This week, 500 Year Diary begins its six-week hagiography of Doctor Who writer, script editor and raconteur Terrance Dicks, with a discussion of his first on-screen script credit The War Games. Ten monster-free episodes culminating in a series-ruining revelation about the Doctor’s backstory — can Terrance make it work?
Notes and links
Nathan was born in Sydney on Sunday 27 April 1969. According to the invaluable BroaDWCast, that was the day of the first screening of The Wheel in Space Part 3 in Australia. (In Sydney, in fact. It was screened later in less important Australian cities.)
Peter and Todd are both right about the World War I location, which was a rubbish dump in Brighton that had previously been used in Richard Attenborough’s 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War.
The Mighty 200 was a fan poll of the first 200 Doctor Who stories published in Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 in October 2009. The results of the Doctor Who Magazine 60th anniversary poll, which included the Capaldi and Whittaker eras for the first time, were published in 2023 across Issues 589 to 594.
Vernon Dobtcheff plays the Scientist here, but he also plays the Terra Nostra Chairman in the Blake’s 7 episode Shadow (1979); on film, he was murdered by Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). He has had a prolific career: his most recent IMDb credit is from 2023, when he was 89 years old.
Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin left Doctor Who to work on Paul Temple (1969–1971), a series about a crime-solving detective fiction writer and his wife, based on popular radio plays from the 1940s. It was a co-production between the BBC and ZDF in Germany, and it featured many many actors and crew members that would be familiar to fans of classic Doctor Who.
Nathan had been thinking about The Power of Kroll recently because he appeared on the Season 16 episode of Strictly Come Hamster alongside its host Joe Ford, as well as Toby Hadoke and Ioan Morris.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.
Last week, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which some mysterious immortal beings troll the crew of Moonbase Alpha by giving them everything they ever wanted.
A couple of days ago, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Waltz, in which Gul Dukat finally becomes the crazed space opera villain his mother always hoped he would be.
And just today, Brendan, Steven and Richard release the latest episode of their Avengers commentary podcast The Three-Handed Game. In The End of Empire #3, they watch and discuss Love All (1969), in which a hefty cleaning lady tricks some misogynist civil servants into falling in love with her and revealing all their most important secrets.
The surprising return of a decades-old monster leads not only to the urgent revision of a long-dormant TARDIS Wikia page, but also to an unexpected addition to the current season of 500 Year Diary. So join us, as we join Steven B for one more visit to a diamond planet called Midnight — it’s The Well.
Notes and links
In Midnight, Sky Sylvestry was played Lesley Sharp, who had worked with Russell in The Second Coming (2003), where she played the best friend of Christopher Eccleston’s character Stephen Baxter, who (it turns out) was the Second Coming of Christ.
This video on the BBC’s official YouTube channel explains how the Midnight Entity™ ended up in this episode. As Russell himself explains, the Doctor and Belinda were to have met the Orisha, divine spirits who are part of the Yoruba religion, but Russell was concerned that it would be impossible to turn them into Doctor Who monsters while still being respectful of the religious tradition.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.
Keen on more Steven B–based content? Well, you’re in luck: today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the first episode of a new triptych called The End of Empire: the boys watch The Gilded Cage, in which Honor Blackman gears up for the next stage of her career by staging a gold robbery in order to trap a criminal mastermind.
Finally, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called To the Death, which contained levels of latex content hazardous to human health.
We return to Bannerman Road this week for the second coming of Samantha Bond as Mrs Wormwood, and she’s just as wonderful as you would expect. We also get the second coming of Kaagh the Slayer as well, at no extra charge.
Not Sufficiently Executed Enough is the title of Flight Through Entirety, Episode 45 on The Hand of Fear. It’s a riff on the Hinchcliffe-Era trope of the villain being an Evil from the Dawn of Time. (See also Sutekh, Morbius and the Master.)
When this episode airs, Anjli Mohindra is 18 years old and Gita Anwar is 39. Nicholas Courtney is 78.
And this week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Picard with an incredible musical number in the middle, which is, for that reason, immune to any kind of criticism. It’s Two of One.
This week, a New Series villain returns for the first time just six weeks after her first appearance — it’s Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, wonderfully played by Annette Badland. Hannah Cooper and Pete Lambert join us.
Cordelia’s “it’s all about me!” realisation comes in the Series 1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight way back in 1997.
Annette Badland plays Hazel Woolley on The Archers. She’s known as Poisonous Hazel, and she visited Ambridge in summer 2005, perhaps watching Boom Town on BBC1 while she was there.
The dialogue Nathan tries to remember from The Parting of the Ways is actually Rose responding to the Doctor’s claim that this new race of Daleks was made from dead human beings. Rose says, “That makes them half human,” to which the Dalek Emperor replies, “That is blasphemy.”
Another classic 80s villain makes her first reappearance on Doctor Who this week. But what will four serious teenage fanboys make of the fact that she has decided to dress up as Bonnie Langford?
Notes and links
In Dynasty, Kate O’Mara’s character Caress Morrell is the younger sister of Joan Collins’s Alexis Colby. She was in 19 episodes of Dynasty in 1986.
Mel’s delightfully overplayed line in The Reality War comes in just before the Rani beams into UNIT HQ: “She’s ruthless. Worse than ruthless. She’s indifferent to any pain or morality or humanity. The whole universe is just an experiment to her.”
Bonnie Langford’s interview with Benjamin Cook in Doctor Who Magazine appears in Issue 595 from October 2023. Here she is talking about her performance as Mel in the 1980s: “I read Russell’s scripts and thought, ahh, glorious! It is glorious, isn’t it?” says Bonnie. “I just feel really personally grateful, and delighted, and lucky to be able to revisit something that I didn’t necessarily think I did very well before.” Did she really not? “I just thought, oh God, I was really awful in it back in the day. I tried too hard.”
Bondfinger’s short series of commentaries on some of Kate O’Mara’s television performances can be found here.
Just a few days before the broadcast of The Reality War (and the recording of this episode), Russell T Davies posted on Instagram an introduction to the Rani and an explanation of the elements of her character he thought it was important to bring back.
This week, the 1980s brings back its most iconic original villain (possibly) to face off against the Sixth Doctor for the second time. But is the reunion a success? Kate Orman joins us again, to discuss Mindwarp.
Notes and links
Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986) and Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (1984) are both mid-80s female leads who are strong and independent without being primarily sex objects.
Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s The Discontinuity Guide has this to say about Mindwarp: “Crozier’s sip of tea before saving Kiv is way-cool.”
Dudley Simpson used a gong to herald the appearance of Ginka, one of Servalan’s henchmen, played by Malaysian-born Ric Young, in the Blake’s 7 episode Children of Auron. We discuss it on Maximum Power, in Episode 38: The Ginka Show.
During the production of Trial of a Time Lord, Eric Saward quit as script editor, taking with him his script for Part 14. However, the script exists online, and it was performed as a radio drama by the Flight Through Entirety team in Episode 112: Time Inc.
Trials and Tribulations is a documentary on the history of the Colin Baker era, focusing on the cancellation and the hiatus. It can be found on the DVD of The Ultimate Foe and in the Season 23 box set.
Last week saw the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the final episode of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land, Wish You Were Here, in which Tara King finds herself in a parody of The Prisoner featuring a number of Doctor Who guest actors from the 60s and 70s.
This week, the Earth’s original inhabitants wake up from hibernation after about a decade, put on their best fibreglass vests and samurai outfits, and invade an undersea base at 0.5× speed. The Silurians and Sea Devils are back — but why?
Notes and links
In the first season of Space: 1999, Moonbase Alpha’s operations were run from Main Mission, a spectacularly huge and beautiful set at Pinewood Studios. Seabase 4’s bridge is similar (but smaller and cheaper).
The memory cheats. The book Doctor Who Special Effects by Mat Irvine (1986) features an extreme close up of a Silurian mask from 1970’s Doctor Who and the Silurians.
Room 101 (1994–2018) was a talk show in which a celebrity guest would discuss the things they hated most. In the episode broadcast on 15 April 2002, former Controller of BBC One Michael Grade appeared and nominated Doctor Who. You can see the relevent clip from the episode here. (He also nominated Shirley Bassey, so he’s clearly a monster.)
These days we think of the Cold War taking place in the 50s and 60s, but it was still going strong in 1984. We mention a few relevant films. We already talked about Threads (1984) in our discussion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth: it was a British TV movie depicting Sheffield in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The Day After (1983) was an American TV movie depicting a nuclear strike on the United States. And WarGames (1983) was a popular Hollywood movie about a teenage computer enthusiast whose hacking nearly kicks off World War III.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.
The final episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire (perhaps) will be out on Monday: we’ll be supplying you with our urgent hot takes on the season finale The Reality War.
Today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the final episode of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land, Wish You Were Here, in which Tara King finds herself in a parody of The Prisoner featuring a number of Doctor Who guest actors from the 60s and 70s.
And there’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we roared with laughter watching the astonishingly boring Season 6 Star Trek: Voyager episode Alice.
This week, the people of the planet Manussa are about to discover that all their ancient myths are true, and that their own thirst and dissatisfaction are rearing up to strike them in rubbery serpentine form. Kate Orman joins us to discuss the second coming of the Mara.
Notes and links
Tanha is the Pali word for thirst or craving. It is associated with dukkha, (“dissatisfaction”), which is the subject of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.
The bhavachakra is the Wheel of Life. In Tibetan Buddhism, depictions of the wheel are used as a focus of meditation; the wheel itself is an image of samsara, the cyclic nature of existence. Hence the visually striking imagery at the end of Part 3 of Kinda.
According to the readership of Doctor Who Magazine (Issue 69, October 1982), Kinda was the least popular story of Season 19. From best to worst, the results were Earthshock, The Visitation, Black Orchid, Time-Flight, Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday and Kinda.
It’s cold and rainy this weekend, and so we’ve decided to catch up with Mark McManus and spend the day larking around Devonshire, falling down holes, and generally hiding from Kevin Lindsay while he brings the Sontarans to the screen for the second time.
Notes and links
As we discuss right off the bat, much of the TV of this period was shot on videotape in the studio and on film on location, giving it a very distinctive look. This look is remarked on by Graham Chapman in this sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Naturally, Nathan mentions El Sandifer about fifteen mintues in. This time, it’s her essay on The Time Warrior, surprisingly. (And although Nathan doesn’t mention it, her essay on The Sontaran Experiment has a lot to say about the use of video cameras on location in this story.)
Every imaginable detail of the history of the screening of Doctor Who on ABC-TV is recorded on the BroadDWCast website, which chronicles the history of the broadcast of Doctor Who round the world. Go to this page to learn about the airdates that were so formative for Simon, Peter, Todd, Richard, Nathan during the 1970s and 80s.
Yesterday we released an episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which Helena’s long-dead husband returned to life to warn the crew not to settle on that nearby idyllic planet and start eating all its antimatter vegetables. With only moderate success.
It’s Invaders from Mars this week, as the terrifying monsters we thawed out in 5000 AD last year make an early appearance on the Moon just sixteen years after the visit of the Cybermen. Their goal: to cement their position somewhere on the top ten list of recurring Doctor Who monsters. Jeremy Radick joins us as we try to work out exactly where.
Notes and links
Peter mentions that the 2003 DVD release of The Seeds of Death was the first DVD release to use VidFire, a technology that uses frame interpolation to restore the videotape look to episodes that now only exist as film recordings.
Nathan is thinking of Gary Russell’s 1994 Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy, a sequel to the two Peladon stories that heavily features the Ice Warriors.
Of course, we mention H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) again, particularly the red weed, which is a Martian plant that starts spreading across the countryside after the invasion.
Jeremy suggests that the first transporter-focused Star Trek story might be James Blish’s Spock Must Die! (1970), in which an evil Mr Spock is created when an experiment with the transporter goes horribly wrong.
In March 2021, the container ship Ever Givenran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking it completely for six days. The BBC reported that it was holding up USD 9.6 billion worth of goods each day.
Last weekend, Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game released their take on the New Avengers episode Emily, Part 2 of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land.
