The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: The Hollows Of Time

The Hollows Of Time: Part One (08/03/26)

So, we're back with the stories which were actually commissioned for Season 23 and this one, by former Script Editor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, is a doozy! This follows his previous form as a script writer on TV where each script improves on the last, from the dire Logopolis to the vastly superior Castrovalva to the brilliant Frontios, and gives us an engaging mystery in a quaint English village which turns out to be a sequel to his last story and sees the return of the Tractators. Sort of. Because we've not actually seen any yet - well, not full ones, and not especially alive ones, either.

Arriving in the coastal village of Hollowdean on the premise of visiting the Doctor's friend the Reverend Foxwell (who used to work alongside Alan Turing as a code breaker), the Doctor and Peri encounter a cult who follow the mysterious Professor Stream (Stream? Why, that's an anagram of...!). The Professor, it seems, also worked with Foxwell and Turing and has set up his commune on the cliffs above the local sand dunes. There's a fete going on with a jumble sale at the local village hall where Peri encounters an 11 year old boy called Simon who's dressed up as a Sand Creature for the fancy dress competition having seen one out in the dunes, and the Doctor finds a 'shell' (basically a Tractator scale) at the White Elephant stall. They make their way to the vicarage and find 'Foxy' Foxwell tinkering in his workshop - it seems old habits die hard and he may have something to do with the anomalies which drew the Doctor to Hollowdean in the first place, or at least is also monitoring them.

There's also a mysterious Chauffeur who seems to be behind everything and is determined to gain access to the Gravis, and a young woman called Jane who's one of Professor Stream's acolytes and seemingly under psychic control of the Chauffeur. He, via Jane, gained access to the TARDIS and has somehow managed to trap the Doctor in his 1934 Citroën Traction Avant drifting through space and about to disintegrate in a sequence which wouldn't have been out of place in an episode of Sapphire And Steel! Meanwhile, Simon took Peri out to the sand dunes in search of his Sand Creature and they both fell into tunnels beneath the dunes where they were attacked by the remnants of a Tractator.

It's all very intriguing, somewhat surreal, and easily Bidmead's best script for the show yet. The juxtaposition of the quaint English country village, the eccentric vicar with his forthright housekeeper, Mrs Streeter, and the local schoolboy who's interested with the vicar's scientific tinkering and isn't being believed about seeing monsters in the dunes, with the overtly creepy Chauffeur, his brainwashed puppet, Jane, and the presence of what I assume is a disguised Master with a plan to get hold of the Gravis for whatever reason and kill the Doctor in the process makes this an atmospheric and fascinating story. Bidmead has also written the Doctor and Peri brilliantly with their often fractious relationship toned down but still subtly present. 

It occurs to me that this season features a lot of children, too. Here we have 11 year old Simon; The Nightmare Fair had teenager Kevin looking for his younger brother, Mission To Magnus had a young boy helping Peri; and Leviathan had Altheya and Gurth who were in their teens or younger (I wonder if Yellow Fever And How To Cure It would have had any children in it?). The planned season finale was even going to be The Children Of January. Was is an intentional theme for the series, or an accidental one like the repeated war motif of Season 21 and the strong mix of camp and violence of Season 22? Or maybe the inspiration came from the Jim'll Fix It sketch A Fix With Sontarans.

Whatever, this episode is a massive improvement on the season's first three stories  and, so far, equally as good as Leviathan. I really hope it doesn't fall apart in the second half, but if Castrovalva and Frontios are anything to go by that's unlikely to happen.

The Hollows Of Time: Part Two (15/03/26)

Well, that was incredibly good, albeit incredibly complicated, and I won't pretend to have understood it all. Not everything made complete sense, such as how the Doctor got from the TARDIS into the Citroën and the Citroën into distant space, but like an episode of Sapphire and Steel (and this felt very much like an episode of Sapphire And Steel) when the weirdness is done well the logic doesn't necessarily matter.

It turned out that the Chauffeur was a robot working for Professor Stream who, in a shock twist, (probably) wasn't the Master. Given that this was meant to follow on from Yellow Fever And How To Cure It which pitted the Doctor against the Autons and either the Master or the Rani or both, this can mean that either both stories were to feature the Master (unlikely), Yellow Fever... was only meant to feature the Autons and the Rani (maybe), or Professor Stream was meant to simply be a Master-like character (and his name was a red herring, living in the stream, no doubt). Given Bidmead's previous stories featured the Master and the Gravis as the main adversaries, it would arguably make sense that this story featured them both, but as it stands I'm glad it didn't. Nostalgia dogged Season 22 and, had both the Master and the Gravis been in this story it would have felt like overkill on the largest scale. So I'm glad Professor Stream sort of turned out to be a mysterious stranger who was capable of mind control, especially since it ended with him inflating like a balloon and going 'pop' like Thunder in Big Trouble In Little China or Kananga in Live And Let Die. I mean, there was plenty of hinting going on that he was the Master, but as he went 'pop' I'm assuming he wasn't.

Anyway, his plan was to use the Gravis and the Tractators in a machine which he'd got Foxwell to build which would make him the centre of the universe or something. However, the Gravis had other ideas and ended up sort of siding with the Doctor and scuppering Professor Stream's plans - hence 'pop'. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the meantime which took the Doctor, Peri and Simon back to the jumble sale on the previous day and, at one point , inside the Time Rotor of the TARDIS (which Professor Steam had also procured to help power his machine) which drip-fed the plot but was nevertheless bemusing and entertaining in equal parts. Most of the sequences with the Gravis took place between scenes, or via telepathic communication, but no doubt had this made the screen he would have featured more heavily, in Part Two at least. It was certainly a novel sequel to Frontios in the same way that Snakedance was a novel sequel to Kinda. They may have featured the same aliens and have been written by the same writers, but they were very different, and that's what a sequel should be. 

It's a shame, really, that this one was never made as it's easily the best of the four which were actually scheduled for Season 23 and have been adapted by quite a margin, and it would have been nice for there to have been a fourth story by Chris Bidmead. He really did improve as a writer for the series the more scripts he wrote.