As some of us are apt to do, in this age of computers and smartphones, I was recently ripping my quite sizable audiobook CD collection onto the Apple Books app. Within all the Big Finish, BBC Audios, AudioGo etcetera, I picked up the 2017 release of Jon Culshaw reading Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks. It’s always been one of my favourite stories, but I then wondered if Genesis is the story that has had more releases, in varying formats than any other Doctor Who. Of course, most Classic Who stories have been released in several, but Genesis seems to have had more than its fair share.

Generally, a classic Doctor Who story would have followed a general set of releases: Target novelisation, VHS, DVD, audiobook, and possibly a soundtrack. Latterly, we can add Blu-ray to that list.

Now, just to be pedantic, I haven’t included Target reprints as all Target books were reprinted, but I have included differing versions of audios if there was something different or noteworthy about it. If I may…

1. Target Novelisation — 1976

Of course, the first release was Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation. A striking cover by Chris Achilleos and a wonderful read: this was the first book that I ever read from cover to cover in one day (aged about 15). Not having yet seen the television version, my only previous experience was the BBC Records’ release. This opened the story more than what I was familiar with and I just couldn’t put it down.

2. BBC Records and Tapes — 1979

Alerted to this release by the cartoon-strip advert in Doctor Who Weekly, I saved up some of my paper-round money and went to Readings Records in Clapham Junction.

Wonderful; the nearest thing we had to an out-of-date repeat. A couple of years later, I even found the tape cassette version (I’m not counting the tape as an extra release as all BBC records were released as a dual format).

I never understood why BBC Records didn’t do any more Doctor Who releases of adapted stories at that time. Having said that, I can’t think of any other vinyl drama release at all making this quite unique; lots of comedy or theme tune compilations, but no drama (The Archers, maybe?).

Tom Baker and the BBC revisited this narration style in the early 1990s with the Missing Stories range of cassette tapes with the stories The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks.

3. BBC Radio Collection: Slipback — 1988

The 1979 audio edit of Genesis was re-released along with the Radio 4 transmitted Sixth Doctor story, Slipback. Unlike the old BBC Records and Tapes’ days, BBC Radio/Audio Collections were nearly always a double tape package. This leads to suspicion that Genesis was added as a filler as Slipback wasn’t long enough to fill two tapes.

Although Slipback was the radio programme and the most recently transmitted, at the time of this release, it was Genesis that hogged the cover. Daleks always sell, but the cover wasn’t particularly inspired.

4. BBC Video VHS — 1991

The Beeb waited eight years, since the first video release of Revenge of the Cybermen, to release Genesis on video. It was also double packaged with The Sontaran Experiment. Not too much of a problem, but the photographs on the spine of the video box did spoil the shelf display a tad.

5. BBC Radio Collection: Exploration Earth — 2001

Another BBC Radio Collection release, this time sharing with the 1976 school’s radio drama, Exploration Earth. Just like Slipback, this version of Genesis is the same as the original BBC Records’ version.

Collectors would have bought this because it was the first time that Exploration Earth was commercially available, but, to be fair, this is noteworthy as this was the first time that the audio edit of Genesis of the Daleks was released on CD.

6. BBC DVD — 2006

Genesis on DVD was released 15 years after the VHS version, minus the Sontarans, but this time packed with extras and much restoration/correction work carried out by Steve Roberts’ Restoration Team.

7. Doctor Who DVD Files No. 31 — 2010

A second DVD release for Genesis was during the run of the Doctor Who DVD Files part works magazine. I don’t know anyone who collected these, but I would say it was quite ambitious to release a DVD set of Doctor Who seeing as most fans would have been collecting the BBC DVDs anyway. I have included this in the list as it wasn’t strictly a BBC title.

8. Daily Telegraph/BBC Audio — 2010

The BBC Radio Collection release from 2001 was re-packaged and released on a single CD, as a giveaway from the Daily Telegraph, during a series of Doctor Who giveaways which included Slipback, Exploration Earth, and Mission to the Unknown. I did wrestle with the notion that this didn’t count as it doesn’t offer anything new, but it was the first time that Genesis was available on a single CD and not as a support for another story.

9. AudioGo — 2011

Only a year after the Daily Telegraph release, AudioGo re-released the audio version, but this time digitally remastered. At the same time, other ’70s BBC albums were re-released; Doctor Who Sound Effects included.

What was particularly nice about this version was that it included the original ’70s artwork and the CD itself was printed to look like a vinyl record. For anyone that had (or in my case still has) the original vinyl, this was a must.

This was also available as a digital download for the first time.

10. Record Store Day — 2016

Released as part of Record Store Day 2016 – a celebration of independent record shops – this was a vinyl re-release of the 1979 package right down to the original sleeve and record label. On the face of it, this was a simple re-release of the original from 1979, but this was not a BBC issue, this being from Demon Records. Oh, and the vinyl was blue.

11. BBC Audio/Audible — 2017

The release that prompted this article: the audiobook. Here we have an unabridged reading, by Jon Culshaw, of the 1976 novelisation by Terrance Dicks and using the same Chris Achilleos cover artwork as the original novel. Book to audiobook in 41 years!

12. Season 12 Blu-ray Box Set — 2018

Packaged within the first Blu-ray season box set was an up-scaled version to High Definition. This also contained the omnibus version which has never been released before. All we need at some point is the Doctor Who and the Monsters edit from 1982 to complete the set.

13. Tom Baker Vinyl Boxset — 2023

And to bring us bang up to date, Demon records have released Genesis as part of a limited-edition vinyl boxset. The inclusion of the Tom Baker-narrated State of Decay audiobook is a nice touch as this hasn’t seen any kind of release since around 1985.

That’s 13 releases of versions of Genesis of the Daleks. Have I missed any? But it’s highly unlikely that any other version of a Doctor Who story is going to receive as many individual releases as this. Or does anyone beg to differ? Was there anything I’ve included that shouldn’t be in the list? Answers in the comments section…

The only other story that could get near is The Power of the Daleks. I think it comes close, due to two versions of the soundtrack (narrations by Tom Baker and Frazer Hines), a black and white DVD and colour Blu-ray of the original animation, and a second animated version, but I believe that Genesis of the Daleks still wins the title. However, if the original episodes of Power ever turn up, that could contend.

But I ask the original question: how many copies of Genesis of the Daleks do we actually need…?

Seeing how Big Finish are pretty much dominating the market with original Doctor Who content, it’s hard to miss if anyone else is attempting the same thing. After all, I don’t see much chatter on X (nee Twitter) about BBC Audio Doctor Who releases apart from audiobooks of Target novelisations.

Thus, it was quite a surprise, when in Bluewater’s Waterstones’ audiobook section (when I say ‘section’, I mean ‘shelf’), a couple of years ago, I found a few BBC Audio/ Penguin short story releases for Classic Who Doctors dotted among the Target novelisation CDs.

It was here that I discovered the first Eighth Doctor original short story, The Scent of Blood (2019). Yeah, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to social media or merchandise websites, but sometimes surprise discoveries like this are a joy in themselves.

What surprised me the most was that it had been a long time since BBC Audio had used the Eighth Doctor. 2013’s Destiny of the Doctors’ Enemy Aliens aside (which was a Big Finish collaboration anyway) the character hadn’t been used since 1998 with the cassette tape releases of Doctor Who: The TV Movie and Earth and Beyond (both featuring readings by Paul McGann).

Since The Scent of Blood, and happily for this Eighth Doctor fan, BBC Audio has revisited the Eighth Doctor a few times with the unabridged audiobook of Doctor Who: The Movie (2021), plus two further short stories: The Code of Flesh (2022), and the latest release, The Teeth of Ice (2023).

Anyway, after that ramble, what of The Teeth of Ice itself?

I’ll get a personal grumble out of the way first… In most of these short story releases they are read by someone connected to the era of the featured Doctor: The Elysian Blade, a Second Doctor adventure, read by Frazer Hines; The Flight of the Sun God, Sixth Doctor, read by Nicola Bryant; and in The Winged Coven, Susan Jameson reprises her role of Mrs Wibbsey who debuted in the Fourth Doctor Hornet’s Nest audios from Paul Magrs.

With the recent Eighth Doctor BBC audios, the readings are all by Dan Starkey who plays the Sontaran, Strax; part of the Paternoster Gang from Moffat-era Who.

It is a bit of a shame, but not to say that Dan is bad at audiobook readings – far from it – it’s just it would have been nice to get McGann himself to read his own adventures, as he has done before. In all fairness to BBC Audio, they don’t really have anyone else to call on for the Eighth Doctor era (in the UK, at least) as the associated companions are all from Big Finish.

The Teeth of Ice has been written by Andrew Lane, who has written the previous two Eighth Doctor short stories and once you’ve heard all three, you will see a patten emerging, but always with a little twist to the expected narrative. The hint of this tale is in the cover art…

The story starts with the journalist, James McFarlane, arriving at an artic base with an intent to write a piece on the team’s explorations. McFarlane, at this point, has become a semi-companion having appeared in the two previous Eighth Doctor short stories. Indeed, this is a sequel as both previous tales are referenced during The Teeth of Ice. However, if this is the first of the trio that you’re listening to, worry not. This is a stand-alone adventure that requires no knowledge of the previous stories, but be aware that the references could be ever so slightly spoilery.

Lane paints a very foreboding atmosphere of the artic region and pulls no punches as to the effect the sub-zero temperatures will have on exposed or damp parts of the human body. Shadrack, the leader of the camp, gives a detailed and chilling (no pun intended) description of what could happen should McFarlane not heed the warnings; Shadrack himself having lost a finger to frost-bite.

Within the base, we are also introduced to a separate group, headed by Rochdale, who is here on a separate exploration. Starkey has a wealth of different voices that he can call on to illustrate the different characters, but it takes one a tad out of the moment when the voice he intones Rochdale with is Strax’s! On the plus side, I’m quite warming to Starkey’s interpretation of the Eighth Doctor. He’s given the Doctor an inflection that makes him sound a little like one of The Beatles — clearly a nod to McGann’s Liverpudlian roots.

Presently, McFarlane is reunited with the Doctor, who has installed himself as the base’s medic. A grizzly death soon occurs and we have a sequence that is reminiscent of the first two episodes of The Seeds of Doom where a monster is potentially loose within the claustrophobic atmosphere of the base.

After a second body is found, the narrative takes a very different direction…

I adore these short stories as they can while away an idle hour, whereas some other audiobooks can last a ridiculous amount of time (the stack of ten CDs that make up The Harvest of Time, I’m looking at you!).

What the short story medium loses is the space for grand descriptive passages and character development, but handled correctly, it can still deliver enough character, atmosphere, and engaging storytelling in a quick, punchy, and flab-free way; and Lane achieves this with The Teeth of Ice. Sometimes, less is more and exactly why Big Finish’s Short Trips can be so engaging.

Unfortunately, I found the conclusion very unsatisfactory. Not the actual events themselves as Lane provides a spectacular finale, but it would be difficult to describe the situation without a huge spoiler. I’ll go as far to say that the Doctor manages to tie-up the strands of the adventure but gets to side-step the self-awareness and responsibility. When you have heard the audio, you’ll understand what I mean.

Having said that, a further sequel is teased and the issue I allude to could be something which is addressed in the next instalment. I’m rather looking forward to that.

The Teeth of Ice is out now, priced £11 on CD.

Ah, The Celestial Toymaker. I’m not old enough to have seen it on its original transmission and, sadly, I have never read the Target novel (have you seen the price that book is now commanding?), but my original exposure with the Toymaker left me with a different interpretation of him, and not the evil entity he is supposed to be.

Let me start from the beginning…

My ‘proper’ introduction to Doctor Who fandom started roughly about the same time as Doctor Who Weekly was released. I was a paper-boy delivering out of a newsagent just off Wandsworth Common. Mr Patel, who owned the shop, introduced me to Doctor Who Weekly #1 as something I might be interested in. Having seen the programme on and off since The Daemons, I was immediately hooked.

I had also been a comics reader all my life and I primarily bought the publication because of the comic strips where I was enticed by Dave Gibbons’ beautiful artwork (the definitive comic strip Fourth Doctor, in my humble opinion).

It was a back-up strip that introduced me properly to the Celestial Toymaker in Doctor Who Monthly (no longer weekly) #56: The Greatest Gamble. You see, gravitating towards the comic strips meant that many of the articles of past foes tended to pass me by. I only made a cursory note of the photographs that were used, in previous issues, so I was aware of the Celestial Toymaker, but not who he was.

For those not familiar with The Greatest Gamble: a gambler, named Lefevre, is on a Mississippi paddle steamer playing Poker, sometime during the late 1800s. He spots an opponent palming an ace and shoots the opponent dead. At this point, the Celestial Toymaker appears and invites Lefevre to play against him. Agreeing, Lefevre is instantly transported to the Toymaker’s domain. As he enters, he passes life-size statues of people. One I particularly remember noticing, on the story’s last page, was of an American second world war soldier which would have been about half a century in Lefevre’s future.

They start to play cards and initially, Lefevre does well, but when his luck changes, Lefevre tries to cheat. When the Toymaker cheats back, saying that he believed Lefevre had invented a new rule, Lefevre tries to shoot the Toymaker. This is the Toymaker’s domain where he even controls gravity and the bullet lands harmlessly on the card table.

“The game is forfeit, and you have to pay!” cries the Toymaker and Lefevre is turned into a statue in which he is to become one of the Toymaker’s toys.

Presently, a Roman centurion enters the domain, also having taken up a challenge from the Toymaker, and he passes Lefevre’s ‘statue’.

I was about 15 when I read that.

From that story, I didn’t get the sense of evil about the Toymaker; as far as I was concerned, it was a morality tale about honesty. Lefevre is a nasty piece of work who kills in cold blood over a game! I presumed that all the other “toys” present had also been wrong-uns who ended up being turned to stone as they fell into their nefarious ways during their gamble. And did the Toymaker choose these people for that reason?

On the face of it, The Greatest Gamble is a morality tale: a cheat and a murderer gets his comeuppance. But the tale itself relies on the reader’s prior knowledge of the Celestial Toymaker. I didn’t have that prior knowledge when reading this tale for the first time and this is only four pages long; the magazine’s secondary strip doesn’t have the time for any kind of resume.

As a result, what I perceived was that the Toymaker was bored and lonely; a celestial being plundering time and space for people to gamble against simply to relieve the monotony. But there was something more than that. The Toymaker, on this occasion, comes across as some kind of avenging angel; to dish out a punishment for the evil that men do.

Of course, I subsequently got to know the original television story better and revisiting The Greatest Gamble today there were clues that the gambling is the point. Had Lefevre played fairly and won, he would have been sent back to the casino on the Mississippi steamer, with his winnings, despite having just committed murder. However, should he have lost, even fairly, he certainly would have suffered the dreadful fate to become one of the Toymaker’s playthings. After all, the Toymaker says to Lefevre that he has no use for money… what would be the Toymaker’s winnings otherwise?

However, in this story the Roman centurion is brought into the tale as another gambler. This gives the impression that the Toymaker is only looking for gamblers to play against. This was something else that familiarity with the original television story put right for me: the situation was even simpler; it was losing or winning a game – any game – as was the case when the First Doctor was presented with the Trilogic puzzle.

One last thing occurred to me back in 1981, when I first read The Greatest Gamble: were the gamblers who turned to stone killed or had they been placed in some statuesque eternal torment rather like Borusa in The Five Doctors?

And finally, a mention regarding the artist, Mick McMahon. McMahon had such a distinctive style and he was probably most famous for his work on Judge Dredd. For me, what springs to mind is his characters always have exaggerated shoes and hands, but the art itself has a gritty cartoon feel. I am lucky enough to have an original page from his work on Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth… and, in a strange coincidence to the Toymaker story, it’s the page when Dredd discovers the mafia-style judges in Las Vegas.

Don’t gamble, kids!

[Editor’s Note: I would just like to extend my congratulations to Colin and his new wife, Karen, on their wedding day. I’m so happy for you both. Colin is a fantastic chap, and I know you’ll be very happy together. Please join me, DWC readers, in wishing them all the very best for the future!]

The year before Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor Who returned to our screens, there started a low-profile, Scottish – and rather entertaining – supernatural series called Sea of Souls. With clear influence from The X Files, it starred Bill Paterson (Victory of The Daleks) as Professor Douglas Monaghan who was the head of a parapsychology (thank you, Apple spell check) unit in the fictional Clyde University based in Glasgow.

Out of four series, the first two featured three two-part stories each, and ran through two sets of assistants; the first featuring Archie Punjabi and Peter McDonald and the second Dawn Steele (recently of Holby City) and Iain Robertson. Series 3 featured single episode stories, stayed with Steele and Robertson and was honoured with a Saturday night slot, rather than its previous Sunday; albeit a late night one. The fourth “season” was simply a single story over two episodes as part of a further anthology series and Monaghan didn’t have any of his assistants along for the ride. At this point, Sea of Souls was confined to the bin.

A few names to grace the episodes were Neve McIntosh (Madame Vastra), Siobhan Redmond (the Big Finish Rani); Hugh Ross (Counter Measures), James Fleet (Max Warp); and some unknown called Peter Capaldi.

Most notably, in the third series, Paul McGann appeared as a mysterious and highly intelligent figure called Christopher Chambers.

The plot of this particular episode, titled Rebound, starts with a young woman, Leah Goodhall, who has become highly electrically charged; blowing-out electrical objects and delivering large shocks to anyone she touches. Indeed, Monaghan gets carted off in an ambulance after their first meeting just by shaking hands.

Chambers comes into the story quite late on. He runs a publishing company where Leah worked for him and they were in a relationship which Chambers ended. Not being able to get over this, and being someone who dabbles in the occult, Leah carries out a magic ritual to get Chamber’s love back, but this also causes her condition. 

After continual noise and power cuts in the area Leah and her parents live, the issue is brought to Monaghan’s team’s attention and they start their scientific investigation. During one such test, Justine and Craig (Monaghan’s assistants) witness a ‘spirit’ above Leah’s head and a warning appears, on a PC screen on their monitoring equipment, that someone wants Leah dead.

Who could this be? All eyes turn to Chambers.

Spoilers ahead…

Obviously, this is all based on wishes and circumstantial evidence but, just for a bit of fun, do the events of this episode point to Chambers possibly being the Eighth Doctor?

The Case for the Prosecution

Exhibit A: Chambers appears to have psychic powers and knows that Justine is a qualified nurse despite only having just met. This was rather akin to the Eighth Doctor’s knowledge of people’s future events in Doctor Who: The Movie. Chambers also senses that Justine too is psychic.

Exhibit B: In Chambers’ house… Roundels.

Exhibit C: At one point, Monaghan confronts Chambers asking who he really is and after offering some suggestions – Lord Lucan and Jack the Ripper – Monaghan settles on Falcanelli, a 19th Century Alchemist and who allegedly found the secret of eternal life. Chambers’ publications often quoted from Falcanelli’s book about sacred architecture in which held a prophecy tied into unfolding current events. “Nobody knows when he died!”

When Monaghan asks directly if Chambers is Falcanelli, Chambers merely states that Monaghan deserves his reputation. “Are you expecting me to believe… that you are centuries old?” asks Monaghan. This is not confirmed, but nevertheless, this is approaching Time Lord lifespan.

Exhibit D: Chambers and Leah’s relationship was described by Leah as a “fantastic nine months”. Could this be a Doctor/companion relationship? Even so, Chambers says that Leah was the love of his life and that he had to sacrifice his own happiness for the battle at “mankind’s spiritual watershed”.  Protecting his companion from what sounds like a fixed moment in time?

Exhibit E: At the same time Chambers is talking to Monaghan in his house, Craig and Justine’s monitoring equipment record Chambers carrying Leah away from out of her bedroom. To be able to carry Leah out of the house, he would have passed others on the stairs, which he didn’t. To be in two places at once and enter and exit a room from nowhere… Time travel and a TARDIS straight to Leah’s room, perchance?

Even so, Chambers’ encounter with Monaghan turns out to be a manifestation; or could that be a holographic representation such has been used in the TARDIS (remember those roundels).

Exhibit F: Monsters! Or rather a momentary appearance of a demon. The only episode of Sea of Souls to feature such.

Exhibit G: It is Chambers who sends the demon, that Leah had summoned by her ritual, back to its own dimension. It is described that he has used magic to do so. Could that magic be future or alien technology?

Here, I rest my case for the prosecution and you, the jury, can decide.

What Could Have Been

Sadly, this episode – in fact all of the last two series – never got a release on DVD and (at the time of writing) Sea of Souls isn’t available on any streaming services. Series 1 and 2, however, were released by Sony and not BBC/2 Entertain!

This was particularly annoying as, back in the Noughties, it would be about a year before the DVD of a programme was released (rather than almost immediately, as today). With this in mind, I digitally recorded off-air captures and encoded them on my PC at a low resolution (VideoCD style) so that the whole series would fit on one DVD-R, in preparation for its proper release a year later… but Series 3 never appeared. This is the reason why my screenshots look like VHS captures.

Lesson learned. I never made that mistake again.

Although what I’ve got is okay to watch in the corner of a computer screen or on a mobile phone, I’d still love a proper ‘watchable’ copy of Rebound for a full size telly. Particularly as I can always pretend that it’s the second television appearance of my favourite Doctor Who incarnation… if I squint a bit.

But let’s be realistic. I’m not just some fan-boy trying to copy and paste a similar character onto what I want this to be. If I had to present a defence, it would largely be that Chambers is a little less friendly than McGann’s Eighth Doctor. But, as I said previously, this was just a bit of fun. However, it is an interesting point to make that at the end of the episode, Monaghan says that they expect to run into Chambers again. Sadly, as Sea of Souls’ fairly decent run was coming to an end – only one more story was ever made after this – that wasn’t to be. The mystical Christopher Chambers, like the Eighth Doctor, only gets limited screen time. But what could have been?

We are probably never going to get an Eighth Doctor television series, or at least another episode (as much as we cross our fingers), but here was a very good opportunity for McGann to get another stab at a semi-regular fantasy role; a British Doctor Strange as it were. Big Finish, are you listening?

Now… while I’ve got your attention there’s a third that got away: try searching for a charming little film, again starring McGann, called Fables of Forgotten Things, which was a pilot of a series that was never, sadly, taken up. It’s on Vimeo, but registration is required.

During the early 1980s, after becoming a ‘proper’ Doctor Who fan in 1979, I joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society — I was a member for a couple of years. I’d receive my copy of The Celestial Toymaker, via Royal Mail, and scour its three or so pages of A4 for any titbit of news and peruse the many adverts for fanzines, information sheets, and posters that numerous local groups and the society itself would be producing at the time.

Then I happened across the announcement for Panopticon V (1982) and desperately wanted to go. Thus, my postal order (remember them?) was dispatched and I received my attendee’s pack. This amounted to a badge, a booklet, accommodation details, and a train ticket. I eagerly waited for the weekend of the event to arrive.

Soon enough, I made my first trip to Birmingham. From when I arrived, on the Friday evening, to when I left, on Sunday afternoon, I was like a child in a sweetshop; it was the first time I encountered cosplay (even if the term wasn’t used back then), bought my first independent fanzine, and I got to meet and have small chats with John Nathan-Turner, Fiona Cummings, and the legendary Douglas Camfield, and I got free (yes, FREE) autographs from the above, along with Peter Grimwade, Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, and John Levene.

But my tale concerns the last event of the convention: the raffle that occurred on the Sunday afternoon. It was straight after the Pertwee/Courtney/Levene panel and all three were still present.

Just to set the scene, I was approaching 17 years old, lanky and with long hair. Not heavy metal length, but long enough. I was also near the back of the rather large hall.

Pertwee pulled out a corresponding ticket to the one that I had. Result! I stood up and as I got to the aisle, Pertwee announced, “Ah, that young lady over there.” As I walked down the aisle to collect my prize, each row burst out laughing as I passed it; it was probably the longest walk I’ve ever made.

When my prize was handed to me by one of the DWAS officials, Pertwee realised his mistake and announced, “oh, that young man!”. As I walked back to my seat, prize in hand, I now faced the mocking crowd who all seemed to be cackling louder than before and all pointing at me (or so it felt). I think I shrank a bit on the walk back. To this day, I am convinced I should be six foot five and not the dwarfish six foot three that I am now.

Thankfully, it was all forgotten as the next prize was drawn (although my hotel room-mate was giggling for ages).

But sadly, dear reader, the embarrassment wasn’t over. We all joined the queue for the after-panel autograph signing and I made it to the first in line of autogaphers (is that a word?), John Levene. There was no way I was ever going to get the chance to remonstrate with Pertwee over my public humiliation, as he was pretty much being dominated by everyone else around me (so was Courtney, come to that). I settled with Sergeant Benton.

“It’s that young lady again,” I mumbled, hopeful for some recognition. He signed his autograph, looked up at me, looked at my name badge and said – in a perfect deadpan impersonation of the late Geoffrey Palmer’s character, Ben Parkinson, in Butterflies – “is that a joke?”

There is that saying about wanting the ground to swallow you up…

Needless to say, it wasn’t very long before I had my hair cut.

And the prize that led me to this Doctor Who themed humiliation? A hardback copy of The Nightmare of Eden, signed by Terrance Dicks (and subsequently the three blokes mentioned above).

I’d love to hear from anyone who was at Panopticon V and remembers my misgendering…

All photographs are (as far as I know) copyright DWAS 1982.

The Waters of Mars at its heart is traditional Doctor Who: primarily it’s Doctor vs monsters, but most notably it’s a ‘base under siege’ that has been a Doctor Who regular throughout the decades. However, there is something about Waters that raises its head above the rest and makes it not just my favourite RTD era story, but my favourite Nu-Who adventure, by far.

The monster is a zombie of sorts; the human host is infected by a single drop of water and is turned into a creature that wants to propagate itself into any other available carrier. If that’s not horrifying enough, the basis of the monster is water itself; an element which, like the wind, cannot be beaten.

The sense of foreboding in the Doctor’s monologue — “water always wins” and the “if only one drop gets back to Earth…” — is fairly unprecedented as most other monsters or threats can somehow be tangibly defeated. The big monsters, especially the Daleks, have now been defeated so often that they’ve become impotent. But here the element of water can only be contained. But even then, did the destruction of Bowie Base One destroy the water or merely turn it to steam, allowing the Doctor to rescue the last few survivors? After all, the Ice Warriors only contained it; vapourised water re-forms as clouds, rain or condensation… All the Doctor has in his arsenal, on this occasion, is to collect all he can and run away: smash and grab.

Even though there is water, there is no soap; The Waters of Mars is a solid action-adventure-horror, told at a break-neck pace and isn’t bogged down by a regular companion asking questions. The Doctor is affectively unshackled which leads to the sucker-punch of the downbeat ending: a Doctor going rogue, leading to Adelaide’s suicide. Her death was a fixed point in time and should not have been saved. This made Waters far darker than anything that had come before.

If it were not for the appearance of an Ood, linking Waters of Mars to the following episode, The End of Time, this would be a self-contained movie. Nevertheless, it’s still grim, gritty, exciting, and properly scary.

On a theme, Netflix has got some rather good South Korean science fiction dramas. A particularly good one is The Silent Sea about a moon-base where a team of stranded astronauts are besieged by intelligent water that infects the host… I wonder where they got the idea for that?

I can distinctly remember buying The Five Doctors paperback; it was the Saturday before The Five Doctors was to be screened during Children in Need 1983 and I was astonished to see the book available before it was broadcast.

The bookshop, now long gone, was in the Harvey Nichols end of Sloane Street, Knightsbridge, and I recall being a little bemused that the Sloane Ranger (remember them?), in front of me in the queue at the till, paid for her book – a measly pound – with a credit card! How times change…

Presently, I was the proud owner of a first edition paperback copy with its silver foil cover. However, I couldn’t read it yet it as I didn’t want to have the story spoiled when I watched The Five Doctors the following Friday.

I kept the book, but it remained unread for 38 years. Until now…

There is always a bit of nostalgia picking up an old Target novelisation; if I ‘read’ any books these days, they tend to be the audio book version as, as with Big Finish or podcasts, one can do other things while listening, but an actual printed book demands one’s complete obedience and an accommodation of time.

Thus, just like the early Eighties when I devoured as many Target books as I could find, I found the time and gave my obedience to Terrance Dicks’ The Five Doctors. There was one major difference this time: I now need reading glasses.

But enough of my rambling. What of the book itself?

The Five Doctors is a fairly simple tale and Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of his own television story tends to align itself very tightly: collected characters make their way to Rassilon’s tomb and watch the ‘baddie’ get thwarted by his own corrupted desire, and then everyone goes home.

But the longer one thinks about it, The Five Doctors is Doctor Who’s version of Raiders of the Lost Ark (according to The Big Bang Theory). Remove the Doctor(s) and the main plot is still intact as it’s the Master that does all the legwork. The first three Doctors’ sequences are of how they travel into Rassilon’s tomb avoiding adversity and the Fifth Doctor is there to ultimately confront The Player so he can explain his plans; The Player being the name Terrance Dicks gives to the unknown figure, at the beginning of the book, who is carrying out the Death Zone kidnappings.

Oh alright, I’ll concede that without the presence of A Doctor, the fate that befalls The Player would have been served to the Master, but that is the only pivotal moment I can see. Please feel free to put me straight in the comments section…

However, being an anniversary story, it was all about getting a good selection of the Doctor’s past companions and monsters on screen and that can only be hung on either a very simple story or a very complicated one. On television, and for the sake of mass appeal, it has to be simple; which it most certainly is. Even so, the Daleks, K9, Jamie, Zoe, Captain Yates, Liz Shaw, Roman,a and the Fourth Doctor (obviously) make very brief appearances. It is a different situation with The Day of the Doctor as they didn’t try to do the same thing as The Five Doctors. Day only had a pinch of nostalgia; not a bucket full.

But that’s not to say that The Five Doctors book is bland: there are instances of the macabre. There is a rather unpleasant passage where a charred dead body is struck by lightning, “making it dance and twitch like some ghastly parody of life.” See also the grim detail of the Raston Warrior Robot’s slaughter of the Cybermen where we are treated to descriptions of arms and heads being violently amputated. Substitute Cybermen with a troop of humans and that becomes quite gory. Not to mention the horrific punishment meted out at the end; just think of the mind-boggling enormity of that fate and that the First Doctor encourages The Player into it!

There are some extra moments here and there. For example, there is a small description of New London – London rebuilt after The Daleks’ Invasion of Earth – where Susan Campbell nee Foreman now lives and has three children. Although, it is strange that Susan gets this big build-up. The First Doctor treks to Rassilon’s tomb, within the Dark Tower, with Tegan. Susan, after a small altercation with a Dalek, becomes surplus to requirements and ends up staying in the TARDIS, along with Turlough.

A special mention for an unintended moment of comedy. While the Third Doctor is trying to escape the time scoop in Bessie, the Doctor is described as “streaking down the road”. Oo’er missus… but it was nice to see my favourite often used Terrance Dicks description “crashing to attention”, but here it wasn’t a UNIT soldier but a Gallifreyan guard.

When we arrive at the final section – all protagonists meeting at Rassilon’s tomb – we are treated to a segment that harks back to The Three Doctors where the usual bickering resumes between the original trio, but the subject of immortality rears its head. Similarly, when the Fifth Doctor confronts The Player he exclaims, “Immortality? That’s impossible, even for Time Lords.” Nearly four decades later and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore: we now have the Immortals (Can You Hear Me?) and a Doctor that is now part of that happy band (The Timeless Children). It’s difficult not to think of these things, when viewing or reading classic Who, now that The Timeless Child’s genie is out of its bottle.

Nevertheless, this Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is an easy read and that’s not a criticism. If it seems I’m rubbishing the story, I don’t intend to. I found it entertaining, but the novelisation is very limited in what it can do. If Terrance made this a more coherent and substantial novelisation, there is the danger that it would divert greatly from the original and the traditional Target books didn’t do that. It’s a story designed to celebrate the 20th anniversary on television. That gives this novelisation a bit of baggage.

Having said that, Terrance does give the Fourth Doctor a more coherent exit; returning him and Romana to the punt on the river Calm and not just replicating the most aligned piece of film that could be salvaged from Shada.

Of course, Target books were aimed at a young age group; I read most of my Targets from the age of 15 and Terrance Dicks’ simple prose helped in so much that I could get through quite a few books in a short space of time. Having Dicks’ name on the cover always meant that I would remain engaged.

The only other writer – that I have experienced – that is in the same camp is Ian Fleming: clear, concise, and keeping the action flowing.

I am very VERY grateful for the Target novelisations and the Terrance Dicks ones especially. Not only did they provide an insight into the vintage stories that I thought I would never see (that old cliche), they greatly improved my spelling, which was pretty abysmal during my school years. If only I’d started the read them while a little younger, my English grades might have been a bit better.

Doctor Who: The Five Doctors is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

This modest little essay was inspired by Jason Z in the comments section of Alex Skerrat’s article, Are There Any Missing Third Doctor Episodes? Jason Z said:

“I think I read in the letters page in DWM about a talk given by someone from the BBC in 1973 about the future of home video – that stories such as Galaxy Four need not have been junked because there were people who saw that home video was coming, well before the junking ceased…”

I can’t shed any further light on this particular talk – and I will come back to the comment – but this got me casting my mind back to the first visual media that I collected. Most of my tales usually start from my childhood and this is no different.

When I was about 13 years old, I had a very cheap 8mm/Super 8 projector and a small collection of cine films stored in a shoebox. Most of them were edits of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, or Looney Tunes, but I also had an edit of the finale of Thunderbirds pilot episode, Trapped in the Sky.

These were all on reels holding 50 feet of cine film, which meant that they each only lasted about three minutes and they were silent; any dialogue were sparse subtitles or had inserted caption-cards similar to films from the silent era.

Cine Film’s Endurance

Just for those who may not know much about 8mm cine film, it was invented in the 1930s where 8mm referred to the width of the celluloid, and in its original form had quite large sprocket holes. Film itself was one of the first formats where someone could easily watch films in their own home. It would usually mean getting out a cumbersome screen and a projector, but 8mm projectors were much more portable than the large 16mm projectors us older readers might remember from our school assembly days.

The main drawback with cine film was where the projector’s bulb would get so hot, it would burn the celluloid should the film stop or get caught in the transport gate.

In the mid-1960s, 8mm was then superseded by Super 8: the film was still the same width, but the sprocket holes were much smaller which allowed more space for a slightly larger and better picture. Projectors around the time of Super 8 would usually be able to play both types.

Home projectors came in two variants. The most common would project a picture only, but more expensive projectors would also be able to play a soundtrack from the film as well. There were projectors that could only handle up to 200 feet spools (like mine) and others that had the ability to accommodate much larger spools of up to 830 feet of film; the larger the spool, the longer the film: roughly 15 feet per minute.

Oh yes, to watch a home-movie, all the lights had to be turned off and the curtains closed.

My projector wasn’t particularly good – a Brevette Cine Max (above); a very cheap plastic effort – but it gave enough power for me to watch my meager collection projected onto my shoebox lid and, thankfully, being so cheap, the projector’s bulb wasn’t strong enough to cause any burn; hence the poor projection range. It also played the movies significantly slower than they should have been, but it worked and that was all I cared about.

8mm/Super 8, although primitive to today’s digital media, was actually quite versatile, as film didn’t always need electricity to watch them: there have been a number of toys using 8mm/Super 8 where short films could be watched using a hand-cranked viewer.

The Movie Viewer alone had variants featuring Disney, Superhero cartoons, Star Wars, and – bizarrely, as it was an adult horror film – Alien!

Like everything else, 8mm/Super 8’s resilience would be subject to storage conditions and the original film stock used. Colour film would often be prone to fading and, like audio tape, it didn’t take too well to being creased or scratched. However, it was relatively easy to edit out segments or damaged parts as editing kits were freely available.

The First Visual Home Movie Recording of Any Kind

The cine camera was the very first visual home recording format; the vast majority of which were yards of film that people shot on their holidays and bored you with at dinner parties.

A cine camera’s film cartridge limit was to produce a 50-foot spool of film and, like the projectors, the cameras came in a silent version and ones that could record sound. Many also had the facility to take single frames. Useful for any budding animators.

There are a several behind the scenes captures featuring Doctor Who cast and crew taken using cine cameras. An example is on The Sea Devils DVD where a naval rating captured footage from the location filming in Portsmouth.

Similarly, there are lots of clips of off-air captures (pointing the cine camera at the TV screen), but home ‘telecine’ was much more low-tech than the BBC’s own version of converting video to film stock. Nevertheless, sections of The Tenth Planet Part Four VHS reconstruction used footage recorded in this manner.

Availability

But back to commercial releases and the 1970s…

Always on the lookout to improve my collection, I obtained a catalogue of available films and poured over the contents. Rather optimistically, as it turned out, as the vast majority were from feature-films and they were ALL too expensive. They had longer running times and were offered on a scale starting at colour and with sound down to black and white and silent. The further down the scale it went, the cheaper the product. Some were short edited segments; others were full movies spread over several reels.

The cheaper stuff I could afford with my pocket money were either from the silent film era or cartoons that I’d never heard of and these would usually be found in the bargain buckets of larger photography shops (and didn’t appear in my catalogue). Imports were on the cheaper side too; the Looney Tunes reels I mentioned were presented with Italian packaging.

Of note that I can remember from the catalogue, were episodes of the 1970’s cop-show The Sweeney which were available in three or four reel sets to cover a whole episode. They also had full soundtracks and had a very high price tag.

I don’t recall anything from the BBC.

When I still visited comic marts during the 1980s and 1990s – the Central Hall in Westminster was a regular haunt – I’d often see the odd Super 8 reel knocking about. The only BBC-related material I’d ever come across were reels from the Cushing Dalek films or Hammer’s remake of The Quatermass Experiment.

Still nothing directly from the BBC.

That was until a visit to a boot fair during the early 1990s when boot fairs were still fun to visit before all the traders invaded them. I found two small 50 ft reels of The Magic Roundabout; silent, black and white. 50p each. A snip!

So there had been release of a BBC programme after all.

The company that released these was Walton who were a big name in the home movie market, but before some exclaim that The Magic Roundabout was originally French, on the box it states “a BBC TV Enterprises Film”.

I have also recently discovered a second release of a programme, shown on the BBC, of the cartoon Tales from Hoffnung. Although this time the box states “as shown on BBCtv” (rather than mentioning Enterprises). Tales from Hoffnung was a BBC co-production, so it’s unclear who pushed the rights to clear this for release: the BBC or the co-producer Halas and Batchelo? My money is on the latter…

What Could Have Been

If we therefore take an average Super 8 as an edited release, how would Doctor Who fare in the three to 10 minute ‘soundbite’ (or silent-bite) stakes, pre-1978?

The evidence seems to suggest that the small three-minute reel tended to be cartoons, comedy shorts (Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy), or children’s interest (Thunderbirds, Stingray, ‘Trips to the zoo’ types). Doctor Who could have provided a few sequences to play around with, especially with the Daleks or Cybermen (suggestions in the comments section, please).

But I’d hazard a guess that The Magic Roundabout’s release was a tester and one that doesn’t appear to have gotten anywhere, considering the complete lack of further releases of any BBC material (although I’d love to find out if there have been any further commercial releases that I don’t know about).

There was also the huge issue of price, but we’ll tackle that one later.

Tales of Hoffnung was from 1965 and The Magic Roundabout’s reels were released later the same decade. If Doctor Who had been exploited around the same time, releases would have pre-dated the junkings. It’s an interesting notion that if BBC TV Enterprises had decided to release Doctor Who snippets before the junking started, there may be at least some clips still existing from missing episodes and of a better quality than captured by fans who pointed their cine cameras at the telly!

What Possibly Is

BUT, while trawling t’internet for 8mm/Super 8 information – and there’s very little of it – I happened across a spool of episode two of The Evil of the Daleks on Super 8, that had been sold on eBay.

How this reel came to be is a mystery because this wasn’t commercially available and the BBC’s film stock would have been 16mm. Someone, somewhere, made the effort to produce this. How this was achieved, I have no idea, but presumably they had to have had access to the 16mm print to do it. What is evident is that there are still many 8mm/Super 8 collectors and who knows what may be out there lurking in their private collections in this format?

We tend to think of missing Doctor Who episodes being discovered stored in large 16mm film cans, but this spool would only be 10 inches in diameter and fit easily on a shelf with a collection of Doctor Who LPs!

More to the point, let’s say that a missing episode was found on Super 8; would Super 8’s resolution be good enough for a decent transfer to digital? With an eye on my previous essay, Doctor Who on Blu-Ray: Why Can’t it all be in Proper High Definition?, if the condition of the celluloid is pristine then there is no reason why a decent Standard Definition transfer couldn’t be achieved. Steve Roberts’ Restoration Team may need to weave their magic, but it is argued that a resolution of 720p (i.e. half HD) can be extracted from a good quality Super 8 picture.

How Much!?

As hinted earlier, the only Doctor Who to be officially released on the home movie format were the two Peter Cushing Dalek films. Dr Who and the Daleks and Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD were both released in two variants in 1977.

The first, was a two-reel edit costing around £32 in colour sound (£10 for b&w silent).

The second was an eight-reel version of the whole movie (although it appears that there may have been some slight edits here and there). The price of the full versions would have been around £130. Bear in mind that the average weekly wage, in 1977, was about £70… Ouch! And for that, you also got those badly drawn covers.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that they didn’t sell very well.

A Possible View of ‘Home Video’ in 1973

If the BBC had been able to exploit Doctor Who on 8mm/Super 8 then it’s possible that the junkings could have been avoided but, bearing in mind the price of a full Cushing Dalek movie, to release a full four-part (at least) Doctor Who story on home-movie with sound – or any BBC drama come to that – the purchase price would have been eyewatering, despite some being black and white only. And what of longer stories such as The War Games?

This would also scupper any ideas of releasing a series of stories as it would simply be too expensive to collect.

Maybe some BBC employees could have seen the home video market on the horizon, but there is a ten-year gap between 1973, when the issue was raised, and the first video tape release. Within that time period the only home-media market (i.e. Super 8) just wasn’t viable.

The prices of those original VHS releases don’t seem so bad now…

The rather excellent UK television station, Talking Pictures TV, recently showed the first Peter Cushing Dalek film, Doctor Who and the Daleks, for the first time on 4th September 2021.

As is Talking Pictures TV’s style, when advertising an up and coming film, they often play the original theatrical trailer, framed to appear as on a cinema screen. Not having seen the trailer before, my interest was piqued, but I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to hear. Very distinctly, the background noise for the first part of the trailer was a sound effect from Gerry Anderson’s live action UFO. More specifically, the sound of the UFOs while they are in flight.

An eyebrow was raised. This couldn’t be right! Doctor Who and the Daleks was made in 1965 (the year I was born, incidentally) but UFO didn’t hit UK television screens until 1970.

Surely Gerry Anderson didn’t use stock sound effects, but according to Wikipedia Barry Gray – who composed and arranged most of Gerry Anderson’s iconic music – created the UFO flight sounds using something called an Ondes Martenot which was an electronic musical instrument that was invented in 1928, in France.

Another little search regarding the Dalek films throws up the answer: Barry Gray is credited as providing the electronic music for the films.

Presumably, as the movie trailer would have been long forgotten by 1969 (when UFO was being filmed), Gray didn’t think anyone would notice if he re-used his sound effect from the Doctor Who and the Daleks cinema trailer.

It is well documented, there are many props, spacesuits and set dressings from UFO that appear in Pertwee era Doctor Who, but this means that the sound effect for Gerry Anderson’s UFOs in flight, which is quite significant in that series, is second-hand from Doctor Who and the Daleks.

Bugger…

As you may have noticed from my avatar, I’m a bit of a fan of Gerry Anderson’s finest hour: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

It’s the television series that was my first love. I spent most of my primary school’s playtimes being Captain Scarlet, and my Dinky-toy SPV is one of the earliest Christmas presents I can remember. Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons was a flashy, colourful (although we only had a black and white telly when I was in primary school, but you know what I mean), and thrilling series with a terrific theme song, superb hardware, and fantastic model work. Tiny me was in awe. Oh, and the staccato beat; mustn’t forget the staccato beat.

Captain Scarlet is still watchable over 50 years after they were made and they still look very good now. It’s a shame that no Gerry Anderson puppet series was as good after Scarlet: Joe 90 and The Secret Service just didn’t have that special something that Scarlet had, but much of that dark storytelling returned with the live action – and more adult – UFO. But I’m drifting away from the point…

The premise of the Captain Scarlet charater was a Spectrum agent whom the Mysterons killed in a car crash, was reconstructed by the Mysterons, and who, through fate, had his human consciousness returned and developed an extra power of retro-metabolism or indestructibility.

Captain Jack Harkness, similarly, was killed by the Daleks, and was brought back to life by Vortex Rose but with added immortality; or to put it another way, indestructibility.

That indestructibility itself is a little bit of a problem for action-adventure storytelling. The character becomes undramatic. In other words, there is no jeopardy as the character cannot be killed. The events of The Timeless Children has brought the Doctor into this little club of immortals too. What is the point of the narrative, in dramatic terms, if the main protagonist is threatened or in peril, when that peril is no threat to them?

And the recent Revolution of the Daleks had two of ‘em!

This was a problem that I picked up on, at a very early age. Being an avid reader of anything Spider-Man during the late 1970s, I begged my dad to take me to see the cinema release of the Nicholas Hammond Amazing Spider-Man TV pilot. While watching in the Wimbledon ABC, I just sat there wondering where all the super-villains were: where were Sandman, Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, the Vulture, or the Green Goblin?

Lou Ferrigno’s The Incredible Hulk did the same thing; peak-time super-heroes on Saturday night television… no super-villains.

Although I now believe it’s a fantastic film, I found Christopher Reeve’s first outing in Superman: The Movie a bit disappointing, to the then 12-year old, as I was hoping for Brainiac, Bizarro, or Mr Mxyztplk; or at the very least a proper comic-book style fight scene (although, they did deliver that in Superman II).

Around the same time, and to cash-in on the popularity of the Superman movie, ITV dug-up the old George Reeves Superman TV series from the 1950s. I had exactly the same disappointment…

What these last four examples have in common is that they were all super-powered leads, but they didn’t have any super-powered adversaries: they tended to just be up against ordinary people. Where is the jeopardy if the baddies have nothing to offer and the heroes all the powers?

Off the top of my head, the only TV series that occasionally delivered, from those days, was The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman (if there are others, the chances are they didn’t reach the UK).

However, all of the super-powered heroes above had mortality, they could be killed or at least had some Achilles’ heel: The Hulk was vulnerable whilst in Bruce Banner form and Ferrigno’s Hulk did die when he dropped from a plane; Superman could be taken down with a well-aimed lump of Kryptonite; and Spider-Man, although fast, could still get ordinarily shot, stabbed etc.

The Doctor, pre-Timeless Child, still had a finite number of regenerations, but could still get killed in the interim (or so we thought). Having said that, The Christmas Invasion gave us that moment when the Doctor was able to grow a new hand, after it had been chopped off by the Sycorax. So there was a limited amount of retro-metabolism there already!

Thus, Captain (Paul Metcalf) Scarlet, Captain Jack Harkness, and the Doctor are all now indestructible: they can feel pain, bleed, but will ultimately recover (albeit for the Doctor, in a different form). So how do the storytellers deal with this without becoming boring?

In Doctor Who’s case, it’s having to find other regular characters to shift the jeopardy to: put the companions at risk for us to worry about instead, like some human shield.

But even though there are powerful alien threats, the Doctor and team will always vanquish them and with the more regular foes, especially the Daleks, defeat will occur so frequently that said foes become practically pointless and ultimately weak. The Daleks even gave the Doctor the nickname of The Oncoming Storm (those Daleks cringing back from the Ninth Doctor in The Parting of the Ways was awful). Not exactly living up to the reputation as the most dangerous beings in the universe.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons doesn’t tackle the elephant in the room directly but the issue is a little different: even though Spectrum’s best asset has invulnerability, he is effectively a minor player in a much greater theatre. The Mysterons – unseen and only heard – are a far far superior force to anything Earth can offer. This is why the series features a war of attrition rather than all-out war; an all-out war with the Mysterons would simply be a route of the Earth leaving poor indestructible Mr Metcalf alone on a burnt-out shell of a planet.

But more importantly Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons featured episodes where the good Captain and Spectrum don’t get to save the day. As early as the second episode – the superb Winged Assassin – the Mysterons threaten to kill the Asian President and are successful. That’s the episode. There’s no vengeance, no justice or comeback. Spectrum fail! Although I’m open to suggestion, I cannot recall a story where the Doctor has suffered such a resounding defeat except for Inferno, but this was a side-step by making that an alternative universe.

A near miss would be Genesis of the Daleks where the Doctor is given the mission to stop the Daleks’ development. Clearly, Terry Nation couldn’t write a story were the Doctor achieves his mission as the Daleks have such a rich history in the programme, so the Doctor is having to be content with only delaying their spread across the universe.

In Big Finish terms, Spare Parts is in a similar position where the Doctor is pre-destined not to halt the beginnings of the Cybermen – or steer their development to a better route – again, because of the sake of the long-standing association that the Cybermen have with the TV show.

Generally, a foe may escape (the Master, on many occasions) but the Doctor still foils the associated dastardly plan. These plans are generally foiled even on the occasions that it costs the Doctor a life, or the life of a companion.

And one for Captain Jack: the ‘win but at what cost’ scenario which was so well displayed in Torchwood: Children of Earth, where Jack sacrifices a member of his own family.

Taking the nod from Captain Scarlet, there is a way of bringing back Doctor Who’s jeopardy: have the Daleks or the Cybermen deal the Doctor a sound thrashing. Not just once, mind, but occasionally. This puts it in the back of the viewer’s mind that things don’t always go to plan. It also gives the Daleks or Cybermen their potency back.

But, arguably, that’s what Doctor Who needs anyway considering that, as happened at the end of The Eleventh Hour, the Doctor just needs to make him/herself known and the bad guys run. In storytelling terms, that’s not a million miles away from a street robber running away from the Incredible Hulk!

I think Gerry Anderson had it right with Scarlet: if the hero or heroine is all powerful, or all intelligent, then that powerful hero or heroine must have an Achilles’ heel; whether it be Kryptonite (Superman), drowning (David Dunn in H. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable), or in Captain Scarlet’s case, failure…