"'s all a bit Harry Potter." No it isn't.

Doctor Who, if one lets it, can consume you. It’s a happy consummation, blissful even, but it can leave one spoiled, specifically when it comes to programmes which on a surface level may appear similar. I’m often asked if I enjoy The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars or Star Trek on the understanding that “you like all that sci-fi stuff” to which – depending on how much I know the person - I often respond, “No, I like the good sci-fi stuff and lots of what you’ve mentioned isn’t sci-fi at all.” In my mind, the good sci-fi stuff includes Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker’s Guide, The X Files, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a sprinkle of Heroes, Dennis Kelly’s Utopia, The Outer Limits and if I’m feeling lucky, The Matrix. One might notice that the list is avoidant of Babylon 5, Thunderbirds, Alien, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and other programmes one might more immediately bring to mind when they consider science-fiction as a genre. Bluntly, a spaceship is a spaceship but as Douglas Adams said, “To design an invisible spaceship, that takes genius.” My list, I like to imagine includes much richer examples of the genre in question. To my mind, The Lord of the Rings (I’m talking the film franchise here) is an incessantly dull New Zealand travelogue during which our characters refuse to develop over nine hours of screen-time and Elijah Wood refuses vehemently to stop looking as if he is suffering an extreme attack of constipation. If it were a Doctor Who story, Tom Baker would be at the top of the dark tower grinning and juggling to the bafflement of Saruman, his imagination bringing the wizard down. The film enjoys many, many minutes of Gandalf and Saruman issuing bolts of lightning from their enormous wands in each other’s direction. I wonder if they’re compensating for their lack of wit. After all, it’s usually the intellectually-wounded dickheads who sport the biggest cars.

What Doctor Who has more than any of these other programmes is imagination. It is only ever in danger of failure when it forgets that. Compare, for example City of Death and Arc of Infinity. The first is hailed as a universal classic (agreed) and the other usually festers away at the bottom of the polls like an unwelcome fart (agreed). Both are filmed in foreign cities and both involve lots and lots of running around the streets of those foreign cities. But one story is about the theft of seven identical Mona Lisas by a man splintered in time and culminates with the most important punch in history at the birth of the human race. The other is about Time Lord protocol and some lost passports and culminates in the Doctor shooting his old, ineffective adversary limply on a small quayside. One is forward looking; the other backward. For the most part, Doctor Who has been successful in its abject avoidance of its own mythos, with Arc of Infinity being an unusual example of the show, rather than its norm. The Lord of the Rings is so up itself, it works on the assumption that we’re already greatly invested in its mythos before we’ve even met people properly and audaciously pulls a slow-motion characters-crying sequence a couple of hours into its nine-hour stretch when Gandalf doesn’t die. Doctor Who doesn’t need to be this po-faced and earnest. It just needs to be imaginatively relevant. The closest slow-mo, aren’t-we-important montage I can think of in Doctor Who is the death of Astrid in Voyage of the Damned. Although it feels earned, given the length of the programme and how we’ve come to adore Astrid, even that has a gurning Mark Costigan with sparkling tooth shot thrown into the mix. 

What Doctor Who has more than any of its contemporaries is an ability to take the piss out of itself and wallow in its own ridiculousness. At the end of The Day of the Doctor, David Tennant again declares: “I don’t want to go.” Matt Smith’s Doctor observes that “he’s always saying that.” In The End of Time almost four years earlier, when arguably the programme was at its very height of popularity, those five words were desperately moving and shook a nation of fans. Here, the programme itself is able to toss them aside like yesterday’s news and point and laugh at them sneeringly. Similarly, in Twice Upon a Time, as Testimony shows the Doctor precisely who he is (The Destroyer of Skaro, the Shadow of the Valeyard, etc) he is able to follow it up with “To be fair, you cut out all the jokes.” This is a programme which stubbornly refuses to be taken seriously except when it matters. It has its cake and eats it. It is able to have us weep for David Tennant’s demise before laughing at ourselves a few years down the line. We can appreciate the Doctor’s mythic status whilst acknowledging that he has always been a bit of a joker. Doctor Who, unlike The Lord of the Rings, has an innate sense of humour and a wise, old, Shakespearean fool in the lead.

Doctor Who has many influences and often wears them on its sleeve. Amazingly, however, it manages to better them most of the time. I’d much rather watch Last Christmas again than Miracle on 34^th Street, Alien or Inception. That might sound scandalous but that nifty little hour of Doctor Who is so much better than all those try-hards. For one thing, it’s funnier. (It includes the line, “I will mark you, Santa.”) And perhaps more strikingly, it refuses to be one thing. Miracle is about the existence of Santa. Alien is about… well, guess. And Inception is dreams within dreams. Doctor Who does all of that at once and makes it look easy. Perversely, it’ll never win any awards for that script (it’s only Doctor Who after all, those well-informed judges will tut humourlessly) but it is so much cleverer, more accessible and more fun than all its influences, namely because there’s an eccentric and wonderful man dressed like a magician with a couple of huge hearts at the centre of it all – and he’s pratting about. 

The climax of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a terrifically well-directed battle between Daniel (“I’m Harry Potter even though I can’t act.”) Radcliffe and Ralph (“I can act but I’m lowering myself to this bleeding awful make-up thanks to a colossal pay cheque.”) Fiennes. Bolts and magic sparks fly. It is an epic battle. Glass shatters, colours flash, eyebrows quiver. It is utterly hollow. There is nothing quite so boring as a fight with neither geography nor emotional resonance. The final film finishes in much the same way: a loud, brash battle with no heart. The films have taken for granted that we really love these characters without doing anything at all to give us a reason to. Harry is a horrible, little brat, so into himself that he forgets how to sympathise with absolutely everyone. Ron is the thick, ginger, Cockney one. We’re supposed to feel for Hermione because she’s a “half-blood” but she behaves like a stuck-up irritant. When Rowling simply expects us to like Hermione because of her bloodline, we can’t. These are facts about characters rather than an indication of what sort of person they might be. So Harry has no parents, right? No and it doesn’t stop him being a right wazzok. We can’t feel sorry for every orphan. Interestingly, Doctor Who fans were up in arms at the time of the Paul McGann TV movie when it was revealed that the Doctor was half-human. I can understand why: it’s a cheap, “now you’ll care about him” shorthand which absolutely doesn’t work because it’s got nothing to do with the plot, pisses over what has come before and chiefly, doesn’t make us care about the Doctor any more or raise the stakes any higher. Ironically, casual viewers are probably less inclined to sympathise with someone only half human. When the show looks into itself, it usually fails. 

I say usually: The Deadly Assassin is perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told in my view, despite its truly rubbish title. One could argue that it epitomises a backwards looking show in its exploration of the Doctor’s origins. However, it’s easy to forget that this version of Gallifrey at the time was completely and radically new. It still remains the best depiction of the planet. Because it’s not a story about the Doctor’s homeworld; it’s a story about the workings of an alien society. It’s why it works so much better than Hell Bent or The Three Doctors or Arc of Bloody Infinity. Assassin understands that we’re not very interested in the Doctor’s origins so it goes out of its way to make this new and exciting world interesting in much the same way Holmes would make the worlds of Ribos, Androzani and even Ravalox interesting. It’s the politics of the planet and the nefarious scheme of the Master’s complete with its dreamlike APC net, as well as the beautifully literate language, that fill the story with life. Appropriately enough, the Doctor treats the place with distain. After all, what is interesting about a place? He’s interested in people. Hell Bent would seem to prove the point: it only truly comes to life when it’s about Clara and the Doctor. When it’s about conversations in a Council Chamber, it’s dull as dishwater. Lord of the Rings is based on a map and its characters inherit the map and are products of it. Doctor Who can never be based on a star-chart, which is why books like John Peel’s Gallifrey Chronicles always left me cold. When Doctor Who is working supremely well, it’s about the people of these strange worlds (be they historical or futuristic) and the strangeness of those places comes hand in hand with character. It’s not about an orphan troll who lives in a mountain cave by a stream overlooking the tower of a dark wizard. Because who gives a toss?

So yes, I’m spoiled. Doctor Who has completely spoiled any love of other more map-based examples of the genre (Hello Game of Thrones) I could care to think about. There are vast swathes of sci-fi that I will never enjoy because Doctor Who does it better. There are spaceships and wonders that will bore me rigid because I’ve seen them before but with a curly-haired maniac grinning his way through them and offering philosophies on teaspoons and open minds. Doctor Who’s imagination is boundless compared to scribblers like Tolkien or Rowling. Names like Holmes, Moffat and Dicks and Davies are the ones to really conjure with. Doctor Who Versus the World? No contest.

JH

MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

When I first became aware that some episodes of Doctor Who didn’t exist, it was when my Dad bought me the VHS of The Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992. At the top of the case was a strapline reading: MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD. RETURNED TO BBC VIDEO AFTER OVER 20 YEARS! I was seven. It didn’t upset me too much me at the time, as the black and white stories I never felt were as engaging as those in colour, despite loving Tomb and even at that age spotting the vast gulf of difference in quality between it and The Twin Dilemma (the other Easter present)! I adored the Peter Cushing Dalek films but felt nothing for their fuzzy TV counterparts. There was also so much Doctor Who that I’d never seen before that a few more episodes couldn’t make that much of a difference. I am now so, so thankful that we have Tomb. It’s an icon. But in 1992, it was just another story I hadn’t seen.

It was in my teens that missing episodes became important to me, specifically with the release of The Ice Warriors Collection in 1998. How I loved those four snowy instalments! I even enjoyed the recon, perhaps still the most cleverly handled recreation of missing footage (and that includes the animations). What I remember most vividly though was reading the inner booklet and realising that the documentary The Missing Years would include footage from The Smugglers, Fury from the Deep, The Highlanders and The Macra Terror. I had never realised clips existed from these ancient tomes and the experience of watching them for the first time was astonishing. Fury looked to be the most frightening Doctor Who story ever made. The Smugglers looked like the sort of spooky Dickensian yarn that would have scared me as a younger child. I had loved listening to the Colin Baker-narrated cassettes of The Macra Terror when I was growing up and putting pictures to the soundtrack was extraordinarily exciting. The fact that clips existed from stories I never thought I’d see was a revelation.

From that point on, missing Doctor Who became a vital interest. Ian Levine had stated quite definitively on The Missing Years that there would always be 108 missing episodes. So when The Lion was found the following year, I was over the moon and that giant, green boxset became one of my Favourite Things Ever. In 2003, shortly after the announcement of the new series, it was revealed that Day of Armageddon had been discovered too. I was at college in an IT lesson when I found out, casually browsing the internet. I cried. In front of my mates who shrugged and got on with their much richer lives. I had a stronger reaction to Day of Armageddon than the news that the real deal was coming back to TV. (After all, something would probably go wrong there.)

And that was that. I never even considered another discovery. Doctor Who’s Missing Years amounted to two moments of euphoria for me, never to be repeated. And I was actually sort of fine with that. Because since Ian Levine’s statement, I’d sort of given up hope.

Then came 2011. I was driving to work when then newsreader told the world that two Doctor Who episodes had been found after being lost in time for decades. “Which ones??!!” I screamed at the radio, but it was no use. She wasn’t for telling. I raced dangerously into work and threw myself at a computer. Oh. The Underwater Menace 2 and Galaxy 4: Air Lock. Well, I could sort of understand why the newsreader hadn’t mentioned which ones. They were hardly fan favourites. In fact, to be blunt, they were the dregs. But I wasn’t deflated. I was excited to see Galaxy 4, there being no telesnaps. This had to yield some surprises. And I was in a minority in that I really loved Underwater Menace 3 and so I was looking forward to seeing Part 2, even though it’s the first and last bloody episodes that are the most visually arresting!

But this time, I didn’t think that was it. Nobody did. Because what probably started as a lovely idea: “Let’s announce it at the BFI and let people see it immediately!” had become six months of secret-keeping. And the horrible thing about secrets is, you don’t know who’s got them. Now, we fans were no longer wondering where the episodes might be, but who might know about them. And that was awful, because the crime of these stories being missing didn’t equate to human error any more but to human secrecy.

Philip Morris appeared on The Reign of Terror DVD commentary to talk about his search for Doctor Who long before his anniversary announcement. I wondered why on Earth he was there and deduced that he must have found some Who he wasn’t telling us about, especially with that last comment as the credits role: “Which would I most like to find? What an interesting question.” As if he hadn’t expected that one to come up! In July 2013, I was told that Enemy and Web were back at the BBC but that it was being kept under wraps and there could be more to come. I waited 3 months before an announcement was made, and again, that was after a long period of secrecy. In the end, I was deflated. I couldn’t believe Web still had an episode missing! But to see these stories was of course, a great joy. In the intervening years, I’d heard the CD soundtracks so often, I knew Enemy was a belter and I was surprised in that Web was even better than I thought it would be and absolutely lived up to that first spectacular episode.

However, what was once a tantalising hope – that one day I might get to see these beautiful programmes, that they’d turn up in a loft or a vault somewhere – has now become an irritation. Why does Philip Morris keep alluding to more finds and refusing to deny that he has any more? Why does he remain so irritatingly optimistic if he has nothing? The protracted way in which Enemy and Web were returned means that there could be stuff sitting at the BBC which we don’t know about at any given point. Bluntly, I’d much rather he admit he has nothing than keep us hanging. It’s worse than not knowing if anything exists; it’s not knowing what Phil is playing at. In the old days, the episodes either existed or they didn’t. Now, we have to wait for someone to tell us that they exist or not. It’s bloody infuriating that a group of individuals would keep their secrets for such a long time. Surely, any fan would like to be told that episodes are back, being worked on and will be released soon, rather than be kept in the dark? 

However, hope remains. And it’s a nagging, horrible feeling! But it’s there!

Episodes I’d still love to see include:

·         All of The Massacre – I think it’s a masterpiece.

·         Fury from the Deep Parts 2 and 4 – the creepiest ones with major set-pieces: the Hariss household and the trip down the pipeline. I can do without the helicopter stuff later on!

·         The Abominable Snowmen Parts 1 and 6 – the beginning and the end. I’d love to see Padmasambhava and the first episode is a tense and wild affair! 

·         Anything from The Daleks’ Master Plan – it jumps around from episode to episode and there are no telesnaps to offer even a clue as to how some of it may have looked!

·         The Savages Part 3 – For Freddie Jaeger’s Hartnell impression.

·         The Wheel in Space Part 1 – It’s a weird, trippy, mental thing.

·         Evil 1 – A contemporary 60s episode.

·         The Macra Terror – Cos it’s bloody amazing.

Of course, any discovery would be most welcome. Strangely, given the animations, I’m less inclined to vote for those stories (Power, Invasion, Moonbase, etc) in a list of Most Wanted, already having very watchable versions to hand. But imagine the delight in getting to see Troughton’s first steps as the Doctor or Hartnell’s last. Even yet, these unknown treasures feel like magical totems. And the hope does remain. Please, Phil, do the right thing: either pull your finger out and share or tell us you’ve got nothing. It’d be much easier to bear. Here’s still hoping, one day soon…

JH

We’re All Stories In The End. Just Make It A Good One, Huh?

Growing up in the 90s, it took me an awful lot of time to realise that there were more Doctor Who fans in the world than just me. For most of my childhood, Doctor Who was an entirely solitary pursuit. Any friends from Primary School I tested it on failed to be interested and by Secondary School most simply laughed at it (although one lad did remark on the Doctor Who and the Silurians repeat in 2000 that the monster faces sported “really good graphics”). Doctor Who was a lonesome business then but not a lonely one: the Doctor never made me feel alone.

In 1993, for one day only, my dad took me to Manopticon at the Town Hall in Manchester. There, I met Jon Pertwee who said a total of five words to me: “Who’s it to?” and “To John.” He asked my dad if it was with or without the h and gave us a mildly disappointed autograph with a tut. Colin Baker was much more affable. He asked where I came from down to the specifics: “Whereabouts in Oldham?” and told me of his early work at the Curtain Theatre in Rochdale and the Shaw Playhouse. Later, I became members of both places on his advice and still work there very happily to do this day. The Collectors’ Stalls were exciting and I particularly loved finding a host of sculpted character heads on display – much too expensive for my Dad! I spent the rest of the day in the video room, watching tantalising, old episodes: The Ambassadors of Death (IN COLOUR!) was a VHS recording from UK Gold but I didn’t care. It was amazing. The biggest joy of the convention, however, was – perhaps embarrassingly - getting to see The Happiness Patrol in its entirety again, a story I’d had taped a few years ago but which I’d sadly lost. A couple of years for a child is a long time and I couldn’t wait to see it again!

What I’d missed, I note in hindsight, were the panels. You know, the one bit that a convention is all about! I attended Battlefield IV in Coventry and Panopticon 2000 at Manchester’s Palace Hotel when I was 15 and couldn’t believe what I’d missed out on: these panels were so much fun! I heard stories about the making of the stories I’d never been privy to before. I saw Tom talk for an hour about flytraps and champagne: Bliss. I saw Anthony Ainley slapping his own arse in appreciation of a new diet he’d discovered. I saw Jon Culshaw take off all the Doctors, in front of two of them. I saw Peter Purves bemoaning his missing episodes whilst Michael Sheard proudly noted that he had never been deleted. What I didn’t realise was that a lot of what I was seeing was actually old hat. Nicholas Courtney had refused to tell the eyepatch story on account of it being so ancient. Sylvester and Sophie wanted to talk about Death Comes to Time. Big Finish and these shiny new things called DVDs were the new kids on the block. One fan very excitedly told me he’d just found out that the next DVD release was to be the TV Movie. “Right. Yeah. I’ve seen it.”

I wish I had been new to the game when these old stories had been doing the rounds originally though, when the actors, designers and producers were new to relating them. I remember telling a mate about how I’d laughed watching such-and-such a DVD when Terrance Dicks imparted such-and-such a thing. His response? “Oh, have you not heard that one before?” These tales now form as much a parcel of a Doctor Who adventure as the adventure itself. Who can watch Ambassadors without hearing, “Well Terrance, you were doing your job and I was doing mine?” Who could watch Planet of the Spiders without intoning “His hair got more and more bouffant as the years went by, you see?” Who could watch Planet of Evil without knowing that the jungle set ended up on the BBC’s in-house designers’ manual? Who could watch Battlefield without knowing that Sylvester saved Sophie’s life? Who could watch Nightmare of Eden without thinking Tom vs Bromly? Who could watch Silver Nemesis without knowing that “that gap is just too wide?” Who could watch Pyramids without knowing it’s Mick Jagger’s house or Mind Robber without chickenpox or Pirate Planet without the sausage dog story? The list goes on and on and on. And I love, love, love those anecdotes.

I’ve tried valiantly to poetrycise them. Here goes:

We only had three Daleks;
The day Sylvester saved my life;
Marshminnows were actually peaches;
Morgaine was Jon’s first wife.

A dog had asked Tom for sausages;
His collar bone broke that day;
Levene was dressed as a Yeti
Jon’s wage Shaun just wouldn’t pay.

She ran up to the vic in her knickers;
Daryl Joyce was filming off-set;
It was so cold I got hypothermia;
The fans Christened him “the wet vet.”

John wanted something totally tasteless;
Jon said, “You gonna do it like that?”
We nearly lost Liz on that underground lake;
Sophie Aldred’s allergic to cat.

“Dalek 1, move to your left”;
Lou wanted her eyes back to blue;
For that set Roger used mirrors;
Gary said, “Let’s make magic now, crew.”

Mr Grade was a pompous, old arsehole;
Mr Powell didn’t return calls;
I nudged Patrick right in his ribs and said;
“Look at the size of those balls!”

“The Daemons was always my favourite;”
The vehicles got stuck in the clay;
K9 was a right bitch to work with;
Chief Clown’s teeth still hurt to this day.

Nick always had to have his three pints’ worth;
Those costumes were terribly hot;
“I was just about to go on leave
When the high-ups said, ‘No Jon, you’re not.’”

I’m off. This is it. I’ll do Dreamwatch.”
Katy had the map upside-down;
The horse it set off through the woodwork;
And the whole thing came tumbling down.

Ark In Space got thirteen million
And we knew we would still be a hit.
We wanted Victorian London
So we caked his Ferrari in shit.

JH