TLIAFD: The Doctor Is Who?
- Thread starter Heavy
- Start date
-
- Tags
- doctor who pop culture
I'm really enjoying this. I just wish that I had thought of using Peter Wyngarde as the Doctor
Heavy
Banned
Haha, I really do appreciate you saying that. It's very obliging of you.
As I said, there's a certain degree of parallelism here, at least up to a certain point. You start with Bill Hartnell, because I think all of these would need to start with Bill Hartnell. Who replaced William Hartnell? An experienced character actor with a particular style who had made a career of supporting roles up to that point. Troughton the clown IRL, Le Mesurier the charmer here. It doesn't entirely fit for the Third Doctor here, because Pertwee was an old musical theatre guy and radio sitcom star who sought the role because he was keen to do some "proper acting" whereas Wyngarde was an experienced "proper actor" who'd previously been a lead in a popular TV series; there's not much of an excuse here, I just wanted to use Peter Wyngarde!
Tom Baker was a relative unknown compared to Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee. He was working on a building site as a bricklayer and contemplating abandoning acting, said to be "of no fixed address" and had to be outfitted from the BBC costume department so he'd look presentable for his first press conference when he was cast because he was too skint to afford anything other than his work clothes. Despite that, he went on to become the longest-serving actor in the part and in many respects the iconic Doctor. By the same token, Neame is a relative unknown compared to Hartnell, Le Mesurier and Wyngarde, and while his situation was perhaps not quite so desperate as Baker's own, here he's a hungry young actor who's up for anything and a bit of a risk because he's nearly half the age of his predecessors.
I actually wanted to make an allusion to Neame's post-Who career which I thought you in particular might have appreciated as an off-hand thing (I'll explain by PM if you're interested), but I might do something with it later, I haven't really decided.
I'm really enjoying this. I just wish that I had thought of using Peter Wyngarde as the Doctor
One thing I have learned doing this story is that there's evidently a lot of Peter Wyngarde fans on AH.com.
Her most recent appearance summarized it well: "Death is for other people."
5. Steady As She Goes: The Fifth Doctor
Heavy
Banned
THE FIFTH DOCTOR
Colin Baker
(1979 – 1984)
Colin Baker
(1979 – 1984)
Prior to taking sole responsibility for production duties late in the year, John Nathan-Turner ("JNT" to his friends and enemies alike) was a de facto co-producer of Doctor Who alongside Graham Williams for most of 1979, in which capacity he enjoyed unprecedented latitude (aided and abetted by script editor Douglas Adams, who privately expressed his intention to Nathan-Turner to remain in the role until at least 1981 to ease the transition) to "set the board" for his prospective ascension to the top role.
JNT had big plans to redefine Doctor Who for the new decade and believed that he would need to "go big" to realise his goals by casting a "name" actor as the incoming Fifth Doctor. Christopher Neame, for all the popularity he had achieved, had been a young and hungry unknown and correspondingly a gamble that could easily have gone wrong; John Nathan-Turner was in no mood to take such a risk again. Instead, eager to drum up speculation, he made a cryptic announced at a press conference that he had had tapped "one of the most recognisable faces on our television screens in recent years" as Neame's successor.
Gossip and conjecture were indeed as rife as JNT had hoped, with guesses running the gamut from credible to ridiculous. John Thaw and Martin Shaw, both well-known for their heroic roles in The Sweeney and The Professionals respectively, were initially the bookies' favourites, while older stars such as Patrick Macnee and James Ellis were acknowledged as outside possibilities. [1] More outlandish proposals centred around sitcom and soap stars such as Frank Thornton, Michael Crawford, Clive Dunn and others, each rejected by the odds-makers more or less out of hand (granted, largely by commentators wholly unaware of JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" media), because what right-thinking casting director would ever contract a lightweight comedy actor to carry a science-fiction drama? Even John Le Mesurier had demonstrated some dramatic flair before he became Bill Hartnell's first successor.
Regardless, Nathan-Turner's eventual choice did indeed take audiences, critics and the entertainment press by surprise: he had indicated his intention to cast "one of the most recognisable faces" in British television, but at no point had he suggested that said face would be one of TV's most beloved protagonists. In 1979, Colin Baker was most immediately recognised for his successful stint playing the villainous yuppie Paul Merroney in four seasons of the BBC drama The Brothers between 1974 and 1976, a role which made him a household name, albeit as the man viewers at home loved to hate.
In other words, an unusual choice for the role of a hero beloved by children across the country, or so one might assume. However, Colin Baker had been a fan and admirer of Doctor Who for all of the programme's life and an appreciable chunk of his own. [2] He was convinced that he was right for the role – even born to play it! – and, if behind-the-scenes rumours are to be believed, received it after insisting as much to John Nathan-Turner and Douglas Adams during his audition. Despite some reluctance over his perceived similarity to Christopher Neame (in 1979, Baker was 36, a full decade older than Neame had been when cast in 1973, but only four years older than Neame was on departing the role earlier that year), Baker promised and quickly demonstrated that he could and would provide a very singular interpretation of the character indeed.
Baker's debut serial was "City of Fear", a script co-written by Adams and Graham Williams and credited pseudonymously to the BBC's all-purpose in-house pen-name David Agnew to work around informal rules to prohibit script editors from editing their own work. It saw him arriving in present-day Rome (production staff joked that JNT wanted to give himself a European holiday) accompanied by Borusa and K-9 and encountering the deadly villainess Countess Scarlioni (Jacqueline Pearce). This script was highly praised for its clever use of time travel and effective humorous tone. Discovering that Countess Scarlioni was in fact the notorious villainess Lucretia Borgia, the Doctor and Borusa journey to three separate versions of Rome throughout history culminating in the Doctor disguising himself as Michelangelo and hiding a secret message in the roof of the Sistine Chapel while Borusa attempted to distract an unseen Pope off-screen in humorously poor Latin. "City of Fear" continues to rank highly in "best debut" polls of series fans.
Immediately, Baker made a visual splash, doffing Neame's pilot leathers in favour of a blue frock coat and silk tie lifted from the prop room of the Italian opera house where the TARDIS landed. "So far," Baker explained before his debut on screen, "I think Doctors have been a bit staid for my tastes. I've spent three years playing a rather plain gentleman on The Brothers so I'm keen on having a bit of colour in my costume. Hopefully it won't be anything too ostentatious."
In most respects, Baker's Doctor was characterised by critics as, "Like Bill Hartnell, only with most of the rough edges sanded off." His take on Doctor cast the Time Lord as an inveterate admirer of human art, literature and culture, and prone to frequent reflections on the "indomitable" nature of the human spirit; it is not for nothing that he has been popularly described as the "most human" of all the classic Doctors. He was the charming and good-humoured gentleman who would probably get on reasonably well with his enemies if only they would stop trying to exterminate him, relaxed and restrained in his manner and dress sense, and as keen to see the sights of Earth's history as he was to save the universe.
Baker himself – who interacted well with the press – explained his intentions in interviews early on in his time on the show, remarking that while he admired Christopher Neame's younger, more intense Doctor, he felt that his long continuous tenure in the part had led to a "dominance of one tone and one kind of story" and that, "I don't think it would be inappropriate to try and recapture some of what impressed me about Doctor Who when William Hartnell was the Doctor."
Such affectations reflected the three components of John Nathan-Turner's plan to reinvigorate the series. First, targeting a clean break with the serious-minded character of the Fourth Doctor, JNT expressed his desire that the Fifth Doctor could, "Be the kind of man who would pass around a paper bag and offer the Cybermen a jelly baby when they had him back into a corner." Facilitating this objective, Douglas Adams agreed to remain on staff as a so-called "script consultant" for most of Baker's tenure after official ending his time as script editor in 1981.
Second, he wished to pull back from the outer space and "gothic alien world" settings common in the Neame / Hinchcliffe / Holmes years and bring the Doctor back to Earth with a higher focus on "historicals", which placed the Doctor in real life historical situations – sometimes with and sometimes without any science-fiction or supernatural elements at all. Adams's successor as script editor, Louis Marks, was a DPhil graduate from Balliol with a particular interest in Italian Renaissance history and would take to this assignment with gusto.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, he made clear that he "wanted the Doctor to win more" after an oft-criticised trend in the late Fourth Doctor era when the Doctor's victories would by pyrrhic as often as they were decisive. [3]
With the conceit that the Doctor had resolved to take Borusa on a tour of Earth's history, these stories were very popular, especially with parents who appreciated their educational tone, although it soon became clear to everyone working on the series that JNT's predilection for "light entertainment" (also evidenced by his casting of soap stars and sitcom actors in roles that did not always suit them [4]) was a larger factor than any desire to improve young minds. In time, the tone of much of the Baker era would come under heavy criticism in later years for its "lightweight" (or, less charitably, "up itself") nature, even as the actor himself always remained well-regarded.
By some distance the inevitable highlight of Baker's tenure with the series was the 20th anniversary special. Although primarily scripted by Terrance Dicks, "Dimensions In Time" featured story ideas contributed by an array of writers associated with the programme, which was treated as a special event by the BBC, it received the unique privilege of being broadcast as a feature-length 90 minute telefilm. Accompanied by his new companions [5], alien princess Teegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding) and dubiously-accented Australian flight attendant Victor Turlough (Mark Strickson) [6], the Doctor pilots the TARDIS into a mysterious dimensional breach and finds himself on a strange alternate Earth overrun by Cybermen.
There, he encounters an aging human scientist who introduces himself as "Dr Who" (Patrick Troughton reprising his role from the Amicus films of 20 years earlier) and explains that these Cybermen attacked while Earth was still recovering from its occupation by the Daleks, and have been rooting out the resistance which he now leads in a losing battle with the invaders. Together, the Doctor and the doctor defeat the Cybermen, and the Fifth Doctor and his friends return home safely.
Finally, after a long stretch spent adventuring in Earth's history or on largely Earth-like planets, the Fifth Doctor's final story ("Return to Gallifrey", written by Robert Holmes) saw the first reappearance of the Doctor's home planet in more than 10 years. Learning that his onetime boss, Councillor Goth (Nicholas Courtney returning to the role) has now risen to the office of Lord President of Gallifrey, the Doctor is charged with identifying and catching an assassin targeting high-ranking Time Lords, and teams up with a suspicious Council Guard named Maxil (played by Peter Davison of All Creatures Great and Small fame).
When the evidence seems to implicate none other than President Goth himself, the Doctor realises that he has been set up, and in one of the most famous cliffhangers of the series; Maxil reveals that he is in fact the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, back for revenge. The efforts to keep this twist secret – aided by the assumptions that Davison was another example of JNT's stunt casting and that Tristan Farnon could never be a "bad guy" – were praised by fans, critics and Baker himself. Although he successfully prevents the Master from assassinating Goth, the Doctor is mortally wounded as the villain escapes, and is forced to regenerate once more.
Between Christopher Neame and the early tenure of Colin Baker, Doctor Who had enjoyed a long and sustained peak. Although a sense of tedium over John Nathan-Turner's insatiable "light entertainment" proclivities and increasing sense of stagnancy precipitated by a reluctance to venture too far beyond Earth or Earth-like settings had led to a (small but noticeable enough to be worrying) decrease in ratings, Doctor Who remained in remarkably good condition for a programme in its twenty-first year. [7] It was generally agreed, as any reasonably astute observer could be expected to agree, that another fresh start and new direction would help to introduce a renewed sense of vibrancy and adventure which the series seemed perilously close to losing altogether.
Unfortunately, unbeknown to anyone, the series was on the brink of a downturn…
----
[1] Although never cast as the Doctor, John Thaw's name would subsequently be raised every single time a new regeneration was announced, so publically and pervasively that it became the subject of extensive parody to which even Thaw himself gamely contributed.
[2] As he was fond of explaining in an oft-shared fan-favourite anecdote, Baker had originally planned to qualify as a solicitor and switched to acting to his discovery of Doctor Who after overhearing a flatmate watching a William Hartnell episode shortly after the programme's debut in 1963.
[3] Most infamously, "The Planet of Terror" ended with both the universe-saving defeat of Sutekh the Destroyer and the deaths of every single character other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, with the Doctor helpless to prevent the latter without jeopardising the former.
[4] John Inman's turn as a "tough as nails mercenary captain" in "The Treasure of Mandragora" was met with particular confusion.
[5] Louise Jameson had left the series in 1981 after a little less than two years, and was briefly replaced in the interim for a small handful of stories by Matthew Waterhouse's teen mathematician Adric, a boy genius whose final story would end with him eaten by a dinosaur, which was then blown up by a Movellan on a planet that was later destroyed when its sun went supernova and turned into a black hole. Waterhouse had failed to ingratiate himself to the production staff and the character had not been well-received.
[6] Strickson was from Stratford, but was ordered to adopt an Australian accent by John Nathan-Turner who wished to make the series "more cosmopolitan". JNT went so far as to instruct Strickson to use the accent (which Strickson disliked using and was always happy to admit "wasn't very good") in public to try and convince audiences that he was a genuine Australian actor. It remains unclear whether JNT hoped to get an Australian holiday out of this strange ploy.
[7] The highest ratings achieved by Doctor Who in the history of its run would be 15.8 million for the fourth and final episode of "The Final Dimension", Christopher Neame's last appearance as the Fourth Doctor, which coincided with a strike at ITV that left the BBC's programming uncontested that week.
Last edited:
John Inman as a mercenary captain! Turlough as an Australian!
Baker stuck with scripts that were seen as too light rather than too dark!
Oh, this is delightful.
Baker stuck with scripts that were seen as too light rather than too dark!
Oh, this is delightful.
I'd thought that Colin Baker would suit the darker Hinchcliffe style stories, so having him as this lighter, gentler Doctor is an interesting development.
Acknowledging the film version of the Doctor is a novel idea. OTL, it's really been ignored, apart from the Beeb buying up some of the second-hand Daleks. There's a hint there that the films led on to other things - maybe even Terry Nation's Dalek spin-off series.
Hopefully the Doctor ends up shooting Maxil this time. IOTL, Baker said he got the job as the Doctor by shooting his predecessor.
6. It Wasn't the Actor's Fault: The Sixth Doctor
Heavy
Banned
THE SIXTH DOCTOR
James Hazeldine
(1985 – 1986)
James Hazeldine
(1985 – 1986)
Throughout its broadcast run, the fortunes of Doctor Who had run the gamut from the stratospheric highs of the Neame and Baker years to such ugly and ignominious lows of the egress of Peter Wyngarde (not to mention some very questionable stories before, after and in between). Although no one could have expected it, the departure of Colin Baker coupled with a rupturing in the balance of power behind the scenes of the series would precipitate a period of uncertainty for Doctor Who. Such was the difficulty that ensued that the incoming Sixth Doctor, Salford television actor James Hazeldine would come to rank his brief and, it must be conceded, unsuccessful tenure as Colin Baker's successor in the role of the Doctor as one of the chief disappointments of his otherwise productive career. [1] A deep and perhaps long overdue trough, in other words, was fast approaching the production.
Although best known for his stage work and supporting parts in other television drama series, Hazeldine was no stranger to science-fiction, having appeared to considerable acclaim in the leading role as the psychic journalist Tom Crane in all thirteen episodes of the BBC Scotland paranormal drama The Omega Factor, originally broadcast in 1979 and securing a large and dedicated cult following in subsequent years. [2] Indeed, Hazeldine's performance as the tough but sensitive Crane in the aforesaid series was the most significant factor in John Nathan-Turner's decision (perhaps increasingly mindful of the near unceasing scorn poured on his casting predilections [3]) to hire him on to succeed Colin Baker.
Despite the usual round of speculation about prospective actors for the Doctor's sixth iteration (John Thaw making his requisite appearance), Hazeldine seems to have been the only seriously considered choice in late 1983 when it became clear that Baker wished to leave in the following year and, indeed, was quite irregularly not even asked to make a formal audition for the role. [4] While an indisputably solid choice assessed purely on his quality as an actor, Hazeldine's veritable coronation reflected a deeper systemic problem which would plague the series throughout his tenure, namely a sense that the caution and conservatism of the production staff in general and John Nathan-Turner in particular was sapping the creative spirit of the programme. At 37, he was only a handful of years younger than the outgoing Colin Baker and only a year older than Baker had been when he was cast as the Sixth Doctor. [5]
Fans continue to debate the extent to which Hazeldine was genuinely enthusiastic about taking on the role or whether it was merely a matter of Doctor Who in 1984, while not the mega-hit it had been a decade earlier, had simply become too good an opportunity to justify passing up when presented as freely as it was being offered to Hazeldine. As the actor would eventually reveal in interviews in the early 1990s, he had been misled by John Nathan-Turner as to the nature of the character he would be playing, so much so that he went so far as consult his solicitor (!) to determine whether he had grounds to sue for misrepresentation.
According to Hazeldine (and confirmed by other sources, many of whom had axes to grind with JNT), he had been promised the opportunity to take the Doctor in a different direction from his outwardly patrician predecessors (even the "down and dirty" Fourth Doctor has given the impression of an aristocratic army officer). He had wanted to play the Doctor as a "salt of the cosmos" type with a pronounced Mancunian accent, in reflection of Hazeldine's own northern working class roots. He would wear a battered leather jacket and flannel shirts ("Like something you'd get in a Primark on Pluto," quipped the actor), scrap physically with enemies and tackle real-world social problems in his stories; his foes (as some insiders would put it) would have "basically been the Tories".
Optimistic though this was, no sooner was Hazeltine's signature dry on his contract than had John Nathan-Turner given rather contrary instructions to both script editor Johnny Byrne (who had taken over from Christopher Bidmead in the final year of Baker's tenure but, it was widely agreed, had yet to genuinely distinguish himself in the position) and the casting and costuming departments. Hazeldine himself had been promptly kitted out with a "singularly bizarre" billowy white shirt and purple waistcoat and uncomfortable-looking breeches which saw him widely and unfavourably compared with Jeremy Irons's title role in the BBC'S 1975 adaptation of Poldark or Robin Ellis's Charles Ryder in ITV's lavish production of Brideshead Revisited [6].
The Sixth Doctor's mooted companion was a Scottish history teacher named Josephine Shaw, played by Gudrun Ure. Such a casting was something of a novelty, representing the first occasion when a companion looked visibly older than the ostensibly 800-year old Doctor (Ure was just over 20 years older than her co-star). This may have provided an interesting dynamic under the pen of a better writing staff but Ure, despite a respected career on stage and screen stretching back to the 1950s, was hampered by the risible attempts at "comedy" she was frequently saddled with. [7] Both Ure and Hazeldine were reported to have gotten on well, with Hazeldine fondly recalling her as a mother figure with whom he bonded over their shared distaste for many of their scripts, and described their long-lasting friendship as the greatest highlight of his time on Doctor Who.
Nonetheless, initial results at least seemed promising: Hazeldine's first excursion in the TARDIS in the final serial of the 1984 season, "The Sontaran Armada", a story scripted by an ailing Robert Holmes (in what would prove to be his final work for the programme before his death in 1986), was reasonably well-received, subject to some minor observations about his apparent discomfort in the role. Ure's performance as Jo Shaw was also fairly well-received, a fact fundamentally attributable to Holmes's decision to take Byrne and JNT's rather broad brief that she should be "comedic" and write the character as a bitingly sarcastic Scottish grandmother with little time for what future script editor Graeme Curry would describe as the Doctor's "U-cert roguish" demeanour.
But from there, in spite of some bona fide successes [8] the tenure of the Sixth Doctor felt like one of managed decline, with the increasingly unhappy James Hazeldine gamely doing his best with uninspired scripts which lacked something every previous take on Doctor Who had enjoyed – a clear sense of identity and direction. To far too many viewers, hungry for a new direction after five years of pleasant-but-samey Fifth Doctor adventures, Hazeldine's Sixth Doctor was simply more of the same. JNT seemed variously oblivious or (more likely) indifferent to such criticism (not to mention to muted but clear disdain implied by Hazeldine and Ure in interviews with the press), preferring to hew to the principle that if something isn't broken, it doesn't need fixed.
More charitable views of JNT's attitude in the final years of his tenure as producer have pointed to the wider context of the 1984-1986 period and argued that he may simply have been mindful of the world outside the bubble of Doctor Who production. As a gay man who had worked on Doctor Who briefly as a floor assistant in the early 1970s, JNT had been profoundly affected by the NVALA campaign which resulted in Wyngarde's exit from the series and decided that Doctor Who and politics did not mix. Once ensconced in the producer's chair, was determined that the series would not unduly risk reprisal from outside forces, a concern and conviction which reinforced itself with the election of the right-wing Conservative government of Edward du Cann ("He had the look of a good Master about him, if I say so myself," JNT would remark in subsequent years), who had made clear that "savings could be found" at the BBC if it put a foot wrong, and enjoyed an ally in the form of Jonathan Powell, who arrived as BBC 1 Controller in 1982. Although Nathan-Turner's caution would prove prescient sometime after he stood down as producer, it served the series poorly from a creative standpoint, and its star was chafing miserably under it.
Aside from the initial Holmes story, the most memorable entry in the adventures of the Sixth Doctor (albeit for all the wrong reasons) was perhaps the four-part serial "The Great Brain Robbery", a story charitably described as being as confused as it was confusing and the sole contribution to the Doctor Who canon to flow from the typewriter of the husband and wife writing team of Pip and Jane Baker. It is memorable for introducing a new villainous female Time Lord called the Rani (Mary Tamm), who overcome the long odds attendant to debuting in the worst serial in the programme's history to become a durable addition to the Doctor's rogues' gallery. The story, which featured the Rani trying to steal the brain of Albert Einstein (played by Michael Sheard) as part of a plot to create an artificial species of intelligent trees as part of a scheme to assassinate the Time Lord High Council. It was clear that things would have to change.
And change things would. With ratings now in trouble, John Nathan-Turner decided to take a serious gamble for the first time years, and volunteered to resign as producer, confident that his offer would be rejected in the absence of any viable replacement and that this demonstration of readiness to accept responsibility for the troubled state of the series would be sufficient to secure his position. As it transpired, this was a fatal miscalculation; Jonathan Powell disliked Nathan-Turner personally and as an employee, deeming his record of diminishing returns since the late Baker years unacceptable in any other business, and resented the popularity of Doctor Who, of which his opinion was correspondingly unfavourable. To JNT's horror, the BBC summarily accepted and proclaimed that the series would not return the following January, but would instead be placed on a short hiatus pending a rethink of its status after the end of the current season. Doctor Who, if it managed to survive, would not return to television until the summer of 1987 at the earliest. [9]
James Hazeldine's own position was up in the air, although at that point, after slightly more than two years characterised by disappointment, the actor seemed to care very little. In his mind, if anyone's head deserved to roll, it was John Nathan-Turner's, with whom he would never reconcile and of whom he would seldom speak favourably in later years. Despite being approached by the so-called "administrators" (a team of BBC insiders which included former producers Verity Lambert and Graham Williams) appointed to reorganise and restructure the series during its break from television with an offer to return to the role after the completion of the hiatus, Hazeldine declined. He'd simply had enough and asked to be released from his contract and written out of the series when his second and final season came to a perfunctory end in March of 1985. Hazeldine's final episode ended with him alone in the TARDIS console room, beginning a regeneration that would never been seen finishing.
Although ranked as the "worst" Doctor for many years (the actor habitually reacted to this news by remarking that it was appropriate, as Doctor Who was by some distance the worst production he had ever been involved with), James Hazeldine was soon reassessed when more news of the difficulties which plagued the series behind the scenes during his tenure came to light. While still criticised for "not trying harder to make the best of it" in some quarters, the intermittent successes of some of his appearances, in his quieter and more intense moments, would remain a tantalising suggestions of what might have been.
And so, for the first time since 1963, Doctor Who audiences were not informed that the series would be returning in the following season. However, changes were coming, and when the series returned in September 1987, it would do so with a very different face topping the bill.
(This has been the most difficult update to write by some distance. As usual, any and all comments are welcome.)
----
[1] With only one year (and then only just) spent playing the Sixth Doctor, Hazeldine remains the actor with the shortest term in the part. As he would good-naturedly joke at convention appearances in later years, "In retrospect, I was lucky to even last that long!"
[2] Hazeldine's co-stars included Elisabeth Sladen as research physicist Dr Anne Reynolds (who had previously been considered as a potential companion to the Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors) and the legendary character actor Tom Baker (of no relation to Hazeldine's predecessor), who received a BAFTA nomination for his compelling portrayal of the villainous psychic Edward Drexel.
[3] Bill Tarmey’s casting as an aristocratic mad botanist in "The Roots of Destruction" left critics scratching their heads so hard that London experienced a shortage of false fingernails in the summer of 1982. The putative "unsuitability" of many castings in the JNT era may seem oblique to modern audiences, but any reader of Doctor Who Monthly of that period would no doubt have appreciated the sarcastic remark "IS BERYL REID THE NEXT DOCTOR?" on the cover of the February 1984 issue.
[4] The actor would subsequently remark, "That ought to have been the first warning sign."
[5] Opinion columns (such as the ever-popular "Sutekh Speaks" and its successor, "A View From Varos", written in character by the magazine's editor) and fan mail published in contemporaneous instalments of Doctor Who Monthly indicated a widespread preference for an older actor, with such names as Brian Blessed, Frank Finlay Ian Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne – the youngest of whom, Blessed, was 47 and the oldest, close to 60 – all ranking favourably in reader polls.
[6] "You'd have thought they were dressing me up for a remake of – you know that Bonnie Tyler music video? [most likely a reference to the contemporary hit "Stark Raving Love", a duet with Canadian rock vocalist Rory Dodd] – some kind of remake of that. Did they want me to sit on the tin dog and ride out of the TARDIS through a cloud of dry ice? Frankly, I should have objected to that costume, but I'd been encouraged reading through that first script from Bob (Holmes) that it would only be for the first few episodes, seeing as it was set in Barcelona."
[7] Ure would successfully parlay her role in Doctor Who into a career as a mainstay of children's broadcasting in the early 1990s, most notably in her villainous turn in the Colin Cant-directed science-fiction miniseries Dark Season, created by a young Welsh writer named Russell Davies.
[8] Eric Saward's "Resurrection of the Cybermen" was deemed a high point of the Hazeldine era, if moderately over-reliant on references to decades-old episodes then believed lost and only available as novelisations from Target Books. It would not be his final association with Doctor Who by any stretch.
[9] "Doctor in Distress", a so-called "charity" single recorded under the auspices of songwriter, record producer, former northern soul DJ and self-proclaimed "celebrity" Doctor Who fan Ian Levine was a minor novelty hit and continues to appear on "worst songs ever recorded" lists to this day. Levine remains convinced that it was a misunderstood stroke of genius – aside from some contributions to the recovery of lost John Le Mesurier episodes, it remains his only substantial association with the franchise.
Last edited:
I second the motion; he was responsible for reforming BBC1 in the mid-1980s (reformatting prime-time, which include a solid 18:00-19:00 news hour, changes in daytime schedules in '86, reintroducing in-vision continuity in the BBC through Children's BBC)
I liked this one. A dip in fortunes is only realistic and you have at least managed to reduce Pip and Jane's contributions to just the one episode which makes ttl better than ot, by it self.
Heavy
Banned
The idea was that Hazeldine basically wanted to play the Ninth Doctor 20 years early but ended up playing, erm, the Sixth Doctor. I appreciate that this update relied a bit more heavily on knowledge of arcane mid-1980s Doctor Who lore but it was all I could really think to do.
Word of warning that next update is unlikely to happen tomorrow since I am away all day. I'll aim to have something done for Sunday but it's likely to be the only one that day because I anticipate that I'll be very busy with other work over the weekend. After that, I'm not entirely sure what the schedule will be like.
Alex Richards
Donor
Which is one of those factoids which probably isn't true, but just about everyone wants it to be.