Season 21- Frontios

 Studio bound, dialogue heavy with a bold concept and lashings of incidental music `Frontios` is very much like season eighteen in style, not surprising since it’s penned by that season’s script editor Christopher H Bidmead. It does make you wish he’d done a second season as whatever shortcomings the production has, its intent is steelier, more sci-fi and definitely serious. He writes the main trio so well and the actors each rise to the occasion while the story incorporates some interesting ideas. He did later admit some of these were poached from Nigel Kneale but that you should “steal from the best”. If the results are like this, then why not? Doctor Who had some of its greatest successes with stories filched from outside sources and remade in the series’ style.

Season 21- Warriors of the Deep

 

I once found myself chatting with Pennant Roberts back stage at an event and when the conversation switched to `Warriors of the Deep` I pondered why he’d not decided to spruce up the atmosphere by having everything doused in emergency red lighting, like that on a submarine. Was it, perhaps, something technicians would not agree with, was it too expensive or was it because it was felt viewers would find the results too murky? As it turned out, it was none of these things. He agreed it would have definitely added something to what is a somewhat over lit production but admitted that, simply, nobody had time to think about it. This was a hint of what we now know was a troubled production that had two weeks’ time taken from its schedule. By those criteria it’s a miracle anything much turned up on screen. Even when things were proceeding as normal there were crazy deadlines and limited scope which was Doctor Who’s biggest enemy whatever the era.