Saturday 28 December 1974

Robot

Masterclass

The Colour of Monsters, Episode 2
Sunday 30 November 2025

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.