The continuing story of Doctor Who that began on 23rd November 1963 and continues to this day has never been what you might call the most closely plotted of narratives. The very nature of serialised television, made by many various hands over the years, and the sheer amount of story produced means that contradictions are inevitable. Whether it’s the contradictory nature of the various explanations for Alantis sinking (from The Underwater Menace, The Dæmons, and The Time Monster) or exactly when the Third Doctor was running around with his army chums from UNIT, as fans we tend to cope with it.

In fact, we do more than that: we invent convoluted explanations as to why things do make narrative sense. Whole books have been printed, thousands of pages of fanzines written, and gigabytes of websites devoted to trying to make sense of 60 (-ish) years worth of storytelling. It’s not just Doctor Who; Marvel Comics would regularly award “No-Prizes” to readers who could explain apparent contradictions in their comics. In his forward to The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide (1996), Terrance Dicks described continuity as whatever he “could remember about [his] predecessor’s shows…” and what his “successors could remember of [his]”. Doctor Who and Marvel Comics were never intended primarily for hardcore fans – so strict adherence to established “fact” was never as important as getting an entertaining story out to the audience. Besides, part of the fun of being a fan was sorting all this stuff out.

I, along with many others, accepted this. I understood how the show was made and that I shouldn’t worry too much about it contradicting itself. Luckily Doctor Who Monthly had its regular Matrix Data Bank column where some of these topics were covered (arguably at times making things even more complicated).

Naturally, opinions varied on what the accepted theories were, but what everyone agreed on  was that only contradictions within the TV show needed explaining. Doctor Who stories in other media, be they comic strips, choose your own adventure novels, or World Distributors annuals, didn’t matter. The TV show was the truth, the canon of the narrative; everything else was not real Doctor Who. The central character is not called Doctor Who like he was in those silly Peter Cushing movies or the strips in TV Comic (despite what WOTAN might think) and The Tenth Planet was set in 1986, not the year 2000 as the Target adaptation would have us believe.

And when the show left our screens in 1989, that was it. The story was finished. We had a complete story, to be analysed and enjoyed as we saw fit. Until June 1991, that is, when a fully authorised continuation of the story began. A series of books published by Virgin Books under the umbrella title: Doctor Who: The New Adventures.

Being aimed at a smaller audience, The New Adventures had much tighter continuity within itself than the television show that spawned them. We had an official continuation of the story that built on and expanded the established canon of the television show. Even better, this time stories in other media tied in. When the books introduced the new companion Bernice Summerfield, up she popped in the comic strip running in Doctor Who Magazine. This was unprecedented – never before had spin-off media from a TV or movie franchise been in lock-step. The continuing story of Doctor Who was in safe hands. Established canon would continue to grow and evolve; we knew what counted.

And everything was good, until the BBC decided to bring it back in 1996. The TV Movie from 1996 did more harm to my sense of what counted as canon than the Cushing films ever did… and it wasn’t the “half-human on my mothers side” line.

First of all the BBC decided to not renew the New Adventures’ licence. That in itself was okay, so long as the new set of books didn’t contradict anything that went before (and since they started commissioning writers from the earlier range, that appeared unlikely – but boy were some fans worried at the time).

However, a knock-on effect of this occurred in the comic strip and a story called Ground Zero. Up until the publication of this story, we were happy with the ultimate fate of the Doctor’s companion Ace as described in Kate Orman’s 1995 novel Set Piece: becoming Time’s Vigilante (hopping between time-zones on a motorbike). The Doctor had continued his adventures with Bernice (and later future-cop double-act Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej). This was my canon. This was the story I had been following since the show ended. And the story the comic strip had been part of.

Suddenly the comics strip is giving us a different final story for the Doctor and Ace, one that killed Ace off. To make matters worse, this story led into the continuing comic strip adventures of the Eighth Doctor. Two canons? Maybe neither counted; after all, the television show trumps all when we talk about established canon. Let’s see how the new series is coming along. We can watch that and stop worrying about the books and comic strips. Only, as we now know, there was no TV show forthcoming.

The latter part of the so-called Wilderness Years, following that one night in 1996 when Paul McGann dazzled us all, is odd when it comes to the Doctor Who canon. Being part of the audience of this material as it came out changed my relationship with the ongoing story. There were two distinct strands of narrative – the continuing comic strip and the BBC book range. These two strands soon became three when Big Finish hired Paul McGann to continue the Eighth Doctor’s adventures as audio plays. Who was the Doctor’s current companion: Sam (in the books), Izzy (in the comic strip), or Charley (in the audios)? Did all these stories actually slot together somehow? If they did, what about the climax of Ace’s story that was part of the established comic continuity? How did that fit in?

I remember thinking at the time that continuity had literally exploded.

And then, in the quiet after the explosion; as I picked through the debris of stories and ideas I realised it didn’t matter. The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it doesn’t make sense, not really. It’s about people travelling through time and space in a Police Box from the 1950s. Whether the person at the controls is called the Doctor or Doctor Who, or if his granddaughter is called Susan or Gillian – none of this matters.

And because none of it matters, it all matters.

It’s the stories that count and whether they thrill and amaze us. Whether they make us laugh or cry. The day Doctor Who continuity exploded and I learnt to stop worrying about canon was the day I started loving Doctor Who more than ever.

I even went back and watched the Peter Cushing films and read some old TV Comic strips. They were rather fun…

The Time Lords send the Doctor and his companions back in time to Skaro just before the birth of the Daleks with the aim of preventing their creation, altering their development, or at least learning a weakness that could be exploited: anything to stop them becoming the dominant creature in the universe.

A plot we’re all familiar with; Genesis of the Daleks needs no introduction. Before the advent of multi-channel television and streaming services, it was one of the most (if not the most) repeated stories of Doctor Who. It was voted favourite story by readers of Doctor Who Magazine in 1998, is in the unique position of having an edited audio version released on vinyl by the BBC back in 1978, and was one of several stories repeated on television in a truncated 85 minute omnibus format. And of course, along with most stories from this era of Doctor Who, a Target novelisation by Terrance Dicks.

The book came out around the time Dicks was at his most prolific. Looking at the publication dates of the Target books, it appears Dicks was producing a novel a month around this time. Dicks wrote six of the 10 books published in 1976. Released in July, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks followed its Season 12 stablemate Revenge of the Cybermen (published in May) and was rapidly followed by the Troughton classic, The Web of Fear (August). In case you were wondering, the other three Dick’s books published that year were adaptations of Terror of the Zygons (as Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster), Planet of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars.

Coming in the middle of such prolific output, one would be forgiven for expecting Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks to be a rushed (dare I say hacked out?) job. How does Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks stand up 45 years on?

One thing I instantly noticed was the character interiority Dicks offers throughout this book. Sarah in particular benefits from this; we are on this adventure alongside her. Quite early on, she is separated from the Doctor and Harry when “buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses”. You feel her sense of confusion, panic but with a gritty determination that won’t allow her to be overcome by it.

The backstory of Skaro really comes to the fore here. Reading about the rise of the scientific Elite in Kaled society rather than hearing about it in a few bits of dialogue gives the reader the space to ponder the ramifications of the power handed to Davros and his “Elite Corps”, a group of society’s leading scientists —  a technocratic elite, protected by heavy security.

Reading this today, one can’t help but notice that, as we continually use more advanced technology, the inner workings of which are beyond the comprehension of most, we find ourselves forced to cede to those with the most knowledge. We trust the computer programmers that create the code that drives everything we use from the Word Processor I’m using to write this review to the washing machine entering its spin cycle in the other room; we eagerly read news articles presented to us by an algorithm designed by teams of data scientists using the latest cutting-edge machine learning technology. Have we considered that any of these people could turn out to be Davroses? Megalomaniacs twisting technological advances for their own ends, rather than for the benefit of everyone?

Overall, this was a fine way to revisit the story. It gave me more admiration for Sarah Jane Smith and gave me something to think about regarding technological growth and the risks involved. Not bad for a “kids’ book” published nearly half a century ago.

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

Several years before playing school teacher Ian Chesterton in Doctor Who, William Russell had thrilled audiences as the male lead in another Saturday tea-time show, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. There is a chance to watch this again as UK archive film and television channel Talking Pictures TV will be broadcasting the series on Saturdays at 5.30pm from tonight (13th June 2020).

The show was originally broadcast between 1956 and 1957 on the UK’s commercial channel, ITV. It debuted on ATV London (the regional nature of UK commercial television in those days meant different companies held the ITV franchise in different regions) at 6pm on Saturday 15th September and ran for 30 weeks. The broadcast rights were sold to NBC in America where it was shown the following week on Mondays at 8pm. The success of the programme in America meant that the last 14 episodes were filmed in colour, making it the first British TV series to have colour episodes (although these episodes were initially only broadcast in colour in the States).

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot was commissioned by famous media mogul Lew Grade’s company ITC Entertainment (who would go on to be responsible for many cult classics such as Danger Man, Department S and The Prisoner). It told the adventures of Sir Lancelot (Russell), one of the Knights of the Round Table at the time of Camelot. The show also boasted another future Doctor Who alumni: Ronald Leigh-Hunt (Commander Randor in 1966’s The Seeds of Death and Commander Stevenson in 1975’s Revenge of the Cybermen) as King Arthur.

It was Russell’s performance in this show that led to him being cast as Ian Chesterton, one of Doctor Who’s first companions. In those early episodes, Ian is certainly the more ‘conventional’ hero of the initial cast and it is said that he was the only actor considered for the part. Doctor Who’s original producer, Verity Lambert, later remarked how striking she found him in the role of Sir Lancelot and noted how he would be used to the demanding schedule of filming Doctor Who due to his time making the earlier series.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot will be broadcast on Talking Pictures TV (Virgin 445, Freesat 306, Freeview or Youview 81 or on the Sky digital satellite platform, channel 328) from Saturday 13th June at 5.30pm and continuing every Saturday at the same time. Saturday’s episodes will be repeated the following Thursdays at 9am.

This week, there is a rare opportunity to watch Nigel Kneale’s final British science-fiction serial featuring Professor Benard Quatermass, 1979’s Quatermass.

Many look at Quatermass as a major influence on Doctor Who. The series was conceived by Nigel Kneale (author of several regarded television plays such as The Stone Tape and The Year of the Sex Olympics) in 1953 when the BBC asked him to write a six-part serial for Saturday nights. That series, The Quatermass Experiment introduced us to the character of Professor Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group. The success of this serial led to the commission of two more series by the BBC, 1955’s Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit in 1958. Hammer films would release film adaptations of the serials in the between 1955 and 1967.

Professor Quatermass didn’t return to our screens until 1979 and it is this serial Talking Pictures TV is airing. This final outing was initially announced by the BBC in 1972, but due to mounting production costs, the BBC halted production and the project was eventually finished by Euston Films and aired on ITV in the UK in October/November 1979.

John Mills plays the retired Professor Quatermass who heads to London to search for his missing granddaughter. She has joined a popular youth cult, the Planet People – a cult that gathers at prehistoric sites believing they will be transported to a better life on another planet. After witnessing the destruction of two spacecraft by an unknown force and the disappearance of a group of Planet People, Quatermass starts to investigate further.

Quatermass (1979) – sometimes called The Quatermass Conclusion – will be broadcast Tuesdays at 9pm from 19th May on Talking Pictures TV (Virgin 445, Freesat 306, Freeview or Youview 81 or on the Sky digital satellite platform, channel 328).

Four years in, the 2008 series of Doctor Who showed no sign of slowing down or losing popularity. Having had three years to work itself out, the show had survived a couple of bumps that could have derailed it completely: the change of actor playing the Doctor and the change of companion. The show at the end of 2007 had a completely different lead cast, the only thing linking the programme to that first episode that marked its returned in 2005 was the opening titles and the battered blue box the title character travelled in. Surviving this and still doing well in the ratings on a Saturday night (remember that, before 2005, drama at Saturday tea-times was unheard of) gave the show’s creators confidence – clearly, they were doing something right. They now knew how to do Doctor Who successfully. To paraphrase Professor Zaroff from 1966’s The Underwater Menace, nothing in the world could stop them now.  

But before all that. Before the return of Donna Noble, the Sontarans and Davros. There was the small matter of the 2007 Christmas Special. A special that illustrates well the confidence the production team now had. Not only did they attempt a full-scale disaster movie on a BBC budget, but they only had the audacity to approach international pop royalty, Kylie Minogue to take on the role of special guest companion (and she only went and said yes).

As a Christmas episode, Voyage of the Damned works. As a disaster movie, not so much so. It has often been said how the Christmas episodes of Doctor Who cater to a different audience than the regular episodes. They need to appeal to a family audience distracted by Christmas celebrations and recovering from overindulgence. Out of all of Russel T Davies’ specials, this is probably the most effective in this regard. The plot relies on tropes of the Hollywood disaster movies of the 1970s (more often than not produced by Irwin Allen, who coincidentally was responsible for many American science fiction TV shows of the ’60s such as Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel).  These films relied on an all-star cast which we not only have in Kylie, but also British telly stalwarts, Geoffrey Palmer and Clive Swift. Watching this, the audience knows what to expect – the cast of characters are going to be picked off one at a time. The drama comes from us getting to know these characters just before they leave the plot. Throughout we are rooting for them as we learn more. It is here the running time and budget restrictions let Voyage of the Damned down. Even with a running time of 70 minutes, the characters just aren’t given enough time for the audience to bond with them. No sooner do we meet Bannakaffalatta (and manage to remember his name) than he’s gone.

Where it does work is in throwing the world of Doctor Who into a traditional disaster movie. Only Doctor Who can set a story on a Victorian luxury cruise ship (albeit in space), populate with a variety of colourful aliens (and a pop princess), and have it work. And it is only a production team that truly understands Doctor Who and is trusted to deliver a solid product that would even attempt such an endeavour.

Making a bold, confident statement of what Doctor Who is (warts and all) for a one-off Christmas special is one thing but doing this over an entire series is something else.  

Partners in Crime is a full-on screwball comedy. We are promised the reintroduction of Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) from a couple of years ago. Getting Tate back as a regular was certainly a coup for the show. Famous for her eponymous sketch show that had been running since 2004,  it was a surprise at the time that she would agree to move on from sketch comedy, particularly considering the long shoot Doctor Who would involve. But agree she did and it wasn’t without controversy in a similar way that casting Billie Piper as Rose was a few years previously.

Just as with Billie in 2005, those doubts soon vanished with the season opener. Again, this is an episode of Doctor Who produced by a team that knows what they are doing. “A Yeti on your loo in Tooting Bec” is how Third Doctor Jon Pertwee describes the show. Partners in Crime certainly channels this. Donna and the Doctor both investigate Adipose Industries by infiltrating a typical office environment with the odd goings-on turning out to be related to the latest diet fad. Both of these roots the plot in the everyday; these are things most viewers would be familiar with or have knowledge of. It means the episode can concentrate on the reintroduction of Donna and discover how much she has grown since we last saw her.

And grown she has. One of Russell T Davies’ regular themes in Doctor Who is how travelling with the Doctor changes people. Watching Donna infiltrate the office, we see how different she is. The parallel narratives of Donna and the Doctor demonstrate a startling similarity between them. Donna only got a taste of the Doctor’s life and turned down the opportunity to travel with him. She can’t get what might have been out of her head. She doesn’t make the same mistake again.

It’s interesting looking at Davies’ four series as showrunner and noting how similar the structure of each run is. The first three episodes of every series feature an adventure set in the present day, one in the past, and one set in the future. And so it was in 2008. Donna’s first trip in the TARDIS takes her to ancient Pompeii. The Roman city well known to schoolchildren everywhere, preserved as it was by the eruption of Vesuvius, and giving us a lot of our knowledge of Roman life.

Landing just before Vesuvius is due to erupt, we are presented with that question that has been asked in the show ever since 1963: can the time traveller change history? The twist here that the sheer presence of the time traveller causes the historical event.

Once again the strong production values sing, unsurprising since the set used was built for the BBC/HBO epic series Rome. We meet a typical family from Pompeii (coincidentally the same family anyone learning Latin in the ’70s and ’80s would have met in the Cambridge Latin course). We see the first signs of the Doctor and Donna team coming together. The Doctor’s decision (echoes of Tom Baker’s “Do I have the right?” from 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks) is taken by both of them, not him alone.

Catherine Tate’s similarly incredible in Planet of the Ood, in which what mankind’s done to the titular alien race horrifies her so much, she asks the Doctor to take her home. It’s fortunately not something they follow through with, largely because there’s some redemption at the story’s conclusion, as the Ood manage to shrug off the chains of their masters and emerge as an empathic, forward-thinking, and peaceful race.

It’s a fantastic piece of drama, slightly undermined by the Ood’s promise to carry songs of the Doctor-Donna with them… despite the fact that they’ve not really done anything to enable the Ood’s freedom.

The traditional mid-season lull reaches us with The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Inevitable since we’re considering 13 episodes, 9 stories here. Creating 9 unique settings (not forgetting this is the fourth time of doing it) means that not everyone is a gem. Curiously the Sontaran double episode works better than the previous mid-season two-parters. The threat feels prescient and genuinely chilling as we become more dependent on gadgets to guide us through life. Going back to Pertwee’s Yeti comment, how easy would it be to do exactly what the ATMOS devices did here? How easy would it be for a car navigation system to take over control?

What really stands out in this story is Donna’s return home towards the first episode’s end. As she walks down the street in Chiswick – we see how much she has been changed by her journey. With no words, Tate evokes a Donna that has been transformed. Almost observing her home through new eyes, foreshadowing the change she will ultimately go through at the end of the series. It is these sequences that make Davies’ Doctor Who so wonderful (yes, I know that this is a Helen Raynor script, but sometimes Davies’ final polish shines through).

Arguably the weakest story in the whole series, The Doctor’s Daughter still has interesting things going for it. The story’s twist gives the whole tale the feeling of a 2000 AD Future Shock. The story is brimming with ideas (the Hath’s breathing apparatus for example) but none of them feels developed enough. Martha feels almost tagged on and her presence and rapid return home leaves one puzzled why she was even in this episode – although it’s difficult to see Donna taking the trip across the planet’s surface. However, that Martha could make this journey does further explore the theme of the Doctor turning his companions into soldiers, an idea explored more fully in the closing episodes. Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter herself, feels little more than a commentary on the show itself. That she and her ‘Dad’ enjoy running through corridors is an amusing dig at the show, pushing at the fourth wall if not actively breaking it. The episode almost ends with Jenny winking at the camera, off to further adventures on CD and download if Big Finish can negotiate a deal (which they eventually did, of course). Sadly, The Doctor’s Daughter never delivered on the promise of changing the Doctor. Interesting, we will soon get a story that did exactly that.

However, before that, we have a brief sojourn to 1920s England and this year’s celebrity historical. There has always been a sense that Doctor Who is a very writer-led show so it comes as no surprise that the historical figures we have met so far have been writers. What’s great about The Unicorn and the Wasp is that it leans heavily on the fact that the BBC are dab hands at Agatha Christie adaptations and you can almost feel transported forward in time to a Sunday night when these adaptations are usually broadcast. Of course, as we discover in the next episode, the Doctor would never land on a Sunday: “Sundays are boring.”

It seems obvious for a writer so fond of playing with aspects of time that it would be Steven Moffat that would postulate what it would be like for the Doctor to meet someone that had already met him, but later in his life.  Quite what the impact of Professor River Song would have on the Doctor we weren’t to know when this episode aired. But watching this back after seeing Professor Song and the Doctor’s relationship develop over the course of Moffat’s own stint as showrunner puts a whole new perspective on it. Alex Kingston excels in this, the pain she expresses when she realises that this man, this man she loves, doesn’t know her because this is the first time he has met her, despite her having just spent one night lasting 24 years with him on the planet Darillium is heartbreaking. Simply stunning stuff and something only this oh so special programme can do. (Did Kingston know? Did Moffat have River’s story planned out when he wrote these episodes? Apparently not, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.)

By 2008, the structure of the series had been well established, making production easier on the whole crew. By now, we knew that at some point in the year there would be a Doctor/companion lite episode. This time, Davies decided to do this over two weeks giving us a Donna-lite episode followed by a Doctor-lite episode. The restrictions in place led to two of the most experimental stories to come out of Doctor Who since the 1963 episodes, The Edge of Destruction and The Brink of Disaster. The Doctor-lite episode, Midnight is effectively a single-set base-under-siege story as the Doctor is trapped on the coach trip from hell as he embarks on a day’s excursion to see a sapphire waterfall. (“… A waterfall, made of sapphires!”) What makes this stand out from the usual base-under-siege stories is the quality of the writing and the strength of the individual performances. David Tennant and Lesley Sharp (as the possessed Sky Silvestry) particularly shine, but the whole cast benefits from having one of Davies’ strongest scripts to get their teeth into. The script is so strong that you could see this working just as well on stage. Alice Troughton’s direction gives it extra weight, putting most psychological horror movies to shame. 

Just as we recover from the emotional rollercoaster, we are presented with an idea so obvious that I’m amazed it took the show nearly 50 years to do it. We need a Doctor-lite episode – let’s do an episode that dares ask the question, “What if the Doctor weren’t around to save the earth?”

There’s joyous energy to most of Davies’ work on Doctor Who. From the beginning of his tenure, we were promised the “trip of a lifetime”. Now, four years in, Davies allows himself to explore the more darker aspect of the world of Doctor Who. Just as Midnight shows how vicious human beings can get when presented against overwhelming odds (just look how willing the passengers are to kill Mrs Silvestry to save themselves), we get similar darkness as we watch society crumble due to the crash-landed Titanic from last Christmas because the Doctor wasn’t there to stop it. All this told through the eyes of Donna and her family. Family is key to much of Davies’ work (most recently in 2019’s Years and Years) and it is watching the Nobles survive the changing world around them (with a little help from the dimension-hopping Rose Tyler) that makes this unlike anything Doctor Who has attempted before. At times, it feels like a Wednesday Play or a Play for Today (the BBC’s anthology drama strands broadcast from the 1960s until the 1980s) with Whoish elements thrown in. Once again, this is a testament to the trust the BBC was putting in the team at Cardiff that they could get away with a piece like this. Jolly Saturday teatime fair this isn’t.

There are hints throughout the series that we are leading up to something big. There’s something about the Doctor/Donna team that makes them seem closer, at times almost symbiotic. Certainly not romantic (the running gag throughout is: “We’re not married.”) but something else. There are hints in Turn Left from Rose that there is something important about Donna and in the closing two-parter, Stolen Earth/ Journey’s End, we get to find out. 

The closing episodes of this series are really Davies’ big finale. The specials form a coda, but this is where Davies’ story ends. And he brings everyone back for a curtain call. 

The Stolen Earth/ Journey’s End is spectacular. Not perfect, but spectacular nevertheless. It is so quintessentially Doctor Who I sometimes find myself pointing to it and saying, this is why I love this show. 

The villains hatch a ridiculous plan that makes no sense. The Daleks are transporting planets (just like they were trying to do in The Dalek Invasion of Earth) so they can use them to wipe out reality (of course). It has Daleks on a suburban street. It has Bernard Cribbins fighting the invaders with a paint gun (echoing the Doctor fighting off the Pyrovilles earlier in the series with a water pistol). It has a long rambling scene consisting mainly of the Doctor and the chief villain (Davros in this case) discussing the villain’s plan and philosophy (this time: why so many people are willing to kill in the name of a self-declared man of peace.)

Most of all, it is a love letter to the last four years of Doctor Who. A love letter to the creations both old and new that made this iteration such a success. You can imagine the applause if this were filmed in front of a live studio audience when we cut to Cardiff and we see the Torchwood gang, the whoop when we catch up with Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke, and the roar of appreciative delight when the Daleks tell former prime minister Harriet Jones that yes, they know who she is.

It’s gripping and has a relentless pace and a cliffhanger that can only be done once. I still remember watching The Stolen Earth with a friend of mine after the pub on that Saturday night. He had yet to see it and I already had. As we approached the climax, I watched him as the ‘regeneration’ kicked in. I’ve never seen someone’s jaw drop as much as his did that night.

In the midst of all this spectacle, we reach the conclusion of Donna Noble’s story. The recurring theme of her not believing in herself, not recognising her strengths, not seeing the empathy she shows to the aliens she encounters, and how she makes the Doctor a better person and how the Doctor/Donna partnership is so much more than the sum of its parts comes to a head. Donna literally becomes the Doctor-Donna – she absorbs the Time Lord’s memories. The best temp in Chiswick becomes something more than a Time Lord. The spark that makes Donna Donna ignites whatever makes the Doctor the Doctor and produces a being that can seemingly solve anything with the flip of a few levers. Yes, the resolution borders on parody (“Closing all Z-Neutrino relay loops…”) and yet it works; it felt earnt.

The tragedy of all this is that it can’t last. The woman who didn’t believe in herself, yet was capable of saving reality, has probably the most tragic ending of any Doctor Who companion (yes, even Dodo). The human mind can’t contain all that Time Lord knowledge; the Doctor is forced to wipe her memory. We leave her with her Grandad and Mum. A Mum who we hope finally realises what a unique and wonderful daughter she has. “Maybe you should tell her that once in a while”, the Doctor tells Sylvia Noble. Words that hopefully have as much effect as “Don’t you think she looks tired?” did on the political career of Harriet Jones when this Doctor was but a few hours old.

Out of all the Doctor Who that has been made over the last 50-odd years, it is this one that exemplifies why we love this show so much. It’s funny, scary, and heartbreakingly tragic. It makes us think, teaches us about our own history, and inspires us to write 2000+ word articles about it. The 2008 series of Doctor Who is Doctor Who at its most Doctor Who. I doubt we’ll ever see anything quite like this run of episodes again.

NEXT: Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

During the 1980s, Doctor Who fandom was entering a new phase, a phase of growth and creativity that is still going strong today. In particular, it was the celebrations of the 20th anniversary year, 1983, that started a template for the relationship between Doctor Who and its fans that hasn’t really changed. And arguably this template has been repeated to a lesser or greater degree across other fantasy franchises. We could go as far to say that the 20th anniversary celebrations for a quirky family show on the BBC were the precursor to the fan culture seen at the massively attended San Diego Comic Cons of the 21st Century.

Doctor Who had always had a loyal following (as the existence of this very website attests) and fan clubs had been in existence since the 1960s. By 1976, the BBC, observing the importance of these groups, would recognise the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) as the official Doctor Who fan club. Starting with 70 members, by 1982 it had around 1,700 members. Regular newsletters gave fans the opportunity to share memories of the show’s past and the first tentative steps of documenting the show’s history had begun. From 1977, DWAS started hosting regular gatherings with invited guests: the Doctor Who convention was born.

Meanwhile, it was the happenings in the nation’s newsagents that would have the biggest effect on the rise of the dedicated Doctor Who fandom. Marvel’s Doctor Who Weekly had transitioned to monthly publication and with that came an increased number of text features – in particular, detailed articles related to the making of and the history of the show itself. This, alongside the repeat season The Five Faces of Doctor Who in 1981 and the vast range of Target novelisations of old stories in most bookshops, meant that even the most casual of Doctor Who fans had an awareness of the show’s history.

Always one to be acutely aware of giving fans what they want, the then-producer, John Nathan-Turner employed the service of one fan, Ian Levine, as continuity adviser. This lead to easter eggs appearing in the show – such as the flashback clips in 1982’s Earthshock. It was Levine who noticed that each story in the 20th anniversary season featured a returning element from the show’s history, and suggested that they should make a big deal out of this. Levine also suggested Omega be the big reveal in the season’s opener, Arc of Infinity just as he had opened the season 10 years earlier in The Three Doctors.

Across the Atlantic, there was also a burgeoning fan scene. The BBC had sold the broadcast rights to several Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) channels in North America and the show gained many loyal viewers. Conventions started springing up and were doing big business, a step up for the not for profit events DWAS had been routinely doing since 1977.

It was this type of convention that John Nathan-Turner took the head of Exhibitions at BBC Enterprises, Terry Hampson and his deputy, Lorne Martin to when the idea of organising an event to celebrate Doctor Who’s 20th anniversary was first mentioned. The event they attended in Chicago was big with more than 5,000 attendees queuing for autographs, panel interviews, and photo opportunities. Hampson and Martin were really impressed and it was an event on this scale that they hoped to organise in the UK. Open to the general public, not just hardcore fans.

The result was Doctor Who – A Celebration. Held on the Bank Holiday weekend of April 1983 at Longleat House, the home of one of the two permanent Doctor Who exhibitions (the other was in Blackpool) that existed throughout the last three decades of the 20th Century (eventually closing in the early 2000s). The event took up six acres of the site with several marquees hosting many activities. Sets from the forthcoming story, The Five Doctors were displayed alongside visual effect demonstrations. Visitors could enter the make-up tent and get a ‘horror makeover’ (predating the face-painting phenomenon at family events that would emerge about a decade later) or, for a small fee, get a polaroid snap of you driving the Doctor’s little yellow roadster, Bessie. But what set this apart from being just a Doctor Who themed family day out was what the organisers had taken from the American events. One marquee housed a cinema, where old episodes were being shown throughout the day (remember this was before home video was a thing); another housed panel interviews with the invited guests; and there were several autograph sessions in the Orangery summer house. Nathan-Turner had persuaded over 20 guests to attend, including all four surviving Doctors. It’s hardly surprising that, with an event of this scale, it would become an important part of fan folklore. This was probably the single biggest gathering of Doctor Who fans ever and it really did become legendary for good reasons… and some not so good reasons.

You see, no one was quite prepared for how successful it was going to be. By March 30th, about a week before the event, 10,000 tickets had been sold. The gates opened at 10am and the already large queue of ticket holders were allowed in. Meanwhile, local radio stations were starting to report congestion in the surrounding area. It wasn’t just visitors affected: guest, Mark Strickson, who played Fifth Doctor companion Turlough, got stuck in traffic 20 miles from Longleat in the cab the BBC had sent to take him to the event. On arrival (several hours late), he had to be escorted by security (Royal Welsh Fusiliers wearing UNIT badges) to his panel. By 1 o’clock on that first day, the gates were closed, leaving many disappointed families unable to get in.

The venue was packed and everyone was shuffled along from marquee to marquee. Paul Cornell has commented how lifelong friendships were started in those crowds, how fanzines were started, and fan fiction created. Anyone who has been to an event like this will understand how this happens. Everyone is there for the same reason: you don’t need to find a common topic to talk about – the obvious subject is all around you. One can’t help but wonder if it was here that the creativity long associated with Doctor Who fandom was given a helpful nudge by the sheer weight of numbers at Longleat in 1983. Russell T Davies was there; Paul Cornell was there. Would Doctor Who have returned to our screens in 2005 if Doctor Who – A Celebration had not happened?

Overall, around 40,000 are said to have turned up over the two days. A phenomenal number of people, particularly when you compare it to the attendance of the similar event 30 years later. In 2013, for the show’s 50th anniversary, around 24,000 people attended a very similar BBC organised event across 3 days at a proper exhibition centre (the ExCel in East London). The two events are very similar. Attendees got to see exhibits from the show, panels with stars and backstage people, merchandise, autographs, and, of course, queues. It seems that aside from better organisation, conventions haven’t really evolved that much over the years. BBC Radio 2 got involved on both occasions by broadcasting live from each event (Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart in 1983 and Graham ‘surprise cameo in Rose’ Norton 30 years later).

Teased by the sets exhibited, many fans returning from Longleat were now looking forward to the anniversary story itself which was broadcast on Friday 25th November. Looking back, it seems like an odd decision to not broadcast The Five Doctors on the anniversary itself. Particularly when, notoriously, the story became the first to be shown in the US rather than the UK when PBS channels aired it two days earlier on the anniversary day. But then you consider when they did broadcast it. The BBC handed over 90 minutes of their annual charity fundraising telethon Children In Need, which had been broadcast annually since 1980, to an episode of Doctor Who. They saw Who as a major draw and had clearly learnt something from the queues at the Longleat event.

The American broadcast on the 23rd itself was for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Doctor Who was very much cult viewing in the States. Appearing on several local PBS channels, sometimes late at night, it was a show fans sought out so a midweek broadcast was neither here nor there. It was also broadcast in conjunction with the other big convention of 1983, Doctor Who: The Ultimate Celebration in Chicago the weekend of 26th and 27th November.

Over 7,000 delegates descended on Chicago’s Regency Hotel that weekend for what was a huge event. The man behind it was successful Chicago-based lawyer Norman Rubenstein. He was keen to run a convention that was to be “run by a business as a business”. Truly the age of the fan convention being a commercial venture was underway.

Rubenstein wanted to host the biggest Doctor Who convention ever. Accordingly, he treated the invited guests in a lavish manner. He flew them over on First Class flights, put them up in hotel suites, and, rumour has it, paid each Doctor a five figure appearance fee.

Guests that attended what became known as the Spirit Of Light Convention (after Rubenstein’s company) included the four surviving Doctors, other stars such as Carole Ann Ford (Susan), Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), and Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier) as well as directors, Fiona Cummings and Peter Moffat. Extensive advertising on local TV (with a commercial voiced by Jon Pertwee) and in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly meant 5,000 people had pre-registered for the event by the middle of October.

In addition to the Longleat and Chicago celebrations, 1983 also included a whole weekend in October to screening old episodes of the show at the National Film Theatre (NFT) (now known as BFI, the British Film Institute) on London’s South Bank. Set up to help publicise the John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s media studies textbook, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, the weekend featured whole stories from each Doctor’s era as well as selected episodes from other tales and also featured a celebrity panel on the Sunday afternoon. The Sunday panel was notable for it being only the second appearance of Patrick Troughton at a Doctor Who event. After this year, Troughton became a regular at Doctor Who shows until his untimely death in 1987.

Doctor Who being used as the basis of an academic textbook was quite remarkable in 1983, so too was the publication in September of an expensive (£10.95) coffee table book: Doctor Who: A Celebration – Two Decades Through Time and Space.

Peter Haining was the writer tasked with putting the book together. Haining, a journalist who had gone on to become an editor of several anthologies of horror, science fiction, and detective stories, admitted himself that he wasn’t much of a fan of the show, let alone an expert. Despite this, and with a bibliography that included non-fiction books about Dracula, Frankenstein, and Jules Verne, he was seen by publishers WH Allen as the ideal person to create something that would appeal to casual viewers as well as more dedicated fans. The book ended up selling over 10,000 copies resulting in many households owning a lavishly illustrated book that, thanks to Haining’s extensive research, gave a rich insight into the show’s first 20 years. Truly a book worthy of the anniversary year and something again that would open eyes to the rich tapestry of Doctor Who and probably helped create a few more dedicated fans. The success of the book lead to Haining penning another four over the next few years.

Amongst all this, one thing did happen during this anniversary year which could have derailed all the celebrations. Towards the end of July, Peter Davison announced he was to quit the show and that the 1984 series would be his last. The publicity around this was handled well. In the year the show was celebrating its history, Davison used this to his advantage by suggesting that advice given to him by former Doctor Patrick Troughton as the reason for him leaving. A month later, Colin Baker was cast as Doctor Number 6 meaning that by the time of The Five Doctors, the change of actor was yesterday’s news. Proving that history has a habit of repeating itself, the same sequence of events happened during the 50th anniversary. At the beginning of June 2013, Matt Smith announced he was stepping down from the role (albeit after an internal BBC email was leaked) and then two months later, Peter Capaldi was revealed as his replacement.

With a celebration at a stately home, an international convention at a Chicago Hotel, an NFT retrospective, an academic text-book, a coffee table book, a feature-length special (and all the publicity surrounding it), a Radio Times special (not to mention a specially commissioned cover for the regular edition), Doctor Who had never been in the public eye so much. Looking back at this year, it’s interesting to reflect on a similar time 30 years later. 1983 felt like the celebrations lasted all year, while 2013 felt very concentrated on the anniversary itself. From the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time (broadcast on 21st November) to Doctor Who Live: The After Party (also known as The One Direction Show) the celebrations of 2013 felt very centred around November. And despite the problems with a link-up in The After Party, everything felt better organised. The BBC had learnt a lot from those early, tentative steps of 1983 and it seems they took full advantage of what they had learnt in the interim time between when Doctor Who first ruled the world and the second.

It’s hard to overlook the similarities between the events of 1983 and 2013. Both featured a big BBC organised convention. Both had a special episode broadcast. There were retrospectives at the NFT/BFI on London’s South Bank. And in both years, the lead actor quit. Which got me thinking: How much we should read into this? Now, I don’t want to worry anyone, but six years after Doctor Who was first celebrated in such a huge way it disappeared from our screens. Fortunately, we are promised a new series in 2020, so I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.

NEXT: To days to come.