Aliens Of London/World War Three: Ranking - 171

              Aliens Of London/World War Three

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 16-23/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Keith Boak)

Rank: 171

In an emoji: 💨

'We've had a look at the What's App messages of the cabinet ahead of the forthcoming enquiry and, well, frankly we're a bit worried. They mostly seemed to be laughing face emojis, with references to 'petty stupid Humans who are so easy to fool' and fart jokes and how they were taking us all for a ride, along with a reminder to avoid the vinegar in the canteen. The strange thing is, this is all from the cabinet before the one that turned out to be a bunch of Slitheen...'

The year 2005 was such a good year to be a Dr Who fan, a victory lap where those of who’d kept the faith through sixteen barren years and a dodgy American special could say ‘see? I told you this programme was great’ to all those who’d laughed at our collection of Who videos (and they were largely videos back then: there were only ten Who DVDs out on the market when the series started, no blu-rays and streaming was still something you only did when you had a cold, that’s how long ago it was). I myself joined the party just in time for the final series in 1989 and in all that time had never known what a thrill it was to have a full series of this very special programme to look forward to and savour week after week, to experience in ‘real’ time alongside everyone else, as opposed to crossing your fingers your old video player wouldn’t eat your VHS or watching on satellite with a finger ready to take out the adverts. At last Dr Who was back and it really was all ours, made by fans for other fans in a way the series had never been old enough or an institution enough to be made before. After nigh on a quarter century of neglect and decay, it was so wonderful to have this series made by people who actually cared for it and wanted it to do well. More than that, though, it was made by people who knew how to make good television programmes anyone could enjoy, the biggest problem with the rollercoaster ride of the 1980s, ready to create a new generation of Whovians by making this show the talk of the playground again (and I’m so envious: when I tried to make up my own Dr Who stories in the playground everyone around me assumed from the name it was a medical drama and wondered why I was running away from the vaguely Dalek-shaped school bin).We fans had been hurt before though many many times though and hadn’t wanted to get our hopes up: there were no less than eight attempts to get Dr Who back on the air before this one and if the Paul McGann TV Movie was the only one that anyone considering worth getting made, well…maybe that was a good thing (particularly given I’m currently reading a copy of ‘The Nth Doctor’ which tells you about the seven others and they all sound dreadful to varying degrees, if perhaps not quite as dreadful as what we got). 

 When the Russell T Davies-steered series came back on the air - initially for a single season only to see if interest was still there, which thank goodness it was in ways that took the BBC completely by surprise – not every episode was a top tier classic of the first degree but what was impressive was how consistently good it was, with a general level of competence that hadn’t been matched since the first Pertwee one in 1970 I would say. Even the worst story of the year, this very story – the first to be written after Russell got the commission and the first to be filmed despite being fourth in the running order - was still better than we’d dared hoped and this two-parter is lacking not because it gets anything that wrong but because compared to everything else it’s still a tiny bit nervy, no one quite sure of what they’re doing yet (the shots of the pig spaceman running around Downing Street was in fact the first ever shot and rather sets the tone for what’s to come: big, dramatic, political and a little bit silly). Russell’s been writing Dr Who stories since he was little (he even wrote a ‘New Adventures’ story ‘Damaged Goods’ for the 7th Dr that’s almost a dry run for this first series, especially the grim council estate setting) and had a lot of time to think about what he’d do if he was ever given the keys to the Tardis on set. This story features three very obvious things people think had been in Dr Who all the time, but were totally new: first up there’s an actual alien invasion on screen that no one can ignore and a lot of this story is about what would really happen if aliens invaded London, the Slitheen crashing their spaceship into Big Ben (or at any rate the clockface on top of the tower, the part that’s actually called Big Ben). Most aliens skulk – this one drives a spaceship into Big Ben as part of a trap. As a general rule in 20th century Who when the aliens arrived on Earth UNIT had hushed the whole thing up and people had either never learned about it or been encouraged to forgot about it, but here Russell sets out to show what it would be like if aliens landed for real in such an obvious way that nobody could hush it up. We get lots of clips of TV coverage to give us a ‘worldwide’ feel and the Doctor sits back and watches things unfold in real time until he gets suspicious, learning things the way we do from all the satellite TV coverage in the Tardis. There’s even a special ‘Blue Peter scene with Matt Baker baking alien cakes! It’s a clever means of providing exposition in a very plot-friendly way so that it doesn’t feel as if we’re being told things and its very different to anything we’ve had in the series before – in the future Russell will get away with just showing us American reporter trinity Wells as a substitute for every country, but here we really get the works including Andrew Marr standing outside Downing Street and Japanese news coverage. It’s all exactly what would happen when the biggest discovery to hit mankind in centuries comes along with first invasion: it gets assimilated into everyday culture to the point where, before too long, it just becomes part of the everyday backdrop. We also see how individual people not on TV react to the alien invasion in a very realistic way: some are agog, but most are oblivious to the implications, including Rose’s mum Jackie (whose still blathering on about who she’s been dating) and Harriet Jones, MP for the fictional constituency of Flydale North, whose still pushing for her pet project of cottage hospitals when we first meet her, even after bodies have been recovered from the Thames. Even the Slitheen yell at one point ‘Get some bloody perspective!’ We also see Downing Street’s response, briefly, as they all run around like headless chickens… 

…At least until they all get taken over by Slitheen and become bodyless, never mind headless. green blobby aliens and Downing Street. This is a story that really plays on people’s suspicions o what’s really going on inside parliament where they’re more alien than us. I love the political side of Russell’s writing, something which gets toned down with time but is at its angriest and most crusading here, with a story that doesn’t just take political sideswipes like some stories in the past but plot commentary that hits right between the eyes (the closest we’d had before this was the reptilian Silurians who are green but not blobby or the Zygons who are blobby but orange; talking of blobby and orange in political terms we’d had a futuristic Margaret Thatcher, a ‘gatherer’ on Pluto with eyebrows that made him look like chancellor of the day Dennis Healey and a disembodied voice at the end of a phoneline named ‘Jeremy’ but no direct reference to any contemporary politician; though written for Thorpe it does my heart good to think that Corbyn got into power in the DW universe with a clear majority instead of being unfairly massacred in the press and then sabotaged by his own party). This story is quite overt though: these are the people put in power to keep us safe and we see in the news, a year from the date of transmission (thanks to a mistake with the Tardis time co-ordinates which means the Doctor takes Rose back home a year late). During filming it was meant to be even more explicit: they hired a Tony Blair double to collapse to the floor, but the likeness proved to be disappointing so all we see in the final edit is him lying down headfirst (not the first time we’ve seen Blair lying on TV mind…) This is the era when trust in UK politics was at an all time low (admittedly it’s even lower now, thanks to Brexit and covid, but the people making this weren’t to know this at the time), when it seemed as if aliens might as well have got into number ten Downing Street and taken over given the way the politicians were behaving. This is the era of 9/11 conspiracies (just note the way we get the shot of the Slitheen fake-shuttle turning downwards to plunge deliberately into Big Ben, like the aeroplanes heading into the twin towers, with a similar sense of panic and history unfolding live on TV) and even more especially of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that followed, countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 (note the constant Slitheen references to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that they themselves set up, the ‘excuse’ given over to starting a war that was really about grabbing oil (oh yes it was!) and how atomic bombs can be sent in ‘45 minutes’ (another detail given for why terrorists had to be ‘stopped’). 

 There’s even a sort-of sly dig when Harriet Jones mentions the way hospitals have been outsourced and turned into business to make money: it’s a small point but in a wider context its everything that’s wrong with this government and why they’re taken over so easily: everything is being run as a business, including the emergency measures, so when an actual emergency comes along nobody knows what the protocol is (note that Harriet Jones is a stickler for such protocols so something like this would never happen under her watch; and indeed she is the next prime minister, till the 10th Doctor causes her downfall in ‘The Christmas Invasion’). Note that the Slitheen are just Blair’s government with extra claws and wind; they’re trying to make money out of people being in desperate situations too, just like hospital patients. So on comment is this story that it’s a wonder they don’t have Harriet Jones committing suicide in strange circumstances just as she’s getting close to the truth. Notably though there’s no Americans coming in and taking over (a Slitheen Bush Jnr could have been fun! It would explain why he kept getting so many basic humans tings as language wrong for a kickoff ) and no mention of the opposition (though the one sop the story does make to the censors is never quite pinning down who is in office: 2005 was an election year, the vote taking place just 12 days after ‘World War Three’ was shown so nobody knew for certain who would get in (as it turns out it’s Blair, again). The election date was so close the Who production team even had to get special dispensation for this story to be shown – something passed when luckily it was agreed that a story that involved aliens in bodysuits destroying the Earth was ‘politically neutral’. Similarly tensions around politics were so high that the film crew were stopped outside Downing Street while the police were called (in any year past this one they’d be able to say ‘we’re filming for Dr Who’ but that seemed so unlikely in 2005 the police momentarily assumed it was a ruse!) Even with these changes, though, the political digs are some of the best scenes in his story: had they thrown in the Conservative wannabe David Cameron getting eaten by a Slitheen this would have been a top ten story for sure. 

 The Slitheen let the story down a little. Russell’s clearly been thinking about his first alien race for some time as well and throws in a few details most writers never bother to add. Rather than being a carbon based life-form, like 99% of the aliens we meet, this lot are calcium based – something that comes handy for the big finale, which feels like a belated attempt to add the sort of scientific educational aspect of the original series back in 1963 (spoilers: let’s just say it’s a quirk of mine to make sure I always have some leftover vinegar in the cupboard, just in case this invasion ever happens for real: the Slitheen are, in nature and methodology, if not necessarily looks, amongst the more plausible of Dr Who aliens). They’re not members of an entire race who’ve turned rogue and evil, just bad eggs – literally given the way Slitheen are hatched – and the finale shows us that they’re just one particular family turned bad and the other Slitheen are good and just (so keen on justice, in fact, that what the family Slitheen get up to here sees them sentenced to capital punishment – something that gives Russell so many sleepless nights he’ll be back exploring this in sort-of sequel ‘Boom Town’). Amazingly we’d never properly had that before: ‘old’ Who tends to be more black-and-white in its thinking, but one of the best things about Russell’s stewardship of this series is the way he fills in so many grey areas that we just came to accept in the old series as the way things were done, making them more realistic. After all, are the Slitheen really that different to the politicians we meet in this story? All they’re trying to do is make a bit of money. For my money there just isn’t enough screen time to really delve into them yet even in a two-parter and the Slitheen really come into their own in sequel ‘Boom Town’ which explores their rationale for killing more but nevertheless they’re a solid threat in this story, with enough bickering between themselves to form character and enough disregard for the Humans to seem as if they really could win. One of the other things we always took for granted was that aliens could always possess Human bodies without any difficulties, even when they were men in rubber suits that were much larger than even the most obese American. Here Russell’s been thinking about the processes aliens would need to go to and comes up with the gag they only take over the fattest politicians – interesting that, given the detail that Blair himself was looking thinner and more gaunt than ever in 2005, in contrast to the fat-suited Slitheen here who are closer in size to Conservative rival Michael Howard or Blair successor Gordon Brown or deputy pm John Prescott for Labour (which might be why the Slitheen don’t do the obvious and simply take the prime minister himself over). The changing bodily processes, though, result in lots of bodily functions, gas and fart jokes, the scene in the lift between two Slitheen farting and laughing uncontrollably is, at a stroke, more embarrassing than any scene in old Who – I mean, the Kandyman, Ergon (space chicken) and Myrka (pantomime cow) made us hide with the sofa in embarrassment too but at least they never got lumbered with dialogue this stupid. 

I’m not the first person to point out that this story feels like it’s working to three separate audiences, as Russell struggles with what every Who producer had to grapple with at some stage: who is Dr Who ‘for’? This has always been a show with one of the widest demographics in British television: it was intended to be for children, but as early as the first series back in 1963 the lines are blurred so that it’s being made by the drama not the children’s department of the BBC and intended to be watched by children in a family environment with parents and grandparents. Russell, as it happens, is a rare writer whose handled everything: he started his career in children’s telly (‘Playschool’ and ‘Why Don’t You?’, which was a factual programme about making stuff until Russell turned it into a drama) moved on to teenage soap ‘Children’s Ward’ then moved onto sort of gay soap operas like ‘Bob and Rose’ before ending up at adult groundbreaking, often political works like ‘the Second Coming’. We at home, waiting for Russell to take our favourite show over and looking up what else he’d done, were confused: which Russell were we going to get? The silly childish one or the heavyweight serious one? For now, in his first script, Russell doesn’t yet know either so we get an uneasy amalgam of all three. This story juggles, not always successfully, a political spy thriller which makes lots of scathing comments about the people we pay taxes to keep us safe who couldn’t give a monkeys about us, a scifi B movie about alien invasion, the soap opera about Rose being away from home for a year and what travelling in the Tardis does to the people left behind and Children’s TV that’s full of more fart jokes per second than anything actually made for children (who would never get away with this much emphasis on bodily functions). Every time this story offers us some real deep emotional thought to consider it’s undermined by the cutaway to aliens laughing and farting, for every deep revelation about what Rose has put her family through there’s scenes of her mum gossiping like nothing’s happening and Christopher Eccleston, a serious actor who crusades against prejudice and classism everywhere he goes and who signed up for this role partly because he wanted to give children a role-model on the side of good to look up to, has never looked more comfortable than when asking aliens ‘Do you mind not farting while I’m trying to save the universe?’ Russell will get the tone right in no time. He’ll just do what every Who showrunner before him has done and decided that children are plenty clever enough to cope with the heavier stuff as long as there’s a few monsters and explosions and throw the comedy into the drama, rather than in separate scenes, to the point where the 10th Doctor is actually making quips to cover up how scared he gets. Judged purely on this story, though, Russell’s trying too hard to appeal to everyone at once and hasn’t learnt yet that this is only going to put off the audiences who think something is either above or below them. The Slitheen costumes themselves are the one part of the story that don’t quite work: they’re the sort of childish men-in-rubber suits that everyone always teased Dr Who for having in the 1970s when the show was cancelled, foetusses with big eyes and stretchy skin and oversized claws that look like they were designed in a Blue Peter competition (I’d love to know when Russell did create them: for all we know he was this age when he made them). To be honest they felt a bit childish when Sarah Jane used them and that was meant to be a children’s series; here they feel tonally out of place with everything else in the comeback. Well, everything except the space pig (a Slitheen decoy). That in turn inspires Christopher Eccleston’s oddest performance in the role: he’s tough and belligerent and angry when he needs to be, but he also spends half this story with a goofy grin on his face as if he’s the Playschool TV presenter not Russell (that being Davies’ first job in telly). 

 Thankfully this story gets most other things bang on – impressively so given how early on this story is - particularly the human characters. Harriet Jones is excellent, a busybody with a conscience played superbly by national treasure Penelope Wilton whose everything a backbench MP should be – moral, nosey and loud, not taking no for an answer. She was the first big name the revived show got (courtesy of her faith in Russell after appearing in ‘Bob and Rose’ – yes another Rose, Russell’s fond of that name - together) and a lot followed this first year partly because she said yes. It’s a surprise Wilton hadn’t been in the show before in fact – not least because her on-screen husband Richard Briers was in ‘Paradise Towers’ during time off from filming under-rated gem of a sitcom ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ (just imagine how that conversation went when they reconvened for the next series ‘Done anything interesting Richard?’ ‘Yes, I was the caretaker of a hotel over-run by monsters and got to dress up like Hitler while shooting at Bonnie Langford and got killed by a giant cleaning robot, no seriously!’ ‘Aww, I just played another beleaguered housewife’) The three Slitheen are all excellent too, despite their often embarrassing and fart-filled dialogue and Annette Badland especially undoes a thirty-odd year career playing goodies in one scene so deliciously evil is she in this story (Russell, visiting the set and standing in for Eccleston at one point when they needed someone tall to set up the lighting, acted opposite her staring into her eyes and realised just how good and comparatively wasted she was, a driving force behind writing ‘Boom Town’ for her and the part in Russell’s post-Who show ‘Wizards and Aliens’). 

 The plot also has lots of breathing room for sweet ‘getting to know you’ moments for Jackie and Mickey, Rose’s mum and boyfriend who hasn’t been seen since the first story. In the early days the one thing the Tardis could never do was get home because it never landed in the same place twice – most companions who joined knew that and were happy-go-lucky adventurers happy to explore the stars; indeed first companions Ian and Barbara didn’t even get that choice and had to risk coming home via Dalek time machine because they thought it was their only chance of ever getting home. Rose is different though: she got into the Tardis to travel without really thinking about it and is only now hit with the consequences and complications. She can’t just up and leave and travel the universe, even in a time machine and for much of the story a far bigger problem for her than invading aliens is trying to make it up to her mum that she went away without saying anything (and that Mickey, as the boyfriend, inevitably got the blame: Mickey seems remarkably calm and forgiving after having his life upturned by police and his home-from-home with Jackie destroyed: we know from other stories how alone family and friend-wise he really is). It’s a detail thrown in later in the series, too, that Jackie is especially alarmed by the apparent age difference, even before she knows the Doctor is a 900-year-old alien: she was Rose’s age when she fell for Rose’s dad Pete who looked roughly the age the Doctor does here and had a miserable time of it, however much she’s built him up into a hero when talking to Rose about him. Like all of Russell’s best writing we see it from all sides: we know that for Rose she’s only been gone a few hours, time enough for two trips in the Tardis, and she hasn’t had time to miss home yet. We also see Rose stumble when her mum asks her is she ever thought of her and the guilt and remorse that fills her when she sees the length her mum has gone to in order to get her back. One of the best things about Rose’s story arc in 2005-06 are the family she has along with her and they’re never sharper or more sympathetic than here. The Doctor and Rose get some great lines too, but notably the best of them are in scenes added at the end when it was found the two episodes were both under-running: extra bits between Rose and Jackie and the dialogue in the limousine when the Doctor and Rose are being escorted to Downing Street where they feel more like their ‘normal’ selves and are acted like them too. It’s the look of the Slitheen and the way they bring this very adult story into being a silly scifi story about aliens and bodily functions that brings this one down. Oh and the first cliffhanger in modern Who is a bit of a letdown: yes a lot of people we care for are trapped in a very Who type way but they’re all going through the same thing at the same time so it’s not really the triple threat the script seems to think it is. In other words, I wish the rest of this story had come later in the run and been given another re-write when everyone knew what they were doing and Russell could easily have fixed little things like this: it honestly is that close to being a classic. 

 But, well, one story has to be first I suppose and this one handled it better than most debuts. It’s the story they needed here with bits magpied from everywhere: Russell himself says he was influenced by the 1950s Quatermass stories (yes him again), specifically the second film set in Carlisle, which is also about world leaders taken over by aliens with hostile intent (while the first draft, before the spaceship crashed into Big Ben, had it being ‘discovered’ buried in the ground just like the first Quatermass series). However, much of this script also feels like different eras of past Whodom stapled together: there’s the cynicism of Robert Holmes about those in power, the philosophical comedy side of Douglas Admas, the farting aliens would have been at home in the Graham Williams/late Tom Baker era of stories like ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ and ‘Meglos’, there’s the takeover horror angle of producer Phillip Hinchcliffe/early Tom Baker era, David Whittaker’s character and world building, Terrance Dicks’ no-nonsense storytelling, the ‘base under siege’ of the various Troughton-era makers (even if this base happens to be Downing Street), even a bit of Andrew Cartmel in the Doctor’s angst-ridden references to a time war we don’t know much about yet. Anyone who’d seen any era of Dr Who in the first 26 years could come to this story and go ‘ah yes, I recognise this’, if only because Russell hasn’t yet found his own voice strong enough to tie all of these elements together and add a little something of his own. Plotwise things are as straightforward as any story in the past (aliens invade Downing Street, with a brilliant model shot so beloved of Whovians of a spaceship taking out the Big Ben clock tower), perhaps too straightforward for a two parter given what’s to come. Maybe that’s why Russell has a second go and writes a rare sequel with ‘Boom Town’, the only story of this first year written after Russell had been able to actually watch the rushes and see what approach was working. 

 It does its job though: the pacing is strong, you get caught up in events very easily, there’s always something happening and the few times there aren’t we get scenes where we get to know these characters on a much deeper, more emotional level than before. Had this story cut down on the fart jokes, made Rose’s boyfriend Mickey less of a wet blanket, had it made us care a little more about the politicians killed in the course of this episode (hard to do I know) and had Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper been that little more comfortable with their characters (he struggles with comedy and she with exposition for now but they both learn quick) then this might have been a top tier episode. Instead it’s just a very very good one that, spoiled as we were, was the first Dr Who story of the comeback to not quite be as good as its predecessor and a low point that’s still pretty high. Frankly, given the amount of pressure riding on this story and with everything new from cast to characters to sets to costume design to writing to producing to directing to the way the show is run it’s no surprise it’s a little bit uncertain and a wonder it’s as confident as it is. Much like the original Dr Who pilot made in 1963 but unscreened till the 1990s you can see why the production team went on to make the changes they did across the year, but also why everyone involved was already so excited about the way the series was going. This is going to be one hell of a ride and everyone working on it already knows it. So did we. It was, for us old timers, a first season that was brilliant in every conceivable way and even the bad bits with dressed up pigs and farting aliens seemed like proper Dr Who gone a bit wonky, the sort of bad bits that no other series could give you. In all of time and space to be alive in, I’m so very grateful to have been on my sofa watching in 2005 and – despite the odd scathing reviews you might have read in this thread across the reviews first posted in January and February at the bottom of the ranking pile– still so very much am. 

 POSITIVES + For me the best thing about the return to DW was that they made Rose feel like a ‘real’ person with a ‘real’ background, as opposed to the many fairytale orphans the Doctor’s adopted over the years who seem to be footloose and fancy free. Rose’s mum Jackie is a great character, a superficial narrow-visioned soap-loving single mum whose the opposite of her curious, kindly open-hearted daughter but instead of making her an out and out monster (like Martha’s and Donna’s mums) Russell and Camille Coduri find a way of avoiding caricature and making her into one of the most rounded characters around. Jackie’s just lonely and needs to fill her days with something and doesn’t think there’s anything better out there than chitter-chatter and soap operas and tanning salons, while her protection of Rose comes from a good place, worried about her only daughter being hurt by a world which (as we’ll see) she knows can be random and cruel. It takes Rose’s experience to show her mum, bit by bit, that life can be random and wonderful too. If my idea that the early days of Dr Who as a sort of ongoing discussion between ‘parents’ and ‘youths’ in the 1960s is correct then this feels like a natural extension updated for the 21st century, an era of teenagers desperate to be famous for something, anything, rather than lead normal everyday lives and who find the narrow repetitive world of their parents restrictive. Rose is basically the same as every teenager who dreamed of fame through their youtube channel, of being an influencer rather than an influence. And here Jackie gets to learn from that ambition from her daughter, that feeling that life is for more than the routine and boring, at the same time she gets a lesson in responsibility. Jackie doesn’t get all that much screen time across her two years but I totally know this character and meet people like her all the time and know a lot more about her than, say, Yaz after three whole series. 

 NEGATIVES - The biggest obstacle facing Russell The Davies at first when the BBC offered him any job he liked and he talked about bringing back his favourite series was getting the Beeb, an organisation that loved dividing itself into separate departments, to work together as a whole. He’ll get what he needs very soon as interest and belief in the revived Dr Who takes off and Saturday teatime family viewing becomes the biggest money-spinner around (in yer face Michael Grade!!!), but for now you can tell that the people who designed the Slitheen costume, the transformed Slitheen CGI effects and the Slitheen model departments are coming at this story from three very different angles, which creates a very jarring effect that brings you out of the story. They probably didn’t even have ‘tone’ meetings in 2005, something they’ve had ever since this story was made just so that we didn’t get mistakes like this one again. The effect of the Slitheen running down corridors in particular looks nowadays every bit as dated as the worst CSO from DW episodes in the 1970s and was a little bit dodgy at the time. Still, that’ll all change. I’m not that convinced throwing vinegar and pickled onions on an alien is enough to defeat them either, however susceptible they are to acid, but it beats just using the sonic screwdriver or K9 I suppose. 

BEST QUOTE: The Doctor on humanity now the aliens are here ’Just this morning you were all tiny and small and made of clay. Now you can expand!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Boom Town’ follows on a few months later.

The Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘Revenge Of The Slitheen’ (2007) has another family Slitheen go undercover as the teaching staff at Pak Vale Comprehensive School in one of the best stories of the early run of the Who spin-off. Written by Gareth Roberts it has all the comedy and tension of the main story and is less political but, despite being made for a children’s series, decidedly less childish all round.

The short story ‘Raxacoricofallapatorious’, a brief bit of back-story provided by Russell T Davies to the guidebook ‘Monsters and Villains’ (2005), fills in a lot of the family Slitheen’s back story – they ran the planet for a whole before being kicked out for  being crooked and wandering the stars looking for gullible planets to conquer. There’s  a brief mention of the ‘Wrath Warriors’, the intergalactic policemen from ‘The Star Beast’ too. 

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