The Rise and Rise of Steven Moffat: Exhibit #1

The Empty Child	The Big Bang	The Bells of Saint John	Heaven Sent
The Doctor Dances	A Christmas Carol	The Name of the Doctor	Hell Bent
The Girl in the Fireplace	The Impossible Astronaut	The Day of the Doctor	The Husbands of River Song
Blink	Day of the Moon	The Time of the Doctor	The Return of Doctor Mysterio
Silence in the Library	A Good Man Goes to War	Deep Breath	The Pilot
Forest of the Dead	Let’s Kill Hitler	Listen	Extremis
The Eleventh Hour	The Wedding of River Song	Dark Water	World Enough and Time
The Beast Below	The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe	Death in Heaven	The Doctor Falls
The Time of Angels	Asylum of the Daleks	Last Christmas	Twice Upon a Time
Flesh and Stone	The Angels Take Manhattan	The Magician’s Apprentice
The Pandorica Opens	The Snowmen	The Witch’s Familiar

Steven Moffat has generated a vast amount of Doctor Who output. The list above details the episodes for which he receives a sole credit. There are also episodes such as Into the Dalek, Time Heist, The Caretaker, The Girl Who Died, The Zygon Inversion and The Pyramid at the End of the World for which he receives a co-writing credit. It’s also hardly a state secret that he rewrote fan-favourites Vincent and the Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife – virtually page one rewrites, uncredited. This is a man who has written more Doctor Who than Robert Holmes and arguably, perhaps contentiously, far less bilge. (All of these scripts are leagues in advance of Pyramids of Mars. I LOVE Pyramids of Mars but it doesn’t stop it being very badly plotted and Part Four is a right old mess.) Is it any wonder though that, given the longevity of his tenure, that Steven Moffat, once the fans’ golden boy who gave us The Empty Child would be viewed by those self-same fans as That Man What Wrecked Our Doctor Who. 

Of the above list, I can spot only three episodes I dislike. Two of those I dislike for directorial reasons. One I dislike because of the writing. Even when Moffat is at his wits’ end (during the well-documented turbulence that was Series 7B) he hits the mark with The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor, before knocking it out of the ballpark with The Day of the Doctor a few months later and majestically putting the cherry on top of all that icing with The Time of the Doctor.

Let’s take a look at The Moffat Era - as it were - and try to catalogue its creatively tumultuous journey to gain a better insight into quite why a section of fandom turned on the man and quite why I am still deeply in love with this stupendously clever writer.

Chapter One – The RTD Years

When the list of writers for Series 1 was announced in Doctor Who Magazine, I remember being thrilled by the choices of Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell and Robert Shearman. I’d adored their Big Finish output and long heard older fans wax lyrical about the quality of their books. The only name I failed to recognise was that of the curly-haired, crab-eyed Steven Moffat (pictured). What the hell did he have to do with our programme? And, wait, what, he had two episodes! The others had one apiece and this geezer gets two?! I read the article to discover he’d written the – admittedly achingly funny – skit for Comic Relief and begrudgingly accepted that he’d most probably be as good as the others. I mean, Russell T Davies had made the call and from everything I knew and was discovering about him, he seemed pretty decent.

Along came the series. RTD was a bit more than pretty decent. Mark Gatiss and Robert Shearman were Good But Not As Good As They Were At Big Finish. Paul Cornell was amazing – fresh, breezy, heartrending. Steven Moffat, though, Jesus… He could make CLASSIC Doctor Who. Old School Classic Series, complete with darkness, body-horror, running, all the things we thought “Good Doctor Who” was (but had never really managed before). And he also delivered the happiest ending of all time. The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were and are totemic examples of our programme. They are traditional yet far better than anything we’d ever had before. They sing. They inspire. If there were any man we wanted writing Doctor Who again, it was Steven Moffat.

And yet… If you read the introduction to The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances in the shooting script book, Moffat admits that there was once a time travel plot involving the German bomb and a time loop inside which Captain Jack could trap the thing. It was RTD who told him wisely to simplify the script, tone it down and deliver something less like a head-f**k. In helping streamline the script, RTD must take some credit for its success.

The Girl in the Fireplace felt a little less spectacular. We were expecting another Empty Child. We got a time travel love story instead. Yes, there were scares too: the monsters hiding under the bed is typical of Moffat’s childhood chills approach to the programme. But the majority of this episode is a beautifully woven tale of heartbreak. It's aged very well and on its own merits, can be counted as something unusual, strange and very, very special.

Blink came next. Or should that be What I Did on My Summer Holidays By Sally Sparrow. Yes, Moffat had already written this story a few years before in the Doctor Who Annual, even down to the video messages and the writing on the wallpaper. He then shamelessly recycled it here! What thrilled us here though were the insanely good monsters: the weeping angels quite rightly became a series icon and provided scares aplenty from here on in.

Finally, Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead proved to be Moffat’s most complicated scripting job yet. Again, the scripts formed a time travel love story with a scary monster thrown in for good measure. But this was a new kind of complexity for the show. The first scene we see is the little girl’s dream wherein she meets the Doctor and Donna. Next, we see the Doctor and Donna arrive in the library and meet what we know to be the little girl. Scenes are told from different perspectives thusly, the Doctor and River’s story back to front and Donna’s story is chopped up in the editing room, the bizarre jump-cuts becoming a part of the narrative itself. Later, Moffat would employ similar techniques to wrong-foot the viewers (see his out-of-order/different perspective scenes in The Big Bang). Silence in the Library was a story that didn’t tickle the fan muscles quite so much as something as traditional as The Empty Child but up to that point, it was perhaps the most layered, complicated and ambitious of Doctor Who stories. Even at the time, there were a select few bemoaning the fact that the story was perhaps too complicated for “the casual viewer.”

And then, gloriously, he was the head writer, the chief exec, the man in charge.

So what did we expect? Looking back on his stories, we longed for the show to go in the dark direction of The Empty Child and those early scenes in The Girl in the Fireplace. We longed for monsters as iconoclastic as the weeping angels. We saw Steven Moffat as the perfect man to take over our show.

Perhaps what we didn’t consider – that those who now complain about Moffat’s tenure should have considered – is that those four tales represent everything that he has done since. There are three time travel love stories (Reinette and the Doctor, River and the Doctor, Sally and Larry). Get that: in two of only four stories, the Doctor is in love! There are over-complications: Series 6 anyone? There are recycled ideas: under the bed, nursery rhymes, don’t blink, breathe or think. Moffat would go on to tell the biggest time travel love story of all time in extending River’s epic journey over the next five years. It was all there. Even the library tale is a re-telling of a Virgin short story. Moffat now openly admits he’s used every idea he ever had at least twice. So in all seriousness, the signs of what was to come were laid out for us all to see. And like most Steven Moffat scripts, what disappointed us most of all in the future, was that he didn’t do quite what we expected him. 

He did something arguably far, far better.

To Be Continued…

JH

Torchwood: Believe

What is it with Torchwood? It’s the spin-off that just won’t die. After two niche stylistically and tonally awkward seasons on BBC3 and then 2 respectively, we had a blistering 5-part season “stripped” across weeknights on BBC One, followed by a fairly silly, often tedious 10-part American epic. The iterations of the programme on TV were massively inconsistent, even across seasons. Episode lengths varied, we had 1,2,5 and 10 parters. This was a programme that was never quite comfortable with what it wanted to be. It could only be identified by its very Welsh bent, Eve Myles and John Barrowman beautifully overacting, immature adult content and a fairly loose grip on reality.

Big Finish have adopted a similarly sporadic approach to their Torchwood tales: there are monthly one parters, two handers, 12-part full-cast epics, 3-part pre-Torchwood boxsets, an anniversary special set thousands of years in the future, and two 3-part full-cast “stripped” stories. The only difference between the adventures produced by the BBC and those produced by Big Finish are that, by and large, the Big Finish stories are absolutely phenomenal. Apart from perhaps, Children of Earth, the Big Finish output eclipses its mother-programme in terms of immature adult content, vivid imagination and ambitious horizons. Also, you almost don’t notice John Barrowman and Eve Myles doing their beautiful over-acting thing. Almost don’t notice.

Believe is a 3-part full-cast drama with a difference: all the original cast are back. Well, actually, that’s how it’s been marketed but the group don’t actually spend a large amount of time together and the actors were clearly scheduled around each other. It must have been a nightmare: The Five Doctors of the Torchwood world. Having said that, it is a bit of a giddy thrill to have them all back together and the early scenes in the hub really feel like stepping back in time.

Surprisingly though, the story doesn’t really feel much like one from 2006/7. For a start, it’s a 3-parter and it’s also far less melodramatic, on-the-nose and rough-around-the-edges than early Torchwood. It’s as if the original Torchwood viewers have grown up, become writers and written new episodes as their younger minds imagined it used to be. Guy Adams’s scripts are excellent. The threat here is one posed by the human race and feels far more dangerous and insidious than any alien threat, especially given that the aggressors target the weak and the lonely. This is Torchwood at perhaps its most mature.

Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori stand out specifically amongst the cast and are given the best scenes. There is a bitterness between Owen and Tosh, given the genuinely uncomfortable events of Episode One, which culminates in a terrifically – and characteristically – clumsy conversation in the final instalment which is completely riveting. This is as real and vivid and painful as their relationship has ever been. There’s a star turn from Arthur Darvill here too which is definitely worthy of note, playing against type and leaving a stark and loathsome impression.

Episode Two focuses on Ianto and again, he is given some terrifically uncomfortable scenes. We fear that he is not a million miles away from the victims of the church with whom he is trying to infiltrate and so there is a more tangible sense of threat posed towards him than perhaps our other leads. 

The final episode ends quietly, in a series of stages, which is indicative of the way Guy Adams goes not for spectacle but for heart in the telling of Believe. It doesn’t need to flex its muscles as much as other Torchwood episodes (and feels comparatively straight judged alongside them) because Believe’s greatest strength is its confidence: it knows it doesn’t have to be showy to be tremendous. For once, this Torchwood episode could happily call itself brilliantly subtle. All told, Believe is a triumph.

9/10

JH

Big Finish: The David Tennant Boxsets

It goes without saying that David Tennant’s return to Big Finish as the Doctor is an absolute triumph, not just for the company but for Doctor Who in general. The fact that one of the busiest and most beloved actors in the country still wants to be a part of our little show is very special and a testament to all that is wonderful and kind and magical about the programme.

Big Finish have deployed some of their finest writers to script these six (so far) tales and some of the strongest actors in what could be called their little repertory: John Banks, Beth Chalmers, Terry Molloy and Dan Starkey, as well as some famous names from British TV, film and stage: Nikolas Grace, Rachael Stirling, Niky Wardley and Sean Biggerstaff. 

So why aren’t the stories working for me?

Before I continue, it feels extremely churlish to criticise a series of plays made with such obvious love for the period, made with such effort to get those character voices right and made with the clear intent of making those actors (or should I say stars?) and the audience feel as if they are right back there in 2006/8. There is no doubt in my mind that absolutely everyone involved in the production of these plays completely loves the era and is doing their damnedest to make these audio dramas as successful as they can possibly be.

The truth is, and there’s no easy way of saying this, they just feel like the other Big Finish plays. That is not to say that they are poor stories. Far from it: quite miraculously given the size of it, the vast majority of Big Finish’s output is absolutely fantastic. In fact, there were periods when I looked forward to the Big Finish monthly CD more excitedly than the next TV episode. So the production values are as strong as ever, the scripts as tight as ever and the performances as high-octane and inspirational as ever. But these Tennant sets aren’t doing anything differently and they’re missing some vital touches to truly epitomise the era from which they are born.

Firstly, from a purely technical and perhaps superficial point of view, Murray Gold’s music is missing. It seems like a tiny thing, but Gold’s scores were at the very core of what made the Tennant years so great. The huge, theatrical, operatic sweeping sounds dragged the viewers through those tales and the themes resonated long after the episodes had finished. Try as he might, Howard Carter simply cannot hope to emulate such majesty. On occasion he gets close: the opening ten minutes of Sword of the Chevalier feel rip-roaring in the best possible way. (Coincidentally, they’re also ten minutes of the best Doctor/Rose written interplay on offer from the company. Perhaps Carter takes his cues from the scripts?) For the most part, though, the scores are generic and despite being able to listen in isolation at the end of each story’s disc, nothing sticks in the memory. This music, in any other Big Finish play, would be perfectly acceptable – terrific even – but here it’s in competition with Murray and sadly, it lags behind.

Secondly, there’s a problem of nuance. The bold, story-as-headline approach which characterised the Russell T Davies years is not quite so much in evidence here. On TV we had AGATHA CHRISTIE; DALEKS IN MANHATTAN; UP POMPEII!; WEREWOLF AND QUEEN VICTORIA; THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND SHAKESPEARE! Here, we have SOME ELECTRONICS DO THINGS; AN ALMOST BUT NOT QUITE INVASION OF NORWICH; A SPACE GARAGE and DONNA IN A WEIRD, MEDIEVAL WORLD. The headlines don’t quite meet the boldness of their TV counterparts. The closest is THE ICE WARRIORS IN THE FREEZER and THE THREE-FACED MAN AND THE CHEVALIER. They come with caveats though: The Chevalier is hardly a well-known, popular historical figure. One might argue that nor was Madame De Pompadour but The Girl in the Fireplace was also the story of THE CLOCKWORK MEN. Cold Vengeance is, to my mind, the closest the audios get to feeling truly like the Tennant years: there’s a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point pre-titles sequence, a monster to match the setting and a bin-lady who discovers herself in time to save the world. But even then, that’s about it: the story is essentially a run-around in a freezer, with a messily-shaped narrative ending with the Ice Lord in the TARDIS, the sort of ending only Boom Town in all its wonderful weirdness was able to deploy (and even that was set-up or the finale). The Doctor and Rose are not really given an awful lot to do either. In Cold Vengeance, Rose tells the bin-lady how unique and special she is, just as she told Beth in Infamy of the Zaross how unique and special she was only two stories earlier - and they are the stand-out moments of the entire set for Billie Piper. I can’t actually bring to mind a stand-out moment for David Tennant (aside from perhaps his entrance in Death and the Queen) and Russell T Davies always played him centre forward. Basically, these sets could just as easily be an entry in a Classic Monsters, New Doctors range insomuch as it feels like a Big Finish amalgam rather than New Series in terms of its plot, form and characterisation.

Perhaps the stories are too long. There is maybe too much plot given the hour’s longevity for the tales to feel as taut and focussed as the New Series 45-minuters. I can imagine a much stronger version of Cold Vengeance without the hiding in a bin bit and a simpler approach to the planetary war. I can imagine a Sword of the Chevalier without the travel sequence from countryside to town. The zippiness of the TV series is lost on audio, the scenes and plays themselves being generally 25% longer. It almost feels like I’m watching a what-could-have-been-less-successful version of the TV show. It’s like Charlie Higson’s Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – all the pieces for a terrific series were there but they just weren’t quite bold or direct enough with a section that’s “a bit boring in the middle.”

In short, whilst these writers have produced works of incredible skill and made a tremendous impression at Big Finish, here they’re in direct competition with Russell T Davies and they just aren’t him. Infamy of the Zaross - a title I can never imagine RTD going with by the way (see also Time Reaver) – is essentially a neater version of John Dorney’s own The Fourth Wall. But The Fourth Wall was a four-part Colin Baker story and better. (Just as Jubilee, the four-part Colin Baker Dalek story was so much better than the TV series’s Dalek.) It’s not enough to graft a Big Finish plot onto the RTD format. What Big Finish really need to do is play out of their comfort zone and go for broke. Be bolder about the decisions they make. These are great writers who can be pushed even further. Let them, and the stories and indeed David Tennant, fly a little higher. Give us bolder headlines: QUEEN NEFERTITI AND THE MUMMY’S TOMB; HENRY VIII AND THE ROBOT PRIEST; THE HIDDEN RELICS OF THE JUNGLE TEMPLE – STARRING RIVER SONG. You get the idea.

If a listener is new to Big Finish – and I’m delighted to say I introduced a friend to the company just last month and he’s since bought eight plays! They do exist! – then I’m certain these Tennant stories would prove just the ticket. Big Finish’s ability to capture an atmosphere and the quality of the performances alone are breathtakingly good. They don’t even compare to BBC Radio plays. They’re immersive, like movies without pictures. But they’ve been like that since the beginning. It’s what us long term devotees have come to expect. From a New Series boxset, I’d like to see the game upped even further. I want to see the Doctor and Rose jump straight into another bold adventure and finish a CD without realising I’ve been holding my breath.

I don't want to end on a lacklustre note. There is, of course, plenty to enjoy in these CDs. There has to be with such a stellar team of writers and actors. But hopefully, next time David Tennant is free, Big Finish can do something a little bit scarier, a little bit edgier, a little bit more fun and just that little bit bigger. With RTD to contend with, one can only be bold.

JH

Learning to Love: Planet of the Daleks

Everywhere I look – published reviews, online reviews, forums, polls - Planet of the Daleks seems to be greeted with a trifling shrug of the shoulders. I hear “It’s Terry Nation’s Greatest Hits” or “It looks cheap.” There are two things wrong with those statements: When did Terry Nation’s Greatest Hits become a bad thing? If it were, you might have chosen the wrong programme to hero-worship. And when did we start judging a Doctor Who story by how cheap it looks? Surely, that’s an instant write-off for the whole of the first 26 years and quite a bit of the Eccleston/Tennant eras these days too.

I watched Planet of the Daleks when I was 11. It was repeated weekly with those funny, little 5-minute documentaries beforehand. And it was bloody wonderful. It would be easy to say that I view the story with rose-tinted fan goggles but actually I am really quite good at disassociating myself from those initial reactions and seeing a story for what it really is. (Hello, Silver Nemesis, old friend.) Planet of the Daleks remains, to my eyes, bloody wonderful and as fans of Doctor Who and the Daleks we should all learn to love it. Here’s why:

Katy Manning IS Doctor Who! Episode One is Jo Grant’s story. In an unusual stylistic move, Jo Grant narrates the story to the viewer as she experiences it. Pertwee’s having a rest in the TARDIS cos he’s feeling a bit polystyrene. Most of Episode One works without dialogue. In that sense, it’s a traditional Terry Nation 6-pages-stretched-out-to-25-minutes but it’s gripping. Here, we really see Jo come into her own. She’s far removed from the ham-fisted bun vendor of Terror of the Autons a few years before. It also climaxes with the wonderfully camp idea that the Doctor forgot he was chasing Daleks and didn’t know he was in a story called Planet of the Daleks (and neither did we) and so ends the episode with a completely surprised and emphatically spat out cry of “Daleks!”

Episode Two is even better. The Doctor genuinely thinks Jo is dead and is quietly heartbroken, Pertwee’s performance becoming more understated. “They murdered her,” he tells Latep, bereft. It’s a subtle change, not brilliantly forecast by the script but Pertwee absolutely sells it. His pathetic screams as the Daleks gun down the Thal ship a few minutes earlier are genuinely horrifying. When the rescue craft arrives at the end of the instalment, Rebec’s revelation is so stunning in its specificity as to be utterly believable: 10,000 Daleks?! In accordance with His Elegance the Lord Pertwee, His Highness Bernard Horsfall goes for the subdued cliff-hanger acting approach and it pays off. 

The story continues apace. The action sequences are terrific. The climb up the shaft which ends Episode Three so excitingly and fuels the narrative for the first part of Episode Four looks splendid on film and stands out as one of the story’s most successful set-pieces. I love how Pertwee drops a few rungs down the spine of the shaft before grabbing hold, his driving-gloved hands those of an action man in his prime. It really is thrilling stuff. In fact, the end of Episode Three is a masterclass in the art of the cliff-hanger, scenes built upon sequentially and ending in as edge-of-your-seat fashion as can be imagined.

By Episode Six, Planet of the Daleks is delivering even more giddy thrills – an enormous golden Dalek to better the later Victory design; a cool spaceship that easily betters the one seen the following year in Death. At this stage, we can look back at the accumulation of thrills Terry Nation has presented us with and look on agog: ice volcanoes, space plagues, lift shafts, bombs, jungle nightlife, debilitating fungus, an underground army of Daleks, Rebec hiding inside a Dalek (never gets old), invisible Daleks, purple Spiridon cloaks, those weird laundry baskets with cargo nets over the top, Jo Grant’s blinggy fingers. Seriously, the fun never ends. 

The story does have its faults, admittedly. The Golden Boss Dalek’s lights don’t chime with its dialogue, Prentis Hancock is in it and there are so many Louis Marx Daleks as to be a little bit bloody obvious. The mix of videotape jungle to outdoor quarry is jarring but the jungle set Peter Grimwade would have died for on Kinda. There is enough exciting incident and character interplay for Planet of the Daleks to tear across the screen. It’s colourful, it’s broad, it’s comic book Doctor Who - but sometimes, that’s just how I want my Doctor Who to be. Planet of the Daleks rocks.

JH

Things That Make You Go "Ow."

Growing up in the 90s, it’s fair to say that being a Doctor Who fan was something of an embarrassing stigma. It was looked upon as old, cheap and more than a bit rubbish. We knew, of course, that it wasn’t. We knew how majestic and wonderful the very idea of the programme was and we knew how expansive was its imaginative reach. However, if we looked a little more truthfully at the show, without those fan goggles on (which tend to paper over the flimsy, gaudy visuals and critique plot points nobody in their right mind would worry about) we would perhaps, just perhaps realise that there were moments of our favourite show which didn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all.

I foolishly watched The Trial of a Time Lord with 4 university mates all in one night in 2004. At the end of the marathon, one mate said, “It was unwieldy, it was convoluted, it didn’t hang together at all.” Not once did he mention that Trial looked cheap, rather that it was just completely rubbish. After so many hours of the thing, I reluctantly had to agree. The other mates were too busy poking needles in their eyes to make comment. 

And yet, I can re-watch and re-watch Trial and find some good in it every single time. I love the music, I love Bob Holmes’s dialogue – far richer in Mysterious Planet than anybody gives it credit for. I love Mindwarp. I love the Part 12 cliff-hanger which throws the story on its head. I love the Master’s casual dropping in of the Valeyard’s real name. I love it. And yet, I can still see what a misguided thing it was to do to invite my mates to watch it. Because at its core, hand-on-heart, The Trial of a Time Lord is dreadful. There’s Colin Baker throwing witless insults at the Valeyard that an average four-year old could trump. (“Stackyard?”) There’s Brian Blessed and Nicola Bryant in super slo-mo inside a big, girly pink heart. There’s Pip and Jane Baker’s dialogue. There’s Joan Simms. “Forward I say!”

Moments of similarly toe-curling embarrassment abound in all of Doctor Who. Much has been written about Ingrid Pitt’s karate Myrka action, McCoy’s cliff-hanging icy umbrella antics, Sutekh’s special bottom feeler, the guy who plays Cotton in The Mutants and the entirety of Timelash. So I won’t bore you by making fun of a 30 year old science-fiction thriller made with minimal money in the same way as a soap opera. Instead, I’ll look at the post 2005 series – the BBC’s flagship programme made with a much larger budget, better resources, and the luxury of multiple takes – and see where this modern iteration of our beloved Doctor has stumbled and fallen. Which moments here already make us cringe? Which will be the moments in the future looked back upon as infamously as Ingrid Pitt’s karate Myrka action? Which moments will we and hang our heads in shame in reminiscence of, whilst all the while still loving the bones of our show?

When I think of embarrassing New Series moments, I am instantly reminded of Freema Agyeman’s delivery of her line at the start of The Sontaran Stratagem: “Doctor, it’s Martha and I’m bringing you back to Earth.” From a purely textual level, it’s a bit of a disaster. Who on Earth indeed would open a telephone conversation that way? The Doc’s been off travelling with Donna, Martha’s risen up the UNIT ranks: lots of time has passed. So how might two friends reconnect? What might the first thing they say be? Surely something more like, “Doctor, it’s Martha. How are you are getting on? … Yeah, I’m great thanks, working for UNIT actually, which sort of brings me to what I was ringing about. Can you do us a favour?” What we actually get is a ham-fisted slap-you-round-the-face-with-nothing line which rams home the idea that the Doctor is not spending this episode on a more interesting planet. Well, whoop-de-do. The fact that it’s positioned immediately before the titles is disappointing, as we’d just enjoyed a stellar sequence with a satnav and a death which would have made for far more of a jeopardy-fuelled hook into the episode. Lastly though, and perhaps worst of all, is Freema Agyeman’s delivery. “I’m bringing you back to Earth.” She stresses bringing?! Why would any actor stress bringing? What is it about bringing in the sentence that needs it marking out as important? “I’m bringing you back to Earth!” she positively exclaims. If there is a stronger example of a bad line being made even worse by a lead performance in the New Series, show me! The true gut-punch is that it was used in the Next Time Trailer in Planet of the Ood, and the Previously On Doctor Who at the beginning of The Poison Sky. So if you’re ever marathoning a series, you have to endure it three bloody times.

CGI had undergone a sea-change since 1989 when Doctor Who returned. It was a culture shock to see our nuts-and-bolts, do-it-yourself, sticky-back-plastic show affected by so much CGI. Platform One was particularly beautiful and strange. Satellite 5 was equally spectacular. And Daleks flying across space to attack it was a visual dream come true. But, it has to be said, lots of the CGI in Series One, even at the time, made us wince. My brother recently asked me if a particular piece of CGI was more or less impressive than “that shit wheelie bin in Rose.” He has a definite point. There are moments where the interaction between CGI and live action just doesn’t convince. Chief culprit, of course, is the Slitheen. Their CG running looks woeful, each Slitheen identical and moving far more smoothly than those cumbersome rubber costumes we have to endure the rest of the time. In fact, those chase sequences around Downing Street are so flatly directed it beggars belief. We never, never believe that the costumes match the CGI: they both look cheap and nasty. Elsewhere in the series, we’ve got the cartoony phial of anti-plastic (bad idea?) smashing as it hits the Nestene: it is as if suddenly, we’re in a Pixar movie. And then there’s that cork flying into plastic Mickey’s head…

The following year sees similar CG tragedies: David Tennant’s head is clumsily copied and pasted onto a man who can actually ride a horse through a mirror in The Girl in the Fireplace. But even this looks more convincing than the wig the same guy wears a few shots later. It has always irritated me how the spectacular sequence of the Cyber Controller climbing the zeppelin rope ends with him not being burnt up in the explosion below but vanishing with a little whooshy puff-of-smoke kind of noise. New Earth’s identical green pods for the walking dead look nothing like the respective location. And I wish that shot of the Daleks emerging at the end of Army of Ghosts looked at least a little bit genuine. 

CGI aside though, other embarrassments can be found in guest performers. Forget Cotton from The Mutants; I raise you the cast of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The brothers here are grim indeed. Mark Oliver as Bram Van Baalen is truly dreadful. He’s not even endearingly dreadful like Christian Cook as Ross in the already-mentioned Sontaran Stratagem. (How is this Sontaran caper so thoroughly enjoyable?) Cook’s delivery of the line “I timed that perfectly,” comes shortly after a joke he has completely failed to deliver at all. Even David Tennant – probably the nicest bloke in showbiz - looks like he’s acting with a mentally retarded fan who’s a bit too eager to please but they’re stuck in a car together and it’s all getting a bit awkward. Mark Oliver though… Jesus. His what-he-thinks-of-as Brando-style cool mumbling belies the fact that all the wrong words are stressed in every single line. He hasn’t a clue what he’s saying. When he dies early, it’s too soon. His brothers are almost as bad. I don’t understand how a story with only three people in its guest cast manages to employ such appallingly poor talent.

There are many examples of inexperienced actors on New Who: even Finlay Robertson as Larry in the otherwise brilliant Blink gives us his awfully staccato reading of “He tricked them. The Doctor tricked them. They’re never gonna move again.” He delivers it like a chid reading from a book for the first time. But then there’s the other fruitier problem: the very, very strong actor who has decided that today is a mess-about end-of-term going-over-the-top-for-the-lads sort of day. I’m looking at you Roger Lloyd Pack. He’s got three successive lines in that first manic scene of Rise of the Cybermen – all start with and. 

And they will refuse me?

And if I don’t?

And how will you do that from beyond the grave?

Lloyd Pack manages to make them sound even clunkier than they already are. He makes questions sound like statements. And gives every line equal weight with that insane vocal choice he’s adopted. Later he also gives us more terrific ands: Monitoring Jackie, he gifts us with, “And… restore!” That’s a personal favourite. Best perhaps is his cackling at the president after his “crashing the party” gag.

Elsewhere in New Who, we find Steven Berkoff, famously hard work on set, ruining the story’s ending for the greater good. We have a delightful scene of the clearly mental and alone Berkoff refusing to look at other actors, laughing under his breath and making no sense of his lines: “The TALLY must be met,” he intones, like a priest who’s forgotten what the words are about. Then there are those Dance BTech hand movements: he is rocking those fingernails, sister.

Mark Costigan as Max Capricorn is an equally treasurable scream. Thrill as he dicks about behind every other actor’s back. Tennant is figuring out the plot whilst Costigan shakes his head, bottom lip quivering. He’s a major gurn. He even manages to detract from The Death of Kylie with his big, open mouth. For those who abhor Voyage of the Damned (nutcases all) tune in for Prime Costigan at the end.

Frankly though, although there is much fun to be had with New-Who, the advancements in technology since the 60s, 70s and 80s mean that fluffs, errors and gaffs are not nearly as pronounced. Just as the 80s show really is incomparable to the as-live 60s episodes. The quality of the series is demonstrably better today. I sometimes ache for the times when a Roger Lloyd Pack barnstormer of a performance could sneak in under the radar. Michelle Gomez is the nearest the Capaldi era has come to the more free-wheeling performance. I wish he’d had a few more big bad villains to face off against.  As we move on into the Chibnall and Whittaker era, I hope that whilst visually what we get is going to be stunning, we can also enjoy one or two mental choices from the guest cast to help the stars align. Doctor Who comes complete with its embarrassments and I’d like a few more to balk at.

JH

"'s all a bit Harry Potter." No it isn't.

Doctor Who, if one lets it, can consume you. It’s a happy consummation, blissful even, but it can leave one spoiled, specifically when it comes to programmes which on a surface level may appear similar. I’m often asked if I enjoy The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars or Star Trek on the understanding that “you like all that sci-fi stuff” to which – depending on how much I know the person - I often respond, “No, I like the good sci-fi stuff and lots of what you’ve mentioned isn’t sci-fi at all.” In my mind, the good sci-fi stuff includes Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s Guide, The X Files, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a sprinkle of Heroes, Dennis Kelly’s Utopia, The Outer Limits and if I’m feeling lucky, The Matrix. One might notice that the list is avoidant of Babylon 5, Thunderbirds, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and other programmes one might more immediately bring to mind when they consider science-fiction as a genre. Bluntly, a spaceship is a spaceship but as Douglas Adams said, “To design an invisible spaceship, that takes genius.” My list, I like to imagine includes much richer examples of the genre in question. To my mind, The Lord of the Rings (I’m talking the film franchise here) is an incessantly dull New Zealand travelogue during which our characters refuse to develop over nine hours of screen-time and Elijah Wood refuses vehemently to stop looking as if he is suffering an extreme attack of constipation. If it were a Doctor Who story, Tom Baker would be at the top of the dark tower grinning and juggling to the bafflement of Saruman, his imagination bringing the wizard down. The film enjoys many, many minutes of Gandalf and Saruman issuing bolts of lightning from their enormous wands in each other’s direction. I wonder if they’re compensating for their lack of wit. After all, it’s usually the intellectually-wounded dickheads who sport the biggest cars.

What Doctor Who has more than any of these other programmes is imagination. It is only ever in danger of failure when it forgets that. Compare, for example City of Death and Arc of Infinity. The first is hailed as a universal classic (agreed) and the other usually festers away at the bottom of the polls like an unwelcome fart (agreed). Both are filmed in foreign cities and both involve lots and lots of running around the streets of those foreign cities. But one story is about the theft of seven identical Mona Lisas by a man splintered in time and culminates with the most important punch in history at the birth of the human race. The other is about Time Lord protocol and some lost passports and culminates in the Doctor shooting his old, ineffective adversary limply on a small quayside. One is forward looking; the other backward. For the most part, Doctor Who has been successful in its abject avoidance of its own mythos, with Arc of Infinity being an unusual example of the show, rather than its norm. The Lord of the Rings is so up itself, it works on the assumption that we’re already greatly invested in its mythos before we’ve even met people properly and audaciously pulls a slow-motion characters-crying sequence a couple of hours into its nine-hour stretch when Gandalf doesn’t die. Doctor Who doesn’t need to be this po-faced and earnest. It just needs to be imaginatively relevant. The closest slow-mo, aren’t-we-important montage I can think of in Doctor Who is the death of Astrid in Voyage of the Damned. Although it feels earned, given the length of the programme and how we’ve come to adore Astrid, even that has a gurning Mark Costigan with sparkling tooth shot thrown into the mix. 

What Doctor Who has more than any of its contemporaries is an ability to take the piss out of itself and wallow in its own ridiculousness. At the end of The Day of the Doctor, David Tennant again declares: “I don’t want to go.” Matt Smith’s Doctor observes that “he’s always saying that.” In The End of Time almost four years earlier, when arguably the programme was at its very height of popularity, those five words were desperately moving and shook a nation of fans. Here, the programme itself is able to toss them aside like yesterday’s news and point and laugh at them sneeringly. Similarly, in Twice Upon a Time, as Testimony shows the Doctor precisely who he is (The Destroyer of Skaro, the Shadow of the Valeyard, etc) he is able to follow it up with “To be fair, you cut out all the jokes.” This is a programme which stubbornly refuses to be taken seriously except when it matters. It has its cake and eats it. It is able to have us weep for David Tennant’s demise before laughing at ourselves a few years down the line. We can appreciate the Doctor’s mythic status whilst acknowledging that he has always been a bit of a joker. Doctor Who, unlike The Lord of the Rings, has an innate sense of humour and a wise, old, Shakespearean fool in the lead.

Doctor Who has many influences and often wears them on its sleeve. Amazingly, however, it manages to better them most of the time. I’d much rather watch Last Christmas again than Miracle on 34^th Street, Alien or Inception. That might sound scandalous but that nifty little hour of Doctor Who is so much better than all those try-hards. For one thing, it’s funnier. (It includes the line, “I will mark you, Santa.”) And perhaps more strikingly, it refuses to be one thing. Miracle is about the existence of Santa. Alien is about… well, guess. And Inception is dreams within dreams. Doctor Who does all of that at once and makes it look easy. Perversely, it’ll never win any awards for that script (it’s only Doctor Who after all, those well-informed judges will tut humourlessly) but it is so much cleverer, more accessible and more fun than all its influences, namely because there’s an eccentric and wonderful man dressed like a magician with a couple of huge hearts at the centre of it all – and he’s pratting about. 

The climax of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a terrifically well-directed battle between Daniel (“I’m Harry Potter even though I can’t act.”) Radcliffe and Ralph (“I can act but I’m lowering myself to this bleeding awful make-up thanks to a colossal pay cheque.”) Fiennes. Bolts and magic sparks fly. It is an epic battle. Glass shatters, colours flash, eyebrows quiver. It is utterly hollow. There is nothing quite so boring as a fight with neither geography nor emotional resonance. The final film finishes in much the same way: a loud, brash battle with no heart. The films have taken for granted that we really love these characters without doing anything at all to give us a reason to. Harry is a horrible, little brat, so into himself that he forgets how to sympathise with absolutely everyone. Ron is the thick, ginger, Cockney one. We’re supposed to feel for Hermione because she’s a “half-blood” but she behaves like a stuck-up irritant. When Rowling simply expects us to like Hermione because of her bloodline, we can’t. These are facts about characters rather than an indication of what sort of person they might be. So Harry has no parents, right? No and it doesn’t stop him being a right wazzok. We can’t feel sorry for every orphan. Interestingly, Doctor Who fans were up in arms at the time of the Paul McGann TV movie when it was revealed that the Doctor was half-human. I can understand why: it’s a cheap, “now you’ll care about him” shorthand which absolutely doesn’t work because it’s got nothing to do with the plot, pisses over what has come before and chiefly, doesn’t make us care about the Doctor any more or raise the stakes any higher. Ironically, casual viewers are probably less inclined to sympathise with someone only half human. When the show looks into itself, it usually fails. 

I say usually: The Deadly Assassin is perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told in my view, despite its truly rubbish title. One could argue that it epitomises a backwards looking show in its exploration of the Doctor’s origins. However, it’s easy to forget that this version of Gallifrey at the time was completely and radically new. It still remains the best depiction of the planet. Because it’s not a story about the Doctor’s homeworld; it’s a story about the workings of an alien society. It’s why it works so much better than Hell Bent or The Three Doctors or Arc of Bloody Infinity. Assassin understands that we’re not very interested in the Doctor’s origins so it goes out of its way to make this new and exciting world interesting in much the same way Holmes would make the worlds of Ribos, Androzani and even Ravalox interesting. It’s the politics of the planet and the nefarious scheme of the Master’s complete with its dreamlike APC net, as well as the beautifully literate language, that fill the story with life. Appropriately enough, the Doctor treats the place with distain. After all, what is interesting about a place? He’s interested in people. Hell Bent would seem to prove the point: it only truly comes to life when it’s about Clara and the Doctor. When it’s about conversations in a Council Chamber, it’s dull as dishwater. Lord of the Rings is based on a map and its characters inherit the map and are products of it. Doctor Who can never be based on a star-chart, which is why books like John Peel’s Gallifrey Chronicles always left me cold. When Doctor Who is working supremely well, it’s about the people of these strange worlds (be they historical or futuristic) and the strangeness of those places comes hand in hand with character. It’s not about an orphan troll who lives in a mountain cave by a stream overlooking the tower of a dark wizard. Because who gives a toss?

So yes, I’m spoiled. Doctor Who has completely spoiled any love of other more map-based examples of the genre (Hello Game of Thrones) I could care to think about. There are vast swathes of sci-fi that I will never enjoy because Doctor Who does it better. There are spaceships and wonders that will bore me rigid because I’ve seen them before but with a curly-haired maniac grinning his way through them and offering philosophies on teaspoons and open minds. Doctor Who’s imagination is boundless compared to scribblers like Tolkien or Rowling. Names like Holmes, Moffat and Dicks and Davies are the ones to really conjure with. Doctor Who Versus the World? No contest.

JH

MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

When I first became aware that some episodes of Doctor Who didn’t exist, it was when my Dad bought me the VHS of The Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992. At the top of the case was a strapline reading: MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD. RETURNED TO BBC VIDEO AFTER OVER 20 YEARS! I was seven. It didn’t upset me too much me at the time, as the black and white stories I never felt were as engaging as those in colour, despite loving Tomb and even at that age spotting the vast gulf of difference in quality between it and The Twin Dilemma (the other Easter present)! I adored the Peter Cushing Dalek films but felt nothing for their fuzzy TV counterparts. There was also so much Doctor Who that I’d never seen before that a few more episodes couldn’t make that much of a difference. I am now so, so thankful that we have Tomb. It’s an icon. But in 1992, it was just another story I hadn’t seen.

It was in my teens that missing episodes became important to me, specifically with the release of The Ice Warriors Collection in 1998. How I loved those four snowy instalments! I even enjoyed the recon, perhaps still the most cleverly handled recreation of missing footage (and that includes the animations). What I remember most vividly though was reading the inner booklet and realising that the documentary The Missing Years would include footage from The Smugglers, Fury from the Deep, The Highlanders and The Macra Terror. I had never realised clips existed from these ancient tomes and the experience of watching them for the first time was astonishing. Fury looked to be the most frightening Doctor Who story ever made. The Smugglers looked like the sort of spooky Dickensian yarn that would have scared me as a younger child. I had loved listening to the Colin Baker-narrated cassettes of The Macra Terror when I was growing up and putting pictures to the soundtrack was extraordinarily exciting. The fact that clips existed from stories I never thought I’d see was a revelation.

From that point on, missing Doctor Who became a vital interest. Ian Levine had stated quite definitively on The Missing Years that there would always be 108 missing episodes. So when The Lion was found the following year, I was over the moon and that giant, green boxset became one of my Favourite Things Ever. In 2003, shortly after the announcement of the new series, it was revealed that Day of Armageddon had been discovered too. I was at college in an IT lesson when I found out, casually browsing the internet. I cried. In front of my mates who shrugged and got on with their much richer lives. I had a stronger reaction to Day of Armageddon than the news that the real deal was coming back to TV. (After all, something would probably go wrong there.)

And that was that. I never even considered another discovery. Doctor Who’s Missing Years amounted to two moments of euphoria for me, never to be repeated. And I was actually sort of fine with that. Because since Ian Levine’s statement, I’d sort of given up hope.

Then came 2011. I was driving to work when then newsreader told the world that two Doctor Who episodes had been found after being lost in time for decades. “Which ones??!!” I screamed at the radio, but it was no use. She wasn’t for telling. I raced dangerously into work and threw myself at a computer. Oh. The Underwater Menace 2 and Galaxy 4: Air Lock. Well, I could sort of understand why the newsreader hadn’t mentioned which ones. They were hardly fan favourites. In fact, to be blunt, they were the dregs. But I wasn’t deflated. I was excited to see Galaxy 4, there being no telesnaps. This had to yield some surprises. And I was in a minority in that I really loved Underwater Menace 3 and so I was looking forward to seeing Part 2, even though it’s the first and last bloody episodes that are the most visually arresting!

But this time, I didn’t think that was it. Nobody did. Because what probably started as a lovely idea: “Let’s announce it at the BFI and let people see it immediately!” had become six months of secret-keeping. And the horrible thing about secrets is, you don’t know who’s got them. Now, we fans were no longer wondering where the episodes might be, but who might know about them. And that was awful, because the crime of these stories being missing didn’t equate to human error any more but to human secrecy.

Philip Morris appeared on The Reign of Terror DVD commentary to talk about his search for Doctor Who long before his anniversary announcement. I wondered why on Earth he was there and deduced that he must have found some Who he wasn’t telling us about, especially with that last comment as the credits role: “Which would I most like to find? What an interesting question.” As if he hadn’t expected that one to come up! In July 2013, I was told that Enemy and Web were back at the BBC but that it was being kept under wraps and there could be more to come. I waited 3 months before an announcement was made, and again, that was after a long period of secrecy. In the end, I was deflated. I couldn’t believe Web still had an episode missing! But to see these stories was of course, a great joy. In the intervening years, I’d heard the CD soundtracks so often, I knew Enemy was a belter and I was surprised in that Web was even better than I thought it would be and absolutely lived up to that first spectacular episode.

However, what was once a tantalising hope – that one day I might get to see these beautiful programmes, that they’d turn up in a loft or a vault somewhere – has now become an irritation. Why does Philip Morris keep alluding to more finds and refusing to deny that he has any more? Why does he remain so irritatingly optimistic if he has nothing? The protracted way in which Enemy and Web were returned means that there could be stuff sitting at the BBC which we don’t know about at any given point. Bluntly, I’d much rather he admit he has nothing than keep us hanging. It’s worse than not knowing if anything exists; it’s not knowing what Phil is playing at. In the old days, the episodes either existed or they didn’t. Now, we have to wait for someone to tell us that they exist or not. It’s bloody infuriating that a group of individuals would keep their secrets for such a long time. Surely, any fan would like to be told that episodes are back, being worked on and will be released soon, rather than be kept in the dark? 

However, hope remains. And it’s a nagging, horrible feeling! But it’s there!

Episodes I’d still love to see include:

·         All of The Massacre – I think it’s a masterpiece.

·         Fury from the Deep Parts 2 and 4 – the creepiest ones with major set-pieces: the Hariss household and the trip down the pipeline. I can do without the helicopter stuff later on!

·         The Abominable Snowmen Parts 1 and 6 – the beginning and the end. I’d love to see Padmasambhava and the first episode is a tense and wild affair! 

·         Anything from The Daleks’ Master Plan – it jumps around from episode to episode and there are no telesnaps to offer even a clue as to how some of it may have looked!

·         The Savages Part 3 – For Freddie Jaeger’s Hartnell impression.

·         The Wheel in Space Part 1 – It’s a weird, trippy, mental thing.

·         Evil 1 – A contemporary 60s episode.

·         The Macra Terror – Cos it’s bloody amazing.

Of course, any discovery would be most welcome. Strangely, given the animations, I’m less inclined to vote for those stories (Power, Invasion, Moonbase, etc) in a list of Most Wanted, already having very watchable versions to hand. But imagine the delight in getting to see Troughton’s first steps as the Doctor or Hartnell’s last. Even yet, these unknown treasures feel like magical totems. And the hope does remain. Please, Phil, do the right thing: either pull your finger out and share or tell us you’ve got nothing. It’d be much easier to bear. Here’s still hoping, one day soon…

JH

We’re All Stories In The End. Just Make It A Good One, Huh?

Growing up in the 90s, it took me an awful lot of time to realise that there were more Doctor Who fans in the world than just me. For most of my childhood, Doctor Who was an entirely solitary pursuit. Any friends from Primary School I tested it on failed to be interested and by Secondary School most simply laughed at it (although one lad did remark on the Doctor Who and the Silurians repeat in 2000 that the monster faces sported “really good graphics”). Doctor Who was a lonesome business then but not a lonely one: the Doctor never made me feel alone.

In 1993, for one day only, my dad took me to Manopticon at the Town Hall in Manchester. There, I met Jon Pertwee who said a total of five words to me: “Who’s it to?” and “To John.” He asked my dad if it was with or without the h and gave us a mildly disappointed autograph with a tut. Colin Baker was much more affable. He asked where I came from down to the specifics: “Whereabouts in Oldham?” and told me of his early work at the Curtain Theatre in Rochdale and the Shaw Playhouse. Later, I became members of both places on his advice and still work there very happily to do this day. The Collectors’ Stalls were exciting and I particularly loved finding a host of sculpted character heads on display – much too expensive for my Dad! I spent the rest of the day in the video room, watching tantalising, old episodes: The Ambassadors of Death (IN COLOUR!) was a VHS recording from UK Gold but I didn’t care. It was amazing. The biggest joy of the convention, however, was – perhaps embarrassingly - getting to see The Happiness Patrol in its entirety again, a story I’d had taped a few years ago but which I’d sadly lost. A couple of years for a child is a long time and I couldn’t wait to see it again!

What I’d missed, I note in hindsight, were the panels. You know, the one bit that a convention is all about! I attended Battlefield IV in Coventry and Panopticon 2000 at Manchester’s Palace Hotel when I was 15 and couldn’t believe what I’d missed out on: these panels were so much fun! I heard stories about the making of the stories I’d never been privy to before. I saw Tom talk for an hour about flytraps and champagne: Bliss. I saw Anthony Ainley slapping his own arse in appreciation of a new diet he’d discovered. I saw Jon Culshaw take off all the Doctors, in front of two of them. I saw Peter Purves bemoaning his missing episodes whilst Michael Sheard proudly noted that he had never been deleted. What I didn’t realise was that a lot of what I was seeing was actually old hat. Nicholas Courtney had refused to tell the eyepatch story on account of it being so ancient. Sylvester and Sophie wanted to talk about Death Comes to Time. Big Finish and these shiny new things called DVDs were the new kids on the block. One fan very excitedly told me he’d just found out that the next DVD release was to be the TV Movie. “Right. Yeah. I’ve seen it.”

I wish I had been new to the game when these old stories had been doing the rounds originally though, when the actors, designers and producers were new to relating them. I remember telling a mate about how I’d laughed watching such-and-such a DVD when Terrance Dicks imparted such-and-such a thing. His response? “Oh, have you not heard that one before?” These tales now form as much a parcel of a Doctor Who adventure as the adventure itself. Who can watch Ambassadors without hearing, “Well Terrance, you were doing your job and I was doing mine?” Who could watch Planet of the Spiders without intoning “His hair got more and more bouffant as the years went by, you see?” Who could watch Planet of Evil without knowing that the jungle set ended up on the BBC’s in-house designers’ manual? Who could watch Battlefield without knowing that Sylvester saved Sophie’s life? Who could watch Nightmare of Eden without thinking Tom vs Bromly? Who could watch Silver Nemesis without knowing that “that gap is just too wide?” Who could watch Pyramids without knowing it’s Mick Jagger’s house or Mind Robber without chickenpox or Pirate Planet without the sausage dog story? The list goes on and on and on. And I love, love, love those anecdotes.

I’ve tried valiantly to poetrycise them. Here goes:

We only had three Daleks;
The day Sylvester saved my life;
Marshminnows were actually peaches;
Morgaine was Jon’s first wife.

A dog had asked Tom for sausages;
His collar bone broke that day;
Levene was dressed as a Yeti
Jon’s wage Shaun just wouldn’t pay.

She ran up to the vic in her knickers;
Daryl Joyce was filming off-set;
It was so cold I got hypothermia;
The fans Christened him “the wet vet.”

John wanted something totally tasteless;
Jon said, “You gonna do it like that?”
We nearly lost Liz on that underground lake;
Sophie Aldred’s allergic to cat.

“Dalek 1, move to your left”;
Lou wanted her eyes back to blue;
For that set Roger used mirrors;
Gary said, “Let’s make magic now, crew.”

Mr Grade was a pompous, old arsehole;
Mr Powell didn’t return calls;
I nudged Patrick right in his ribs and said;
“Look at the size of those balls!”

“The Daemons was always my favourite;”
The vehicles got stuck in the clay;
K9 was a right bitch to work with;
Chief Clown’s teeth still hurt to this day.

Nick always had to have his three pints’ worth;
Those costumes were terribly hot;
“I was just about to go on leave
When the high-ups said, ‘No Jon, you’re not.’”

I’m off. This is it. I’ll do Dreamwatch.”
Katy had the map upside-down;
The horse it set off through the woodwork;
And the whole thing came tumbling down.

Ark In Space got thirteen million
And we knew we would still be a hit.
We wanted Victorian London
So we caked his Ferrari in shit.

JH