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.

Christopher Bidmead

 

Christopher Bidmead, who has died, was the first of producer John Nathan Turner’s trio of script editors each of whom ushered in quite different approaches to Doctor Who. Bidmead was the chosen enabler of JNT’s intent on making the series more serious and drawn from real science as opposed to the boggle eyed, humorous iteration that Graham Williams and Douglas Adams had delivered the previous season. From a forty five year distance, Bidmead’s ideas and commissions were not that far removed and no less ambitious that those of Douglas Adams; it is just the way they were played was tonally different.