Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

There's a great Doctor Who book floating out there called _Interference_ where the Doctor runs into an enemy who completely FUBAR's his past timeline. I love that idea and I'm kind of bummed out that the show never really exploited that aspect of time travel (ill-conceived Valeyard aside).

Doctor Who assistants - Search/Destroy
The Man That Ruined Doctor Who
Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic strips - Search/Destroy

MIND FITE!!!

Castrovalva is rubbish though!

The VERY FIRST companion was Susan, who was the doctor's DAUGHTER? No? She was interesting, it being 1963 and therefore pre- pop, let alone pre-Kate Millett: cuz she was SUPER-CLEVER, and the earth-boys were baffled and threatened and intrigued by this. But I don't remember her to look at since (a) B/W episodes never repeated

I remember the surviving B/W episodes being shown on UK Gold when UK Gold first started, in the early 90s. I think Susan told everyone that she was the doctor's granddaughter, but this might just have been a ploy to explain why he was her guardian to boring Earth people.

My favourite Doctor Who related thing is probably Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a Douglas Adams novel put together from late-70s Doctor Who scripts that were never broadcast. (as was the third Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book)

Exquisite. Simply... exquisite.

Tico - The BRANE OF MORBIUS should only be attempted after a couple of cans of RELAXANT in my opinion cos it is very silly. Also you will be annoyed by the rubbish assistant who falls over a lot. The priestesses are brilliant. But yes I am up for DOCTOR ACTION.

Secret flame! Secret fire!

Also the invention of real actual computers was catastrophic for Dr Who cos they insist on using them and seeing Z80 graphics on futuristic screens is more horrible than any rubber monster. Castrovalva has a particularly poor eg of this.

It is vvv amusing in Castrovalva when they are reading up on ZERO CO-ORDINATES on what looks like a primitive Teletext reader. I do not like the assistants there cos one of them IIRC tried to SHUN K-9. Bah humbug.

K-9 did a STERLING job in the Sun Makers.

X = reason why someone (who generally does not like Genre of which X is example) started to like Genre

Typical nerd response:

X = RUBBISH!!!

I hate nerds.

This leads us to a question I asked Mrs Tico Tico last night - why exactly was Beryl Reid famous again?

What I am trying to say is that for some people (including HSA) the rubber suits and stupid aliens were a turn-off, which distracted him from being able to appreciate the clever plots and interesting concepts which made Dr. Who so fantastic. Castrovalva had no rubbish monsters, but it did have an amazing concept.

So you get all these nerds going "My appreciation of Dr. Who is superior because I can look past the rubbish rubber monsters" (or even "I *like* the rubbish rubber monsters") which totally disregards the point that it is the concept and plots and writing which makes Dr. Who a cut above the usual rubber monster sci fi rubbish.

Mostly because he could do the thing that still sets great Dr. Who stories apart: a fairly stable system which suddenly has a relentless resourceful force of chaos rampaging through it.

I am a nerd, but I wasn't trying to pull a move of 'oh no that's not part of the canon' or 'oh no that's not obscure enough' - Castrovalva is highly regarded among Dr Who fans I've discovered, but that regard baffles me a bit.

spplutter, I am glad in the US Doctor Who never caught on w/ the fanboy community WHAT??

I have not been to that many conventions, but at the ones I've been to, the Doctor Who presence was miniscule compared to Star Trek, Star Wars, anime, etc.

Did anyone* see the Cruise of the Gods one off drama on telly this past Christmas. A bit sappy, but funny stuff and well observed, obviously from 1st hand experience.

* these people did http://www.delgados.co.uk/dailydiary_1201.htm

if you watch carefully at the end, when Morbius falls off the cliff his claw falls off, revealing the act-or's hand underneath.

As for Dr Who, I liked it as a kid and stopped watching soon after Tom Baker left, and have hardly looked back since. I watched the one off filmed special and thought it was utterly misjudged, same as everyone else.

This is the best one sentence description of Dr. Who ever.

I heart Dr. Who. But growing up I generally preferred UK SF TV (Dr. Who, and all the Gerry Anderson shows) to the tedious American ones.

It is utterly hilarious - if you've ever seen the Rowley Birkin QC drunk character from the Fast Show, then that's what it was like. Dear old Tom rambling away with stories that had bugger all to do with the episodes he was supposed to talk about (eg: "ah! Well, now, I don't recall a thing about this story, but I do know there was a delightful barmaid at the lovely little pub nearby. Smashing").

Towards the shows end he got all maudlin when he went over the fact that apart from a couple of guest spots on things, he's never really been succesful since. It was all rather sad.

Great viewing if you can find it, I wish I could remember the name of the thing.

Actually it *did* look rather ph33rs0m3 cos from the blurb on the back they seem to be taking over the world by controlling MANNEQUINS THE WORLD OVER. Arrrgh!

Why did I not steal this video? It is because I am a FULE. Also I forgot my shopping bags. Groo.

However, I've never seen it, except for the made-for-TV movie.

If I were to start, -where- should I start, and is it on DVD?

ignore the 2 doctors and the varos one

oh no! they are PUSHING THEIR WAY THRU BRACKEN!! oh NOOOOO!!

if i wasn't sitting down already i wd need to

I can't remember how the lowly superstar window dresser managed to make her come to life though. Wasn't she a cursed princess or something?

Tico I would love to borrow the episode. I sense it is something that should be watched under AMBIENT LIGHTING and clutching teddy bear/blanket/bottle of GIN, yes?

a great Dr Who thread would be S/D Minor Characters In 3rd Doctor Stories Who Exist Only To Get Killed At the Beginning.

Search: Pigbin Josh (eh, is he the one from Spearhead From Space? or is he from Claws Of Axos?)

correction: no convention in or near Singapore, he just pitched it outright as a Tenko cash-in ahead of the final series airing

previously, part 3:

1984-02-15: UP asks the Beeb if they'd shell out the full amount for the New Orleans shoot
1984-02-29: Trout and Jamie signed

1984-04-16: Beeb says no to US shoot
rest of April: UP suggests Venice instead; numbers are run and found to still be too expensive; a junior in the office suggests Seville, as she'd had a cheap holiday there earlier in the 1980s; UP cuts two (of eight) studio days & four (of twelve) location filming days, gets cast and crew to agree to minimal per diems, and books a holiday package deal with airfare, accom and breakfast included

early May:
Holmes reluctantly agrees to rewrite the three scripts of "The Kraalon Inheritance" to be set in Spain, throwing out 90% of the jokes, including a major throughline of differences between British and American English
making up for this reduction in humor, anagram enthusiast UP changes the aliums to an anagram of "gourmand," retitling serial "The Androgum Inheritance," and adds the name "Dastari" (A TARDIS).

late May:
in a helpful fever of creative contribution, UP changes the story title several more times, to Creation, Parallax, The Seventh Augmentation, The Seventh Amendment, and The Two Doctors.

June: fresh from the triumph of The Twin Dilemma, Peter Moffatt is booked as director, and hires two tall actors as Sontarans because he thinks they might seem non-threatening, even comical, if they are played as belligerent while being short. Or fitting into the costumes.

Cast and crew leave for location shoot 1984-08-07, with entire case of Androgum eyebrows and hairpieces getting permanently lost in transit. Various other disasters and illnesses plague the shoot, but Moffatt's efficient directorial style ensure no time is lost, even with only 2/3 of the shoot days available. Three studio sessions take place between August 30 and Sept 28, connecting us back to 1984-10-26: Holmes is sent the tape and asked to write a story set in Singapore, called "Yellow Fever And How To Cure It."

(the Python eps are just cutdowns of eps 1-3 and 4-6 of that season afaik. presumably a) the details exist but b) watching off-airs or receations would only prove the court right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_v._American_Broadcasting_Companies,_Inc.)

(the Python eps are just cutdowns of eps 1-3 and 4-6 of that season afaik. presumably a) the details exist but b) watching off-airs or receations would only prove the court right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_v._American_Broadcasting_Companies,_Inc.)

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic), Saturday, March 14, 2026 2:41 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

yeah i just have an unhealthy interest in monstrous perversions, such as Stolen Assets' Clutch Cargo's Unnamed Superfan's Loose Cannon's photocomposite's Donald Tosh's John Lucarotti's The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve. we're at the bottom of the uncanny marianas trench here lol

November 1984:
UP then asks him to add the Rani (a new bad Time Lady whose appearance was being shot at the time).
And to bring back the Autons, another alium monster creation from two Holmes stories, 14 and 13 years previously.
And to include the Master, the bad Time Lord introduced by Holmes 13 years earlier but never written again in the original character's run. Holmes had created a new, deadibones version of the character eight years previously, and never written it again. UP had debuted a third incarnation of the character three years earlier, used him in three consecutive stories, then in 14 episodes in another 24 months, and was also appearing in the currently-shooting story.

Having resented the "shopping list" nature of that year's previous commission, and been contemptuous of the requirement to rewrite it completely when the list turned out to be for a different supermarket, Holmes requests that the delivery date on the commission he was sent for the first episode be amended until after rights to use the Rani character, and to shoot in specific locations in Singapore, are secured.



...


1985-02-13: Holmes' agent is told that Singapore is confirmed, and subsequently sent a contract for all three episodes.

by 1985-02-25: Doctor Who is cancelled. After this hits newspapers on the 27th, the BBC announces that it's just taking a rest for a bit and the next season will air in 18 months.

early March 1985: Three of the six writers commissioned to write 45-minute-episode stories for S23 are asked to write them as 25-minute episodes instead for 1986, when S23 will be cut from 26 to 14 episodes.

late May: S23 is decided to be a single narrative, with all existing story plans dropped.

1985-07-09: Holmes' advance for 6x25 of Yellow Fever And How To Cure It is transferred to eps 1-4 and 13-14 of Trial Of A Time Lord.

(sometime in the 90s?): UP tells DWM his very detailed plan for the two-and-a-half hour story that he asked Holmes to write: Peri asks to go home to the USA, the TARDIS lands and they see the Statue Of Liberty out of the scanner screen. They open the door, but it's a 12-foot replica in a cultural garden in Singapore. As they leave, they don't notice some statues moving (omg Autons!). Maybe the Master and the Rani have joined a travelling street theatre?

sometime in the '00s: USF claims that he has the full three-part story outline and completed first 45-minute episode script.

By 2012, he says that he has mislaid the script, and the outline is somewhere in his shed, but his memories of reading them 27 years ago are so reliable that he has written a new 3-part version that he has had audio recorded and privately animated.

He also claims that in the revised S23, it was to be preceded by a story called Gallifrey, written by Eric Saward, which Saward had discussed in detail with him. This USF has also written himself and had animated, with changes to both in order to link planned themes and characters better.

The original story had conmen pulling a major scam, but in turn being used by a bunch of evil Time Lords, trying to frame Flavia and depose her. Eric and I had talked about it. Bob Holmes told him to expand on the Manchurian Candidate idea by having sleeper agents in place controlled by the evil Cardinal who would be the next President (Julian Glover). The ONLY element I added here was making it the Matrix secrets because they did crop up in the next story which was written by Bob Holmes, so they could easily have been used in Gallifrey anyway, as Bob was advising Eric on it. The Deadly Assassin had been one of the highest rated Doctor Who stories ever, and Eric, with Bob's guidance, wanted some more of that, and used the success factor to try to win JNT round to his way of thinking. After all, Arc Of Infinity hadn't exactly been a classic.

The original story ideas for both Yellow Fever and Gallifrey were both so outstandingly strong that they almost wrote themselves just by extrapolating each writer's original story plans.

In the real world, paperwork shows that Pip & Jane Baker were commissioned to write Gallifrey for the revised 25-min S23, but did not turn anything in before it was scrapped for Trial, and have confirmed they never put pen to paper. Eric Saward has confirmed that he never had anything to do with it, let alone writing an entire plotline and collaborating with Holmes on a half-year arc.

When presented with the paper trail on all the above, USF insists that Eric has a terrible memory, and that re Yellow Fever, Nick Courtney had agreed to be in it*, Peter Moffatt was hired to direct it**, the idea of the Rani being in it was dropped because Kate O'Mara was booked to be in the US shooting Dynasty for the entirety of 1985***, and that Holmes was still going to write Yellow Fever even after the entire season was scrapped for Trial****.

* never signed, never approached, never mentioned until USF's private animated version included UNIT
** the story never entered pre-production, as Dr Who was cancelled a little over a week after the story outline was requested
*** P&J were paid for the rights to use the Rani in January 1985. Kate O'Mara arrived in LA in mid-October 1985 to shoot her first episodes of Dynasty. Yellow Fever would have completed shooting before this.
**** Holmes formally withdrew from the YF commission when his fee was transferred to Trial.



By 2015, USF claimed that Gallifrey was commissioned for the 45-minute S23, and Saward argued that they should drop all the stories paid for, not just half of them in order to meet the reduced episode count, and UP was such a bitch that he then commissioned P&J to write the 25-min Gallifrey from Saward's outline, but that Saward "made such an almighty stink" that this commission was withdrawn a week later.

Eric finds this period so painful he has forgotten half of what happened, but Bob Holmes had offered the guidance of a mentor to Eric to write a story about con men, deposed Presidents, and sleeper agents with a hint of The Manchurian Candidate thrown in. Eric discussed the entire plot with me prior to the cancellation, but it never made it past the original story ideas as it would have been the last of the six stories to go into production, but Julian Glover was considered as the machiavellian arch villain President.

At this point USF revises his claim about Yellow Fever to be that he only ever had the outline, because Saward had been commissioned to novelise it for the Target book line, but later returned the advance and gifted USF the outline. Presumably due to trauma.

He also now says that

was a story about The Master, The Brigadier, UNIT, and Benton. The first half was set in London, with an Auton Prime Minister, the second half in Singapore. It would have been wonderful, especially with Graeme Harper directing.

It was very common to hire two directors in those days: a good one and a shit one.

The next paragraph from that version of the story is

I am really sick and tired of people spouting fantasy mistruths about this cancelled season.

One might propose a very specific solution to this frustration.

I always regretted its loss,down to being JNT's mouthpiece to Charles Catchpole of The Sun, and the dreaded Doctor In Distress, and I reconstructed three of the missing stories myself on audio, and did detailed visual recons on DVD of all six stories, with Nicola Bryant, Julian Glover, Milton Johns, Jon Levene, Waris Hussein, John Leeson, Nigel Plaskitt, Ian Fairbairn, and many many more. I am incredibly proud of them. Both Yellow Fever and Gallifrey were totally faithful to the original storylines.

I can 100% assure you all, no matter what anyone says to the contrary, that Gallifrey WAS to be the sixth story of that aborted season.

I apologise for not being able to track if this means that Gallifrey has moved from leading directly into Yellow Fever to following it.



Ten years after that: USF begs for donations to pay grifters to make multiple iterations of promptslop versions of Yellow Fever from his circa-2010 audio recordings of scripts that he had been able to type because the non-existent details he had imagined from never-existed outlines wrote themselves so comprehensively. He posts the results, to verifiable acclaim:

https://i.postimg.cc/dk6p6syr/Grf-BV4s-Xg-AAD7DQ.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/8JNxLJjy/Gu-TRz-GCXs-AATMo2.jpg

to wit,

the really bizarre stuff are his "reconstructions" of episodes that never existed, like "yellow fever". i tried watching one because i haven't ever actually seen a breakdown of the plot beats of it or know how far it got to having a script written. it was just so. fucking. bad. utterly execrable. sic, aldo, whoever, do you know how far "yellow fever" got and how much of this "recon" is just shitty ao3 fanfic?

The entire three-episode, 135-minute plot breakdown of "Yellow Fever And How To Cure It" consists of https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g294265-d324758-i202515446-Haw_Par_Villa-Singapore.html

(but Holmes would have had to add fifteen minutes of extra detail for the six-episode version.)

...

argh :( pics:

https://i.ibb.co/wFyCnXnq/Grf-BV4s-Xg-AAD7-DQ.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/Vc87RpT7/Gu-TRz-GCXs-AATMo2.jpg

ah! this would explain why i have never seen anything about this supposed story mentioned in any other source, including richard molesworth's holmes bio, which i do have a copy of, read, and liked, but can't recall very well. in general i get the impression that molesworth is a reputable, reliable writer who seems to have done a good deal of research, in contrast to unnamed superfan, who gives the impression of having nearly the exact same talent for self-promotion possessed by UP without _quite_ the level same level of artistic refinement as said UP. which leaves just one mystery left to solve: how the hell is moonstone's cover of "the visitors" such a fucking banger?

this does remind me though that i do wanna track down a copy of the book by that guy who wrote an early, pretty much entirely abandoned, draft of "the ark in space". i forget his name. not lucarotti. whoever did the info text on "the ark in space" did a good job on those... i learned a lot from them.

well i can't say that unnamed superfan doesn't know his audience, at least.

ok, i went through and watched the first three episodes straight through - i'd seen "day of armageddon" before, but i figured there was no point in just skipping from episode 1 to 3. i'm glad i did, because it really brought home that there is just no larger story at all here - it's as close as the show came to a classic movie serial. it's just a bunch of stupid, random shit happening with no larger point or real respect for its audience, and i love the story so much for that. hartnell here is doing what i kind of think of as "prequel trilogy george lucas", which is to say, a sort of burlesque, exaggerated version of the character he was supposed to play, with almost complete indifference to the actual lines. this is just as well, because the doctor here is written as an absolute bumbling idiot who has nothing but terrible ideas.

like, the literal first thing the doctor does on this story is land on a random planet and go out looking for drugs. he doesn't know anything about this planet - its name, its population, whether or not its atmosphere is _breathable_. he's just like "oh, cool, a hostile jungle planet. well, i'll go see if i can find someone here who has drugs." then nick courtney shows up - and he's great, god, just a joy to watch. we get some great scenes of courtney's character, bret vyon, and kert gantry doing this very... well, in my head they're gay lovers, is all i'm saying. why not, if bret vyon is apparently sara kingdom's brother, you know? everything in this story is just shit randomly thrown at the wall, and some of it is fun. i actually enjoyed watching the scene where lizan and roald argue about what to watch on TV. there's this real feel of, i don't know, kitchen-sink sci-fi. characters argue for no reason and then bret vyon tells them to "shut up" and then billy hartnell does this whole character bit where he's like, well, ok, the script says i'm supposed to say "no, you shut up," how can i do that in a way that feels like the doctor? ok, the line wasn't written as "we must get through! the daleks will stop at anything to prevent it!", but you know what, i like it better the way billy says it. it's a dumb line. it doesn't deserve to be read as written. really this is not terribly different from how tom baker around season 17 would deal with lines of dialogue he didn't like, but tosh and wiles were trying to bring a real season 18 vibe to things. fortunately tosh and wiles were so shit that they couldn't even manage to get rid of a lead actor who clearly couldn't remember his lines and was not well enough to continue in the role...

anyway, this kind of thing is just perfect for terry nation, because he's great at writing filler and this whole story is nothing but filler. i didn't realize that the macguffin doesn't even show up until episode two! which of course leads us to the great scene where bret vyon does a stealth takedown of seaweed alien zephon, solid snake-style (clearly going for that big boss rank), at which point the doctor has the brilliant idea of tying up zephon, stealing his clothes, and infiltrating the conference pretending to be zephon. i mean, the doctor isn't, in fact, a seaweed alien, doesn't sound anything like zephon, and doesn't even steal, apprently, the only significant part of zephon's costume, zephon's blinged out necklace. he's just a random guy in a black robe covering his face who doesn't know anything about what he's doing or why he's there. he still manages to steal the macguffin, though, because, like i said, this story has no respect whatsoever for its audience.

i am really enjoying watching douglas camfield's direction. i don't have any strong opinions on richard martin as a director (HE'S STILL FUCKING ALIVE!?!?!?), but the show was fun to watch, and the good kind of stupid, and i think a lot of this is down to camfield bringing a certain amount of panache to the proceedings, even if there's just nothing he can fucking do with desperus. god, what a piss-poor excuse for a "prison planet". apparently everyone there is a caveman? like, if the cavemen from "100,000 BC" spoke english, it'd be basically the same fucking thing. i also have to say that clearly nobody had any idea at all how to write katarina, because as written she's a complete fucking idiot who believes she's dead and is incapable of understanding concepts like "keys" and "drugs". adrienne hill does the best with what she's given, which is, really, less than nothing. perhaps that's why i'm so fond of the character!

best discovery from the episodes - i have heard the complete soundtracks, but it hits different to be able to actually watch them - is that the doctor _invented his own bondage furniture_. i know there are a lot of weird things about the first doctor era of who, but even by those standards "doctor who, designer of kink furniture" is, uh, a little odd. for the record - i'm speaking as someone who's seen a fair amount of kink furniture here - the doctor should stick to his day job of saving the universe. dungeon interior design is not his forte.

---

technical notes: it doesn't seem to have undergone much restoration at all... episode 1 in particular looks not great... the closing credits scroll is obviously misaligned, for instance. i'm not really connected with broader fan communities... are these prints suppressed field or stored field? has their been much speculation on the source of the prints? like, we now have five of the eleven-ish episodes of this story, from three different recoveries... is it fair to assume that they're all from the same set of prints, either the set that we know was sent to australia or another set that was made at some point before the videotapes were wiped? like, maybe there was a set that went walkies in a way where it wasn't, like, extremely well valued or desired or cared for. these were just some old junk prints of some old TV show. and since they weren't valued, any or all of them could have been junked by now, or they could still be around somewhere. i don't buy into these "hoarder" theories where there's some superfan sitting on a hoard of 50 episodes that they're keeping for themselves... that's probably true in at least _one_ specific case, but given what i know of film collectors, a lot of it is just weirdo film collectors with weirdo film that they don't want to talk too much about because it's _technically illegal_ and they don't want to get in trouble, nevermind the fact that they don't even know what half of the shit they have is (hi, i'm a digital hoarder with way too much random uncategorized shit on her file server!)