This week, on a planet where evil carnivorous overlords oppress and prey on a helpless populace, we decide to watch and discuss State of Decay.
Notes and links
As we said last week, Horror of Fang Rock was a hurried replacement for a Terrance Dicks script called The Vampire Mutation, after the Head of Serials Graeme McDonald asked them not to proceed with the script because of a high-profile BBC telemovie called Count Dracula (1977), which was to screen later that year. Doctor Who researcher Paul Scoones has the full story…
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. Particularly emphasised in the book is the fact that Offred is forbidden to read, and is left alone for hours in her room with nothing to do. This is an echo of the South’s anti-literacy laws, which were used to suppress the education of enslaved people, or black people more generally, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In Marxism, mystification is the process by which the ruling class attempts to obscure the true nature of their power and control over society. And so Aukon, Camilla and Zargo invent the Wasting to position themselves as the people’s saviours rather than their oppressors.
Inevitably, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) comes up again as a possible source of inspiration for this story. We talked about it last week as well.
And then, as so often in the 1970s, Doctor Who takes its inspiration from the Hammer Horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s — particularly the nine Dracula films, the first of which, Dracula (1958), starred Christopher Lee as Dracula and our very own Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 1972, a very young Lalla Ward appeared in a Hammer Horror film, Vampire Circus, which also starred Adrienne Corri, who played Mena in The Leisure Hive.
Hammer House of Horror (1980) was a short-lived anthology television series created by Hammer Film Productions. Its final episode, The Mark of Satan, aired on ITV on 6 December 1980, the same night as Part 3 of State of Decay. Emrys James, who is Aukon in this story, appeared in both.
Lalla Ward and Emrys James both appeared in the BBC’s production of Hamlet (1980), part of its full set of Shakespeare plays broadcast between 1978 and 1985. Ward played Ophelia, while James played the Player King. (Hamlet was our very own Derek Jacobi, his mother was Doctor Who’s own mother Claire Bloom, and his murderous stepfather Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart.)
Nathan alludes to the Flight Through Entirety episode on The Hand of Fear, whose title encapsulates the typical Hinchcliffe-Era Doctor Who monster: Episode 45: Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.
William Lindsay, who plays Zargo here, also appears in the Blake’s 7 Series D classic Animals, where he plays the Captain, a young Federation officer who joins Servalan in the moderately expensive hotel room bar that she drives around the galaxy during that final season.
By 1981, Terrance was script editing BBC Classic Serials, miniseries adaptations of classic novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, starring Tom Baker and Caroline John) and The Invisible Man (1984, inevitably featuring Michael Sheard). By 1985, he was producing them. His career is described in detail in Toby Hadoke’s obituary of Terrance, published in The Guardian in September 2019.
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.
We’ve just released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode Memorial. Keep an eye out for our next episode — our Christmas special, where we’ll be discussing William Shatner’s towering directorial début, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Terrance’s planned vampire story has been unexpectedly cancelled, and he has only a few weeks to come up with a replacement. Fortunately, he’s brilliant. Melvin Peña joins us to discuss Horror of Fang Rock.
Notes and links
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer best known for his gothic stories, including the short story Carmilla (1872), which is a foundational vampire story, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. It’s likely that Terrance Dicks named his vampire queen Camilla after Le Fanu’s character (more of which next week).
The Forsyte Saga is a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy (1867–1933), originally published between 1906 and 1921, and published together in 1922. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, starting in the 1880s. Millie Gibson recently appeared in a TV adaptation, The Forsytes, which screened on Channel 5 in late 2025.
Among many other things, Andrew Orton creates digital models of the sets of Classic Doctor Who stories.
When Season 22 of Doctor Who was first broadcast in Australia in 1985/86, its 45-minute episodes were split in half and broadcast from Monday to Thursdays at 6:30 PM. As a result, we got to experience some pretty terrible cliffhangers. Simon quotes the cliffhanger to our Part 3 of The Two Doctors:
DOCTOR: Perhaps you can lead us to this hacienda?
ANITA: Of course. It’s this way.
[sting]
The Tales of Ratiocination refers to three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), which are sometimes considered to be the first examples of detective fiction. In each of these stories, a mystery is solved by C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective from Paris. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844).
The Willem Dafoe/Robert Pattinson movie Melvin mentions is The Lighthouse (2019), in which two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers are isolated in a lighthouse by a storm, alternately making out and hitting each other with axes, apparently.
Here’s an adorable image of Peter, aged about 8, with a small subset of his collection of Target novelisations.
This week, Terrance gives up the script editor’s seat to Bob Holmes — but not before adding a final flourish to his era (and scoring one more paycheque) as the writer of Tom Baker’s first story, Robot.
Notes and links
Donkey Kong Bananza is the latest game in the Donkey Kong series, released on 17 July 2025 alongside the new Nintendo Switch 2. Nathan really likes it, describing it as “like eating a whole bunch of red food colouring and then watching a Japanese game show”.
Nathan mentions the BBC’s 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice whose exteriors were shot on film in Lincolnshire and whose interiors were shot on videotape in tiny, tiny studios. It’s not great, but it does feature some familiar faces, including Moray Watson (Black Orchid) as Mr Bennet, Barbara Shelley (Planet of Fire) as Mrs Gardiner and Clare Higgins (Night of the Doctor, The Magician’s Apprentice) as Kitty. Horrifyingly, the vastly superior 1995 adaptation of the book is now 30 years old.
Richard mentions Susan Jameson in Colony in Space. She had originally been cast by Michael E. Briant as the villainous Morgan, but the casting was vetoed by BBC’s Head of Drama Serials Ronnie Marsh, on the grounds that a sadistic female villain would have been too sexualised for a family audience.
Robot first aired in Australia in April 1976. At about that time, ABC-TV decided to stop buying the series, and so on 24 August 1976 a group of fans decided to picket its Sydney office, which is how the Doctor Who Club of Australia was born. Henry Bland had been appointed Chairman of the ABC in July that year.
Here’s the TARDIS Wikia page for Short/Robinson; delightfully, TARDIS Wikia just accepts it as established canon that the two of them are the same person.
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, Brendan, Steven and Richard released 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.
At the start of November, the Blake’s 7 Series 2 blu-ray box set was launched at the British Film institute, and Maximum Power was there to check it out. And to their surprise, they ran into some of the people responsible for the box set’s exciting new modelwork. Check out their latest field report.
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.
