Shada: Ranking - 3

 

Shada

(planned for season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, planned for 19/1/1980-23/2/1980, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Douglas Adams, director: Pennant Roberts)

Rank: 3

The Shada Redemption:
‘Dear fellas, I can’t believe how time doesn’t fly on the inside. I dreamed of punting on a Cambridge river once when I was a kid, marvellous things that were everywhere. But now I’m stuck here, away from everyone else tearing around in such a damn hurry. The parole board got me in this cell after helping a Dalek with the prison plumbing when its plunger got stuck to a wall. It’s hard work. I try to keep up, but my hands and brain were meant for books, not menial work. I don’t think the Judoon prison officer likes me very much. I keep thinking of my own kids who put me here, the timelords, might show up and just say ‘hello’ but they never do. I have trouble sleeping. Bad dreams. I keep feeling like I’m falling. Through time and space. I wake up scared, thinking of the life I should be leading, in quiet contemplation, at a university on Earth. Sometimes it takes me a while to realise where I am when I wake up. That I’m sharing a cell with a Voord.  I don’t like  it here. I’ve decided not to stay. And the best thing about being a space-time traveller is they’ll never be able to find me. I doubt they’ll kick up a fuss. Not for an old timelord like me on his last regeneration. Although I will miss the prison tea. Now, was it one lump or three?!?’

 

There are some guidebooks that will tell you ‘Shada’ doesn’t count as ‘proper’ Dr Who because it was never finished. There are others who will tell you that, even if it had been finished, it wasn’t very good anyway and the colossal interest there has been in the story over the years is precisely because it was never made, not least by its own author who dashed it out in less than a week. There are others fans who say that, even if it had been completed, it’s so different every other DW story that it would exist in its own little vacuum like ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’ that we try not to think about too much and should never be mentioned again. Even allowing for the fact that one of the great things about this series is the variety which means everyone gets to have an opinion about this show, they’re all wrong. ‘Shada’ isn’t just one of the most brilliant Dr Who stories ever, it’s one of the most Dr Whoy Dr Who stories ever. It’s like a summary of all the other 334-odd reviews I’ve written, where an eccentric outsider who defies crumbling oppressive institutions is chased by another eccentric outsider who was so evil his own people had to lock him up, in search of a third eccentric outsider who was exiled to Earth and who has made a home away from home within our own crumbling archaic institutions where he can be as eccentric as he likes and no one will notice. It’s the tale of good versus evil and individuals of the present versus archaic institutions but where the line between all of these gets blurry. A story that asks big questions about mercy and justice and forgiveness and whether a reformed criminal who did horrific things so long ago that he can’t remember them is more deserving of redemption than some wannabe newbie who knowingly causes hurt. A story that asks whether the extraordinary can be defeated by the courage of ordinary people who were having an ordinary day and fully expected to lead out ordinary lives until the Doctor’s extraordinary world came crashing in on them head-first and turned everything they knew upside down. It’s a tale of how learning and education is sacred across the universe, but how knowledge itself isn’t what saves us, because it can be used for good or ill – its wisdom that makes the world a better place (a lesson all the more resonant given that its set in the grounds of one of Britain’s two oldest universities by a local lad who would have watched all the stuck-up people arriving in his home town). It’s a tale that no other scifi series would deliver, of impossible mundane objects given the greatest power, from floating orbs to books, with chases not in space shuttles but on bicycles and gondolas. Mostly, though ‘Shada’ is a tale of morality and how only by working together and bringing out the best in each other can we defy the worst, a thread that’s been running through Dr Who since its earliest day. It’s a story every bit as thrilling and funny and thought-provoking and as downright bonkers as any in Dr Who’s long history, intended as the grand finale for two of the unsung heroes of Dr Who in the 1970s, Graham Williams and Douglas Adams, who had saved enough budget to make this closing epic every bit as big and important as it deserved to be.

And for years it brought me such pain that such an important part of this series, it’s quiet two hearstbeat, was missing so that we couldn’t see it – a little like all those lost black-and-white stories, only worse because there wasn’t even the hope of it being recovered in some strange and mysterious way in the future. Because they never finished making it, with Shada a victim not of Krags or criminal timelords or even time in an abstract sense, but clocks. Yes clocks. The production team had got as far as the extensive location filming in Cambridge and the longest of three planned studio blocks (some 77 minutes recorded out of approximately 130) when ‘Shada’ was halted by a technician’s strike that meant the studios were unusable across TV centre. It was a strike about workload that had been brewing for a long time (something Dr Who had accidentally added to by requiring two lighting riggers to work overtime during the location night shoot) but which came to head over, of all things, the extra duties needed looking after the wind-up clock on the set of toddler favourite series ‘Playschool’. The cast and crew had just arrived back at TV centre to start the second run of filming and camera rehearsals had gone fine in the morning, but when everyone turned after lunch they found the studio shut and lights out. Usually when this sort of thing happened in years past a re-mount would have been booked within the next story so that we’d have got the ending in some form, even if it was rushed and incomprehensible (‘The Power Of Three’ springs to mind), but this strike was a deep one that ran across more programmes than usual and given that it was taking place in early December the BBC wanted to prioritise it’s high profile Christmas specials (Morecambe and Wise got the Dr Who studio, for instance, when the strike ended a day after ‘Shada’ was meant to be completed). Usually a delay this serious would see a story shuffled to the following year (that’s what happened with ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) but this was a Douglas Adams script with a lot of input from producer Graham Williams and for the first time in the show’s history men in both roles were leaving the show at the same time.

By this point Douglas had already got fed up of the series and the long hours he was working on honing other people’s scripts instead of the long hours when he should have been working on his own (but was more usually in the bath trying to avoid writing at all). He’d been unlucky enough to have been unemployed for years before scoring his two biggest successes back to back, hired to write and then script-edit Dr Who on the back of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, which had become bigger than he’d ever realised when he’d accepted the Who job. Left to his own devices Douglas liked the show and would have stayed longer, but he was already very late for the book adaptation of the first series, he’d already had to cancel the first recording sessions for his second radio series (sheepishly admitting to his producer that he hadn’t actually written any of it yet). He’d tried to soften the blow by getting his old flatmate and collaborator John Lloyd (yes, the QI guy) to write for the show and maybe take over, but that story ‘The Doomsday Contract’ been a non-starter that hadn’t got past the scene breakdown and other scripts from friends of his or the show had fallen apart too (‘Child prodigy’ by a new writing partnership Beaton and Dumant, ‘The Secret Of Cassius’ by a teen fan Andrew Smith who’ll finally get his big break with ‘Full Circle’, ‘Erinella’ by director Pennant Roberts, ‘Valley Of The Lost by old producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and an untitled story about Halley’s comet by scifi writer James Follett).  So Douglas decided to write the finale himself, using it as his big finale before leaving the script editing job after one of the shortest but busiest runs of anyone in that role (he’s already written ‘City Of Death’ at short notice this same year). As for Graham, he’d loved his work on the show but had run out of steam, deciding to quit after one too many fights with Tom Baker (who was reportedly devastated at his leaving). While Douglas got on with the work he should have been doing, the producer’s last days on the show were spent sadly hanging around the studio doors and filling in paperwork (as cast still got paid if they turned up), with what should have been one of the show’s greatest triumphs one of its biggest anticlimaxes (and forget some of the reactionary things you might have read, all the cast loved this story and knew it was special when they were making it – and trust me, Tom Baker especially didn’t say that about many scripts). This story would have been John Nathan-Turner’s last job as production unit manager before becoming the new producer and he was fond of it, sending a request in to the BBC to have it made before the cast moved on or were unavailable, offering to make it as an extra story in his season or a special if he got a bit of extra budget to cover the new filming but they refused. JNT, who’d worked hard on what ‘his’ year of Dr Who would look like and already stung by the BBC shortening the episodes per season, simply didn’t have room for it. For the first time Dr Who had run out of time. Only JNT’s quick thinking, officially asking for a ‘preservation order’ on the surviving footage, meant that any of this story survived at all back in the last days before home video when the BBC were still merrily junking parts of our heritage to make way for football or something equally useless. 

Soon the only sign fans had that ‘Shada’ wasn’t just the fever dream of the actor’s wonky and/or boozy memories was a couple of scenes cleverly re-used in ‘The Five Doctors’ to cover up the fact Tom Baker didn’t want to do that story, where a Gallifreyan timescoop supposedly picks the 4^th Doctor and Romana up during the start of this story and preventing them from having it (presumably they’re dropped down at the start of ‘The Leisure Hive’ and never actually have it – or at least that’s what the Paul McGann audio version hints at).  That and the lo-fi bootlegs of the rushes that began to circulate during fan get togethers that were fascinating, even unfinished with unreadable shaky text for the missing bits and without the special effects or music. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when ‘Shada’ was finally released, as a super-expensive video in 1992 with typically eccentric Tom Baker links for the missing scenes as he taunts a kraag at the British Museum of Moving Image. Admittedly the music was a bit weird (Keff ‘Cacophony’ McCulloch claimed he was doing what Dudley Simpson, also working on his last story, would have done – but not without travelling to the 1990s and using it’s cheap synthesisers he wouldn’t!) and it was still hard to tell what was going on, but my goodness the footage that was shot was good: Tom Baker and Lalla Ward at the top of their game! A perfect supporting cast! The single best use of location filming in the series’ history! And that script – even unfinished it made more sense than most. The inclusion of the script with the video (apparently signed off by Douglas in error amongst a batch of papers for other things – he was so mortified he gave all his royalties to Comic Relief so at least something good would come of it all – sadly there isn’t a pdf of it on the DVD as I’d hoped).) was tantalising though: even as an unfinished rehearsal script rather than the finished product, weirdly, it was fabulous. What a shame we couldn’t see it all. So you can imagine how over the moon I was when ‘Shada’ was released on DVD in 2017 with ‘proper’ music this time and a more accurate script filling in the gaps. And how over the universe I was when they finally made it ‘whole’ in 2021, a mere forty-one years later, using even more eccentric live action Tom Baker links, animation in the style of the completed ‘missing episodes’ and all the surviving actors returning to finally tell the story complete. Yes I now own four different versions of ‘Shada’ but I don’t care – there’s no other colour Dr Who story I watch more than this one anyway. I’m thrilled over any restrictions of space or time, sitting here in November 2023, that so many fans get to see ‘Shada’ as part of the overall collection on the BBC i-player’s ‘Whoniverse’, back where it always belonged as another story to be judged against others, located in between ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ and ‘The Leisure Hive’, so that this story can dance and sing and live on down the ages. It feels like a Dr Who tale all in itself, one that defies the logical progression of time. After all, so many fans till now have given this story a miss: it was always a pricey DVD/video/blu-ray and fan response is mixed, with ‘Shada’ dismissed as a not very good, not very Dr Who story only aficionados and completists ever got round to seeing but now it can be judged like the others, as another Dr Who story.

And what a story! Douglas’ original plan was to make the Doctor ‘retire’ along with him, putting his feet up for good in a Sherlock Holmes bee-keeping weay, only to be tempted back for so many ‘one last adventures’ that eventually he gets the bug to set off all over again. Williams worried that it sounded a bit too much like sending the show up, to which Douglas is said to have replied ‘How is it possible to send up a series about a man who flies around the universe in a police box defending evil, armed only with a long scarf, a bag of jelly babies and a robot dog?’ Then he went away and read the paper and came across a story about the Yorkshire Ripper who had just been caught and the debate about what should be done about him. Some politicians were talking about bringing back the death penalty in England just for this one case (a few suggested using it as a deterrent to the IRA bombers too) and a lot of the public was supporting it, though others felt it made the law as bad as the murderers and that it was better to lock them up and forget about them. Douglas began to wonder what the timelords might do. It seemed more in keeping with Gallifreyan lore to simply ignore the problem and get rid of it, but equally giving someone with thirteen lives who changed character with each one ‘life imprisonment’ seemed especially cruel. Douglas decided that the very Gallifreyan way would be to send the worst prisoners to a special prison so secret that everyone would have their memories of it wiped so that they couldn’t be embarrassed by it and came up with a criminal who was both on the run and settled in his new home. Knowing the way Douglas’ mind worked, being ordered back to ‘work’ rather than writing about a fun holiday for him and The Doctor would make him automatically think of a prison anyway!

Now all he needed was a setting that would be cheap but also different to the usual formula of the Doctor trying to convince the locals that people were in great danger. Douglas figured that he’d known a lot of people like the Doctor and his new villain Skagra growing up in Cambridge, eccentrically dressed strangers who swanned around like they owned the place and who seemed to be older than time. As a student at St John’s College, Cambridge he’d even had secret suspicions that some of his lecturers were so odd they couldn’t possibly be all human and it seemed like the sort of place a Dr Who story ought to be set (amazingly we won’t get a ‘finished’ story set in one until as late as 2017’s ‘The Pilot’, where Peter Capaldi is like a sharper version of Chronotis, the only person in the room not confused by his lectures). So he came up with the idea of a fellow renegade timelord to the Doctor who’d become obsessed by Earth and was living out his exile in the university at St Cedd’s (named after a real saint, another exile, a Christian priest who defied the local paganism and founded a monastery in Northumbria before dying of the plague in the 7th century, although there is no college named after him in ‘our’ universe. Douglas also lived for a time in Essex and there are a lot of St Cedd’s churches and buildings round there). So, fresh from seeing how well the location filming in Paris turned out on ‘City Of Death’, Douglas scripts this story as a homage to his home town of Cambridge, lovingly recreated it in all its beauty daftness and anachronisms, with several digs at the locale’s expense without ever losing an obvious love for the place (naturally he contacted St John’s first in the hope of filming there, but even for their alumni they wouldn’t agree, so the college you see is 2010 University Challenge winners Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Tom Baker became a local hero on the first day of filming when he broke the cardinal rule of not being allowed to walk on the grass without a don present – repeatedly!) ‘Shada’ looks so good throughout. Whether we’re listening to the Doctor comparing punting on the river Cam to a simpler Tardis as Romana takes in all the sights, watching Dr 4 ride his bicycle furiously round town past a bunch of a capella college kids (who Tom Baker and director Pennant Roberts met down a pub and drunkenly promised a cameo – one they had to wait a full thirteen years to see!), the jokes about students getting in the way of their lecturer’s past-times reading snoozing and drinking tea or watching the loving re-construction of an English university room in the studio, accurate down to the last detail, this story looks gorgeous and all the better for the fact that it’s a story that revolves around four separate time-travelling individual aliens (a lot even for Dr Who), all the very real location filming roots this story to a definitive place in space and time. Douglas even names a few characters after his university classmates (his best friend, Chris Keightley, ended up naming two characters and in real life ran the Footlights comedy group that gave Douglas his big break and Monty Python contacts). It’s a real shame we didn’t have more location filming in cities away from London in the series (and more recently Liverpool, Cardiff and Sheffield) – only ‘The Awakening’ comes close to Shada’s love letter to the English countryside as a place where impossible things can happen before breakfast (and as a two-parter we barely get to explore there as it is – whereas there’s lots and lots and lots of location filming here).

No wonder Professor Chronotis moved here – it’s as weird as Gallifrey without the hassle or funny robes. He’s a terrific character who never gets enough credit, a timelord in his thirteenth and final regeneration simultaneously absent-minded in the extreme and sharp as a tack (funnily enough he’s most like the 11^th of all the Doctors – the one officially on their ‘thirteenth and final regeneration’ give or take some jiggery pokery with The War Doctor and David Tennant’s hand). Even in a series full of dotty professors he’s delightful, hard of hearing and mad as a box of Urbankan frogs, a harmless eccentric who’s no visible threat to anyone. Chronotis has been there for centuries, with each passing generation of students and teachers never noticing that he was still there and not aging. At first when The Doctor meets him you think he’s an old Human friend before they start discussing time travel and having different faces before he admits he’s asked for The Doctor’s help in tracking down a book he’s lost, one of the ancient artefacts of Gallifrey (it’s a little like treating the Magna Carta as an overdue library book). Douglas’ script cleverly plays off three great revelations that keeps the plot moving (and definitely spoilers here for quite a while, as it’s just unavoidable I’m afraid): the fact that the book is more than just a book (time passes backwards over it – I read a few books like that in my English degree myself), that the Cambridge rooms are more than just Cambridge rooms (they’re the console room of his Tardis with the usual panels and controls hidden by stacks of books and knickknacks!) and that Chronotis, to quote from a later script editor, is ‘more than just a timelord’.

To take those revelations in order, it’s a great and very Dr Whoy idea to have a plot revolve around a book. While other scifi franchises are both about and for people who have never read a book in their life or only read comics and/or scifi books, it’s a given fact that The Doctor has read every book going and that if he’s your ‘hero’ then chances are you have too. There’s a reason they novelised each and every Dr Who story up to 1996 when most other franchises stopped at one or two; it’s because Whovians are trained to read. Not just Dr Who books and not even scifi: Sydney Newman wanted this series to be educational and for children to go to the library and look something up after it had been in an episode, whether it was about science, history or simply people. While the educational remit got lost to some extent that idea of The Doctor as a bookworm who solved things not because he walked around with weapons but because he was very clever and knew things runs through the series and rubs off on a lot of the fanbase, who by and large share the same curiosity for how the world and the people in it work and the same thirst for knowledge. It’s more buried in the modern series perhaps but it’s there too, far more than other shows that stick to a rigid formula and encourages the viewer to learn about all sorts of things they might never have heard of in any other way. As a result so many Dr Who stories have been about how knowledge is key to understanding life and planets, but they’ve nearly always been about aliens coming to destroy us or searching for an actual physical tangible object – having that information be contained within a book, something that’s interactive and depends on the reader coming to it in the ‘right’ way to be used properly, is such a delicious idea. Also, to have an alien come to destroy Gallifrey via Earth through it (instead of the other way around) allows Douglas to write in all the usual Dr Who formulas, but from the ‘Inside out’. As a result we get to see all sorts of in-jokes about how the usual Dr Who world ‘works’: Skagra the villain ends up doing what the Dr usually does, growing increasingly impatient at the eccentrically dressed locals who are either ignorant or nonchalant towards him and misunderstand the dangers when he tries to be all powerful, the epic fight to the death takes place not in Bessie or some space rocket but on a humble bicycle and the Doctor and Romana get to pilot a Tardis in one of the most dangerous chase scenes ever seen in the series from the comfort of Chronotis’ own arm-chairs. Even the book, though it looks like any other book, is impossibly different, breaking the carbon dating machine and being negative 20,000 years old (Nice to know they still have books not ebooks that far in the future!) Equally we see the conventions of our normal world turned on their head: the two Cambridge students are amongst the cleverest people in their chosen scientific field; they’re on post-graduate courses in one of England’s two most prestigious colleges so their knowledge is as up to date as it gets. Yet The Doctor turns everything they ever knew in hours (and has to ‘soup up’ poor Clare’s brain to get it up to a Gallifreyan standard. One wonders if it fully wears off after the story ends or whether there’ a residue she has to ignore for the rest of her studies). A lot of Dr Who stories tell us that knowledge is power but ‘Shada’ is the only one that means it so literally, something to be treasured above all else, to be savoured, for its ability to wipe out planets with a single world, where the right book in the right hands can be the single most important object on a planet leading to whole new worlds of information and where bad people will go to very desperate lengths to suppress other people knowing things.

Douglas clearly loves books and yet there’s a slight dig at both his and anyone else’s student days. We saw when Romana first turned up at the Doctor’s side (in ‘The Ribos Operation’) that she was book smart, but he’s world smart, clever in another way. There’s a bigger world out there, Douglas seems to be saying, away from our books and learning and if humans only knew what the bigger picture was we’d never bother to learn anything again – which is ironic, because it’s our ability to learn and adapt to new knowledge is what makes the human race better than animals and the ability to adapt from new information is what allows us to grow. Skagra the ‘real’ villain is evil because he doesn’t learn – he has that same rigid mindset of someone who thinks they know everything already and people only need to know what he does. Skagra doesn’t learn the information he needs, he takes it, stealing from some of the greatest minds of the future (and presumably risking robbing it of several inventions, books and theories along the way). He’s the scary tutor who wants you to remember everything he tells you and to never think for yourself, soomeone who wants everyone to conform, to be just like him (Douglas’ stage directions for his first scene say that he ‘walks with the arrogance of someone who doesn’t know what the word ‘arrogance’ means’). He ‘loses’ in this story despite his amazing scientific knowledge because he can’t adapt, he’s thrown off by chasing three eccentric timelords who are full of surprises and turn his carefully controlled box of logic on its head. Douglas’ point is that respecting someone for knowledge is not enough: they have to be wise with it, to be open to learning because it never ends. Cambridge is the perfect setting for the era when the Dr is still trying to be a sort of teacher with Romana as his pupil, but in a story where knowledge isn’t enough to save you and even the oldest teachers can be fair game to mindless thugs like Skagra. As a side effect of this there are a lot of delightful and very Dr Whoy jokes against institutions and authorities in ‘Shada’: it’s very Douglas that the timelords, who are still seen as an all-powerful and conquering race in 1980, are shown to be forgetful and flawed, while the story ends with a policeman scratching his head over reports that a Cambridge room can possibly go ‘missing’(the irony being that the story’s criminal is finally arrested not by his own people for crimes he really did commit but for a crazy sounding story here on Earth that he didn’t). Along the way we get an internal logic that only a fan of Cambridge uni favourites the Goon Show could have written: a logical computer is defeated by its own logic and a kind word, as the Doctor persuades it that if it’s all powerful master wants him dead then there’s no way he could possibly be alive and so it doesn’t need to actually kill him. There’s also poor put-upon Wilkins, a college dean so used to the Doctor’s crazy comings and goings that he knows the Doctor’s movements better than he does (even the times he’s turned up with a ‘different face’). Then there are Douglas’ digs at old humans traditions that make no sense now the context of what they once meant has been lost (may week really did used to take place in may week, until I was moved until after final exams in June, but the name somehow stuck).

The revelation that we’re inside a Tardis is played to perfection and Douglas makes great use of the Tardis as more than just a rocketship the way some writers do: here it’s a home away from home and a library is the perfect disguise for something that’s bigger on the inside, given how many different worlds are carried around in books sitting shoulder to shoulder on our bookshelves. A whole pile of them mentioned and debated by the Dr and Romana while searching for the rare and dangerous text ‘The Worshipful And Ancient Law Of Gallifrey’, a mismatch of old modern and not-yet-written volumes that any timelord would have. The scene where the Tardis disappears, confusing poor Wilkins as to why there’s suddenly an empty shell in the professor’s rooms, makes for one of the all-time great comedy moments too. Not to mention the gag about the milk being twenty years old, but kept fresh in a statis chamber. Although the funniest scene is The Doctor, after years of struggling with the Tardis, struggling with a simply punt on a river, much to Romana’s bemusement (though The Doctor’s scripted to be hopeless, Tom Baker really was – he had lots of extra rehearsal and still the only time he successfully managed to manoeuvre the boat in the right direction was the one time the cameras weren’t rolling! To be fair the crowds of children giggling at him probably didn’t help. Those things are harder than they look too: I’d have fallen in).
It’s not all jokes though, despite Douglas’ reputation for never taking anything seriously and a lot of Shade is tense and at least heading towards scary, despite the threat being more abstract than usual. Rather than a killer book that hurts you by dropping on your foot, however, the physical threat in this story is a simple sphere (a sort of balloon attached to a rod that’s surprisingly effective on screen, growing and shrinking at a sneaky press of a button by the actors even though it’s so incongruous it totally looks like a special effect added in post production...until you remember this story didn’t get far enough to have any post production). The effect it has is agonising: it doesn’t just kill, it takes away a person’s intelligence, so that all that learned wisdom, whether it be in person like the Dr and Romana or at universities like Chris and his nearly sort-of though-he-hasn’t-got-round-to-telling-her-yet girlfriend Clare, is gone for good. In a series like Dr Who knowledge is the single greatest weapon in the universe and having that taken away from you, to forget who you are and what the world is, becomes more terrifying than death or regeneration. On that score, together with Chronitis’ dottiness (he’s clearly at the end of a long life) ‘Shada’ also feels like a comment on dementia, on the tragedy of losing access to who you are. It’s another reason why Chronotis seems so sweet: he genuinely can’t remember being anything else (that great line about not remembering the sieve his memory is like is a Douglas injoke, from his first published work, a short story in a 1965 edition of ‘The Eagle and Boy’s World’, when Douglas was all of twelve).  

I like to think, too, that Douglas might have been having a little dig here with the football-like sphere: sports are the antithesis of many an intellect and writer, who don’t understand why they have to waste half their education slogging away chasing a bit of leather up and down a muddy field when there are worlds to uncover and explore – and gangly nearly seven-foot uncoordinated Douglas was, it’s fair to say, not a natural athlete. He might well have shared with me the secret feeling that people turn to sports in their youth because education and knowledge isn’t taught properly, in a flawed educational system that lets rogue timelords sit in power over us without question and its only fans of series like Dr Who that slip through the cracks and realise how valuable and wonderful and brilliant education can be that see this, worshipping intelligence and originality instead of worshipping braindead sports stars who can’t see beyond the end of the football pitch. Too many brilliant minds are sucked dry by believing that there is nothing more important in the world than football and that the world beneath our football boots is all that there is (just don’t tell Matt Smith who was very nearly a national player till he got a back injury and became an actor!) For why should anyone want to rule the universe or ignore the universe when they can explore and learn about how utterly wonderfully brilliant it is, like the Dr? That’s the message that runs through Dr Who like rock but no other story says it quite as passionately or as clearly as ‘Shada’ does. Skagra’s still intense immovable psychopath is a good match for the 4th Dr’s wild flippant eccentric, a symbol of the sort of rigid unthinking authority Douglas would have been used to at Cambridge and its very Dr Who to have a villain who wants to shape a universe to look like him that’s actually efficient and reliable but who also sucks the joy and individuality out of life; he’s a less shooty Dalek from the same Hitler school of fascism: Skagra’s taunt to Romana in episode three that the only alternative to his purpose is ‘entropy’ caused by dissident outlaws who should be wiped out is very 1930s Germany, not least because Skagra himself is a rebel figure not an authority one (to quote another Dr Who story, what is he going to do with people like himself who fight against his authority?) ‘Shada’ itself is a fascinating concept, a prison where all the worst criminals in Dr Who are kept who are too dangerous to be let loose flying around in time (we were due to see a Zygon, Cybermen and Dalek in the cells in the script, but sadly they never filmed those bits). We already saw in ‘The War Games’ what the timelords do to errant but harmless rebels like the Doctor, so you can only imagine what they must do to real criminals – and what a threat Salyavin must be. There is, though, a major twist in the middle that’s rather been lost to the days when most people tend to read about ‘Shada’ in books first before seeing it (so more major spoiler right here). For half the story you’re meant to think that nice old Chronotis is squeaky clean and Skagra must be mastermind criminal Salyavin. But of course he isn’t, Chronotis is, because Skagra is too thick to be a mastermind criminal wanted across apace and time – it takes someone with brains to buck the system and fight it from the outside and while we never do find out what he’s done Chronotis is a threat to the timelords more because of what he knows that could be a danger to them than what he did (the way sadly that a lot of legal systems work based around legal rather than moral justice - there are always a lot of law students at Cambridge too). 

We’ve rather lost the shock of the revelation, now that most people tend to come to this story after reading about it in guidebooks, but it’s is one of the best twists in the series. You spend most of the story thinking he’s the Doctor’s soulmate, someone who ran away from the rigid rules of Gallifrey to a place of knowledge and learning and even before he knows he’s in Salyavin’s presence the Doctor talks about him with some awe, as someone who was brave enough to break the rules rather than a dangerous criminal, a charismatic outlaw disobeying the rules for all the right reasons, in the ‘Robin Hood’ mould (which makes his later behaviour in ‘Robot Of Sherwood’ all the weirder). He isn’t The Master or The Meddling Monk in hiding, he’s not an evil villain who wants to uproot the place he lives and rule it through terror, he’s just a nice old man living a quiet life out amongst his books, the equivalent of the Russian spies living out a quiet cold war life in Britain (where quite a few were granted safe passage in the 1960s and 1970s in return for selling out their Russian paymasters; if this was a new Who story they’d have lobbed in a sub plot about him being poisoned with his library door handle to make the point even clearer). We never fully find out what Salyavin did or even which regeneration he was in when he committed his crimes (after the 6th Dr and The War Doctor, not to mention Missy being a version of The Master who tried to become good, its clear that a timelord’s morality changes along with their personality) and the worst we see Chronotis do is be late handing a book back late (even in the Dr Who universe that’s usually just a fine). We can’t bring ourselves to see him punished, especially when he ‘dies’ during the course of the story (something that was meant to be definitive, but Douglas liked the character so much he kept writing him back in, having Clare accidentally bring him back to life by fiddling with the Tardis controls – this part makes most sense if you assume his ‘soul’ was on its way to the Gallifreyan matrix but hadn’t made it yet, the same way people ‘die’ on operating tables and report coming back to life before they follow the clear white light all the way to Heaven). It’s Skagra who really ought to be locked up of course, someone who was born evil, even if he’s so hopeless he doesn’t actually manage to do anything evil. Skagras are two a penny but Chronotises are rare and, like the Doctor, don’t belong on a world full of people with power turning a blind eye to corruption because they’re always going to see the bigger picture and fight back (and, like a lot of the best Dr Who stories, this one urges us to follow the Dr and be like him rather than a unfeeling Skagra, even if it ends up with us being persecuted for it like Chronotis). The Professor is clearly no longer any harm to anyone, if indeed he ever was, and is actually doing a lot of good by passing on his knowledge and enthusiasm to the students in his care; by contrast Skagra is evil and needs to be locked up for the good of everyone else, even if he’s too incompetent to have actually done anything. There’s no such thing as a one-size fits-all criminal and a lot of criminal actions were only seen that way in hindsight anyway. Just look at the Humans that would have been in Shada had the script been filmed as intended: larger than life people like Genghis Khan, Boadicea, Lucretia Borgia, Emperor Nero (see ‘The Romans’) and Rasputin (really the Master? See ‘Power Of the Doctor’): not your cold-blooded killers, more your imaginative dictators, with debate raging about how ‘evil’ or ‘good’ they really were.  It’s an interesting take on capital punishment and how people can change – literally in a timelord’s case - contrasting a repentant criminal mastermind against a hapless wannabe who really does mean to cause harm. There are different levels of criminals and not all deserve prison. In that sense ‘Shada’ is like a less abstract ‘The Mind Of Evil’, although rather than seeing evil impulses as something separate to individuals that spurs them on it suggests that there’s a little evil in all of us. Even the people in charge of setting up the ‘Playschool’ clock (honestly, all those pro-union Dr Who stories then this happens!)

As well as brilliant themes this is a story littered with great characters, exceptionally cast: Denis Carey is mildly disappointing in his other Dr Who roles  (‘Keeper Of Traken’ ‘Timelash’) but he’s exceptional as the sort of dusty crusty lovable professor you long to have for real, so absent-minded he can’t even remember the proper analogy for how absent-minded he is and the moment when he dies (or so it seems) is properly tear-jerking.  Christopher Neame as Skagra is often picked on by other reviewers but I think he’s great as a contrast to the other more emotional actors, stiff and tightly controlled and serious to a fault, unable to understand any of the wild goose chases the Dr leads him on. The students, who could have been simple ciphers, get a lot of character, Clare being the more naturally heroic gutsy one (she’s Liz Shaw mark II), while Chris is clearly Douglas writing his younger self into the story as a passionate science nerd who ends up doing all the scientific pontificating the Doctor normally would – who is then forever being told he’s got it wrong! Even the minor role of Wilkins is deliciously played by Gerald Campion, once TV’s Billy Bunter (see ‘The Celestial Toymaker’), with just the right amount of eye-rolling (Baker was thrilled when he found out as it was one of his favourite programmes as a boy – and even more thrilled when he found out Campion was a distant relative of his hero Charlie Chaplin). Even better is what this story does for the regulars; Tom Baker clearly adores letting his eccentricity loose and laughing at quaint English customs and is never wittier or snarkier than here, a bohemian student let lose in a real student world, really raising his game now he at last has a script worthy of it. Lalla Ward’s Romana gets even more to do than he does, with the air of someone who’s in on the single funniest joke in the universe and delighting in telling it to people who just won’t get it. What’s more their combined chemistry leaps out the screen: this is, by all accounts, the last of their ‘loved up stories’ when the two actors were very much an ‘item’ (maybe on screen too: note how the first thing Skagra’s sphere picks up from the Dr is a picture of Romana, whose the ‘dominant thought’ in his mind, rather than say The Tardis or K9), before the realities of seeing each other outside work and the frustrations of their last year together under new management get in the way of one of the most unusual courtships in all of time and space (there was another unusual courtship, too, with Chris actor Daniel Hill later meeting production assistant Olivia (nee Bazalgette) on this story during location filming in Cambridge and later marrying and having a family together. Ahhh). Even K9 enjoys one of his best stories, being used the way he always should have been, simultaneously as comedy relief who’s still the cleverest person in the room even in Cambridge that still no one listens to and doing all the things that the plot needs someone to do in order to free up the Doctor and Romana to run around madly having fun.
If there’s a fault, well, it’s nobody’s fault (except, maybe, a misguided clock technician who was living off a pittance in 1980) and they do their best to get away with it, but even the finished version never feels quite finished. The switch between live action and animation is jarring (even if the voice overdubs are seamless, the actors sounding as if they haven’t aged in decades – and a quick shout out to that glorious last scene of a 2017 Tom Baker emerging from under the Tardis console to give us one last big grin that I find even more emotional than his cameo in ‘The Day Of The Doctor’). The story does rather give out a little in its last third too (the part that was never finished, mostly), reverting to a template Dr Who story with monsters after two-thirds of a story showing just how far everyone can get away with not needing one. An invisible spaceship is a bit of a budget copout too, though I suspect the shots of Skagra and later our friends disappearing into thin air would have been quite something if finished in 1980 with contemporary technology (rather than 21st century that doesn’t quite fit).

Mostly, though, ‘Shada’ is a gem, a masterpiece of comic timing that’s only ever a few minutes away from a perfect belly laugh but one where the comedy is a side effect of the drama, not getting in the way that it does in contemporary stories (such s the two either side of it especially) in a story that’s still deeply serious about the bigger points its making. It’s one of those Dr Who adventures that’s a complete and utter thrill from beginning to end, with some of Dr Who’s scariest moments, funniest lines, biggest concepts and finest acting in its entire sixty year run, all somehow making sense nestling against each other in the same story. There has been debate ever since it was made about whether ‘Shada’ is ‘canon’ or not, something complicated by the fact that little bit was recycled in ‘The Five Doctors’ (does that mean the Dr and Romana were pulled by the timescoop just when they were about to have this adventure so they never actually had it? Or were they dropped back into place, their memories wiped, straight back again?) and a Big Finish audio adventure that teamed Romana up with the 8th Dr (can you have the same adventure twice without noticing?) No less a person than Douglas Adams himself rather killed off the cult growing round this story by saying that he made it in a rush and he was kind of glad no one saw it. But literary geniuses are no guide to the power of their work sometimes or the best advocates of the power that words can have (a very Shada theme) and Douglas wasn’t one of those annoying writers who boasted about their work even when they knew it was substandard: he underplayed everything he wrote in interviews, very much including his Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy series (and anyway if Douglas had really hated ‘Shada’ he wouldn’t have recycled so much of it into Hitch-Hikers volumes 3 and 4 or the two under-rated Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency books). There’s also been a reactionary push against the reputation this story once had from fans who question whether this story fits, whether it deserves a place in the canon, whether its worthy of all the many attempts to re-make it down the years (even though it keeps getting better with each version; by the time hologram-actors come in around 2050 and the missing scenes are re-created seamlessly it will be recognised where it should be as one of the best Dr Whos of them all). More than that, there’s even been a push about whether this story is truly funny or not. I like to think that’s just an automatic reaction against something that people still haven’t seen properly the way it was intended, a story which most everyone would have loved automatically if it had. Not proper Dr Who? Not funny? Ha! This story has more Dr Who-ness and more jokes per minute than probably any other story, where eccentric timelord prisoners could be living just round the corner, where you hold the greatest power of the universe in your hands when you open a book and where you never ever stop learning, even when you’re impossibly old and on your last regeneration. What could be funnier or more Dr Who than that?! I say ‘Shada’ is not just one of the greatest Dr Who stories ever made but one of the greatest bits of TV made by anyone anywhere at anytime, a love song to just how mad, scary, funny and uplifting the universe can be, especially to those of us who go about with our nose in a book. Had it been broadcast as planned it might well have seen Dr Who return to its peak at the top of the TV charts, at least amongst under-graduates who would have got the jokes most. Instead it had to be replaced by a repeat of ‘Wonder Woman’. Sometimes there really is no justice in the universe. Which is, more than anything else, what ‘Shada’ is all about.

POSITIVES + There are some excellent model shots by Dave Harvard. Skagra’s spaceship looks like nothing else seen on the series, a cross between Blake’s 7’s Liberator and the Battlestar Galactica, back in the days when most Dr Who spaceships still looked like rockets or were big and unwieldy. The ship suits Skagra down to the ground: it’s big bulky, practical, and not the slightest bit aesthetically pleasing. The space station, meanwhile, looks as if somebody from Deep Space Nine bought the video of ‘Shada’ along to an early production meeting. Given that this story wasn’t finished (and the shots looked a little clunky by 1992 standards, never mind 2017 standards, when they’re treated to lots of extra CGI effects) the model shots don’t get enough credit, but by 1979/80 standards they’re pretty darn great.

NEGATIVES - The Krags are a little too obviously added at the last minute, thrown into the script to give us a cliffhanger for episode five where the Dr and Chris are onboard Skagra’s spaceship and it’s a bit of a shame that such an inventive thoughtful script resorts to throwing in monsters in at the last minute. They seem very underdeveloped compared to the rest of the story (the draft script has them as ‘Kraags’ with two ‘a’s, a straight anagram of Skagra) and make little sense, developed by the ship’s computer when under attack (how do they know who to attack? Do you have to enter a password like modern life? If so you could have been throttled multiple times before your pass code comes through. And seeing as the computer keeps creating them without being stopped, what happens when the ship runs out of room? They’re not exactly svelte). Sadly this cliffhanger was a scene that wasn’t filmed and I sadly because while the costumes in stills have been much mocked by fans they look rather good to me –  sentient slate with a collection of overlapping triangular bits of felt with big starey red eyes ‘like burning coal’ according to the script (which just look ridiculously rendered as an animation). Stylistically, though, they’re an unnecessary throwback to the need to put a monster into every Dr Who episode, even ones that spend so long time debating who the real monsters and villains are the way this one does, a drone unthinking race in a story that’s all about how intelligence is the real threat, not a lumbering brainwashed monster.

BEST QUOTE: Dr: When I was on the river I heard a strange babble of inhuman voices, didn't you, Romana?’ Romana: ‘Yes!’ Chronotis: ‘Oh, undergraduates talking to each other, I expect. I've tried to have it banned!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Some of the footage ended up in ‘The Five Doctors’ with The Doctor and Romana never quite getting to Cambridge to start this story, because they’ve been taken out of time as part of that story, only the timescoop goes wrong (presumably dropping the pair off at the start of ‘The Leisure Hive’ instead!)

 ‘Cambridge Previsited’ is another ‘Brief Encounter’, not published in Dr Who Magazine unusually but in the 1993 Dr Who yearbook. A short story by Karen Dunn, it reveals that The Doctor’s friendship with Professor Chronotis goes back much further than we ever expected and explains why Wilkins knew The Doctor (sometimes by different faces!) The 1^st Doctor has presumably left Susan at Coal Hill School in 1963 and set off to meet his old friend at Cambridge after he’s just started work there. Chronotis has missed the date and is lost in thought, tutting over the rock and roll ‘caterwauling’ on the radio, but marvelling at the greenery of Earth ‘so alive’ compared to Gallifrey. He finds the students full of curiosity just like him and ‘irritatingly fascinating’ (‘even if the planet was tone deaf’) when The Doctor taps him on the shoulder. The Doctor laughs at his notoriously bad time keeping, but Chronotis points out in turn that a note to ‘meet me in the library fifteen minutes ago’ isn’t exactly helpful! They spend a nice time talking about Gallifrey and The Doctor comments on how he could never stand to be exiled on a backward planet like Earth for so long and would ‘go mad within a fortnight’ (little does he know…)  This is clearly not the pair’s first visit, Chronotis letting slip about meeting a ‘journalist’ with him last time they met (Sarah?) which makes The Doctor think he’s going senile. The pair recommend books to each other (‘The Time Machine’ is The Doctor’s, ‘Treasure Island’ Chronotis’), then The Doctor gets up to go, a lonely Chronotis asking him to visit again. Which The Doctor does, turning up again that night to borrow ‘Treasure Island’, nestled between a copy of ‘Peter Rabbit’ and a mysterious book that was ‘patiently waiting’. A fun little character story – I wish Big Finish would do a box set of all The Doctors meeting Chronotis, that would be such fun!

‘Shada’ is of course unique in that it was never finished – not till animated versions in 2017 and 2021 anyway. The very first ‘finished’ version though was as a BBCi webcast produced in 2002 (and re-issued as a CD in 2003 and included in the 2017 blu-ray ‘steelbook’ edition of the animated Shada), as the third online new Who in a trilogy with ‘Death Comes To Time’ and ‘Real Time’ (see ‘Scream Of The Shalka’, though this one was only audio without the slightly wonky animations this time), bridging two different eras as Paul McGann is The Doctor and Lalla Ward companion Romana, with John Leeson also back as K9. Gary Russell bookends Douglas Adams’ original script with a bridging piece about The Doctor half-remembering an adventure that got cut short and retracing his steps to work out what happens, even getting Romana along on time off from her job as president of Gallifrey.  Thereafter the story is very faithful to the original, with just a few tweaks for the more visual scenes with the silent mind-sphere replaced by something a bit more ‘audio friendly’. Otherwise it’s much the same and the 8^th Doctor even makes much the same wisecracks, although McGann is a far more naturally laidback kind of Doctor than Baker was. They make a good little trio these three regulars, while even after you know Douglas’ script really well it never fails to make you chuckle. At the time especially it was great to hear the last three episodes as full-on drama (rather than simply reading what happened in the missing bits a la the 1992 VHS version, the one made in such a hurry they don’t even print the Dr Who diamond log on the ‘correct’ page where it’s meant to show through the book cover cutaway). Of course now we have Tom Baker himself completing the work this version is kind of unnecessary nowadays and the animated DVD is very much the way to go now you have the choice here in 2023, but it’s still an interesting exercise in compare and contrast between the two versions. 

Previous ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ next ’The Leisure Hive’

Full Circle: Ranking - 131

                                                              Full Circle

(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and Adric, 25/10/1980-15/11/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Andrew Smith, director: Peter Grimwade)

Rank: 131

  'By gum Romana lass, after all that trouble with t'Tardis earlier we seem to have entered a parallel world where everyone talks as if they be from Yorkshire. Even K9's at it, he's flipping turned into a whippet so he has. Let's have some Yorkshire tea with our jelly babies and maybe a Yorkshire pudding while I try to sort out what's gone on ‘ere…
                                                                                                            'By ‘eck Romana, I'm reet chuffed, I just worked out what's 'appened. The Tardis has gone an' flown right into Eee-by-gum space! I don’t know what’s been gannin in her head these days I reet don’t…' 

Out of all 328-ish stories in Dr Who so far ‘Full Circle’ is the one that feels most as if a baton is being passed on, when the baby boomer and before children who’ve been making it up till now are replaced by what sociologists now term ‘Generation X’, written produced and made for a completely different era. But a different era that stil has roots in the old because it’s being made first and foremost by fans: by 1980 Dr Who had been running for seventeen years - long enough for the children who grew up watching the early episodes to become writers themselves and to have folk memories of the series, to know what it’s like to be part of the main audience it was being made for, beyond looking things up in the archives. So far in season 18 we’d already seen the youngest producer for the series so far in thirty-three year-old John Nathan-Turner, who worked for many years as production assistant on the show and knew it well. Script editor Christopher H Bidmead was younger than most at thirty-nine too. But now we have the first writer for the series who’d been a mere toddler when the series first started (Andrew was a whole sixteen months old when the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ went out and therefore the perfect age for the Troughton years onwards). Few TV series ever run long enough to reach this point and certainly no so-called children’s series and this gives Andrew a unique voice within the series up to that time (though he’s joined later by fellow fan Marc Platt who wrote ‘Ghost Light’ in 1989). We make the claim a few times within this project that the 1960s stories especially were the parents and children talking to each other about the collective trauma of the Second World war and where society should go from here, because there weren’t many other series where both generations would have been watching together. ‘Full Circle’ though comes full circle, being a story where the baby boomer children are now the adults and Generation X are the kiddies with ideas of their own. And what a fascinating story it is too. 

This a story about children first and foremost and their fears about what they might turn into when they become adults, along with that sudden realisation that happens in most people’s life somewhere around their teens when they realise that the big bad authority adults trying to keep them in place and telling them how to behave don’t really know any more than they do. Despite being called ‘Deciders’ they don’t really know the truth of the planet or the decisions they make – they’re in a position of power through age and experience, not wisdom and in many ways are the worst people to be in charge because they flout authority for authority’s sake and don’t listen t any opposing view. Real adulthood is about making your own decisions based on the evidence before you, without taking it on trust, but being open to the wisdom learnt from the people who came before you. Growing older doesn’t get you closer to a place of perfection, it gets you closer to state of devolving into an animal again, driven by instinct rather than knowledge because beneath all the societal niceties we are all still animals underneath and there’s no one golden moment when you ‘grow up’ to become something more than that (the novel plays this up more, with all the creatures on this planet sharing a sort of latent telepathy which knows when the time of great change is coming). After all, you can’t have illusions of grandeur in a society where everyone (spoilers) has evolved from spiders. ‘Full Circle’ is set on a planet named Alzarius where a spaceship crashed generations ago and the outer shell is still intact enough to be called home by most of the adults. Most of the teenagers though have broken away to create a society of their own, calling themselves ‘The Outliers’, convinced that everything the adults believe is wrong. They live on the fringes of society trying to pull a new society together but they can’t do it alone and mostly get by nicking bits of fruit from the society they’ve just left and dreaming about how it will all be better when they’re older. Like a homing beacon, though, they’re turning into the sort of adults they resented, creating their own hierarchy and turning on each other with petty squabbles and fights of the sort they promised themselves they would never have. At the same time there are marsh-children who by instinct reach a certain age themselves (a time known as ‘Mistfall’) and climb out of the Alzarian swamps to walk into the crashed spaceship – the adults are terrified, assuming they’re going to be attacked and the marshmen do look scary, with their reptilian bodies and squashed drone-like heads, amongst the most ‘alien’ aliens in the series, at least in this era. Only, in one of the most magnificent twists in the entire twists (spoilers) it turns out that Alazrius suffers from a quirky orbit that means that every fifty years they pass through a different part of space which does strange things to everyone’s DNA and moves everything around: it’s that which makes the swamp creatures head into the rocketship and take it over, only the adults get scared and trap them inside starving them of the Alazarian gasses they need to live, so the humans die out and the marshmen…transform into the humans. And this has been going on for generations, on a continuous loop, with the two sides of the generation gap so scared of each other even though it turns out that they share the same DNA and are exactly the same as each other, destined to go through the same cycles of fearing who comes after them and becoming the thing they feared. It’s one of the better Dr Who twists that you don’t necessarily se coming – everyone is afraid not of some stranger but of themselves in a different form and the monsters they are running from in fright are just their descendants. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, one that confused many a fan at the time but is perfectly in keeping with the original Dr Who ethos in the 1960s that the pre-war and baby boomer generations really aren’t that different and that one day everything the adults own now will be theirs (see ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ ‘The Chase’ and especially ‘The Space Museum’ for more inter-generational struggles in the 1960s). 

 The symbols of dreading turning into the person you once feared don’t stop there either: this story is also about Romana and the end of her time in the Tardis. ‘Full Circle’ starts off with a summon from the timelords to go back home (it seems odd that the timelords have wait till now, a full nine stories – counting ‘Shada’ – since the ‘Key To Time’ struggles against the Black Guardian was resolved but it works nicely thematically in this story). She doesn’t want to go: she’s learned so much being alongside the Doctor, adding real-life experience to her book knowledge and the thought of living a boring life back on static old Gallifrey and gong through the same routines day after day fills her with horror. Romana may be in her 130s but in timelord age she’s basically a teenager herself and has been working with the Doctor as a sort of apprentice, learning from him how not to become the adult she felt doomed to grow up to be. So she effectively runs away across the course of this story, using the Tardis’ unexpected flight into E-space as a means to go her own way and escape. Though she doesn’t officially leave till ‘warrior’s gate’ in two stories time you can already feel her making up her mind to leave here, at the earliest opportunity, to not just be with the Doctor but to become the Doctor and have adventures of her own as an adult. Because that’s what the Doctor does: he inspires people. For all of their early clashes, for all of Romana’s despair at the Doctor’s childishness and disorganisation and flippancy, she’s come to see that his way of living, as an outlier just like the rebels on Alzarius, is best. For Smith as a fan and as a writer the Doctor represents a whole new way of living that doesn’t have to be the way everyone else lives: that you can be kind and be a rebel, living out your best life without the confines of what society tells you to be. I’m willing to bet there aren’t many fans who disagree with that statement either: while previous writers have either come to love Dr Who or admired it as an adult, for Smith the love for Dr Who and what it represents runs deeper than that; ’Full Circle’ is the first love song to this series and everything it represents that couldn’t have been simply tweaked and re-written as a bit of standalone scifi; like many of the ‘comeback era stories (also written by fans who grew up loving the series) that admiration for everything Who represents runs through it dearly. 

 So how did a teenager get to write for the series? A combination of talent and luck. Smith had already been writing for years and had written a number of barbed gags about the early days of the Thatcher administration for topical news shows ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ and ‘The Week Ending’. Armed with a copy of Malcolm Hulke’s 1974 textbook ‘The Making Of Dr Who’ he’d written an outline for a different story ‘The Secret Of Cassius’ about a spaceship approaching Pluto and being shocked t find it inhabited. Andrew and sent it in, unasked, to the Dr Who production office. The first person who read it was Douglas Adams who’d liked the writing and put it in a ‘keep pile’, but also requested a second idea which became ‘Full Circle’ (but was the titled ‘A Colony Of Devils’). Alas Douglas was in the process of leaving the series so never got to commission it and he regenerated into Anthony Root, who also liked the story enough to set up a meeting, but he was only in the job temporarily so never got any further than asking tentatively for a first draft of episode one. Christopher Bidmead didn’t know any of that when he entered the production office and found, to his horror, that his predecessors had left him very few stories that had actually been started (‘The Leisure Hive’ and ‘Meglos’ were the only two). In his big vision for the future of the series Bidmead had talked about setting up a young writer’s group to encourage more talent, similar to the one Andrew Cartmel will unofficially create later in the decade, but found that writers’ unions would have been against it and reluctantly dropped the idea. With no one else to turn to he began to look through the ‘backup’ pile of stories and fell in love with ‘Full Circle’, a story that was very much an idea after his own heart: a monster who isn’t really a monster and an intellectual twist that changed everything you thought you knew about this planet. He hired Andrew to write a full draft without knowing that he was an inexperienced teenager, particularly impressed at the way Andrew had written out a synopsis in exactly the professional way that the production team wanted, unlike most of the other unsolicited manuscripts (he didn’t know about Hulke’s book at the time!) Most script editors on finding out the truth at a first meeting would have dropped them then and there but Bidmead stayed true t his word about nurturing new talent and worked closely on the one script he didn’t write in season 18 that he really believed in. You can tell: there’s a lot of love and care in ‘Full Circle’. 

 Unfortunately there’s also Adric, the future companion whose become synonymous with this story and who every fan loves to hate, but who wasn’t one of Andrew’s creations and isn’t in his first draft (it’s one of the biggest false assumptions in the series that, given the writer behind this story was also a teenager, Andrew was writing about himself but nope: Adric would have been a more literary creation all round than a mathematical logical one). JNT and Bidmead both had been discussing about how they wanted to attract a new and younger audience and between them came up with the idea of a teenage mathematical genius who would be like a mini-Doctor, a rebel who broke away from a rigid society so he could see the universe. He’s written in the script as being ‘to our eyes around fifteen’ though as Alzarius has such a wild and wonky orbit he could be older than Romana or The Doctor in reality. They figured he could become the younger audience’s identification person, as a contrast to the cleverness of Romana and to replace K( as a children’s favourite (JNT loathed the robot dog and tried to farm him out to a spin-off series; see ‘K9 and Company’). They figured he would be perfect to introduce in this story and got Andrew to write him in, even though he’s far less developed than the other outliers, an adult’s idea of a teenager who doesn’t fit a story about a teenager’s view of adults. On paper Adric was to be the artful dodger in space, always mischievous and ducking and diving and getting into fun scrapes. In practice? He’s more like Oliver, the spoiled kid whose used to being treated as special until he ends up in tough times and ends up running away to be with a team of misfits who think he’s posh and untrustworthy, when really he’s a goody two-shoes whose never known real pain or struggle and thinks the people he’s run away with are a bunch of losers: even his brothers (that all makes the Doctor Fagin, a part that Christopher Eccleston is playing on TV now, funnily enough). It would have been a lot more obvious to create an outsider character who was thick and rejected by society, but Bidmead shaped Adric to be more or less a younger version of himself (and to reflect a lot of the Dr Who nerds he’d already met): earnest, bright, interested in science and mathematics and with a deep understanding of how the world should work but little experience of how it actually does (to any Star Trek fans reading: he’s our equivalent of Wesley Crusher). He’s Romana again in other words, but in pint-sized form and given extra unlikeable qualities of being sulky and brattish and prone to sulking (like I say, an adult’s idea of a child). His name comes from Dirac, the quantum physicist Bidmead really admired, figuring that if this was e-space this might be his parallel world version (equally, for a draft or two, Alzarius was named Yerfillag, the mirror image of Gallifrey, and still shares its co-ordinates, just in a different dimension).

In time Adric will become shorthand for everything that was wrong about 1980s Who: a sulky prodigy with no people skills who always sides with the baddies and who spends most of his time in the Tardis either doing maths, something clever with computers or pouting. Adric is the kind of kid we watched programmes like Dr Who to forget having to rub shoulders with in the classroom. Anyone but anyone would have struggled to play a character as instantly unlikeable as this. And who do they give it to? Matthew Waterhouse, an inexperienced filing clerk on his second acting job who, by coincidence, is the first actor to have grown up loving the series (and is seven months older than Andrew and twenty-three months older than the series itself. For context even Russell T Davies was seven months and Steven Moffat two years old in November 1963, making them all four close contemporaries which given the gap between their eras of the show is just insane. All the moaning about how young the cast of the next series of DW in 2024 will be have nothing on the kids of 1980). Matthew has born the brunt of a lot of criticism from Who fans over the years but it’s not his fault: ‘ve seen him in other things and, with the benefit of another twenty-thirty years experience and better characters, he can really act. But he plays Adric exactly how he is on the page, as an insufferable know-it-all, without the benefit of experience that would have brought nuances and depth to the character. Almost as soon as they introduced him everyone seems to have realised that he was a mistake and he will indeed (spoilers) be killed off by the end of the following year. He always did his best though (even if his inexperienced best is clever never really good enough) – the real blame lies with the production team for casting him and writing him that way. 

 That said everyone assumes that the story that introduces Adric should be awful too, but really it’s very good – and not just the bits without him either. What people forget is that, right here back at the beginning, Adric was a genuinely promising character who was, if not quite one of us, then more us than the pair of clever timelords and their robotic dog. He makes sense in this story in a way he never quite will again. Thanks to his fellow teenager writer, in ‘Full Circle’ Adric gets way more back story than most companions along with more reasons to leave in the Tardis at the end than most (it’s very on character for both of them that Adric smugly stows away assuming he’s been unseen and the Doctor sees but let’s him think he’s got away with it – that will be their relationship to the end pretty much). After all, you can’t say he’s one-dimensional here: the tragedy Adric goes through in this debut story alone – shunned by his peers for being elitest, desperate to rough it with the lower classes, watching his beloved brother Varsh sacrifice his own life for his - should have given the DW writers enough trauma to play off for a whole series. Matthew is really rather good at the scene where he mourns his brother too or indeed any scene that gives him something to get his teeth into rather than merely stand around – Matthew channelled his own still burning grief at losing his elder brother Nicholas to suicide two years earlier and you can tell; this scene feels ‘real’ in a way that few including Adric ever will be. In Smith’s hands Adric’s not the know-it-all who still gets everything wrong; he’s a child cast adrift in a world of adults who doesn’t quite understand how it works and keeps messing up, which fits well with the theme of the story. Though Bidmead’s baby Smith ending up creating he most memorable parts of Adric: his badge for mathematical excellence he wears like a totem, his desperate longing to fit in and belong somewhere anywhere, his rather naïve utopian vision of what life outside civilisation would be like and his disappointment that it’s not as romantic or luxurious as he thought (Waterhouse will rebuild his career after Who partly on the back of a critically acclaimed one-man play based on ‘The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn’ and plays the boy let loose on an un-colonised America in much the same way Adric should always have been). 

 You have to say, though, that the other outliers - whom Andrew did create - are more interesting; well up to a point. Varsh is a young man with an old problem on his shoulders, the one nominally in charge of his gang and trying to keep everyone safe. He finds it an arduous task compared to the freedom he experienced at the bottom of the ladder on board the space freighter and begins to see life from a different angle becoming as authoritarian and brusque as the strict humans he despises. His confidence is, like the grown-ups, a cover for just how insecure he really is and yet it’s working enough to fool Adric, also unsure of his place in the world, who clearly looks up to him. Richard Willis struggles to make varsh any more than just a bigger brattier version of Adric, though. June Page as Keara too is hugely loyal to Varsh to a fault, in a way that she never is to the rest of the authority figures, which only makes things worse: Varsh can cope with letting himself down but the girl who has a crush on him and his younger brother? That’s just too much pressure when all he wants is to be a kid! Though they share next to no chemistry on screen Willis and Page fell in love while making this story and later got married, one of three meetings on the set of Dr Who that resulted in weddings (see ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘Shada’ for the other two), although alas this is the only one that didn’t last (Willis gets remarried a few years later to Kate ‘Rani’ O’Mara!) Unfortunately we don’t really get to see as much of their relationship in the plot as perhaps we should. The original draft of ‘Full Circle’ featured the marshmen far more, especially a young girl that hangs around the Doctor and whom he calls, sensibly enough, Marsha. We at home see her as truly innocent and pure and are horrified when the human adults see her as a threat to be tortured and near-dissected in their quest to know more about this world and how it works: it’s a real gut-wrenching moment that the show should have been brave enough to go with. Alas Mary Whitehouse-fuelled fears about violence meant that Andrew was made to back track and the whole plot element of the marshmen becomes watered down. It’s a shame: so much of the plot relies on them being more than just ‘monsters’ and yet that’s all they are for the vast majority of the story, mute beings that loom and don’t actually get to do anything much. As for the humans, well: they’re every authoritarian figure ever seen in the series and while they need to be a faceless bunch so that we can compare and contrast the youngsters it’s a shame they have to be quite this faceless. As brilliant as the script is (and even better as the first draft was before it got mucked around with) you come away wishing there had been just one more draft to make the most of all these great ideas. 

 And it is great. Yes fans can and have pointed out elements nicked from other Dr Who stories as Andrew Smith would have known, being an early organiser of the Dr Who Appreciation Society: the marshmen rising out of the swamps is a direct steal from ‘The Sea Devils’, the idea that the monsters are actually quite human and that the humans are the monsters (many stories especially ‘Galaxy 4’ and ‘The Savages’), the smashed starship that isn’t quite what we think it is (‘Planet Of Evil’ ‘Face Of Evil’), the spiders (‘Planet Of the Spiders’). However rather than blindly copy these ideas the way lesser writers do Smith is clearly just so steeped in Dr Who lore that he’s been watching carefully what will and what won’t work, juggling these elements within his own very new story and coming up with something new. Like Frontios’ and unlike any other Who story (weirdly enough the only two stories to do this are nearly next to each other alphabetically) the only villain here is gravity (sorry, mavity, I forgot which universe I was in then for a minute) with lagoons that change to marshland because of the chemical imbalance when Alzarius gets pulled closer to the sun. It’s a great and all too plausible idea. I’d go so far as to say that ‘Full Circle’ is one of the best Who stories of the 1980s in terms of pure script, certainly the deepest, most complex and metaphorical one Who had had for some time, since the Douglas Adams days, a neat starter for the main course of deeper stories to come this same season like ‘Warrior’s Gate’ ‘Keeper Of Traken’ and ‘Logopolis’ that nevertheless stands out a mile in context coming between the camp silliness of ‘Meglos’ and the gothic retro feel of ‘State Of Decay’. It’s arguably the first story where new script editor Christopher H Bidmead gets to have a big say in shaping it too and it’s as big a stylistic shift as we got with any of the modern showrunners taking over: in a flash Dr Who becomes weirder, deeper, less about the plot and more about meaning than the monsters. 

 For instance the title refers to the evolutionary lifespan of the planet Alazarius, something added by Bidmead and the only change Andrew was said not to like (mostly because the BBC still frowned on using the word ‘Devil’ on TV back then; you can tell how much this title sticks out compared to what came before it because the novelisation was the first Who book that didn’t put ‘Doctor Who and…’ at the front because that would have been silly. Though, admittedly, not as silly as some of the titles we did get). Had we just ended up here in this story from larks with a giant cactus the week before (which story was written by the novice teenager again?!) it might have felt like too much of a change in one go, but as the start of the E-Space (‘Exo’ as opposed to ‘N’ or ‘Normal’, ‘Latin’ for ‘outside’) trilogy it sets this story up to be a bit different. And it is. While ‘State Of Decay’ is just like our universe but with vampires both ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ really go out of their way to show different kind of a universe where the usual rules don’t apply. Especially this story in a way because the idea of a pocket universe ‘outside’ normal space-time going about things its own way in parallel to ‘our’ space is very much reflected in the main plot. As a whole the idea of e-space is frustratingly underused but holds lots of promise, allowing the production team to tell some very different stories even if the means of the Tardis’ accidental journey there is oddly handled and treated as a bit of a joke. Though the first draft of Full Circle’ wasn’t written for a trilogy or a different universe you can tell the writer and script editor have gone away to think about this world too: it’s there in the planet’s unusual orbit, the unique marshfruit everyone lives off and even the speedy metabolism of the locals which mean they can heal all wounds in seconds. 

 There are some great lines scattered across the script too that really ‘get’ the 4th Doctor’s mixture of childish playfulness and stern authoritarian and no wonder really, this being the first person to write for the series who was a fan before they were a writer – The Doctor’s reaction to the marshmen to wonder why he’s scared it off when everyone else is running away, commenting that ‘he’s always been good with children’, is one of this regeneration’s best lines. Smith is surprisingly less sure-footed with K9, the dog all but ignored in his penultimate story (though not for lack of trying: the original draft had a sub-plot about K9 being worshipped as a God by locals and K9’s puzzlement, but Bidmead diplomatically took it out knowing how much the producer, already wary of commissioning new writers, hated the dog) and even less sure with Romana though, who at times is the Doctor’s equal and at others is treated like every other generic companion: the scenes of her being possessed by cheap-looking spiders, for instance, is laughable and Lalla Ward struggles to be convincing when acting being hypnotised, given that she’s an actress who uses movement so much all the time. The scenes with the spiders all round are some of the worst actually: the model effects haven’t got any better since ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ eight years ago and they don’t move convincingly at all, especially the shot of one biting Romana which is all too obviously the actress flicking off a fake rubber spider from her face with the footage then reversed, one of the cheaper Who trick shots and not one of the better ones. The spiders don’t really need to be there: I’ll buy the idea that the marshmen evolve into humans when starved of particular gasses but saying that spiders then evolve into marshmen seems like an evolutionary quirk too far: there’s just no reason for them to grow legs and crawl into the swamps when, by the looks of things, they’re faring better than the marshmen are. And why do both exist at the same time anyway? Wouldn’t the same evolutionary homing device, caused by the heat of the planet’s strange orbit, transform all the spiders at roughly the same time? The script could easily have been written without them (we only need them for the traditional cliffhanger when they bite Romana – and having something that traditional in the middle of such an esoteric story always felt wrong anyway). 

Other ways that this story comes across on screen lets it down badly too, seemingly made in the cheapest and most basic way possible despite being a story positively bursting with great ideas everywhere you turn. There just aren’t enough extras here to convince you that this is a proper colony with a history. The acting is, at times, atrocious, some of the worst across the board in the series. The sub-plot partway through of having Romana possessed also feels like a really backwards step and something that’s been done better hundreds of times before, taking up space where a greater look at this most interesting of planets ought to be. It doesn’t help that Lalla Ward, along with Tom Baker, is about the only member of the cast giving this story their all so when she ends up being made to act hypnotised and act all bland too that just leaves Tom Baker and even his personality isn’t big enough to fill the entire screen (though his impassioned rant against the Deciders in the finale brightens the last episode up no end).Tom, meanwhile, is in an angry, sullen mood (this is the last bump in his relationship with Lalla Ward when both of them were struggling to be in the same room as each other; things will be much happier for their last story together as filmed ‘Warrior’s Gate’ and the pair will marry months later, to the surprise of everyone who worked on this story and remembered their cross words and angry glances at each other). Matthew Waterhouse is, believe it or not, by far the best actor of the ragtag bunch of teenage off-worlders, blankly reading out lines that ought to be invested with high emotion. The decision to paint a possessed Romana in hi-vis scotch tape and shine a camera at it so that she ‘glows’ doesn’t work any better than it did in ‘Death To The Daleks’ (you think they’d have learned to stop trying that technique by now, although it did reportedly work rather well on the Romana waxwork in Madame Tussauds. At the same exhibit Tom Baker was turned into the cactus from ‘Meglos’ and he’s still, to date, the only person to ever be an exhibit in the museum twice at the same time). The starship set is one of the more boring ones too, all cold steel and clinical walls without any sense of having been lived in for generations although the library, with books crammed into every nook and cranny, is more interesting. 

 Thankfully some aspects do work on screen, especially the location filming with lots of lingering shots of the swamp (Blackwater Park in Iver Heath Buckinghamshire, which looks a lot more convincing than the swamp in ‘The Power Of Kroll’). The marshmen costumes are excellent for their era, slimy and warped and not as obviously men in costumes as normal and even if their scene coming out of the water isn’t as strong as the one in ‘Sea Devils’ to a generation of fans who’d never seen it this was the best cliffhanger in years, especially when matched by one of the best incidental music of the era (Paddy Kingsland at his best). The model heads look alien, with clever details such as the slight impression of the spider-eggs left as an early clue as to what they’d grown from. The costumes were based on wet suits to enable the actors to stay underwater comfortably – even so there’s clever use of the slow mo-replay machine to slow the footage down and let us linger on the way they move coming out of the water. They’re a rare Who alien that actually seem suited to their natural terrain (Smith clearly spending more time thinking about his world-building than more experienced writers did for the series). Best of all most of the marshmen action is shot through a fish-eye lens, which makes tem automatically alien and strange and unlike other instances where these sorts of shots are used it works with what we see of the marshmen too (as their eyes really are naturally wide apart). The sound, too, is great: the sound the marshmen make is actually pig grunting slowed down and reversed (a natural fit given that of all the animals bar the monkey family they have the most in common with humanity) recorded by Dick Mills on a pig farm especially for the story rather than taken from tape. 

 The result is a mixed story, one where the production team got very lucky in hiring their writer (nobody but nobody watching this story, who hadn’t read the article about the new writer and companion in the radio Times, would have guessed not only at Andrew’s real age but his lack of experience) but unlucky in other aspects, mostly the casting and the set design, ending up a story that’s still something of a chore to sit through, with long periods where nothing happens except big drips talking to other big drips when all we want to see is more of the fascinating dripping monsters. It got unlucky with the timeslot too: this is the era when ITV started putting the big budget ‘Buck Rogers In the 25th Century’ on up against Who and the ratings take a nosedive they never fully recover from. To many casual younger fans Dr Who had lost its way: it looked childish and cheap and silly and wasn’t for ‘them,’ anymore, even though – in script terms at least – it had never been more for them than with this story. There’s a reason more fans who saw this story remember it than what happened in Buck Rogers this week though: there’s a really clever story about generational trauma and cycles at the heart of ‘Full Circle’ and an intelligence not often seen in Who as well as this. It’s just unfortunate that it’s also a story made at a time when even the best episodes had major issues with the way they were being put together on screen and that this one suffers from those issues more than most. Like mistfall itself it’s a generational anomaly, an intellectual script that no one quite knows what to do with so they pretend it’s business as usual, treating it as a bit of kid’s TV rather than the start of a whole new brave dawn. Smith himself will never write for the series again: not through lack of trying either, but JNT and Bidmead will fall out and without the script editor there to champion his work there was no way the producer was going to allow the protégé of the man he saw as walking out on him at a time of need to keep writing for the series, a great pity for everyone (Andrew didn’t get any other scripts made either, retraining as a police officer before Big Finish tempt him out of retirement and have him write for the series again). Not surprisingly, given the discrepancy between what should have been and what is, Andrew Smith’s novelisation is tonnes better than the episode itself. Still, the idea of a series that’s once again trying really hard to do something new, stymied not by ambition or ideas but by money, is pretty much full circle where we came in with Dr Who and if ever there was a story written by someone who ‘understands’ this series then it’s this one, a small triumph and something of a revolution in an era when the series had fallen into a bit of a rut. 

 POSITIVES + There’s a ‘look’ and an atmosphere about ‘Full Circle’ like no other story and it gets the balance between exotic locations shot on film and static studio sets better than any other story – we really feel how exotic these alien marshes are when set against the static man-made spaceships that don’t belong in this world. The mist that drives the story permeates through everything, shrouding the planet in mystery. Almost every scene of this story is someone trying to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes and keeping the truth about them, so it makes perfect sense that we at home see everything through a fog too. The production team g the extra mile, too, by adding powder-paint to the foliage and using exotic lighting to make the swamp loo alien. All this makes Alzarius feel like the production team really did set off for a planet in e-space, where our earth-based knowledge of how worlds work doesn’t apply – rather than down the road in Buckinghamshire. 

 NEGATIVES - The outliers are middle-aged people’s idea of what hip teenagers are like in 1980, whatever planet they’re from and however young the writer was. They sit around a cave but otherwise they’re a clichéd version of teenagers hanging round the shops with nothing to do and giggling about the ‘squares’ who are in charge back at the spaceship. You half expect a scene with an off-license and under-age drinking just to ram home the point that ‘they’re meant to be like you, yoofs of 1980!’ (maybe that isn’t fog – maybe the outliers are vaping just out of shot?) Most frustratingly of all, in an episode about needing to break out of repetitive patterns and cycles, nobody here learns anything: the closest is Adric and he ‘learns’ not by putting things right on his home world but by running away in the Tardis. The whole plot of ‘Full Circle’ centres (see what I did there) on the fact that teacher’s pet Adric is so desperate to join this band of outlaws he’ll even break the cardinal rule of all planets and steal from people but, honestly, why would anyone want to join this bunch of losers? They can’t even steal fruit properly without getting caught. 

BEST QUOTE: Login: ‘A little patience goes a long way’. Doctor: ‘Yes, but too much patience goes absolutely nowhere!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Mistfall’ (2015) is a Big Finish audio adventure (#195 in their main range) that sees Andrew Smith return to Alzarius a full thirty-five years on. A 5th Doctor adventure from the era after Adric’s death (in the brief period between ‘Mawdryn Undead’ and ‘Terminus’ when Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough were all in the Tardis together, though weirdly the latter isn’t haunted by The Black Guardian in this story) it’s an emotional homecoming for them all, the Tardis escaping certain destruction by jumping through e-space thanks to the co-ordinates Adric once programmed into the Tardis at the beginning of ‘Earthshock’. Smith puts together a script that’s much closer to his original plan for the story with several ideas that were in his original draft. Alazarius is referred to as ‘the planet that slept’ and Merrion the Decider is much closer to his original vision for the captain of the Starliner. The best parts, though, repeat what ‘Full Circle’ did so well: the marshmen coming out of the gloom while Nyssas and Turlough are stranded out in the open at night. You could argue that this sequel is a bit unnecessary, given that it doesn’t do a lot the original didn’t do, but it repeats everything in some style and the emphasis on the marshmen rather than the humanoids is definitely a plus. It’s a shame this story was recorded in the days before Matthew Waterhouse joined the Big Finish team though as a return home for Adric would have been all the more bittersweet and dramatic. 

 Set in the gap between ‘Full Circle’ and ‘State Of Decay’, ‘The Invasion Of E-Space’ is one of Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles (2010) and once again written by Andrew Smith. Though the slight plot is about the Tardis crew’s attempts to create their own artificial Charged Vacuum Emboitment to take them back to n-space, really it’s a ‘getting to know you’ story. On screen Romana and Adric only shared three stories together and were never the best of friends and this story harks back to their very uneasy alliance. They’re a bit too similar: both a bit posh and spoilt learning that the universe is darker and stranger than they first realised and in timelord terms Romana is not much more than a teenager herself. She sees a lot of her younger self in Adric during the ‘Key To Time’ season and is surprised to feel almost parental towards him. The story starts off well then goes a bit downhill when a Sontaron-style race named The Farrion turn up to use the CVE themselves, but this short story runs out of time to do any more than make them caricatures. Not one of the better stories in the range, though Lalla Ward has great fun reading it out. 

 One of the oddest Dr Who spin-offs was the ‘Viewmaster’ toy, which in the days before home video was the only way to see parts of the story whenever you wanted and were everywhere in the early 1980s (I never had the Dr Who one for instance but I did have 1980s animation epic ‘Mysterious Cities Of Gold’). The pictures were in 3D too, well sort of (the effect was like staring down a pair of binoculars at pictures that look far away but sort of blurrily move; it’s a more convincing effect than in ‘Dimensions In Time’ anyway). There were twenty-one photographs from the serial used, which sort-of tell the basic story complete with captions explaining what was going on. Given that the production team had signed up to having one of these made across the year ‘Full Circle’ is the best choice available, a very visual story in what was a rather un-visual era and the toy sold so well they did the same again with ‘Castrovalva’ the choice from the following season. The cover illustration of Tom Baker is awful though. 

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