Bought this in London last week. Excellent value - six Hartnell epsiodes of classic story, plus various mini-documentaries, including a short silent film shot by Carole Ann Ford on her last day as Susan (featuring William Hartnell with no wig and looking ten years younger).

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is good - in fact, the first three episodes are excellent, with the Dalek coming out of the river at the end of episode one, and episode three a real high point, with the scenes of the Daleks in London, wandering past Westminster, congregating in Trafalgar Square, and patrolling the Albert Memorial (having obviously somehow got up the steps) particularly effective. That is also the episode where Susan tells David of her feeling of dislocation: "I never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to. I’ve never had any real identity." And the incidental music is great - I hadn't heard of the composer Francis Chagrin before but he was apparently a well known film composer; shall look out for his other work. There is a real feeling of occupied Europe resisting the Nazis (and I write this in a village which experienced that directly rather than just in the cinema).

It is a bit let down by episode four, with no Doctor in sight and the rather rubber-suited Slyther, and the Daleks' actual plan when revealed stretches our suspension of disbelief. But the pace is kept up (especially by Jacqueline Hill as Barbara).

And finally the departure of Susan. Beautifully done, the first time that a member of the regular cast had left the show. "Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine," says the Doctor, promising to return, but we know he never will.

I was intrigued by this story after the positive write-up given it by Cornell, Day and Topping in The Discontinuity Guide. Although the film of this Hartnell story is lost, I managed to get hold of a fan "reproduction", with black and white pictures of scenes from the programme montaged against the original sound-track. I watched it late last night, and was not wildly impressed. But this may have been due to just being too tired to take it in properly - I went back to a couple of key scenes this morning to check points for this review and suddenly found myself being drawn into it much more.

Is this the only Doctor Who story featuring just the Doctor and a single, male, companion? Indeed the Doctor himself features only in one and a half episodes out of four, with William Hartnell credited as the Abbot of Amboise in the middle two episodes, though of course Steven (and the audience) are unsure about whether he is really the Doctor in disguise. Peter Purves really has to carry the entire story until half way through the last episode, and is just about up to it.

In some ways it's actually the basic Doctor Who plot - Tardis arrives in the midst of fiendish political plotting, our heroes make friends with one of the locals and have to sort out the goodies from the baddies. The interesting wrinkles are that the setting is not an alien planet but an obscure corner of French history, the 1572 massacre of the Huguenots, and that the baddies win. Looking at its place in the original broadcast sequence, it came immediately after The Dalek Master Plan in which not one but two companions were killed off, so fitted into a bleak rather than comic phase.

But it really does come alive in the fourth and final episode, when the Doctor reappears without deigning to explain where he has been. He and Steven actually leave Paris with ten minutes of story yet to go, leaving time for them to have a row, Steven to walk out of the Tardis in disgust, Dodo Chaplet to walk into it by mistake, and then Steven to return. In his brief moment on his own, the Doctor delivers a soliloquy which sounds much much better than it looks in script:

Steven:	I tell you this much, Doctor, wherever this machine of yours lands next I'm getting off. If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part.
Doctor:	We've landed. Your mind is made up?
(The TARDIS doors open.)
Steven:	Goodbye.
Doctor:	My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don't quite fully understand. Why should we? After all, we're all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore, don't try and judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe.
(Steven walks out of the Tardis.)
Doctor:	Even after all this time, he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors. Now they're all gone. All gone. None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan, or Vicki. Yes. And there's Barbara and Chatterton... Chesterton! They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now Steven. Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can't. I can't.

Anyway, we've been watching The Dalek Invasion of Earth as well, and loving it. More on that in due course.

12) Doctor Who and the State of Decay, by Terrance Dicks

This is Dicks' novelisation of his own script for the 1980 Fourth Doctor story featuring Romana, K9, Adric (who stowed away on the Tardis at the end of the previous story) and vampires. Suffers from the usual problems of the novelisations - too much reliance on dialogue in particular, and Dicks' rather flat prose. Still I remembered a couple of vivid moments from the series - the high-tech destruction of the Great Vampire by the Doctor, and also the rather clumsily written moment where Adric attempts to assure Romana that he's on her side - weakened the dramatic impact drastically as I remember, though perhaps that was the fault of Matthew Waterhouse's acting. I had forgotten that the Doctor found the key piece of information on magnetic data disks left by Rassilon in every Tardis just in case. Good nostalgia, though I really read it as preparation for the two sequels.

Over the last few weeks, an episode here and an episode there, I've been watching the first ever appearance of the Doctor's ultimate foes, first broadcast in 1963-1964 in seven episodes. Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker's novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:

1) the settings were very convincing - the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.

2) Barbara's romance with Ganatus - there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?

3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.

4) The time travellers, despite Barbara's relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.

5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger - with a brutal resolution

6) Terry Nation's attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.

7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes - sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.

8) the one bit that really didn't work - the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.

Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy's assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)

I've been catching up on classic Doctor Who which I had not previously seen.

Watched "The Sontaran Experiment" last weekend. It comes between two excellent stories of Tom Baker's first season, "The Ark In Space" and "Genesis Of The Daleks". Alas, the two episodes in between are not much cop, with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah running around a quarry and falling down holes, in the company of some dishevelled stranded astronauts, a Sontaran and a robot reminiscent of Graeme Garden's computer from the Goodies. The final victory is implausible even by Doctor Who standards of plausibility, and the experimentation scenes gratuitously nasty without adding much to the plot.

Jon Pertwee's first story, "Spearhead from Space", is a different matter. ( lengthy explanation of why )

The whole thing made me realise just how true to the series' traditions "Rose" was. Like "Rose", "Spearhead from Space" was effectively a relaunch of the series - six-monthly runs of stories, all in colour, all set on Earth. They had to prove that the old show could work in the new format, and they succeeded. (Compare "Attack of the Cybermen" which was surely when the writing went on the wall for the old run.)

Finally, isn't it amazing how few of the great stories from the original TV run of Doctor Who were not touched by Robert Holmes at some point? I hadn't quite taken in that apart from being script editor for the first (and best) Tom Baker years, he also wrote this, "The Ark in Space", "Carnival of Monsters", "The Caves of Androzani", "The Deadly Assassin", "The Krotons", "The Power of Kroll" (well, we all have an off day), "The Ribos Operation", "The Sun Makers", "The Talons of Weng Chiang", "Terror of the Autons", "The Time Warrior", and "The Two Doctors". Plus a couple more I'd completely forgotten about. Will have to add more to my collection...

...it was the pilot I watched yesterday morning, because we watched the real thing later on in the evening. Thanks to captain_wesker, blue_condition and Paul Cornell for putting me right.

Didn't think there was much to choose between them, to be honest. The broadcast version is a slight improvement, with the Doctor's costume and the line "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be travellers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles?".

My birthday haul was (mostly) waiting for me when I got back from Sweden, and was much appreciated:

• The Medieval Cookbook, by Maggie Black;
• Old Man's War, by John Scalzi and Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (actually not explicitly a birthday present, but happened to arrive at the right moment)
• Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
• The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The DVD set of Doctror Who: The Beginning

I am going to watch last night's episode again later on, but Anne and I watched the very first ever episode of Doctor Who from November 1963 more or less as soon as I could got the wrapping off. It is rather surprisingly good.

Did the theme music continue playing over the opening scenes with the policeman, after the title sequence had finished, when it was first shown? An awfully good touch.

Susan's line about decimalisation must have sounded a bit irrelevant in 1963. In 2006 it is a really palpable hit.

The title character does not even appear until over halfway through the 25 minutes, and unless I missed it, he is never once addressed as "Doctor". The answer to the question "Doctor Who?" is really given only in the closing credits, when you have to work out that he was the character played by William Hartnell.

Once he is there, though, he totally owns the show. The lines themselves could have done with a little fine-tuning, but are delivered with great conviction:

You have heard the truth. We are not of this race. We are not of this Earth. We are wanderers in the fourth dimension of Space and Time. Cut off from our own planet and our own people by aeons and universes far beyond the reaches of... err, your most advanced sciences.

The "aeons and universes" are at the centre of a dubiously mixed metaphor, in that they are both a mechanism for cutting off the Doctor and Susan from their home, and also potentially within the reach of sufficiently advanced science. But if I hadn't had the subtitles on, I would not have picked up on this point.

I was actually expecting also the lines, "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be travellers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles?" - and am now wondering if I accidentally watched the pilot episode by mistake. No doubt someone knowledgable on my friends list will put me right.

When I first saw this in 1981, the repetition of the title sequence over the Tardis dematerialising seemed to be tedious and long, but trying to imagine how it would have seemed to a new viewer in 1963 I felt it was pretty memorable and effective.

Some day I'll read through all this commentary. But in summary, I thought it was pretty good.

Certain circumstances have enabled me to watch the 1965 Doctor Who story, "The Crusade", this evening. (With a break to watch a BBC2 documentary about, er, the Crusades.) Sadly only episodes 1 and 3 survive in full, but we have the audio of episodes 2 and 4 with reconstruction via photographs etc. It is rather enjoyable.

In particular, there are three strong guest stars - Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart, Jean Marsh (ex-wife of future Doctor Who Jon Pertwee) as his sister Joanna, and Walter Randall as the fictional villain el-Akir (Randall's career seems to have been otherwise not awfully memorable bit parts but he did this pretty well, I thought). I'll put in a word also for Viviane Sorrell as Fatima, who (according to IMDB) never played another role on-screen. And the regular cast are good (though Vicki not given much to do).

The plot is a fairly basic "time-travellers get caught up in real historical events and spent most of the story untangling themselves" one but done effectively, with a real sense of different places as between Crusader-controlled Jaffa and Saracen-controlled Lydda. (Though the thicket in which the Tardis lands does not look in the least Palestinian.) Of course, because the Doctor and Barbara know their history, this gives rise to the usual potential for time paradoxes, though with a certain air of wistfulness:

VICKI: Doctor, will he really see Jerusalem?

THE DOCTOR: Only from afar. He won't be able to capture it. Even now his armies are marching on a campaign that he can never win.

VICKI: That's terrible.

THE DOCTOR: Hmm!

VICKI: Can't we tell him?

THE DOCTOR: I'm afraid not, my dear. No. History must take its course.

A particularly striking aspect is the use of rhythm in the script. I found one website claiming that parts of it were actually written in iambic pentamenter, and, well, it's nearly true; see what you think.

RICHARD: We think our words were plain enough.

THE DOCTOR: It is
a good scheme, sire, if the princess agrees.

RICHARD: (quietly) Joanna knows nothing of this matter.

THE DOCTOR: Will she agree?

RICHARD: (firmly) You should rather ask
how can she refuse? To stem the blood,
bind up the wounds and give a host of men
lives and futures? Oh, now there's a marriage
contract to put sacrifice to shame
and make a saint of any woman.

LEICESTER: Sire,
with all the strength at my command I urge you,
sire, to abandon this pretence of peace!

THE DOCTOR: (angrily) Pretence, sir? Here's the opportunity
to save the lives of many men and you
do nought but turn it down! Without any
kind of thought. What do you think you are doing?

LEICESTER: I speak as a soldier. Why are we here
in this foreign land if not to fight?
The Devil's horde, Saracen and Turk,
possess Jerusalem and we will not
wrest it from them with harried words.

THE DOCTOR: With swords, I suppose?

LEICESTER: Aye, with swords and lances, or the axe.

THE DOCTOR: You stupid butcher! Can you think
of nothing else but killing, hmm?

LEICESTER: You're a man for talk, I can see that.
You like a table and a ring of men.
A parley here, arrangements there, but when
you men of eloquence have stunned each other
with your words, we, we the soldiers
have to face it out. On some half-started
morning while you speakers lie abed,
armies settle everything, giving sweat
sinewed bodies ironed life itself.

THE DOCTOR: I admire bravery and loyalty, sir.
You have both of these. But, unfortunately you haven't any brain at all. I hate fools!

LEICESTER: A fool can match a coward any day.

(Leicester pulls out his sword and faces the Doctor.)

RICHARD: Enough of this! (to Leicester)
You dare to flourish arms before your King?

(Leicester reluctantly sheaths his sword.)

Perhaps I should start writing my livejournal entries in blank verse. I know of two people who do all theirs in haiku - which is all very well, but I tend to have more to say.

Yes, I admit it; I splashed out on the new Genesis of the Daleks DVD, and it arrived today, and we watched the bit from Blue Peter (with John Noakes, Peter Purves and Lesley Judd) and the first three episodes tonight. And it is Great.

I couldn't help but feel that Nyder is just ever so slightly Peter Robinson to Davros' Paisley. But perhaps that is an Evil Thought.



Do you see what I mean?

The Discontinuity Guide seems to suggest that Season 7 (Pertwee's first) was particularly good. Views?

alexwilcock has been watching old Doctor Who series:
Second Doctor: The Ice Warriors
Fourth Doctor: The Deadly Assassin [corrected!]
Fifth Doctor: Arc of Infinity
Seventh Doctor: The Curse of Fenric
[Edited to add: Fourth Doctor: The Androids of Tara]

Since December 24th I have watched a lot of Doctor Who for the second time. Spoiler-free summaries follow, in the order in which they were first broadcast (but I should first of all mention that all but the last of the stories below are at least mentioned in Graham Sleights' superb essay for Strange Horizons, Take Me To The Fantastic Place):

( dockeroo: Pyramids of Mars, Rose, Dalek, The Long Game, [Father's Day], The Empty Child, [Hugo nominations], The Christmas Invasion )

Bought this 1965 Doctor Who series on video at Worldcon, along with Remembrance of the Daleks. My hopes were not especially high, as I knew that the Empire State Building, the Mary Celeste and Dracula's castle are settings for parts of the story. But I didn't really know quite what to expect - the only other William Hartnell series I've seen is An Unearthly Child, way back in 1983 when it was repeated for the 20th anniversary. It's also the first time I've watched any entire series of the "old" Doctor Who since the new one started.

Before I put the lengthy comments behind the cut tag, let us just all agree that it is a real shame that Brian Epstein vetoed the idea of the Beatles appearing as themselves but much older, playing at a fiftieth anniversary concert set in, I suppose, 2013. Apparently the Fab Four were on for it but their manager was not impressed, so at least we get a rare studio clip of them playing "Ticket to Ride". This also gives us a couple of good lines, as the Doctor complains when the machine is switched off that "You've squashed my favourite Beatles", and Vicki tells us that she has "been to their memorial theatre in Liverpool… but I didn't know they played classical music!" (But how does Ian know the words to "Ticket to Ride"? After all, he left Earth the day after President Kennedy was assassinated...)

Well, to my surprise there were some more tolerably good bits. The Mechanoid city was great. The Dalek/Mechanoid battles were fun. The rapidly rotating planet Aridius was well done. The Dalek's emergence from the sand dune at the end of the first episode is pretty good. To my surprise, I even quite liked the Mary Celeste bit, though my wife and mother-in-law snorted with giggles, and the final shots of the deserted ship with the last view of the name plate was quite effective. And there was a real feeling of time passing for the characters, not just the rapid rotation of Aridius but also the meals, the Doctor and companions sleeping, things we don't often see happening.

Other good bits: The location scenes on the planet Aridius (though it also appears to be the setting for the Gettysburg Address). the scene where the other three think they've lost Vicki, and her attempts to contact them from the Daleks' time machine. Peter Purves' performance as Steven Taylor, stranded rocket pilot and Ben Gunn lookalike. Indeed all three companions are on form throughout, even Barbara playing machine guns with the Doctor's Dalek-killing device. Hartnell, when he's awake, is good, but he fluffs a number of lines and was perhaps personally upset at the departure of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, leaving him the sole survivor of the original cast. And their departure is a rather moving moment as well.

My one complaint of Vicki/Maureen O'Brien isn't really her fault, but has to do with the crapness of three of the monsters. On four occasions she is attacked - by a Mire Beast, an Aridian, and two Fungoids - and more or less has to walk into them - I think she actually has to wind the Mire Beast's tentacle around her own neck. She pulls it off well, but the only monsters that are any good in this story are the Mechanoids, and that's not saying a lot.

Oh yeah, and the Daleks. Can't count, fall off boats, can't kill Frankenstein's monster or Dracula, easily confused by Barbara's cardigan. But this is because they are being funny, which is sort of OK but you don't want it every time. The robot Doctor I didn't mind too much, but he fluffed the crucial line which was supposed to let the companions know he was the fake - the script says he addresses Vicki as "Susan", but I missed it.

The first two episodes, on Aridius, have good settings and filming - had Dune already been published before this story was written? In magazine form, surely, but maybe not yet as a novel. But the Aridians and Mire Beasts are ludicrous. The Empire State Building scene was simply pointless. The Mary Celeste, as I said earlier, I rather liked.

The Hammer House of Horrors sequence worked rather better if the Doctor's theory was right - "we were lodged for a period in an area of human thought" - rather than it being a festival sideshow in a 1996 where the Chinese rule Ghana. But maybe that, too, is but an area of human thought. (At the very beginning Ian is reading a book called "Monsters from Outer Space - Science Fiction". The ISFDB doesn't seem to have heard of this one, so presumably it has yet to be published in Our Time Line, or else is imported from the one where the Chinese rule Ghana.)

I really hated a) the jazzy intro music, b) the time vortex shots and c) the Shakespeare meets Elizabeth I scene.

Sorry this is a bit disjointed. Lots more in-depth analysis of The Chase by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore here, by Paul Clarke here, by Cameron Mason here, and by numerous reviewers here.

Listening to the audio verison of "Fury from the Deep" episode 1 on my way to work, I was intrigued by the accent of one of the characters; he sounded distictly African, and I wondered if this might be the first example of a black character in a Doctor Who story set in contemporary Britain (let alone the future)?

However it turned out that the character, van Lutyens, was supposed to be Dutch; he even finishes his first scene with a Verdomme! (recorded in the script as "mutters his reply in Dutch"). The actor, John Abineri, was apparently fluent in German, but that doesn't explain the accent in this case.

I suppose it's simply that to a British audience in 1968 (and indeed to a British actor) a South African accent sounded more realistically "Dutch" than a Dutch accent would have done. This was, after all, years before the UK joined the EEC. (I never saw "Van der Valk", which started in 1972; did its Dutch characters have accents? Or was it all played as if everyone spoke perfect English? Which of course is not totally unrealistic for Amsterdam.)

Yesterday at PicoCon, Jon Courtenay Grimwood was saying that he reckoned all good British sf was now being written by people from the left side of the political spectrum, and someone, either he or Brian Stableford, went on to argue that this was all a reaction to Thatcherism, which was admittedly a deeply traumatic and formative political experience, even on those of us from parts of the archipelago less affected by her economic and social policies (ie both parts of Ireland).

( It's not the whole story, though. )