Dimensions In Time: Rank - 295

      Dimensions In Time

(30th Anniversary Special, Drs 3 4 5 6 and 7 with Susan, Victoria, Brigadier, Liz Shaw, Capt Mike Yates, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, Romana II, K9, Nyssa, Peri, Mel and Ace, 26-27/11/1993, producer/showrunner: John Nathan-Turner, writer: David Roden and John Nathan-Turner, director: Stuart McDonald)

Rank: 295

In an emoji: 👓

'Leave the girl - it's the Mr Blobby I want! Actually on second thoughts maybe I don't...'

Well strike me with a magluthian slime skinner, this is an odd one! Being a Dr Who fan in the 1990s was painful. We only got two stories in the whole decode and neither of them felt like Dr Who. Especially this one – even though it featured no less than five of them (the most we’ve ever had in any story to date as played by the ‘proper’ actors!) It’s a measure of just how badly Dr Who’s stock had fallen that the show’s 30th anniversary was celebrated not with a big budget spectacular using the latest 3D technology taking Hollywood by storm (as per 50th anniversary ‘Day Of the Doctor’) but in a 12 minute fundraiser for charity Children In Need, where it was used as the guinea pig for cheap 3D technology that just wasn’t there yet. Poor Dr Who wasn’t even allowed to stand on its own feet as a proper segment: instead it’s a crossover with another long-running BBC programme ‘Eastenders’ and was cut in two, the first seven minute part going out on the charity theme night and the second five minute part going out as part of Noel’s House Party the following night, watched by Noel Edmonds with a smiling Jon Pertwee. Which goes to show just what a fine actor he was (why five minutes? Apparently Edmonds had a strop and said it was too long so had it trimmed by two minutes so he could fit in more quality entertainment. Like gunging celebrity guests –thankfully a fate Pertwee avoided – and more larks with Mr Blobby, a sort of accident-prone pink version of the Gel Guards from ‘The Three Doctors’. Actually sadly Mr Blobby isn’t there: with his weird dress sense, clumsy enthusiasm and general air of rebellion he’s a natural for Dr Who. Admittedly his vocabulary is a bit limited but then so was everyone’s in the Chris Chibnall era). No less than no less than eighteen actors who’d been in the series made a return for free – nineteen if you count John Leeson ever so briefly voicing K9 – which should make it the biggest fan favourite of ever. Instead fans hate it. The resulting fiasco is misguided to say the least: the 3D technology didn’t work properly, the story confused the heck of out of a general audience or curious Eastenders fans who didn’t know what was going on (even longterm fans struggle to be honest) and set the show’s return back by at least twelve years. 

 How did this monstrosity ever make it to television? Good intentions. The new BBC head of features, Nick Handel, was put in charge of organising that year’s Children In Need fundraiser and by chance he’d been given his big break by one-time Dr Who producer John-Nathan Turner, as a drummer in one of his infamous Christmas pantos. He was an obvious person to call and despite doing his best to break away from the show and move on with his career JNT was struck by how good a reunion could be while the producer had done a lot of charity work himself with and without the show. Only the BBc high-ups were still distrustful of show they said nobody would remember or watch so there were a few stipulations along with the go ahead: it couldn’t be too long, had to features many past Doctors companions and monsters as possible, had to use the fun new 3D technology that was a running theme for the night (with money raised for the charity through the sale of 99p 3D glasses), there had to be a further money raising phone number competition for audiences at home to ‘take part’ oh and there had to be a crossover with another BBC institution, just to make sure people actually watched the thing. Anyone else would have run a mile screaming, but say what you will about JNT he relished challenges and was eager to actually have a bash at writing a Who script himself despite never having a go before. Since leaving the BBC he’d been giving talks on television making and a lecture on scriptwriting from his experience working with writers, one eager participant of which was a young lad named David Mansell who’d sent him in piles of scripts for him to look at and was roped in too (though he was credited as ‘David Roden’ after it was discovered there was already a ‘David Mansell’ on the books at equity back in the days when you could only have one person per name – the same reason why David Tennant renamed himself Tennant instead of his real name McDonald). After aborted goes that included ‘Destination: Holocaust’ (a darker tale of the 7th Doctor and the Brigadier finding a crashed spaceship full of Cybermen, vetoed for needing expensive night shoots, model effects and lots of extras) and ‘Endgame’ (a re-match with The Celestial Toymaker in a script that Russell T Davies must surely have come across when writing ‘The Giggle’, with the Toymaker turning each of the then-seven Doctors into a clone of himself, which is sort of bi-regenerational, dropped when Michael Gough made it clear he wasn’t interested) they finally ended up with a vague crossover that could be altered more or less on the spot depending who was available. 

 For the crossover it was decided that Eastenders would be a great choice. The BBC soap opera had been running a long since 1985 and had a passionate fanbase of its own, while many Dr Who stars had either ended up there (Sophie Aldred had only just finished playing Suzi a few months earlier although she’d never got to visit the Walford Square set until Who) or Eastenders cast members had been in Who already (Leslie ‘Dirty Den’ Grantham had played a very similar part all round in ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’; conversely Bonnie Langford will be running up and down the market stalls as Carmel Kezami, a Salford regular herself about a decade or so on from her appearance here). It kind of fitted, too, as the sort of ‘ordinary’ world that the Doctor was always landing in on screen. Only there was a problem: Eastenders producer Leonard Lewis didn’t like the idea at all and given the own fast pace of making his programme decided Dr who could only have a day on the official Walford Square set, while he was only willing to allow a handful of actors from his show to come in (and for free on their day off indeed). Only Dr Who couldn’t possibly film twelve minutes in a day using new technology at that – in a soap opera that would be straightforward (all you have to do is point the camera at actors and laugh, sorry press record) but on a technically advanced show like Who forget it! The show was officially cancelled, until JNT realised that he shared an agent with regular Wendy Richards – then eight years into her stint as long-running regular Pauline Fowler – and asked for her help. She’d loved her time on Dr Who (she was nearly a companion herself after being cast in ‘The Faceless Ones’ back in 1967) and she knew a lot of her colleagues were so surely they could have a re-think, please? Begrudgingly Dr Who got three days instead. And best of all the Eastenders cast were sitting ducks, already on site because of the quirky way the soap opera is set up, with every actor on call nearby unless needed for a scene or having a set day off (one of them, Adam Woodyatt – Ian Beale on Eastenders – was such a Whovian he actually sneaked out from a scene he was meant to be shooting just so he could appear at the back of shot – he’s in the scene where the two Mitchell brothers walk in on Romana in a garage. Nowadays, of course, Dr Who fans know Eastenders better thanks to the brief clip of a cyber-ghost returning in the series in ‘Army Of Ghosts’). Now all that JNT needed were for his old friends on Who to say yes. 

And amazingly the very majority said yes. eager to take part, despite it being for free, half of them even travelling for hours to make it to the Eastenders set before rushing back to their day jobs. Most of them had never returned to Dr Who after leaving it so for some of the people involved it was a real coup: while Ace was still sort of semi-officially the current companion, Sarah Jane had got her own spin-off series, Susan had been in 20th special ‘The Five Doctors’ and the Brigadier came back at the drop of a hat, these are our first glimpses of Victoria, Liz Shaw, Mike Yates, Leela, Romana II, Nyssa, Peri and Mel since leaving the show, companions who in many cases we never thought we’d ever get to see again. In that sense alone it’s a worthwhile exercise in nostalgia. Jamie was set to appear too and had booked time off from his day job Emmerdale, but last minute difficulties meant that he had to be called back for a night shoot and didn’t make it on time. Some stars admittedly do better than others: Pertwee gets lots of screen time as the sort of ‘chief’ Doctor, Romana is the one companion to get an entire scene on her own and comes the closest to getting back into character (possibly because poor Sylvester McCoy was held up in traffic returning from rehearsals for West End play ‘The Invisible Man’ – the other Doctors looked at the scripts and cheekily delegated all the scifi technobabble at the end to him to learn!) while the Brigadier finally gets a scene with the 6th Doctor, giving Nicholas Courtney a ‘full house’ of acting with all the Doctors so far in some capacity (though admittedly he was Bret Vyon against Hartnell in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’). You have to feel, too, for poor Colin Baker: there he is, just seven years after being sacked from this show, still mildly angry at JNT for not sticking up for him against BBC head Michael Grade, returning for free out of his love for the series and then they give him the least screen time of all the Doctors and instead of a planned reunion with Jamie (Colin and Frazer had been quite a double act making ‘The Two Doctors’) he was stuck with Carole Ann Ford as Susan complaining that he wasn’t a ‘proper’ Doctor. Anyone less professional would have walked off the set.Tom Baker was the big sticking point: referring to the script as ‘whippet shit’ but JNT knew that as the face most associated with the series he had to be there. For a while it looked as if the production team was down to recycling unused clips from ‘Shada’ again but finally Baker compromised on the understanding that he do a scene at home, without having to travel or share time with the other Doctors and that it wouldn’t be in costume. Oh and the script had to be totally rewritten. Nervously JNT sent in a revised script, expecting a no-show but Baker had calmed down and agreed. JNT had also sneakily brought his old costume along out of storage and left it hanging on a hook hoping that Tom would fall in love with it and agree to wear it – which, amazingly, he did. 

 As for the baddies Kate O’Mara was an obvious choice, being a longtime friend of JNT’s and was only too eager to make her third appearance in the show. Alongside her had been written an assistant, one who – given that he got no onscreen credit – fandom affectionally called ‘Shagg’ (as in, we know what the Rani was getting up to in her tardis!) but was technically called ‘Cyrian’. That name’s actually a joke the writers knew would never be used on screen: JNT seriously thought he could get a big name star in to play this hapless role of just a few lines and hoped that ‘Sir Ian’ McKellan might take the role (after all, it worked with John Hurt twenty years later). McKellan apparently laughed hias head off at the idea of appearing in a show he didn’t understand for free in a freezing English town when he was making real money in Hollywood and turned it down. In the end they did get a star, of sorts, though a rising one: that’s Timothy West, son of actors Samuel West and Prunella Scales and the part was something of a favour to someone who’d been trying hard to get into the business but who at 27 had never been given his first break till now, at the very bottom of the bill. Ask a non-Whovian today and he’s easily the biggest name in the series. say what you will about JNT at his worst, but he did have an eye for new talent. As for the rest of the cornucopia of non-speaking monsters we get an Argolin (‘The Leisure Hive’), a biomechanoid dragon (‘Dragonfire’), a rather beaten-up looking Cyberman, a mutant (‘Mawdryn Undead’), Lord Kiv (‘Mindwarp’), a Mogarian and a Vervoid (‘Terror Of The Vervoids), an Ogron (‘Day Of The Daleks/Frontier In Space’), a Plasmaton (Timeflight), the Sandminer robot D84 (‘Robots Of Death’), a Sea Devil, Fifi the Stigorax (‘The Happiness Patrol’), a Tetrap (‘Time and The Rani’), a Tractator (‘Frontios’), a Vanir (‘Terminus’) and – most weirdly of all – Zog the Aldeberian, an alien only seen in 1980s Dr Who stageplay ‘The Ultimate Adventure’. If you’re thinking to yourself ‘gosh what a ropey lot of monsters – what on Gallifrey were that lot chosen for? then you’re right. The BBC had, in its wisdom, sold all their Dr Who costumes off and the ones that appeared here were all kindly donated by fans for free after an SOS in the fanclub – notably the big name costumes had all been bought up by big name collectors who expected to be paid. One monster that the BBC had insisted on appearing were the Daleks – only their creator Terry Nation, who had to be contacted for any and all appearances, baulked at the idea of a short cheap charity fundraiser and thought their appearance might the reputation of the most evil creatures in the universe (outside certain members of the Eastenders characters anyway). 

 He’s not wrong. ‘Dimensions In Time’ is a mess - a well meaning mess admittedly, an understandable mess given the time and budget constraints and it’s a wonder given the shockingly shoddy way Dr Who was being treated (in an era when it was raking the money in for the Beeb via video sales!) that we got anything even vaguely watchable at all, but still a mess. Given how rushed and low budget everything is pointing out the mistakes is a little like shooting Sea Devils in a barrel but there are many and plenty. The Eastenders link brings this story right down and isn’t properly thought out at all: this is a market stall that people walk through and so few people appear from the soap’s regular cast that it’s really not worth their time. Most of the cast wonder through it looking bemused giving that peculiar kind of fake-acting that everyone says Dr Who was full of but you really only get in soaps, that sort of wink to the camera that ‘you and I know both know this is imaginary but it fills in time and gets me paid, OK? There’s only one bit of Eastenders continuity, the mention of a ‘Dr Legge’, a character played by Leonard Fenton who’d left the series in 1988 but who the Mitchells automatically think is the right Doctor the companions are searching for. These two series, though often linked as ‘cult shows’, really inhabit two very different universes: Dr Who is about endless possibilities, about the links between past present and future that mean you have to make the most of every moment right now and treat people fairly if not kindly. It’s meant to be big, full of saving the universe every week, to show everyone at home that there’s a wider world out there beyond what humans have limited themselves to, with our cosy little bubbles of 9-5 jobs and chips and scones and texting. The whole point of series like Dr Who is that you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Dr Who broadens horizons. Soap operas limit them. Their whole reason daitre is to reflect the boring safe little ordinary life you’re living at home, with the occasional frisson that some people actually have it worse off than you. They’re entirely concerned with the present, with almost no mention of what happened in the past or worries about the future, because everyone’s trying to get by in an eternal present. The whole point of shows like Eastenders is familiarity, that you’re watching stories with people you know inside out happen almost in real time, in real life situations. It’s a half hour of escapism where you don’t need to worry about the world past your television screen. These two shows mix like oil and water. Had they played up the differences, whisked the Eastenders cast away to an alien planet and woken them up a bit before the Doctor spends an episode putting his feet up and wallowing in having a rest for a change it might have worked, but of course there’s no budget for an alien planet and not enough time to tell that story anyway. So instead you have two different shows blinking at each other, puzzled, without really interacting. It’s a daft idea that was never going to work. 

 Not that the Dr Who cast fare any better and they don’t sound like themselves at all. They’re all jumbled up together at random, depending on who was available on the day and there’s no logic to the way they come and go, the Doctor sometimes having one, sometimes two companions and sometimes not there at all (when McCoy is stuck in traffic). There’s only Romana getting the chance to be all Doctory (mostly because she gets the Doctor’s lines) and the 7th Doctor and Ace who sound anything like her old self and then it was mostly because of little bits and pieces the pair improvised on the day (such as the Doctor giving Ace all the boxes to carry so she couldn’t see where she was going, something that took ten takes to get right given how tight the marks had to be for the 3D cameras!) There are plenty of sweet little ‘ah!’ moments in this story, such as Yates pulling up in Bessie or the Brigadier turning up in a helicopter to meet the only Doctor he doesn’t know, but they last a second and then they’re gone. With so little time per person this script needs to be scalpel-precise at nailing these characters and the weird situation they find themselves in, but for the most part it’s twelve minutes of people going ‘but I don’t understand Doctor!’ pathetically while rubbery monsters loom out at people not doing much. Even allowing for the vast amount of changes and the unique situation the dialogue is stupid: any fan could have come up with something better on the spot. The one character who stays in character is K9 – because after a whole day of working fine in rehearsal (and amusing the child cast of Eastenders) he suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason and had to be pulled on a rope, just like the old days (he’s a method actor!) All the cast were disappointed by the script, not just Tom Baker. And at a time when Dr Who was seen by the general public as a programme that was cancelled because it looked this rubbish every week that’s a dangerous thing to do (because it didn’t: it’s weird, indeed, to think that the last time a Dr Who story was being filmed it was ‘Ghostlight’, in trouble for being too clever). At least there are no wobbly sets, I suppose, given that we’re outdoors (not that there ever were bar one or two which isn’t many across twenty six years: that’s another myth by the way). 

 If that doesn’t give you a headache then the 3D technology used to make this episode will. This isn’t the high-tech state of the art 3D used in ‘Day Of The Doctor’ (which is actually quite clever) but a ‘trick’, a device known as ‘The Pulfrich Effect’. The brain’s methods of taking information finds certain colours easier to decipher than others, so if you make half your eye see things through a red filter and the other through a blue filter (the two extremes) you get a momentary delay in processing that ‘pulls’ the picture and makes it seem as if it’s moving. However this technique works best when objects are going from left to right and the camera is also moving from left to right so you get the full effect. Which means that if you were watching with your cheap 99p lenses you got to see such scary and deeply odd effects as the 4th Doctor surrounded by floating jelly babies and Fifi the Stygorax looking even more like a puppet than she did in ‘The happiness Patrol’. If you didn’t have your glasses (as no one will now this many years on, stumbling across the story on youtube) then it all looked weird and was enough to make you seasick with all the constant motion. Mind you it felt like that with the glasses too I seem to remember, which never really worked properly for me – I got a better result using different coloured Quality Sweet wrappers. The worst effects are the shots of the first and second Doctor’s floating heads (the Rani having already taken their regenerations before the action starts). Without William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton around to shoot in 3D the production team went for crafted busts, something took quite a lot of this episode’s meagre budget…And they’re dreadful. The shots of the disembodied zombie-like heads flying towards you is one of the scariest moments in all of Who – and it’s one that was meant to be sweet (typical!) The only part that worked properly in 3D I recall, was the McCoy opening titles (you know the one, with the spinning Tardis in a globe and all the explosions)…and they were just the ones that already existed shot with the new camera! How ironic: Dr Who has never been more one-dimensional or static, just when it’s got the technology to be in 5D and constantly moving. 

Credit where it’s due, though, I quite like the plot. I mean it’s not the deepest or best constructed plot we ever had, but at twelve minutes this story doesn’t have the chance to do anything else and it feels like the most authentically ‘Dr Whoy’ thing herewhile being malleable to bend to whoever was available on the day. The Rani has meddled with the Doctor’s timelines so he and Ace keep ending up as different people, so while they’re busy sorting that out she can get on with her other diabolical schemes while she clones them for her own ends. It makes sense: she’s always been a chemist who thinks of people as giant chemicals and electrical impulses in meat sacks and it’s just an extension of what she does with humanity’s biggest brains in ‘Mark Of the Rani’. Having the timelines change around the Doctor (who just happens to land in Albert Square) so that the Eastenders set keeps glitching from 1973 to 1993 to 2013 is clever too: the effects team even add in a monorail for the later period and age the actors in makeup, which is as close to accurately and safely predicting the near-future as Who ever comes (Pertwee, who hadn’t bothered to read the script till the day, didn’t realise this and was shocked to find his old friend Wendy Richards looking so old, getting quite tearful till she told him what was going on!) Roden-Mansell has even does his Dr Who homework, throwing in a plot twist whereby the Rani accidentally gets carried away and clones Romana, not realising she’s a timelord as well and ending up with two regenerating brains inside her computer, which is itself to blow it (let’s face it, back in 1993 computers were at a stage whereby it was a lottery whether mine was going to actually turn on or not). It’s clever for what it is, does the job it needs to do, and explains in simple terms even an Eastenders fan could understand what’s going on. It’s what they do with the nuts and bolts of it, the dialogue, the props, the way the scenes switch at speed so that people don’t even get to the end of a sentence that doesn’t help the cause. 

 We fans who were there at the time were bitterly disappointed. This was the longest Dr Who had ever been off the air (much longer than the 18 month hiatus) and we were starved of product. We also knew that, to get any Dr Who made in the future, this would have to be good – really really good, to banish people’s erroneous ideas of what Dr Who had become. Instead it looked cheaper and tackier than anything the series had done for real – even the Myrka. What made it all worse was that, for months before this, we’d been promised an entirely different sorts of anniversary story. The rights to Dr Who had been auctioned to various production companies (including one set up by original producer Verity Lambert),ending up in the hands of Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin. Spielberg was a fan but all fully booked up so handed the project over to Phillip Segal who, three years before the TV Movie, hired a writer named Adrian Rigelsford (whose famous now for other things, such as making up quotes by famous dead people in making-of books, including William Hartnell and being taken to court for it). This was a big and proper story, a darker-edged one than anything we’d seen in the series too. It starred the unlikely duo of Tom Baker and Sophie Aldred, with something known as ‘the Creature’ (hatched by a professor mastermind that Brian Blessed got as far as a costume test for) having killed the 7th Doctor (in the opening credits! He’s even given a Viking funeral like in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ just so we know he’s really dead) and passed back through his timelines (just like ‘Name Of The Doctor’ ..Seriously, did Steven Moffat read a script?) A bewildered amnesiac 4th Doctor stumbles across Ace in Totter’s Lane in the near-future (the post opening titles would have had a paramilitary policeman walk past just like ‘An Unearthly Child’), whose living an ordinary life under the name Dorothy, stirring memories inside them both about past incidents. Invasions by Cybermen, Daleks and Ice Warriors interrupt the action before Ace’s boyfriend is kidnapped – he turns out to be the Brigadier’s son, Ace having unconsciously reached out to him for help. After the intervention of Bernice Summerfield (from the ‘New Adventures’ books) the pair end up at UNIT asking the Brig for help and he decides to do what the Doctor would do and take Ace to where she feels the memories most. It turns out that his place is a big graveyard with a gigantic impossible library, with the big revelation that it’s a disguised Tardis that got the chameleon circuit working. Along the way we meet a changed 5th Doctor whose joined an army in the future, a 3rd Doctor whose inside the 4th Doctor’s mind in a white void (a little like the ‘Power Of the Doctor’ – did Chris Chibnall get a copy too?!?) and a 6th Doctor whose o trial (again!) At the end there’s a big showdown at the scene of ‘Logopolis’ (where the 4th Doctor is saved from dying so the creature can eat him) and the creature is cast back further in time to the big bang (like the start of ‘Castrovalva’ to keep continuity fans happy) before the 4th Doctor collapses and regenerates into all his other lives before waking up as Sylvester McCoy. It would have been a much more daring, fan-friendly show, with proper scenes for everyone (though it was cancelled, partly, because of outrage that Tom Baker got the most) and a lot more substantial than this, with the chance of more adventures. It would surely have still been muddled though and seems unlikel to be the sort of thing to appeal to newer fans, while the same production team (bar the writer) being bejind the TV Movie three years later doesn’t exactly fill me with certainty that they’d have pulled it all off. Still, it seemed more exciting than a twelve minute charity romp. Poor ‘Dimensions In Time’ suffers badly from seeming like leftovers. 

 Well, it was the best we could hope for in 1993 and arguably it seems a little better now. Indeed to modern eyes it looks like nothing more than AI given a bunch of Dr Who scripts and told to conjure up one at random, that sort of half-makes sense but without the extra ‘knowledge’ of a human so we’re primed for this in 2023! We’re more used to 3D technology too(thank to that bizarre couple of years when everything was made with it, including ‘Day Of the Doctor’, before it all stopped overnight) and crossovers between programmes is more a thing, while we’ve had oodles of Children In need specials sine (if none quite like this one!) Now that we know Dr Who came back and was safe we don’t need to view this one with quite so much horror. It’s an anomaly nowadays, a quirky side effect of the wilderness years when we were happy for anything and what people forget nowadays is that it was a huge success, seen by around 15 million people (the biggest ratings Who had received since 1979 and then only because of an ITV strike meant people had a choice between ‘City Of Death’, an obscure animal documentary or static). Not bad for a programme that Michael Grade said was dead and no one would watch! It also raised £101,000 for charity directly (thanks to another pioneering invention Dr Who was a guinea pig for, the charity phone vote: Eastender Mandy won the chance to star at a slim margin of 57% while the scene with Big Ron has still never been shown; people talked at the time about how amazingly close this was and how they might have to run it again. remember the Brexit referendum vote that changed all our futures was at 51% and 49% and we weren’t allowed a second go!), not to mention the Who share of 3D glasses sales. I almost like it now – almost. I mean, they didn’t have to make anything and seeing so many old friends in one place, many for the last time, is really rather sweet. Of course it’s also absolute piffle that wasted everyone’s time and shouldn’t be counted as Dr Who (and yet officially it is hence why it’s in this book while say. ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ isn’t, complete with a production code that followed on from ‘Ghostlight’) but it’s also rather sweet piffle. Treat it like a DVD extra rather than aserious episode and you might enjoy it. If you can see it of course: this is the only story that exists in the archives, beyond the special case of ‘An Unearthly Child’, that isn’t currently on BBC i-player and the only one not to be officially released on VHS or DVD. Contrary to popular thought there wasn’t a waiver that meant the actors would only agree to it being shown once for charity – however the official copyright does belong to Children In Need, which means they’d charge a fortune in the few meagre royalties any release was likely to get, whilst it couldn’t be used as part of the official Dr Who franchise, with logos, because of wibbly wobbly copywriter bitey reasons. At least we got something which is more than we got for the 40th. I do fear, though, what might happen on the 70th: will Dr Who still be popular enough to get an extravaganza like the 50th or a trio of episodes like the 60th? Or will we be watching peter Capaldi turn into Jodie Whittaker while running around the set of ‘Strictly’ in 5D? Only time will tell…

 POSITIVES + Aww, they put the Brigadier with the 6th Doctor just so they could have a ‘scene’ together. Brief as it is, ill and portly as the Brig looks, as suddenly old as Colin Baker looks, this is a sweet moment indeed. 

 NEGATIVES - Spare a thought for poor Louise Jameson, one of Britain's best actresses and one of the companions who found the biggest fame post-Who, getting horribly done by: she agreed to appear on the condition that she didn’t have to appear in her regular leather clothes as Leela, figuring that sixteen years on and two children later it would be far too uncomfortable and undignified, only nobody realised till the last minute; her costume, hastily knocked up from odds and ends on the day, is so un-Leela like and fans have long since assumed her character was going to a fancy dress party as Hiawatha. She gave up her time for free you know! 

 BEST QUOTE: Victoria: ‘Who was that terrible woman?!?’

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: David Roden/Mansell wrote a prequel to this story ‘The Rescue’ for the 1995 Dr Who Yearbook, where it appeared a few pages before a ‘making of’ for the story. In this surprisingly sombre and violent story Cyrian finds himself stranded on the nothing planet DV Acrol 8 ’84 billion blighted square miles of rock’ and being attacked by a metal snake and the even more metal Cybermen until being rescued by The rani (thus making sense of quite why he is so subservient to her). This short story is unusual in that it’s almost all description, with barely any dialogue. Roden’s actually very strong at this and the story’s a decent one for what it is, though it doesn’t exactly throw extra light on the character or tell you anything you didn’t know. 

 Cheekily but brilliantly the novel ‘First Frontier’ (1994), a ‘New Adventures novel by David McIntee, has the 7th Doctor remembering a nightmare in which ’all my old foes chased me round a soap opera and he felt trapped, unable to get out. So did we Doctor, so did we…

 Previous ‘Survival’ next ‘The TV Movie’