned 30th Anniversary special: It would reunite all the surviving Doctors in a script written by Adrian Rigelsford, a fan turned writer who at the time was producing reference works which are now viewed as somewhat dodgy due to the providence of interview material used, and under the trusted eye of director Graeme Harper. However this project was cancelled on orders from on high (for reasons which wouldn't become clear until much later). It's a shame because they were planning to film at Royal Holloway College, University of London while I was there doing my degree.

What we got instead was a documentary, Thirty Years in The Tardis, aired on 23rd November that year covering the show's history directed by fan Kevin Davies. Davis had worked on the animation sequences in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, produced the game graphics end title sequence for Terrahawks and produced the much lauded Don't Panic documentary on Hitch Hikers. Here he married interviews with specially shot footage recreating key scenes from the show's history. An extended version would be released in 1994 on video as Doctor Who - 30 Years in the Tardis which is due to get a DVD release shortly alongside Shada and many assorted oddments that couldn't be included on previous DVDs.

But what you won't see on Video or DVD is Dimensions in Time, a two part special made for Children in need uniting the casts of Doctor Who and EastEnders. Returning from Doctor Who are Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor & Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor with (deep breath) Sophie Aldred as Ace, Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman, Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Richard Franklin as Mike Yates, Caroline John as Liz Shaw, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, Louise Jameson as Leela, John Leeson as K-9, Lalla Ward as Romana, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush and Kate O'Mara as Rani. For all bar McCoy, Courtney, Sladen & Leeson it would be their last appearance as these characters.

The show was filmed using a new 3d process relying on motion that would be invisible for those watching without glasses but give added effects for those who had them hence some of the odder effects like the heads of the first two Doctors flying round the room.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your point of view: I take the latter) the contracts for the actors for this show stipulated that this was a production for charity and as such was not for commercial release so it has never been released on Video and will never be released on DVD. Even more fortunately my video copy has gone missing! Sadly YouTube came to my rescue. I watch this so you don't have to....

..... and that was excruciatingly bad. Blipvert scenes cut together so rapidly you haven't a hope of telling what was going on if the plot made any sense whatsoever. Dire.

And what's worse is that the vote, for which Eastenders character would help the Doctor, went the wrong way. It obviously should have been Big Ron, instead of Mandy, because the actor that played him had been an extra in Destiny of the Daleks. One of the other then current members of the Eastenders Cast with Who form, Mike Reid (The War Machines) gets a brief moment on screen and the experience obviously didn't put Louise Jameson off the soap because she joined the cast a few years later.

To think we got this (mercifully) brief rubbish instead of a new feature length Doctor Who episode!

And then the rumours about an American TV Series remake/pilot movie started rumbling loaded and louder.....

701 Survival Part Three

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."

EPISODE: Survival Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 701
STORY NUMBER: 156
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 06 December 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

Karra comes for Ace and calls for her to go hunting. On Earth the Master struggles to reduce the Cheetah planet's influence on him. The Doctor worries how far Ace has changed and whether she can be brought back. Ace is found by the Doctor who reduces the planet's influence on her. He warns he of the dangers of allowing the influence to spread but she agrees using the power to bring them, Patterson and the remaining youths back to the Tardis in Perivale. The Doctor knows that the Master has been brought to Perivale by Midge so they start searching at the flats where he lived, where they find a dead cat and young girl. Ace lapses under the Cheetah planet influence detecting Midge at the youth club. Midge turns on Patterson when he arrives killing him. The Doctor & Ace track him to the top of the hill where she lapses again. Midge moves to attack them on motorcycle and Ace has to be dissuaded from fighting him. He and the Doctor charge at each other on Motorcycles and Midge is killed in the explosion. Ace believes the Doctor has gone too and is attacked by the youths but Karra appears from the Cheetah planet and drives the youths off. Karra confronts the Master but is slain by hi,. The Doctor wakes up on a nearby rubbish pile. Karra dies in front of Ace transforming back into a human as she does. The Doctor corners The Master as he tried to steal the Tardis, but the Master's feral nature takes over transporting them back to the dying Cheetah planet where they struggle. The Doctor realises they musn't fight or it will destroy the planet but the Master attacks him. As he goes to bring the rock down on him the Doctor teleports himself back to Earth and the Tardis. One of the Cheetah people comes for Karra's body leaving Ace alone on the hill where the Doctor finds her. She tells the Doctor that she wants to go home, home to the Tardis and they leave together.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."

And that's it. The original Doctor Who series is finished and I concluded my viewing of the original series at 14:19 on Tuesday 19th June, a little ahead of schedule.

Yeah it's a good episode again. The Motorbike thing is a little pulled from nowhere: we don't see motorbikes until just before the scene and it all looks a little staged with the bike being left there for the Doctor to ride on. Dramatically it serves a purpose: it temporarily removes the Doctor from the action and gets rid of Midge but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It also caused problems during production: stunt manager Tip Tipping walked off the production after a disagreement with Eddie Kidd, brought in to help stage the motorbike stunt, over it's safety.

The story itself is good: Ace brings the Doctor home, albeit at a cost to herself. If I'm reading the story right Ace still has the Cheetah people influence inside her but it's sleeping as their world was destroyed. The Cheetah people have moved on somewhere else so there's the possibility that she's moved on somewhere else..... We don't know how the Master got to the planet and although we see him trapped there at the end he's escaped from similar situations before. Which leads me to the Doctor: how does he manage to escape from the planet? Is he too coming under it's influence?

In case you miss it there's an important point made about Ace in this episode, and emphasises again by dialogue art the end: When she brings the surviving humans and the Doctor home yes she does bring them to Perivale, but she brings them to where the Tardis is in the town. Perivale's not her home anymore, the Tardis is.

One new location this episode: The Medway estate is the council estate shown. The child that appears at the flat there (named Squeek) is a young Adele Silva now better known as a model and actress on Emmerdale.

This is the last episode of the Twenty Sixth season of Doctor Who, and is it turned out the last episode of the original run. The possibility that this would happen arose in post production and Sylvester McCoy was summoned to provide the voice over speech that closed the episode to give the series some sense of closure, over a forlorn and mounrful version of the middle eight from the theme music. The reasons the show were cancelled are myriad and it's not 100% clear what eventually tipped the balance. Yes it was doing well ratings wise but it had been scheduled up against Coronation Street and nothing is going to do well there. A popular theory is that the BBC didn't like Doctor Who (and science fiction in general) backed up by the BBC still not having bought Star Trek: The Next Generation despite it now being in it's third season. When they eventually did the following year it got slotted into the teen programming slot at 6pm on BBC2 previously occupied by repeats of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. And then rumbling in the background were rumours of movies and American versions..... I've just sat down and watched Endgame on the Doctor Who - Survival DVD and virtually everyone there has a different theory/reason for why it ends without any definitive answer being given.

Script editor Andrew Cartmel was headhunted to script edit Casualty in 1990 while producer John Nathan-Turner was finally relieved of the producership when the production office was closed in 1990. At that point he was one of only two remaining staff producers working for the BBC as a system of independent production was adopted. JNT still continued to be involved with the program, producing special releases for BBC Video & Audio as well as helming the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time. John Nathan Turner died on the 1st May 200s. Sophie Aldred went on to work in Children's television, which led to a career in voice over work. Both she and Sylvester McCoy would return for the Dimensions in Time in 1993 and McCoy would later appear as the Seventh Doctor for the US TV Movie version of the show in 1996. This was Anthony Ainley's last television appearance as the Master but he later reprised the role for the Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors CD-ROM video game in 1998. He passed away on 3rd May 2004 and became the first Doctor Who actor to get his obituary in Wisden.

Survival was adapted as a Target book by it's television author in October 1990. It was released on video in October 1995, and on DVD on 16th April 2007

700 Survival Part Two

"Do you know any nice people? Y'know, normal everyday people, not power-crazed nutters trying to take over the universe?"

EPISODE: Survival Part Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 700
STORY NUMBER: 160
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 29 November 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.8 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

The Doctor & Patterson escape on horseback and find Ace & her friends. The Master sends one of the Kittlings to find the Doctor as he struggles to maintain control of himself. The Kitling on Earth brings a Milkman to their planet which is attacked by the Cheetah people provoking battle between them and the humans causing Ace to be separated from the Doctor. The Doctor & Master meet as the Doctor realises the planet is heading for destruction. The Master needs his help and explains that if they stay there they'll become more like the Cheetah people. His eyes glow yellow and he bares fangs at the Doctor. Ace helps an injured member of the Cheetah People bringing her some water. The Doctor finds them and they decide to look after the creature. The Doctor tells her they need an animal who's home is Earth to get back there. Patterson gathers the surviving human youths together to try to survive. Ace starts to feel like she belongs on the alien world. They find the humans but Midge has begun to transform into one of the Cheetah people and runs away. The Master catches him and uses Mitch to return to Earth.The Doctor explains that one of them must change to return to Earth as Ace's eyes becomes cat like and she begins to change too.....

Good stuff again this episode, almost entirely confined to the alien world with the alien race, how they work and the planet's difficulties being laid out clearly before us. Patterson's philosophy is to survive but the Doctor is thinking beyond that, how to get home, and there's indications quite early on that he thinks Ace may be changing and represents a possible route back home.

A big hurrah for Anthony Ainley returning as The Master for the first time in three years for his first appearance against the Seventh Doctor. He's the only member of the Survival Cast to have been in Doctor Who before or since, but Lisa Bowerman, as Karra the horse riding Cheetah Person we've seen, later found Doctor Who fame voicing the Seventh Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield. Bernice was introduced in the novels and later starred in a series of audio stories for Big Finish. Outside of Doctor Who she's best known for playing paramedic Sandra Mute in Casualty (partnered with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood's Robert Pugh) where in 1987 she became the first regular character in that series to die.

The spot the Milkman is taken from is Medway Drive in Perivale, close to the other Perivale locations..... and looking at the map on the linked page I've just realised I've driven past these locations loads of times on the A40 journeying out towards Aylesbury (and the Logopolis lay-by location)! Meanwhile the location for the Cheetah People planet is Warmwell Quarry in Dorset, used the previous year during Greatest Show in the Galaxy and close to locations used this year for Curse of Fenric & Ghost Light. Quarries used in Caves of Androzani, Death to the Daleks & Destiny of the Daleks are all close by.

This is, if you count the cancelled story Shada, the 700th Doctor Who episode. It's also the penultimate episode of the original run of Doctor Who. Join us tomorrow to find out how it all ended and what happened next.....

699 Survival Part One

"I though you were dead! That's what they said, either dead or go to Birmingham"

EPISODE: Survival Part One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 699
STORY NUMBER: 160
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 22 November 1989
WRITER: Rona Munro
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Survival

In a suburban London street a man is washing his car observed by a cat when something leaps on him, vanishing in a burst of light just before The Doctor & Ace arrive. They have brought Ace home to Perivale so she can see her old friends. Elsewhere the cat is observing some children playing, a sight also observed by it's master who comments on what he sees. They visit a youth club she used to go to where she finds martial arts classes being run by former army sergeant Patterson who tells her most of her friends have moved on. He remembers Ace's Mum had listed her as missing and tells them four more children had vanished that month. The Doctor takes an interest in the local cats and buys some food to tempt them. The shopkeepers he buys from find their pet cat dead. Ace meets her friend Ange out collecting money for charity who tells here that all her other friends are gone. The cat finds one of the youngsters from the youth club for it's master. The youth is stalked & vanishes. While the Doctor tries to lure a cat to him Ace finds one in a playground before being confronted with a catlike humanoid on horseback which stalks her. She shouts for the Doctor but by the time he arrives she is gone, transported to a desolate alien world where she finds the body of the man seen cleaning his car. The Doctor finally finds a cat, but is grabbed by Patterson, acting for the neighbourhood watch, allowing it to escape. Ace is stalked by the cat person who id distracted by the youth which she kills. Ace is found by her friend Shreela and taken to her other friend Midge as the Doctor chases the cat but is pursued by Patterson. The Doctor finds the cat as Patterson finds him and both are transported to the alien world where they are cornered by a number of the cheetah creatures who take them to their village where The Doctor finds his old foe The Master waiting for him.

That's good stuff there. Straight forward to follow: there's something odd going on with the cat and it turns out it's linked to the cat like people (Cheetah People in the script) on the alien world who in turn are being controlled by the Master, who we got see in the shadows with weird glowy eyes but only is unveiled right at the end. Script Editor Andrew Cartmel moans about both the animatronic cat and the Cheetah People in his book as being effects that spoil the show but both work for me, as does the effect of suddenly getting higher as the victim is stalked, presumably insinuating the moment where the cat is replaced by the Cheetah Person on horseback. And there's a nice little tip of the hat with the teleport effect from Earth to the Cheetah planet: the circular white flash used is in the McCoy title sequence.

In a way there's some nice thematic stuff going on here: in the last two stories Ace has confronted her fear of the haunted house in Perivale and her feelings towards her mother: now she suddenly wants to come back home. She says she wants to see her friends but you wonder if the encounter between her and the baby Audrey has made her want to seek her mother out. But there's not just the Ace stuff going on here: this is the first episode of the final televised story in the original run and also contains the 700th episode of the series. It started with the Doctor taking two people away from their London home in an Unearthly Child comes to an end as he brings a lost girl back home to London. There's some evidence that this idea was floating around with the production team as the idea of getting home keeps popping up throughout the serial.

All of Survival is filmed on location and in fact many of the locations for the story are in Perivale, the town in West London where the story is set, rather than somewhere else substituting for them lending the story an extra element of realism. Colwyn Avenue in Perivale serves at the street where the car is washed while Bleasdale Avenue is where the Tardis lands. Horsenden Hill provides the high ground overlooking the town seen in the story, while Woodhouse Avenue is one of the other streets The Doctor & Ace walk down. The David Lloyd Centre in nearby Greenford stands on the site of the EYC Martial Arts Centre, part of the North Ealing Sports Centre, which was the youth centre in the story. Medway Parade provides the shops with number 20 Medway Parade forming the interior of the shop. Avenue West Ealing provides the pub that Ace goes in while Ealing Central Sportsground is the playground where Ace is attacked by Karra. Finally Colwyn Avenue Alley is the alley that the Doctor chases the cat down.

I'll be honest: casting comedians Gareth Hale & Norman Pace as shopkeepers Len & Harvey looks rather like stunt casting designed to attract a few column inches to the program. In 1993 they made their only other notable venture into straight acting staring as the police detectives Dalziel and Pascoe in a dramatisation of a Pinch of Snuff. When the Dalziel and Pascoe TV Series started three years later they found themselves replaced by Warren Clarke & Colin Buchanan who are now firmly associated with the roles in the minds of the viewing public whereas Hale & Pace's version is long forgotten!

698 The Curse of Fenric Part Four

EPISODE: The Curse of Fenric Part Four
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 698
STORY NUMBER: 159
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 15 November 1989
WRITER: Ian Briggs
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Mallett
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.2 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Curse of Fenric

The Doctor, Ace & Soren are taken out to be shot but are rescued by the remaining Russian soldiers. The Fenric possessed Judsoon teleports itself to the lab hidden in the mine and summons the Ancient Haemovore. The Doctor retrieves Kathleen Dudman's chess set while Ace helps her and her baby to safety directing them to her grandmother's in Streatham. Fenric's host Judson is weakening so he transfers himself to Soren, who like Judson & Millington is a descendant of the Viking who hid the flash in the church but not realising he is now Fenric, Ace reveals to Soren the solution to the chess game the Doctor has challenged him to. The ancient Haemovore is ordered to take the poison to the sea but the Doctor reveals to him that that is the action that will create the future earth that the Ancient Haemavore has summoned from. The Fenric possessed Soren uses Ace to protect himself as she is protected by her faith in the Doctor but the Doctor brakes that faith by insulting her and the Haemovore locks both of them in the fume chamber and gasses them with the poison killing Fenric's ancient evil. Ace is shaken to discover that the baby Audrey is her mother.

It's this last episode where everything falls apart. The Ancient Haemavore is pulled out of nowhere, destroys the other Haemovores on Fenric's orders and then turns against him. Little emotional pieces for Ace keep popping up all over the place but just don't seem to fit with the rest of the show. In the middle of one of these Ace drops in this story about a haunted house in perivale which is meant to set Ghost Light up but doesn't due to the story order being joggled areound.

Really there's just too mcuh going on here. I recall at the time there were rumours of enough material to produce a fifth episode and I can believe it, this just doesn't seem to flow right for most of it's length.

I'm finding watching the later McCoy stories a bit of a task: Remembrance was great, and Silver Nemesis, despite being Remembrance reheated, wasn't bad. But the others have a common theme of not quite flowing right, too much going on and the main story not making too much sense.

Curse of Fenric was novelised by it's original author in November 1990. The video was released 3 months later adding in 6 minutes of extra footage. The DVD was released on 6th October 2003 and contains both the original broadcast version and an expanded special edition movie version helmed by Mark Ayres (no relation) the Restoration Team's sound expert who wrote the score for the original story.

Just three episodes of original series Doctor Who left.

The End Is Near.....

First three entries for new Blog scheduled from Tuesday onwards :-)

Yeah because the secret of comedy is timing I've foolishly agreed to be away from home with no net access when the Who blog "finishes" and the new one starts.....

"finishes" is a loose term....

Wednesday is Survival 3. That's the end of the original run. After that there's the McGann movie and that'll probably be 23rd November for obvious reasons.

After that....

Well we're having trouble with the new series episodes. A touch of writers block, but mainly too much pain and lack of concentration recently.

So....

A choice: wait until I've got most of the new episodes written and start publishing then (could be a long wait)

or

Do I switch publishing patterns and deliver as and when I watch and write one?

Decisions.....

697 The Curse of Fenric Part Three

EPISODE: The Curse of Fenric Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 697
STORY NUMBER: 159
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 08 November 1989
WRITER: Ian Briggs
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Mallett
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Curse of Fenric

The Doctor & Ace return to the church where Wainright searches the parish records for the descendants of the Viking settlers. Ace uncovers an ancient flask in the cellar where the Navy had been digging but the church is attacked by the Haemovore creatures. The Doctor saves them with the help of the Russians. Two of the Russian soldiers escort the Doctor, Ace & Wainright through the mine shaft to the camp where they are sealed in by Millington who takes the flask from them to the Ultima machine. The Soviet commander Soren comes to parley with Millington and is arrested but freed by Ace. Wainwright is slain by the Haemovores who use the mine tunnel to get to the base. The Ultima machine sparks towards Judson and he is knocked to the floor as the Doctor enters, then stands without the aid of his wheelchair, possessed by the Fenric being Millington has been seeking.

Oooh, I can feel the story struggling to get out here but there's just stuff that keeps bringing it down. I'm still not clear quite how the Doctor repels the Haemovores from the church, but there's some kind of singing going on. The dialogue, as Ace uses her womanly charms to distract the guard is just awful. And Millington's performance is all over the place, looking like he's out of it half the time then suddenly for no reason dropping the name of Fenric into the conversation which suddenly turns out to be the name of the big villain at the end of the episode..... We've had references to him throughout the story but no idea of what he is till the Doctor describes him here as some sort of ancient evil.

By far the most recognisable figure in the series is Nicholas Parsons as Reverend Wainwright. At the time Parsons was probably best known to the average TV viewer as the host of Sale of the Century but what wasn't so well known was he had been an actor appearing in a number of West End productions. He was a voice artist for Four Feather Falls, an early Gerry Anderson series alongside his then wife Denise Bryer (who went on to voice both Commander Makara in Star Fleet and Mary Falconer in Terrahawks) and Dalek Voice Artist David Graham. Now Parsons is probably best known as the host of Just a Minute the long running Radio 4 panel game which he has hosted (or on rare occasions taken part in) every edition since it's start on 22 December 1967. At the time of his casting the news he'd be appearing was almost universally put down as stunt casting but actually he does a decent job here as the Vicar.

This story mark the last appearance in Doctor Who of Cy Town, regular extra since The Silurians in 1970 and Dalek Operator from 1973's Frontier in Space till the previous season's Remembrance of the Daleks. IMDB reckons his final appearance is as a Haemovore in episode 1 but I can't recall seeing any in that episode. Marek Anton, playing the Soviet soldier Vershinin, we saw a few weeks back as the Destroyer in Battlefield, even though that was filmed after this. Anne Reid, here as Nurse Crane, would return in the New Series episode Smith and Jones as Florence Finnegan, the disguised Plasmavore hiding in Martha Jones' hospital that the Judoon come for.

One more location this episode: Yew Tree Farm provides the tunnel location where Ace reveals to the Doctor that she's found the flask.

696 The Curse of Fenric Part Two

EPISODE: The Curse of Fenric Part Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 696
STORY NUMBER: 159
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 01 November 1989
WRITER: Ian Briggs
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Mallett
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Curse of Fenric

The Doctor treats a Soviet soldier who has been exposed to something in the sea and persuades the Soviet Commander, Soren, not to suicidally attack the base. Returning to the church they find a new inscription on the wall before they in turn are found by Millington who shows them a chamber when the Navy are collecting a poison from a source inside. The poison is being gathered as a weapon to end the war and some has been secreted in the core of Judson's Ultima machine, which programmed to detonate it when it receives the word love. Whitehall wishes the Soviets to steal the core so they may be dealt with after the war. Two girls evacuated to the village swim in the sea and are consumed by a mist transforming them into vampire like creatures which attack and kill first a Soviet soldier, then their landlady. They come for the Reverend Wainright but he is saved by the Doctor & Ace. Ace reveals to the Doctor that she has unwittingly told Judson that the instructions are a logic diagram. He has fed it into the Ultima machine which has gone into overdrive. The Doctor is unable to stop it as mutated vampire figures rise from the sea bed.

On one level this seems quite simple: UK Forces have found a poison and are using it as weapon/trap. But into this we've got lots of Norse references, something bad having happened a long time ago, creatures rising from the sea and a seemingly inexplicable confiscation of all chess sets on the base!

When location scouting was being carried out for this story it was realised that it was possible to shoot the entire four part story on location, a distinction shared with Spearhead from Space & (sort of) Greatest Show in the Galaxy. The Naval base scenes were filmed at Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex, while most of the rest of the locations are just across the border into Kent filmed in a town called Hawkhurst. St Lawrence's Church substitutes as St. Jude's Church where Nicholas Parsons claims he was mistaken for a real vicar! Lillesden School provides Millington's secret lab and Roses Farm is the cottage where the two girls have been evacuated to.

The only location not found in the vicinity is Lulworth Cove in Dorset which provides the beach and sea locations used during the story. This location was chosen due to the director having worked their before and two members of the production team having experience diving in the location. Both the preceding story, Ghost Light, and the following one, Survival, use locations nearby.

695 The Curse of Fenric Part One

EPISODE: The Curse of Fenric Part One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 695
STORY NUMBER: 159
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 25 October 1989
WRITER: Ian Briggs
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Mallett
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.3 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Curse of Fenric

The Doctor & Ace land at at a naval encampment in England during the second world war which they infiltrate with the help of some papers forged by the Doctor. The wheelchair bound Professor Judson is involved in top secret research into German cyphers at the camp run by his old school colleague Commander Millington. Nearby a team of Soviet soldiers has landed on a covert mission but many of their number have been killed at sea. The Doctor & Ace visit the local church where they find Judson working on translating Viking inscriptions to prove his theories. In the churchyard they find many gravestones with Viking names on them and at the cliffs a package of sealed Soviet orders. The vicar, Reverend Wainright, admits to the Doctor that his Grandfather managed to translate some of the inscription which said that the Vikings wished to go back to the "North Way" but the curse claimed their lives at Maiden's Bay. Returning to the base, the Doctor & Ace meet the WRNS listening to coded transmissions. Ace is taken with a baby in the room but when she learns it shares the same name as her mother she hands it back. The Doctor discovers that Millington keeps an office identical to a German Cypher room in Berlin and within it finds a Viking Chess set. Returning to Maiden's point to search for clues the Doctor & Ace are captured by Soviet Soldiers.

That wasn't bad at all: it looks good, especially the underwater sequences, but by this point the production team had realised that something with a historical leaning was playing towards the BBC's ability to do historical drama well. Yes it suffers from some problems: Ace & The Doctor are here, there and everywhere with very little reasoning. For example why do they show up at the church?

Incredibly this is Doctor Who's first visit to the Second World War, although you can made a claim that the Daleks, Dalek Invasion of Earth & Genesis of the Daleks are all inspired by World War II and events surrounding it. Historical trips to the Twentieth century (IE after 1900 but before the episode went out) as a whole are rare: Abominable Snowman, Pyramids of Mars.... possibly Horror of Fang Rock.... Black Orchid & Remembrance of the Daleks are the only ones that spring to mind in the original series prior to this story.

We don't get to see the main enemy protagonist of WWII in this story so for Doctor Who meets The Nazis see Exodus, the New Adventures novel published a few years after this episode went out.

2013 DVD Schedule

DWM's just dropped onto the doormat with a substantial portion of the 2013 DVD schedule:

2013 DVDs and BD

07/01 Shada/30 Years in the Tardis
28/01 Reign of Terror
18/02 Ark in Space SE
11/03 Aztecs SE with Galaxy 4: Airlock
25/06 Terror of the Zygons

June Spearhead from Space BD

Still unaccounted for:

Tenth Planet
Underwater Menace 2
Ice Warriors
Mind of Evil.

Rumoured:

Moonbase SE

694 Ghost Light Part Three

"This place is like a madhouse "

EPISODE: Ghost Light Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 694
STORY NUMBER: 158
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 18 October 1989
WRITER: Marc Platt
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who : Ghost Light

Light explains to the Doctor how he came to Earth to catalogue all the species there but when he finished he discovered everything changed and he had to start again. During this survey Nimrod was taken as a specimen. Josiah was his "survey agent" sent out into the world and Control the control element for the investigation. Josiah rebeled against Light, imprisoning him and Control in their spaceship beneath the house. Josiah now plans to ascend the evoloutionary ladder by coming the top person in the land by assasinating Queen Victoria at a garden party that Redvers Fenn-Cooper has been invited to. Control now desires what Josiah has achieved and wishes to be transformed into a lady. Redvers elects to take her to the party instead of Josiah thwarting his plan. Light discovers that everything has changed again during his hibernation and decides to destroy all life on Earth. Control subdugates Josiah and retreats to the ship with him, Nimrod & Redvers to commence a new survey. Light overloads and dissipates into the house, the presence that Ace felt when she set fire to the house in her teens. When the Doctor asks her if she has any regrets she says she wished she'd blown it up instead.

I watched that and my mind just went WHAT ????? On screen it doesn't appear to make any sense at all and what's written above is a combination of what I can remember and what I read at The Tardis Wiki. The "Control wanting to be ladylike" stuff has just thrown me before until I realised this time that it's to do with her wanting to evolve like Josiah has. In case you wondering where the rest of the human cast got to Gwendolyne & her mother Mrs Pritchard got turned to stone by Light and Inspector Mackenzie, the cream of Scotland Yard, was turned into primordial soup by Josiah.

"Who was it who said Earthmen never invite their ancestors around for dinner?" asks the Doctor at the dinner table: Douglas Adams in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of course.

There's an element of Control that was inspired by Marc Platt's day job cataloguing radio programs for the BBC archive, a task that was never finished die to more being produced all the time.

The two new members of the cast are Sharon Duce as Control, in real life the partner of Dominic Guard (Olvir in Terminus) and John Hallam as Light who you can spot in the background of Flash Gordon as Luro, one of the Hawkman.

So Ghost Light: looks superb but makes no sense whatsoever! Forgive me but I like to feel like I have some clue what's going on when I watch Television. Script editor Andrew Cartmel feels that Ghost Light is the closest thing on screen to what was written in his entire time as Doctor Who script editor. I'd say that it's symbolic of his time as script editor: lots of big ideas, too many probably, I suspect he'd not got a real grasp of how to structure a piece of television drama that people can watch. At this stage he was telling people to write what they wanted and they were cutting it down, usually by about 20 minutes per story, in the edit. Compare this approach to Terrance Dicks or Bob Holmes....

Ghost Light marks an important moment in our journey: it was the last story filmed in the original run of Doctor Who. Two stories filmed before it, Curse of Fenric & Survival, were shown after it was.

Marc Platt went on to write for the Virgin New Adventures book range after adapting Ghost Light as a novel released in September 1990. It was released on video in May 1994 and on DVD on 20th September 2004.

693 Ghost Light Part Two

EPISODE: Ghost Light Part Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 693
STORY NUMBER: 158
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 11 October 1989
WRITER: Marc Platt
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who : Ghost Light

Gwendolyne shows the Doctor the body of a policeman, housed in one of the specimen drawers. Josiah's Neanderthal butler Nimrod saves Ace, but she smashes a window in the underground chamber filling it with light. The Doctor finds Josiah and takes him to the cellar, rescuing Ace & Nimrod but as dawn nears all the residents of the house retreat to their rooms. The Doctor wakes Inspector MacKenzie and gets Nimrod to tell his story. Ace & MacKenzie discover Gwendolyne & her mother, the housekeeper Mrs Pritchard, under sheets in the attic along with Josiah's discarded body and the stuffed form of Revd Matthews regressed to that of an ape. Nimrod goes to see the advice of Redvers Fenn-Cooper. At 6pm the inhabitants of the house comes to life but the Doctor uses the list to summon from the basement Control, a dishevelled figure dressed in rags, and it's companion light whose glowing presence fills the room.

I watched this and hadn't a clue what was going on. Yes, I can condense it down to a simple summary like that but that just doesn't do it justice. The amount of odd detail being thrown at us here is just so confusing. References to Java seemingly being a euphamism for death like Redvers' reference to the interior alluding to madness, Gwendolyne being the daughter of Mrs Pritchard and the owner of the house who Josiah has murdered, the evolutionary argument between the Revd Matthews and Josiah.... and then there's the cellar with the odd monsters and what seems to be a stone space ship.

Guest Cast: Ian Hogg as Josiah Samuel Smith was famous for playing Detective Sergeant Alan Rockliffe in Rockliffe's Babies and its follow-up Rockliffe's Folly. Lady Pritchard is played by Sylvia Syms who's got a long TV and film career while her daughter Gwendolyne is played by Katharine Schlesinger who had her name spelt wrong in the title slides. She'd recently been in a BBC Sitcom No Frills at the time of this episode's broadcast. John Nettleton as Reverend Ernest Matthews, to will almost certainly recognise as playing Sir Arnold Robinson the Cabinet Secretary in Yes Minister

Three of the cast have been in Doctor Who before but Frank Windsor, as Inspector Mackenzie, was most famous for playing another policeman Detective Sergeant John Watt in Z-Cars from 1962 to 1965 (Second Z-Cars Guest Star this year after James Ellis as Peter Warmsley in Battlefield), and thereafter its spin-offs Softly, Softly and Softly, Softly: Taskforce. He previous appeared in Doctor Who in the 1983 story King's Demons as Ranulf. Appearing as Redvers Fenn-Cooper is Michael Cochrane. Previously in Black Orchid as Charles Cranleigh. Since then his brother Martin Cochrane has appeared in Caves of Androzani as General Chelak and his sister in law Kate O'Mara was in Mark of the Rani and Time & The Rani as The Rani. Carl Forgione playing Nimrod, was previously in Planet of the spiders as Land but also has a Star Cops appearance to his anme as the Tour Guide in This Case to Be Opened in a Million Years.

692 Ghost Light Part One

EPISODE: Ghost Light Part One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 692
STORY NUMBER: 158
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 04 October 1989
WRITER: Marc Platt
DIRECTOR: Alan Wareing
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4.2 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who : Ghost Light

The Doctor takes Ace to a Victorian house which she dislikes, reminding him she's previously told him that she dislikes haunted houses. The meet a British explorer, hunting for Redfers Fenn-Cooper. He sees his reflection in a window, realising that is Fenn-Cooper before being led away by the house's staff. They meet the Reverend Ernest Matthews, come to see the house's owner to protest about the theories he has been espousing. Ace realises they are in Perivale, at Gabriel Chase a house whose ruin she visited when she was younger and terrified by. She flees as the house's owner Josiah Samuel Smith approaches the Doctor about ridding him of his enemy and discovers three creatures dressed in dinner jackets in the house's basement.

A dark house, the Doctor & companion under remote observation, odd servants including a Neanderthal butler.... you really can't go wrong can you? And I've got no real complaint to register against this episode itself.

Ghost Light is this year's "all in studio 3 parter", with Survival it's "all on location" counterpart. However there is a brief shot of location filming in these episodes: Stanton Court, in Weymouth near Dorset, and not far from locations used in both Curse of Fenric and Survival, serves as the exterior for Gabriel Chase, the house in this story.

Ghost Light was the final story of this season to be filmed. Here's the production vs broadcast order again:

7M The Curse of Fenric
7N Battlefield
7P Survival
7Q Ghost Light

while the broadcast order is

7N Battlefield
7Q Ghost Light
7M The Curse of Fenric
7P Survival

So all seems ok here but it comes a bit unstuck in the following story when Ace starts talking to the Doctor about the haunted house in Perivale and you think "Oh dear, we've already seen this, Ghost Light should be after Curse of Fenric"

Ghost Light is written by Marc Platt a fan working at the BBC who had been submitting stories to the Doctor Who production office since Robert Holmes and had been commended by the great man for submitting the only story even worthy of consideration. Ghost Light comes from a story that Platt had come up with called Lungbarrow, dealing with the Doctor's ancestral home on Gallifrey. Producer John Nathan-Turner wasn't keen on the idea but elements were salvaged and used in this script. I've read the novel that Lungbarrow became and can see similarities between the two. Don't bother looking for a copy on eBay as it goes for a few pennys now. It used to be available as a PDF on the BBC website but has now been removed. However a google search for Lungbarrow PDF should find you a copy quite quickly.

691 Battlefield Part Four

EPISODE: Battlefield Part Four
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 691
STORY NUMBER: 157
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 27 September 1989
WRITER: Ben Aaronovitch
DIRECTOR: Michael Kerrigan
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 4 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Battlefield

The Doctor & Brigadier capture Mordred but Morgaine orders the commander to attack again. The Doctor & Brigadier bring their captive to the hotel where he escapes as The Destroyer brings the hotel down round them. They find Ace & Shou Yuing in the rubble but Morgaine has escaped with the Destroyer & Excalibur. The Doctor, Brigadier and Ace follow Morgaine through the vortex she has created back to her lair. The Brigadier is attacked by the Destroyer and flung through the wall. The Doctor seizes the sword but the Destroyer is freed. Mordred finds his mother and both disappear from the building as the Doctor, Brigadier & Ace flee. The Doctor loads the Brigadier's gun with silver bullets, but is knocked out by his old friend who returns to the building alone to confront the Destroyer who he kills bringing the building down on them. Mordred & Morgaine capture the nuclear missile and begin it's detonation sequence, extracting the fail safe release code from Bambera's mind. Excalibur is returned to the ship where the Doctor discovers a note from himself saying that Arthur is dead and that Morgaine has gained control of the missile. The Brigadier & Ace destroy the ship on The Doctor's instructions while the Doctor confronts and defeats Morgaine, convincing her top stop the missile sequence. She demands to face Arthur but he tells her that she is dead, breaking her spirit. Mordred & Morgaine are locked up. The Doctor and his friends go to Lethbridge Stewart's house where the ladies go off together in Bessie leaving the men behind to cook the supper.

Hmmm. Apparently the Destroyer is meant to be a euphemism for Nuclear War. Really? That's not how it comes across on screen. He's just a monster, any subtext is completely lost. The story itself on screen just doesn't work. Yes the Special Edition on the Doctor Who - Battlefield DVD works better with some footage reinstated but even so it's still lacking something and doesn't really work: the Brigadier almost feels like a bit of a parody of his earlier self, Bambera is hamstrung by a useless catchphrase and the only characters that feel remotely real all get driven off together in episode 3! It's a huge disappointment because writer Ben Aaronovitch's previous Doctor Who story, Remembrance of the Daleks is just so good.

As originally written Battlefield was meant to kill the Brigadier off in spectacular manner saving the Earth and indeed it was under these conditions that Nicholas Courtney agreed to return as Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. However by the time of filming the production team had changed their minds as to the long running character's fate. Courtney first appeared in the Douglas Camfield directed Dalek Masterplan in 1965 as Bret Vyon, opposite William Hartnell as Doctor Who, before bring cast by the same director as Captain Knight in Web of Fear with Patrick Troughton. However the actor playing Colonol Lethbridge Stewart dropped out and Courtney got promoted to Colonol. Another promotion, this time to Brigadier, followed when Lethbridge Stewart & Courtney returned for The Invasion and he went on to play the character opposite Jon Pertweein (deep breath) Spearhead from Space, Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Dæmons, Day of the Daleks, The Sea Devils, The Time Monster, The Three Doctors, The Green Death, The Time Warrior, Invasion of the Dinosaurs & Planet of the Spiders. In fact the only Pertwee stories that he ISN'T in are The Curse of Peladon, The Mutants, Carnival of Monsters, Frontier in Space, Planet of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks & The Monster of Peladon! He appeared twice with Tom Baker in Robot & Terror of the Zygons and twice with Peter Davison Mawdryn Undead & The Five Doctors. Colin Baker is the only Doctor in the original series that he didn't appear on screen with. This is Courtney's last role in mainstream televised Doctor Who. He returns for two radio productions, the Dimensions in Time charity special, a couple of Big Finish stories and one final television appearance opposite his former co-star Elizabeth Sladen in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Nicholas Courtney died 22 February 2011, aged 81. His passing was noted in the Doctor who episode "A Good Man Goes to War" where it was revealed that the Brigadier had also died in similar circumstances.

Battlefield was novelised in July 1991 by Marc Platt, the writer of the following story, Ghost Light. Bar the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, which were released several years later, this is the last Doctor Who story to be adapted by Target Books. Battlefield was repeated from 23 April to 14 May 1993 as the final story in a Doctor Who repeat season: it is the only Seventh Doctor serial to be repeated. It was released on Video on 24th January 2000 with some additional footage inserted. It was released on DVD on 26th December 2008 including a special edition movie edit which reinstated even more footage removed for the broadcast edition (details here.)

690 Battlefield Part Three

"....and gold tipped bullets for you know who!"

EPISODE: Battlefield Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 690
STORY NUMBER: 157
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 20 September 1989
WRITER: Ben Aaronovitch
DIRECTOR: Michael Kerrigan
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 3.6 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Battlefield

The Doctor frees Ace by having her catapulted out the tube into the lake where she rises to the surface, still clutching Excalibur. The device controlling the spirit is destroyed by the arrival of Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart who is pleased to see his old friend. Mordred, sent away in disgrace by his mother, has been trying to drink the hotel bar dry when the Brigadier's pilot arrives looking for a phone. Morgaine interrogates her as to the enemy's strength, killing her in the process. She pays her son's bar bill by restoring the sight of Elizabeth Rowlinson before leaving with her son. The Doctor assists UNIT evacuating the area by persuading the reluctant Walmsley and Rowlinson onto the bus. As the Doctor & Brigadier continue their investigations in Bessie, Morgaine summons the Destroyer from another dimension. Ace & Shou Yuing shelter with Excalibur in the hotel, a chalk circle protecting them but uncharacteristically start arguing between them. The Doctor halts a fight between Mordred & his forces and Ancelyn & the UNIT troops but Mordred tells him it was all a diversion as Morgaine & the Destroyer appear in the hotel to claim Excalibur.

Ugh. Just all a bit flat really, and doesn't really work. Why bring Bessie back? Just because they can? Honestly the bit I liked the most was the Doctor convincing Walmsley & Pat Rowlinson to leave, once again using the hypnotic powers he suddenly seems to be developing just like what the Master has always had.

The scene with Sophie Aldred's Ace in the water tank has gone down in BBC history: As it was being filmed Sylvester McCoy noticed the glass front to the water tank was cracking - you can see the crack in footage early in the new material for episode 3, ordered his co-star be pulled out which she was just before the crack expanded flooding the studio causing it to be evacuated. McCoy's actions almost certainly saved Aldred's life and probably many of those in the studio given the amount of electrical cabling on the floor. The cameras were running so the entire incident is preserved for posterity and was for many years used as part of a BBC internal safety film. The footage is on the Doctor Who - Battlefield DVD along with the recollections of the stars of this incident.

Battlefield is the first story of this season broadcast but it was the second recorded. The original production order was:

7M The Curse of Fenric
7N Battlefield
7P Survival
7Q Ghost Light

while the broadcast order is

7N Battlefield
7Q Ghost Light
7M The Curse of Fenric
7P Survival

There's no real continuity clangers like in the previous season due to the change of order but you get the feeling from the dialogue that Curse of Fenric is meant to occur before Ghost Light. The main effect of the change of order is that we get to see Marek Anton as The Destroyer before his first recorded role in Doctor Who as Vershinin in The Curse of Fenric.

One final bit of location work for the story: Wothorpe Towers in Cambridgeshire is used for the exterior shots of the abandoned house that Morgaine uses as her base.

689 Battlefield Part Two

EPISODE: Battlefield Part Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 689
STORY NUMBER: 157
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 13 September 1989
WRITER: Ben Aaronovitch
DIRECTOR: Michael Kerrigan
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 3.9 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Battlefield

The injuired knight draws the attention of his opposite number, Mordred, to the Doctor who he claims to be Merlin and, using this guise, the Doctor drives the other knights away while returning to the hotel wih the wounded knight, Ancelyn, and Bamberra. Mordered retreats to a local deserted house where he uses his sword and advanced technology to summon his mother Morgaine from an alternate dimension. This activity creates a storm and earthquake, causing the scabbard to fly off the wall of the hotel and embed itself in the wall nearest the lake. Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart is briefed on London and sets out by helicopter again for Carbury. Walmsley takes the Doctor & Ace to the local dig site showing them a mysterious transcription which the Doctor translates from his own handwriting to read Dig Hole Here which Ace obligingly does with explosives revealing an underground tunnel which the Doctor & Ace go down. Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart 's helicopter is brought doen by Morgaine and his pilot injured. He goes for help but finds Morgaine and her warriors holding a ceremony to comemorate Earth's war dead. Morgaine promises the next time they meet she will kill him. The Doctor and Ace open a door at the end of the tunnel, keyed to the Doctor's voice print, and find themselves in a chamber within a spaceship containing the body of King Arthur and his sword, Excalibur, which has been sending the distress call they picked up. Ace frees the sword from the stone it's buried in but this activates the ship's defences unleashing glowing green spirits which trap Ace in a chamber and knock the Doctor over. As the Doctor watches helplessly the chamber begins to fill with water.....

Just lacking something this episode. I mean we're two episodes in and the Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart haven't shared a scene yet. The rememberance ceremony seems out of place (I haven't seen the special edition on the DVD recently to know if it explains this. Yes the model of the ship under the water looks good, but it does look very Zygon spaceship in Terror of the Zygons.

I mentioned the Knights yesterday and how they could have been so much better. This episode we see one that stands out from the croud by wearing red trousers. Why? It just looks so cheap like they couldn't find anoter set of whatever is substituting for chain mail for this one character.

The main guest star for this show is of course Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. Courtney first appeared in the Douglas Camfield directed Dalek Masterplan in 1965 as Bret Vyon where he was shot by Sara Kingdom (his own sister), a character played by Jean Marsh an actress who also reappears in this story as Morgaine. Prior to Dalek Masterplan Camfield has used he as Joanna in the Crusade. Famed for appearing in and co-creating Upstairs, Downstairs, Marsh was also the first wife of Courtney's frequent Doctor who co-star Jon Pertwee. (an aside: he brother in the Crusade, Richard the Lionheart, was played by Julian Glover who was at the time married to one of the other creators of Upstairs Downstairs Eileen Atkins!)

Angela Bruce appears as Brigadier Winifred Bambera. Science fiction fans would have seen her the previous year as the female Dave Lister in concluding episode of the first season of Red Dwarf. Apparentlly Ling Tai, playing Shou Yuing, has been in Doctor Who before as an extra: IMDB thinks she was in The Leisure Hive: Part 1 as a Tourist (uncredited) and Warriors of the Deep: Part 1-3 Seabase Crewmember (also uncredited). June Bland, here as Elizabeth Rowlinson, definitely has been: she was Berger in Earthshock. Her character's husband Pat Rowlinson is played by one of two actors in the cast closely associated with BBC Police series: Noel Collins was Sergeant George Parrish in Juliet Bravo while James Ellis, playing Peter Warmsly in this story, was in Z-Cars right the way through it's run Bert Lynch rising in rank from PC to Inspector through the 17 years the show was in the air. Robert Jezek as UNIT Sergeant Zbrigniev has appeared in many Big Finish productions as Frobisher, the sixth Doctor's shape changing penguin companion while Stefan Schwartz, Morgaine's Knight Commander, went on to direct the film Shooting Fish.

Location time: all the material of the Brigadier inside the helicopter was filmed at Black Park, close to the location used for his home in episode 1 and previously used by Doctor Who in Full Circle & the Visitation. We saw lots of locations around Hambleton last episode but the village itself provides the street the Brigadier walks up and the church where he meets Morgaine while Hambleton Woods provide more of the lake & the dig site.

688 Battlefield Part One

"Shame!"

EPISODE: Battlefield Part One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 688
STORY NUMBER: 157
TRANSMITTED: Wednesday 06 September 1989
WRITER: Ben Aaronovitch
DIRECTOR: Michael Kerrigan
SCRIPT EDITOR: Andrew Cartmel
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 3.1 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Battlefield

Retired Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart is enjoying life with his wife Doris while his successor Brigadier Winifred Bambera is having problems with a Nuclear Missile Convoy she is escorting which has had an electrical explosion and overturned near Lake Vortigen at Carbury. The Doctor picks up a distress call and lands near by. The are taken to the lake by local archaeologist Peter Warmsley hearing impact noises round them that Warmsley suggests are a local army firing range. The Doctor and Ace gain access to the Unit convoy using passes belonging to the Third Doctor and Liz Shaw but are escorted away from the site by Brigadier Bambera who takes them to the local hotel where Ace meets Ling Tai, a young woman of about her ages, and the Doctor takes an interest in a scabbard hanging above the fireplace which Warmsley gave to hotel owner Peter Warmsley and his blind wife Pat. Lethbridge Stewart is summoned to Lake Vortigen by helicopter. Bambera becomes involved in a battle between two groups of knights at the Doctor's Tardis involving swords and advance weaponry. When the single knight that makes up one side is thrown towards the hotel she follows. The Doctor, Ace and Ling Tai find the knight in the hotel's brewery and despite Ace thinking it might be an Android the Doctor unmasks it to reveal a human underneath who recognises the Doctor as Merlin. Bamberra arrives but so do the other party of Knights who hold everyone at gunpoint.

I can remember having high hopes for this story when it first aired: the return of Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart in a story written by the writer of Remembrance of the Daleks incorporating elements of the Arthurian story (I'd seen John Boorman's Excalibur by this point - if you haven't then buy it now on DVD! And how about a UK BD release please?) Well the Brigadier's incidental to this episode though we do (finally) get to see Doris (of Planet of the Spiders watch fame), now Mrs Lethbridge-Stewart, played by Angela Douglas of Carry On Films fame.

If Bamberra doesn't trust the Doctor & Ace, and doesn't accept their story, why does she go to the trouble of driving them to the hotel? Similarly who's accepted that the Doctor is the Doctor and made enough fuss to get the Brigadier summoned to Carbury?

The Tardis scenes at the start are too dark and there's a reason for this: the wall sets had been destroyed since it's last appearance in Greatest Show in the Galaxy and the reduced lighting hides that the backgrounds are just drapes. I didn't say it hides them terribly well!

Bambera's exclamations of "Shame" seem to be an attempt to get another character to swear on screen without actually swearing - see Ace stories passim. We suggest you insert another short word beginning with SH every time she says it and her disgust for hitch hikers will become more evident!

Why does Ace think that the Knight might be an Android? That's because it's meant to be a futuristic Knight, rather than what we got. Unfortunately the costume people read the word Knight and immediately gave us something in the traditional vein rather than, as was intended, something that looked more like Top Gear's The Stig. Think of that, with lightsabres and better guns, not those horribly sparky things (again) and you'll be getting there.

This episode of Doctor Who has the dubious honour of having the lowest viewing figures of any episode of the original run, just 3.1 million. OK it was up against Coronation Street but even so..... This is how the record of lowest viewing figures for an episode of Doctor Who progressed:

Episode #	Date	Story & Episode	Rating Million Viewers
1	23/11/1963	An Unearthly Child: An Unearthly Child	4.4
127	10/09/1966	The Smugglers: Episode One	4.3
129	24/09/1966	The Smugglers: Episode Three	4.2
251	07/06/1969	The War Games: Episode Eight	3.5
689	06/09/1989	Battlefield: Part One	3.1

This is the first episode of Doctor Who that aired after I made the transition to sixth form college from secondary school. This is also the first episode of Doctor Who that I recorded off the television! We bought our first video recorder that summer and already by this point I owned Spearhead from Space, Day of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons on video. I still have the recorded copy of Battlefield, and all four stories this season, to this day and was almost tempted to dig it out to watch for the blog!.

A large amount of Battlefield is recorded on location with very little of the action in this episode occurring in the studio. Fulmer Plant Park in Buckinghamshire is then location for the garden centre that the Brigadier & Doris visit quite close to Little Paston which is where the scenes at their home were recorded. The majority of the action in this story occurs at locations in Lincolnshire with Twyford Wood providing the location for the Tardis landing site while Hambleton Old Hall serves as the Gore Crow Hotel. Nearby Hambleton Ridge is where Bambera radios the convoy for assistance and is also probably the location where the shots of the UNIT convoy is in difficulty were recorded from using Barnsdale on the other side of the lake. Finally the shot of the Knight crashing into the hill was filmed at Castle Cement Quarry about 5 miles away from the other Lincolnshire locations.