Doctor Who: Classic or Dud?

There are too many great stories to count, but my favourite episode is probably The Ark In Space, or whatever that scary one with the sleeping people in the space station that got eaten by giant bees.

Also, the whole season that was the "key to time" story arc, I can't remember the name of any individual episodes, but just the fact that the Sonic Screwdriver ended up being the key on which the whole universe hinged was pretty damned cool. Plus, I had, like, a huge crush on Adrik, the original indie maths nerd, when I was a pre-teen. Though of all the companions, I think Romana was the coolest, just cause I wanted to *be* her. She was smarter than the Dr, after all. :-)

Funny, cause all the things that people point to, saying it's a dud- abysmally low production budget, lack of special effects, socks with googley eyes glued on for monsters- were all the things that made it endearing. And the quality of writing was just AMAZING- the minimal budget that they had, they spent on getting the very best in sci fi writers to come up with concepts and stories so engaging that you didn't care that it looked crap.

I could go on at length, but I've already outed myself as a geek enough on this board for one week...

"Doctor Who" was far and away my favorite show growing up. "The Ark In Space" is definitely high on my list, along with "The Robots of Death", "Kinda", "The Caves Of Androzani", the whole Key To Time season, "Inferno", "The Mind Robber"... Oh, I could go on and on. Favorite Doc is Davison, mostly because he managed to pull off underplaying the role and comes across as even more powerful because of it. Hell, I'm so into it that I've got EVERY book published in the New Adventures series from _Timewyrm: Genesys_ in the Virgin series through _Vanishing Point_ in the BBC series. (I do draw the line at conventions, though. Even when I was a kid, I thought the entire concept of a Doctor Who convention filled with adults dressed as these characters to be really disturbing.)

Best companions? Without a doubt, Leela, Romana I, Tegan, Sarah Jane, and Turlough. Especially Leela. (cf: fictional characters I've had a crush on)

Classic: the (original) Master, played by Roger Delgado.

Dud: all the stuff with Unit (ur-notion for the Initiative in Buffy? Only rubbish instead of good, obviously), and Pertwee himself (to me = Troughton nut). But Pertwee's ENEMIES were often grate (=Devils, Sea Devils: one of the Devils was called BOD!!)

Ten-ton dud: Tom "Overract why fucking don't you" Baker. But the Gallifrey/Time Lord business was often amusing.

Three-ton dud: Peter Davidson. BUT the ing on the first season of stories (esp. CASTROVALVA, abut timewarps and paradoxes, name taken from a lithograph by ESCHER = overlooked classic)

Hundred-ton duds: subsequent Doctors /Peter Cushing movies

Castrovalva! Was that the one where they were trapped in the scarily moebius strip city that Adrik (ah, archetype of all indie mathsrock nerds of my heart...) discovered that he had mistakenly created with his mathematical formulae?

Oh, and here's a question: K-9, what think you? Super-cool uber gadget who always saved the day, or annoying cutesy ploy, the Dr. Who equivalent of Ewoks?

Man, I have always wished that I had a sonic screwdriver!

Castrovalva and Adrik: very possibly correct — of course, this era Who is NEVER repeated (cuz supposedly a decline on Pertwee/ Baker), plus my memory is swirling away like asteroids into a time discontinuity anyway, so I don't recall. Part of my mathrock reason for liking Adrik was that the maths was, erm, not utterly entirely bogus. (mathrock = mathmath in my case...)

Jo = my major crush-assistant, I suppose. Can't be: she always screamed and wuz scared. Who was the one who ACTUALLY DIED? Played by Jean Marsh (later of Upstairs Downstairs). Or am I tripping?

GOT IT! My major crush assistant was Zoe!! (This too is a Wow-factor thing...)

Sub-thread Q: lamest Dr Who assistant?

Mark is right - it's your second. Peter Davison in my case. This theory probably falls down if applied to any post-Davison due to transcendental awfulness.

Jean Marsh played Sara Kingdom in "The Dalek Masterplan" and has the distinction of being the only companion to join and die in the same story. (Of course, "The Dalek Masterplan" went on for 16 episodes or something like that...)

"Castrovalva" is definitely the one where the Master uses Adric to generate a trans-dimensional mathematical construct solely to trap a confused and newly-regenerated Doctor.

Patrick Troughton rocked the house as far as I can tell. The only stories of his I've really seen are "The Mind Robber" and "The War Games", though, so I don't have enough evidence to knock Davison outof the top spot. The Yeti were SORELY underused, though.

Frasier Hines, who played Jamie, was also on "Upstairs, Downstairs".

The Doctor had three companions die during the television series; Srar Kingdom, Katarina, and Adric. The books added Liz Shaw and Roslynn Forrester to this list, plus the Brigadier is now living out the rest of his life in an alternate dimension populated by faries. (No, really.)

The misfortune of the Peri character was teaming her with the sixth Doctor. Either forceful, grating personality could have worked, but both together were a SHOCKINGLY bad idea. Interestingly enough, the new fiction line has managed to not only completely salvage Peri and the sixth Doctor, but also the hideously misconceived Melanie Bush, who has gone from being a chirpy nightmare to one of the more capable people the Doctor has travelled with.

Worst companion? Victoria Waterfield, aka the extremely wet Victorian girl whose sole function was to scream, "Help me Jamie!" at every opportunity. They replaced her with Zoe for reason, folks...

No, but that would have been awesome! More sad fannishness:

Sixth Doctor, "Trial of a Timelord". The Doctor gets taken outof time by the Timelords and put on trial for being a general menace to the universe. As it transpires, he was pulled out of time as he was rushing to rescue Peri from having her brain sucked out and replaced with one from a slug-like dictator. Therefore, he wasn't there to save her and she was killed, becoming an evil pod person. The companion who ended up replacing her, Mel, was played by Bonnie Langford.

(At the end of the trial, it's strongly hinted that Peri was actually saved by one of the people fighting the evil slugs and ended up marrying him, which is why I didn't list her amongst the dead.)

And he had a soft spot for Jo. There's a scene in "The Green Death", at some point after she announces her engagement to Dr Jones, where he glances at her as if to say 'if I were ten...fifteen years younger'. Quite touching really.

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; and (b) her character/look is overlaid by things I much later read in ancient second-hand TV comic-books and by the very repeated film with Bernard fucking Cribbins in it). (BC = cool, just not appropriate to this story...)

But I do remember a scene with her in it, which is poorly revisited in the film, when the white bedford van she is in (driven by a dalek-resistance soldier) is strafed by the giant dalek ship. Cuz where I lived and where my dad worked the staff van was a white bedford van, and when I was in it, I often used to check out that there was enough foliage near enough that I could jump out of the van — as Susan had — and roll to cover into it, shd the dalek ship appear and begin strafing.

That is all. (That is enough...)

An episode of Fireball XL5 gave me the all- time nightmares-for-week spooking, though.

My memory of this is hazy, despite being told this story dozens of times in my youth, but by all accounts he was very nice, askign K9 why he wasn't in the tardis, who his friend was and so on. What a nice chap.

Best series Genesis of the Daleks, but only cos a friend did it as a one man show. His interpretation of Davros was jumping around in a frying pan, tom Baker was a pan on the head.

tom Baker was the best imho.

Ace was very annoying though, and janet what's her name from Blue peter

Anyway, Jo (Katy Manning) destroyed and stomped on my pre-adolescent heart by marrying the dull Sgt. Benson in the Pertwee/Unit days. I've never ever recovered, never will and don't want to. A goddess.

Great call on Roger Delgado. A scary mutha in a very English way.

Mark: my school library also always had the Mail. The librarian was a self-described "true blue" Tory, hmmm, what a surprise ...

Taking sides: Peanuts vs The Perishers

Did you all see the mid-90's TV movie with Paul McGann and Daphne Ashbrook? Any comments?

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!

holy shit that video is fucked up, it's kind of amazing. I imagine in 10 years the output will be so good that it will blow us away, but I kind of like this fucked up weird acid trip version.

Revived this because I am finally getting around to Season 26, the classic last McCoy season. For some reason I have never seen these even though they're regarded as his best season and in fact, one of the best seasons of the show ever, I believe. Marc Platt, Ben Aarronovich, these guys are great writers. When these first aired in the US my local PBS station couldn't afford the rights the first few years, so I just never caught them, and even though they've been on dvd and streaming for ages now I'm just now getting to them. Through Ghost Light now; cheesy effects as always, and really annoying sound mix (too-loud soundtrack was not just a thing on Doctor Who during the Matt Smith years) these are great.

After this I'll either go back and watch a bunch of early things I haven't seen in over 30 years now, or finally pick up where I left off (mid Jodi Whittaker season 1).

fyi that the blu-rays have versions of most of the S25/26 stories with essentially “writers cuts” that flow better or make more sense than the versions that were broadcast

I like the Ace/Professor pairing better than the stories themselves, but it’s a very good season - although I can’t remember Battlefield at all, I don’t think I’ve seen it since 1989! Fenric is the best although iirc it gets a bit silly at the end. Survival is daft too, but I love the time capsule of the northwest London suburbs in the setup - it’s not far from where I grew up. I guess you don’t get New Adventures and nu Who without this season.

I read the novelization of Ghost Light before I saw the story and maybe I would change my mind if I saw it again but at the time I remember thinking “had I not read the book, this would be wholly incomprehensible”

There’s so much going on in the characters’ heads that doesn’t translate to the screen, the entire story is basically a series of arbitrary weird nonsense

oh ghost light is 100% incomprehensible but it's really fun

I'm watching BluRay rips of these; battlefield is a re-edit and so is Fenric

Missing episode recovery rumours bubbling up again as they tend to do every few years -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWyB_KiFKws

Paul V has said for years he knew of one or two in the hands of collectors and now Film Is Fabulous has charitable status they're using it to try and secure the films before the collectors die.

The families have no idea what they hold - we had a fascinating conversation at an event where he admitted that the Norman Warren collection was recovered from a skip after his death, as house clearers had just dumped it.

well this sucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyHK35zuM7s

guess i'm not getting any more of the classic Doctor Who blu-ray box sets :(

yuk

i watch doctor who (and all 60s/70s/80s tele) off DVDs on a 4:3 CRT set

and in our fallen world, that is the closest we can get to what God intended

(i know it might sound like i'm joking but i'm not, I picked an old CRT up off the street years ago and just love the fuzzy warmth of the picture - it is like the TV equivalent of being a vinyl/turntable fetishist (which i also am))

the rumors were true, apparently! www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g7kwq1k11o

My son was finally ready to restart watching some older episodes (we were midway through 10th doctor when he lost interest), only to find it’s no longer on HBO. Only streamer right now is Brit Box which we don’t subscribe to.

is it not on yt streaming anymore?

anyway episodes 1 and 3 of "the daleks' masterplan", god, that's five out of the 12 (or 13) found so far... kind of shocking how much of it has turned up, maybe the other six (episode 7 being pretty unlikely to be recovered) will turn up sometime

Doctor Who is on the library streamer Hoopla for the U.S. folk, all nu-Who up to Season 13, Whitaker’s third.

unbelievable news re recovered eps, it is remarkable they are still out there (although the quiet part is some collector sat on them for decades knowing how sought after they were?)

Holy cow! I’ve been going through Hartnell as exercise bike viewing and I just started The Chase which seems quite a lot better than most since the previous Terry Nation story.

the quiet part is some collector sat on them for decades knowing how sought after they were?

I'm quite close to the missing film community and the problem is - particularly with the older collectors who have hoarded a lot of this stuff - the threat of prosecution has never technically gone away. It's less likely, but still a real threat (no matter how remote). This still seems to be a little known story in the real world:

https://filmstories.co.uk/features/bob-monkhouse-his-movie-collection-and-the-bizarre-serious-crime-squad-case/#:~:text=Yet%20Monkhouse%20found%20himself%2C%20inadvertedly,film%20can%20by%20film%20can.

When someone as high profile as that gets done, you bunker down.

The next real issue is that a lot of these people, very sadly, die either alone or with distant family and their collections just get junked because relatives or a house clearer either don't know what they are or don't care. That's the space where Film Is Fabulous are working in - building a relationship with them while they're still alive so the family know what to do with the film when they're gone.

Paul V told me that he rescued the entire Norman J Warren home movie collection (including stuff he'd made as a teenager) from a skip out side his house after he died and that was only, what, 5 years ago?

I'm quite close to the missing film community and the problem is - particularly with the older collectors who have hoarded a lot of this stuff - the threat of prosecution has never technically gone away. It's less likely, but still a real threat (no matter how remote). This still seems to be a little known story in the real world:

The next real issue is that a lot of these people, very sadly, die either alone or with distant family and their collections just get junked because relatives or a house clearer either don't know what they are or don't care. That's the space where Film Is Fabulous are working in - building a relationship with them while they're still alive so the family know what to do with the film when they're gone.

Paul V told me that he rescued the entire Norman J Warren home movie collection (including stuff he'd made as a teenager) from a skip out side his house after he died and that was only, what, 5 years ago?

― Overtoun House windows (aldo)

that's a good call-out!

i'm _not_ close to the missing film community but i have read bartok and joseph's "a thousand cuts" and it really shed light on some of the issues in the community. in the US in the 1970s there was an infamous case where the FBI went after private film collectors, including Roddy McDowall, at the behest of the studios, and it casts a long shadow. one of the interesting things that also came out from the book is that there was a preponderance of gay men collecting films, which doesn't seem directly relevant except that when you're dealing with guys who were gay in the '70s, it sadly means that yes, a lot of them do die alone and don't have kids and have hoarded this vast collection of stuff that family often see as a nuisance to get rid of. there are _so_ many stories about collections like this of all kinds.

it's also worth pointing out that issues like this can occur even when the films are public domain! i listened to a podcast recently about the goon (somethingawful forum members) who ran across the working print for "manos: the hands of fate", which was _much_ higher quality than any of the other prints in existence. even though the movie was clearly and manifestly in the public domain, that didn't stop some grifter from making all kinds of trouble for the dude, who was a solid guy and on the up-and-up. the grifter roped in one of the family members of someone associated with the film as well. ultimately he didn't have a legal leg to stand on, but even though he very obviously didn't, the guy who found the prints still went through a _lot_ of bullshit to try and get the print released.

there's this whole mythos of the "nefarious hoarder" and probably there are people like that out there... i don't necessarily have a lot of sympathy for whoever sniped episode 3 of "the web of fear" out from under philip morris. that said, there are... well, next bit spoilered for discussion of SA.

like, even Unnamed Superfan, who is someone I'm not particularly a fan of personally, he did make a bargain in order to gain access to the show and the way i understand it the cost of entry was allowing himself to be sexually assaulted. that's kind of fucked up imo. and yeah maybe not everyone will see it that way, that's just my understanding. i don't really want to talk about that kind of thing because us queer people get demonized enough, and i'm not out there trying to cast aspersions on anyone in particular, it's just that some fucked up shit happened that people are understandably hesitant to talk about, because it could get taken the wrong way, and the only reason i do talk about it is because i personally believe that a culture of silence and secrecy is worse.

which is one of the reasons i admire eccleston as much as i do, because he's gone through some shit and as a result has a very low tolerance for things that he looks at and says "well, that's not right". i'm not saying that to judge or blame anybody else personally, no matter who eccleston judges or blames. sometimes shit happens that just isn't right, is all.

in lighter news i've got A Theory about classic who, which is that the best way to start is by watching the bulk of the Robert Holmes-scripted episodes. not all of them, mind. i think people should skip his six-parters, "the space pirates" because it is (a) mostly missing and (b) bad, "the two doctors" because it's kind of a mess, and "talons" because it is racist and therefore also bad. also the krotons, i mean, look, the thing that frustrates me most about people who want to watch the old show is that they're always like "oh i want to start at the beginning and watch it through" and that is the absolute worst idea. i love the black and white episodes, i advocate for the black and white episodes strongly, they're just not a good place to _start_. for me, the best place to start with classic who is when the show goes to colour, and either one can just watch the show episode by episode from there or kind of hop around holmes' stories to get the highlights.

anyway here's my classic who bob holmes starter kit:
"Spearhead from Space" (1970)
"Terror of the Autons" (1971)
"Carnival of Monsters" (1973)
"The Time Warrior" (1973)
"The Ark in Space" (1975)
"Pyramids of Mars" (1975)
"The Brain of Morbius" (1976)
"The Deadly Assassin" (1976)
"The Sun Makers" (1977)
"The Ribos Operation" (1978)
"The Caves of Androzani" (1984)

obviously this isn't a complete list of episodes worth watching, but if someone watches these stories and is like "jeez this is kind of bad" maybe classic who is not for them.

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finally, is there any news on classic series blu-rays and their questionable use of ai? i'm happy to buy the blu-ray sets but the reason i liked the sets was that they were pretty definitive as far as technical quality goes... my impression is that that's not really true of the season 13 and 21 sets :(

if you're looking for it, you can see it. but as someone who used to watch these episodes taped off OTA broadcasts and copied from VHS tape to VHS tape to share, and considering it's this or nothing for classic who on physical media, I'll still be buying them for as long as they release them.

The Space Pirates is actually great, it's just that the surviving ep is the only stinker and gives the impression it's rotten.

The use of AI in The Collection is bad but there are only 2 colour seasons left and I am just going to have to suck it up (plus the dvds are just fine imo having had fifth generation VHS bitd). My guess is there won't be a b&w set for a couple of years as they've said that there will be individual bluray releases of any animations before they end up in a Collection and there aren't any announced yet.

my recollection of unnamed biography is that unnamed superfan would deliver or suggest targets for SA in order to maintain his access to show, and that superfan was distinctly “not the type” of biography subject’s unnamed partner

but I only read the first edition, not either of the revised ones

lolol unnamed superfan is dejected about the recovery of two episodes of his favourite story ever bcz he has paid ppl thousands of pounds to type prompts in plagiarism engines and create three different theftslop versions of each in the last three years, and screamed about how they are perfect recreations

Haha great, yeah soon as I read it was these specific episodes that had been found I was imagining his reaction.

xxxp many thanks for that aldo, so interesting - and also a bit sad re the lonely deaths & skipped collections - the private collector figure has always featured in these missing ep rumours - and i was never quite sure if it was just wishful (or conspiratorial) thinking on behalf of fandom at large - and never quite understood the psychology of the individual (as it were)

well here’s hoping they turn up a couple more Troughtons before the world ends (or even better, an ep or two of Public Eye or Callan)

The revised version of unnamed biography says that unnamed superfan was indeed the type of unnamed biography subject exactly once. It also, at length, points out that unnamed superfan is only one of several routes to SA throughout biography subject tenure (which obviously does not excuse unnamed superfan in any way).

Xpost - the best thing I saw recently that was recovered was an episode of Mogul/The Troubleshooters, a series I was barely aware of but the recovered ep was so good.

There was also an absolutely honking episode of a Tom Jones show that was nearly unwatchable. So swings and roundabouts.

I've seen something that clearly suggests this is a different discovery from the one FiF have been trying to close out for the past year and Sue Malden has been talking about. So I'm optimistic there's more soon-ish.

Mogul/The Troubleshooters

i absolutely loved The Plane-Makers and The Power Game - well what is left of em - and this sounds like the same kind of thing - hopefully will be made viewable somehow, i used to spend $$$ on Network DVDs but i am not aware of any similar outfit operating now

There was also an absolutely honking episode of a Tom Jones show that was nearly unwatchable. So swings and roundabouts.

Challenge accepted!

only one of several routes

Interesting — my recollection of the first version is that while UP was given access to multiple hunting grounds, he usually made his selections personally and advances directly. Whereas USF identified targets unlikely to resist and brought them to UP’s workplace, AND also gave UP and BSubj VIP access to his own workplace, and identified patrons who were likely receptive there.

(On a more consensual spectrum, though one wonders whether prior exploitation of his own power in that environment informed his assessment.)

lonely deaths & skipped collections - the private collector figure has always featured in these missing ep rumours - and i was never quite sure if it was just wishful (or conspiratorial) thinking

The Melbourne ultrahoarder who very well may have had dozens of Troughtons and lost Countdowns as off-air (bulldozed and landfilled on his death a couple of years ago) apparently had collector friends who were aware of the scope of his taping, but his family didn’t know he had even that amount of social connection.

if you're looking for it, you can see it. but as someone who used to watch these episodes taped off OTA broadcasts and copied from VHS tape to VHS tape to share, and considering it's this or nothing for classic who on physical media, I'll still be buying them for as long as they release them.

― fluffy tufts university (f. hazel), Friday, March 13, 2026 10:05 AM (six hours ago)

oh i absolutely had internet bootleg tape trade copies of things like "the web of fear 1" back in the 90s and there's no question that anything that gets put out currently is an exponential improvement on those. i'm still used to the restorations _improving_ things, how good they were, how much work went into them. the revised cgi versions weren't ever really great, but they were also very seldom presented as the _only_ option (might have happened with "the five doctors" maybe? i can't recall).

i've seen them enough times and i can watch them streaming online. if i'm gonna pony up for a physical release (not that the sets are terribly expensive or anything), i'd rather be demanding. my hope is that people will realize that this stuff is an "improvement" in the same sense that the cgi version of "the dalek invasion of earth" is an "improvement" and make versions without the ai shit available at some point. or, you know, maybe i'll die first. it's not _that_ important.

unnamed superfan being livid about episodes being recovered is hilarious. that man is well and truly cooked. for me, i was like "yeah ok whatever, i mean he'll die before getting to see these episodes so why not, there are worse problems in this world than what a bad disco producer with too much money decides to do with said money". i never imagined the man would have gotten that utterly brain-damaged. god, i'm glad i'm not him.

the multiple slop versions of "missing episodes" is hilarious enough... 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?

i will say my hope is that the digital release of "the nightmare begins" and "devil's planet" at least doesn't have any ai "improvements" applied to it, cuz yeah, i _will_ be buying those.

The revised version of unnamed biography says that unnamed superfan was indeed the type of unnamed biography subject exactly once. It also, at length, points out that unnamed superfan is only one of several routes to SA throughout biography subject tenure (which obviously does not excuse unnamed superfan in any way).

― Overtoun House windows (aldo), Friday, March 13, 2026 12:08 PM (four hours ago)

yeah i want to be entirely clear that i am in no way making excuses for actions of unnamed superfan. it's more that there _was_ (and, in a broader sense, _is_) a larger cultural issue, one which obviously was/is _not_ in any way particular to queer people (i don't actually have to name _those_ people's names, cuz we all fucking know the names of at least _some_ of the people in question), and that us queer people _do_ have to deal with similar fucked up shit, with the added "bonus" that any such fucked up shit gets weaponized against _our queerness itself_. yay.

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well here’s hoping they turn up a couple more Troughtons before the world ends (or even better, an ep or two of Public Eye or Callan)

― Cod:Shellfish (emsworth), Friday, March 13, 2026 12:01 PM (four hours ago)

seconded on "public eye" and "callan"! particularly "public eye"... the first two series of "callan" are better-attested than the first three series of "public eye"... i think i read there was a recent release of some of the off-air audio recordings of those eps, none of which are nearly up to the standard of the graham strong recordings, but which might _possibly_ be marginally intelligible? the best-quality surviving off-air audio recording (is it "the morning wasn't so hot"?), if i remember was on one of the public eye sets and was pretty unlistenable to me though. i could manage it if there were subtitles to go along with it... mind you there is that one website with _copious_ information on the missing "public eye" eps that i've barely scratched the surface of, so there's no point in my complaining.

my "can we do this before the collapse of what passes for 'civilization' these days" is chromadot colour recovery on "The Year of the Sex Olympics". I'm told the chromadot information _does_ exist... am I mistaken in this belief?

Also, I would like a deluxe Ken Campbell box set with a complete recording of the stage versions of "The Warp" and "Illuminatus!" from back in the day. Which probably don't exist. I don't care.

Xpost - the best thing I saw recently that was recovered was an episode of Mogul/The Troubleshooters, a series I was barely aware of but the recovered ep was so good.

There was also an absolutely honking episode of a Tom Jones show that was nearly unwatchable. So swings and roundabouts.

I've seen something that clearly suggests this is a different discovery from the one FiF have been trying to close out for the past year and Sue Malden has been talking about. So I'm optimistic there's more soon-ish.

― Overtoun House windows (aldo), Friday, March 13, 2026 12:13 PM (four hours ago)

See, this is the shit I love. I second emsworth in that I'd like this stuff to be more widely available. I tell you what I've gone mad for, looking at the advert breaks and continuity on the Kaleidoscope YT site. That shit is pure fucking gold. My fucking ADHD brain. I went looking yesterday to see if there are any old recordings from RTS Channel 5 Singapore (yes, an end of transmission recording from early 1980) and somehow found myself stumbling on a cache of vintage candlepin bowling off-air recordings.

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The Melbourne ultrahoarder who very well may have had dozens of Troughtons and lost Countdowns as off-air (bulldozed and landfilled on his death a couple of years ago) apparently had collector friends who were aware of the scope of his taping, but his family didn’t know he had even that amount of social connection.

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic), Friday, March 13, 2026 2:11 PM (two hours ago)

i do think about this as i get older. i'm not a physical collector, but i am a digital hoarder, and i've learned by now that the internet is not, in fact, forever. i might actually have some stuff that's considered "lost media" by this point, some stuff that people are out there looking for, particularly given that fucking anybody can create media with a global audience. how would i know? my data hoard isn't collected or organized or properly tagged. i'm aware of _what_ gets "lost" and a lot of what i download these days is stuff that no sane person would care about. i'm not trying to conceal or "hoard" anything, it's just that most of what i have is _not_ of any particular value right now. at some point, assuming i live long enough, _somebody_ might want to go through my old files looking for something of potential value, but who's going to have the time or electricity?

also for god's sake will somebody fucking release "maybury"

and yeah admittedly from what i recall from hearing "the space pirates" on audio, episode 2 is definitely the worst episode; the story would be ripe for re-evaluation (along the lines of "enemy of the world") should the rest of the episodes turn up. ok, here's a controp, it might actually be the best of his six-parters (um, counting "the two doctors" as a six-parter, even though it's only a three-parter... because otherwise it's just "the space pirates" and "talons of weng-chiang", which makes that opinion just another way of saying "racism is bad", which isn't a particularly interesting thing to say even though it's obviously true).

shit, maybe i'd reevaluate it even if they just did an animation. the overall quality of the animations is, uh, not good, but i like some jank in my who. idk, have people discussed the petscop-style animation of the "celestial toymaker" animation? because i like it. if there was ever an episode that called for a petscop-style animation...

... honestly taking another look the big downer is that it doesn't look petscop _enough_. that story needs an animation that makes it look like a PS1 game.

sic, aldo, whoever, do you know how far "yellow fever" got and how much of this "recon" is just shitty ao3 fanfic?

afaik the sequence is this:

1981-10-22: the first two episodes of hit co-pro Tenko are TXed, filmed in Singapore

1981-11-05: episode 3, the first of a remaining 28 filmed in Dorset dressed as Singapore and introducing Louise Jameson to the cast, airs

1984: UP is invited to a convention in (Singapore or nearby country?), and asks the BBC for money for him and his assault-enthusiastic partner to take a holiday and location scout on the way back.

1984-10-19: UP and GD shoot some camcorder footage on a day out in Singapore.

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."

...

previously, part 1:

UP had gotten pissed and laid on holiday at Mardi Gras in 1981, and thought it would be fun to get paid to go back and do it again, if the BBC would fund a story to be shot in New Orleans.
In late 1983, UP gets a verbal agreement from the company that distributes Who to PBS partner stations that they will co-pro on an American-shot storyline.
In November 1983, the week of The Five Doctors' TX (which preceded the UK's) UP asks a merry Troughton at a Chicago convention if he'd appear in such, and secures an agreement.
UP has already commissioned Andrew Smith for a new Sontarans story, the first in six years, but on learning that Frazer Hines has booked a sabbatical from the soap that he's been on for eleven years, to take place in the second half of 1984, UP sacks Smith circa January 1984 and asks Holmes to write a Sontarans story set in New Orleans.
Smith, for whom this would have been his second commission, gives up his TV dreams and becomes a cop, returning to writing 26 years later with a Companion Chronicles for Big Finish.

...

previously, part 2:

Holmes did not like the idea of writing a story set in a specific place or bringing back old aliums for nostalgia, but he thought the two Sontaran stories that other ppl wrote were fuckin' stupid, so maybe he could make the actual joke again and see if it stuck. He proposed that the N'awlins aliens could be the second thing you thought of in connection to the city, rather than UP's suggestion of the first, as foodie monsters allowed for story possibilities, whereas monsters who enjoyed listening to jazz in their off-hours was shrug emoji.
With the 45-minute format, and a need to maximise the expensive filming locations, he pitched the longest DW story in 14 years.

1984-02-13: first episode commissioned.
1984-03-09: the other two episodes commissioned.

between the two dates, it turned out that a small regional distributor of BBC programming that had only come into existence 2.5 years earlier

-- and only because the previous distributor, media giant Time-Life, had illegally re-edited and censored the final (/only) season of Monty Python at the request of local US tv station ABC, leading to the members of the group gaining ownership of the programme from the BBC, leading Time Inc to go "well fuck you then" and drop the Beeb altogether --

could not actually afford to fund an entire British cast and crew on a month's location shoot across the Atlantic.

...

(more later, my back started hurting so I sat down to post for the first time in two months and two cats sat on me)

can't wait, really interesting to hear about the time/life -> lionheart thing, i thought there was more continuity between the two than that (specifically that the "time/life" who had distributed who in the US were fairly loosely affiliated and when time/life dropped them the people involved went on to form the backbone of lionheart? that could be a misunderstanding on my part though). i'm also very interested in the implicit propagandistic aspect of int'l distribution of Who stories... i've seen hints that there may have been some minor (no more than minor and probably incidental, to be clear) involvement by more formal, uh, _covert diplomatic_ elements.

i also was pretty ignorant of the monty python case and its implications... is is there more information on what's in these specials anywhere? i guess they're probably not circulating, though it's theoretically _possible_ for someone to have taped them off-air in 1975.

hope your back feels better!

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!)