This week, we rashly decide to steal the Daleks’ favourite thing and run away, only to find ourselves pursued through time and space for three months, during which time we visit Z Cars, the cricket, a volcano planet or something, and some of BBC Television Centre’s most lavish jungle sets. Toby Hadoke joins us to help us thwart The Daleks’ Master Plan.
Notes and links
On 13 March 2026, it was announced that two missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found by an organisation called Film is Fabulous! among a film collector’s “ramshackle” collection. These were Episode 1, The Nightmare Begins and Episode 3, Devil’s Planet. They were released on iPlayer at Easter.
If you’re a fan of a certain age, you will probably remember the 1983 publication of Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space, which was our first exposure to fan opinion about rare or missing Doctor Who stories. So here’s the first critical response to The Daleks’ Master Plan that most of us encountered: “Quite simply the longest Doctor Who story ever recorded and also one of the best, although it is doubtful if director Douglas Camfield thought so at the time with the tremendous script and production problems doing the story of this length engendered.”
Peter Black was the Daily Mail’s TV critic for more than 20 years, from 1952 to 1997. On Monday 15 February 1965, the Mail published his review of The Web Planet, which included this assessment of the regular characters: “The heroes are the dullest quartet in fiction… the attraction is the ancient one of watching people who are dafter than yourself.”
Toby mentions his earlier take on this story, expressed in Running Through Corridors, Volume 1 (2010), a book consisting of a daily email correspondence between Toby and Rob Shearman as they commit to watching Doctor Who through in order, one episode at a time. It’s a charming book, with something positive to say about even the most obscure or unloved episodes.
Fans of discussions of missing Doctor Who episodes will also enjoy the work of Gavin Rymill (@themindrobber on X), who uses visual reference material, soundtracks and AI to recreate scenes from the missing episodes, as well as Tim’s Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes Podcast, where he talks about the phenomenon of missing episodes and reviews the episodes themselves.
500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll tell you an interminable shaggy dog story about the airline losing our luggage at Cairo airport while you’re trying to watch the Blakes 7 episode Star One.
And more
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, on Startling Barbara Bain, we started our coverage of the justly maligned second season of Space: 1999 by watching its opening episode The Metamorph, featuring the return of Brian Blessed and Catherine Schell to the series, the departure of Victor, Paul and David, that lovely Main Mission set, and the slightest sense that this was more than just a preposterous and dumb space opera. Only 23 episodes left to go!
In an isolated episode on a distant, inhospitable planet, the Daleks are fomenting an intergalactic conspiracy to overthrow the Solar System. And for arcane budgetary reasons, the Doctor isn’t there to stop them.
Notes and links
On 9 October 2019, exactly 54 years after the first broadcast of Mission to the Unknown, a recreation of the episode was released on YouTube. It had been created by staff, graduates and students of the University of Central Lancashire, using Derek Martinus’s original camera script as well as extant photographic reference material and the surviving soundtrack.
To accompany the recreation, the BBC also released a documentary create by friend-of-the-podcast Josh Snares, including behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with the cast and crew of the recreation, and interviews with Peter Purves (Steven) and Edward de Souza (the original Marc Cory).
The dark concertina-head delegate with scary white triangular eyes is called Sentreal, and he reminds Adam of McDuff, the blue-headed concertina character from the upsettingly named Australian children’s television programme from the 1990s called Johnson and Friends. You can watch the entire run of the series on YouTube. So off you go.
Nathan mentions that his first encounter with The Daleks’ Master Plan was the MP3-CD release from 2001, which he listened to on his beloved and compellingly cheap iPod shuffle (first generation), an adorable and completely impractical flash-memory-based iPod released in 2005, available in 512 MB and 1 GB variations.
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.
As always, Adam Richard Has a Theory on his daily Doctor Who podcast of the same name. Right now, he’s talking about Colony in Space, but recent topics include cosplay, the Disney Plus era of Doctor Who and an imagined version of the lost 2026 Doctor Who Christmas Special starring Billie Piper.
Just yesterday, on Startling Barbara Bain, we started our coverage of the justly maligned second season of Space: 1999 by watching its opening episode The Metamorph, featuring the return of Brian Blessed and Catherine Schell to the series, the departure of Victor, Paul and David, that lovely Main Mission set, and the slightest sense that this was more than just a preposterous and dumb space opera. Only 23 episodes left to go!
A new triptych has just started on The Three Handed Game called Back to the Bassinet. Episode 1 is Something Nasty in the Nursery — Brendan, Steven and Richard are reunited with a bunch of sitcom actors from their childhoods (or from Richard’s childhood, at least), while Steed and Mrs Peel investigate some leaky civil servants.
On the 200th episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched an episode in the acclaimed final season of Star Trek: Picard called Imposters, featuring a reunion between Picard, Riker and former Maquis defector Ro Laren.
Taranium Core, Episode 5: Solace and Succour (Mission to the Unknown)
This week, Adam Richard and Kevin Burnard join us for a picaresque and shoddily made romp through time and space, with Daleks, followed by a devastating emotional farewell.
Notes and links
The Chase got its first home video release in 1993 in the form of a limited edition two-tape VHS box set which also contained fan-favourite Remembrance of the Daleks. So there was no avoiding it really.
Way back in 2018 (for God’s sake), a massive marathon of Classic Doctor Who episodes was broadcast on Twitch, and the reaction to these ancient televisual artefacts was heartwarmingly positive, and included the meme-ification of Ian’s line from Part Six — “London, 1965!”
This article on the TARDIS wiki enumerates the further adventures of the Mary Celeste in Doctor Who, including Nardole’s account of the digestion of the entire crew by an Enzomodon ambassador, in The Eaters of Light.
The introduction of time-travelling Daleks inevitably reminds Nathan of Carolyn Seymour’s turn as an evil leaper in Quantum Leap. By the most amazing coincidence, Seymour had played the lead in Season 1 of Terry Nation’s post-pandemic series Survivors in 1975.
A somewhat more modern take on the conflict between the Daleks and the Mechanoids can be found in Daleks! (2020), a five-part animated series written by James Goss and released as part of whatever Time Lord Victorious was. It featured Anjli Mohindra as the Mechanoid Queen.
Some faint praise, perhaps, for Benjamin Cook’s pop-art version of The Daleks, called The Daleks in Colour, which was released in 2023 as part of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary celebrations.
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.
A new triptych has just started on The Three Handed Game called Back to the Bassinet. Episode 1 is Something Nasty in the Nursery — Brendan, Steven and Richard are reunited with a bunch of sitcom actors from their childhoods (or from Richard’s childhood, at least), while Steed and Mrs Peel investigate some leaky civil servants.
This week, it’s our annual trip to post-apocalyptic 22nd-century London to see how David, Tyler and Jenny are getting on. Turns out, probably better than we let on last time.
Notes and links
Josh Snares is a Doctor Who documentarian and YouTuber who has actually guested on an episode of Flight Through Entirety. James mentions his version of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which is now apparently no longer available. To make up for this, here is a link to an adorable video where Josh gets to operate a Dalek based on the black Dalek from The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
You and Who was a series of Doctor Who essay anthologies edited by friend-of-the-podcast J R Southall and published between 2012 and 2019. Brendan was one of the contributors.
Andrew Hodson’s Contract Roulette is our way of referring to the fact that sometimes the Doctor just dumps his companion on whatever planet he’s on when the actor’s contract ends. See, for example, Steven, Vicki, Leela and Mel. Its first mention appears to have been in Flight Through Entirety Episode 109: Dark Colours.
James’s speculations about the Doctor and Susan’s relationship are interrupted by Richard accusing him of “lungbarrowing it”. Marc Platt’s Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow (1997) provides an unsuspecting fandom with a definitive answer, apparently, to a question that no one really cared about. According to the TARDIS wiki, it’s established elsewhere that Susan’s real name is either Larn or Arkytior. For Christ’s sake.
Brendan mentions producer Verity Lambert’s correspondence with Donald Baverstock, who was the Controller of Programmes for BBC1 in 1963, when Doctor Who was being created and during its first two years. He resigned from the BBC in 1965 rather than moving over to BBC2.
Terry Nation goes on to create a show set in a post-apocalyptic England after billions of people die of a plague. It’s called Survivors, and it runs for three seasons from 1975 to 1977. It’s clearly inspired by John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. In Series 1, Episode 9, Law and Order, not written by Nation, a disabled man is falsely accused of murder and is executed; when the real killer confesses, they decide not to execute him because he is an essential member of the community. (Sandifer summarises the episode in this essay on Survivors.)
Kenton Moore played the Roboman who drowns himself in the Thames at the beginning of Part 1. He will go on to play Noah in The Ark in Space (1975). He died in May 2025 at the age of 93.
Terry Nation has left the Daleks at home this week, but he’s still bristling with so many ideas that the TARDIS crew rush through no less than five mini-stories in six weeks, proving that while the sea-bathing on the planet Marinus is basically lethal, there’s still a lot there to keep the tourists occupied.
Notes and links
Nathan refers to the entry on The Keys of Marinus in About Time, a nine-volume series of reference books on the making and reception of Doctor Who through all of the Classic Series and the first five years of the New Series.
Peter mentions a number of story and script ideas that were floating around in the early days of Doctor Who’s production, including The Red Fort by Terry Nation, which was to be set in India during the British Raj but then abandoned in favour of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Masters of Luxor (AKA The Robots) by An Unearthly Child scriptwriter Anthony Coburn, and The Hidden Planet (AKA Beyond the Sun) by Malcolm Hulke, which would have featured a twin planet to Earth which was dominated by women, inevitably.
Simon likens the storytelling in The Keys of Marinus to the books in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, fantasy gamebooks that allowed you to affect the outcome of the story by choosing actions that send you off to different pages of the books. These are still being made, but their heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were among the most popular children’s book series in the world, selling 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.
Peter asked me to tell you that he made a mistake about this story’s director John Gorrie. He didn’t also direct an episode of Marco Polo (that was John Crockett), but may have directed an episode of The Reign of Terror when its director fell ill.
Fans of podcasts about Terry Nation’s television work will also enjoy Maximum Power, a podcast in which the hosts of Flight Through Entirety and the hosts of the Trap One podcast join forces to discuss Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7.
In the most recent episode of The Three Handed Game, the Annette Andre experience concludes with an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards, in which Miss Andre’s Suzy Miller finds out that her husband is (1) a Cold War sleeper agent, and soon afterwards, (2) dead.
Doctor Who has barely even started when the writer of Episode Five shows up and decides to take the show in a whole different direction. That writer was Terry Nation, and that episode, or possibly the one after that, will change the world forever.
Notes and links
500 Year Diary has already discussed one Terry Nation story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, in Season 2, Episode 1: Daleks Daleks released on 27 April 2025. This episode was part of our season The Second Coming, which looked at how Doctor Who monsters are changed in all kinds of ways by the process of removing them from their original context and making them one of the show’s ongoing concerns.
In that episode of 500YD Season 2, Simon remembers watching an episode of Homicide when he was at university. This was a well-known Australian police procedural on the Seven Network, which ran from 1964 to 1977.
The first scene of Doctor Who shot on location appeared in Part 2 of The Reign of Terror, Guests of Madame Guillotine. In it, the Doctor walks along a country lane in long shot. He’s played by Brian Proudfoot, who also appeared as a different character in The Reign of Terror, as an Aridian in The Chase, as Tigellinus in The Romans, and as the Doctor again in The Space Museum. Edmund Warwick played Darrius in The Keys of Marinus, doubled for Hartnell in a scene from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and played his robot replica in The Chase.
Donald Wilson was the Head of Serials at the BBC when the show was being created. In 1971, he claimed to have come up with the name.
The Masters of Luxor was a Doctor Who script written by Anthony Coburn (who wrote An Unearthly Child), which never made it to production. Even though David Whitaker gave up on the script, some less discerning people saw fit to release it into an unsuspecting world in the form of both a script book and the inevitable Big Finish adaptation.
Here on 500 Year Diary, we like to suggest that in the last three episodes of The Daleks, our heroes are bravely heading into the Dalek City to fetch some more episodes. We get this from Kieran Hodgson’s video Bad Doctor Who Impressions: The Daleks.
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.
In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we said goodbye to Victor, Paul, David, and that huge beautiful set, while watching the alarmingly mediocre final episode of Season 1 of Space: 1999 — The Last Enemy.
In the most recent episode of The Three Handed Game, the Annette Andre experience continues with an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards, in which Miss Andre’s Suzy Miller finds out that her husband is (1) a Cold War sleeper agent, and soon afterwards, (2) dead.
On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a brilliant episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks called Where Pleasant Fountains Lie, in which the Chief Engineer’s mother comes aboard the Cerritos, determined to make sure that her son loses his virginity, so that he will be forced to take his rightful place as King of the Planet Hysperia. Things don’t quite go according to plan.
Taranium Core, Episode 1: Captures and Escapes and Reversals (The Daleks)
It’s the end of the week, and although some kids and a whole building full of public servants are dead, we all learn that even the ones who walk away from Omelas discover that the real Omelas was inside them all along.
Notes and links
We didn’t have a whole season of Doctor Who in 2009, because David Tennant took a year off to play Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008/2009. In fact, it was during the interval of one of the performances in October 2008 that David Tennant appeared remotely at the National Television Awards to announce his departure from the show.
In the 1998 French and Saunders Christmas Special, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders played overly enthusiastic extras on James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), who ended up being repeatedly duplicated in a panicky crowd scene. (They also played Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet respectively.) Here’s the trailer.
Adam’s ridiculous theory podcast is Adam Richard Has a Theory, available daily wherever you get your podcasts.
Fridge logic is a plot element in TV or film that doesn’t actually make sense, but you only realise that when you go to the fridge to get something afterwards. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term icebox scene to describe a scene that “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox”.
In 2009, there’s a general awareness of child abuse in care homes and in the church, and there are plenty of reports in the newspapers. However, Jimmy Savile’s history of abuse isn’t widely known until after his death in 2011 and an ITV documentary about his life in October 2012. A month before Children of Earth airs, the Plymouth child abuse ring was first reported to police. (Content warnings apply.)
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) is a beautiful and harrowing short story by Ursula Le Guin about the discovery that our comfort and prosperity depend on the exploitation and immiseration of others. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds covers the same ground in its Season 1 episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.
In 2025, one of the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story was Isabel J Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, a satirical response to Le Guin’s story for the vastly more cynical world of 2024. (It did win the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for that year.)
During the tag, Adam recommends two TV shows with actors from Children of Earth. Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo star as detectives in Apple TV’s Criminal Record. In ITV’s Gone, an alarmingly blonde Eve Myles investigates the disappearance of David Morrissey’s wife.
Tonight, John Frobisher’s relationship with the 456 turns from sour to ugly, while Captain Jack Harkness’s day starts with humiliation and ends in death. In contrast, the British PM and his advisors are being uncharacteristically dynamic and productive, which doesn’t bode well for anyone really.
Notes and links
The Trolley Problem is a well-known series of thought experiments used to test our moral intuitions about consequentialism, devised by the English moral philosopher Philippa Foot. In it, most people say that if a runaway train is going to kill five unsuspecting people on the track, it’s okay to flip a switch and divert the train onto a track with only one person on it. However, people tend to be less enthusiastic about stopping the train by pushing a person in front of it, even though the outcome is the same. Sometimes people are invited to imagine if it would make any difference if they knew the person to be sacrificed — a variation on the scenario which will become important later.
The film Contagion (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, concerns a highly transmissible and deadly pandemic outbreak which kills 25 million people worldwide. In early 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was getting going, the film enjoyed a surge in popularity, going viral, according to this story in The Guardian from January 2020.
Bury Your Gays (also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome) is a trope in media — particularly television, although it predates television — denoting the tendency for gay characters in fiction to suffer tragic outcomes, including but not limited to death.
Tonight, Jack finally works out why everyone wants to kill him (and it’s not the reason you might expect), while mere miles away the 456 arrive in Thames House and immediately run up an upsettingly large cleaning bill. Adam Richard and Kevin Burnard join us to discuss Day Three.
The Second Coming (2003) was a TV miniseries written by Russell T Davies, in which a man who works at a video rental store in Manchester turns out to be the Son of God. It will seem familiar to anyone who has watched Aliens of London, not least because the man is played by Christopher Eccleston.
El Sandifer talks about what Martha’s role might have looked like in Children of Earth in her essay on Day Two.
Adam’s daily Doctor Who podcast is called Adam Richard Has a Theory, and it consists of no less than 1315 episodes of Adam’s insightful, implausible and hilarious theories about the show throughout its entire history.
Adam mentions an episode of the British satirical show Brass Eye called Paedogeddon, which aired on Channel 4 in 2001. It was a ridiculous parody current affairs show containing absurd stories about paedophiles, satirising the hysteria and hypocrisy that attended the topic in the British media of the time. You can watch it here.
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, the lads at The Three-Handed Game released their latest episode — the first part of an interview with prolific Australian actor Annette Andre, who plays Judy in an episode of The Avengers called Mandrake and Suzy Miller in an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards. She had a massive career in British TV throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. You might know her from her role as Jeannie Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but she appears in all of our favourites — The Saint, The Prisoner, The Persuaders! and The Return of the Saint. (And, for us Australians, Taurus Rising, Cop Shop and Prisoner.)
The 456 said they’d drop round some time this evening, so while they wait, Simon and Nathan chat with Johnny Spandrell and Melvin Peña about villains, childlessness, the Home Office onboarding process, how great Eve Myles is, and whether Torchwood really is appropriate viewing for grownups.
The latest iteration of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, is also concerned acout children and the world that we have created for them to grow up in. You can hear Joe and Nathan discussing the pilot on Untitled Star Trek Project Episode 180.
In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, Earth receives an alien message containing 30,000 pages of schematics for a Machine which can transport people across the galaxy. In Children of Earth a far more basic group of aliens order us to build a tank.
Just over a week before Children of Earth was broadcast, John Barrowman complained in the paper that Torchwood had been punished for its success by being given a reduced episode order.
Simon mentions the TV event miniseries of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these is probably Roots (1977), a generational story about an enslaved man, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) who is kidnapped from West Africa. Over eight consecutive nights, we follow his family history until his descendants are liberated after the Civil War. We also mention V (1983), in which lizard aliens camply invade and occupy Earth over two consecutive nights, and The Thorn Birds (1983), in which over four consecutive nights, Richard Chamberlain plays a heterosexual Australian priest with varying results; Bryan Brown also features, playing his customary block of wood.
In May 2021, John Barrowman’s behaviour on the set of both Doctor Who and Torchwoodcame into question after Noel Clarke was accused by several people of bullying and sexual harassment on set. Barrowman had previously apologised in 2008 for inappropriate behaviour during a live broadcast on BBC Radio 1.
The lads at The Three-Handed Game have just released their latest episode — the first part of an interview with prolific Australian actor Annette Andre, who plays Judy in an episode of The Avengers called Mandrake and Suzy Miller in an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards. She had a massive career in British TV throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. You might know her from her role as Jeannie Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but she appears in all of our favourites — The Saint, The Prisoner, The Persuaders! and The Return of the Saint. (And, for us Australians, Taurus Rising, Cop Shop and Prisoner.)
And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford said farewell to a surprisingly complex and beautiful kids’ show iteration of Star Trek — Star Trek: Prodigy, whose two-part finale Ouroboros aired in 2024 and which vanished from streaming just a year or so later.
Unearthly Children, Episode 2: Treason on Tuesday (Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two)
