This Way Up 2

Whatever your view of the recently curtailed RTD2, there’s no doubt that the showrunner’s first era was peak Doctor Who.

As time trundles on, we forget places that once seemed important and then quite often find out decades later that they are gone.

In a nihilistic season packed with implied or actual violence, `Timelash` stands apart as being a more traditional Doctor Who story.

John Nathan Turner was right when he claimed that “the memory cheats”.

By 1975/ 76 Doctor Who on tv had become more sophisticated in its storytelling yet the Annuals continued to run stories that more often than not lacked the then current approach of the series.

“My Favourite Waste of Time” One event I attended in mid 1985 was LogiCon hosted by the Solihull local group the same day as Live Aid.

As anyone reading this might know, today the BBC announced that this year’s proposed Xmas special had been cancelled and that both Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf are leaving the franchise.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (aka DWAS) this year, I thought I'd post this amended two part version of an article I wrote back in the early Nineties.

The links to this blog's pages are working again- these take you to additional content.

In the Society’s early days as well as the regular fanzines they would also publish a Yearbook and the first of these covers much of what happened during the DWAS’s first year.

Is `The Caves of Androzani` the best Doctor Who story ever?

With two further episodes of this story having been recently found and now available to watch on BBC iPlayer, we can get a broader impression of `The Dalek Masterplan` though there is still more than half of it missing.

Planet of Fire `Planet of Fire` seems to have been somewhat forgotten over the years despite being only the second time the show filmed overseas as well as Turlough’s farewell and Peri’s debut.

One of the aspects that distinguished the Hinchliffe/ Holmes era was that, however bleak the scenario, lively dialogue, character interaction and some dark humour gave it more depth.

Studio bound, dialogue heavy with a bold concept and lashings of incidental music `Frontios` is very much like season eighteen in style, not surprising since it’s penned by that season’s script editor Christopher H Bidmead.

I once found myself chatting with Pennant Roberts back stage at an event and when the conversation switched to `Warriors of the Deep` I pondered why he’d not decided to spruce up the atmosphere by having everything doused in emergency red lighting, like t…

Classic Doctor Who has reached that point where it’s been through so many different formats from the original broadcasts through releases on video, DVD, Blu ray and streaming, individually and in collections.

As the previous individual dvd releases for this season were fairly comprehensively packed with additional features- most included here- there’s not quite as much brand new material in this Collection as there have been in others.

It’s been said that atypical Doctor Who often works best – and unconventional stories such as `Caves of Androzani` or `Blink` often appear to poll highly - but `Seeds of Doom` might seem to be an example where the reverse is true.

Christopher Bidmead, who has died, was the first of producer John Nathan Turner’s trio of script editors each of whom ushered in quite different approaches to Doctor Who.

`Brain of Morbius` should not work.

It’s a shame that this story is destined to sit forever at the foot of any poll you might run for this season yet there is a lot about `The Android Invasion` I really like.

Considering some of the talent involved on both sides of the camera (Dennis Spooner, Douglas Camfield, Peter Butterworth, Alethea Charlton) it’s somewhat disappointing that this story fails to catch light.

This is a fantastic book for those of us with fond memories of getting as close to travelling in the Tardis as we could at Blackpool’s Golden Mile each summer.

A fill in story apparently only roughly drafted by Terry Nation and then developed by Dennis Spooner, `The Chase` struggles to match the drama of it’s title.