The Moonbase: Ranking - 23

 

The Moonbase

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben Polly and Jamie, 11/2/1967-4/3/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Kit Pedler, director: Morris Barry)

Rank: 23

   'I see the moon and the moon sees me 

A round speck of hope in a starlit sea 

Until invaded by Mondas monsters all silvery 

Replacing all we've gained with what they want us to be 

How can mankind ever be free? 

By embracing the situation's gravity 

And saving the moon for you and for me'

Ever since original producer Verity Lambert had left at the start of season 3 DW has been in freefall. Second producer John Wiles lasted a whole three stories before promptly retiring and third producer Innes Lloyd is pretty certain about what he doesn’t like about the series (getting rid of lots of traditions like world-building and exploring, alternating futuristic stories and historicals, companions galore and even the Doctor) without being quite sure what it is that he wants to fill the vacuum of time and space with. A lot of season 4 is an exercise in vamping before something better turns up – sometimes quite brilliantly (‘Tenth Planet’ ‘Power Of The Daleks’) sometimes, umm,not (‘Underwater Menace’). It reaches the point where every story since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ twelve whole stories ago would have been described as ‘oddball’ by people who were watching them in sequence and even the ones that have glimpses of what’s to come (‘The War Machines’ ‘Power’) seem deeply odd seen in context of stories about celestial toymakers and fish people. Out of nowhere, though, ‘The Moonbase’ turns the corner and pulls everything into focus, offering a whole new way of doing DW that’s every bit as frightening and fascinating and imaginative as what’s come before it but which feels more urgent and desperate somehow. 

From now on DW isn’t about exploration and gaining new insight into the universe but about survival and losing what we already have and no fight to survive is better than this one, with the ultimate ‘survivor’ race up against mankind in the most remotest outpost you can think of (this is the story that has the Dr’s speech about ‘terrible things that must be fought’ out there in space, a speech its inconceivable of him making ain any earlier story than this one – you’d never get the 1^st Dr being so black and white about alien life for a start). Give or take a few Dalek cliffhangers ‘The Moonbase’ is the first time DW is properly scary and had there been room behind my sofa (most people have them up against the walls don’t they?) this would still be one of the top five DW stories of any era that would send me scurrying there. We owe a lot to ‘The Moonbase’ then, the second and for me still the best Cybermen story, which remakes the rules and kick-stats a whole new era so brilliantly. On the surface the threat is the same as in ‘The Tenth Planet’ just four stories ago: The Cybermen, late of Earth’s doomed twin planet Mondas, are still travelling the solar system to look for spare body parts they can convert and despite having defeated them once humanity is still an obvious choice, especially as we tend to be a bit smaller, and punier than they are. What’s changed is how they come across: in their debut The Cybermen are a ghostly presence, both literally because of their bits of white cloth still hanging from their bodies walking across a polar blizzard but also symbolically, as they stand around looking menacing but are more about talking than killing. They’re still close enough to us to be cousins and while they’re more than good enough to bring back they’re just another promising idea rather than a monster on a par with The Daleks. By ‘The Moonbase’ though they’re that much further along in their evolution and that bit further cut off from their humanity, their hands and faces now covered by metal, their survival instincts darker and more desperate, their methods more ruthless. They look like robots now rather than men in costumes, standing tall and menacing (only actors above 6”2 were cast in the roles so that they tower over the actors, particularly Patrick Troughton’s Dr; this is another reason why the lone 4^th Dr Cybermen story ‘Revenge’ doesn’t work so well as he’s the same height!) but with the clever scifi twist that they became robots, rather than were made that way, still with memories of what life was like as flesh and blood, however much the idea repels and sickens them now. The biggest change though is in the voices – where they used to be actors speaking in a sing-songy type of way now their vocals are fully robotic, not like the Daleks’ grating emotional staccato but a more even tone, via a ‘mechanical larynx’ used in the ‘real world’ on people who had lost use of their vocal chords (mostly smokers) by placing an electronic gadget up against the actors’ throats as they mouthed words (a lot of the poor actors got sick from all the vibrations): as something recognisable ‘our world’, yet totally robotic and alien, its another of those moments of DW making the ordinary extraordinary and totally chilling. Shot in black-and-white, with director Morris Barry’s shot selection emphasising the Cybermen’s tallness and stillness while the humans flutter around emotionally and going to pieces, as these unstoppable giants take them over one by one, is one of the most threatening scenarios DW ever provided. Particularly as they’re let loose on one of DW’s greatest ever sets: this feels like a real working base, especially the gravitron machine (a prop so huge it nearly killed Patrick Troughton when he went for a wonder pre-filming to familiarise himself with the set and it fell over, missing him by inches). 

This is only the second true DW base under siege and the one that really sets the format: weirdly it feels more ‘real’ than The South Pole, perhaps because so much of the imagery was based on real documentaries of space travel (and there were a lot in 1967, in the run-up to man’s first mission to the moon). It’s a natural place for the series to go, the moon our next big thing to get to and a sign of our own evolution a step further on from the last encounter with the Cybermen, though they’ve evolved just as much to match us (‘Mondas’ too is a word that sounds like ‘Moon’; both of us may have gotit from ‘month’ and the idea of time registered in orbits round the Earth, but whereas the moon is regular and stable, rotating every 28 days, Mondas’ is irregular and unstable, which might be why the Cybermen have become such cold hard, logical creatures as compensation). This could plausibly be us in the future (the setting of 2070 is getting ever closer - a small child watching this first time round might have had hopes of living in their twilight years in this date with advances in medicine) and the fact that the Cybermen are crashing what was in 1967 mankind’s biggest achievement as if its nothing adds a whole frisson of vulnerability to mankind in this story. Like the best DW stories we’re a spec of dust in an infinite cosmos, nothing that special, so up against a real threat we come over feeble and useless. The Cybermen are still a ghostly presence though, compared to say the directness of a Dalek, playing hide-and-seek with the base so that you’re never quite sure where one’s going to pop out from next (the moment when the Dr recognises the cyber Doc Martens sticking out from under a bed sheet before it lumbers towards him with no hope of escape is one of the all-time great cliffhangers, although even that’s beaten by the epic end to episode three when a whole army of Cybermen march across the moon, their heavy regimentation in sharp contrast to how the Tardis crew individually bounce their way over in episode one) and they choose the logical destination of the sickbay to invade first, so the first sightings (by a concussed Jamie, who injured himself on the spacewalk) can be easily dismissed as a fever dream before the mass invasion in the last episode turns them into a living nightmare. 

The Cybermen also have a natty space plague that kills people horribly, affecting their nervous systems and making people’s veins turn dark as they become infected, a strikingly visual idea that makes humans look as if they’re turning into Cybermen without needing clunky body parts (I’m still half-convinced covid is a Cybermen plot as it works in much the same way, just invisibly – people might start taking it seriously again if they could flipping see it!) In his last two stories the 2^nd Dr hasn’t skipped a beat, merrily leading Scottish highlanders and Atlanteans on a joyful dance as he plays his recorder, but here he’s really pushed and scared in a way the 1^st Dr never was and gets to make a speech about how ‘evil must be fought’ that Hartnell’s Dr, all about taking alien cultures at face value until they did something nasty to yours, would never have contemplated. Here a lot of the drama comes from the Dr’s conviction that the Cybermen can wipe humanity out and trying to make the second of many a sceptical base of cut-off humans realise the danger they’re in (it helps that Ben and Polly are every bit as scared following their first encounter with the Mondas metal meanies). This is also the first time we really see the Dr’s scientific credentials as he tries to work out where the infection is coming from and why it only affects some people at the base and not others (spoilers: I still think of this scene whenever somebody asks me how many sugars I take in my tea). As a side thought, given how many 1960s DW stories are really about the adults making this series being afraid of what their ‘flower children’ are turning into, note that the plague comes in the form of sugar cubes; this is, for those not in the know, how many a 1960s youth took their LSD and, well, this was shown in 1967 so if DW was ever going to slip in a sly drug reference it would be this year. The idea that it only affects the nerves of some people and not others too seems like a horrified parent idea of drug culture based on stories and gossip – this is a bit early for Syd Barrett but he’s an obvious example of a drug casualty who took much ‘doped sugar’ it set his nerves on edge, although admittedly if anything drugs enhanced people’s emotions and put them in touch with their ‘inner child’, not turn them into hulking great six foot cybernetic droids, so maybe its all coincidence. Nevertheless this story fits a more overall theme of the people making DW in the early years becoming afraid of what might happen in the future when they’re dead and gone and the youngsters have taken over and it is a story set in the future when the youth of the day have become the ‘old guard’. Taking of youngsters, while Ben doesn’t get much to do as usual this is easily Polly’s best story, the one where she gets back a lot of the sarcasm that was her biggest character trait in ‘The War Machines’ and she saves the day more than the Doctor, realising that the acetone in her nail varnish remover might attack the Cybermen’s dangly metal bits in much the same way as her nails. 

As much as people quote Sarah Jane as being the show’s first feminist there are actually lots of candidates going back to Barbara at the beginning; Polly though is one of the more interesting examples – she screams and runs away with the best of them, but she also keeps a cool rational head and fights the idea that she should sit things out and let the boys have a go. The pan that saves everyone is her idea and even though the ‘boys’ take it over she sulks at them getting to have all the fun. Never mind the future though – ‘The Moonbase’ might have had a rival in the present on its mind. This is the first real time DW has been inspired by its new rival in town ‘Star Trek’ (on in America since 1966 and not shown over here till 1969, but people still talked about it) by having an international base made up of people from lots of different countries who were ‘enemies’ when the episodes first went out this tale reads like someone whose read about Star Trek without getting the chance to actually see it – note how despite their nationalities everyone is still very British, unlike Star Trek where despite their nationalities everyone is very American (Star Trek will repay the compliment by ‘borrowing’ the Cybermen concept for the Borg). Still, the idea that there is an international community of people working together is quite a hopeful change compared to most DWs of the 1960s and even with its token Frenchman in a cravat (actually there to hide a mistake in the spelling on Benoit’s name-tag; good job they made the mistake with the Frenchman really!) its a remarkably forward-looking vision of the future and notably everyone is a fully rounded character with motivations of their own, not just a bunch of people we barely know (as per a lot of the DW base siege stories to come). Unlike Trek though the important difference is that there are no Russians or Americans, the two giants of the space race then and now (maybe they killed each other off in the DW universe?) There’s even a Nigerian in a day, a dashing pioneering hero like all the others here, back when black actors tended to be the butt of the jokes if they were on TV at all. They’re a braver bunch than most these scientists too, as in future most stories will take a more cynical view of mankind and have us wilt under the slightest pressure but here they hold their own – there’s no bunch of men (of course there’s no women: that’s a stage too far for 1967) I’d rather entrust the future of humanity to in the face of such a disaster than this one. In other words its another close run thing this battle: the Tardis crew are more than just hangers on leaving things up to the Dr (give or take a poorly Jamie) and the base are worthy but the Cybermen are such a powerful apparently unstoppable force in this story you still feel that they only just win this battle, especially the epic fourth episode where the stakes keep getting higher and higher, ending with (spoilers) a glorious shot of the Cybermen flying into the air on kirby wires as the moonbase turn off the gravity. A tense, taut, frightening thriller with one of the Cybermen’s more logical invasion plans and filled with a great script, great acting and great ideas, there’s very little in this story that goes wrong at all. What does tends to be common to other DW stories of the era: three companions is one too many even with Jamie unconscious for half of it (at least in this era when stories are more compact; it worked in the first season of sic and seven parters but in four parters there aren’t enough lines to go round; this gets even worse in the 5^th and 13^th Dr years when there’s almost always somebody with nothing to do), we don’t get as much of a chance to explore this world as we would have done with the Hartnells as all we see is one set and a si8ck bay and some of the dialogue seems woefully dated at times (mostly whenever Polly is told to put the kettle on and make everyone a cup of tea). Unique to this story too is a weird experiment that doesn’t quite work where the Dr talks to himself while mulling over his investigations and we hear him talk straight back via pre-recorded tape as if we’re hearing his thoughts (you wonder why he never does it again – the 4^th Dr barely tolerates conversation with anyone else as it is).Mostly though you notice what this story gets right: its faster paced than anything seen in the series before (except possibly close cousin ‘The War Machines’), the monsters are a real threat rather than something odd to gawp at and if you’re not scared at or moved by something somewhere in this story then I have bad news about how Cybermen might have taken over and replaced your heart already. The Cybermen are a wonderful creation, mankind’s killer cousins who used to look on us with envy and spite who are now taking us apart limb by limb out of logic and reason. As great as all the 1960s Cybermen stories are, though (not so much the later ones) this is the story that makes best use of their threat, the one where they’re the most cunning and evil, the backdrop of mankind’s greatest achievement being the time of our possible disaster only adding to the tension and power of this story.

+ Alas we can’t see it as episode 1 is missing (so is episode 3) and DW sets tend to look different when people are moving on them rather than standing statically in telesnaps, but judging by the surviving photographs of it the recreation of the lunar surface was breathtakingly good. There are lots of stories about how uncomfortable and strange it was for the actors crammed into heavy spacesuits and flown by kirby wires across a set full of mock-up craters and after reading the novel first I had a sinking feeling it would just look stupid on screen, but no – the delight as Ben, Polly and Jamie launch themselves across the moon’s surface (and thus getting in the gravitational plot element for later) is infectious. At least until poor Jamie comes crashing down and bangs his head; a clever way of writing him out for this story so the others get more lines (this is only Jamie’s third story and having him join as a companion was very much a last minute decision; other writers chose to give him some of Ben’s or Polly’s lines but writer Gerry Davis cleverly covers this by having him serve a plot function instead of a member of the base, adding a backstory where he sees the Cybermen as the spectral ‘phantom piper’, his MacCrimmon clan’s equivalent of The Grim Reaper, a lovely touch)

.

- This is the third story born from the fruits of DW’s association with actual scientist Dr Kit Pedler, as part of his mate Gerry Davis’ quest to get ‘proper science’ into DW under his watch as script editor and most of the science is scarily accurate: Pedler’s concern over transplants and the point at which we ‘lose’ our personality is key to the Cybermen’s creation, whilst an outpost on the moon is still being talked about now. And then they go and spoil it all when the Cybermen invade and damage the moonbase’s dome and the air is sucked out of it at speed. How do they get out of this sticky situation? By having the Dr hold a drinks tray in place of the hole. Erm, err...not so sure about the science of that one.

The Crusade: Ranking - 24

 

The Crusade

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Vicki, 27/3/1965-/17/4/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Denis Spooner, writer: David Whittaker, director: Douglas Camfield)

Rank: 24

In an emoji: ⚔

   'Ja Nus Hons Pris by Richard the Lionheart - Draft One

No man in prison can tell his tale true 

Not least the adventures of strangers from a box so blue 

That altogether made for such a strange crew 

I brought on them dishonour with ransom due 

In winters past 

They saw through my words, that they were untrue 

I felt remorse for what they had been through 

But what else is a needy King to do? 

There's always a part of the kingdom to woo 

I wonder where they travel to now, in futures to come or history passed?'

There it sits in the Dr Who canon between the one with the unrealistic ants and the one about jumping time tracks, sandwiched by historicals where The Roman Empire becomes a recurring farce and Monks living amongst Ancient Britons and Vikings use electric toasters, a last gasp of realism in a series that’s become increasingly gonzo, only half remembered and indeed only half returned (we only have episodes one and three and we only got the first of those back relatively recently in 1999, when someone bought it at a film fair in New Zealand not knowing it was rare but thankfully found out and sent the BBC a copy – given that officially New Zealand never even bought this story it’s given us all hope that more episodes are out there even in places that aren’t supposed to have them). There it sits in the back catalogue as a last minute bit of ‘old school’ to educate us, just as Dr Who is becoming a series that’s increasingly made purely to entertain. But I put it to you, dear reader, that even in a canon of some of the most exquisitely crafted, multi-textured and grown-up scripts ever written ‘The Crusade’ is special, deep and complex and full of rich dialogue that makes you feel as if you really have stepped back in time to another age. For this is the story where the ants are real and used by evil men on good people and where the time tracks are the difference between the haves and the have-nots, where the only farce is the problems caused between good men who want the same thing deep down and where time is so brutally set in stone our heroes can’t change it however hard they try. This is a world where the people who sit on top of an awkwardly stacked pile of cards that could come crashing down off their throne at any time, one where the only comedy is dripping in bitter irony and the only anachronisms in a tale of man’s inability to ever truly change is the Tardis. 

 This is the third time original script editor David Whittaker wrote for the series and, surprisingly, the only time he got to write one of his beloved historicals (he was a true history buff who loved researching and immersing himself in another world even more than writing and it shows). Whittaker is a class act who always did his homework, whether he was writing about feasible science in the near future or inventing impossible worlds that might exist out in space somewhere, so you can bet he goes the extra mile with material he can actually sit down and learn about. Of all the many great trips into the past Dr Who has taken down the years this is the one that feels the most ‘real’, as if you really have been transported back in time and, good as the serials that centre around the Dr and companions are, there’s something to be said for the historicals that throw the past at them rather than them at the past, so that for the last time the whole plot revolves around not the impact they have on the people they meet but their attempts to get their way back to the Tardis, to the impossible machine that represents home and rescue, in a land so brutal and harsh that you really don’t want to be stuck in for any longer than you have to. What with its tales of Kings marrying off their sisters, misbehaving Arabs and possible blackface or at any rate Caucasian actors in heavy make-up to play people from the Middle East some fans think ‘The Crusade’ is a story best to be left unremembered anyway, a tiny embarrassment from the days when we didn’t know any better and thought our Westernised central idea was ‘right’ to the point of blotting out all other voices (which was how we ended up in the mess of The Crusade in the first place after all). But ‘The Crusade’ is misunderstood precisely because its ‘about’ those things and how different life is now (i.e. in 1965), Whittaker picking up on the crux of other scripts he worked on like ‘The Aztecs’ and ‘The Reign Of Terror’ and asking out loud why people put up with things they knew at the time to be hurtful and deceitful without putting up more of a fight, coming to the conclusion that humans are scared, frail creatures terrified of being seen to do the right thing in case it makes them look weak and who live in a world made up of a tapestry of deceit and lies that means even when they try to do the right thing everyone is so suspicious that they assume they’re up to something. Everyone is a victim in ‘The Crusade’, worried about how they’re perceived, from Richard the Lionheart trying to save his kingdom by showing God is on his side, to Joanna the sister he intends to marry to keep the peace, to Saladin whose just trying to appear strong to his people against the Christian invaders, down to Barbara ending up in a plot to pretend that the King’s right hand man is really him, to the Doctor’s pretence of being a nobleman to steal some clothes to Ian pretending to be a knight to rescue Barbara to Vicki dressing up as a boy. Everyone in this story is trying to be something they’re not and it’s that tapestry of lies and deceit that causes ordinary people to become monsters, as the best means of survival, rather than pure cruelty. The closest to a noble motive the whole story is Muslim ruler Saladin in a move that’s practically blasphemous by 1965 standards, back when King Richard was still treated as almost an English patron saint. As deeply grateful as I am for all returned episodes of missing Dr Who, how I wish it had been episode four not episode one returned most recently, just to prove how modern this story is and how it subverts the slightly uncomfortable subtexts of its opening episodes. 

This is a complex story with no winners only losers, that shifts perspective so that you see it from several sides at once. At first you’re with the noble King Richard The Lionheart as he goes on a daring quest to bring education and knowledge to the barbarian hordes, especially when viewed from the eyes of the soldiers who are so impressed by his words and his valour in battle that they would gladly give their lives in his name (unthinkable in an age when British Royals stand for sleaze, corruption and charging us money for stuff that isn’t truly theirs: just compare how regal Richard is here to shots of Charles having a strop over a leaky pen and you can see where things have gone wrong). But then, the closer the plot gets to the King himself, the more you see this as a good p.r. stunt, that The King is really on a Crusade to make his name and keep his critics quiet as much as anything else, a last ditch attempt to raise funds by a man whose spent too much on the finer things in life that he can’t rule his kingdom (and suddenly the direct line between Royals then and now becomes easier to see). By the time Richard has refused to send help after Barbara and is busy attempting to marry his sister Joanna off for a proxy peace deal without asking her first, you start to see the sham as it really is. Equally while Palestine is painted at first as a dark and evil land, full of cruel and sadistic people who need to learn a bit of that English stiff upper-lip (especially when Barbara is captured by the evil El Akir almost as soon as the Tardis lands, a man whose as close to a pure sadist as any we see in Dr Who until Davros). By the end we see the Middle East of 1191 as a place with a culture and history all of its own, that doesn’t ‘need’ the Christianity and civilisation the soldiers are promising to bring to the ‘infidels’. Before Ian has a chance to rescue her Barbara is rescued in turn by more sympathetic locals who take pity on her plight and who are still trying to seek justice even in a land that’s patently unfair, risking their lives to stop their own ruler even at the cost of their life. 

 ‘We’re’ the invaders in this story, the aliens from outside imposing world domination on another, not ‘them’. Usually Dr Who, at least in these early days finds a historical setting and throws our heroes and heroines at it to see how they cope, but in this one there’s too: the England of the 12th century is portrayed as being just as alien and strange as the East. Basically everything we thought we knew in episode one turns out to be a lie by episode four, but that’s because in this strange medieval world where religion is key and science doesn’t exist yet and everyone’s so jumpy the truth can get you killed. Everyone survives in this story by hiding behind lies: The Doctor can’t let on that he’s a time traveller, Vicki has to pretend to be a boy to be allowed anywhere near court, Ian and Barbara have to be careful who they confide in, Haroun feeds his daughter white lies that the rest of their family is still alive and out there somewhere because without that she would have nothing to live for, Richard has to hide from his people that he’s not really pursuing The Crusade out of noble religious reasons but to hold a shaky poverty-stricken kingdom together, while Saladin hides from his people that he’s not really the brutal murderer they think he is but someone more civilised and understanding (he even sends snow and fresh fruit to Richard, just as he did in real life – and no that’s not an insulting present, fruit and snow were rare and valuable in Europe back then). The only person telling the truth is Joanna – and as a ‘girl’ she has no power whatsoever, despite being a princess, privy to the whims of her brother. Even more than that, though. ‘The Crusade’ points out how typically human and yet unnecessary it all is. Had everyone come clean from the beginning about their motives, had Richard gone to Saladin with trade in mind rather than conquest, had the Dr opened up about who he was to an open minded King, had Ian gone to fight as himself rather than a supposedly rich knight of Jaffa, had Vicki been a girl from the first instead of spooking Chamberlains with dress orders (there’s a great moment, now lost to modern viewers, where he laughs at the idea of sexes dressing as each other and moans about what times they’re living in just like every parent of every hip young trendy thing watching this in 1965) then everyone in this story could have been happy – but they aren’t, because humans are odd little distrustful creatures who don’t seem to be able to stay happy for any length of time.

 Whittaker is clever enough a writer to show that this isn’t just a bleak view of the Middle Ages but a view of humanity in general – and in an era when there were still ‘cold wars’ in Vietnam and Korea it would have struck a lot of viewers the first time round as being familiar (if anything it’s even more spookily familiar today, with two super powers fighting a religious war over Jerusalem). Whittaker’s been writing this story for some time too, threading it into the core of ‘his’ series in his days as the show’s first script editor: this is all pretty close to ‘his’ episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ about the distrust between the Doctor and future companions when if everyone had been open and honest from the first Ian and Barbara wouldn’t now be so far from home and in constant danger (an episode credited to Anthony Coburn, whose son is causing all the fuss over rights to the first story and its availability on i-player in November, but generally recognised as mostly Whittaker’s work, based on ideas from original Who script editor C E Webber, who didn’t last long enough to see the show on the air, because in those days it was the norm to only credit one writer per story in any BBC series weirdly enough).The Tardis crew have all learned a lot about themselves travelling together and knocking the rough edges off their characters so have become trusting of each other, to the point where when Vicki talks about her worries of being left behind, Maureen O’Brien visibly quaking at the thought of being trapped in this deadly world (she’s always good, far better than she’s given credit for, but especially here where she really makes the most of what little she’s given to do) and the Doctor is shocked – they’re a team now – in this crazy world the only people they can rely on is each other. 

The writer who more than anyone created all four of these people really makes the most of going back to their characters and asking how much their time spent together has changed them, made them stronger by working together – at times faith of being rescued is the only thing that gets Barbara through some pretty horrific ordeals in this story. Whittaker has really taken to the kindlier 1st Doctor he wrote in at the end of ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ when it was clear the series had a future but pushes him further than ever before so that instead of, say, ‘Marco Polo’ where it’s the Dr being unreasonable in a land of nobles, this time he’s the noble in a world of savages, with William Hartnell unbelievably good as he becomes the only person brave enough to rage at the King, seeing through the charades and publicity he’s built up for himself to the scared little boy out of his depth and trying to hang his kingdom together by a thread. Being diplomatic, however, doesn’t come easily to him and the Doctor finds this harder than fighting of an army of Daleks; it’s scenes like this where he loses his temper in the presence of a jumpy King and his loyal soldiers where you sense here just how young he is (yes at the time Whittaker, like every writer on Who, considered the Doctor impossibly old but it’s notable how much it works equally well now that the Doctor has lived so much longer how green around the gills and short-tempered the first Doctor is; that’s why he’s my favourite in fact, because he’s more flawed and less super-timelord than the others). There’s a terrific shown between politicians and soldiers where, for once, the Doctor seems to come off worst (and a great speech about how ’when you men of eloquence have stunned each other with your words we the soldiers have to face it out, while you speakers lay bed our soldiers sort out everything’ something true of every era: I re-write this against the backdrop that posh politicians are talking about conscription and sending working class boys and girls to war against Russia, though of course they’ll never send their own kith and kin). 

 In every previous story you could count on Ian’s British heroics and sheer goodness to put things right, but in this one his moral upstanding makes him easy prey for the people around him who trick and con him with their honeyed words to the point where he finds himself being staked out in the desert and smeared with actual honey, at the mercy of drones who are action heroes like him but without his gained wisdom, just taking orders blindly without thinking (both ants and humans; bet Ian wishes he’d kept a bit of that DN6 back from ‘Planet Of the Giants’). Vicki found the pace of life too slow in ‘The Romans’ and treated it like a giant holiday but she can barely keep up in this story, her 25th century way of thinking even more appalled by the injustices and casual cruelty than her 1960s friends. Barbara has been at the mercy of people in power many a time in this series, be they Aztecs, Roman Emperors, French revolutionaries, Dalek surrogate Nazis, Voords, Sensorites, insecticide pedlars or Giant Ants. You suspect that this is the adventure she remembers late at night most though, shaking from a nightmare long after she’s back safely in 1960s London, as she really goes through it: she isn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong place but kidnapped at knife point, not just leered at in this story but very nearly raped, while standing up to the baddy the way she always does very nearly comes at the cost of her life. Barbara started her time in the Tardis dreaming of changing the past, but all she wants to do now is survive long enough to go back to her own time. It’s quite the journey. 

 The main players all learn valuable lessons too: King Richard can fool everyone but not his sister and her barbs sting in a way no one else’s do, while Joanna learns that while blood is thicker than water a King with a kingdom to rule is thicker even than that, her life turned upside down at the cost of a kingdom that isn’t. Richard gets an early insight into the humility that will see him captured in Austria on his way back from the Crusades, where he becomes a prisoner, spending his time doing what he always should have been doing instead of fighting – writing poetry (Ja Nus Hons Pris’ is his best known, though weirdly a lot better regarded in France than here. I take it back, Royals really are different nowadays, I mean King Charles writing poetry?!) Saladin, too, is the reverse of Richard: The King’s problem is that he has a noble band of men fighting an un-noble war for money that’s only pretending to be about Christianity, whereas Saladin’s a noble man surrounded by thugs trying to keep his goons under control by telling them it’s all for money, when really he’s trying to keep his kingdom together any way he can. He’s also a ‘true’ Muslim in a way that Richard patently isn’t a ‘true’ Christian and is only spouting religious fervour because it’s the best way of making money (he looks positively appalled when his sister claims the Pope has greater rights to loyalty than a King). The only person who learns nothing in this story is the racist sexist thug El Akir, a baddy as mad, bad and dangerous to know as any we see in the series – though even he gets a reason for it with a back-story of being a victim in Whittaker’s brilliant novelisation that shows how he’s angry at all women after being rejected by the love of his life, his brother’s widow and being angry at every female since (in their parlance he’s an infidel – in today’s parlance he’s an incel). Everyone it seems has a personal crusade, a quest to change things and gain new territory that makes them learn about themselves, even if that quest is only survival. And that’s such a good fit for Dr Who as a series where, more often than not, we see the effects that people’s actions have on the people around them and the ripples across past, present and future that every action takes and why we should do the right thing by people where we can because of that (one of the few constant themes across the show’s sixty years) Dr Who was unusual from the first in being a series where people did grow from story to story, where the adventures they had weren’t interchangeable and where you couldn’t just drop in and out in any order the way you could most dramas and soap operas but under Whittaker’s guiding hand especially this becomes exactly the series Sydney Newman created it to be: a drama where people learn things, not just about the environments they land in but about themselves. 

 Of course you can write all the glorious words you want and it won’t mean a thing if the cast can’t deliver them properly, but the brilliance of ‘The Crusade’s dialogue is matched by the brilliance of its cast. Julian Glover is an excellent King, a renowned stage actor even back then when he was just thirty, risked his reputation by doing Dr Who back in the days when it wasn’t the cultural phenomenon it is now and dismissed by many for being merely a ‘children’s show’. He did this story on the back of the script, which he rightly recognised as being on a par with any of the big revered history plays he was in at the time, with Richard arguably richer and more complex in this story than he is in any of the actual books and plays directly about him (including ‘Age of Kings’ a 1961 drama with the same director as this story Douglas Camfield in which Julian Glover played, umm, Richard the Lionheart and ‘Ivanhoe’ a 1982 drama directed by Douglas Camfield in which Julian Glover, err, played Richard The Lionheart, despite the actor not having more than a passing resemblance to the paintings of him; not to mention the most famous interpretation ‘The Lion In Winter’ and works by Vidal Gore and Tariq Ali; naturally Richard The Lionheart is an actual lion in the Disney universe when he turns up in ‘Robin Hood’). Incidentally, when Glover returns in Dr Who in ‘The City Of Death’ he plays the last of the Jagaroth, an alien race whose been splintered and sent back across twelve different stages of history, which involved the actor briefly dressing up in lots of different costumes from different time periods – one of which is a Crusade uniform. Could it be that the King himself is an alien?!) Jean Marsh wasn’t yet as well known (though she had been in excellent Twilight Zone episode ‘The Lonely’ before this) but you can already tell that she will be, the first of her three Dr Who appearances in many ways her best as she makes Joanna simultaneously soft and warm, harsh and tender, haughty and common, caught between a life as the revered sister of the most important man in the land and the little sister who can still be put to the sword if she angers her Royal brother too much. It’s a brilliant portrayal – I yearn for more of this story to be found if only because of all the rich acting that’s going on in Jean Marsh’s eyes in the episodes we do have, when the camera’s meant to be looking at someone else and which you can’t see in photographs or from a soundtrack even if you squint. Bernard Kay too is excellent as Saladin, peeling the layers of a complex character away one by one, while George Little superb in the little he gets to do as Haroun, a man of honour in a world that doesn’t often let him use it (again the novel gives him more back story for his motivation: revenge against the leader who gave the orders to set his house alight and murder his wife in cold blood, something only vaguely hinted at here). By contrast Walter Randall has a whole different job as El Akir, being one-note nasty and a threat around which the whole story turns, but he’s excellent too, a rare person in Dr Who with no redeeming features whatsoever who still feels ‘real’ rather than a caricature. Mostly, though, everyone’s a scoundrel in one way or another or at best dishonest for no worse motive than trying to stay alive. 

 Yes to modern eyes its a shame that they give the three decent Arab parts to Europeans (though if anything Who is going against the grain for TV traditions of the time in having genuine Arab actors at all and not just in this story – this is the middle of three times Tutte Lemkow is there, an actor whose become very popular with fans on the back of his three appearances in the show, though you might not recognise him without the pet monkey or the one-eye of Cyclops of ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Myth Makers’; the poor chap cut himself badly at rehearsals, sticking the knife he threatens ian with in his own finger down to the bone, resulting in a trip to hospital and a Tetanus jab, but he gamely turned up without missing a rehearsal). Forget what some of the Dr Who textbooks tell you though: this isn’t a story that’s clumsy about the racial issues at all but one that’s very much aware of the complexity of this period of history in this part of the world and how people of the 20th century view it through different eyes. Compare it to almost any other 1960s TV about the Arab world and what impresses you most is just how fair this is, right down to the actors speaking proper BBC English rather than silly voices. 

One of the best things about ‘The Crusade’ is that it doesn’t feel like it’s ‘just’ a stop off back in a time that couldn’t possibly exist again and needs to be imagined – it feels like another part of an ongoing tapestry that exists to this day, another stalemate in an ongoing battle between ‘locals’ and ‘invaders’ that can never be won. The cleverness of ‘The Crusade’ is that feels like another chapter in part of an ongoing story about man’s inhumanity to men that don’t look like he does, part of a long lesson in learning that we might learn one day but probably won’t. It feels like a long time ago this story and in other ways no time at all – it’s quite eerie to be reviewing a story about how peace in Palestine feels impossible during a month when the ongoing wars in the middle East, which have ebbed and flowed going back to the 12th century, have flared up into massacre-levels again, with a similar tapestry of lies and propaganda and skirmishes and betrayals setting the tone for our current battle. Spookily both stories are about an invasion of Jerusalem, although Richard never quite gets there on screen (or in real life: the Doctor fudges his soothsaying for the King but though Richard sees the Holy Land he knows he doesn’t have enough troops to capture it so turns back). We’ve been here before so many many times because humanity never ever learns: chances are David Whittaker, writing in 1965, had the Suez crisis of nine years earlier at the back of his mind when he wrote this story (an Egyptian blockade of Israel) or maybe even the 1950 ‘Law Of Return’ that saw the English promise a ‘safe return’ of Jews to their homeland they couldn’t possibly make good (much like the ‘Crusade’ itself its ‘our’ fault for meddling in things bigger than us, however much the history books tries to paint us as trying to spread civilisation to a backward land to make people’s lives better, which is what most British viewers were being told at the time). You can absolutely draw a line between the fake-peace of this story in the 11th century, secured by marrying off a princess who doesn’t want to go to a man who doesn’t care for her, in a war fought for money but hidden behind religious banners, and today when war overturns ceasefires that overturns wars, depending on the people in power and splinter terrorist groups at any one time, in an ongoing stalemate that neither side can win. 

 Even if you don’t see that then, like other Dr Who historicals in the 1960s, the past is still brought brilliantly to life, perhaps more so than any other example (which is really saying something this decade’s trips to the past are all so accurate and detailed) not just with costumes and make-up and props as normal (the BBC often did plays set in this time period in the 1960s so had a lot of stock ready made to hand – perhaps another reason this time period got chosen in the first place) but with the rich dialogue. While The Romans and Vikings and Aztecs still talk much like 1960s people with the slang turned down and some old-fashioned words sprinkled throughout, Whittaker writes this story as it would have been heard in the day, rich in iambic pentameter and blank verse and with practically everyone saying something quotable most of the time (So many of my favourite lines are from this story: ‘All wise men look for peace. The terms of peace make wise men look fools’ ‘Give him every liberty – except liberty itself’ ‘You must serve my purpose – or you have no purpose’, ‘Hold one hand out in friendship, but keep the other on your sword’ ‘The brave deserve their favours ‘The only pleasure left for you is death – and death is very far away’ and a line I use all the time ‘You ask for the impossible very lightly’, something I’d forgotten even came from Dr Who until re-watching this story again). The dialogue is especially rich when the Tardis quartet aren’t around and we’re dropping in on the people here in their ‘natural habitat’ – the full on argument between Richard and Joanna in episode three, a brother and sister squabble heightened by the fact he’s King of England and she resents having to obey her sibling even though she has to, is particularly rich with insults and language. No wonder ‘The Crusade’ was one of the first three Who stories selected to be turned into novelisations soon after it was on the air (alongside ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Web Planet’), novelised by Whittaker himself: at the time, far more so than now, ‘The Crusade’ was being held up as being a particularly sophisticated entry in a series that was always far more educational and classy that it had any need to be. The novel is in fact where I first fell in love with this story, long before I could see the remaining half or listen to the soundtrack taped off the TV onto a reel-to-reel and decades later made available to buy on a shiny CD by a combination of science and magic (I’ve read how ‘cleaning’ processes and compact disc mastering works enough times in my ‘day job’ as a music reviewer, but I defy anyone to not see a little bit of Dr Who like magic in how something taped in murky audio sixty years ago can be cleaned up to sound better than a lot of things being made now). The original TV version didn’t disappoint when I saw it though: everyone is going the extra mile in this story and everyone means every last worthy word they say, from the main parts to the regulars to the extras. 

 The accuracy too is first class. Richard isn’t the patron saint of other dramas or the butcher with an axe to grind, or a gullible fool, or a religious zealot as so many lesser dramas do, but a more complex man, who knows what he does is probably doomed but does it anyway as it’s a better alternative than poverty or all-out war. They could have made him a noble explorer like ‘Marco Polo’ or a comedy twit like Nero but he’s neither: he’s a man trying to be the King his people need. Richard’s not a glorious lion-hearted ruler here but a newly installed cub, two years into his reign, watching his kingdom unravel but doing his best to keep it from the people around him. Admittedly in real life Joanna was meant to be married off six weeks after the fake-Richard got captured rather than more or less simultaneously, but that bit of artistic license aside every single bit of this story is true and there are plenty of spaces where the Doctor and friends’ adventures can fit. Whittaker even correctly guesses at the incestuous relationship between Richard and Joanna, of which more has come to light since this story went out. Although this element got toned down (reportedly because William Hartnell was outraged: in his childhood Richard would have been painted as even more of a folk hero as much as anything else, though I shouldn’t think producer verity Lambert was too happy at having such an idea go out under her watch either) Glover and Marsh still pitch their performance as something more than siblings if slightly less than full on lovers, something they found fairly easy to do given that Glover was in fact married to Marsh’s best friend actress Eileen Atkins at the time (and a rare name you think must have been in Dr Who at some point but never has). Even so Lambert left them notes after the producer’s run – which they seem to have ignored given episode three – that read ‘don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to!’ Jean also knew Hartnell having started her career in the 1953 film ‘Will Any gentlemen?’ in which he starred (though both are upstaged by newcomer Jon Pertwee! It’s where he and Jean first met and the pair married not longer, though had divorced by the time Pertwee became the Doctor. So as you see very incestuous all round!) 

The result is a story that feels a class above anything else on offer, even in what I consider Dr Who’s most golden patch, a smart story by a smart writer that doesn’t ever talk down to its audience or make the kind of sacrifices for TV viewing that other Dr Who stories do, in all eras. Like the best writers of history you can tell both that Whittaker adores this place but also that he’s done enough research to know that in reality he’d hate to live there. This isn’t a sanitised version of past at all: Barbara in real danger, at one point handed a knife by Haroun and told to kill herself and his daughter if soldiers get near otherwise expect a fate worse than death: you feel it too. The attention to detail is extraordinary, from the script to the costumes (al proper period) and down to the sound (there’s an extra echo added to the scenes in the Arab world, to better reflect being inside temples rather than being outside). Even the livestock: Camfield hired actual ants from London Zoo from the scenes where Ian’s arm gets daubed in honey (something William Russell, understandably, refused to do so that’s production assistant Viktors Ritelis’ arm you seen on screen…well, telesnap photo) not to mention a live animal carcass (which reportedly made the studio stink to high heaven) and a real life falcon – Richard’s favourite pet. If there’s a downside it’s nothing that can’t be explained by time or budget: this story doesn’t look as lush as the earlier historicals (though I’ll gladly take that back if episodes 2 and 4 are returned and prove me wrong!) and while the script mentions battles –aplenty most of what we get on screen is the talking, bar a very lowkey skirmish at the very start and a swordfight at the end. The whole is almost unrelentingly grim: only ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’ cut this one close to just how dark a vision of the world it is; much as I admire that, much as its better than just making the past out as fun and games, I do prefer my Dr Who stories to come with just a dash of hope. Especially from Whittaker who usually excels at happy endings: this one just ends with a cowed Tardis crew being grateful they escaped with their lives and a cut shot of Richard finally praying to the God he claims to serve, even though we at home know his Crusade is doomed. This isn’t just gratuitous misery though: Whittaker uses this story to explore a lot about the misery of being human in any era and how misunderstandings can quickly grow and spread and above all other things this story is a tragedy with a capital T, a world of people with clashing convictions equally convinced they’re right rather than heroes and villains. Which is exactly the sort of story Dr Who should be telling and one I wish they’d tell more. ‘The Crusade’ remains above all else a real high point of the ‘intellectual’ side of Dr Who’s ever elastic catalogue, a story that’s rich in words and costumes and ideas, even if the starting point is a King whose really very poor indeed. 

 POSITIVES + Even in the middle of one of the grimmest, most serious Dr Who stories of them all there’s a prime comedy moment where the Doctor outwits a hapless merchant whose on the take, pretending to be of high standing and what you might call an ‘influencer’ today, someone sure to tell everyone he meets about this wonderful market stall. Both men think they’ve got the better of the other (he’s a crook whose stolen these clothes in the first place) but there can only be one winner and William Hartnell’s sheer delight at his own ruse as he tries not to get the giggles and give the game away is TV magic. 

 NEGATIVES - There is, however, one element that’s maybe not quite as great as in other Dr Who historicals: the sets. Barry Newbury is stretched by other jobs so we just don’t get the same level of care and attention to detail we usually had under his watchful eye. The ‘forest ambush’ in the opening episode is particularly poor, being basically a cluster of droopy fake looking trees gathered together on what’s clearly a studio floor (shot in Ealing, not Lime Grove or TV centre, to afford bigger space in a sign of how regarded this series was now at the BBC– which they then don’t seem to use. Most odd. That, incidentally, is probably why we don’t get one of Whittaker’s beloved Tardis chat scenes the way we do in at least his original draft of every other story he wrote or re-wrote, which is a real shame: more than anyone he viewed these stories as about how the characters reacted to events, not the events themselves). And this eighteen months after they successfully brought an alien petrified jungle to life in ‘The Daleks’! Thankfully the sets get better as the story goes on (the harem and castle look particularly good) but still without ever reaching the luxurious heights of ‘Marco Polo’ or ‘The Aztecs’. 

 BEST QUOTE: Joanna on the Doctor: ‘There is something new in you yet older than the sky itself’, which is as good a description of Doctor as we ever hear in any story. 

Previous ‘The Web Planet’ next ‘The Space Museum’

Blink: Ranking - 25

 

Blink

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 9/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Hettie MacDonald)

Rank: 25

In an emoji: 👀

   'I've just been sent back but come armed with knowledge of when the Tardis is going to reappear so I can go back to my original timeline. The Weeping Angels sent me back to Coal Hill school in 1963 where I became a classmate with Susan Foreman, only she fell out with me because I didn't like John Smith and the Common Men so I missed out on the chance to travel in the Tardis and go back to my proper time, so instead I hung around till 1966 when I tried to meet him in Covent Garden, only I got delayed by the war machines, so I had to wait until the Tardis flew into Gatwick Airport but just as I was about to speak to the Dr the Tardis got kidnapped by the Daleks so I had to wait for him to be exiled to UNIT but the Brigadier wouldn't let me in without a pass so instead I got attacked by mannequins outside a shop and then I waited all the way until 1989 when I got kidnapped by giant cats on horseback outside Perivale and then in 2005 I got attacked by mannequins outside another shop and by the time I finally talked to the Dr in 2007 I thought 'ah stuff it, I might as well stay'...

‘Don’t even blink’ – the words that we only used to hear as a simple warning from our local optician has now become so synonymous with a certain story that it’s enough to send even the biggest and baddest Whovian scuttling for the sofa. ‘Blink’ is, so most fans agree, a masterpiece. I’ve yet to see a ‘best story’ poll since it was shown where this wasn’t in the top two – a remarkable feat for a fanbase as polarised as ours can be sometimes. What’s even more impressive is that it isn’t like any other Dr Who stories, it doesn’t fit being part of an arc or follow the usual rules of a Dr Who story, not least because the Dr himself and all the things we associate with him are barely in it at all and yet it also feels like one of the most Dr Whoy stories of them all, a big wide timey wimey ball of emotions and big themes about how we’re living our lives and how we experience time from the writer who, more than anyone else, treats time as a central character in this series. This is a self-contained story that pushed the ever-elastic format of DW to breaking point, but in a way that also makes perfect sense within the context of the series and which created arguably the one villain of the modern series memorable and distinctive enough to be up there with the ranks of the Daleks and Cybermen. 

 Honestly, it would be perfect if only the Doctor (and Martha) were in it more, but then without that ‘Blink’ wouldn’t exist at all. Steven Moffat was desperate to write for the third series and the production team were desperate to have him after ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ were such big hits (both winning HUGO awards for best television drama no less). Only he had a problem: Moffat was up to his eyeballs in work for the series Jekyll (a sort of brain-dead ‘Brain Of Morbius’) and didn’t have time to ‘Blink’ never mind give months of his life to writing for Who. Having initially been presented with the idea for ‘Daleks Of Manhattan/Evolution Of the Daleks’, then when he ran out of time pitching what became ‘Forest Of the Dead/Silence In the Library’ as a two-parter, eventually the deadlines made the whooshing noise they always do on a series like this and Moffat had to confess that he’d run out of time to write anything except the ‘unknown’ slot that traditionally fills up episode 10/11 of a series and which nobody ever wanted to write (because Dr Who only had time to make thirteen stories with the regular cast a year and with a Christmas Special added on top was at its limit – not part of the original plan for the comeback but Russell T wasn’t going to turn down a yearly festive special with a mega audience when it was offered to him - meaning one story or another had to be made back-to-back, either with the Doctor and companion split or barely appearing at all). Even this was pretty tight: Moffat had just weeks to get this story ready and already had the production team breathing on his shoulder asking for ideas, effects, props, budgetary requirement, the lot. It seemed an impossible brief: Russell even left Steven a jokey memo saying ‘Remember: no Doctor, no Martha, but do scare us to death. Thanks!’ Most writers would have gone under and ended up weeping themselves, but Moffat suddenly had a brainwave: a very simple static prop that everyone working on the show had seen countless times in their lives and an actual source material so that everyone knew what page he was on that everyone working on the show were probably given for Christmas about a year earlier: the 2005 Dr Who annual. 

 What not many fans will tell you that this original draft was even better. Of all the many spin-offs of Dr Who there’s been over the years the annuals are the one that’s least like the show itself and yet the one part and parcel of the original Dr Who experience the modern series has re-created as close to the original era as possible, as if released in a parallel universe where Dr Who always remained a ‘children’s show’ with a target age of about six while the main show gets darker and older (incidentally why was there never a ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ annual? The format’s tailor made for one!) There was a book released every Christmas between 1964 and 1984 and there has been one every year Christmas since 2005 too, with a run of ‘Yearbooks’ (not quite the same thing, for older grumpier ‘archivist’-type fans) released in the middle between Christmas 1990 and 1994. Traditionally they were written to sell extra ‘tat’ at Christmas, mostly by writers who worked for the annual publishers World Distributors rather than DW itself and you suspect had never seen the series before getting the commission and didn’t understand it even after they had, with stories that were full of ripe dialogue set on planets filled by aliens who had walked straight of the science-fiction B movies cliches list and featuring the Drs doing things they would never do on TV and saying things they would never say, interspersed with comic strips that only had two or three photos of each Doctor’s likenesses to work from and often didn’t feature the companions at all, interrupted every few pages by ‘filler’ puzzles, a board game that always had to be different to previous years so which ended up being more complicated than ‘Only Connect’ by the 1980s and spurious ‘space facts’ that were at best debatable and at times downright wrong even at the time. Even in the modern era, when the annuals tend to be written by fans and people who actually wrote for the series, they tend to feel closer in spirit to those old annuals than the TV series and have the feel of being rushed off in a hurry to pay the bills and give their creators time to hone their craft on TV (and still come with the same filler, though this time its more likely to be about the show itself rather than time or space). 

 Fans still love them though: back in the day they were only way to re-engage with the series in between series and before the Target novelisations they were often the only link to this series people had in the days when TV programmes were ephemeral and fleeting, never to be repeated. and even today they’re a good alternative to driving your family mad by watching your favourite story over and over again and probably having it confiscated. There’s still a moment, too, once or twice per annual, when somebody cottons on to the fact that the restrictions of this format (the reduced word count, the need to work as a standalone story that doesn’t do anything major to the characters that would need to be addressed on TV, only having one or two pictures) can also be a strength (the chance to write something with hardly any editorial restrictions and no budget issues whatsoever), offering a unique writing challenge that results in Who stories quite unlike any other, a curious mix of being both more child-friendly than the series and with the ‘censor stabilisers’ of TV off (because you can go to way more places in text than you can on screen). Dr Who’s elastic format means it’s perfect for the variety of annuals in a way that, say, 80 pages of Basil Brush or Blue Peter or footballers or superheroes soon gets boring. Sprinkled alongside the most childish and silliest Dr Who stories ever written, full of fish people from Kundalinga (a story even sillier and cartoon-like than ‘The Underwater Menace’) and X-Rani and the Mutants (a story even sillier and more cartoonish than ‘Time and The Rani’), where at first the 1st Dr travelled with two grandchildren younger even than Susan and actually has the surname ‘Who’, a 2nd Dr who wears a utility belt like a super hero and shouts lines like ‘die hideous monster die!!!!’ and a 3rd Dr who acts more like James Bond with even more gadgets, are some of the bravest, most grown-up Dr Who stories of them all, with clever writers honing their craft by trying to ‘break’ the format of their favourite show (some of the 4th Dr annual stories, in particular, are amongst the most surreal scifi stories ever written: my favourite story regarding the annuals is that an artist once included a gigantic white blot at the heart of one comic panel because he meant to go back and fill it in later but forgot – only it was in such a surreal story the editor assumed it was meant to be part of the design and left it in:  it’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ from the over-sized 1977 one if you’re interested though, honestly, it could be any of the comic strips in the next four as well).). And the best story? It was this one. I might have been 23 when I got the 2006 annual for Christmas 2005 but Steven Moffat’s ‘What I Did In My Holidays By Sally Sparrow’ was a story that always stood out as being head and shoulders above the rest and perfect for the more childlike audience of the annuals and one I raved about to people even before it got turned into a TV story 18 months later. 

 All the nuts and bolts and wibbly wobbly timey wimey angle of ‘Blink’ are there (with the first hints of Moffat’s unique ability to use time in Dr Who as an active participant rather than something people live through), its just that the threat isn’t yet the Weeping Angels, the doctor is still Christopher Eccleston not David Tennant, the Doctor hadn’t even met Rose yet never mind Martha, the communication between the main characters comes from a home video not a shop-bought DVD and the Sally Sparrow we follow isn’t a young adult played by future star Carey Mulligan but a twelve year old schoolgirl with braces (and yet a character who in many ways is more grown up than the Sally we get here). The main story is still much the same though: a plucky girl in the present ends up saving the Doctor in the future by undoing something he did wrong in the past. It’s a story that still asks all the big brave questions about fate and pre-destiny that all the best Who stories ask and the perfect distillation of the Dr’s extraordinary world directly hitting our ordinary one, all the more so for the fact that it disrupts a world of homework and braces and fish fingers and custard (though not in the same dish, not yet) rather than something only older people recognise. It’s the ultimate Dr Who annual story in that’s its clearly written for a younger audience, comes with its own re-set button that doesn’t impact other stories around it (though presumably this is a post-regeneration 9th Dr before he meets Rose) and it does things that you couldn’t do in the TV show, not about plot so much as the effects each of us have on each other every day and how something someone does in the past can affect people of the future who aren’t even born yet and how you can converse across distances of decades if you somehow know how the other person is going to reply. In this version the Doctor is stuck in 1985 after his Tardis ‘burps’ and shoots forward twenty years without him and he leaves Sally messages pleading for help through text left under the wallpaper in sally’s aunt’s house, in messages held up in old polaroid photos and finally through an old VHS video tape that ‘answers’ all her questions as if they’re having a conversation, just twenty years apart. The Doctor doesn’t bother asking the adults for help, only Sally, via a pre-ordained conversation she wrote down for the Dr that she passes off as a homework assignment (handed to herself as an adult in the future, when she’s working as a spy). 

 If anything the twelve year old Sally Sparrow is an even more interesting character than the adult one in the TV version (though she’s a mighty young twelve and reads more like seven or eight truly – it absolutely makes sense the Doctor would choose someone as childlike as himself though and she’s a prototype for the feistier young Amy Pond in ‘The Eleventh Hour’. Moffat’s always been good at writing for children: his childhood (particularly childhood fears) always seems closer to the surface with him than it does for most writers. This Sally’s the perfect companion for the Doctor as she’s the sort of person where the bigger and smaller pictures and the real and the vividly imaginative live side by side in her head all the time anyway, treating a universe that needs to be saved and a madman in a box as incidents in between wishing for bicycles and school bullies making up songs about her sticky-out hair and with the same belief in better tomorrows mixed with miserable todays running round in her head (Moffat finds it much easier to write for children and teens than adults – you can see it in his superlative breakthrough series ‘Press Gang’ too, where the teenager journalists are amongst the most complex ever shown on TV but the adults are all ciphers. Even the adult Sally is basically Lynda day all over again: smart and tough and a little spoiled, in some ways curiously older than her years and in other ways curiously younger, so concerned with what she’s doing that she doesn’t have time to consider other people’s feelings but still doing the right thing for others in the bigger picture because that’s how she rolls. Even her romance with Larry in this story is what would have happened if she’d ditched Spike for childhood friend and sub-editor Kenny). 

 The annual version went down well with the sort of fans like me who still remembered their inner 12-year-old as well as actual 12 year olds and it was a big deal for all of, ooh an entire Christmas morning, then at Christmas lunch-time the Doctor changes into David Tennant and everyone got excited about something else and moved on. But the thought stuck in Moffat’s head ‘well, why can’t I put this on television?’ The plot needed a bigger reason for the events to happen than just the Tardis going wrong again, however, so Moffat, now having firmly let his inner 12-year-old off the leash, remembered an event that had so greatly scared him as a child, a holiday his family had taken in Dorset and where Steven’s hotel room happened to look out on a disused graveyard with the sign ‘danger keep out – dangerous structure’. From the window it looked for all the world as if the notice was being held up by the sort of statues you only see at graveyards, weeping over the dead (so the living can get on with their lives without feeling bad) – no doubt Moffat was reading a Dr Who annual of his own at the time and spooking himself; they can do that to an impressionable mind. Similarly when Moffat grew up he lived for a time in a place named ‘West Drumlins’ (the name of the abandoned house sally finds the angels in) which gave him the same spooky feeling as an adult (and though Moffat mentions it a lot in interviews he’s never actually said where it is: the closest I can find is that there’s a region named ‘Drumlins’ in Ireland). It’s also worth adding that te writer was eleven when a gargoyle brought to life by the Devil was seen in ‘The Daemons’ in 1971, the perfect age for that to make a lasting impression too. As well as looking like a gruesome Dr Who monster the gargoyles seemed anachronistic and felt as if they’d just arrived in a portal from another time because nobody is quite sure why they’re there at all or why our ancestors had such bad taste in graveyard decoration. They’re also everywhere and you don’t need to go that far out of our house to come across something weird made of stone somewhere (most of them on top of older British buildings are there to ward off evil spirits by frightening them away in fact). How perfect, then, as a race of Dr Who monsters who don’t view the universe the way that humans do but who live across dimensions of time as well as space (itself harking back to dialogue by Susan in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’). They’re such a Moffat creation too: he has a hang-up about death, struggling to kill off anyone in his stories (and even more so if they actually get lines): the Weeping Angels don’t kill you but do feed off the years you would have lived by sending you back through time (‘the kindest psychopaths’ as the Doctor puts it). 

 Putting the two plot strands together was a moment of genius as they fit together so well: like the annual TV Sally is an ordinary person having an ordinary day and messing about with her friend in an old house until she discovers hidden messages telling her to ‘duck’, only the danger is more immediate here and the stakes much higher as her friend and the boy she fancies are taken back through time, the Weeping Angels ‘feeding’ off the years and ‘potential energy’ of the lives they would have had. Rather than being scary because they can kill you The Weeping Angels are terrifying because they can take away everything in your world in an instant and all the different things you might have become, the extraordinary of Dr Who not only impacting your ordinary life but swapping it for another ordinary life you shouldn’t have lived. Losing everything that makes you you and being effectively reduced to a child starting over again with having to make new friends and a new life for yourself in an era that might not even have the job you were working in, is a far greater horror for an adult than merely dying. And yet the childlike element of the annual story still remains: Moffat says he was also inspired by the children’s game ‘Statues’ (also known as ‘Grandfather’s Footsteps’ in some countries where the ‘it’ person is known as ‘the curator’ incidentally – this game really had an impact on Moffat didn’t it?! I would hate to be his psychologist…) and being scared at the way his lively, sociable friends managed to stay stock still as if they’d been possessed when playing the game as well as the ‘person’ grabbing you when they sensed you nearby. The Weeping Angels are another variant of the ‘thing that lives under the bed’ in the dark that terrifies all children at different times (albeit for different lengths – ‘Listen’ will give us that story too) and the idea that they can only be stopped by a bodily function that you don’t usually think about (blinking, what did you think I meant?) gives them a frisson of danger other monsters don’t have. The Weeping Angels also get round the perennial problem of most Dr Who monsters lumbering around not very fast because they’re a bulky costume: though still worn as costumes, cutting the footage means the angels can move faster than Usain Bolt at warp-speed when you’re not looking (and it also solves the perennial problem that a Who monster is at its scariest when it’s about to pounce in the cliffhangers, not when it’s pounced in the continuation the following week). 

 Mostly though you still feel the magic when Dr 10 starts talking with Sally from across several decades via a hidden ‘Easter Egg’ on her DVDs and the frisson that’s what happening is incredible, utterly bonkers – and yet, in context of a series about time travel, eminently plausible. They were already a ‘thing’ in the community before ‘Blink’ came along: Dr Who DVDS have more unlisted Easter Eggs than probably any other regular series and are perfect for the show, a great example of the hidden amongst the seen and the extraordinary living alongside the ordinary unseen before breaking through if you know how to look at them the right way. This is a show full of hidden messages about how the world ‘really’ works and feels like a parallel version of our universe that only a lucky few have ever fallen into – so what better thing for the spin-off DVDs than to give you some extra ‘clues’ not everyone sees? (at least until the DVDs ruined it by mentioning them on the back) found only by hitting the buttons of your DVD remote in a certain sequence. Seriously there’s about fifty, most forgettable but some terrific, particularly the ‘home movie’ ones too shaky to be counted as an extra in their own right: my favourites are the ‘behind the scenes’ cine-films on ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ taken by the grams operator, the audio of a trailer for ‘The Abominable Snowman’ whose video footage has been long since wiped, an audio recording of location footage for ‘The War Games’, Jon Pertwee riding a traction engine at a village fete which is arguably the best thing on the ‘Monster Of Peladon’ DVD, Tom Baker in costume is at another event in Blackpool on ‘The Ark In Space’, a – ahem – blink and you miss it outtake hidden away on ‘The Seeds Of Doom’, Tom Baker guesting in a John Cleese sketch in return for the Python’s cameo in ‘City Of Death’, location filming for ‘The Twin Dilemma’ and David Tennant reading his lines for ‘The Infinite Quest’ as if he was a pirate – there are lots of lists on the internet on how to find them all if you haven’t already; some modern DVDs even have the Dr’s one-sided conversation from this story on there as an ‘in-joke’. 

 Even so, it’s all a big risk that could have gone wrong: the idea of monsters that just stand stock still and who can’t hurt you as long as you ‘see’ them could easily have been stupid if done badly and the story might have fallen apart badly with the Doctor reduced to a few minutes of one-sided dialogue, while ‘Blink’ is a lot closer to hammer horror than science-fiction. Thankfully it doesn’t: mostly because of the characters, who are some of the most three-dimensional Moffat ever wrote and who we feel we get to know well inside forty-five minutes. With the innocence of Rose, the calmness of Martha and the curiosity of Donna the adult Sally Sparrow feels like a trial run for Amy Pond (right down to the unlikely fairytale-like surname) and might well have become a full time companion had they not gone and cast Carey Mulligan in the role shortly before her Hollywood ‘breakthrough’ role in ‘An Education’ (she remains the only actor to be nominated for an Oscar after appearing in Dr Who: it remains speculation but I’m pretty sure she was meant to be the full-time companion instead of Donna on the back of this story, only for Carey’s career to take off. She’ was everywhere and only isn’t now as she got married to Mumford of Mumford and Sons and retired to bring up a family. Which is as close to time-travelling back to 1969 as you can probably get in real life: they’re a sort of 21st century ‘Ganger’ version of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). Much like the story in the annual you always got the feeling she was something special before she was a star: she says a lot with her eyes without even needing speech, with a Sarah Jane-like mix of incredulity and acceptance, bravery and fear, as she gets wrapped up in a world she didn’t have the first clue existed is even more convincing as a ‘real’ person than Elton in ‘Love and Monsters’ and her heartbreak as she realises she’ll never see her best friend with the even more unlikely name Kathy Nightingale or Billy, her brief fling, is as emotional as anything we see in Who despite the comparatively brief screen time (even more when Sally does see Billy one last time, as an old dying man – Louis Mahoney stole the show as the newsreader in ‘Frontier In Space’ at the start of his career and dying werewolf Leo in Who’s closest 21st century cousin series ‘Being Human’ at the end and nearly does the same here – and the comments on the weirdness of this being the same rain storm as when they met decades earlier, despite all the weather that’s been between the two moments, is chilling). I really don’t know why they didn’t bring Finlay Robertson back as Kathy’s brother Larry in a later story though as he’s never been as busy – he’s excellent as the ‘Dr Who’ style voice of knowledge about science and time travel, geeky enough to be ‘us’ watching at home, in the same way Osgood will be, a typical Whovian whose lucky/unlucky enough to live in a universe where the Dr is real rather than the star of a TV show. Even the small part of Kathy’s grandson Malcolm, played by Brian ‘Dominator’ Cant’s son Richard, is well drawn. The only thing that doesn’t ring true about any of these characters is Sally’s response to her friend’s disappearance (she’s still in shock, right?) and the fact that Billy ends up learning how to manufacture DVDs in his ‘second life’ (I mean he’s a policeman: it’s not a natural fit; if I’d ended up back in 1969 and the future depending on me learning a new technology I didn’t understand, well, let’s just say we’d be in for a lot of trouble). Still, those are the side effects of knowing these characters so well that it seems strange when they do something out of ‘character’ – generally it’s only the Doctor and companions and sometimes the villains you get to know well enough to even know what’s in ‘character’.

 It could still have collapsed and unravelled so easily had ‘Blink’ gone the easy route, had it all ‘been a dream’, had Sally gone back to her old life, or had the Dr arrived at the last minute to put things right, but no – the ending is as clever as everything else, the Tardis (spoilers) ‘fooling’ the angels by making them look in a circle so that they stop each other in a massive blank stare. This was the bit that delayed Moffat the most (because how do you defeat a perfect monster without the Doctor actually being there?): there’s a story that Mark Gatiss rang him up to ask how the story was going and was sad to see his friend tearing his hair out and all but having a nervous breakdown with a deadline looming so he kindly offered to read the script he had. Mark picked up on the fact Steven had specified having four weeping angels at the end and this gave Moffat the brainwave that they were four corners of a square all looking at each other when the Tardis de-materialises. It feels like the morally ‘right’ ending told in a Medusa-like folk tale from the mists of time, a cautionary story of being turned to stone if you become too complacent, like the rest of ‘Blink’, impossible technology that sounds like a legend solved by impossible technology that sounds like a myth. 

More than anything else this story stands out because it features the shaky parallel world storytelling from the annual thrown into a Dr Who story so that this one feels more unusual, more quirky, more special than even this series generally does, as if it’s playing by different rules. As fond as people are of the many Weeping Angel sequels, for me they never have quite the same impact because they are approached like ‘other’ Dr Who stories, where the Angels are another monster to be defeated by something clever with gadgets. This story is a fable, an old folk tale overheard and passed on in whispers, not a big action TV show that follows a formula – that’s also why, for all his hard work as a showrunner, Moffat was never quite able to recapture its feel for a whole series (though ‘The Eleventh Hour’ comes closest). ‘Blink’ is a story about more than just another base under siege or about companions or the Dr in peril – it’s a story about ‘our’ world, not ‘their’ world, where the extraordinary is just out of reach of our eyesight our whole lives as, unknown to us, The Weeping Angels remain trapped and ‘quantum locked’ because humanity has been staring at them for so long we’ve forgotten how weird it is that these odd little gargoyles are there (I mean, I can’t explain why they’re there – and the ‘real’ reason, that they’re ‘fake’ demons believed to keep ‘real’ demons away from holy locations by scaring them off, sounds like a Dr Who plot anyway). Much as I can see why such a popular monster was brought back, it’s also the sort of story they can only really do successfully once and future angel appearances are toothless by comparison. The other reason ‘Blink’ ‘works’ as well as it does is because it shows a world where we could be in a Dr Who story any second, that all it takes is finding a scribbled note behind some old wallpaper or pressing the button on a DVD and we could be having adventures of our very own. Most of all though ‘Blink’ works because it’s a clever story that moves the frequent background discussion of fate and pre-destiny in Dr Who to the forefront, asking big questions of the audience about what their life might look like if they had to start over again in a different time. 

 From its earliest days (well, sixth story ‘The Aztecs’ to be precise) the Doctor talked a lot about how history was set in stone and couldn’t be changed ‘not one line’ – that you could observe events in the past (sometimes even the present and future) but you couldn’t play a part in changing them because they are part of an ongoing tapestry of experiences that need to be played out in order, with every event having ripples and ramifications because we live in a universe where what we do maters because we all impact each other so much. A few of the more ‘Buddhist’ stories in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Dr eras ask similar questions about cause and effect too: there’s the idea that life is a learning process, that we’re meant to face certain challenges and come across certain people in our life to shape us from the Dr on down (that’s one of the reasons this series became so big again in ‘lockdown’ when communities were cut off from one another). ‘Blink’ is a story where time is set in stone alongside the baddies: the characters are clearly meant to end up where they’re meant to end up, with Kathy for instance meeting her husband the minute she steps back into the past. The events in this story too are set in stone: they have to be so the Dr doesn’t wander off script, a conversation in ‘real time’ across totally different eras linked only by the notes Larry hastily scribbles down (good job the Dr wasn’t relying on my shorthand, something I was notoriously bad at, or he’d have said something like ‘Don’t even Blonk, Blonk and you’re bread!’) David Tennant’s one-way conversation must have been one of his hardest scenes to shoot, even with someone reading Sally’s lines off-screen, but he handles it perfectly: his urgency leaps out of the screen and he makes the most of one of only four scenes he’s in (though Freema Agyeman almost steals the show with her put-upon companion working in a shop to make ends meet until the Doctor can work out how to get them home again). 

 It all harks back to the questions posed in the original version of this story published in the annual – the feeling, at 12 years old, that nothing has been written in stone at all yet and anything in your life is possible, that the person you’re meant to be with and the dream career that makes you you could be hiding round any corner before real life gets in the way and you end up compromising to pay the bills and learn to stop believing in magic. The Weeping Angels are, in a sense, a re-set button that can take you back if not exactly to childhood then the chance to begin again, as a whole new person, surrounded by whole new people, doing a whole new career – and yes as we’ve said that’s terrifying, but the other side of the coin is that it’s also liberating. This is, ultimately a happy story: the Doctor and Martha get home, while Kathy and Billy lead nice happy lives that are arguably happier than if they’d stayed in their old ones. A lot of Dr Who is about putting the magic back into ordinary life so that you can awaken your inner child again and realise just how impossible it is to be floating on a rock hanging in an infinite cosmos, the inevitable result of lots of conjoined bits of DNA from across multiple generations. That’s why having the Dr appear talking to our episode representatives through their television is so perfect: everyone has a part to play in this universe and while its Sally’s today it could be ours tomorrow. ‘Blink’ is, of all the many examples of Dr Who making the ordinary and extraordinary come together in one big explosion, one of the cleverest and one of the best. 

 I can totally see why for so many fans ‘Blink’ is the greatest DW story ever made. Is it mine though? Well, a few things don’t quite fly. There’s a lot of faffing about in the middle moving the pieces in the right order so that Sally and Larry only end up walking in on the Weeping Angels properly 40-odd minutes into the plot just in time for the resolution. As cute and perfect in many ways as the idea of DVD Easter eggs are, it really is most unlikely that Billy would have got the means to add them to all the DVDs that Sally owns (not to mention the fact that she only has 17 DVDs; the vast majority of people reading this own more of course I would have thought and that’s just the scifi ones, but even if you’re not interested in owning collections, even in 2007, then you were unlikely to even have that many, its a weird number to stop at. It would have been more fitting in this Douglas Adamsy story if they’d made the number ‘42’). Plus the Doctor’s cryptic message ‘look at the list’ is less use than say, ‘Oi, you know that copy of ‘The Time Travellers’ Wife’ film you got for Christmas? Well, in addition to the plot seeming suddenly quite familiar to you now you might want to press left, right then menu screen then left again: there’s a message for you). The idea that Sally and Larry both haven’t met before (their best friend/brother didn’t introduce them to each other?!) and end up together at the end is just too unlikely and too neat: even for such a fairytale story they clearly wind each other up no end in ‘real’ life and its sad that, following their brush with greatness, they end up running a secondhand DVD shop as a couple rather than, say, meeting up with Jo Grant and travelling the Amazon saving people. It helps if you don’t spend too long thinking about the weird evolutionary processes that resulted in a creature that’s powerful enough to feed off time but not so powerful it can’t over-ride people staring at it too. Some of the pacing is all over the place as well: Kathy disappears from the story far too abruptly, with most of what we learn about her coming in the form of the letter she sends right when she disappears (how much better if we’d got to know her properly before she disappeared and had it some random stranger who disappeared in the opening minutes?), while other scenes last an eternity, especially the padding in the middle. To me, personally, being sent to 1969 isn’t the punishment the story seems to think it is either but the single best thing that could ever happen to me (not least because I could see the missing episodes of ‘The Invasion’ and ‘The Space Pirates’). As cleverly as the plot parks David Tennant off to the side you still feel a Doctor-shaped hole in the middle of this story where he should be, especially compared to the way Eccleston shines out of the annual short story front and centre. We really needed more of this episode’s all too brief shots of ‘snarky Martha’, sniping at the Dr the way Peri once did, and she’s much more likeable than the love-lorn version from other stories. For every four scenes that are brilliant (one bit that nobody else seems to pick up on: I love the bit of the DVD player foreshadowing the plot by ‘blinking’, because even technology can’t pause for very long so how can a mere human? Plus Billy’s line ‘don’t look at me!’ when he’s old, just like the Angels) there’s maybe another one that doesn’t quite come off. 

 No matter. ‘Blink’ is still a brilliant piece of work, a fantastic concept and a terrific script that got very lucky indeed n the way it was put over on screen, without any of the usual Dr Who ‘mistakes’ – it would have fallen apart badly without this cast making us believe in them so readily or had the Weeping Angels been another of those costumes that just looked like an actor in a suit. Thankfully everything went right. Even the location discovery was a bit of fortuitous luck (i.e. magic): Fields House, in Newport, was derelict and falling into disrepair when the film crews turned up. I was the perfect find: Moffat himself called it ‘the creepiest house I’ve ever been in’ and in many ways its become his lucky talisman (‘The Snowmen’ and ‘Knock Knock’ were also filmed here). The shoot did wonders for the property too: it was turned into an Airbnb house not long after filming, charging money to Whovians, before being sold in 2020, the papers making a lot about it’s Who links. ‘Blink’ ended up being a well made experiment touched with all of Dr Who’s concept and production strengths but still one that felt fresh and fundamentally was unlike anything Dr Who had ever tried. Yes the years have diluted its impact slightly – not least because of all the Weeping Angel stories and time-travelling shenanigans that follow once Moffat takes over as showrunner but it still feels and unique and special, magical in all the best ways. Most of all ‘Blink’ is also so very Dr Who in all the concepts it holds dear that only a Dr Who fan could ever have written it (twice!) Don’t even blink? Heck, this is one of those stories I didn’t want to miss a second of and I still don’t even sixteen-odd years on even while I know it backwards . 

 POSITIVES + One of the big reasons the story took off is its much repeated catchphrase, one that was mentioned once in the original script but it took Russell T Davies – never one to shy away from such things – to see what a perfect repeatable catchphrase it made and it duly became the talk of playgrounds across the land. ‘Don’t even blink!’ is a terrific idea: monsters you can shoot with weapons are boring but ones you can control by simple human movement that you can’t hold off forever, is chilling. I’m someone who blinks a lot. I lost every staring contest around when I was original Sally Sparrow’s age and my eyes aren’t much better now (I blame it on all the Dr Who I’ve watched) so the idea that my life could depend on something I’m not very good at and would somehow be my fault is a lot more terrifying than a creature I was never going to outwit in a month of Saturday tea-times. 

 NEGATIVES - Thank goodness another line didn’t take off as a catchphrase. Sad really isn’t ‘happy for deep people’. That’s just nonsense best left to memes and fridge magnets and not up to Moffat’s usual high standards of writing. It also sounds like the ‘wrong’ sort of thing for ‘our’ Sally to say: as much as she’s walking round an empty house she doesn’t dress, act or think like the goth or depressive those words would imply. 

BEST QUOTE: Billy ‘I often thought about looking for you before tonight, but apparently it would have torn a hole in the fabric of space and tie and destroyed two-thirds of the universe. Also…I’d lost my hair’. 

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