A short time ago, Spotify pulled roughly eighty episodes of FTE — over the short musical quotation that separates the intro from the body in each FTE episode, a quote usually taken from the soundtrack of whatever Doctor Who story we’re discussing. And episodes of 500 Year Diary have already begun to disappear from Spotify.

I think this is fair use: each clip is a brief quotation from the work under analysis, it’s part of something essentially transformative, and it doesn’t replace the work itself in any way at all. Protecting this sort of thing is what the concept of fair use is for.

Of course, Spotify doesn’t give a shit about any of that. It has complete control over its entire podcasting world, and it doesn’t have to host FTE or anything else it doesn’t approve of.

But outside of Spotify is the entire world of podcasting — built on open standards, under no one’s control, and immune to the arbitrary algorithmic decisions of a single evil corporation.

Which is why, in the meantime, you can find us on our website, 500yeardiary.com, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you very much for listening and goodnight. We’ll see you later, somewhere else.

The Daleks' Master Plan

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Daleks’ Master Plan in Episode 7: How Would You Address a God?, released on Sunday 31 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Toby is @tobyhadoke.bsky.social, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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!

After their triumphant 200th episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford took this week off. Which gives you the chance to listen to some of our hot takes on episodes of Strange New Worlds before the season finale this coming Thursday.

Mission to the Unknown

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.

Fans of Melvin’s appearances on 500 Year Diary will also enjoy his recent appearance on the Trap One podcast, discussing the recent vinyl LP release of The Rescue.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Mission to the Unknown in Episode 6: Nipples, Dear Listener, released on Tuesday 12 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 invite you to a weeks-long conference where we don’t provide any snacks.

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.

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.

The Chase

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!”

Nathan discussed The Chase on an episode of the All of Time and Space podcast called Scooby Who, which was released in June 2021.

Here’s Elizabeth Sandifer’s not-entirely-serious redemptive reading of The Chase, which culminates with an earnest appreciation of the show’s beautiful final scene.

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Chase in Episode 5: She’s Madame Mao, released on Sunday 3 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Kevin is @scribblesscript.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 drive a bunch of Mini-Minors into your house and clutter up your living room.

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.

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 Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched Captain Sisko take on the Maquis’s most determined musical theatre gay, Michael Eddington, in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called For the Uniform.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Dalek Invasion of Earth in Episode 3: Bernard Cribbins in Vinyl, released on Sunday 20 July 2014. We discussed it again last year as part of 500 Year Diary Season 2: The Second Coming, in which we discussed the second stories of Doctor Who’s most important monsters and villains. That was Season 2, Episode 1: Daleks Daleks, released on Sunday 27 April 2025.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 cover this story again this time next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Don’t think we won’t.

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.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we gave Barbara a week off and watched The Day After Tomorrow, a one-off educational drama produced by Gerry Anderson between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999. Were we entertained? No. Were we disappointed in any way? Also no.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford said goodbye to Wesley Crusher (for now) in an underwhelming episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Final Mission.

The Keys of Marinus

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.

And here’s a 2015 obituary in The Guardian for Robin Phillips, who plays Altos in this story and who had a long career as an actor, a theatre director, and the artistic director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Keys of Marinus in Episode 2: So Maudlin, released on Saturday 21 June 2014. We returned to Marinus to record a disgracefully inebriated commentary episode in Episode 91: The Velvet Commentary, released on Sunday 30 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 chase you around our ski lodge in a way that is not really acceptable in this more enlightened era.

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.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we gave Barbara a week off and watched The Day After Tomorrow, a one-off educational drama produced by Gerry Anderson between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999. Were we entertained? No. Were we disappointed in any way? Also no.

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.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a strange experimental episode of Star Trek: Short Treks called Ephraim and Dot, a vivid, propulsive and charming love letter to the Original Series.

The Daleks

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.

Simon has been reading the biography of David Whitaker, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023) by Simon Guerrier.

Peter and Nathan both recognise that The Daleks was very much inspired by both the book (1895) and the film (1960) of H G Wells, The Time Machine.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Daleks in Episode 1: Horribly Blond(e), released on Sunday 15 June 2014.

And finally, Nathan recklessly spoils an important reveal from the Series 3 Finale of Blakes 7, Terminal, by Terry Nation.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 invite you round to dinner and then leap out at you from behind a pillar brandishing an egg whisk. When you least expect it.

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.

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.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

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.)

We found Aimee Davies, who played Mica Davies in Children of Earth: she is now a Twitch streamer called Aimsey.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 only pretend to be sad when you head off into space on that cold fusion cruiser.

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.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, its 30th anniversary celebration — Trials and Tribble-ations, in which the crew of the USS Defiant wangle their way into a beloved episode of original Star Trek from 1967.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 interrupt your next important meeting with our unwelcome and somewhat threatening opinions.

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.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Voyager, its 100th episode — Timeless. And we’ve got a brilliant Deep Space Nine episode coming along next. So stay tuned.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three

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.

Notes and links

In 2017, Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of making a sexual advance towards him at a party when he was 14. Spacey apologised, but also came out in the process, as if his sexual orientation had been some kind of mitigating factor.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Kevin is @scribblesscript.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 attend that formal reception you’re planning and behave in a completely unacceptable way.

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, 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.)

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford sat through an unbearably dull and silly episode of Star Trek: The Original Series — The Savage Curtain, an episode enlivened only by the guest appearance of a heavily made-up Abraham Lincoln.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two

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.

Notes and links

The Big Finish Torchwood range started in 2015 with Torchwood: The Conspiracy, and it will conclude in May 2026 with its 100th monthly release, Joe Lidster’s Fare Well.

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 Torchwood came 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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social and Johnny is @johnnyspandrell.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 drive up to your house in a forklift and make off with your gazebo.

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.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

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.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

After 44 years, the 456 are coming back, but before they get here there’s a fair amount of setting up to do. First, remind us how scary and weird children are; second, introduce us to a troupe of amazing new actors; and third, blow up the entire show. Should be fun.

Notes and links

The Torchwood episode with the screaming adult that Nathan struggles to name is Season 2, Episode 11, Adrift, in which Ruth Jones searches for her son Jonah, who disappeared seven months ago, only to discover that he fell into the rift and is now an ugly adult with a massive latex head who screams non-stop for twenty hours a day. Horrible, and in no way entertaining.

Adam refers to Eddie Murphy’s 1983 comedy special Delirious, which caused a stir when it appeared on Netflix in 2017 and everyone discovered the lovable Donkey’s homophobic history. (Murphy apologised for the routine in 1996.) Here’s the clip that seems to have inspired Torchwood S1E2 Day One.

Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi are reunited in Criminal Record (2024) on Apple TV. They play a pair of detectives investigating a murder for which the wrong person may have been convicted. Season 2 will premiere on Apple TV on 22 April.

The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel by John Wyndham about a village whose female residents become mysteriously pregnant after a Doctor who and the Dæmons–style alien incident. The result: two sets of 30 identical Children who operate as two gestalt entities, speaking and thinking in unison. A film adaptation was released in 1960 as Village of the Damned, and it has been adapted several times for both film and television since then.

Inevitably, Nathan refers to El Sandifer’s essay on Children of Earth: Day One.

We also mention Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), which is the story of a husband-and-wife team of radio scriptwriters who live through what slow and largely unseen alien invasion which turns the sea against humanity. It has a lot in common with another five-episode Doctor Who spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea.

Ianto talks to his sister about Jack, and Peter is reminded of a similar scene from Beautiful Thing (1996). Directed by Hettie Macdonald (Blink, The Magician’s Apprentice, The Witch’s Familiar), Beautiful Thing is a romantic comedy about a gay boy living with a single mother on a council estate, who falls in love with his next-door neighbour.

Adam talks about anxieties around queer men and children, and mentions the current production of The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, starring Simon Burke. Elocution is a one-hand play in which a queer elocution teacher describes his interactions with a young queer pupil and the hostility he encounters as a result. It was written by Steve J. Spears, and the original production in 1976 starred Gordon Chater.

Frobisher is also the name of one of the Doctor’s comic-book companions — a shape-shifting hardboiled detective who usually takes the form of a penguin.

Here’s the Dead Ringers Torchwood sketch from 2007.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Adam is @adamrichard.com.au. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 stand unresponsive in your driveway for hours when you’re trying to drive your kids to work.

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.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

Over on Startling Barbara Bain, we’re nearing the end of Series 1 and considering the prospect of rewatching Series 2 with some apprehension. Still, in the meantime, we recently watched Space Brain, in which Alpha is apparently attacked by the same foam machine that caused Pat Troughton so much delight in The Seeds of Death.

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford just watched the first episode of Season 2 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Homecoming, a charming and intriguing relaunch, despite a surprising lack of incident.

Timewyrm: Exodus

Our tribute to the great Terrance Dicks concludes this week with a discussion of his first original Doctor Who novel, but we also take the opportunity to talk about what he achieved and how much we all owe him. Kate Orman and Adam Richard join us for Timewyrm: Exodus.

Notes and links

First, some background.

The Virgin New Adventures launched in 1991, as an “official” continuation of our cancelled show. It comprised 61 novels over nearly six years, including books by Classic Series writers Terrance Dicks, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, as well as New Series writers Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies — not to mention five-and-a-half novels by our very own Kate Orman. Virgin lost the rights to Doctor Who in the middle of 1997, but the range continued until the end of 1999, with twenty-one novels featuring Benny Summerfield, a companion created by Paul Cornell for his 1992 novel Love and War.

Terrance Dicks didn’t get to launch the Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys is the second novel in the range. The 28th novel, Terrance’s sequel to State of Decay, was called Blood Harvest, which — together with Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera — was used to launch a second series of original novels, the Virgin Missing Adventures. Finally, when BBC Books acquired the rights to publish original Doctor Who fiction, they launched their series with a novel by Terrance — The Eight Doctors, which is not very highly regarded, sadly.

There are many dystopian novels set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II. Adam mentions Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which depicts life in a United States partitioned between two mutually hostile Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

In an episode of the dreadful British science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–1979), Hitler’s Last Secret, Part 2, Michael Sheard plays a revived Hitler, who is in reality a galactic criminal called Neebor from the planet Vashig. Here’s Neebor’s gruesome (and alarmingly cheap) unmasking for your viewing pleasure. Or not.

Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010) are two novels in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. The premise: In 2060, it’s possible to send students and historians back in time, confident in the theory that it’s impossible to change the past. But now three people find themselves trapped in World War II and start to find discrepancies that might change the outcome of the War.

Perhaps unwisely, Peter consults some reviews of Timewyrm: Genesys that he finds on the Time Scales website.

And finally, here’s the text of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, just to remind us all that one day even our most impressive achievements will come to nothing.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 keep going on and on and on at you about this amazing documentary we saw on the History Channel last week.

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.

Mere hours after the release of this episode of 500 Year Diary, over on Maximum Power, we’ll be releasing an epic retrospective of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere, discussing how Blake’s 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and enraged us over the years. So until then, keep an eye on the website or on your podcatcher of choice.

Last week, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

Instead of taking Christmas off, Untitled Star Trek Project released one more episode for 2025, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watch another highlight of the franchise, the season premiere of Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Way of the Warrior. This is one of our favourite episodes of the franchise and of the podcast: you won’t want to miss it.

The Five Doctors

Well, our ridiculous show has just turned twenty, and so it’s time for everyone both alive and available to celebrate the occasion by reporting first to North Wales and then to the BBC Television Centre. But only one man can give them all exactly the right things to say and do — and that’s the man who knows what colour monsters are.

Notes and links

As Peter observes, 1983 was a big year for Australia’s Doctor Who fans. First of all, Peter Davison visited us for the first time during April, signing books at some shopping centres and presenting at the TV Week Logie awards (don’t ask). Then in May, ABC-TV started a run of Pertwee repeats that included six stories broadcast for the first time in colour in Australia: Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Mutants, The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. And then, of course, there was The Five Doctors…

Nathan recently recorded another podcast episode on The Five Doctors, this time for The Maran Chess Club, a Doctor Who podcast by Luke Sims-Jenkins which focuses on the Davison Era on TV and in books and audios. Nathan’s episode will be available at Christmas, so like and subscribe now.

We mention that Robert Holmes was the first writer given the opportunity to write the twentieth anniversary story. His treatment was called The Six Doctors. I’m fairly certain that this is the discussion document outlining Holmes’s ideas for the story.

Simon gives pi to thirty decimal places as 3.141592653589793237462643383279, but as he correctly points out, the second 7 there should be an 8. If you feel like outdoing Simon, you can find the first million digits of pi here.

One version of Susan Foreman’s life story was presented on Radio 4 in 1994, in the radio mockumentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, starring Jane Asher as Susan. Spoiler alert: sick of living on a dystopian post-holocaust Earth, Susan contacts her godfather’s brother Terry, who takes her back in time to the 1960s, where she gets a civil service job and ends up becoming the EC Commissioner for Education.

Terrance Dicks is the author of the best, most influential description of the Doctor’s character, quoted by the Doctor himself in both The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time. It first appeared in the second 1976 edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Here’s the quote in full: “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”

Peter Haining’s book Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983) was hugely influential in shaping fan opinion throughout the last few years of the show’s original run. It’s been said that a lot of fannish discourse during the 90s was a reaction against the capsule reviews of each story that Haining wrote for this book.

The Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House ran for nearly thirty years, starting in 1974. Longleat House was also the site of the Twentieth Anniversary Event, which took place on the 3rd and 4th of April 1983. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend over the two days, but thirty-five thousand turned up on the first day. You can get your commemorative programme here.

Simon introduces his theory that the 20th and 50th anniversaries both signal the start of some kind of decline in the show’s popularity in Flight Through Entirety’s second episode on The Day of the Doctor, Episode 249: It’s No Arc of Infinity.

Flight Through Entirety commented on The Five Doctors in Episode 90: Great Balls of Commentary!, released on Sunday 16 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 keep telling you that story about everyone wearing eyepatches on the set of Inferno over and over again.

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.

Just yesterday, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

And last of all, on Untitled Star Trek Project, we’ve just released our Christmas Special, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford are joined by Todd himself to watch the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — a film that manages to be heartwarming and fitfully entertaining, despite its many, many obvious flaws.

State of Decay

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed State of Decay in Episode 71: Why is E-Space Green?, released on Sunday 24 April 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 pop up behind you the next time you’re making a speech and create alarming and ridiculous tableaux to amuse your audience.

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.

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.

Horror of Fang Rock

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.

If you want to hear more of Peter and Simon in furious disagreement about the quality of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, here are the relevant episodes of Flight Through Entirety — Episode 220: Centuries of Embittered Religiosity, and Episode 221: Generic Potato Person.

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Horror of Fang Rock in Episode 50: The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive, released on Sunday 25 October 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 hide in your basement flicking the lights on and off until you come downstairs and ask us politely to stop.

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, Maximum Power returned with its field report into the release of the Series 2 blu-ray box set at the British Film Institute.

And 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 The Best of Both Worlds and The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, perhaps two of the most well-known and significant episodes not just of Star Trek: The Next Generation but of the entire Star Trek franchise. We thought they were a bit slow.

Robot

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 a link to the TARDIS Wikia page of Terrance Dicks’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, where you can see both versions of the cover.

Brendan suggests that one inspiration for Dicks’s script might be a script written by him and Malcolm Hulke for a 1962 episode of The Avengers — The Mauritius Penny. We released a commentary on The Mauritius Penny for Bondfinger back in 2020; of course, many more commentaries on The Avengers are available on The Three-Handed Game.

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Robot in Episode 32: Quentin Crisp Duck Face, released on Saturday 20 June 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 tease your Roomba until it turns on you.

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, 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.

And finally, 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 a perhaps justifiably unloved episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Up the Long Ladder, finding much more to enjoy in it than they expected.

The War Games

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.

Inevitably, here’s El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The War Games.

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The War Games in Episode 19: Hipster Klingon, released on Sunday 28 December 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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 sneak into the judges’ robing room at your trial and tell them you’ve chosen the one who’s too thin.

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, 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 Well

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.

Our Doctor Who flashcast The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire recorded our first impressions of The Well just a few weeks ago in Episode 15.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Steven is @steedstylin.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or when you’re not looking we’ll stick a post-it note on your back that says KICK ME.

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.

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.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Enemy of the Bane

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.

Notes and links

We discussed this story’s predecessor Invasion of the Bane in Season 1, Episode 6: Where Kelsey Went.

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.

Mrs Wormwood returns in the second box set of the series Rani Takes on the World, The Revenge of Wormwood, released in December 2023. A wonderful six-minute interview with Samantha Bond accompanied the release.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

If you want to hear more of Adam’s theories about the world of Doctor Who, you can tune into his daily Doctor Who podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 open up an unconvincing CGI portal in the middle of Milbury and ruin one of your formative childhood experiences.

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, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 podcast Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

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.

Boom Town

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.

Notes and links

The entire UK bans smoking in pubs and restaurants from the middle of 2007, but the ban is announced just a couple of months after Boom Town airs, in October 2005.

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.”

Flight Through Entirety discussed Boom Town in Episode 142: Going One-on-One, released on Sunday 4 November 2018.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, Hannah is @hannahcooper.bsky.social, and Pete is @quiteamess.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 invite you to join us for some ice-skating. In a very suspicious way.

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.

Yesterday, we released another episode of Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

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 a funny and likeable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Forsaken.

Time and the Rani

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Time and the Rani in Episode 116: Terrified of Tinsel, released on Sunday 25 June 2017.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 hang you upside down from the ceiling until your face is really, really puffy.

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.

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 a top-tier episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — Tapestry. There will be a new episode released next Friday.

Mindwarp

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.”

The music for Mindwarp was composed by Richard Hartley, who had a long career composing film scores, including the incidental music for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and its much less well-known sequel).

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Mindwarp in Episode 109: Dark Colours, released on Sunday 7 May 2017.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 do a very slipshod job of planning your next surprise party.

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.

The final episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire (perhaps) was out on Monday, discussing the last Doctor Who story of this entire era The Reality War.

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.

And there’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ll be returning this week — God willing — with a random episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Spoiler alert: it’s Tapestry.)

Warriors of the Deep

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 actor who plays Bulic, Nigel Humphries, appeared in an episode of Blake’s 7 called Mission to Destiny, which we discuss in Maximum Power Episode 7: Jeopardy Space Meteorites.

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Warriors of the Deep in Episode 92: Is Ichtar Okdel?, released on Sunday 20 November 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 enter your house uninvited and very very slowly and fill your bed with goannas.

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.

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.

Snakedance

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Snakedance in Episode 85: Tiny Little Petty Flaws, released on Tuesday 9 August 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 start making rude remarks about how fat you look in that distorting funhouse mirror.

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.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be supplying you with our urgent hot takes on Wish World.

Last week, we released an episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which Helena’s zombie husband turned up on the base to warn everyone not to settle on the poisonous planet nearby that everyone was so excited about.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we said a heartfelt farewell to Star Trek: Lower Decks as we watched its finale The New Next Generation.

The Sontaran Experiment

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.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Sontaran Experiment in Episode 34: Choc Bit Breast Plates, released on Saturday 4 July 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Mark is @quarkmcmalus.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll call up your boss and tell him about all the Balatro you’ve been playing during work hours.

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.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be trying keep it together as we discuss The Interstellar Song Contest.

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.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a gentle and hilarious Star Trek: Lower Decks episode called Fully Dilated.

The Seeds of Death

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.

Inevitably, Nathan mentions El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The Seeds of Death.

In March 2021, the container ship Ever Given ran 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.

Toby Hadoke can be heard praising Ronald Leigh-Hunt’s performance in the Blakes 7 episode Children of Auron in Maximum Power Episode 59: Snogging & Nihilism.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Seeds of Death in Episode 18: Sideburn Trouble, released on Tuesday 23 December 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break into your house, fiddle with the settings on the air conditioner, and make off with all your woolly jumpers.

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.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be trying to work out what we thought about The Story & the Engine.

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.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a bafflingly undercooked Star Trek: The Original Series episode called The Empath.

The Moonbase

We’re walking on eggshells this week as we await the arrival of an army of marching Cybermen, approaching the Moonbase with a dastardly plan to change Doctor Who for ever. For the better, on the whole.

Notes and links

The Moonbase was novelised by Gerry Davis as Doctor Who and the Cybermen, published in 1975. The audiobook is read by Anneke Wills and was released in 2009.

The article Peter cites as a source for the phrase “behind the sofa” was called “The metamorphoses of Who”, written by Stanley Reynolds and published in The Times on 9 April 1973.

If you want to hear more of Adam’s theories about the world of Doctor Who, and of course you do, you can tune into his daily Doctor Who podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Moonbase in Episode 12: Comedy Accents, released on Sunday 26 October 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Adam is @adamrichard.com.au. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll go through all your cupboards and drink everything with even a hint of hydrocarbons.

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.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be offering our lukewarm takes on Lucky Day.

Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game has just released their take on the New Avengers episode Emily, Part 2 of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land.

Our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain has reached Episode 12, End of Eternity. Plans are underway to record Episode 13 some time this month.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from the show’s imperial phase, The Drumhead, guest starring Jean Simmons.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

This week, we launch the second season of 500 Year Diary with the first of our Second Comings — Doctor Who’s second ever Dalek story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. How will the Daleks survive leaving their city on Skaro and subjecting themselves to the public gaze just before Christmas?

Notes and links

Nathan mentions guesting on a podcast to discuss The Chase. That podcast was the All of Time and Space podcast, and the episode was called Scooby Who. It was released in June 2021.

The only way you could buy a copy of Remembrance of the Daleks on VHS back in 1993 was in the Dalek Tin, which included a VHS copy of The Chase and a commemorative booklet by Andrew Pixley called Daleks: A Brief History.

Simon remembers being shown 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, and which featured somewhere on the résumés of most Australian actors of the period.

In The Reign of Terror, the role of Doctor Who on Location was played by Brian Proudfoot.

We mention a number of post-apocalyptic dystopias relevant to this story: Threads (1984) is a terrifying TV movie depicting the effects of a nuclear holocaust on Sheffield. On the Beach (1957) is a novel by Neville Shute, depicting the lives of a few survivors of a nuclear holocaust living in southern Australia, waiting for the fallout to reach them; a film adaptation was released in 1959. The Day of the Triffids (1951) is a novel by John Wyndham set in England after an accident blinds most of the population and lethally venomous walking plants start wandering around killing people. And The War of the Worlds (1898) is a novel by our very own H G Wells, depicts a temporary successful Martian invasion which results in the collapse of human civilisation.

Later on, Terry Nation will get to create his own post-pandemic apocalyptic dystopia, Survivors (1975), which ran for three seasons, even though Terry himself left the show after Season 1. It was mostly about how great lovely middle-class people would be at mucking in after the entirety of civilisation collapses.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Dalek Invasion of Earth in Episode 3: Bernard Cribbins in Vinyl, released on Sunday 20 July 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sell you out for a few root vegetables and (hopefully) a bar or two of soap.

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.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be offering our lukewarm take on The Well.

Since we last met, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain has reached Episode 12, End of Eternity, in which an aggressively upper-middle-class Peter Bowles plays the Devil, who (understandably) offers the crew of Moonbase Alpha an eternity of conscious torment.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched the second last episode of the Xindi arc from Series 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise, Countdown.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane

We bring our first season to a close with the new beginning of Doctor Who’s most successful spinoff, in which a beloved TV heroine from our childhood was given one last chance (or twenty-seven last chances) to save the world.

Notes and links

Kelsey Hooper is played by fifteen-year-old Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, who had been in Stars in Their Eyes Kids at the age of nine. You can see her in action here.

Nathan mentions a couple of children’s TV shows which are formal influences on The Sarah Jane Adventures, including Chocky (1984) and Children of the Stones.

Adam alludes to a theory by friend-of-the-podcast Gary Russell, which he outlined in a tweet in 2022: the third bedroom was actually locked, bolted and then the door bricked over, making it airtight. Behind it was Kelsey. “I wonder whatever happened to her?” SJ would ask - and Luke and Maria would look at each other knowingly… and say nothing. It was “the pact”.

Wētā Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand, were the design studio for the gorgeous miniatures in Thunderbirds Are Go (2015) (among countless other things).

Flight Through Entirety did its first commentary on the first Doctor Who spinoff K9 and Company (Episode 76: K9 and Commentary), in which Todd first notes writer Terence Dudley’s relentless obsession with phones and doors.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Adam is @adamrichard. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 be weirdly cold to you for no reason the first time we meet in person.

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.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio; after that, we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday. In it, we talk about Steven Moffat’s return to the show in Boom. We’ll be doing weekly episodes until the end of Season 1 of the new era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 3 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 3, they conclude their Reach for the Stars triptych, with a Cathy Gale episode called The White Dwarf.

In news just to hand, Brendan and Bjay have just dropped another episode of The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they played Cat Quest, a cheerful and cartoony action RPG featuring an alarming number of cat-based puns.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched one of Nathan’s all-time favourites, a relaxed and genuinely funny episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Disaster.

Torchwood: Everything Changes

It’s 2006, which is just the time to launch a gritty and adult Doctor Who spinoff — Torchwood, a show with an immortal lead character which is basically about the finality of death. But has Torchwood learned anything from its parent show’s many, many launches and re-launches?

Notes and links

James compares Torchwood to the Virgin New Adventures, a series of original Doctor Who novels launched in 1991, after the cancellation in 1989 and once the full set of novelisations had been all but completed. Like Torchwood, the VNAs initially featured lots of sex and swearing, before settling down a bit and discovering that there were other ways of being adult.

Joseph Campbell was a writer and narratologist who codified the main features of what he called the Hero’s Journey, a narrative framework which is exemplified (he believed) in heroic myths across a range of cultures. He’s a big source of inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars films.

One we missed: India Varma played Tala Durith in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), blowing herself up (inevitably) in her third episode. (Spoilers, sorry.)

Cucumber was a 2015 drama by Russell T Davies about a gay man in his forties who discovers, after the breakup of his long-term relationship, what gay life is like for young people in their twenties. Its sixth episode focuses on the brutal murder of one of the main characters.

Flight Through Entirety hasn’t covered any Torchwood at all, but for a fresh take on this episode, take a look at this review by friend-of-the-podcast Michael O Sullivan. His blog, Angst and Death and Random Shoes, will be covering as much of the show as he can tolerate watching.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood and Todd is @toddbeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 break into your house and use your flatbed scanner to create PDF copies of the complete works of Herman Melville.

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.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The latest episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire is probably out by now, or if you’re a particularly keen 500 Year Diary listener, it will be out in just a couple of hours. In it, we talk about the two new episodes released on 11 May — Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be covering the whole of the new series, releasing an episode a couple of days after each new Doctor Who episode comes out. Like and subscribe.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we marvelled at the superb Roxann Dawson, as B’Elanna went for another round of overwrought self-examination in Voyager’s Barge of the Dead.

The Christmas Invasion

Just nine months after Doctor Who’s twenty-first century iteration burst triumphantly onto our screens, we all get together with Steven B to watch as the BBC’s flagship drama introduces its exciting new lead to nearly 10 million viewers on Christmas Day on BBC One. It ends up going pretty well.

Notes and links

We were all more or less certain that David Tennant would get the Doctor Who gig on the strength of his charismatic performance in Russell T Davies’s Casanova (2005). It’s worth a look — it definitely feels like an audition piece for Doctor Who.

Christopher Eccleston’s audition piece for Doctor Who was probably not his performance as cat theatre proprietor Dougal Siepp, which you can get a sense of here (if you can tolerate a terrible racial stereotype played by Steve Pemberton). In fact, Eccleston’s real audition piece is role as Steve Baxter in RTD’s The Second Coming (2003), where he plays a 40-year-old man working in a video shop who discovers that he is (really) the Second Coming of Christ.

Here’s the Dead Ringers sketch Christmas at Doctor Who’s (2005).

If you’re not sure what we mean by the Doctor Who theme’s “middle eight”, here’s the description from the TARDIS Fandom site. And here’s what it sounds like in Murray’s first version of the Doctor Who theme.

On 2 May 1982, during the Falklands War, the Argentinian cruiser ARA General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine outside a declared exclusion zone and while Peru was trying to negotiate peace between the two sides. 323 people died.

Flight Through Entirety’s commentary on The Christmas Invasion was Episode 147: The Commentary Invasion, released on Monday 24 December 2018.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Steven B is @steedstylin, and Brendan is @brandybongos. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 sneak into your house and leave fruit in your bed.

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.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over a week, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We just released Episode 5, in which you can hear us talking about the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we cheered on Star Trek: The Next Generation as it took its first confident steps into its imperial phase, with The Survivors.

Terror of the Autons

It feels like only a year ago that Doctor Who underwent a strange and cataclysmic soft reboot, and it looks like it’s happening again this week. Or is it?

Notes and links

Paul Cornell’s negative review of Terror of the Autons was originally published in DWB Issue 112, way back in April 1993. Here it is republished in the old Usenet forum rec.arts.drwho (or at least the version of it to be found on Google Groups right now).

Jeremy Bentham (yes, a relation) was the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society back in the 70s. To us, he was more famous for contributing a section to Peter Haining’s 1983 coffee-table book Doctor Who: A Celebration, a section which briefly covered every Doctor Who story up to the final story of Season 20, The King’s Demons. We mentioned it last week; it wasn’t just a source of information about the history of the show, but a massive influence on received fan wisdom for years afterwards.

There exists a three-minute training video from 1972 in which Doctor Who producer Barry Letts talks about how CSO works. It can be found on the Carnival of Monsters DVD release and on the more recent Doctor Who: The Collection Season 10 blu-ray box set.

According to this story’s TARDIS Fandom page, stuntman Terry Walsh was actually hit by one of the cars during the scene in the quarry, but he just got up and continued with the scene, so it made it into the finished episode. Barry Letts’s recollection is somewhat different, however.

And inevitably, we end up talking about the eccentric way the Pertwee Era was shown in Australia in the late 1970s, so you might want to jog your memory by re-reading the shownotes for last week.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Terror of the Autons in Episode 23: Increasingly Baroque and Stupid, released on Sunday 15 February 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 put on big plastic masks and leap out at you from behind a fixture the next time you’re test-driving couches at IKEA.

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.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over two weeks, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week, Brendan and his friend Bjay returned to the mic for another episode of their gaming podcast, The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they enjoyed There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, a surreal and metatextual point-and-click adventure with a surprising amount of heart.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We should have Episode 5 to you in about a week, so you can prepare by watching the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we cheered ourselves up by watching a scary episode of Strange New Worlds called All Those Who Wander.

Spearhead from Space

In the first week of the 1970s, Doctor Who is back, with a new Doctor, a new alien threat, new companions and a new earthbound premise. So what makes it the same show?

Notes and links

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is well known for regularly going into a coma to heal himself. He does that in this story, in The Dæmons, in Planet of the Daleks, in The Monster of Peladon and in Planet of the Spiders. (I’ve probably left some out.) This phenomenon is so well known that is has a name — the Pertwee death pose — characterised by Pertwee lying flat on his back with one knee bent. Flight Through Entirety named its Jon Pertwee retrospective after this — Episode 31: One Knee up for Pertwee.

When Peter and Simon refer to “625-line Pertwees”, what they mean is the episodes that still existed in their original PAL format, as opposed to episodes that only existed as film transfers. The 625-line Pertwees were the only episodes repeated by ABC-TV in Australia in the late 70s, which meant, roughly speaking, that we would go from Spearhead from Space straight to Day of the Daleks, and then to Seasons 10 and 11, skipping Planet of the Daleks and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, each of which had one episode that only existed as a film transfer. You can find an account of the history of Doctor Who repeats in Australia on this page from BroaDWcast, and you can find details of the state of our collection of colour Pertwee episodes on this page from The Destruction of Time.

Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the Season 8 story Colony in Space was called Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974). Colony in Space was Jo Grant’s fourth story on TV, but the novelisation describes her arrival at UNIT and her boredom in the job until she is whisked away by the Doctor to an alien planet. It’s not until the following year that we get the novelisation of Jo’s actual first story in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

The sting is the screaming sound that leads into the music of the closing credits of the Classic Series, starting with The Ambassadors of Death, two stories after this. (It can now be heard at the beginning of the opening credits as well.)

Startling Barbara Bain is our commentary podcast on Space: 1999, a lavishly expensive British TV show from the mid-70s shot entirely on 35mm film, with lots of visual effects done in-camera (including the famous model sequences).

ADR is part of the post-production process: actors are brought into a recording studio to record dialogue for scenes that have already been shot.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Spearhead from Space in Episode 21: They’ve Cancelled My Show, released on Sunday 18 January 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we will bring this dirty old box into your clean house.

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.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 2 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 2, they continue their Reach for the Stars theme, with a Tara King episode called Invasion of the Earthmen.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched what Nathan believes to be the worst ever episode of Star Trek: Voyager — Course: Oblivion. You won’t believe how shrill his ranting gets.

The Power of the Daleks

A big week for beginnings this week, with a new Doctor, a new origin story for the Daleks, and a whole new approach to defeating the bad guys. Oh, and a new podcast to discuss them all on. So let’s welcome Patrick Troughton to the studio floor, as we discuss The Power of the Daleks.

Notes and links

The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.

Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at times.

The Omnirumour was a series of rumours arising during 2013 that as many as 90 missing Doctor Who episodes had been found and were ready for return to the BBC Archives, possibly as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This didn’t happen, obviously, but we did at least get nine episodes: five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of The Web of Fear.

Let’s continue the tradition: here is Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on this story, which (inevitably) discusses the importance of mercury to the new Doctor’s character.

Nathan and Brendan refer to Kieran Hodgson’s Bad Doctor Who Impressions version of The Daleks, which is something you should go and watch immediately.

James very thoughtfully plugs Brendan and Richard’s new podcast about The Avengers, called The Three-Handed Game, in which they are joined by old friend of the podcast Steven B to discuss episodes from different eras in the history of the show.

At the end of the episode, Simon recounts the story of the gradual revelation of The Power of the Daleks throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. Among the things he mentions are Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (also 1983), The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2nd edition, 1976), an edition of DreamWatch Bulletin (possibly issue 121 in December 1993) announcing the upcoming publication of the telesnaps in Doctor Who Magazine, and the discovery of some clips from this story in an Australian TV Show called Perspective: C for Computer.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Power of the Daleks in Episode 11: Bum Wetting, released on Saturday 18 October 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 write next week’s shownotes in a completely incomprehensible acrostic code.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back a couple of days after the screening of the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Ncuti Gatwa Era on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we said farewell to Star Trek: Enterprise by watching that universally acknowledged Star Trek war crime, These Are the Voyages….