Radio Times 1983 Doctor Who Special

 

The 1973 Radio Times Special (see Featured Post of go to November 2018) was an iconic publication for fans so it’s not surprising that a follow up was produced ten years later to celebrate the show’s twentieth anniversary in 1983. Selling for £1.50 it doesn’t actually make the best first impression courtesy of an amateurish looking overcrowded cover involving several Tardises each with one of the Doctor’s faces inset into them.  The design has these police boxes flying out towards the front which unfortunately means William Hartnell occupies a tiny square in the top right corner while at the foot of the page, you only see three quarters of Colin Baker. Its not a patch on the unique photo on the cover of the 1973 one. Fans may also complain that the show’s 80s logo is rendered in yellow rather than white. The back cover is more striking featuring a Dalek.

How I would bring Doctor Who back!

 

Obligatory What I Would Do as Showrunner Post (Well, everyone else is doing it)

 So, the tenders are in and probably about five or six months from now we will discover who has been handed the keys to the TARDIS and sixty four years of tangled lore, continuity, contradictions, success and failure. Put it that way and you wonder why anyone would bid to take it on! Of course, fans always have plenty of ideas about what they would do with the show even though most of us have no inside knowledge of how to make a tv show other than quotes from promotional interviews. So as a lot of other people have given their outlines of how they would bring Doctor Who back, here’s mine…

 

Fan Scene CT Oct to Dec 1984

 

OCTOBER

It seems like pastel-coloured covers and thinner paper are behind us with this issue which debuts thicker white paper though there’s still a flash of colour on the headlines which is quite effective. Mark Anthony is this month’s clever headline referring to Anthony Ainley’s return on `Mark of the Rani`; “he of the lecherous laugh and diabolical dentures”, as Dominic describes him.  There’s news too of story five, `Timelash` whose author Glen McCoy seems to have foxed the usually information heavy Dominic who can find nothing about him. Story six will be written by Eric Saward and directed by Graeme Harper, a combo who of course delivered `Earthshock`.

Fan Scene- CT Jul to Sep 1984

 JULY

From a distance of forty two years, what are we to make of the headline atop the July issue? I daren’t even reproduce it here but suffice to say it mangles racial slurs and alliteration inappropriately in a story relating to the fact that `The Two Doctors` will be filmed in Spain. Meanwhile, `Space Whale` has been beached so instead Gangsters author Phillip Martin will pen `Vengeance on Varos`. Other season 22 news announced this month includes Maurice Colbourne returning as Lytton, Graeme Harper also coming back and the filming of `Attack of the Cybermen` starting at Gerrard’s Cross and Acton.  Remember when summer repeats were a thing before you could reach for your blu rays or iPlayer? In 1984 these welcome re-showings would include `The Awakening` and `The Kings Demons`.

Fan Scene CT Apr- Jun 1984

 

APRIL

What’s this? Gordon Roxburgh has regenerated into Dominic May as the CT editorship changes hands amidst a flurry of gold light and reported on salmon coloured paper. An immediate hint of Dom’s cheeky approach to the news zine comes with the headline The End of CT.  The story is actually that the final episode of `The Celestial Toymaker` has been found in the vaults of ABC Television in Australia. This find, which takes the number of missing episodes down to 130, was announced by JNT at the Interface event in February (see the time lag again). The producer also said he will be visiting Australia to check if there are any more such treasures lurking in ABC’s store rooms. Elsewhere it is reported that Eric Saward is staying on as script editor though unlikely to be writing any stories while Season 21’s ratings have hovered around the 7.5 to 8 million mark.

Fan Scene- CT Jan- Mar 1984

 

Yes, the return of a series I ran nearly ten years ago on early issues of the DWAS fanzine Tardis and its newsletter Celestial Toyroom, this time covering the Doctor Who and fan happenings as reported during 1984. 

 JANUARY

Gordon Roxburgh is the editor as we enter 1984 which seems to have been compiled just after the broadcast of `The Five Doctors` as there was a lag of several weeks from the issues being assembled to being mailed out. So there’s some news of the twenty first season which would be starting by the time members received the issue. Amongst the snippets of news on the yellow front page are that the Society donated £100 to the recent Children In Need appeal, and the release of a Doctor Who computer game called `The First Adventure` It may boast Peter Davison’s face on the cover, but the game takes its cue from the Key To Time season. There’s a reprint of a couple of newspaper previews of `The Five Doctors` and some comment on the decision to screen it in the US before the UK.

Twenty one years later...

 

Whatever your view of the recently curtailed RTD2, there’s no doubt that the showrunner’s first era was peak Doctor Who. This is an (occasionally re-edited) overview of that period in the show’s history, originally penned in 2010 for the zine Plaything of Sutekh. You can see my enthusiasm and if I’m honest, looking back at this period now, my zeal remains undiminished. As well as being a fan of the classic series, I feel that the 2005-10 period contains some of the best Doctor Who ever!

Once upon a time people used to define eras of Doctor Who by the incumbent Doctor so they would refer to the `Troughton Era` for example. A bit later, it was the producer who would be given all the credit, hence the `Hinchliffe Era`. Later still when we knew more about the way the programme was made; we’d refer perhaps to the Barry Letts / Terrance Dicks Era, recognising the invaluable creative input of the script editor. Latterly it reached a point where it seemed you could actually define three distinct Eras under the aegis of the show’s longest running producer John Nathan Turner. In fact, it was never even as simple as all of that but one thing we can never be in doubt about regarding the 2005-10 period of broadcast Doctor Who is that to call it the Russell T Davies Era is totally- factually- correct.

Farewell to the Lyric Hotel

As time trundles on, we forget places that once seemed important and then quite often find out decades later that they are gone. I recently discovered that the Lyric Hotel in Blackpool was demolished in 2023. Some Doctor Who fans of a certain generation will remember the Lyric as the hub of the annual Blackpool gatherings that took place each May. The Lyric was every much the centre of these events as half the attendees stayed there, the others in a hotel two doors way, and were sure of a warm welcome from the family that owned the hotel. As far as I can tell the Lyric did not relocate and so is gone forever which I suppose also reflects changing times.

 

Timelash

 In a nihilistic season packed with implied or actual violence, `Timelash` stands apart as being a more traditional Doctor Who story. A regular near the foot of fan votes it seems to be written off as a bit of a mess. Yet like such stories there is something of worth if you watch it with an open mind and try to forget all the brickbats that have been hurled towards it. With Pennant Roberts again lumbered with bright sets (as he was in `Warriors of the Deep`) the story is already hamstrung while Glen McCoy’s script feels like it needed more work and production values are not the best. There are interesting concepts within it but the resulting production doesn’t always do justice to them. I’ve heard `Timelash` summarised variously yet almost always in the negative but I would say its middling. I don’t even think it’s the worst story of this season but I would agree that it’s presentation does not help its case.

 

Attack of the Cybermen

John Nathan Turner was right when he claimed that “the memory cheats”. At the time he was referring to Sixties and earlier Seventies Doctor Who against which many of his stories were being unfavourably compared. Now that this era is of an even older vintage watching a story like this shows how accurate he was. I’ve always held `` `Attack of the Cybermen` as an example of how terrible the show was at this point. One moment in particular is stuck in my memory when a brick wall sweeps to one side to reveal a brightly lit group of Cybermen like some tv variety show introduction. In fact, this occurs sooner in the story than I recalled and the only reason the light seems so bright is because we’ve spent the previous few minutes mooching around in semi darkness. The story is full of little moments like this which I’d forgotten or mis remembered because it must be more than twenty years since I’ve seen it. That is not to wholly redeem the story which is rather messy at times, but does show its not as poor as I thought it was.

 

Doctor Who Annual 1976

 

By 1975/ 76 Doctor Who on tv had become more sophisticated in its storytelling yet the Annuals continued to run stories that more often than not lacked the then current approach of the series. Some of them feel generic as if they might be lifted from a pool that could be applied to any Doctor. The 1976 Annual does at least sometimes have the Doctor, Sarah and Harry sounding (though rarely looking) like they do on screen while there is one story so packed with great ideas it seems too good for this format. Annuals were always dated for the following year and this edition was actually published in September 1975 so the makers would presumably only have seen some of Tom Baker’s first season. Tom’s Doctor stares out from the cover looking somewhat unimpressed. Has he just read the stories?

My Time on the DWAS Executive Part Two

 

“My Favourite Waste of Time”

One event I attended in mid 1985 was LogiCon hosted by the Solihull local group the same day as Live Aid. I’m sure they asked Bob to move his event, but it wasn’t happening. We couldn’t compete with Queen, Paul McCartney, Wham and co but I did end up on stage interviewing Graham Williams, Ian Marter and Richard Gregory. This wasn’t planned, in fact Paul Vanezis asked me the evening beforehand even though probably anyone else there was more suited. Back then of course with no prep and no Google, I had to rely on my tragically vast knowledge of Doctor Who related facts and wing it when it came to the rest of their careers.  Anyway, I muddled through and now that embarrassing clips have turned up on two recent Collection films I think I was ok, maybe not projecting enough. For the record I have never done any on stage interviewing before or since but I’m kind of glad I did it. I’ll tell you though, the one person who seemed less comfortable going on stage than me was Graham Williams whose suggestion we have ` a couple of pints` beforehand (this was lunchtime) did indeed help the interview go more smoothly.

What will they do with Doctor Who?

 

As anyone reading this might know, today the BBC announced that this year’s proposed Xmas special had been cancelled and that  both Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf are leaving the franchise. Doctor Who as a property will remain owned by the BBC and the programme making will be put out to competitive tender. Neither of these are too much of surprise, rumours to this effect have been circulating online for a few months. What it means is that the show may not be back for an unknown number of years. Conservative estimates say two years, some suggest more like five or six. As I’m sure the tabloids of old would put it- Who Knows?

My Time on the DWAS Executive Part One

 To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (aka DWAS) this year, I thought I'd post this amended two part version of an article I wrote back in the early Nineties. Its about the time I spent as part of the DWAS' organising committee... 

“Hold the Door!”

It’s 1985. The location is a plush hotel somewhere in London. I’m standing behind a table holding two large doors shut because if someone doesn’t keep them closed a breeze will chill the two guests currently sat at a table in front of me signing autographs- John Nathan Turner and Colin Baker. Or perhaps there’s a bison lurking on the other side of those doors, I’m not quite sure. I doubt the two stars are even aware of my presence and I’m not really even supposed to be here. However, as the person who is supposed to be here hasn’t turned up, here I am. For me it affords a view of the heart of Doctor Who fandom eagerly queuing for a few moments chat and an autograph. If this sounds like a familiar pastime (the autographs not the door holding) then it’s worth remembering that at conventions nowadays people pay a fee for this sort of thing and doors are so good nobody needs to physically hold them closed. Back in the day you would pay to attend the event but autographs were free. You could even take a picture though there was no social media to publish it on.

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Blackpool Exhibition Pix - selected photos from the 70s Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool!

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