Where to start with classic Doctor Who?

Over on popular social media site Facebook, one of my pals said she was planning to explore the world of classic Doctor Who and I took it upon myself to recommend two stories by each classic Doctor as an introduction (one from each seemed simply too few). As part of my campaign to become a major force in Doctor Who fandom, I present my list here, with non-spoilery notes as to why I have picked them. If you are classic-Who curious, consider starting here. If you are already familiar with classic-Who, consider leaving comments berating me for my poor choices.

First Doctor
The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell, from 1963 to 1966. Initially the Doctor is almost anti-heroic, having basically kidnapped two school teachers and taken them with him and his granddaughter on his travels through time and space. At first it is the disgruntled school teachers who fulfil the more heroic roles required by the plot, but that gradually changes.

• "The Daleks" - the second story from the First Doctor and the series' first not set on Earth (in classic Doctor Who it was not unusual for stories to be set on other planets). This is notable for its introduction of the titular Daleks, whose massive popularity is said to have pushed the series in a more science-fictiony direction than originally envisaged.
• "The Tenth Planet" - the last story from the First Doctor, as William Hartnell was retiring due to ill health (one of the episodes had to be hastily rewritten to explain the Doctor's absence, as Hartnell was too ill to record it). The story introduces the Cybermen, who would go on to be the other one of Doctor Who's star monsters, and it ends with the astonishing twist of the dying Doctor transforming into someone else (something that is now unremarkable in Doctor Who but back then was a real "with one bound, Jack was free" moment).

Second Doctor
The Second Doctor was played by Patrick Troughton, from 1966 to 1969. The recordings of many of his stories were wiped by the BBC, so picking ones to recommend is not easy.

• "Power of the Daleks" - this is the first Second Doctor story. As the title suggests, it features Daleks, as apparently the production team decided was a good idea to have familiar monsters while the audience found their feet with the strange new Doctor. Important caveat: all original visual recordings of this story were lost, but home audio recordings have been combined with new animation to recreate the story; if you fear animation this may not be the story for you.
• "The War Games" - this is the last Second Doctor story. it goes on a bit (ten 25 minute episodes). At the start it appears to be a straightforward historical adventure set on the Western Front in the First World War, before we discover that something else entirely is going on. The story is notable for the first appearance en masse of the Time Lords, the Doctor's own people, from whom he is estranged.

Third Doctor
The Third Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, from 1970 to 1974. Doctor Who is now in colour. Initially the Third Doctor finds himself marooned on the Earth, with UNIT (a military organisation whose members serve as helpful cannon fodder) providing a larger supporting cast than previously seen.

• "Inferno" - the Doctor is drawn towards the Inferno project, where scientists are working to drill through the Earth's crust to access the limitless stores of energy to be found down below. Things start to go very wrong, and thanks to an audacious plot device we see them going wrong twice. As well as the UNIT army types, this also features their scientific advisor, Dr. Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John), one of the great Doctor Who assistants.
• "Terror of the Autons" For this one the Doctor is still stuck on Earth, but now he must deal with an attempted invasion by the Autons, plastic people animated by a malign alien intelligence (who later appeared in the first new Doctor Who story). Worse, the story introduces his great adversary, the Master (played by Roger Delgado), another Time Lord, an old friend of the Doctor, but also a psychopath seeking power and his own advancement. And if that wasn't enough, there is a character from Northern Ireland.

Fourth Doctor
The Fourth Doctor was played by Tom Baker, from 1974 to 1981. The Fourth Doctor is my Doctor, as little me started watching the series with his first story. I find it hard to narrow his stories down to just two, not just because of my familiarity with them but because I genuinely think that the first three seasons of the Fourth Doctor are the highlight of the show's entire history, with almost the entirety of the stories being all-killer-no-filler.

• "The Seeds of Doom" - beginning in Antarctica before moving to rural England, this story's themes of infection and transformation are reminiscent of both Alien and The Thing, both of which came out several years after this was broadcast. It also features one of the all-time great barking mad human villains.
• "The Robots of Death" - this is set on an alien world where decadent humans have creepy art deco robots to do all the work for them. The Doctor lands on a sand miner, on which a small group of humans and their robot crew are extracting valuable minerals from sand storms, only the humans are being mysteriously murdered. The writing and characterisation is very strong in this one and the art design of the robots is also impressive. The story features Leela, the Doctor's knife-wielding savage companion, impressively portrayed by Louise Jameson.

Fifth Doctor
The Fifth Doctor was played by Peter Davison from 1982 to 1984. My recollection of this Doctor is that he was surprisingly un-dynamic and spent a lot of his time being sad about how things turned out.

• "Earthshock" - massive caveat, I have not seen since this since it was first broadcast, but I remember it packing a real punch and being packed full of what 2000 AD readers know as Thrill Power. The story features the surprise return of an old enemy (the surprise being somewhat spoiled by their appearance on the DVD of the story) and one of the more downbeat endings in Doctor Who's history).
• "The Caves of Androzani" - the last Fifth Doctor story, this one was written by great Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes and sees the Doctor caught up in a complex struggle over between a corrupt plutocrat and a phantom-of-the-opera style robot builder of questionable sanity.

Sixth Doctor
The Sixth Doctor was played by Colin Baker from 1984 to 1986. It is a bit harder to pick stories from Colin Baker's tenure as there are not that many of them (those three years include 18 months when the show was on hiatus). Also, the programme is somewhat on the slide in these years, with Colin Baker's entire second season taken up with the frankly terrible "Trial of a Timelord". But there is still some good stuff in there.

• "Vengeance on Varos" - on the titular planet the apathetic population can watch live torture on their television screens and if they don't like decisions by the planet's leader they can vote to give him electric shocks. Meanwhile a creepy slug-like alien (played by Nabil Shaban, a fascinating character in his own right) is pushing the Varosians into an unequal trade deal. The violence in the story was controversial, despite the anti-violence theme of the story, but I suspect that by our standards it would look pretty tame.
• "The Two Doctors" - the Sixth Doctor meets up with the Second Doctor! And they find themselves up against warlike aliens the Sontarans and some other gourmand aliens who have travelled to Earth in order to eat people. Somewhat unusually, the aliens land in Spain rather than in England. I think this one has a poor reputation, but I remember it as being an enjoyable romp.

Seventh Doctor
The Seventh Doctor was played by Sylvester McCoy from 1987 to 1989. His tenure is the hardest for me to pick stories to recommend. For all that I still like his portrayal of the character, the stories he was given are generally poor and are marked by something of a collapse in production values. I have also seen relatively few of his stories in their entirety, both because I was at a stage of my life when watching television no longer seemed a priority and because they were not really worth watching. Perhaps I am missing some gems here, in which case I invite readers to point out my errors in the comments.

• "Remembrance of the Daleks" - in a burst of metafictionality, the Doctor returns to London in 1963 just before the broadcast of the first episode of Doctor Who, only to find that the Daleks are trying another of their invasions. While perhaps the story is not the strongest, this is pretty atmospheric and features one of the greatest end-of-episode cliff-hangers.
• "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" - I remember this as being set in some kind of strange alien circus and being a bit weird. Features clowns.

I hope you found that interesting, whether you are familiar or otherwise with classic Doctor Who. It has certainly piqued my interest in rewatching some old stories.

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The First Doctor, his granddaughter Susan, and the Daleks (Randomwhoness: Revision, reversion and The Daleks (1963/4))

"Tomb of the Cybermen" (1967)

This is a four episode story from the popular TV series Doctor Who. In this one the second Doctor and his pals Jamie (Scottish) and Victoria (Victorian) land on mysterious planet called Telos and fall in with some space archaeologists, who are looking for the eponymous tomb of the Cybermen. Said tomb turns out to be some class of trap laid by the rubbish cyborgs, though even after a close watching of this story I am still unclear as to what the Cybermen were hoping to accomplish that could not have been accomplished by not entombing themselves. For all the plot problem, the story just about deserves its reputation as a classic of early Doctor Who, with the episode two cliffhanger of the Cybermen waking up and bursting out of their cells being one of the programme's most memorable. The story also features the great stock character of Doctor Who, the human villain who thinks that by doing some kind of favour to implacable aliens they will assist him (usually him, though in this case also a her) in conquering the Earth; this always ends well.

Tomb of the Cybermen follows directly after Evil of the Daleks, in which said Daleks killed (nay, exterminated) Victoria's father. There is a quite touching scene in this story in which the Doctor (played by Patrick Troughton) talks to Victoria about grief and her memory of her father, referring obliquely to his own lost loved ones. In days of yore Doctor Who was primarily aimed at children, so I cannot but think this scene was intended as a comfort to any children who might themselves have lost family members.

The story also features Cybermats, which are kind of like rats that have been turned into animal versions of the Cybermen or something. I think they are meant to be threatening, but as is the way of such things they end up looking quite cute.

These days however Tomb of the Cybermen is often noted for its problematic racial stereotyping - Middle Eastern people are shifty while Africans (or the story's one African) are muscleheads. And Americans are all "gee golly" etc., showing yet again the downpression and negative stereotyping white Americans must endure on a daily basis. I thought maybe the stereotyping was not the worst I have ever seen, but then I am notorious for my unwoke nature.

image source (Wikipedia)

Octocon Day 3

Readers, apologies for the delay in bringing my Octocon write-up to a conclusion. In my defence let me say that I was very busy with my amazing World War 1 blog in the run up to the centenary of the Western Front armistice and then was away in Utrecht attending the Le Guess Who music festival. I also had my v important day job to attend to, but let's be honest, the real reason this is so late is that I am a slack-ass and have spent my time in dissipation when I should be blog-writing.

If the time-lag is so long that you have completely forgotten what previously happened at Octocon then let me refer you to part 1 and part 2. And if you are too busy refer back to those, a quick reminder: Octocon is the Irish national science fiction convention, which this year took place in the Crowne Plaza hotel in Blanchardstown.

Sunday morning, I made it out to Blanchardstown too late to catch the Sunday Service, at which John Vaughan talked further about the worst films he has seen this year (possibly featuring further unsound comments on Hereditary) and rofflin’ James Brophy talked about television. I did however make it to Janet O’Sullivan’s interview with comics creator Colleen Doran, Octocon’s other guest of honour. A lot of fascinating stuff came up here, not least regarding the materiality of the craft, with Doran drawing attention to the non-durable nature of the original comics art from a surprising number of artists, which is often drawn onto paper that falls apart over time with paint that will degrade even if the art is kept in a cupboard. Although she does write comics (both for other artists and herself), Doran works primarily as an artist and I was taken by her praise for writers she has worked with like Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman; she mentioned how when Alan Moore writes very detailed instructions to artists it is because he has thought very deeply about how the comic should look, which is sadly not the case with some other writers who have also taken to providing artists with ponderously descriptive scripts.

However, the Colleen Doran interview really ramped up towards the end when the subject of Comicsgate and online harassment. I have not been paying attention to comics in recent years but it appears that all those Gamergate Sad Puppy dipshit man-babies have moved on to comics and taken to harassing comics creators. Doran noted that harassment is something she has had to deal with from the earliest days of her time in comics but that it has escalated of late as the dipshits use social media to swarm their enemies. At the same time she reports that it is somewhat easier to deal with now because the targets are able to talk amongst themselves, thereby realising that they are not being singled out for dipshit attention. It also appears to be the case that male comics creators are now receiving their own share of targeted harassment, making them suddenly aware of what their female colleagues have had to put up with for years. What is still a bit problematic about all of this is that the comics companies are pushing (sometimes requiring) the creators to establish social media presences but are being a bit slack about assisting them when they start attracting attention from the arseholes.

An unfortunate consequence of attending the wonderful Colleen Doran interview was that I missed a session on the new season of Doctor Who, but I did make it to a live recording of the CinePunked podcast by Robert JE Simpson and Rachael Kelly, at which they discussed the mid-1970s sudden and possibly coincidental appearance of three Frankenstein-related films in a short period, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Young Frankenstein (1974). The last two of these are obviously homages to vintage horror and SF films while the first one was the last film of old Hammer, making it almost a homage to itself (and featuring David Prowse, subsequently of Darth Vader fame, as the Monster). I have somehow never made it to a podcast recording before and have a surprisingly limited exposure to podcasts themselves (if I wanted to hear people talk I would turn on the radio or pay attention to the people at work) so I was fascinated by the process, in particular the completely and preternaturally fluid nature of the conversation between Mr Simpson & Dr Kelly. I was also struck by their comment on how much the 1931 Boris Karloff film defined how we think of Frankenstein and the Monster, introducing tropes like the hunchbacked assistant and the Monster being stitched together from corpses (Shelley herself never describes the monster thus and is deliberately oblique as to how the Monster was created or indeed what he looks like). The problematic sexual consent issues raised by all three of these films added to a troubling and recurring theme for the weekend. That said, for me the panel never really grappled with the question of whether the roughly simultaneous appearance of these three Frankenstein-related films was merely coincidental or whether there was something in the air that caused these three works to appear in a short period (and if so what that something was). The fact that roughly the same period also the Frankenstein-themed Doctor Who story, The Brain of Morbius (1976), so maybe there genuinely was something in the Zeitgeist. But what?

Much of the rest of my time at Octocon was taken up with the Golden Blasters, which is a science fiction short film competition run by none other than John Vaughan. This year previous winners were competing for the most golden blaster of them all, with winners of the Silver Blaster (the audience award) also thrown into the mix. This allowed me to see again films I had seen at previous Octocons in 2017 and 2015 as well as some works that were new to me. Olga Osorio's Einstein-Rosen, the winner of both Golden and Silver Blaster in 2017 once again one both prizes. It is an entertaining tale of two kids who discover a wormhole to the future outside their apartment block, an amusing mix of just about credible funny science and some disarming performances from the child actors (the author-director's sons), it was a worthy winner. I know, you're thinking, "A cute kids film? I think not", but there is a genuine charm to the two boys' performances.

Nevertheless, with my own taste for darker fare made me prefer Sleepworking by Gavin Williams, a creepy tale about a future in which people can earn extra money by renting themselves out while they sleep to perform menial tasks as somnambulists. The creepiness comes in when two of the sleepworkers start remembering flashes of their slumbering labours, with the whole thing being very evocative of the confused state of those who are never quite sure whether they are awake or dreaming. On a lighter note, I was happy to renew my acquaintance with Andrew Chambers' The Detectives of Noir Town, a film that manages in its short length to be more than just Roger Rabbit with puppets. I was also intrigued by John Kim's Steadfast Stanley, an animated film about a good dog in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and found Simon Cartwright & Jessica Cope's steampunk stop-motion The Astronomer's Sun to be both mysterious and poignant.

The call of a pint and convivial chit chat after the Blasters meant that I missed the last proper panels and the ever-interesting round-up of upcoming cons, but I did make the closing ceremony of the convention at which Chair Janet O'Sullivan revealed two pieces of amazing news. Firstly, even though Worldcon is coming to Dublin next year, there will also be a mini-Octocon, probably a one day event taking place once more in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Blanchardstown. The reasoning here was that for various reasons some people will not be able to go to Worldcon but will still want to get together with other science fiction fans at a smaller, shorter and more intimate event. The other piece of sensational news was that Raissa Perez (this year's volunteer coordinator) is joining Janet as co-chair, putting Octocon into another pair of safe hands.

That was pretty much it. Some people found a way of watching the third episode of the current Doctor Who series (the one about Rosa Parks). I was one of these people. The experience reinforced my view that the current Doctor Who series represents something of a levelling up by the series. Perhaps more of that anon. It also reminded me of how much fun is to be had with shared viewings of good things. And then we were off first to enjoy a meal with houseguest Nicholas Whyte and then home to feed our hungry cat.

For another view of Octocon day three, see this post by SaraWIMM.

Suspicious Similarity

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Inside the giant panda research centre - in pictures (Guardian)

Story 29 - The Tenth Planet (Tardis Musings)

An inuit panda production

My Life in Music

In the pages of Frank's APA I somehow found myself reminiscing on music and my early life. Read on to join me in a trip down memory lane.

My recollection is that my parents did not listen to music that much when I was young, though the things they did listen to they listened to a lot. So I remember my dad having a Neil Diamond compilation that he played all the time. My dad had - and has - a fondness for extreme heat, so I associate the Neil Diamond record with sitting in a stifling hot front room on a Saturday evening. My dad also had some tapes of music by Planxty that would get played in the car. I remember being a bit scandalised by some of the risqué lyrics.


My parents had some older vinyl records, which we would listen to on a Dansette that was given to my sister and I when my dad got himself a more advanced sound system. I think these included a couple of musical soundtracks, with a cast recording from a stage production of The Sound of Music particularly sticking in my head.


At some point I started developing my own interest in music and mastered the art of taping songs off the radio. However, I was only able to do this for a while, as before too long the taping facility of my dad's sound system packed in. If those tapes still existed and were playable they might be an interesting record of my own pop tastes back in the early 1980s.

What might be especially fascinating would be the tracks I taped from when one of the pirates counted down through the songs its listeners had voted as their favourites, a concept that was entirely new to me at the time. I was very excited by this and expected that it would reveal the official greatest songs ever. I can still remember some of the songs in the top ten, and they were a pretty sorry bunch of late 1970s softy rock - 'Lying Eyes' by The Eagles, 'Follow You Follow Me' by Genesis, shite like that. But the number one track was 'Stairway to Heaven', and I think this would have been the first time I heard it.


The first record I ever bought with my own money was a cassette of Adam and the Ants' Prince Charming. But more iconic for me is my first vinyl album, a second hand copy of Geoff Love and His Orchestra's Star Wars and Other Space Themes (officially the first record I bought with my own money, though a cassette copy of Prince Charming by Adam And The Ants may actually have that honour). This is an odd record. Geoff Love (and his orchestra) play a number of themes to science fiction films and TV programmes. In several cases, they rearrange the tracks into disco tunes. At the time, this rather annoyed me, but now it is a key part of why this record has remained in my collection. The cover is also amusing; the record company clearly did not have permission to reproduce identifiable material from the various films and programmes, so the cover shows things that look similar to but not too like recognisable space ships and characters.

In secondary school I did not really hang out with the kewl kids who liked kewl music, so I did not pick up anything from them. Most of my friends were largely indifferent to music although one of them was a bit more seriously into it, though his tastes failed to rub off on me. As I grew older I remember getting a number of records as Christmas presents, because I asked for them - the likes of U2's Unforgettable Fire, The Very Best of Christ de Burgh (pre-'Lady in Red'), Kate Bush's The Whole Story, Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms and, on cassette, Talking Heads' Little Creatures. A copy of Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet had also come into my life. I remember also having a strong interest in musicals around this time, largely through being in them at the time and having naïve aspirations towards writing them with a more musically talented schoolmate.

Time passed, I went to college, and I met the people who became more formed influences on my musical taste. For some reason it was only at this point that I registered the existence of the music press. Not too long after leaving college I joined Frank's APA, a collective of people who have remained the biggest shaper of my musical interests.

Neil Diamond His 12 Greatest Hits

The Very Best of Chris de Burgh

An inuit panda production

Elisabeth Sladen

When I was very small, I used to watch Doctor Who. Tom Baker played the Doctor, Ian Marter played Harry, and Elisabeth Sladen played Sarah Jane Smith, who was kind of like all your nice primary school teachers rolled into one. After a while Ms Sladen left Dr Who, but she went on to appear on a TV programme for small people called Stepping Stones. After a while she stopped appearing on that as well and largely disappeared from the television. Some years later she showed up in a not-very-good Dr Who spin-off called K9 and Company, before returning to make occasional appearances on non-canonical nu-Dr Who.

Ian Marter died some years ago. And today I read that Elisabeth Sladen too has died, aged 63. Here is her last appearance on Doctor Who.

Suspicions confirmed

Like many people I watched some Dr Who yesterday, but it was old Doctor Who from 25 years ago, called Resurrection of the Daleks. This one was about the Daleks (hence the title), who were trying to bust a rather sulky Davros out of jail so he could make them immune to some virus. For plot device reasons they were storing samples of this virus in a disused warehouse in London's docklands, connected to their space ship by a "time corridor". The Doctor manages to defeat the Daleks (obv.), but his annoying Australian companion Tegan Jovanka decides she has had enough time travel and leaves.

One of the most striking things about the story was Tegan's rather outlandish costume. It may have been the kind of thing that young ladies wore back in the early 1980s, but it did lead to ongoing "WTF?" reactions every time she came on screen (see image; Tegan is the one to the right). There was an accompanying bonus feature in which then Dr Who producer John Nathan Turner and Janet Fielding (who played Tegan) appeared on some early morning breakfast programme (itself a fascinating relic of the early 1980s). JNT confirmed that the rather revealing costumes the lady assistants wore were primarily designed to appeal to any dads who might be viewing.

image source

Ice Volcanoes???

I remember years ago reading about some olde Doctor Who, probably PLANET OF THE DALEKS, in which an ice volcano featured, this being some kind of volcano that splurged out ice rather than molten rock. I took this to be yet another occasion on which the Doctor Who science advisor had been smoking the crack, but now it turns out that today's scientists think there might be ice volcanoes on Titan, the enormous moon of Saturn, the well-known ringed planet.

It is not believed that the Daleks are building a secret base on Titan.

More

TV: Christmas 2007 Dr Who

It was quite a while ago now. It was also rubbish. It's a while since I have seen any nu-Who… is it all this bad? The Poseidon Adventure in space premise was enjoyable enough, but the ponderous scene on the narrow bridge across the abyss was straight out of the book of hackneyed clichés. And the music was dreadful, in the wrong kind of bombastic way. On the other hand, Kylie Minogue was surprisingly pleasant, and looked far less like the Aphex Twin than she does in photographs.

Doctor Who and THE DAY OF THE DALEKS

In an oh-the-nostalgia kind of way, I am re-reading this classic Terrence Dicks adaptation of a Pertwee-era Doctor Who story. This was always one of my favourites of the Target novelisations, and it still has it. The story is one of those ones about people from the future coming back in time to change their past. In this case, the future is one where a nuclear war left the world so weakened that the Daleks were able to come along and take over, herding the survivors into monster concentration camps and forcing them to engage in back-breaking toil for unspecified Dalek purposes.

The two best things in this are the future resistance people and The Controller, the Daleks' quisling administrator of what was once Britain. The resistance people are plainly modelled on the kind of ker-azzy urban guerrilla and Palestinian militant types you have knocking around in the 1970s, with their favourable portrayal mirroring the almost film star qualities of people from then like Carlos The Jackal or Leila Khaled. At the same time, the book is not afraid to portray some of them as being just a bit too driven in their commitment to the freedom struggle. And in an interesting touch, they all have Middle Eastern sounding names.

The Controller, meanwhile, is probably the book's most complex and sympathetic character. His job involves being permanently bossed around by the Daleks and threatened with extermination should he fuck up, but for this he gets status and various little luxuries that his enslaved fellow humans can only dream about. Much of the book is told from his point of view, so you get a lot of the rationalisations he uses for self-justification. The Daleks are invincible, after all, so he might as well make the best of it for himself. And as Controller, he can do little things here and there to make the lot of the humans slightly less terrible. Or so he thinks.

Some years after reading this for the first time, I actually saw The Day of the Daleks on video. Like most Pertwee era Doctor Who, it was pretty rubbish. The lesson I have learned from this is simple – for Doctor Who from before Tom Baker, stick to the Target novelisations.

(book cover from the Wikipedia page on Day of the Daleks)

If you would like to read more about Day of the Daleks without bothering to read the book itself, the Kaldor City people have an article about it: Day of the Daleks, but Alan Stevens with Fiona Moore. The are looking more at the TV series than the book, and there is a worrying air of Continuity Nerdism about the article, but it does give a taster.

The Sixth Doctor: "The Ultimate Foe"

This is Colin Baker's last, and the last of the Trial of a Timelord. In this one the trial is over, and for no obvious reason the Doctor disappears in the Matrix, a weirdo computer generated landscape of existential threat. This one seemed a good bit more enjoyable than the rest of the Trial rubbish – it was baffling, absurdist, and reminiscent of the stranger episodes of The Prisoner (then very popular among my pals); the Prisoner similaries were heightened by it being revealed that the Timelord guy who was prosecuting the Doctor was actually the evil side of his personality from the future (or something).

I will at some stage talk in general terms about the whole of the Colin Baker "Doctor Who" era. Stay tuned.

The Sixth Doctor

I bet you are wondering when I am going to finish running through the Sixth Doctor's stories.

The Sixth Doctor: "Terror of the Vervoids"

One of my friends once asserted that much of the Vervoids' terror came from their having vaginas on their heads. Many were more perturbed by Bonnie Langford arriving to play the Doctor's new companion.

The Sixth Doctor: "Mindwarp"

Sadly this does not see the Doctor squaring up against an excrement obsessed Hessian rocker. It does however feature companion Peri (played by lovely Nicola Bryant) marrying a character played by BRIAN BLESSED.

A top tip – do not undertake a Google image search for "Peri", unless you like images of peri-rectal abscesses.

The Sixth Doctor: "The Mysterious Planet"

This was the first of the totally suckass Trial of a Timelord linked season of stories, in which every story would be periodically be interrupted by a cut back to a courtroom where the prosecution would tiresomely assert that whatever was happening was proof of the Doctor's badness. The rubbishness of the framing device largely overshadows the individual stories. This one may have featured a loveable rogue character called Savalon Glitz. This fellow was showing up as a guest character in stories around this time.

I was reading that nearly every episode in the Trial of a Timelord season ended with a cliffhanger close up of the Doctor's face, presumably while he was going "Noooooooo!" in a Crisis on Infinite Earths styleeeee.

The Sixth Doctor: "Revelation of the Daleks"

The Daleks have opened up a mortuary home somewhere and are turning people into Daleks. Oh noes! I think general anti-Sixth Doctor sentiment has poisoned opinion against this one, but I remember enjoying it. The Glass Dalek (containing someone in the middle of the Dalekisation process), Alexei Sayle, and some futuristic space knight guy are the things that loom largest in my mind.

The Sixth Doctor: "Timelash"

This was not very good. I recall it having H.G. Wells in it as a character for no obvious reason, and while Paul Darrow might also be playing someone, he never says anything along the lines of "Villa... Where are you Villa?". This story ends with some odd looking fellow being lashed through time, only to end up in Loch Ness, where he presumably is eaten by the giant monster the Zygons were previously revealed to have living there.

The Sixth Doctor: "The Two Doctors"

The Sixth Doctor meets the Second Doctor! And Jamie! Gourmand aliens come to earth on holiday, determined to dine on the finest meats available, including human flesh! The Sontarans are somehow involved!

I don not understand why this story is not remembered as a classic to rival The Brian of Morbius.

The Sixth Doctor: "The Mark of the Rani"

At the time, DWM tried to talk up The Rani, a renegade lady Timelord played by Kate O'Meara, but they did not bother trying to claim that this story was anything other than formulaic rubbish.

The Sixth Doctor: "Vengeance on Varos"

The Doctor travels to the planet Varos where political leaders are tortured to death on live TV if the public thinks they have made unwise decisions; torture generally seems to be the planet's main TV entertainment. The various torture scenes proved somewhat controversial at the time, with people not necessarily registering that the story was actually suggesting that TV violence might be a bad thing. Nowadays, though, I gather people see this as all a bit heavy handed, kind of like A Clockwork Orange without the clever dialogue. I bet the torture scene are rally lame too. Nevertheless, I remember this story fondly, but then it is over twenty years since I saw it. One plot device that seemed to work well was having a Varos family at home whose sole involvement in the story was to watch TV and occasionally vote on whether people should be tortured or not.

One thing I remember as being particularly striking about this story was the main villain, a repulsive slug-like alien called Sil. I remember being a bit uncomfortable when I registered that Sil was played by a disabled actor called Nabil Shaban. I mean, it's nice that disabled actors can get parts in popular TV programmes, but it is maybe a bit problematic if they only get to play repulsive slug-like aliens.