The Five Doctors: Ranking - 79

       The Five Doctors

(20th Anniversary Special, Dr 1 with Susan, Dr 2 with The Brigadier, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane, Dr 4 with Romana II, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 25/11/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Peter Moffatt)

Rank: 79

   'An Edwardian, A Clown, A Dandy, A Bohemian and A Cricketeer can be friends

One wants to do some math

One wants to have a laugh

One fears The master's wrath

One wants to wear a scarf

One wants to take Rassillons path

And only by the end can they be friends!'

 

Happy 20th birthday to Who! It’s the second anniversary story and one that I honestly can’t split apart by much rankings-wise from the 10th and 50th anniversary stories (the 30th is another matter…) even though all three are very very different. ‘The Five Doctors’, for instance is the only one that re-cast the actor that had died (William Hartnell: in a sweet gesture the production team rang his widow Heather up to warn her and belatedly ask for permission, which she was only too happy to give), features a story that’s really more of a an over-arching quest than a plot, was made with outside help (Australian network ABC helped pay for some of the extra costs as part of an exclusive deal where they got to show it for free and got as many past episodes of the show as they wanted for syndication half-price), lasts a full ninety minutes (only split into episodes for a 1984 repeat) and was the first Dr Who story to be broadcast as part of the BBC’s ‘Children In Need’ charity night, the start of a long tradition (albeit one that meant it was the second special not to be broadcast on the anniversary itself, with a delay of a couple of days to be broadcast on the planned night which meant that, for the first time ever, this show made its worldwide debut somewhere other than Britain). While most fans tend to like either the 10th, 20th or 50th stories best, for me they all do very different jobs more or less equally well: they’re all excellent stories, both in their own right and for the wave of nostalgia that each of them bring, although none of them are the very very best the series has to offer (despite ‘The Day Of The Doctor’ winning all the polls held since 2013). With an extra ten years of history to cover compared to ‘The Three Doctors’ this story is a bit more piecemeal, with less of an actual story and more the feel of lots of cameos stuck together, while we still only get three ‘proper’ Doctors again 2,3, and 5 (with a cameo by Dr 4 and someone pretending to be Dr 1 who looks nothing like him) – general viewers tend to prefer either the 10th or 50th stories as a rule. Even so some of the individual moments are quite lovely and of all the anniversary stories this is the one that’s most self-indulgent towards fans and feels most like a ‘celebration’, as befits a story made in perhaps its most self-indulgent fan-serving era. The result feels like the closest Who has ever come to having a ‘greatest hits’ compilation (‘Now That’s What I Call Who 20!’) – albeit one of those sets that’s full of ‘re-recordings by the original artist’ that ‘aren’t available in the shops’(because then you’d be in your rights to take it back for not sounding quite right). Even so, in the days when repeats were thin on the ground and the first Who videos weren’t out for another year (and then at a price that made the monetary system on Pluto in ‘The Sun Makers’ seem reasonable) and this was all we could get it was more than enough, a welcome chance to see lots of old friends together. Other Who stories ration the things they can afford to show us (even the 10th and 50th stories) but this one is there to cram your face with – you’re really not meant to pay attention too closely, as it’s not really that sort of an adventure. 

 This idea of bringing everyone possible together is a problem once a series runs as long as this one, with so many people to be brought back and sharing screen time, plus potential arguments over billing and who gets left behind. As with any big celebration party the sleepless nights came not from working out what party games everyone should play but who was not going to turn up despite having said yes to the invitations and who was going to get angry at being left out. They’ll solve it for the 30th anniversary story by giving everyone a whole two minutes of screentime each and a plot that didn’t matter who was speaking to whom; they’ll avoid it for the 50th by only bringing to Drs and a ‘missing’ one back with cameos for the rest. Mostly because making this 20th anniversary special was so much extra hard work.The idea of an anniversary celebration seemed inevitable from a production team who’d already gone out of their way to include something from the past in each of the stories in their 20th season that had ended that March. However it seems to have caught them on the hop a little: it took Jon Pertwee, in a discussion of royalties regarding a series of repeats on that year, to ask if they were doing anything for the 20th and if so could he take part please and thankyou? Pertwee was, in fact so keen to be the Doctor again he forfeited his fee for the location shoot when early costings for the show turned out to be whoppingly expensive. Patrick Troughton was more than happy too and while Peter Davison had misgivings of being swamped by his predecessors he was under contract so couldn’t complain too much. It was the other two that were the sticking points: Tom Baker had only left the job two years ago and had been working hard for a couple of years to throw off his Dr Who tag so he could get some other work, while he really hadn’t enjoyed his final year on the show at all, falling in and out of love with Lalla Ward (Romana II) and producer John Nathan-Turner. For years it was assumed that he’d turned down the request to appear with a flat no, but in the years since as ore paperwork has come to light it looks as if came really close to saying yes, going for many lunches with JNT and script editor Eric Saward and throwing in some of his own ideas while being overjoyed at the thought of working with his old friend Elisabeth Sladen again who’d been one of the first people to say a definite yes) who he hadn’t even seen in seven years before, reluctantly, pulling out t the last minute (JNT never did get to the bottom of why, or the reason he ‘hid’ behind his agent after being so friendly and open. The closest we’ve got to a hint is that he was afraid of sharing the limelight with so many other leading actors, though Tom being Tom he never gave a clear answer and this might just be people projecting ideas onto him: I mean, he wasn’t exactly shy of sharing the screen with Matt Smith in ‘Day Of The Doctor’). As for the 1st Doctor the production team really wanted him there but were stuck who to re-cast: at first they thought about going with Jon Pertwee’s suggestion of his old friend from Worzel Gummidge Geoffrey Balydon, who had enjoyed his time in the series in ‘The Creature From The Pit’ and who, indeed, had once been on the shortlist as a possible 1st Doctor himself had Verity Lambert not persuaded Hartnell to take on the role. It was regular fan consultant Ian Levine who suggested Richard Hurndall after seeing him playing Nebrox in the ‘Assassin’ episode of ‘Blake’s 7’ and thought he looked quite Hartnellish (goodness knows why though, I mean he’s thin built and was playing a man scared for his life – it’s only the long white hair he shared with Hartnell and most of that had been a wig). 

 Casting in place, there was only one writer who could possibly fulfil such a remit of including as many people from the past as possible: Terrance Dicks, the man who’d written for more of the Doctors and companions than anybody (he’d written the Target novelisations for four 1st Dr stories, co-written ‘The War Games’ for the second and started a long run of being script editor that ran right the way through the 3rd Dr era and into the 4th for whom he wrote ‘Robot’ and ‘The Stones Of Blood’. The only Doctor he didn’t know well and couldn’t get a hold of was the then-current 5th Doctor, which is why he spends so much of it lying on the floor going ‘aagh’). Weirdly though he was the production teams’ second choice: script editor Eric Saward was a huge fan of Robert Holmes and thought he’d be the perfect person for the job. No less a person than Holmes himself disagreed: while he was keen to write for the series again (the negotiations leading to ‘Caves Of Androzani’) he was the sort of writer who hated being told what to do, resented a brief that asked him to be flexible while the production teams tried to finalise details of who would be available when and who thought nostalgia was something best left in the past. Most of all he thought the idea of using actors who looked so significantly older without referring to it (and worse some that were re-cast) was a slap in the face to fandom. Reluctantly he pieces together a script that tried to explain it all, ‘The Six Doctors’, where it turned out the 1st Doctor and Susan were both cyborgs created by the Cybermen as a trap to lure in the Doctor’s other selves so they could steal their genetic code and create their own master race (thus pinching the plot of ‘Evil Of the Daleks’, often hailed as the best story back in 1983). Holmes being Holmes, though, his idea of ‘anniversary frolics’ was a dark tale where the Doctors would be tortured into giving up their secrets and where it appeared that the 4th Doctor had turned evil, working as a cyber-collaborator for most of the story until an inevitable last minute switch of sides. By the time Tom Baker finally backed out, causing huge re-writes to Holmes’ original script, the writer began to get the sort of cold feet known only to Who authors, Cryons and Ice Warriors. 

 The production team began to get a bit worried Holmes might not be able to follow through and needed a script soon, so they went for the backup plan, Saward phoning Terrance up to ask for his help. He committed two faux pas in the series of one short conversation: as it happened Terrance was at a Dr Who convention in America, organised by JNT, and Eric had forgotten, ringing him up in his hotel room at 4 in the morning. The second mistake was that Eric let on that, rather than officially contract Terrance, he wanted him to write a first draft so they could compare it to Holmes’. Dicks was angry at this: Bob was one of his oldest and dearest friends and he hated the thought of being asked to write in private without his knowledge, the story going that he told Eric that it was no way to treat a writer of that calibre, hanging up the phone and going back to sleep. Desperate Eric tried again, at which point Terrance had done some extra thinking, pointed out that it was no way to treat a writer of his calibre either and hung up again. The next morning he was in a happier frame of mood though and tentatively agreed, possibly after checking with Bob first that it was alright – as it happens Holmes was getting sick of the whole idea and only happy to hand the script over. Dick, who prided himself as a ‘master fixer upper’ after his years as script editor, was much happier to write an ambiguous piecemeal script and as a big Who fan himself tried hard to get as many elements in place as he could. For now Tom Baker was still involved so he got the scenes on Gallifrey the 5th Doctor got from the midway point, with the hint carried over from Holmes’ script that he’d turned evil (it looks as if both script editors, like me, had enjoyed ‘Invasion Of Time’ where the 4th Doctor does just that). For now he was paired with Sarah Jane, the 3rd Dr with the Brigadier and the 2nd Dr with Jamie after initial contact showed that all three companions were eager to take part and kept their diaries free. Disaster then hit last minute when not just Tom Baker but Frazer Hines pulled out: he was under contract with soap Emmerdale who had it written into his contract that work with them came first; though he’d liased with them to get the work off early as a sort of ‘holiday’ strike delays meant his planned shoot over-ran (he still found time to make a quick cameo though). That meant a complete change of the companions so that the 3rd Dr was now teamed with Sarah Jane and the 2nd with the Brigadier. Terrance tried hard to make this a Cybermen-Master story and enjoyed writing for the Anthony Ainley model a full decade after he last wrote for the Roger Delgado one, but he wasn’t keen on the Cybermen (one of the reasons they never appeared in a 3rd Dr adventure) and thought it should have been ore of a Dalek story instead, who Eric wasn’t keen on. There then became a running joke where every draft he wrote came back with a memo from Saward asking for more Cybermen, which Dicks ignored by giving a bigger part to the Daleks instead! In another compromise Dicks wrote in the Cybermen but also wrote in ‘The Raston Warrior Robot’, who killed them all off sadistically instead! 

 That sounds like enough cast for any story, but the production team tried hard to get as many people as possible involved. William Russell was interested but the dates clashed with a long running tour he was in and was worried fans wouldn’t recognise him now his hair had turned white and he thought he looked nothing like the Ian of old, Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves gave JNT a flat no, Jackie Lane had all but retired from acting and was now working as an agent and didin’t fancy going back to her day job anytime soon, Anneke Wills had moved to New Zealand and the production team couldn’t afford to fly her back home – though Michael Craze, perhaps the biggest Who fan of any regular in the old series, was eager to come back he wouldn’t do it without Polly, Debbie Watling was in the early drafts before a clash with another project, Wendy Padbury was very keen but also very pregnant (instead agreeing to a cameo alongside her old buddy Frazer), Liz Shaw was free but supplanted by Sarah Jane so ended up another cameo, Katy Manning was living in Australia and though interested cost a lot to bring home too, John Levene hated the early Holmes script he’d been given and especially the way Benton had been written in as not knowing who the 2nd Dr was (despite both Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney ringing him up to try and persuade him to change his mind), Richard Franklin seems to have been overlooked but heard about the project from a fan who wrote to him asking him if he was going to appear, basically turning up at the BBC production office and saying ‘here I am!’ and getting a cameo too, Ian Marter was busy working abroad and couldn’t take the time off, Louise Jameson – in 1983 perhaps the biggest star name of the lot after her recent stint in ‘Tenko – was very happy to take part but the script editors just couldn’t work a way to get her in without Tom Baker there, the production team figured there wasn’t an easy way to bring the first Romana back either given that shed regenerated and don’t seem to have en asked her not that she’d been likely to say yes, Lalla Ward was still bitter from her divorce with Tom gave everyone a flat no early on, Matthew Waterhouse had been killed and Sarah Sutton had only just left. Terrance was keen to write for K9 though Eric was keen not to have him there at all and they both agreed he wasn’t exactly built for traipsing through wild moorland– in the end they compromised with a quick scene with Sarah Jane where the dog warns his mistress of danger. For some reason nobody seems to have asked Jacqueline Hill which seems a colossal oversight given it wasn’t that long ago she’s returned for ‘Meglos’ and was keen to re-start her acting career after coming out of a self-imposed retirement to bring up a family: maybe they figured they couldn’t have Barbara without Ian? 

 Realising that he needed a script that could both logically include all the Doctors and be piecemeal enough to be chopped and changed depending on the revolving cast (with the added worry from Eric that the actors might not get along and ought to be kept apart as much as possible) Dicks came up with the final idea that the timelords were behind it all. Along with Malcolm Hulke Dicks was the co-creator of the timelords and though he’d written them in as detached all-powerful beings he’d admired the take Bob Holmes had given them in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ as being corrupt and wrote them to be a sort of combination of both. His eureka!’ moment was the idea of a black glove moving pieces into position as if it was playing chess, but with the Doctoers (always a canny businessman, Dicks may have had half an eye on toy sales too, proudly keeping some of the Doctor/companion ‘toys’ after filming and keeping them on top of the filing cabinet in his home office, though in the end none were produced in the decade f1977-1987 when we went from a highly generously proportioned Leela who’d been embarrassed when giving over her statistics to the toy company and exaggerated a little thinking no one would notice despite the fact the Leela toy’s boobs looked as if they could take a child’s eyes out; the next companion to be a doll is Mel, who came in two costume changes, which is just licensing gone mad and a collectible too many for even the most hardened of fans). At first Terrance wrote the hand to belong to The Master but Eric thought that was too obvious and the pair of the hatched the idea that it was the benign timelord everyone would least suspect: the Doctor’s old teacher Borusa. As for the catch-all Game of Rassilon quest and the ‘Death Zone’ where the Doctors could face all kinds of jeopardy separately and together Dicks drew inspiration from one of his favourite poems, ‘Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came’, a most uncharacteristic work by Robert Browning the poet said came to him in a sort of fever dream. A tale of fighting monsters above, below and through it’s an allegorical tale of sorts about the different paths through life to heaven or hell on Earth before death, although even the pet confessed he didn’t really know what it was all about. Dicks doesn’t seem quite sure either but it worked as a way of giving the Doctors three different ways into Rassillon’s tomb, coming up with a finale that asked big moral questions about immortality and the greed of insisting you lived forever when others died. After all four of these Doctors had given up their lives already in one adventure or another for the greater cause and the need to live so long while doing nothing tied in nicely with why the Doctor had gone on the run from his own people the first time round (as Dicks had written in ‘The War Games’). 

 The plot, such as it is, returns to lots of tried and tested Dr Who ideas that’s loose enough to change with every edit while still making sense: there’s a tomb of Gallifrey’s co-founder Rassilon hidden away in what’s rather worryingly referred to as ‘The Death Zone’ where timelords never go and which is a vast empty wilderness rather than the usual quarry but still feels close enough to tradition. It’s all a part of a timelord tradition we’ve never heard about but which makes sense: before they became detached they used to throw beings in here to make them fight – it fits with both the Doctor’s need to get away from their hypocrisy all those years ago and the sense, loosely hinted at across the series (notably in ‘Mind Of Evil’) that every civilisation goes through a death penalty phase before they mature and grow out of it; typically the timelords go in for this in a bigger way than any other species. The Doctors have been sent there not by choice but by an unseen assailant with a ‘time-scoop’ that’s pulled them out of their own times in search of the immortality Rassilon promised in timelord lore, which isn’t quite what it seems. Quite why the baddy choose to only take the first five Doctors when they presumably have access to all 13-and-counting (plus timeless children versions as we know now) is anyone’s guess, but I suppose short of inventing a time machine for real the production team couldn’t practically do anything about this (maybe they all got stuck like the 4th Dr? I like to think Dr 6 is huffing round his tardis, Dr 7 is calmly playing chess, Dr 8 is ignoring everyone watching an opera, Dr 9 would have been strutting round the deathzone unseen as if its Salford, Dr 11 would be pushing past the 3rd Dr to use the zipwire while shouting ‘geronimo!’, Dr 12 would be swapping insults with The Master, Dr 13 would be standing around staring and looking a little lost before babbling away to anyone nearby and Dr 10? He’s busy kissing the companions. Even Turlough). The best plot element is The Master’s: Dicks makes Anthony Ainley a more rounded figure than he’d been since Christopher H Bidmead revived the character, more a person than a pantomime villain and his desperate attempts to make the Doctor believe he’s on his side are a great twist on the usual format (although it’s sad that apparently none of the Doctors ever work this out and he ends up, trussed on the floor returned to his own times, without the chance to say ‘I told you so’. Odd Rassilon never offers immortality to The Master either the way he does Borusa and the Doctors because, despite what’s just happened in front of him, he might just have been daft enough to take it). Under instructions from JNT and Saward, who feared a big ol’ argument that never came, Terrance keeps the Doctors apart till the big finale: a positive in that the idea of an old Gallifreyan nursery rhyme offering the ideas of going ‘across, above, below’ is rather clever and gives all the Drs a chance to demonstrate different abilities and get more or less the same screen time being heroic, but a negative in how little we see of the Drs sparring off each other (easily the best thing about ‘The Three Doctors’). 

The script was, at last, taking shape and is about as good a catch-all as any script written in such a chop and changing way could ever have been, cleverly telling us what we need to know in scenes that bounce from Doctor to Doctor to keep the piece moving. One of this special’s great strengths is the way Dicks nails every single character in what’s very little screentime. After all, as Terrance liked telling people, the Doctors really aren’t all that different, they just have different regenerations that emphasise different things, and yet they all sound like their natural selves without falling into caricature – the 1st Dr is a thinker, the 2nd Dr is always on the edges of the action distracting someone even if it’s only himself, the 3rd Dr is dashing and heroic and the 5th Dr is an innocent abroad. Dicks knows these characters well and his affection for them all shines through, with all of them getting a scene that makes them shine in turn (all but the 5th anyway, who he never did quite get a handle on). The first Doctor suffers from being played by someone who looks nothing like him and the need to make a now clearly middle-aged Carole Ann Ford play Susan with the same childish innocence she had twenty years earlier (although for all we know timelords have a longer childhood than humans even the Doctor acted the same way until he looked a lot older). However Dicks really nails Hartnell’s mannerisms even if Hurndall can’t, giving him just the right amount of irascibility and unpredictability that means you can never be quite sure if he’s going to bite your head off or make you laugh, very in keeping with how Hartnell played the part. Pairing him off with Tegan for so much of the story is a masterstroke – of all the 1980s characters she’s the one most like him and has almost the same relationship with her Doctor this Doctor once had with Barbara, the Davison Doctor being the voice of calm and reason while she bad mouths every creature in the universe. The actors have great fun squaring off each other and there’s a neat bit, improvised on the day when Janet Fielding threw a strop at the sexism of the original script, where the 1st Doctor asks her to make the tea and she refuses, with Turlough heading off to make it instead to avoid a Tegan monologue. The recreation of the Dalek city on Skaro is brief but well handled, with a return of the original Radiophonic sound effects from out the cupboard and a very 1st Dr trick of trapping the Dalek so that it ends up shooting at itself in a corridor, using the weaponry of an enemy against it rather than killing directly. The other Doctors are notably far more bloodthirsty than the first. Susan doesn’t come off quite so well, being mostly held back in the Tardis alongside Turlough and even getting a scene where she twists her ankle as if she’s still fifteen not thirty-five (a scene that would have been much funnier and more ‘up to sate’ if it had been Turlough!) 

 Of all the characters the ones that Dicks most has fun writing for are the 2nd Doctor and the Brigadier and their banter is hilarious, even if it has little in common with how these two were when they first met in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Invasion’ when the Brig was more of a no nonsense type than the world-weary pessimist he became by the end of the 3rd Dr era and as eager to mix with aliens as the Doctor himself. This 2nd Doctor is a long way from the shifty manipulator he really was too and more of the comic relief seen in ‘The Three Doctors’. Nevertheless Troughton and Courtney are so good at the humour that their banter is delicious and the yeti, unseen for fifteen years, are a welcome monster to face them off against even if we barely get to see it. The best scene of the whole story comes at the start when the 2nd Doctor turns up and spoils the Brigadier’s big day, insulting his successor (‘I didn’t think mine was too promising either!’), his office (‘You’ve redecorated!...I don’t like it’) and revealing that he read about the Brig’s big do in ‘The Times…Tomorrow’s Times’). 

 Interestingly the Doctor who sounds least like their real self is the 3rd, as if Dicks has spent so long writing him for the slighter younger market of the target novelisations that he can’t quite bring himself to stop. For years American fans thought that The Master’s first name was ‘Jehoshaphat!’ given the rather uncharacteristic colloquialism he gives when he first meets him in the Death Zone (it’s a mile exclamation in ye olde English, not often used this days – equally virtually the first words he says is ‘great balls of fire’). That said the 3rd Doctor finally gets to say the line everyone thought he said but which he never quite did, ‘reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’, while of all the actors Pertwee is the one most visibly comfortable in the part (even more than Davison, whose been the Doctor more days than he hasn’t the past two years) and relishing his banter with Elisabeth Sladen, who has just the right level of bravery and self-deprecating humour. Her best scene comes at the start too, when she ignores K9’s warnings about something evil in the air and apologises for not being able to take him on the bus (the best gag of the episode is the sign on her gate: ‘beware of the dog, written in the same robotic lettering as K9’s side panel). This is the only time the 3rd Doctor ever meets the Cybermen and it’s as good an action scene as any, even if the Doctor’s largely a bystander (the Raston Warrior Robot is a last minute replacement for a scene with a hang-glider that was cut for reasons of cost and replaced by a zip-wire). 

 As for the 4th Doctor, it’s a shame he couldn’t turn up to the party but the use of clips from the unfinished story ‘Shada’ is a moment of inspiration (and an idea, so the legend goes, suggested by Tom Baker himself). The clips are well chosen, the scene on a boat in Cambridge full of all the sort of Bakerisms you can fit into a minute or so clip, though it’s sad there’s not more – especially as there were so many readymade scenes available for use (‘Shada’ features the 4th Doctor rushing away from a sphere while riding a bicycle – the Doctor I mean, not the sphere, that would be silly – how easy would it have been to have replaced that with the sort of ice cream (time)scoop that picks everyone up in this story? 

 It’s the 5th Doctor’s sub-plot that doesn’t quite work as Peter Davison is shunted to the side in his own programme, in great contrast to the kind way they boosted Pertwee’s ego and made him feel the ‘star’ of the 10th anniversary show (remembering how he felt Pertwee was careful to go out of his way and make Davison feel it was his show). The DVD booklet might have some guff about how this Doctor is ‘at the heart of the plot’ but really he’s kept out the way: for the first half Dr 5 is the stooge to the 1st Doctor, then in the second he’s a mere onlooker, investigating what’s really going on in Gallifrey, but without being able to move too far in the plot while all the other Doctors are moved into position there’s not much for him to do except argue and he’s not the arguing kind of regeneration. Indeed its hard to tell between the Doctor when Borusa has brainwashed him and when he’s acting independently. The downside to ‘The Five Doctors’ nostalgia is that it shows up more than any other story exactly why this incarnation didn’t quite work, how his passiveness is so at odds with all his predecessors and why he never quite feels like The Doctor the way the others do. When the story ends with the Doctor claiming he’s ‘not the man I was…thank goodness!’ that’s not entirely true: you miss the others more than ever. The highlight, of course, is when all the Doctors meet up at the end and though you can see why this scene is so short, given the logistics of getting everyone free at the right time, the actors all bounce off each other so superbly. After all, despite Eric’s fears of them not getting on, they were all old friends who’d spent a lot of time together at various conventions around the world and their delight as they try to upstage each other is apparent (though notice how quiet both Davison and Hurndall become, letting Troughton and Pertwee take over). The latter two are perhaps the biggest friends in the cast of the lot and have a whale of a time continuing their feud and trying to upstage each other: a lot of their insults are ad libs worked out in rehearsals with Pertwee relishing the fact that, after four years of playing Worzel Gummidge, he gets to call someone else a ‘scarecrow’! 

 Inevitably in a story done this way, in pieces, some parts were going to work better than others. The plot is a bit daft when you think about it: Borusa’s entire plane revolves around having the Doctors fight their way through obstacles so he doesn’t have to, but he still wants them to get to Rassilon’s tomb for his own nefarious ends – and yet he ends up chucking in a few extra monsters just to make life harder! Even the idea that a timelord is after immortality seems a bit odd: most timelords (who don’t live the sort of dangerous lives of The Doctor or Master), with thirteen long lives, can live to several millennia which surely is enough for anybody; it’s not like a human who was always going to live a short life anyway. Costing meant that an elaborate sequence involving the 3rd Doctor in a re-match against The Autons had to be dropped and the last minute replacement, Sarah Jane and the Slightly Inclined Slope Of Doom, is hilarious (did they think tweaking the camera angle would hide the fact the Doctor could walk over to pick Sarah up?) This is made worse in the episodic repeats where this sequence becomes the first cliffhanger (though the other two, by chance, are actually pretty good: a Cyberman attacking the Tardis and The Master gloating and spying, unseen, on the 5th Doctor). You really would have thought that in the biggest budgeted special so far, made at a time when Who had a bigger audience than ever before, they’d have been able to afford a slightly more salubrious location than Cwm Bychan, Llandbedr, part of the ‘wastelands’ of Wales (following ‘The Abominable Snowman’ the second and last time the series films in its future adopted home country in the 20th century). Much nicer all round is the ‘Eye Of Orion’, filmed in Plas Brondanw, Llanfrothen, in the gardens of architect Bertram Clough William-Ellis’ estate (the designer of Portmerion as seen in ‘The Masque Of Mandragora): an accident with the tape meant that key scenes here weren’t recorded which involved in a hurried recall for all the actors, a particular blow for Mark Strrickson who’d taken off on holiday and hadn’t left a contact number; in the end oen of his aunts had to go in a car to bring him back! The ‘Dr Whoduunit’ aspect of the story is, alas, rather feeble – we all know it’s (do we really need spoilers?) Borusa, the Dr’s old teacher turned bad (I had a few teachers like that) and for the supposedly most powerful race in the universe the other timelords are rather easily fooled. The ‘phantom’ cameos are too short and too wasteful: we’ve waited so long to see these characters back again and seeing them play ‘evil’ is such a waste of their short scenes while it’s never fully explained in the plot why Rassilon’s tower would even have phantoms; I mean, after going through so much, it’s not like the Doctors are likely to turn back (and where is The Master’s phantom? It would have been great to see someone he cared for. If there is anyone). 

 The biggest problem by far was that while Richard Hurndall tries his best and is an excellent actor in other things – including, Blake’s 7 and well, Doctor Who as it happens with a small part in ‘The Gunfighters’ in 1966 - he’s very much the weakest link here, struggling to re-create a character that he only vaguely remembered (and he refused to watch old footage in case he got panicked and tried to mimic rather than act). Just to compound the problem the production team take the odd decision of putting the ‘real’ Hartnell on a the start, in a pre-titles clip from ‘The Dalek Of Invasion Of Earth’ we really didn’t need, which just highlights how un-Hartnell his performance is. Most fans say ‘ah well, it was the best they could have done in the circumstances’, but it so isn’t: they could easily have had the 1st Doctor trapped the same way that the 4th was and had him played by a body double or in a clip from one of Hartnell’s episodes where he collapses (there are no end of examples). It might be better than a three-dimensional shrunken head (which is what we got in ‘Dimensions In Time’) but it still seems a slap in the face to the memory of the star who made the series so successful, having him re-cast as a doddery grump. I have to say, too, the moral at the end about the dangers of immortality and living forever, whole perfectly in keeping with every other Who story out there, seems a weird message to be passing on in a show that’s now officially become the third-longest running BBc series ever, behind just ‘Coronation Street’ and ‘Dixon Of Dock Green’ (Dr Who will move up to second in another year). 

 No matter though: despite the plotholes and the absence in different ways of no less than 3 of the Doctors this is still a triumph, a heartwarming story that successfully condenses what this show is all about across twenty sometimes very different years within 90 minutes of screentime. No matter which era of Dr Who up to 1983 is ‘yours’ and which made you fall in love with it it’s here somewhere, lovingly recreated on screen: the out-thinking the Daleks like old times of Hartnell, the comedy versus a base under siege of Troughton, the killer robots and The Master from the Pertwee years, the skullduggery on Gallifrey seen in so many 4th Dr stories and the soap/family element of the 5th. If you were an old fan who’d stopped watching Dr Who and tuned in just for the special you got lots of reminders of the things you half remembered (this is still the only story to date to feature The Master, Daleks and Cybermen – though sadly not in the same scene) and it’s a lot more inventive than a story this speedily written and indeed re-written has any right to be. It’s not all nostalgia either: if you were a new fan who didn’t care much for the past or had never heard of this show before then the Raston Warrior Robot is a genuinely interesting creation we needed to see in a proper story (and JNT, filling in as director to make up for lost time on this particular sequence when it was running behind time, really captures it well in what might well be old Who’s best and certainly paciest action scene of the old series: truly the former production assistant was wasted as a producer – he should have been a director). Borusa’s comeuppance is highly satisfying, an end that sums up this series well in all eras, that everything has its time and place and that lifetimes are short even while humanity goes on forever, barring accidents. None of the specials get things right all the way through and this one maybe drops the ball in more places than the other two, but it’s got the best ending of the three (the Doctor running away from his responsibilities in a rickety old Tardis), is never less than watchable and often quite quite brilliant. If Dr Who stories are (time)-scoops of ice cream then this one is a Neapolitan with all the flavours existing side by side: you’d never pick it as your absolute favourite flavour because you don’t get enough of any individual taste in one go, but at times when you can’t decide what you’re in the mood for its nice to have all the flavours in one go – and they do complement each other better than really they should. It’s worth remembering something that fans often forget because we’ve become so acclimatised to the idea of anniversary multi-Doctor stories but having elements from the past combined in this way is something unique to Dr Who: they can’t do it in Coronation Street, they can’t do it in long running documentary series, I guess they could sort of do it in quizzes if they has the host regenerating every few rounds but they don’t as a rule: only Dr Who can give a pick and mix version of a format that both celebrates the changes across twenty years of programmes and the way that the format has mostly essentially stayed the same. Of all the anniversary specials so far it’s that aspect which ‘The Five Doctors’ gets right the most and best of all this special really does feel special and its hearts are very much in the right place, capturing as it does more Who-ish people, monsters and plot devices in one go than maybe any other story. 

 POSITIVES + There are several great performances sprinkled across this story: Patrick Troughton’s comic timing, Jon Pertwee’s game attempt to be an action hero again while in his sixties, Janet Fielding’s understated mirroring of the 1st Dr and Anthony Ainley’s mischievous smile even as he tries to help the Doctors out. The best performance though, surely, has to be Nicholas Courtney and his permanently raised eyebrow as he goes from expecting a cosy celebration dinner at UNIT to meeting a Dr in the wrong order to being transported to a cave on an alien planet and being roared at by a yeti without breaking sweat. His lack of surprise tells you everything you need to know about his relationship with the Doctor far more than dialogue ever could. 

 NEGATIVES - Everything they did to the ‘special edition’ of this story, which between 1995 and 2008 was the only legally available way of watching this story (and for a while was the only Dr Who DVD available to buy so it was a lot of fans’ introduction to the series as a whole). Because of the way it was made, as an international production, it was filmed a little differently to normal and stored a little differently too. The master-tapes were good enough quality to use for the first video release in 1990, which sold rather well; wanting to keep it on catalogue the production team went back to it in 1995 to take another copy and found to their horror that it was damaged in places. By chance there had just been a stock-take of all the video reels of Who the BBC still housed, made as part of the 1993 documentary ‘Thirty Years In The Tardis’ which had discovered all the original footage had been retained (some of which, mostly the scenes of the Doctors at the end, is an extra on the DVD): all they needed to do was re-edit it to look like the original. Only Richard Molesworth and Paul Vanezis, put in charge of the project, had a brainwave: why re-create the original when they could put together a new versions, featuring extended scenes and unseen bits, plus the chance to update some of the special effects to be more in line with the mid 1990s. The BBC, realising that fans were quite likely to buy a second copy, put up the budget. A nice idea in theory – and when they did with the original Star Trek episodes their more tech-savvy fanbase were cockahoop so I can see why a pen-pusher from the BBC okayed it - but Who fans aren’t like Trekkers and there was an outcry: part of the brilliance of this series is how it makes you use your imagination and for us the new effects were distracting, not better (it’s a Who fan past-time to find something to grumble about and we really don’t need an excuse, another reason we’re so different to our American scifi cousins who are pleased with everything short of pure incompetence). Meddling with the past by giving it too many effects past its natural time and distorting what wasn’t there to begin with feels to us too much like a plausible Dr Who plot featuring The Meddling Monk), In principle it means a lot of scenes that ran too long already run even longer, hanges the order to suit the original script (which makes the balance between the Doctors uneven), some alternate and less suitable clips from ‘Shada’ were used and the pacing is all over the place, while the dodgy special effects of the mid-1990s seem worse to modern eyes than the dodgy effects of 1983. The original had plenty of problems, but no fan in 19083 watched it and thought ‘it would be great if only we had slightly longer scenes and others stapled together, plus some better effects’ (mostly because were too busy bitching about Richard Hurndall, wishing Tom Baker had turned up and wondering what they did to poor Susan). It’s something they really should never have tried and after a similar reaction to ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (which at least did some extra filming) have thankfully never tried again - although I’m still up for improving the models in the ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ DVD if anyone fancies having a bash at those. Director Peter Moffatt, who says he was never consulted about this, was horrified. From triangular timescoops badly overdrawn onto the video screen to the Dalek extermination rays to the voice effects on Rassilon (that are meant to make him sound other-worldly but just make him sound like he has a bad cold) everything seems ‘fake’ in a way the originals didn’t and none of the effects on transmission were ever that bad they needed replacing anyway. After all this story, more than any other, is meant as a ‘celebration’ of the series good bad and ugly, how Dr Who managed to buck the trend of people who tried to cancel it more years than not to run a full 20 years on some very tight budgets and yet still hold its own against bigger budgeted, better promoted, more ‘commercial’ scifi shows. If you’re coming to scifi purely for the effects then, well, you’re watching the wrong show. In any era. We know the effects are sometimes ropey. In response to the backlash the BBC said that they weren’t trying to ‘replace’ the original – which is odd thing to say because they were, at least from 1995 when this was the only version commercially available on video and again in 1999 when this was the only version commercially available on DVD. Sensibly the 25th anniversary edition in 2008 includes both versions, but even that’s a bit cheeky, given that fans were originally charged roughly double for approximately five minutes of extra footage BEST QUOTE: 2nd Dr: ‘I shouldn't even be here at all. I'm not exactly breaking the laws of time but I am bending them a little’. Brigadier: ‘Yes, you never did care much for rules as I remember!’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: See ‘Shada’, still unfinished in 1983, to see the adventure the 4th Doctor would have had Rassilon not taken him out of time. 

Our old friend ‘The 8 Doctors’ (the first 8th Doctor novel, written by Terrance Dicks and published more or less at the same time as the TV Movie’ in 1996) is set during the 5th Doctor’s sub-plot on Gallifrey, as the newly regenerated amnesiac McGann Doctor visits his earlier selves to regain his memories. Along the way the 8th Doctor saves his 5th counterpart from a second Raston Warrior Robot by luring it into a waiting nest of Sontarons (the Raston comes out best, being one of Terrance’s creations!) We get a little more backstory about it too: it was built by an ‘impossibly old civilisation, older even than the timelords’ that destroyed itself in a nuclear war, leaving the Raston Warrior skulking round the death zone waiting for new orders that never came (he’s almost a pitiable figure in the book). The book also fills in a bit of the backstory of what was happening behind the scenes on Gallifrey (but which would have given the game away too early if presented on screen) with a renegade timelord named Ryoth sending all the monsters. Ryoth tries again with a drashig (see ‘Carnival Of Monsters’) but the two Doctors working together send it back to the source of the homing beacon where it eats Ryoth instead (the Galifreyan guards somehow managing to eject it back into the death zone, where presumably it still lives). Ooh, nasty, but he had it coming! In many ways it’s the best passage f the book, what with this being Terrance writing a book around a script he wrote fifteen years earlier and knew better than some of the cameos of the rest of the story, although the two doctors themselves (shall we say perhaps the blandest of all the 20th century regenerations) don’t exactly shine off the page. 

 ‘The Birth Of A Renegade’ is a truly bonkers short story by Eric Saward to tie into ‘The Five Doctors’, included in the Radio Times’ 20th anniversary pullout. This prequel, ignored by all other writers to come since, claims that Susan is a relative of Rassilon rather than the Doctor and fill sin a lot of The Master’s backstory. The 5th Dr, Tegan and Turlough are stranded when the Tardis stops working in mid-air and head off to explore what appears to be a battle cruiser but is, in fact, The Master’s Tardis. Apparently in the dim and distant past The Master tried to secure a coup against a lord president named Chancellor Slann, also a descendent of Rassilon and blames the Doctor for why it didn’t work (because it was while trying to recruit him that the plan was overheard, but the Doctor was innocent. Weirdly enough he’s a goody two shoes student type in this version). The Doctor fled Gallifrey not out of boredom but out of fear for his life, finding the intended next descendent of Rassilon Lady Larn hiding in his Tardis and using the pseudonym Susan. The Master is returning to Gallifrey to start a coup with an army of (what else in a Saward script?) Cybermen, but has stopped off to gloat first. A captured Susan, whose been pretending to go along with his scheme, comes good at the end and saves The Doctor and her planet from destruction. Hmm, yes, I’m not so sure about that either. You can read it for yourself if you own the ‘Enlightenment’ DVD where the Radio Times pullout is a bonus pdf (and no, I don’t know why it’s on that DVD and not ‘The Five Doctors’ either!) 

 If you’re wondering who ‘The Terrible Zodin’ was, as mentioned by the 2nd Doctor, lots of writers have had very different and often contradictory ideas (after all, there’s not much to go on in this actual script). In ‘Power Play’ (an abandoned story from Season 23 later made into a Big Finish audio in 2012) she’s a cruel ruthless tyrant who hires an assassin who comes as near to destroying the Earth as anyone does until being stopped by the 6th Doctor (this certainly fits in with what he remembers of her in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’), in the ‘Missing Adventures’ novel ‘Cold Fusion’ (1996) she’s a much gentler personality who meets all the Doctors, flirts with them and then erases their memories, in ‘Lungbarrow’ (1997) - the last of the ‘New Adventures’ books - she’s a sword swallower at the Grand Festival of Zymymys Midamor, the Big Finish 4th Doctor Adventures story ‘Requiem For The Rocket Men’ (2015) calls her the third most wanted intergalactic criminal (the first two being The Master and The Rani if you’re wondering), in the novel ‘Verdigris’ (2000) she’s again a huge flirt when Iris Wildthyme (herself not immune to flirting with half the universe) meets her with the Brigadier in tow, while the ‘Past Doctor Adventures’ novel ‘The Colony Of Lies’ (2003) mentions her being more animal-like, having talons and fur. Could it be that Zodin either has different regenerations akin to the Doctor, or just a split personality?! Surprisingly as yet no writers have come up with stories explaining what the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Doctors were up to when Rassilon (time)scooped them up and took them to the death zone or who the previous timelords who sought Rassilon’s immortality’ are and what happened to them (someone call Russell quick, I have another idea for a spin-off series…) 

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