The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon

Tom Baker's time on Doctor Who can fairly easily be split into three distinct eras: The Hinchcliffe Years, which had an increasing lean towards Gothic Horror pastiches and violence; The Graham Williams Years, which saw an increase in college humour and a more Science Fiction bent; and Season 18, which brought in more stylish production values and eschewed humour for serious scientific ideas. Each of these eras had their high and low points, with Hinchcliffe usually being regarded as producing some of Tom's best serials. Williams has received a less consistent level of fan appreciation over the years but oversaw some fantastic stories, worked alongside literary icon Douglas Adams and took the show abroad to film for the first time. In turn, John Nathan-Turner brought the show straight into the Eighties with the changes he made for his first season as Producer making it look sleek and modern for the post-Punk, electronic age. Each year brought us some classic stories from The ...

The 1970s saw a complete turnaround for Doctor Who with the Doctor's exile to Earth and the change from Black & White to Colour. The new Doctor, also, was a contrast to what had gone before; whilst Troughton had introduced more physicality to the role, Jon Pertwee went one step further and made the Doctor an action hero. After a debut series with a much grittier, adult look, heavily influenced by the BBC's earlier Quatermass productions, Producer Barry Letts and Script Editor Terrence Dicks brought in a softer approach which took advantage of the new colour recording, and widened the cast beyond the companion to encompass not only new series regular Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart but his group of UNIT soldiers including Sergeant Benton, Captain Yates and (briefly) Corporal Bell. The 'UNIT Family' came to epitomise the Pertwee era, along with the introduction of new arch-nemesis the Master, and 1970-1974 was something of a 'Golden Age' for the show seeing it...

The Deadly Assassin: Part One (30/10/16) Gosh! What a change in quality! Clever, witty, nicely paced - I guess I should've expected this when it said Robert Holmes wrote this episode. Receiving a telepathic warning that the President of the Time Lords was to be assassinated, the Doctor headed back to Gallifrey to prevent it. First off, he avoided the guards by setting up a hookah in the console room - which we saw much more of in all its Jules Verne glory this week - but some grotesque, cadaverous bloke seems to be setting the Doctor up, lurking in the shadows and watching what he's doing. He's not the only one, either, as Castellan Spandrell and his sidekick, the very funny Coordinator Engin, are on the Doctor's trail aware that he's a convicted felon. Speaking of which, they appear to be working with a Chancellor Goth who I'm sure is one of the Time Lords who tried the Doctor in 'The War Games', and the Doctor has apparently been working for the Ce...

Patrick Troughton's take on the Doctor was very different from William Hartnell's, necessarily so, and his time on the show saw it evolve from an adventure series about travelling through time into one very much about aliens. It took a while for the actor to settle into the role, and for the production team to settle on the right formula for his interpretation, but they eventually hit the right mix with my favourite Troughton story: The Macra Terror You're probably all thinking there are far better stories than this missing Season 4 caper. Troughton got a lot of memorable and classic stories; his debut in The Power Of The Daleks is brilliant, the Season Four finale is equally stunning killing off the Daleks (at the time) once and for all, and David Whitaker arguably understands the Daleks far better than their creator did. Likewise, later stories such as The Enemy Of The World , The Invasion and The War Games are epic tales with great direction and wonderful lo...

As my Doctor Who Real Time Marathon posts are rapidly catching up with my viewing 40 years on from transmission, I've been thinking about what I can do to expand my Blogs beyond my original remit. I'm not just a Doctor Who fan (in fact it's actually only my second favourite Sci Fi series) so there's the possibility of starting posts about the likes of Farscape , The X-Files , Defiance , Babylon 5 , Star Trek , etc. However, I want to stick to Doctor Who for the time being so  I thought I'd take the opportunity to share my thoughts on my favourite stories for each Doctor so far. I know that there's a lot of this out there - for example, Brendan Jones produces videos on YouTube which appraise episodes, stories and seasons brilliantly - but I've always found my thoughts on various stories tend to be at odds with the majority of fandom, and whilst my DWRTM blog is a journal of my thoughts on individual episodes in order directly after watching them, th...

The Hand Of Fear: Part One (02/10/16) Massively better this week. The episode started off with some aliens in quilted habits exiling a criminal and blowing him up. Then the TARDIS landed in a quarry on Earth and, ignoring the sirens alerting them to imminent detonation, the Doctor and Sarah discussed cricket before getting buried under a massive cliff face which was spectacularly blown apart! The Doctor was okay and, helped by the quarry workers, found and dug out Sarah who had grabbed hold of a disembodied hand (as it turns out, it looks to belong to the criminal, Eldrad) and gone into a coma. Rushed to hospital, the Doctor discussed Sarah's condition with a nice Indian doctor, which felt very realistic (all my GPs have been Indian), then went to Radiology to speak to Doctor Carter who was looking at the 'fossilised' hand Sarah had been clinging to. Working out the hand belonged to a silicone lifeform and  leaving Doctor Carter to keep doing his tests, the Doctor wen...

The Masque Of Mandragora: Part One (04/09/16) A new series and an new TARDIS control room! We started off with the Doctor and Sarah wandering through the interior of the TARDIS, which was rather cool but brief - I don't think we've seen beyond the console room since the Hartnell years! There was a huge boot cupboard and the Secondary Console Room, which is all Jules Verne wood and brass and looks rather gorgeous. Anyhow, they flew too close to something called the Mandragora Helix - a spiral of energy that acts like it has a controlling intelligence at its centre - and got pulled in. Looks like the rumours are true because a big, red, flashing ball of energy flew into the TARDIS and forced it to land in Renaissance Italy. Upon arriving in an orange grove (Sarah has a really  weird way of eating oranges) Sarah got kidnapped by some monks who KO'd the Doctor when he tried to stop them. When he regained consciousness, he went about looking for her but encountered th...

The Seeds Of Doom: Part One (31/01/16) A pretty good start. Realised it was likely to be a good one when Robert Banks Stewart's name was on the titles - the guy who wrote 'Terror Of The Zygons'. Set at an isolated base in Antarctica, three members of a World Ecology Bureau have found a seed buried in the ice. They alerted their superiors in London who brought UNIT in, specifically the Doctor, who recognised the seed and headed straight out there. However, the team's botanist had sat it under a UV lamp and the seed grew, awakened and opened, infecting another of the group. The WEB informed the Doctor en route, and when he and Sarah arrived they did some Mulder and Scully stuff while pondering what to do. Unfortunately, one of the people in charge at the WEB has contacted fey millionaire and Plant Lover Harrison Chase and offered him the seed pod in return for lots of money, and Chase has sent a couple of his Heavies out to collect it. Apparently, the pods trave...

The Brain Of Morbius: Part One (03/01/16) An interesting and very Gothic start to the New Year. The TARDIS has landed on the planet Karn, guided off course by the Time Lords according to the Doctor, where they found a load of crashed space ships and encountered a Mad Scientist called Mehendri Solon who is a member of the Cult of Morbius and has a penchant for getting his retarded henchman, Condo, to decapitate people. Apparently, Morbius was an evil Time Lord who tried to turn the Time Lords into an all-powerful army or something but was defeated. Solon rather stupidly has a clay bust he made of Morbius' head in his castle which the Doctor recognised, but too late as Solon had drugged him with wine. Ironically, Sarah was smart enough not to drink hers and played dead when Solon and Condo took the Doctor down to the laboratory for a civilised decapitation. Meanwhile, the local Sisterhood are fretting over the fact that the fire that creates an elixir in a rock face in their ca...