Saturday 19 April 1969

The War Games

Boys’ Own Cliffhangers

The Colour of Monsters, Episode 1
Sunday 23 November 2025

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.

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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.