In our look at the first series of Doctor Who, we saw how the show went virtually overnight from being a well-made but undistinguished making-learning-fun history-fest to the ratings-topping eye of a money-spinning storm flinging around the word 'Dalekmania' in those funny triangular letters. And also how there were too many fucking rope bridges.

After a short break over the summer of 1964, Doctor Who returned in the Autumn with a concerted effort to capitalise on this success in all senses of the word. Along the way, the production team would have to wrestle both with significant changes to the regular cast, and with their own apparent self-defeating wheel-reinventing determination to find the 'new' Daleks while the originals were still pretty much the second biggest phenomenon on the planet. Although the contenders for this honour most definitely did not include...


That Darn Cat!


You may recall that, back in the first series overview, there were a few subtle and restrained comments about the manky bulk-bought stock footage that the Doctor Who production team were prone to using around this time in lieu of having to film resource-challenging things like sweeping landscapes and extreme weather conditions. It's only when you witness one of their attempts at filming a complicated live action sequence for themselves that you realise just why they were so keen to reach for the crumbly bits of cloudy 16mm snipped out of dismal old films nobody liked. A significant proportion of the final episode of Planet Of Giants involves the inconveniently miniaturised Tardis crew being unconvincingly menaced by a particularly disinterested-looking normal-sized cat, determined to inadvertently thwart their attempts to prevent unscrupulous scientist Forester from getting his hands on decidedly eco-unfriendly compound DN6. This in itself is visually problematic enough, but if you watch closely you can't help but notice that the cat itself subtly but very definitely changes between shots, from a tortoiseshell with a straight-down-the-middle light/dark facial fur divide like some lost extra from the video for Passengers by Elton John, to another with a more subtle blend of mug-upholstery, and back again. Of course, this might have been down to the fact that episode three was actually edited down from two episodes' worth of material, and there may well have been some proto-Eurocrats In Brussels regulations about how many consecutive hours an individual cat could spend in Lime Grove, and as such the animal handlers might actually have brought along two mogsters for the recording blocks. But let's not weigh this down with reason and logic, shall we? Incidentally, it's also worth noting that for a swotty know-all science teacher whose primary purpose was to convey educational facts to the young audience, Ian really does come across as a bit dense in this story.


The Dalek Invasion Of Earth Is Astonishingly Well Made


You probably won't be too surprised to learn that The Cat did not manage to inspire a deluge of tie-in merchandise. Nor indeed did it cause Raymond Cusick to bitterly reflect on not getting his share of the rights to it every time a camera was plonked in front of him. In late 1964, though, The Daleks were everywhere, and you could scarcely walk past a shop without being submerged by a landslide of Dalek Fish Slices whilst a shopkeeper with a top hat and monocle counted a wad of guineas and grinningly reflected on the commercial boom of 'Dalekmania'. The BBC and Terry Nation both knew that they'd have to bring them back in a big way, and The Dalek Invasion Of Earth got this exactly right; ambitious, imaginative, action-packed, Daleks every three seconds, and - crucially - an entirely different story to their debut in almost every regard. From this distance, it would be easy to write The Dalek Invasion Of Earth off as a story elevated to 'classic' status by circumstance and hype (and there was a lot of hype - how many ITV shows at the time had trailers that expensive and prominent, let alone BBC offerings?), except for the fact that even now it still looks amazing. Sidestepping that never-explainable cliffhanger with a Dalek rising out of the Thames, Terry Nation's script is a clear attempt at playing with the big-screen big boys, and director Richard Martin rises to the challenge admirably with dynamic pacing, some very fast editing for the time (including lots of cutaways to Daleks, a joke that will be lost on approximately 93% of the audience), a skilful combination of imaginative location work and convincing studio sets, and just generally making everything look and feel 'bigger'. In fact, it's not really that far away from the later big screen adaptation of the story... but we'll come to that in due course. Meanwhile, if anyone has any idea of that business with the two mysterious figures caught measuring Robomen on set was all about... actually, on second thoughts, keep it to yourself will you?


Other Stories Were Less Astonishingly Well Made


OK, so we can point towards the Daleks haring across Tower Bridge, chasing Barbara past the Albert Memorial, and getting a bit soggy at Queen's Wharf, and rebut some of that insistent journalistic twaddle about cardboard monsters made of rubber or whatever it is. And yes, there are other superb effects dotted throughout this second series, from the model spaceship that doesn't look like a model at all in The Rescue to the flamethrower-strewn smackdown between The Daleks and The Mechonoids/Mechanoids/whichever spelling we're taking as authoritative today. Even those giant-sized props in the first story mostly look pretty convincing. When they don't quite pull it out of the bag, though... they really don't pull it out of the bag. In fact you sometimes have to wonder if they'd even known where the bag was in the first place. You'll all have seen that Zarbi walking head first into the camera - possibly even without Pappy's Fun Club shrieking over the top - but there are so many other effect and design slip-ups more worthy of chortling disdain than poor old star-seeing John Scott-Martin. There's Vicki apparently doing her Wii Balance Board exercises to indicate that the Tardis is being forcibly moved, the hilariously unmenacing impracticality of the Mire Beast, the Optera's side-letting-down Ragdoll Productions-esque appearance, and let's not even get started on the somewhat less than advisable 'blacking up' in The Crusade, which is frankly too shoddily rendered even to be offensive. And all of this might well be linked in some roundabout way to...


What's That Coming Over The Hill, Is It A Fungoid?


One of the strengths of the first series of Doctor Who was that even the supporting characters were incredibly well-defined. Alright, so One-Line Wonder The Man From Lop brought down the average a bit, but on the whole they were believable characters with at least serviceable back stories, and were quite often given well-written 'star moment' scenes to explore their philosophies and motivation. On top of that, the production team very clearly spent a long time working on the regular characters, ensuring that their interactions, attitudes and propensity for twisting ankles were always consistent and easy for the viewer to identify with. Most impressively of all, some considerable thought went into making the female characters as strong and independent as was practical at the time, and they even had some dialogue on that very subject. By the time of the second series, though, this has all changed - The Doctor, Ian and particularly Barbara ("Oh boy... THAT was a mistake!") just about manage to cling on to their established personas, and there are a couple of exceptions amongst the rag-taggle of Dalek-fighting civilians, but just about everyone else ends up as little better than a one-dimensional cipher, all the way from the jovial village 'bobby' and the hilariously purpose-free Morok Messenger to new companion Vicki, who is likeable enough and has a good rapport with The Doctor, but never seems to actually 'do' anything as such. This is presumably because the bulk of everyone's creative energies was being given over to the newly-found 'So you like aliens, eh?' imperative, which would be all very well and good if it wasn't for the fact that Malsan The Aridian and company had about as much chance of dethroning The Daleks as Ian And The Zodiacs did The Beatles. And yes, this does include The Zarbi, no matter what volume of 'Plastoid' badges they may have inspired. Of course, this did change towards the end of the series... but more about that later. Meanwhile, on a similar note...


There Are Too Many Stories With A Good First Episode


Admittedly this was a problem that would continue to plague Doctor Who for many years (and still does, if you count the ones that have a good first seven minutes), and arguably actually began with The Sensorites in the previous series, but this was where the phenomenon first took hold. There are few greater disappointments than a creepy, atmospheric and tightly-plotted opening episode followed by three to five of just wandering about going 'erm', and you'll find more than anyone's fair share of them here. Take, as a completely random and not at all obvious example, The Space Museum, which opens in fine style with imaginatively realised spooky stuff about the 'ghost' Tardis and the Food Machine acting the goat, Hartnell's Dalek-impersonating interlude, and a genuinely shocking cliffhanger, and then follows it up with seventy five minutes of meandering along corridors and re-enacting the Tony and 'Control' sketches from A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Then there's The Web Planet, in which a visually arresting opening episode with the cast wandering around Vortis in their Bespin Fatigues gives way to more or less nothing whatsoever, and adds insult to injury by at least making an effort with all that Top Of The Pops Studio Lights/Jackanory Kaleidoscope mayhem in the final episode, by which time most people had probably stopped watching. Quite how so many writers managed or indeed were allowed to put so much effort into their first script and yet follow it up week upon week with the first thing that sort of half came into their head-ish is something that no amount of production documentation can ever really adequately explain.


They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie


Quite what changed in the couple of weeks between production blocks is something that may never be known, but the evidence is there for all to see. And boy, is there evidence. In the second series of Doctor Who, the fun and improving show for all the family, there is a sudden and marked emphasis on casting ladies with oversized backsides, and what's more the cameramen go out of their way to draw attention to this, anchoring their shots on the back-gotters and lingering thereon until William Hartnell deigns to start speaking and they reluctantly have to turn to him. Even allowing for the 'outrageous' ((C) Polly Toynbee) vagaries of sixties fashion, this still seems a bit jarring and, well, over-abundant. This reaches its dubious highpoint - or possibly nadir - when an extra of Kardashian proportions takes a stroll around the top of the Empire State Building, attracting the intent attention of not only comedy Good Ol' Boy Morton Dill but also a suspiciously modern-looking extra, whose reaction was almost certainly authentic. And while we're in that general area, later on in the story there's the inadvertent exposure of Barbara's pants...



Seriously, What's With All The Ants?


In Planet Of Giants, the miniaturised Tardis crew encounter a DN6-immobilised Giant Ant. This is, it has to be admitted, an acceptable and probably even predictable plot device for this kind of story. What is somewhat less acceptable, and certainly less predictable, is the heavy recurrence of ants as a motif in the remainder of the run. Not only is Ian tortured in The Crusade by Ibrahim The Bandit dabbing a trail of date honey to his wrists and inviting his 'little friends' to sample the 'great delicacy' ("such ecstasy!"), there's also the not inconsiderable matter of the elephant-sized ants in the room in the cumbersome shape of The Zarbi. In the second series of Doctor Who, the Stewart Lee's True Fables-esque struggle between man and ant is as all-pervading a feature as the much more widely remarked-upon Mercury and Static Electricity. But why the sudden fear of our eusocial chums? Did David Whittaker live in constant fear of a six-legged army hightailing it out of his kitchen carrying entire slices of cake and joints of ham? Sadly, unless there are any long-lost internal memos headed 'Thirty Two Points Of Worry (Over Ants)' knocking about, we may never know.


Why Are There Only Eight Planets On The Time Space Visualiser?


The closest planet in the Solar System to The Sun, metal and silicate-based terrestrial body Mercury was first definitively observed as far back as the Fourteenth Century. Remotely mapped several times from the 1800s onwards, it was finally subjected to modern scientific analysis when a team of Russian scientists successfully bounced a radar signal off its surface in June 1962. However, news of this clearly had not filtered through to whoever made the Time Space Visualiser that The Doctor 'borrowed' from The Space Museum. Although ostensibly allowing visual access to any moment in space and time within the solar system, it actually only features labelled controls for eight planets (including Pluto - the International Astronomical Union hadn't started saying 'aaaaaaaahhhhh' yet), with poor old Mercury missed out altogether. We can only presume that its close proximity to the sun and negligible atmosphere renders it beyond the technological reach of the TSV. Either that, or whoever designed it wasn't really taken with that Kurt Vonnegut Jr book where those splodgy things hang on the cave walls or something. And while we're on the subject...


The Beatles Were As Clumsily Crowbarred In As Any New Series 'Reference'


OK, let's not set about rewriting history - not one line - as there's no escaping the fact that even by the Summer of 1965, The Beatles were ever so slightly huge. They were already an almost unprecedented two and a half years into a chart-topping career, and Ticket To Ride was not only their ninth hit, it was also their seventh consecutive number one. It was also, it should be added, taken from the soundtrack of their second box office-walloping feature film. That said, however, there's similarly no getting away from the fact that a large part of the potential audience of Doctor Who couldn't stand the sight of John, Paul, George or indeed Ringo, regarding them as an annoyingly ubiquitous and over-lauded passing fad who weren't really distinguishable from Heinz or The Swinging Blue Jeans. At that time there was simply no suggestion that they would make such a dramatic artistic leap forwards only a couple of months later, never mind go on to change the sociocultural face of the entire world and leave a legacy that shows no signs of abating even now, and there were plenty of people out there who were heartily sick of the merest mention of the Fab Four. So when they showed up on the Time Space Visualiser in the first episode of The Chase, was it really any better - for a large proportion of the audience at least - than when the All-Singing All-Dancing 'New' Series gratuitously crowbars in an appearance by a reality TV star or reference to some pop favourite du jour? No, it's not. And it could so easily have been Herman's Hermits...


Was This The First Ever 'Reboot'?


As exciting as The Dalek Invasion Of Earth is, as amusing as The Romans is, as good as William Hartnell continues to be, as much as any given villain might make thinly veiled statements of S&M-tinged intent towards Barbara, even the most ardent adherent of the black and white era would have to admit that in the second series of Doctor Who, there's an overall feeling that they were coasting on their success a bit. Except that, right at the end of the series, something very odd happens. Terry Nation's The Chase, another set of scripts well above the batting average, combines thrills, action and self-contained comic setpieces with a deftness that would have had the average adult series later in the Saturday schedules seething with envy. It also waves goodbye to Ian and Barbara with a beautifully light-hearted and surprisingly 'modern' montage of them pissing about in Central London, introduces new companion Steven as a much-needed mouthy know-all, and most significantly unveils The Mechonoids, the closest thing to a rival to The Daleks until The Cybermen came along, and hurls them into a literal guns-blazing battle with said rivals in a sequence that must have left the average 1965 youngster reeling, or at the very least rushing straight out into the street to 'play' Mechanus. Then the final story, The Time Meddler, not only introduces us to the first ever fellow renegade member of The Doctor's race in the form of Peter Butterworth as The Monk, but is also carried along on a wit and verve that has seldom if ever been witnessed before now. Even the stock footage of longships looks quite convincing, though that shot of a fox appears to hail from another somewhat grainier universe. Frankly there is too much of it going on to arrive at any other conclusion than that the production team had decided to up their game and get more in step with whatever else was grabbing the family audience at that time. Which was... um... well ITV were scheduling Thank Your Lucky Stars against Doctor Who so... erm... had Quick Before They Catch Us started yet? Anyway, whoever and whatever had managed to convince them to dial things up a notch, the fact of the matter is that they did, and when Doctor Who returned after a short break, all manner of mayhem was about to break loose...

...but we've got a slight detour to take first. So join us again next time for A Postmodern Tramp, More Base Voyeurism, Ian Singing The Glory Of Love, and Something About Professor Kitzel Falling Down A Plughole...


And if you want to read a more detailed piece on The Romans, The Crusade, The Time Meddler and all of the other sixties historical stories, you can find one in my book Well At Least It's Free.

One thing that those big walloping housebrick-sized books about the 'end' of 'the sixties' never get round to mentioning is the decline of ITC. Once ITV's in-house powerhouse of dynamic fashion-driven action serials, when everything started sliding towards loudly-patterened curtains and mirror-disc top hats and all the hippies jumped in a bin to hide from the BBC Schools Diamond or something, ITC lost their small-screen hitmaking direction in a way that their Jaguar-swerving lead characters sure would never have done.

Perhaps reflecting the more street-level politicised nature of the times, as the seventies rolled on audiences were increasingly looking for something grittier and grimier featuring detectives who wrestled with real 'issues' rather than billionaire supervillains and dangerous new inventions, which ITC seemingly took as their cue to move in completely the opposite direction. They may have seen in the decade strongly with UFO, Jason King and The Persuaders! - all of which at least technically began production in 1969 - but within a couple of years they'd moved on to such unmemorable fare as Millicent Martin-starring swinging air hostess solving crimes in her spare time effort From A Bird's Eye View, a vision of jet-setting glamour that was already jarringly several years out of step with the times, and bizarre co-production funding-driven Gerry Anderson-helmed detective series The Protectors, which even the cast and crew later admitted that they never quite understood. They also cut the average running time of their shows from an hour to thirty minutes, presumably in pursuit of some unfathomable Stateside 'syndication' deal, which hardly even gave them the chance to develop properly as action-driven television shows, let alone catch on with audiences. All in all, ITC's single biggest success of the time was The Adventures Of Rupert Bear, a long way and yet only a few years from their triumphantly lording it over the Saturday Night schedules with Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons and The Prisoner.

Times change, though, and nowadays even the biggest and boringest of TV flops of yesteryear has a reasonably profitable degree of cult appeal. Good, bad and The Adventurer alike, you'll now find every last ITC series on DVD, on Bluray, and on repeat channels on an unending loop. With one very glaring exception. First seen in 1974 (though some sources insist that the two-part pilot The Mountain Witch was shown as a one-parter in an hour-long slot in 1973), Skiboy starred seventeen year old Steve Hudis - son of Carry On films creator Norman - as Bobbie Noel, a skiing instructor who solved crimes, mounted daring rescue missions and defused wartime bombs in the Swiss Alps in his spare time. And that was literally the only skill and advantage he had at his disposal - skiing. In crimefighting terms, that makes him about as useful as Nathan Petrelli.

One area where young Bobby's quaterpiping skills should have proved an advantage, though, was in attracting viewers. At the time, fuelled by spectacular Olympic displays, glossy glamorous books like Stein Eriksen's Come Ski With Me, and World Of Sport's need to fill fifteen billion hours every Saturday with stuff that they could actually get the rights to, skiing was seen as pretty much the high altitude of thrill-packed glamour and sophistication. Ski chases and Alpine romances were a regular feature in James Bond films, while the Milk Tray man wouldn't even have considered delivering a single Strawberry Temptation without getting in a spot of downhill carving along the way. 'Action' comics like Tiger and Hotspur were crammed with storylines about their stunt plane pilot/record-breaking sportsman characters making emergency landings in hazardous off-piste areas, and their readers also thrilled to the endless procession of ski-themed Fisher Price Adventure People playsets. Toblerone was still the classy 'expensive chocolate' gift of choice, and it was unusual to see a European-made soft porn film that didn't feature a spot of hot Ski Lodge lovin'. Erm, apparently.


There was more than enough behind the scenes ambition to pull this off too. Skiboy was masterminded by producer Derrick Sherwin, who had recently pulled off a successful full colour relaunch of the floundering Doctor Who - including casting Jon Pertwee - and cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who had worked on some of the early Quatermass serials and was also primarily responsible for the infamous Panorama Spaghetti Harvest hoax. Under the letterhead-friendly auspices of 'Skiboy Productions', they were basically handed a huge wodge of co-production cash and told to go off and make a series on location to capitalise on this most intangible of crazes; only a couple of years later, they'd doubtless have done it as a martial-arts themed show called 'Dragonboy', which just goes to show what a huge potential audience they had. And they were given all this on the basis of what Sherwin recalls as a two-paragraph pitch, and the belief that a combination of their experience and the sheer glamour and exoticness of the setting would make for a winning formula. It was like Heaven's Gate, Neither Fish Nor Flesh and The Contrabulous Fabtraption Of Professor Horatio Hufnagel all rolled into one. And about as successful as any of them too.

Is this really fair though? Does Skiboy really deserve its... well, it doesn't even really have a reputation, does it. Does Skiboy deserve its obscurity? There's only one way to find out - to do something that possibly nobody at all has done since the scattered repeats finally took an Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards-style jump into oblivion in the late eighties, and actually watch an episode...


Written by Derrick Sherwin himself, Hot Ice opens with a pair of standard issue big-coated seventies 'heavies' more or less shouting "BLAH BLAH SECRET PLAN" as they approach the ski lodge - to the accompaniment of some fancy wah-wah guitar and electric piano - in search of someone to guide them up a nearby mountain. While they do so, Bobbie and his winsome fellow instructor stroke love interest Sadie pass by unwittingly in the background, chasing their bone-pursuing pet dog Gruff and uttering some conveniently foreshadowing dialogue about how "thieves always bury their loot". Resort head honcho Claire is reluctant to assign any of her staff to guide them up what turns out to be called Monk's Fall, pointing out that it's completely inaccessible in winter, but clearly has some suspicions about their motives for wanting to visit the 'beautiful' Chalet Blanc; and not without good reason, as once they're back outside, the flatter-nosed 'heavy' announces that he'll find someone to take them "even if I have to use some... persuasion", adding rather obvious-statingly that he'll "kill anyone who tries to stop us".


Anyone who knows their ITC will be aware that this is usually the moment when the opening titles kick in, and lo and behold we're promptly treated to some startling footage of Bobbie skidding down slopes and hurtling through the air, to the accompaniment of the truly unhinged theme song. Written by Anthony Isaac, who was not exactly noted for his subtlety and restraint in the art of small screen show-openers, this features a brass-led disco-funk combo whipping up a storm whilst a string section play as if running on an overload of adrenaline and some harmonising girls belt out "SKI-BOY! SKI-I-I-I-I-YEE-BOY" at appropriate intervals. If nothing else, the series is worth revisiting for this thrillingly alarming piece of music alone, which is uncannily close to the sound that Air would later turn into a global sensation; and as the series was actually rather popular in France, where it was broadcast as A Skis Redoubles! -  a more or less untranslatable title which basically means nobody skis more than him - it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have been tuning in.

The 'heavies' take their coats off menacingly and approach Peter Stringfellow-esque ski instructor Jean, who rejects their substantial offers of money and sternly informs them of the story of how Monk's Fall got its name. It's exactly how you suspect it got it. Back outside, there's some more conspicuous exposition about how they have to get there before a fellow criminal is released from prison and "we can't wait... and we won't". With a menacing growl of slap bass, this is followed by some lengthy footage of them skiing and arguing, more or less confirming the suspicion that the pair are played by stuntmen rather than full-time actors. Bobbie and Sadie, watching from the top of a nearby slope, are also suspicious of them, but for very different reasons; they've noticed the ne'er-do-wells watching them, though not closely enough to get wind of the plot to kidnap Gruff to ensure their assistance. And sure enough, once they've gone for a nice sit down in the lodge, the hapless mutt is tempted away with a rather inflexible-looking chop and bundled into the boot of a car.


Bobbie and Sadie head out to look for the errant pooch, and split up after about eight seconds, upon which Bobbie is promptly approached by the suspicious characters, who persuade him to help them in exchange for Gruff's safety in the manner of Dino and Luigi Vercotti. Early the next morning, Sadie can't find her dashing chum, and that's because he's already headed out to help guide the crooks on their treacherous journey, which takes in some genuinely hazardous-looking ice-climbing, occasioning the nervier of the 'heavies' to throw a momentary panic and refuse to move any further; "then stay there", adds his more menacing chum, "you'll either fall off, or freeze to death".


Back at the lodge, Claire, Sadie and Jean are busily comparing notes about Bobbie's disappearance, Gruff's disappearance and their encounters with the two sinister interlopers, but bewilderingly manage to conclude that none of them are in any way linked. They're in for a surprise, though, as Gruff has somehow managed to tunnel his way out of the hut where the villains had stashed him, and bounds up to them like some snow-drenched Lassie trying to alert them to the situation. It's only at this point that Claire realises that she recognises the men and that they're actually dangerous criminals who'd been up to no good in the area a couple of years previously; surely you'd actually have to make an effort not to remember that?! A lengthy display of skiing across Monk's Fall follows before the trio arrive at the Chateau, with the bad guys electing to shoot the padlock off the door when they find it's frozen shut. "That was no hunting rifle!", exclaims Jean from some considerable distance away, informing Sadie to call the authorities as he races off in his car.


After Bobbie is unconvincingly thrown to the floor, the 'heavies' start chiselling open the wall and find a cache of stolen diamonds - "the only ice on this mountain that's hot!" - but while they're babbling some rubbish about the ghosts of the old monks hiding it, Bobbie makes his escape and deftly skies not only around their gunshots but with sufficient verve to cause the snivelling smuggler to tumble down the mountainside. Every action series from around this time was required by law to have a scene featuring a helicopter, and sure enough, that's how Jean, Sadie and a snow-copper in a furry hat arrive on the scene; the less easily dissuaded bad guy tries firing on them but they zoom in close enough to make him lose his balance, upon which Bobbie races up and literally skis the gun out of his hand. You don't get that in Sons Of Anarchy.


Back at the lodge, Gruff and Bobbie are both eagerly tucking into breakfast when Claire suggests that he's likely to receive a reward; like some slalom-friendly Alberto Frog, Bobbie announces that he wants the biggest ice cream sundae Sadie's ever seen, and - in as standard issue an ITC closing gag as it's possible to get - as a special treat he's going to let her watch him eat it. Then there's some really rather thrilling closing titles, in which Bobbie races down a slope, slicing up huge clouds of snow and zigzagging through what look like real-life skiiers, before pausing, grinning at the camera in close-up, and whizzing off across the horizon into the invisible distance... and that's Skiboy.


Never exactly the star of the TV slopes - some regions would hastily shunt it into their weekday children's schedules, while all that Look-In could find to say to promote it was that it was 'TV's Newest Series' - poor old Skiboy never quite made the jump to a second series. Before long it had become TV's Forgottenest Series, to the extent that only just over a decade later, the famously exhaustive fanzine Time Screen overlooked it entirely in a massive retrospective of ITC scriptwriter Dennis Spooner's career. ITC looked as though they were finding their feet again afterwards, with Space: 1999 and Return Of The Saint, but other ITV companies had stolen their thunder with the likes of The Professionals and The Sweeney. ITC's response to this was a significant and ambitious change of direction, turning their attention towards grittier and harder-hitting feature films; a plan which was derailed by their washing their hands of the already-completed The Long Good Friday, and then sunk completely by Raise The Titanic.

Given that it's quite possibly the first thing that anyone has said about it from that day to this, the first thing to say about Skiboy is that it's not actually a bad series. In fact it's actually rather charming and enjoyable, and certainly a lot more fun than Spyder's Web or The Zoo Gang to name a couple of contemporaneous ITC offerings. True, it's hardly The Singing Detective, and the all-too-obvious desire to make it as 'family friendly' as possible leaves it feeling a bit on the lightweight side, but it looks amazing and zips along at a fair old pace, and sometimes, that's all you want from a television programme. Viewers at the time might not have wanted it, but that's not really a good enough reason to leave it languishing on the archive shelves; after all, they didn't want The Strange World Of Gurney Slade either.

Skiboy isn't just a half-decent not-even-half-remembered action series from a lost age of television, though; it's also a fascinating snapshot of that lost age of television, and indeed in some ways of the world around it. It's a textbook example of how shows were commissioned and made in the days before focus groups and tone meetings, when anyone with a proven track record could pitch a basic idea, and more than likely be handed a wodge of cash and told to go off and bring home the televisual bacon; which admittedly Skiboy didn't exactly manage to do but they were at least allowed to try before failing. It's also a vivid depiction of the last gasp of that sixties and seventies fascination with jet-setting Eurocentric glamour, before harsh economic realities and The Sex Pistols saying 'BARSTARD' at Bill Grundy moved the sociolcultural goalposts and the entire world went on to washed-out 16mm ITN newsfilm. On top of all that, thanks to the combination of dazzling location footage and equally dazzling fluorescent Alpine fashions captured on garish oversaturated film stock, it doesn't even look like any other TV show of the same vintage; if anything, it looks closer to those films that you'd stumble across on SAT1 and Bravo at a million o'clock in the morning like Modesty Blaise, Vampyros Lesbos and that German one about the three girls who stole a speedboat and a cine camera and... um... sorry, you were saying? Anyway, the cold hard fact remains that no matter how many column inches of ecstatic raving-over the latest HBO/AMC/Showtime/They're Just Making These Up Now heavyweight drama might inspire, none of them will ever be as inadvertently redolent a document of their time as Skiboy.

So, there you have it. Skiboy may not be the greatest television series ever made, but nor does it deserve to be languishing at the back of a cupboard where it's been for so long that it's probably gone mad and thinks it's actually zigzagging between Melbourne House Software and Hardware lorries on the way to the nearest ski hire shop. Given that even Stainless Steel And The Star Spies has been dusted down for reassessment, it's high time that TV's Newest Series got an opportunity to be TV's Newest Old Series. Just don't ask me to reassess The Adventurer.


You can read more about Skiboy, and other examples of The TV That Time Forgot, in my book Not On Your Telly.

Wogan, the BBC's flagship early evening chat show, was a regular fixture on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 1982 and 1992. Doctor Who, their occasionally flagship early evening family adventure serial, was a regular fixture on Saturdays between 1963 and 1986. And when Doctor Who finally slipped out of the Saturday evening schedules, the two programmes ran up against each other in an unexpected way.

Having tried to quietly cancel it back in 1985, only to find that 'Doctor Who fans' and 'quietly' are concepts as alien to each other as The Voord, the BBC had been forced against their better judgement to bow to public pressure (and it's always worth pointing out that there was sane, rational and mainstream public pressure as well as all the buffoons picketing Colin Moynighan's house dressed as Vega Nexos or whatever it was) and bring it back. As they hadn't particularly wanted to bring it back, and an initial attempt at recapturing its Saturday Night audience had failed spectacularly and taken Roland Rat with it, there was only one realistic option left open to the BBC - to shove it away where nobody would see it, and it could just sort of fade from view like a badly-rendered mid-seventies Tardis dematerialisation. Hence from its low-key high-profile relaunch in 1987 to its quiet gurgling down a plughole at the very end of the eighties, Doctor Who was scheduled on Monday and/or Wednesday evenings directly against Coronation Street.


Yes, that's Coronation Street, the ratings-conquering ITV soap opera that had not long celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and indeed was so popular that plans were afoot to bring in a third weekly instalment. Doctor Who on the other hand had just waded through two messy series featuring its least popular lead actor by some distance, so it wasn't so much not a fair fight as not anything even resembling a fight to begin with. Doctor Who got the polarity of its neutron flow comprehensively reversed by Brian Tilsley and company and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. The fact that even most of its supposed fans were gleefully sticking the boot in didn't exactly help, admittedly, but you can't help wondering how much of the carping about 'pantomime embarrassment' and sneering at Sylvester McCoy fighting a cardboard monster made of a rubber set or something actually came from people who wanted to make sure that they got to watch Coronation Street on the colour TV set.

The average household at that time would more than likely have had a single colour television set and a black and white portable in the 'other room', and a combination of majority rule, passive aggressive occupation of armchairs and argumentative tactics learned from the soaps themselves usually resulted in the more mainstream-orientated members of the family getting their way and getting to watch in colour. The hapless Doctor Who fan would therefore have to fiddle about with that crackle-prone tuning dial thing until they got a decent enough signal to watch the latest exploits of Mr. Ratcliffe and The Kandyman in glorious monochrome. True, it wasn't as unfair as when poor old dad was made to watch the snooker in black and white, but you can hear the massed fumings of injustice reverberate to this day. In the hope of preventing armed revolution in the living room, an uneasy truce was usually arrived at whereby the Doctor Who fan was allowed to video the show instead to watch in colour at some later date, and that's where their practical problems began.


With blank videotapes costing a comparatively fair amount, available recording space at a premium (if you worked it out correctly you could fit seven episodes on an E180, requiring a budget-friendly two tapes per series), and little realistic hope of seeing any of the new episodes again otherwise - the BBC had released approximately two and a half Doctor Who stories on video by that point, and repeats seemed indescribably unlikely - getting the whole episode but nothing more on tape was paramount. And, due to the associated need to flit between two rooms in order to accomplish this - nobody upon nobody had the video hooked up to their 'other' television - a very tricky operation indeed. Thus it was that from about half past seven every Monday and/or Wednesday evening, a nation's hallways were filled with fans nervily listening out for the closing comments and closing music of Wogan, trying to work out the precise moment when they could press record with minimal tape-wasting collateral damage. One shudders to think how many obsolete old tapes there are out there, wrapped in line-drawn 'Tape Library' covers done by a bloke at the Sci-Fi local group, containing late eighties episodes of Doctor Who interspersed with twenty seconds of the closing titles of Wogan. Mind you, you do have to feel for those fans who actually liked both Doctor WhoandCoronation Street... but that's another story.

Though you wouldn't know it from the average autopilot cut-and-paste history of the show or indeed grandstanding JNT-bashing forum swear-off, belittled and embattled Doctor Who did actually put up a good and admirable fight against the Cat-heralded behemoth on the other side. Though only those few faithful who actually bothered to stick with it will be able to attest to that. Which, come to think of it, gives me an idea for an article...

"Sylvester Stallone's the new Mister Who!".

It was with those words, uttered by a classmate who was obsessed with being the 'first' with the latest showbiz news despite apparently never quite understanding what any of the words involved in it actually meant, that I learned of the casting of the seventh - and, as it would turn out, final - Doctor Who lead actor of the show's original run.

Whatever 'Mister Who' may have been, it's entirely possible that Sylvester Stallone might indeed have considered ditching Cobra to take up the lead role in it; after all, he was always being linked around then to unlikely revivals of old Cult TV shows that ultimately (and thankfully) never happened. As for Doctor Who, however, they'd perhaps more sensibly opted for Sylvester McCoy, who on paper at least seemed an inspired choice. To younger viewers, he was already well known as the anarchic quick-talking second-stringer in a variety of off-the-wall shows including Vision On, Eureka, Tiswas and a stint as the 'tall' one of The O-Men in Jigsaw. Meanwhile, to older viewers, he was familiar from a range of more cerebral shows like the gently absurdist nostalgic sitcom Big Jim And The Figaro Club, not to mention literal careering around arts and culture shows as part of the worryingly unpredictable performance troupe The Ken Campbell Roadshow. Those somewhere in between would at least have seen him marching around on Schools' TV holding up a placard reading 'EQUAL RIGHTS FOR MCCOY'. In short he was an energetic, freewheeling, versatile performer with wide experience of non-mainstream theatre and a clear leaning towards the 'outsider'. In other words, exactly what Doctor Who needed at that point.

Alright, let's be honest about this - what Doctor Who needed at that point was a lot more than that. It needed a new and more assertive producer, it needed the showboating BBC 'top brass' to admit to themselves that there were other scheduling White Elephants far more deserving and worthy of being run into the ground, it needed fans who weren't barking mad lunatics intent on catapulting themselves at The House Of Commons dressed as The Shrivenzale in protest at something or other where nobody was ever quite sure what it was, and above all it needed a slot in the schedules that wasn't directly against bastard Coronation Street. It didn't get any of this, of course, but never let it be said that those who were left to fight the battle didn't fight it admirably, and in a way that led many of the remaining faithful to believe, just for a minute, that they might win after all. It was, in a sense, Chris Morris' Large Charismatic Biblical Chicken, which I mention purely as a way of getting a plug in for my book about Radio 1 comedy, Fun At One. Yes, alright, I'll get back to Doctor Who now.

Despite what the revisionists from both outside and inside fandom might try to insist, and regardless of whether it actually worked or not, there really was a stylistic sea change from Sylvester McCoy's arrival onwards, and a vivid determination to get as far away as possible from directionless self-referential mean-spiritedness of the past couple of series. And for the admittedly few who did stay on board for what one certain continuity announcer infamously described as "a journey to an altogether more far-flung shore", this meant a much-needed freshness, brightness and sense of fun, and - just for the briefest of moments - a genuine hope that they might finally be getting it right again, and that the lingering threat of 'cancellation' might finally recede. The irreverent pranksters behind the definitive McCoy-era overview Wallowing In Our Own Weltschermz have argued with some force that, while still some way from hurtling back to shore at a rate of knots, the production team had at least turned the ship around, whilst Gareth Roberts, one of the most perceptive analysts that archive TV has ever had, put it more simply and directly still: "suddenly, somebody opens a window, turns on the air-conditioning, squirts lemon disinfectant around with abandon, and we get Season Twenty Four".


Of course, that optimism was quickly dashed, and fans would see in a new decade with that famously inspiring Doctor Who Magazine cover featuring a dejected-looking Sylvester McCoy beneath the headline 'Waiting In The Wings - What Does The Doctor Do Next?'. Over time, this hope-dashing would lead to a widespread and erroneous belief that there was never any hope to dash in the first place; that the series really was the 'pantomime embarrassment' that self-appointed 'superfans' with their own well-known personal beefs with cast and crew went to great lengths to inform us it was every three minutes, that the sets were uniformly flimsy and the music uniformly terrible, and that Sylvester McCoy spent three years falling over while saying "twosidzzzzzz onecoin" (and with friends like that, who needed Jonathan Powell?). And yet, there were so many who watched, accepted and liked those three series on face value, who saw and felt the excitement and potential of the gradual improvement, and really did believe for one gloriously deluded moment that Doctor Who in its original incarnation still had a fighting chance in a changing home entertainment landscape and against the machinations of an incoming wave of media 'money men'. Some of them may even have penned a short article for their Local Group's Newsletter analysing the out-of-season coverage between series twenty four and twenty five and described it as 'encouraging'. Which certain erstwhile Local Group Newsletter editors had best not now dig out lest their feature about how long the whole thing took to photocopy and staple should also 'leak' online.

Sometimes, in fairness, arguments against the McCoy era have been made cogently, rationally, and backed up with thoughtful assessment. Nine times out of ten, however, they've been made by prats whose evaluation goes no further than the fact that they don't particularly think much of McCoy's debut story Time And The Rani. That, apparently, is the beginning and end of their argument, no further questions Madame Inquisitor. Is Time And The Rani even that bad, though? Surely there were a lot of viewers who quite enjoyed it when it went out, and maybe even found it refreshing and invigorating after the aimless and alienating lack of restraint and focus that had dominated the past couple of series? Well, yes there are. Hello. You're reading the stridently pro-McCoy ramblings of one of them right now in fact. And this is as good a moment as any to take another look at the Seventh Doctor's debut outing and see if any of that scoffing and snorting actually does hold any weight after all. So, fire up the black and white portable, sit impatiently through the last two minutes of Wogan, flit trepidatiously in and out of the room where everyone else is watching Coronation Street in colour to make sure you start the video just at the right moment, and let's go!


NEXT TIME: New Theme Music, New Opening Titles, New Doctor, and the problems begin...

Episode One of Time And The Rani is, so a lot of fans would have you believe, Where It All Went Wrong For Doctor Who. Actually, one or two of them say it's Paradise Towers Episode Two, but let's not split hairs here. This is the point at which, apparently, Doctor Who became entirely unwatchable. When it finally vaulted over the point of self-parody into what every third-rate fan writer insisted on referring to as 'pantomime embarrassment', and even its most ardent and unhinged supporters gave up, packed up, went home, and started lamenting the cancellation of Star Cops instead.

While it's all very nice and neat, this is a version of events that conveniently omits quite a few important points. For starters, there's the small matter of the two series that directly preceded it. Then there's the weaker Troughton stories, and all those times that Tom Baker was phoning it in while working from a script that the writer apparently couldn't even be bothered finishing. There's The Sensorites, there's Meglos, there's The Space Museum, there's The Dominators, there's The Armageddon Factor, there's The Two Doctors, there's Time-Flight and there's The Time Monster. Good Lord Almighty there's The Time Monster. And we haven't even got started on the average weekly reaction to any given post-2005 episode yet. So yes, it may well be that the people with their fingers wedged in their ears genuinely disliked and continue to dislike the Sylvester McCoy era; but it's also likely that it marked a convenient excuse for them to stop watching Doctor Who as they'd simply outgrown it, got bored, or had other things to do. Or, of course, preferred Coronation Street. And if you weren't actually watching at all at the time, you don't get a vote on that. Sorry. How's that Rings Of Akhaten working out for you?


Anyway, Episode One of Time And The Rani. It wasn't just fans who stopped watching - or at the very least elected not to start watching again - and Coronation Street was not entirely to blame. If we're going to get anywhere near understanding why, it's important to disregard any of the arguments that fans tie their brains into knots with and consider how it must have looked to the average ordinary everyday television watcher who'd just enjoyed an edition of Wogan, probably featuring Peter Egan. No matter what the HBO Evangelists may have to say about the need to persevere with an unfolding story arc for fifteen million episodes before you can possibly be allowed to decide whether you like a TV show or not, the cold hard fact of the matter remains that the average viewer has to be grabbed in no uncertain terms by the first couple of minutes of any television show, and if they aren't, it's Bonekickers time for everyone. And, even allowing for the huge wodge of the audience who would already have decided to watch Coronation Street instead, it's clear that the vast majority of viewers weren't hooked by the opening of the first episode of Time And The Rani. So if it's actually good and not bad like YOU thought - which of course is what we're trying to argue here - where did it go so wrong?

Well, that's a difficult question, and one that to a certain extent depends on when you were actually watching it. This widely-reviled twenty five minutes of television opens with a pre-credits sequence that is frequently held up to ridicule now, but actually seemed arresting and refreshingly different when it first went out. No, really. For a start, it was unusual to see a pre-credits sequence on any BBC programme back then, let alone one that opened with a hefty wallop of impressive visual effects, and it's this more than anything else that underlines the fact that everyone involved at least went into Series Twenty Four with the intention of doing something a bit different. In fact, especially when considered in conjunction with his liking for bringing in guest stars from theatre and musicals, cameos from popular Light Entertainers, and specially-shot trailers full of Blipvert-style fragments of flashy clips, it's almost as though John Nathan-Turner had seen the direction that American TV (and especially Doctor Who's close rivals) was headed in, and was trying emulate it on his own terms. Unfortunately for all concerned, he had neither the budget, the resources, the expensive film stock or indeed - let's be honest about this - the motivation and dedication to carry it off.


As if to labour the point, within this pre-credits sequence there are three small but significant breaks with recent tradition, all of which manage to highlight both the strengths and flaws of the entire McCoy era at the exact same time. There's a hefty dose of dazzling-for-the-time computer graphics and video effects, which are certainly more impressive than anything seen in the more lauded The Box Of Delights, but they're employed purely for show and not for any substantial dramatic or aesthetic reason. There's a guest star camping it up something rotten, in a manner that would soon become de rigueur even for more 'heavyweight' drama, but who is undermined by not having anybody to react to or interact with, and on an overlit Tardis set that had seen better days to boot. And, thanks to Colin Baker's understandable truculence, there's a regeneration accomplished with only one Doctor present on set, which is as bold a statement of John Nathan-Turner's defiant make-do-and-mend attitude as you're liable to find, only here there's no story completed to impressive effect in a car park when an asbestos scare booted them out of the studio, only Sylvester McCoy in a wig turning into Sylvester McCoy not in a wig. It all still looks and sounds great, but it's really rather empty in some respects; though, that said, as the entire purpose of the sequence was to shake off the stuffy stench of recent years and do something noticeably fresh and new from the outset, maybe that's all it needed to be. That shot with Ikona watching the Tardis plummet planetwards is good, though.


Then, with a burst of pixels and a splatter of Yamaha DX7-derived audio pyrotechnics, we're flung directly into the path of the primary weapon in the McCoy-sceptic's arsenal, their ultimate convenient stick to set about its muggy boneheadedness with; the brand spanking new all-singing all-dancing all-winking opening titles. In the interests of transparency and full disclosure, it's true to say that the new titles and theme arrangement weren't exactly universally well received even back then, but there's still an important differentiation to be drawn. Nowadays, the favoured line of attack is to scoff at how 'dated' they look and sound; technology and taste have marched on and we're all so much more cultured and aesthetic than those poor primitive fools back in 1987 with their Timbuk 3 and their Fido Dido and their Arkanoid on the Atari ST. When those poor primitive fools actually were back in 1987, however, the rumblings of dissent came instead from those who felt it was too 'modern', sufficiently alienated by the sampler'n'CAD-fuelled Shock Of The New to write distressed letters to fanzines voicing suspicion of this new-fangled McCoy man and the godless 'spray-can' effect of his dangerously modern logo.

In fairness, it's true to say that CAL Video's in retrospect slightly crammed and cluttered Elite-trouncing visuals have been long since superceded on every possible technical and artistic level, and that - as the makers of the opening titles themselves wearily sigh in one of the best ever Doctor Who DVD extras - you can do much the same on a mobile phone nowadays; a quick glance at YouTube, however, will confirm that for the majority of Doctor Who fans, the ability to do anything even halfway as entertaining with the technology remains depressingly elusive. Similarly, Keff McCulloch's bright and clipped micro-management of the theme music, resembling nothing less than an Art Of Noise record punching itself in the face, and swamped in so much MIDI that it makes Mike Lindup from Level 42 look like a lackadaisical technophobe, now sounds unnervingly similar to the sort of home-made Doctor Who theme ringtones that people gave up thinking were a good idea over a decade ago.

These are charges that, admittedly, it's difficult to refute. The first ever Doctor Who title sequence to use digital technology rather than stretched plastic bags and tape loops, it is with no small irony that it is now the most 'of its time' by some considerable distance (though that said we'll see how the current one looks in a couple of years). In its time, however, it looked and sounded little short of amazing, and again was streets ahead of pretty much everything else on the small screen back then; the camera cutting through one of the solar rings in particular was a topic of considerable excitement amongst the less luddistic fans. Yes well we had to make our own entertainment in those days. John Nathan-Turner wasn't always quite so sharp in his quest to stay one step ahead of technology - disastrous 'real robot' companion Kamelion is evidence enough of that - but here he made absolutely the right decision in reaching out to two experts at the cutting edge of their respective fields, and it's hardly any of their fault that the end result isn't quite as impressive all this time later. More to the point, you would have been hard pushed back in 1987 to find anyone cheerleading for Delia Derbyshire's sparse hand-crafted electronics or the creaky 'howlaround' effect; both were roundly viewed as primitive relics from another age and perhaps all adventurous technologies have to go through a period of derision or disinterest before they can be properly re-evaluated. Incidentally, there was a single-length edit of Keff's theme arrangement prepared, but it never actually saw release on 7". If you want to know why, though, I'm not telling you here. You'll have to get my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box instead.


So, even from the outset, even the most titles-dazzled average viewer would probably have had at best mixed feelings about this journey to an altogether more far-flung shore, and mixed feelings do not an EastEnders-challenging ratings-topper make. Meanwhile, the end of the opening titles bring with them a sight that will strike fear into the very central nervous system of any self-respecting Doctor Who fan; no, not McCoy's wink, but a writing credit for Pip and Jane Baker. Defending the much and often rightly derided husband and wife scriptwriting team is not an enviable task in anyone's book (and given their involvement, we can only hope the book isn't Doctor Who: Race Against Time), but people aren't just asked to work on a primetime television series out of nowhere, as much as many fans may wish that was the case, and it's always worth taking a look at people's career paths outside of the show that far too many contributors' entire artistic value gets based on. The Bakers seem to have enjoyed a promising early career, contributing to several highly-rated drama series and penning a couple of well-received standalone dramas, though sadly much of this has long since been wiped. By the late eighties, though, they'd veered wildly off course, penning such groundbreaking masterpieces as children's sci-fi sitcom Watt On Earth. You'll never guess what it was about.

Anyway, there's no getting away from the fact that their four Doctor Who stories were putting it mildly not what was needed at that point, and on top of that their bullish fingers-in-ears defensiveness when faced with criticism did little to endear them to what was left of the show's audience. In their defence, though, they were quite often doing their best in difficult circumstances - one episode was as good as written overnight so that there would at least be something to go before the cameras in the morning - and were amongst the show's staunchest defenders at a time when taking that stance can hardly have brought them a wealth of professional benefits. On top of that, they frequently protested - to an equally finger-eared reaction from fans - that what ended up on screen often bore little resemblance to what they had originally written. In the case of Time And The Rani, they'd intended it for Colin Baker and had tailored the action specifically to take place on a heavily wooded planet, and some of the more notorious scenes apparently weren't even written by them in the first place. So, bear that in mind as we move into the episode proper...

...which we'll be doing in the next part, along with much discussion of rotten puns about hats, an ear-testing preponderance of banjos, and the general uselessness of Ikona. So why not join us? Or, alternately, take out a couple of half-sentences, string them together without their surrounding context, and then scoff indignantly on a forum that they don't add up with each other. Whichever way you look at it, it's all Strange Matter...

When you get past the pre-credits sequence and the new opening titles and actually start watching Time And The Rani, the first thing you notice is that it looks good. And this is no mean feat when you consider where, when and how it was made.

Some time around the mid-eighties, the BBC had switched from using 2" videotape to 1", which may not sound like much of a major lifestyle choice in this jetsetting digital age, but in all seriousness, there is a massive technical difference between the two. While 1" tape was cheaper, more cost-efficient and easier to edit, and the associated equipment took up a good deal less space, the regrettable trade-off to this convenience was that - putting it as simply and non-technically as possible - it just didn't look as good. Compared to 2", the resultant recordings were flat, lifeless and colourless, and this is the primary reason why pretty much every studio-based BBC show from the late eighties, be it Wogan, Open Air, What's That Noise?, Ever Decreasing Circles or Billy's Christmas Angels, looks and sounds more or less exactly the same as each other.

And that wasn't all. Mindful of the fact that the brand spanking not-all-that-shiny-really new 1" VT equipment was cheaper and more portable, and required a much smaller crew than film did, the BBC had also begun to 'encourage' producers to cut costs and balance books by using videotape for their location work as well. Doctor Who had notoriously switched over to 1" VT for its studio sessions with Warriors Of The Deep, a story that as a direct consequence showcased exactly the wrong kind of cheapness, and as of Episode One of Time And The Rani, they were using it for location sequences too. And bear in mind that this was at the exact same time that the exact same executives who were forcing these kinds of production and budgetary decisions were also publically berating Doctor Who for not looking as good as Star Wars; a complaint roughly equivalent to frowning over the fact that Panda Pops Green Cola doesn't taste as good as a Raymond Massey made with Macallan 55 Single Malt.


So by a simple process of technical elimination, you'd be forgiven for expecting Time And The Rani to look flat, dull, lifeless, colourless, and more or less indistinguishable from any given episode of Laura And Disorder. Yet it actually looks bright, vibrant, and colourful to the point of garishness, ironically resembling nothing so much as it does Panda Pops Green Cola, and giving off whatever the visual equivalent is of the now quite possibly illegal level of sugar rush too. This involved more than just throwing a couple of tins of primary coloured paint around, though; it was an attempt to work with a difficult and restrictive technological format and engage the ordinary everyday viewers again, with costumes, designs, effects and digital retouchings carefully designed to add a dash of liveliness and colour to this drearily Five To Eleven-esque world. Whether individual viewers or fans felt that it was 'for them' or not, it's an approach that would dominate the original series for the remainder of its time on air, and runs right through this particular story like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock.

Even in this opening episode, you'll find an overwhelming barrage of impressive - or at the very least vivid - visuals that present a substantial challenge to the widely held belief that latterday Doctor Who looked cheap, nasty and unconvincing. The computer-aided video effects are meticulously rendered and way ahead of their time, especially the spinning globe traps; the 'Tetrap's Eye View' camera effect adds a nice bit of variety to what would otherwise be rather staid and repetitive scenes, the model work is of a consistently high standard (have a look at the exterior shots of the Rani's lab cut into a cliff face if you want evidence of this), the Lakertyans' make-up is far better than the average alien 'prosthetics' of the day - well, at least by BBC sci-fi standards - and even the clearly budget-conscious costumes manage to come across as eyecatching. Where it falls down, unfortunately, is in the sheer cheapness of the studio sets, though at least they're cheap as in sparse rather than the painted backdrops and wobble-prone cardboard walls of legend. Even the quarry standing in for alien planet Lakertya - in lieu of Pip and Jane Baker's favoured tree-strewn vista - somehow manages to avoid looking quite as boring and unconvincing as usual, though a subtle amount of digital tweaking probably had some bearing on this.


Unfortunately, the second thing that you notice about the episode is just how nervous Sylvester McCoy is. When he'd shown up on Blue Peter a couple of months earlier to announce his casting, more or less in his own regular clothes and with little available detail to reveal about the forthcoming new series, he'd appeared uncharacteristically uneasy and racked with self-doubt; something that was reinforced by an alarming interview-closing comment about how he was 'looking forward' to the autumn, accompanied by a fretful gurn to camera. Without wishing to venture too far into the realms of sub-Big Brother's Little Brother mock-psychoanalysis, it does seem as though the sheer weight of expectation that came with taking on that part at that time was playing very heavily on his mind indeed. Seemingly very little had changed by the time that McCoy actually stepped in front of the camera, as his entire performance in this first episode is jumpy, reticent and noticeably short on comic timing. As we shall see, this would right itself soon enough, but perhaps the presence of a seemingly shaky leading man was part of the reason why so many people took so strongly against Time And The Rani from the outset.

Admittedly McCoy is hardly helped by the fact that his first lines as The Doctor come in the middle of a hamfisted and clunkily exposition-strewn scene, which would be an ideal starting point for launching into an extended takedown of Pip and Jane Baker if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't really write it. The Bakers had in fact wanted to open the episode with a scene showing King Solomon being abducted mid-wisdom dispensal, which would have been a much more effective and engaging way of kicking off the story and indeed the new-look new series, but were prevailed upon to replace it with The Rani shoving Einstein into a fish tank at comparatively short notice, and it's not unreasonable to assume that their original curtain-raising scene might have been slightly better than what ended up on screen. If you're scoffing at that, incidentally, then it's worth bearing in mind that this is more or less exactly how every third episode since Steven Moffatt took over has started. There's some debate as to how far The Bakers were even actually involved with the near-total rewrite, and even then if they were in fact particularly willing participants, so if this scene doesn't exactly help to hit the ground running, then for once it's not really their fault.

There can be less doubt, sadly, about the authorship of the impenetrable and scientifically unsound technobabble spouted by The Doctor when he comes to in The Rani's laboratory, still sporting his previous incarnation's horrendous costume; though, in fairness, it had been written with that coat's rightful wearer in mind and would have suited him much... well, not better, but that's another argument for another time. Naturally, the new Doctor is keen to know exactly what he's been brought to Lakertya for, but unfortunately seems more interested in reeling off endless streams of nonsense with no gaps between words - and indulging in some very un-McCoy-like badly-staged pratfalls - than doing anything constructive about it. The Rani doesn't seem very interested in doing anything constructive about his not doing anything constructive about it, though, and gives him enough time to mess about with her electronically-stored plans and discover something about a 'strange matter asteroid' and witter "What monstrous experiment are you dabbling in now? Your past is littered with the diabolical results of your unethical experiments!"before she finally sees fit to call in Urak The Tetrap - an extremely well-realised part-animatronic species of bat-like bipeds, who all the same would have worked much better in the original intended woodland setting - to put him out of action with a flashy spangly web-firing gun. Presumably he was not a fan of the dialogue.


This, really, is the problem with Episode One - it looks and sounds tremendous, but has the rug pulled from under it by just about every scene having one weak link so weak that everything else collapses sideways onto it. Whether it's the high-speed spurious pseudo-scientific gibberish, McCoy getting cold feet whenever someone shouted 'ACTION', the time-filling spoon-playing, The Rani's impersonation of Mel (which could have worked if it had been written with a bit more verve and properly played for laughs by all parties, but it wasn't, they didn't and it didn't), and those sodding misquoted proverbs, clearly somebody's idea of a good 'gimmick' for the new Doctor but which mercifully disappeared shortly afterwards. And then there's Ikona.

The Lakertyans ("rather unusual species, can't say I recognise it... human with a rrrrrrrrrrrreptilian influence") are by and large a sappy and ineffective bunch, persuaded into docile servitude towards The Rani by their useless leader Beyus. Dashing young Ikona, however, has rejected all of their values, including those concerning not being an irritating character. As we shall see, he gets progressively worse throughout the story, and what's all the more surprising about this is that actor Mark Greenstreet was something of an up and coming next big thing at the time, having recently turned in a widely-applauded dual-role turn in the BBC's 'Sunday Classics' adaptation of Brat Farrar, which coincidentally enough was produced by former Doctor Who showrunner Terrance Dicks (and if you want a detailed history of the 'Sunday Classics' slot, you'll find one in my book Not On Your Telly). He was also something of a favourite with teenage girls' magazines at the time - Mark Greenstreet, not Terrance Dicks - but his memorable for the wrong reasons stint as Ikona seems to have thrown a brick wall right in the path of his promising career. A few scattered appearances in high profile dramas and a failed attempt to become the next James Bond later, he retired from acting to forge a new career as a writer and director. Meanwhile co-star Karen Clegg, who plays fellow eye-candy Rogue Lakertyan with a weird run Sarn until she steps on one of the spinning globe traps, opted instead to concentrate on a busy theatre career, later developing a successful one-woman show reviving forties musical turns. You can bet she's pestered at the stage door by people wielding Dapol Tetraps to this day, though.


Meanwhile, if we're owning up to all of the less-than-good bits in Episode One of Time And The Rani, then we may as well come clean about that wince-inducingly unfunny scene with The Doctor picking out his new costume. By this time it was apparently a 'tradition' for the incoming Doctor's first episode to feature a scene set in the Tardis Wardrobe Room - after all, it had happened a staggering total of once before then* - and, so the story goes, when John Nathan Turner noticed that Pip and Jane had neglected to include one, he hastily scribbled one in himself. And good lord, can you tell. Thus it was that we got to enjoy Sylvester McCoy wandering around making weak puns about sweaters whilst Keff McCulloch indulged in a preposterous medley of musical motifs; a burst of accordion for some Napoleon-styled getup, a fanfare for a busby, school bells playing a flat approximation of the Big Ben chimes for a mortar board, some of Tom Baker's outfit accompanied by a bit of that xylophone that was always in every single scene of all of his stories, frilly-shirted Pertwee-esque harpsichord jangling, a comedy smashing window for the full Peter Davison ensemble, and finally a quick flourish of banjo as he steps out with a Troughtonesque coat, his new Bud Flanagan-inflected costume, and that bloody Question Mark Jumper, which surely nobody can ever have thought was a good idea. Even the fans who bought and wore their own. Incidentally, keep an ear out for that banjo, as you'll be hearing a lot more of it. More than you would ever conceivably want to, in fact.

So, one whole quarter into Time And The Rani, we find ourselves very much on the back foot. Everything that's even halfway impressive about this opening episode is undermined by problems that even the saner and more even-handed critics of the story could make a powerful case against it out of. How can it even be possible to prove that it's not that bad after all, or even to excuse the frankly ridiculous amount of words that have been written about it already? Well, there's still three more episodes to go. And some of them might not even have any banjo in...


*Before you start scoffing with loads of emoticons, it's true - the Second Doctor rummaged in a chest for his clothes, the Third stole Doctor Beavis' clobber from the hospital, the Fourth walked in and out of the Tardis door sporting different costumes, and the fifth took his from what appeared to be the Tardis Games Room...

While Time And The Rani was being broadcast, Children's BBC how-it-works show for under-tens Corners suddenly picked up a couple of million extra viewers. This was largely down to the fact that the show's new presenter Sophie Aldred was also set to become the next Doctor Who companion, and as well as the usual standard issue obsessive fan that has to watch every last appearance by every last actor connected with it, there were also a significant number of smitten teenagers who just couldn't get enough of their latest TV crush. While they would have to wait until 1989 to see Sophie dressed as Cleopatra and wearing a Victorian ballgown with a plunging neckline on Children's BBC game show Knock Knock, anyone who was still watching Corners in December 1987 would nonetheless have got a nice surprise of a very different kind.


During an edition devoted to 'Music', Sophie visited Keff McCulloch in a weirdly dingy cellar-based studio for a look at how he put that contentious new arrangement of the Doctor Who theme together. In a fun little interview, he explains how a synthesiser works, and essays not altogether convincing 'flute' and 'organ' tones before breaking out the somewhat less conventional sounds used in the theme, which it has to be said sounded little short of amazing when tearing out of your TV speaker in isolation. Sophie then gets to play the bassline and edit it into shape using a sequencer; she observes that 'you'd need about twenty hands to play all that', upon which Keff launches into a guided tour of the 24 Track Mixing Console, pushing the faders up and down in a way that seems barely noteworthy now but was the sort of thing that you normally didn't get to see or indeed hear back then.

You may speculate, of course, that this feature was originally intended to tie in with the abandoned single release of the Keff McCulloch version of the theme. Which I would normally use as an opportunity to plug my book about BBC Records And Tapes Top Of The Box, except for the fact that Ian Shazam and all the wacky japesters on the Charter Review committee have just announced that promoting anything to do with The BBC is very bad and wrong. Which I'm happy to comply with, as long as they are similarly happy to dodge an incessant hail of sharpened copies of Come To My Party by Keith Harris And Orville.


Anyway, one thing that surprisingly didn't put in an appearance in his actual arrangement of the theme music, but was all over his incidental music as if it was vying for prominence with that pesky banjo, was the dreaded 'orchestra hit'. For those of you who aren't familiar with it... well, let's face it, you are familiar with it. It's a blanket name for those sampler-derived bits of angular and slightly off-key punches of massed musical emphasis that you'll find roughly every three seconds in any given Pet Shop Boys single. It was an effect that had started to creep in during the early eighties, primarily via Trevor Horn, and by the end of the decade was everywhere, from Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth, through Express Yourself by NWA, all the way to that preposterous Sun-Pat 'P-P-P-Peanutritious' advert. Keff McCulloch had no searing expletive-strewn message to deliver about Black America needing to stop fighting itself before it could fight White America, though, nor indeed any phatic air-punching sentiments about how youngsters hold the 'key' if only the grown-ups would listen to them. Not even any reason to extol the nutritional virtues of a spread made from ninety three percent peanuts. He was there, purely and simply, to punctuate Gavrok thumping his fist through a flimsy paper 'loudspeaker', and didn't we know it.

First essayed in Time And The Rani, Keff McCulloch's approach to incidental music has since become one of the most widely derided aspects of the original run of Doctor Who, and in some regards it's not difficult to see why. Heavily indebted to the MIDI-er-than-thou computer-controlled samplings of The Art Of Noise - whose contemporaneous theme for The Krypton Factor would not have sounded out of place in a McCoy story - his contributions rely far too often on clinical and sterile 'funky' motifs driven by all-too-obviously synth-derived brass and piano sounds, with orchestra hits thrown in for good measure whenever a character does something dramatic like sit completely still doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. They are loud, they are mechanical, they are precise, and they are very much of their time. However, they were also perfectly good in their time, succeeding in making Doctor Who at least sound more modern than it had done since, well, ever really, and scoffing at them for having had the temerity to wear a bit badly is a bit like castigating Coldcut Featuring Yazz And The Plastic Population for not being Rich Homie Quan.

Admittedly, even allowing for this, Time And The Rani does not exactly find the beleaguered synth wizard at his best, seemingly weighed down by the need to make a good first impression, and with high-speed atmospherics careering about the place like a copy of Galactic Nightmare had burst all over the soundtrack. There are also way too many 'clever' variations on the basic theme tune melody; you can hear the first stirrings of his notorious 'Latin Version' here, if you're unhinged enough to actually want to. Ironically Keff McCulloch would do a much better job with a much shorter time to work in on the following story Paradise Towers, then really hit his stride when called on to throw in elements of fifties pastiche when they went back to 1959 - The Rock'n'Roll Years! - for Delta And The Bannermen.


There are plenty of decent moments in his Time And The Rani score, though, and the entire soundtrack does at least exemplify the one virtue that Keff McCulloch never gets anywhere near enough credit for - brevity. Unlike Murray Gold and his ceaseless attempts to shoehorn an entire symphony into every single close-up, there is invariably just enough music to make a point or set a mood and then they get on with the controversial business of actually allowing the audience to hear some of the dialogue. So much so that when some of his music was included on The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album the following year, full-length tracks had to be made up from bizarre ill-matching cut'n'shuts of much shorter pieces of music. Although, that said, the two extracts from Time And The Rani were actual full-length pieces, albeit only heard as brief background edits onscreen. Erm, as you were.

More to the point, the alarming modernity of Keff McCulloch's DX7-derived sounds were enough to lull hapless fans into a deluded notion that their 'cool' friends might start to see Doctor Who as 'cool' again. They'd probably deny it now, much like they'd deny that they ever purposefully ate McCoy's crisps in a misguided act of 'solidarity', but the truth of the matter is that every fan went through a stage of believing that the hip fashion-followers in their class could be converted to the cause if only the right 'in' could be found. And now Doctor Who had music that sounded a little bit like what was in the charts; was this the moment they'd all been waiting for? No it wasn't. It would take more than a couple of orchestra hits to tempt juvenile trend-surfers away from The Lost Boys and paisley waistcoats. It was about as liable to connect with them as that dreadful Italio House-themed Vimto ad, and the only time fans would be hearing the Doctor Who theme around school playgrounds was when the 'zany' kid sniggered and sang "OOOOOO-weeeee-oooooOOOOO" at them in a sort of out of tune sarcastic voice. The Beatmasters did not see fit to drag Roberta Tovey out of retirement for a chart-topping collaboration. There would be no We Sing In Praise Of Total War '88 by Eric B & Rakim feat. Robert Moubert.


Nonetheless, there remains a small but significant faction of fans out there who actually quite like Keff McCulloch's incidental music, and in the pre-DVD Extra age many of them would come to treasure that snippet of Corners that they'd hastily recorded between the omnibus repeats of Dick Spanner. Many would also 'treasure' off-airs of Never Kiss Frogs and Melvin And Maureen's Music-A-Grams, but perhaps we'd better not go into that. But of course, Sophie Aldred wasn't in Time And The Rani, and mentioning her so heavily in this context would be a bit like if an earlier draft of this piece had suggested that some of the additional Corners viewers "had turned on too early for Droids", when in fact the BBC didn't start showing the animated adventures of R2D2 and C3P0 until the following year. It's time to turn our attention back to what Ikona and company are up to.

Meanwhile, in a freak coincidence, there actually was a credible crossover between Doctor Who and new-fangled dance music the following year, and it would have wider and longer-lasting implications than anyone expected at the time... but that's another story.

The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society is a book collecting some of my recent columns and articles, including previously unseen ones on Chigley, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home and David Bowie's wiped early TV appearances.

Within its pages you can find out what Jimi Hendrix was really watching when he wrote The Wind Cries Mary, why old Glam Rock compilations are an ethical nightmare, and how time stood still in the middle of Summer Holiday mornings on BBC1, alongside in-depth features on Camberwick Green, Battle Of The Planets, Hardwicke House, Doctor Who, Blue Jam, The Monkees, The Stone Roses, Pink Floyd and plenty more besides, including more detail than anybody ever wanted or needed about Skiboy. Even Skiboy himself.

You can see a couple of pages below. And you can get The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society as a paperback here, or as a full colour eBook here.

Doctor Who's third series in 1965-1966 is in many ways its most interesting. It's also - frustratingly - the least represented in the archives, at least in terms of key visual material. Bold if aimless changes of direction, struggles to maintain a strong regular cast, desperation to cling on to the remnants of 'Dalekmania', and reputed behind-the-scenes high level clashes would all play their part in shaping this often overlooked set of episodes, but many of their most glaring manifestations were wiped before the sixties were even over and have never surfaced again. Unless they're in that tedious proverb-dispenser's coal scuttle, of course.

As it stands, we have no concrete idea of what some key scenes and costumes actually looked like, or even what some characters were actually called, but you can rest assured there'll be plenty more about that later. It also means that there's comparatively little of the series actually available to watch, and while the surviving audio recordings have really come into their own at this point, it's still going to make this instalment something of a challenge to write. And so, if you will, The Nightmare Begins...


The Drahvins Would Have Loved Twitter


Series Three's opening story Galaxy 4, one of the most overtly politicised Doctor Who stories ever, saw the Tardis crew caught up in a struggle between spaceshipwrecked factions of glam glittery-eyed statuesque blonde female-dominated race The Drahvins, and reclusive walrus-like scary-voiced bug eyed monsters The Rills, of whom every photo ever printed is apparently 'rare'. You can guess who turned out to be the real 'monsters' of the piece. Along the way, there is a good deal of strident-for-the-time debate about the pros and cons of a female-led society (not all of them entirely endorsed by Vicki), the effects of cloning on human behaviour, and the point at which equality becomes inequality - alongside, to be fair, mass frowning at the wishy-washy passive pacifism that The Rills claim makes them 'superior' - and the moral and ethical ramifications that these beliefs and values hold for The Drahvins' plan to get away from the unnamed planet. As their plan more or less involved slapping a Trigger Warning on the poor old Rills before setting up a Safe Space and then No-Platforming them into the middle of an exploding planet, they'd no doubt have jumped at the opportunity to indulge in a hashtag-fuelled argument about which of them was the best at having the plan. Meanwhile, it's probably best not to speculate on what Maaga's oft-referenced 'special things' might have been.


"Then There Was A Galaxy Accident"


Let's be honest about this, the entire history of Doctor Who right up to the present day is awash with jaw-droppingly jarring examples of simultaneously unscientific and ungrammatical dialogue. And it's not really the purpose of this series-by-series overview to point and laugh at deficiencies (unless it's The Anti-Matter Monster), but there's some that you just can't let pass. The Ark is not exactly a story known for its understated and naturalistic script exchanges - in fact, that bizarre bit with a Monoid smashing a vase threateningly, then throwing the flowers that were in it to the floor as if 'underlining' his point almost made this list in its own right - but one particular line elevates all of this to a virtual art form. It's all going swimmingly when The Doctor starts quizzing a friendly Refusian about why their planet is so keen to accept the incoming colonists, Human and Monoids alike, until he asks how the Refusians came to be invisible. This was, we are informed, due to a 'Galaxy Accident'. Oh, right, thanks. You can't help feeling that there were probably better explanations in Space School (BBC, 1956). The Ark was ostensibly written by Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott, although Erickson later alleged that Scott was simply credited out of courtesy and did not have any hands-on involvement in the scripts. Evidently not, as she might well have crossed that line out.


Katarina Could Actually Have Been Quite Good


Let's get this series' first major Elephant In The Room out of the way then. And not the actual elephant in The Ark. Given that even proper hardcore fan researchers are at stern-faced loggerheads over it, it's likely that the debate over whether short-stay regular cast members Sara and Katarina constitute proper 'companions' (or, as they were more accurately known at the time, 'assistants') will rage on for ever more. While I do have my own opinion on the matter based on the wider context of television at the time, I have no intention of turning this into a free-for-all scoff-festival, and so shall leave it there. Other than to say that certain magazines who snort at the idea of including them probably shouldn't pass out with excitement over someone who was in about two and a half recent episodes a couple of pages later. Anyway, the main argument made against poor old Katarina as a character - who for many years was only represented by less than a minute's worth of footage in which she essentially had no dialogue - was that she slowed down proceedings too much. Hailing from Ancient Troy, she was forever having to have anything and everything and indeed everyone explained to her, which quickly got on the production team's nerves, to the extent that Terry Nation simply noted her final scene in the script as 'SPEECH HERE TO COVER THE DEATH OF THE GIRL'. Then an episode featuring Katarina turned up, but everyone was too busy trying to work out which Delegate was which to notice that she actually seemed to have a lot more potential than anyone had quite reasonably assumed. Adrienne Hill gives a solid performance combining superstition and pre-scientific intellect with a combative nature and a reverential trust in The Doctor - almost like a faint evolutionary echo of Leela - and while she isn't used particularly well in that particular episode, it's easy to see how with a bit of time and work, that could have slotted into the show's dynamic to good and potentially comic effect. She'd certainly have ended up with a bit more to do than just twisting her ankle. Speaking of which, Sara was a properly badass independent woman who'd made her name in a man's world and showed more bravery and level-headedness in facing off against an entire Dalek army than The Doctor and Steven combined, so maybe she's worth 'allowing' on that basis alone? I mean, it's not like the vast majority of Doctor Who fans are huffy chauvinist blowhards or anything. And while we're on the subject of uppity female regular characters...


Are Dodo's Outfits Really That Ludicrous?


Gobby Mod Girl Dodo Chaplet joined the Tardis crew halfway through Series Three, but never really endeared herself to the viewers and was quietly written out at the end of the run. Since then, she hasn't exactly endeared herself to fans either, and comes in for a good deal of flak on account of her inconsistent accent, chipper street-smart attitude, ludicrously contrived backstory and somewhat 'of their time' fashion choices. In fairness she wasn't the best conceived or realised regular character in Doctor Who history, and there is probably something in all of these criticisms. Apart from the last one. Dodo, so we're told, was the ultimate Doctor Who fashion victim, sporting ludicrous getup that made Capable Caroline from Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush look underdressed, and bore no relation to anything that anyone in the real world would ever have been spotted wearing. In the context of the High Street Fashion of the day (as opposed to everyday clothing), though, she wasn't too far off the mark. And in terms of the sort of Swinging London style explosion she was supposed to represent, absolutely bang on Mod Target. That pop art two-tone 'Crusader' tabard that she wears to much snigger-provokement in The Ark? Keep an eye on Roy Wood the next time BBC4 repeat that clip of The Move doing Fire Brigade on Top Of The Pops. The miniskirt, vest and cap combo covered in psychedelic circles in The Celestial Toymaker? Try finding a mid-sixties magazine shoot where a model isn't wearing something similar. Nehru Jacket/Plastic Mac hybrid in The Savages? Seriously, talk of the UFO Club right there. It probably would have gone down well in a similar if fictional club Dodo once visited, too. Other than that...


There Is A Distinct Lack Of 'Mods' In The Inferno Club


Right at the end of Series Three, there was a conscious attempt by incoming producer Innes Lloyd to 'reinvent'Doctor Who by shaking off the lingering air of Improving Children's Literature and give it a more contemporary and action-packed edge. This he managed in no uncertain terms with The War Machines, a story that combined cutting edge mass communication-related scientific concerns with getting out and about in 'Swinging London', a large part of which actually takes place within the Capital's hippest and most happening nightspot, The Inferno. Yet while it looks convincingly close to the sort of place that Georgie and her mates would have hung out at in Adam Adamant Lives!, and had the post-Georgie Fame pre-Syd's Floyd Hammond-Jazz grooves and trendy lingo spot on (though it's best not to dwell on that reveller that tells The Doctor "you look like that Disc Jockey!"), the actual clientele have somewhat less of an air of authenticity. Aside from the Op-Art patterns sported by new assistant Polly and Sharon Tandy-esque club hostess Kitty, and one alarmingly frugging extra with a dandy suit and Jeff Beck hairstyle, everyone else just looks as though they're sporting their Sunday Best and dancing at a Church Hall 'hop'. In effect, they look exactly like how you'd get one cool person in amongst a load of clean-cut youngsters with am-I-doing-this-right? expressions in the average sixties Top Of The Pops audience, which is 'authenticity' of a sort but almost certainly not what they were aiming for. Still, given recent revelations, it's a good job none of that mid-late sixties Top Of The Pops footage exists or anything...



Hey! That's The Name Of The Series!


Sorry, where were we? Oh right, yes... The War Machines is also notorious for a sequence in which snazzy big WAP-enabled computer WOTAN appears to suggest that The Doctor also goes by the somewhat more contentious monicker of 'Doctor Who'. This one throwaway line has caused more in the way of consternation, hair-splitting and 'thinkpieces' than pretty much any other in old-skool Doctor Who's entire twenty six year history. There are those who argue that it proves this is his full name after all, those who try and invent ludicrous He's Free Is Nelson Mandela-style conceits in order to posit that it's some form of mishearing of '(it is The) Doctor who is required' or similar, and at the most ridiculous extreme the ones that furiously declare that it means The War Machines isn't 'canon'. And this is one of those moments where you have to look at Doctor Who as Just Another TV Series. Nobody involved in The War Machines had any idea that anyone would even care about it after what they expected to be its one and only showing, they'd never exactly been averse to playing around with this before then ("Eh? Doctor Who? What's he talking about?"), and with several new people coming in on the production side it's hardly surprising that something like this should have slipped in under the radar. Honestly, you do have to wonder about the sort of person who gets exercised about what was 'meant' by something that probably predated even the merest suggestion that it might in fact 'mean' anything at all.


D/C? Or Not D/C? That Is The Question


So many question marks over the lost visuals of the last ten minutes of The Massacre alone. No way of knowing for certain which of The Delegates was which and precisely how many episodes each of them appeared in. Impossible to reliably determine whether those two cricket commentators actually appeared on screen or not. And yet there's nothing about those long-lost Series Three stories that provokes more in the way of humourless debate than the conflicting accounts of what one of them might actually have been called. Actually, yes there is - the same story's production code. Mission To The Unknown, a one-episode story made without the regular cast and as more or less a 'trailer' for the forthcoming twelve part The Daleks' Master Plan, was recorded in tandem with Galaxy 4, or in internal document-ese 'Story T', and was duly assigned the story code 'T/A'. At least that's what we all thought, until someone went poking around those selfsame internal documents and found that it was occasionally referred to as Dalek Cutaway, and that - shock horror - the production code had been occasionally scribbled as 'D/C'. Even to the untrained eye it should be obvious that these are a description and a bit of shorthand respectively, and as such could only be counted as the genuine article in a universe where Strange Matter, The Destructors, Enemy Within, Oh Y'Know That One With Chellak and The Final Three Part Story Does Not Have A Title As Yet are also considered official story titles. More to the point, Mission To The Unknown was explicitly stated as the story title by Radio Times, and T/A was used somewhat more soberingly on the release form for wiping the episode in the early seventies. And anyway, Dalek Cutaway sounds stupid. And now, if you'll excuse me, I really must get out more.


The Gunfighters Is Actually Really Good


Although 'conventional', 'fan' and 'wisdom' are not really words that have any meaning when placed next to each other, conventional fan wisdom has it that The Gunfighters is one of the single worst Doctor Who stories ever. It is, apparently, a hammily overplayed comedy short on actual laughs, woefully historically inaccurate, crammed full of time-filling ear-assaulting musical performances, and all in all the main reason why the production team stopped doing those 'pure' historical stories (as apparently it's a legal requirement to refer to them as) altogether. Except that when you actually watch the story, it turns out to be a rather fun stage farce-like bit of Wild West hokum, where the reluctant and dreadful musical turns are actually part of the storyline, the cast get the chance to play for laughs and seem to enjoy it, and there are subtle but effective hints of 'adult' behaviour thrown in for good measure (Dodo seems disconcertingly - if realistically - taken with drinking and gambling), and anyway, who cares about getting minor bits of Frontier Days folklore wrong in the series that gave us The Megabyte Modem? True, The Ballad Of The Last Chance Saloon does get a bit wearing after a while... but you can read more of my thoughts about The Gunfighters, and all of the other historicals too, in Well At Least It's Free.


The Feast Of Steven Is Also Actually (Possibly) Really Good


Conventional fan wisdom also has it that the episode that went out on 25th December 1965, featuring the regular cast sprinting through a series of panto runarounds in the middle of a grimly serious twelve part Dalek epic set in the far future, isn't actually the sort of thing that most BBC shows did for Christmas around that time but the product of some sort of momentary lapse of sanity and basically a Fourth Wall-breaking aberration that should not be considered alongside the 'proper' series. Although it's difficult to say for certain unless The Eleventh Day Of Christmas brings us Eleven Philip Morrises A-Film Can Waving, chances are that for much the same reasons as above, it was actually an enjoyable Fourth Wall-breaking bit of silliness; it certainly seems that way from the existing audio recording (although it would be a stretch to say it looks that way from the few surviving off-air photos). After all, it was written by Terry Nation, who'd had years of experience in radio comedy, and starred William Hartnell, who was in a number of top-rated TV and film comedies before he started going 'eh?' a lot, and why get so stony-faced about The Doctor addressing the audience directly? It's almost like it might just be, you know, a bit of entertainment or something. And again, you can find more of my thoughts about this episode and The Daleks' Master Plan in general in Well At Least It's Free. And I'll go on plugging it until we get all those episodes back.


Did The Savages Actually Exist?


There are plenty of Doctor Who stories that everyone forgets about - try recounting all of the post-2005 adventures in order if you don't believe me - but at least there's still some tangible evidence that they were actually made and broadcast. Poor old The Savages, however, is somewhat lacking in that area. Broadcast once between two stories that were at least memorable, albeit for wildly differing reasons, and wiped not long afterwards, The Savages had little about it that would have imprinted itself in anyone's memory. Nowadays it's only represented by some unremarkable Telesnaps that could have come from any story, a couple of seconds of blurry off-air cine film of Frederick Jaeger that could frankly just be from any old film he was in, and audio recordings that even people who have listened to them within the previous forty eight hours would struggle to tell you very much about. In fact, not only did I find I had nothing to say about it when preparing for this feature, I'd actually unknowingly left it off the original list of notes. Even some prominent and authoritative episode guides list various crew members as 'Unknown', and it's hard to shake the suspicion that it might actually just be a massive hoax, slipped into a list of sixties stories by some jolly prankster so long ago that everyone's just come to believe that they always knew it existed. Still, being unremarkable to the point of nothingness is still better than being Rings Of Akhaten. Oh hang on, we haven't had any of that They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie stuff this time, have we...?


Anyway, join us again next time for 'Can You Sew Cushions?', Krail and Krang singing Reet Petite, and whatever NXOZ might actually mean...

The Comedy Cash-In Book Book, Ben Baker's book on the history of the TV Comedy tie-in large format paperback, has recently been reissued in an expanded form with even more on the shows that shouldn't have made it into print but somehow did. You can find out more about it here. At the time of the original release, I wrote a piece to promote it about my favourite example of the genre, Zen And The Magic Of Roundabout Maintenance, which you can now read again below...


Like Tin Machine, Carry On Columbus and, well, any other early nineties wheel-reinvention of a much-loved cultural phenomenon, history tells us that Nigel Planer's redubbing of The Magic Roundabout was a best-forgotten excursion into artistic self-indulgence that nobody asked for. In fact, like Tin Machine and, well, probably not like Carry On Columbus, it was a little more complicated than that.

Co-written with his scriptwriting Not The Nine O'Clock News/Spitting Image alumnus brother Roger (who also narrated some episodes when Nigel was otherwise engaged), these new scripts never sought to replicate Eric Thompson's much-loved original loose reinterpretations of the French originals, but instead pursued their own comic agenda, mixing topical satire with hefty and often obscure swipes at the late sixties counterculture (which, of course, Nigel had originally made his name parodying) that The Magic Roundabout had more recently found itself bizarrely tied in with, courtesy of planks who insist that anything that ever showed a bit of imagination had to have been all about teh drugz. Admittedly this approach didn't come across too well when slapped over the top of actual episodes of The Magic Roundabout, especially when most viewers - and it originally went out as part of a straight-faced breakfast news show - were probably looking for a quick fix of childhood-recreating nostalgia.

Where it did work better was in two long-forgotten spinoffs; the bizarre spoof 'making of' documentary The Return Of The Magic Roundabout, which saw Nigel drawn into a Cold War-like world of backward messages, missing tapes and 'silenced' BBC employees, and the accompanying book Zen And The Magic Of Roundabout Maintenance. With a surprisingly large number of pages to fill and no particular brief, the Planers simply let their countercultural amusements run riot, telling the history of the show's characters in a wild psychedelic blur of references to celebrated drug literature, Oz magazine's unintelligible design stance, and what may or may not be a genuine photo of Dylan with The Beatles. There are also Zebedee-driven meditations on Stephen Hawking's recent theories, a map of where far-out sixties pop hits have become lost in Dylan's subconscious, and plenty of swipes at The Magic Roundabout's one-time scheduling rival Hector's House. And did the latter ever get his own peculiar obscure sixties reference-heavy spinoff book? No he didn't. Stitch that, 'Hector'.


You can also find the podcast that myself and Ben did to promote the book, featuring us talking about the best and worst examples of the genre, here. And if you want to hear more of me talking about The Magic Roundabout, then you can find thathere.

Looks Unfamiliar is a new podcast in which I talk to a guest about some of the things that they think that only they remember.

Joining me in this episode is Phil Catterall, who tells us about his troubling memories of Madballs Comic, Channel 4's Wise Up!, Phantom 2040, the Platoon computer game, Birdseye Steakhouse Grills adverts, and Droids. Along the way we'll be finding out whether 'R1D1' is canon, why crisps are a vector for healthy living, and just which bits of The Untouchables were deemed suitable for a scrolling platform game.

You can download it from here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find Phil on Twitter, or hear an episode of his podcast here.

You’d probably need some sort of Space Detective to work out exactly what started off the early eighties trend for ‘intelligent sci-fi’. But whatever it was, even the most amateur of Space Detectives could prove beyond all reasonable doubt that it made for something of a renaissance of the genre and some top notch books, films, television and radio shows. On the BBC alone you got, amongst others, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, The Day Of The Triffids, Peter Davison-era Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Radio 4’s Earthsearch, and even a couple of children’s game shows, both of which which are remembered far better than any children’s game show of the time has any right to be. And neither of which was Cheggers Plays Pop.

The Adventure Game, a Hitch-Hiker's-inspired series of logic puzzles designed to fox the combined intellect of Stilgoe’n’Craven-heavy teams of Children’s BBC-friendly celebrity contestants, is rightly and roundly celebrated anywhere you might care to look. But not so the equally fondly-recalled Captain Zep – Space Detective. But who was this Captain Zep? How did he come to attain the coveted rank of ‘Space Detective’? And what does all this have to do with Ernie Wise, cash-strapped punk rockers and a semi-naked Glynis Barber? Well, to find out, we’ll have to go to another time, another place, where the clues are indeed there for you to trace…


Captain Zep – Space Detective ran for two series and twelve episodes on BBC1 between 1983 and 1984, featuring quizzes based on crimes from the casebook of  the crew of Zep One, the flagship of the 21st Century’s Space Office of Law Verification and Enquiry – or S.O.L.V.E. for short. Each episode would see Captain Zep and his two assistants relate one of their past cases to an audience of youngsters sporting slicked-back hair and cumbersome orange jumpsuits; said youngsters were invited to pick up clues from the action and, following a couple of leading questions from the Captain (“So… who was the saboteur? Why was Grazarax in the Munitions Bay?"), offer their own conclusions on who the intergalactic culprits were, scribbling their answers down on a neon pink ‘magic slate’. Once the successful had been congratulated and the unsuccessful commiserated, the Captain addressed the audience at home with an additional poser about the case, inviting them to write in with their answer and, just possibly, win a S.O.L.V.E. badge of their very own.

All very ordinary sounding and indeed semi-educational sounding, but what really made Captain Zep – Space Detective stand out was that it looked like a 2000 AD strip come to life. Literally, in fact, as the archived cases of the Captain and company were achieved by superimposing the actors into a series of crudely animated futuristic watercolours of aliens, spaceships and landscapes; many of these were the work of Trevor Goring, a rising star of the comics world who would later become better known for his work on the official Torchwood strip and the feature film version of Watchmen. For such a simple idea, the effect was surprisingly well-rendered, and it’s probably no coincidence that this same technique had very recently been used for Jane, BBC2’s Glynis Barber-starring adaptation of the exploits of the thirties comic strip heroine with a penchant for losing her clothes. As coincidence would have it, one of the artists working on Jane was Paul Birkbeck, who also contributed to Captain Zep - Space Detective and - in an apparent bid to dominate the mid-eighties BBC by sheer will of pencil alone - was also responsible for the sketches seen in the titles of Miss Marple.


Perhaps surprisingly, Captain Zep - Space Detective was created by veteran gagsmith Dick Hills. With his writing partner Sid Green, American-born Hills had been a highly sought-after writer for post-war comedians, with their engagements including a long stint providing sketches for Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise (which also saw them script the duo's three sixties feature films), and contributing to Anthony Newley's notorious absurdist sitcom The Strange World Of Gurney Slade. He would later spend part of the seventies in America, working with the likes of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Flip Wilson, and by the time of Captain Zep - Space Detective he was busy churning out topical one-liners for the likes of Rory Bremner and Jasper Carrott. Hills would write all six episodes of the first series, which saw the Captain recall his investigations into Death On Delos, The Lodestone Of Synope, The Plague Of Santos, The G&R 147 Factor, The Tinmen Of Coza and The Warlords Of Armagiddea.

Captain Zep was portrayed by Paul Greenwood, already well-known to viewers as the long-suffering PC 'Rosie' Penrose in a series of sitcoms penned by Roy Clarke, with Ben Ellison as disconcertingly naïve second-in-command Jason Brown, and Harriet Keevil as the more forensically-minded Professor Spiro. Unusually for a series of this nature, the three had a clearly-defined and often antagonistic relationship with each other, and also a fair amount of comic dialogue. They also had three of the bulkiest costumes ever seen on television, which were doubtless very uncomfortable under hot studio lights, with Kevil’s gaining unwitting iconic status amongst adolescent males of a certain generation due to its elaborate stylised bust-adornments.


Not everything about Captain Zep - Space Detective was quite so futuristic. Firmly rooted in the here and now - though, it has to be said, light years ahead of much of the BBC's children's output of the time - was the synth-heavy New Wave-styled theme song, complete with suitably clumsy rhymes like “help me help me if you can/Space Investigator Man/across the stars he’s on his way/it’s Captain Zep to save the day!”, which were delivered in a suspiciously proto-Blur vocal style. If you're thinking this sounds like the work of a long-forgotten second-wave New Wave outfit of the sort that used to crop up on Cheggers Plays Pop all the time, that's because it was the work of a long-forgotten secong-wave New Wave outfit of the sort that used to crop up on Cheggers Plays Pop all the time. A rare punk signing to EMI's predominantly prog-rock imprint Harvest, The Banned had enjoyed a couple of hits at the turn of the eighties with covers of relatively obscure sixties psych-punk numbers like Little Girl and Him Or Me. After the hits had dried up, various members had taken to recording music for use in films and TV shows, which including the BBC's long-running children's art magazine show Take Hart.

It was this association that led to them being commissioned to record the Captain Zep - Space Detective theme song, which sufficiently popular to be released as a single by BBC Records And Tapes during the first series. Credited to 'The Spacewalkers' and backed by the unrelated instrumental groover A Race Against Time, this was, along with a little-seen puzzle book, the only official (and, let's face it, basically the only) item of merchandise related to the series. However, obsessive Captain Zep collectors should note that the theme also appeared on the album BBC Children's TV Themes in 1984 (also home to the Peter Howell arrangement of Doctor Who and the full-length theme song from legendarily outlandish Japanese import Monkey, as well as numerous other delights from shows aimed at a younger audience, which is why it fetches a fair amount second hand now), while Dick Mills' effects from the 'Armagidden War Games' appeared as a track on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop album The Soundhouse, while an earlier self-titled Radiophonic Workshop collection included Mills'Adagio, which was used as backing atmospherics in the S.O.L.V.E. Academy sequences.


Broadcast early in 1983, Captain Zep – Space Detective was a hit with its intended audience and with sci-fi fans desperate for something to fill the long gap between series of Doctor Who, and a second run was commissioned for early the following year. Paul Greenwood, however, was unavailable, due to commitments for Thames TV's upcoming adaptation of The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, so he was replaced as Captain Zep – now revealed to be a title bestowed on the captain of Zep One – by Richard Morant. This was an unusual departure for an actor who was almost exclusively known for heavyweight costume dramas, though in fairness the role did require him to tackle heavyweight costumes of an altogether different kind. Harriet Keevil was also replaced by Tracey Childs as Professor Vana, while Dick Hills handed the writing duties over to Colin Bennett. One of the more eccentric figures in the dramatic arts, classically-trained Bennett was well-known to younger viewers of the BBC for playing a comedy janitor of the same name in the long-running Tony Hart-fronted art show Take Hart, and while working on Captain Zep – Space Detective he was also hard at work scripting the equally futuristic juvenile sitcom Luna for ITV. Subsequent career moves have seen him do everything from direct stage musicals to presenting the legendary off-the-cuff ITV nighttime documentary series Night Shift, placing him in the unusual position of having writing the scripts for Death Under The Sea, The Missing Agent Of Ceres, The Small Planet Of Secrets, The Sands Of Sauria, The Tree Of Life and Death By Design appear as one of the more conventional entries on his CV.


Sadly, this was to be the final outing for Captain Zep – Space Detective. Although popular, it was also one of the most expensive series produced by the Children’s Department at that time, and when they were forced to make cuts to help accommodate the forthcoming launch of a BBC daytime service, it was unsurprisingly one of the first to be axed. Hapless viewers could only turn to Starstrider, ITV’s attempt to fill the void with a rather aimless sci-fi quiz fronted by Sylvester McCoy. While Ben Ellison was rarely seen on TV afterwards, Paul Greenwood, Richard Morant and Harriet Keevil still often show up in guest roles, usually in Midsomer Murders, while Tracey Childs went on to spend several years as one of the stars of the BBC's yacht-boardroom drama Howard's Way.

As for Captain Zep – Space Detective itself, as fondly remembered as it might be, there’s no sign of even a DVD release, let alone any kind of revival. We can only hope that, somewhere, the punkily-heralded ‘Man of Steel, Man of Nerve’ is looking for clues to his own mysterious cancellation in front of a giant comic strip rendering of Michael Grade’s face.


An earlier version of this feature originally appeared in in This Way Up magazine. You can find more about the single release of the Captain Zep - Space Detective theme in Top Of The Box, my book about BBC Records And Tapes, and more about weird, wonderful and mundane forgotten TV shows in Well At Least It's Free, Not On Your Telly and The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society.

If you still hadn’t recovered from the weekend’s celebrations on Tuesday 3rd January 1967, then you were in for a sharp wake-up call. At 13.30pm on BBC1, a shaky zoom in on a clock tower, followed by a riotous start-of-working-day burst of puppet activity, filled the nation’s television screens for the first time. Steadily, sensibly, never too quickly but never too slowly, Trumpton was here.

Gordon Murray had been commissioned by the BBC to make a second stop-motion series shortly after work on Camberwick Green had finished, but while it would be set in the same fictional locale and use the same production techniques and indeed narrator and musician, it was obvious from the outset that this would be a very different prospect to the laid-back working days of Farmer Bell and company. Set in a busy, bustling town centre, Trumpton was more colourful (though admittedly this was not obvious on the early black and white transmissions), energetic and – comparatively – noisy, set in an urban environment with a greater emphasis on transport, professions and machinery, and a large cast of characters constantly crossing each other’s paths in communal areas.

In order to achieve the right sort of pace and tone, Murray had co-written the scripts with Alison Prince, whose dangerously modern tales of transport café life in Joe had caused a minor stir amongst the Mothers doing the Watching With earlier in 1966. An entirely new cast of puppet characters was created, a number of short repeated sequences were inserted into each episode, and Freddie Phillips composed a set of decidedly more brisk and strident songs that in many cases would not have sounded out of place amongst David Bowie's Deram-era material. Ironically for a programme that would later start to look creaky and out of touch as attitudes and audience expectations evolved, back in 1967, Trumpton was probably about as modern as it got.


A couple of readers have asked why my book The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society includes articles about the first episode of Camberwick Green and the last episode of Chigley, but nothing whatsoever about Trumpton. Well, that's basically down to the hilariously tedious reason that it just wouldn't have fitted stylistically or thematically into the middle of the book (where it would have been wedged between features on Summer Chart Party and Blue Jam), and so you're getting it here instead. Actually, if you've already got the book, there's a properly formatted downloadable version of this article further down the page. And if you've not already got it, you can get it from here. Anyway, keeping in mind what we were saying about never too quickly, never too slowly...

Telephone, the seventh and 'middle' episode of Trumpton, was first seen on BBC1 on 14th February 1967, and would continue to be constantly repeated right up to 9th May 1985. Like pretty much every episode of Trumpton, it revolved around the townsfolk encountering a practical and/or technical conundrum that had to be resolved with the assistance of the local Fire Brigade; quite possibly the reason why its storylines are now recalled more vividly than the looser and more travelogue-like counterparts seen in Camberwick Green and Chigley. On this particular occasion, the practical and/or technical conundrum was all down to a couple of GPO Engineers and some excessively nosey dogs.

Like every episode of Trumpton, Telephone opens with the familiar sight of the programme's name in white text on a black splodge on a deep blue background, and what appear to be the exact same first three notes as the opening theme from Camberwick Green, presumably incorporated as part of some sort of vague Clown-skewed cross-show continuity that we are probably best not questioning. There's that celebrated unsteady zoom as Brian Cant weighs in with his familiar introduction to the clock - "steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time... for Trumpton!" - and the figures of town founders Sir Rufus And Lady de Trompe emerge to strike the hour and announce the start of the working day. This they do to the accompaniment of one of Freddie Phillips' best compositions Chime And Clock Theme, which, as if to underline his precision-targeted home-made musical genius, features exactly nine chimes to tally with the clockface showing nine am. PC Potter (and not PC McGarry like you thought) takes a look around the town square, which immediately bursts into life as a milk float cruises by and everyone opens up shops, sets up selling pitches and looks out of windows to the jerky, frantically-paced sound of Busy Little Market Town, which fades out just as the Mayor comes out onto the Town Hall balcony to get some fresh air.


Looking down onto the Town Square, The Mayor catches sight of carpenter Chippy Minton and his son Nibs pulling up in their pickup truck, and initiates a shouted conversation about their respective daily itineraries. Chippy and Nibs, it transpires, are here to do something unspecified but presumably wood-related for Mr. Platt the clockmaker, while The Mayor has to head back into his office to look over some paperwork at the behest of his unnveringly David Steel-like Town Clerk Mr. Troop. Top of the pile are a handful of complaints about the streetlamps in the never-glimpsed but oft-referenced George Street, prompting Mr. Troop to place a call to never-glimpsed but oft-referenced borough engineer Mr. Bolt. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Bolt nor the Mayor can hear each other properly due to some loud crackling on the line; Mr. Troop reports that this has been happening all morning, upon which they abandon any pretence of continuing to care about the state of the street lights and telephone instead for a GPO Engineer. Quite how this was any more intelligible than any of the other referenced calls is never exactly explained.


Mr. Wantage and his apprentice Fred promptly show up in their oddly-shaped van, pull up a paving slab, and sing a catchy little number about their line of work, complete with ringing phone sound effects and Rex Harrison-style 'spoken-sung' interludes. It has to be said that it does seem rather odd and jarring now to hear so many references to the GPO and 'Post Office Telephones', and it might be worth clearing your throat and giving this song an airing the next time that a privatisation-crazy politician starts blethering on about how aspirational a view of life Trumptonshire represents. It might also be worth giving it an airing to Thom Yorke and telling him that this is how you write an actual proper song with a tune and everything, but anyway...

With cables and wires sufficiently exposed and untangled, the two engineers break for lunch, but Mr. Wantage finds to his alarm that his unwrapped sandwich parcel actually contains 'Granny's birthday present'. Far too ravenous to wait until they've finished the job, he heads off home to fetch his errant lunch and leaves Fred with strict instructions not to touch anything. And bang on cue, expansively over-dressed hatmaker Miss Lovelace arrives with her three yappy Pekingese Spaniels, Mitzi, Daphne and Lulu. The overenergetic canine chums are more often than not the cause of mishaps in and around Trumpton, and sure enough, they mob poor old Fred in a quest to make off with his sandwiches, ending up with Mitzi toppling nose-first into the manhole. Fred quickly pulls her back out, but dislodges some of the wires in the process; fearful of a dressing down from the himself hardly exactly attentive to detail Mr. Wantage, and encouraged by buck-passing flattery from Miss Lovelace, he elects to take matters into his own hands and shove them back in where it looks like they should go. You can probably take a reasonable guess at what happens next.


Over in his print shop, Mr. Munnings is hard at work setting up his ink and typeface - as we are told in seemingly unstoppably intricate detail over an instrumental version of his song - to knock out some branded paper bags for greengrocer Mr. Clamp; who, what with his own song exhorting all and sundry to "come buy, come buy, come buy them from me", never seems to have missed a promotional trick. Constable Potter sticks his head round the door for no obvious reason while the bags are printing, and then promptly disappears again, which was a tad inconvenient of him as he could easily have helped avert the chain of ridiculousness that followed. As a result of Fred's copper cabling chicanery, when Mr. Munnings telephones Mr. Clamp to inform him that the bags are ready, he gets through instead to Miss Lovelace, who is none too impressed at having her time wasted with paper bag-related blather.

To add to the mounting nonsense, an impatient Dora Minton telephones Mr. Platt to inform a tardy Chippy and Nibs that their dinner is at risk of burning. Only the message is relayed instead to Captain Flack at the Fire Station, who hears the flame-related terminology and inevitably sounds the alarm. Well, they never did seem to get to tackle an actual blaze, so you can understand them jumping the gun a bit. "There, that should fetch him!", muses a riled and long-suffering-sounding Dora, blissfully unaware that Captain Flack has already flicked the big massive switch next to what close inspection reveals to be - bewilderingly - a map of Florence. Freddie Phillips' slowed-down alarm clock standing in for a fire bell sounds, and Trumpton's single most famous sequence begins.


As anyone of a certain age will be able to recall with alarming clarity and detail, the impressively heavy-looking Fire Station doors clang open, Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb slide down the pole and line up next to the engine, Captain Flack blows his whistle and conducts a quick inspection and they're off and away through the streets of Trumpton to the strains of the jaunty Firemen Bold, which you can't help but notice bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Buffalo Springfield number. On arriving Chez Minton, they are surprised to be greeted by a placid Dora and a distinct lack of smoke. Chippy and Nibs promptly turn up, and calmly theorise that there must have been some kind of mixup with the GPO engineers, before dismissing all of this nonsense and heading indoors in search of their not yet burned dinner, in a tone that suggests an implied impatient "woman!" at the end. "Poor Captain Flack", muses Brian Cant as the picture momentarily fades to black, "he never has a proper fire to put out". No, but he gets all manner of other and probably more interesting stuff to do. AND makes Cuthbert fall in a pond.


Back in the Town Square, in a scenario that will be familiar to anyone who's ever been expected to fix a computer in their spare time, Fred is surrounded by a disgruntled mob (well, Mr. Platt, Mr. Munnings, Mr. Clamp and Mr. Troop) demanding that he dispense with the technical jargon and put everything right at once. To make matters worse, The Mayor then strolls up admonishing him for causing the Fire Brigade to be called out on a false alarm, conveniently sidestepping the fact that it wouldn't have happened if Captain Flack had elected to engage his ears, closely followed by his brain. The hapless Fred's bacon is saved by the arrival of the suspiciously late Mr. Wantage, and the intervention of Miss Lovelace, who confesses that her dogs were in fact responsible. Upon which The Mayor decides to dish out a bollocking to them instead. You would have to wonder how he ended up in high office, if it wasn't for the example set by certain real life mayors we're all too familiar with.

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which I talk to a guest about some of the often very strange things that they think that only they remember.

Joining me in this episode is Garreth F. Hirons, who tells us about his troubling memories of The Bigger The God, Food Fighters, Saboteur, The Triangle Of Terror, Sizzlin' Bacon Monster Munch, and Fun At The Funeral Parlour. Along the way we'll be finding out why wrestlers should never attempt topical satire, why ZX Spectrum owners lived in fear of Ian Durell, and how Piers Morgan caused the decline of the maize-based snack industry.

You can download it from here.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can find Garreth's excellent blog here. And don't forget to have a listen to the first one...

Had this been a different kind of a day, right now I'd be driving you all to distraction with relentless plugs for an article on the ridiculous ITV children's programme The Mersey Pirate. It's more or less done, to be honest with you, but I haven't felt like writing those last couple of sentences and shuffling the images around. I haven't felt like hitting the 'Publish' button. And I'm fairly sure most if not all of you wouldn't have felt like reading it. The screengrabs of Echo And The Bunnymen and jokes about Billy Butler being washed overboard mid-broadcast can wait.

Jo Cox was only a couple of weeks younger than me. Our lives went in very, very different directions, and while she might well have seen The Mersey Pirate, she certainly did something more useful and worthwhile with her time afterwards. We don't know yet why her life was cut so brutally and senselessly short, and to be honest we may never really know. Situations like this are not exactly noted for their clear-cut logical explanations. But while the true extent of its influence is open to question, the uncomfortable and unsettling truth of the matter is that this has come in the absolute eye of the storm of a nasty and troubling time.

We live in a culture where escalating threats are common currency and nobody does anything. And yet we all feed into it, and none of us does anywhere near enough to stop it. Public figures, notably Lily Allen, have told some pretty alarming stories recently, though it's worth me sticking my head above the parapet and saying that I've had threats - on one occasion through the post to my home address - on the basis of things that I've written on here. I'm nobody. And I venture non-opinions on subjects that I'm quite proud to say don't matter. Think about that for a minute. We - and that's literally we, all of us - have created a situation where it's quite acceptable to focus your hatred, frustration and anger on an individual who you've never met and has done nothing to you, for no other reason than that they happen to be in your line of vision. And we all stir and amplify this in so many seemingly inoffensive ways, whether it's hurling abuse at politicians or vilifying reality show contestants. A sad inevitability that this should spill out into reality in so tragic and horrific and pointless a way. Kenny Everett, aware that he was terminally ill, once reflected how easy it is to make others into a "receptacle for your spare hatred" and we'd do well to think on that occasionally.

A while back, for a number of reasons, I decided that I'd had quite enough of contributing to it myself and resolved to try and do something more positive whenever I started tapping out words on a keyboard. To tell upbeat stories of achievement and innovation, to find good things to say about bad television, to defend the 'bullied' in popular culture. Hence Higher Than The Sun, hence Skiboy, hence trying against almost insurmountable odds to find - and then finding - a reason to challenge the widely-held view of Pip and Jane Baker's writing career. Hence what someone recently described as 'going soft' on social media. Hence, well, giving the benefit of the doubt to The Mersey Pirate. True, someone will probably now dig out some tweet where I'm snarky about Philip Morris, or some disparaging reference on here that they take exception to, but that's the whole point. Not one of us is above this and we all need to try harder.

And yes, I am making this 'all about me'. Because it's all about all of us. It's rampant and unchecked, and we are all responsible and need to take that responsibility. So... be nice about something or to someone, won't you? It all goes a long way.

On 2nd June 1979, arguably the weirdest idea for a Saturday Morning TV show ever - and less arguably the most technically ill-advised - set sail around the ITV regions. Launched by Granada on a wave of local talent, The Mersey Pirate was ambitious, live, witty, and conspicuously up to date with current trends in pop music. It was also broadcast live from the middle of a notoriously weather-battered body of water, and, well, a bit of a mess. But the kind of compelling, memorable and glorious mess that you just don't get in this slicker and more sophisticated age, when people actually sit down and think before putting programmes on air.


Inspired in no small part by Gerry And The Pacemakers' 1964 top ten hit Ferry Cross The Mersey, and the modicum of lasting international fame that this had given the handful of boats that lurch daily between Liverpool, Birkenhead and Wallasey, The Mersey Pirate commandeered long-serving ferry The Royal Iris for a weekly splash of Saturday Morning fun. Literally commandeered in fact, as the show occupied every last corner of this ad-hoc floating television studio, including - most infamously - the deck. If you're already thinking that sounds like a somewhat precarious arrangement, then just you wait. You really haven't heard the half of it yet.

Launched on 28th April 1951, The Royal Iris was as dedicated to leisure cruises as it was to the practicalities of daily commuting, boasting a dancefloor and stage, tea room, buffet, cocktail bar and even its own miniature fish and chip shop. Needless to say it was a popular choice for Mersey-crossing as part of days and indeed nights out, and doubtless foremost in Gerry Marsden's thoughts when he sat down to write Ferry Cross The Mersey; though the film based on the song - now probably never likely to be seen again on account of its heavy Savile content - was actually shot aboard less elaborately-appointed rival ferry the Mountwood, while that weird colour promo film with Gerry and assorted inauthentic-looking 'Pacemakers' scampering about the deck with distinctly seventies haircuts was filmed on the Woodchurch. It would clearly take something more ambitious, technically complex, bewilderingly concieved and simultaneously surfing trends and not understanding what they actually were to begin with to get The Royal Iris on screen. And that's precisely what The Mersey Pirate was.


With ATV's groundbreaking outburst of Saturday Morning mayhem Tiswas having proved an unexpected phenomenon when it finally started edging out into other regions, rival ITV broadcasters were only too keen to get in on the act and set out to provide their own distinctive take on this wild combination of comedy, cartoons, heavy viewer interaction and general air of not particularly controlled anarchy. Quickest off the mark were LWT with Our Show, which unwisely handed over the presentational reins to 'talented' youngsters, and Southern with Saturday Banana, which saw Bill Oddie and Metal Mickey doing their best to achieve wackiness without even a fraction of the resources available to Chris Tarrant and company (and yes, Oddie did indeed contribute a heavily funk-inflected and tune-deficient theme song). Always one of the artier and more technologically ambitious of the ITV regional franchise holders, Granada instead took a look at what was literally to hand, and decided on a format that would involve doing their live two-and-a-bit-hours of weekend entertainment from a working ferry and using almost exclusively local talent. Thus it was that a weird geodesic dome was constructed on the deck of The Royal Iris, a hapless 'backroom boy' stood on top of a building in the then-rundown docklands holding out a UHF receiver, and The Mersey Pirate cast off into uncharted and decidedly choppy televisual waters.

The basic conceit of The Mersey Pirate - not a million miles from the technological truth, if we're being honest about it - was that it was an actual 'pirate' broadcast, breaking in to the ITV transmission for unathorised Saturday Morning fun with the aid of a cobbled-together broadcast setup. This was actually something of a hot topical issue at the time, with the dawn of public access media hovering close on the horizon, and Vrillion Of Ashtar Galactic Command having only recently hijacked Southern TV's news programme to spread his intergalactic message of peace and love. A very different kind of 'anarchy' to Tiswas, but one that nonetheless caught the imagination of a large percentage of its target audience, and in particular the ones who could more normally be found 'playing' television with the aid of a modified cardboard box and reluctantly recruited 'studio guests'.

However, with little in the way of contemporary inspiration to draw on, The Mersey Pirate looked back instead to a similar phenomenon from the recent past, and styled itself loosely on the poptastic Pirate Radio boats that had so irked and eluded the authorities in the mid-sixties, with attendant Merseybeat reference points to boot. To this end, the presenters were all assigned nautical roles; club comic Duggie Brown, then well known to viewers for his Shep's Banjo Boys-accompanied gagsmithery on Granada's famously 'unpolished' standup show The Comedians, was the nominal host, or 'Captain', of both the boat and the pirate broadcast. Voluble Radio City DJ Billy Butler, the very definition of 'locally famous', was the 'Entertainments Manager', alongside comedy folk-singing 'Bolton Bullfrog' Bernard Wrigley as the ship's chef, up and coming actor Paul Clayton as the Chief Petty Officer, and Frank Carson as a sort of gag-crazed Long John Silver. Also along for the ride - not that any of the above were aware of it - were a couple of somewhat less reputable youngsters.


Philosophical teenage tearaway Franny Scully and his somewhat less philosophical sidekick Mooey had first appeared in the mid-seventies, in a series of short plays that Alan Bleasdale had written for Radio Merseyside. In 1977 Bleasdale adapted the plays into a best-selling novel, which led to the BBC commissioning Scully's New Year's Eve, an energetic and sharply funny entry in the ever-unpredictable Play For Today strand, for broadcast on 1st January 1978. Andrew Schofield and Ray Kingsley would later rerprise their respective roles as Scully and Mooey for the 1984 mini-series Scully, which is both as vivid a snapshot of rough-and-ready four letter-friendly early Channel 4 as you're likely to find, and for an entire generation the ultimate example of the Programme You Had To Sneakily Watch On The Portable. In between came this unusual engagement, recasting the pair as stowaways who snuck aboard the ferry each week, incurring the somewhat hypocritical wrath of the 'pirates' but inevitably doted on by the old dears who did the actual on-board work. Ironically, given that they are the most established and well-realised characters in the whole setup, Scully and Mooey are a large part of the reason why The Mersey Pirate didn't really 'work'. Bleasdale's high quality and genuinely witty material sits jarringly in the middle of other less sophisticated comic dialogue - sometimes literally in the middle of it, as there are times that it seems like he's added their lines into someone else's sketches - and the transition between the two is never exactly easy.

In contrast to their more cerebral musings, Duggie Brown and Billy Butler proved a particularly effective combination, with the former's polished audience-ready approach working well against the latter's more sharp and quick-witted pop DJ style. Bernard Wrigley lent a suitably manic air as he improvised and over-acted wildly around scripted sketch material, and Frank Carson - who of course could also be found appearing regularly on Tiswas - was essentially just Frank Carson, albeit with a neat running gag about the on-board child audience fleeing in terror from his awful puns as he read out the 'Pirate News At Eleven'. Also perhaps more suitable for the majority of the target audience were the Dave Prowse-devised 'keep fit' segement Ship Shape, fashion tips from local radio presenter Therese Birch - host of the part-networked LBC children's show Jelly Bone - in Decked Out, a weekly update on the Top Twenty, and the energetic open air games played whenever weather permitted. And as we shall see, those last three words were key to the strange tale of The Mersey Pirate.


However, before Scully and Mooey become too consumed with existentialist angst, it's worth pointing out that the show also did a great deal to reflect the more esoteric and fashion-conscious tastes of a certain percentage of its intended audience, aware as they were that strange post-punk things were happening right on their doorstep. The theme music was a frantic slap bass-led discofied reworking of Ferry Cross The Mersey, and there were plenty of filmed insert features on local artistic happenings, while The Royal Iris' ballroom - which not that long ago had played host to The Beatles and company - became the ship's 'disco', home to performances by the suspiciously hip'n'happening likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, Lene Lovich, Bad Manners and and The Undertones; in reality, they were probably the only bands who were both near enough and prepared to get up at that hour on a Saturday morning. Meanwhile, although this will have meant little to anyone outside of the immediate vicinity, Granada were keen to play up the 'pirate broadcast' conceit in a very real and interactive sense. Much-coveted Mersey Pirate mugs and 'I SAW THE MERSEY PIRATE' badges were distributed to those hardy souls who had spent the duration of the show languishing in the grim breeze-battered surroundings of the Pier Head, waiting to cheer the ship's company back in to shore, and they even staged an 'open day' inviting all and sundry (including a certain aspirant TV historian youngster) to wander around the ferry and see how the show was made, the results of which were filmed and shown as a mini-documentary as part of the following Saturday's edition.

However, it was to be precisely those feats of dockside technical wizardry that would guide The Mersey Pirate onto the rocks. Adverse weather conditions would regularly cause outdoor features to be delayed or abandoned, leading to improvised fill-ins with Butler chasing Mooey and Scully around indoors, and would also wreak havoc with the precarious broadcast setup, causing sound and picture interference and even on occasion scuttling the entire programme, prompting the hasty deployment of old cartoons and film serials to fill the resultant gap in the schedules. The Mersey Pirate sailed merrily on, but a genuine squall was looming in the form of the technicians' strike that blacked out the entire ITV network over the late summer of 1979. This unexpected interruption more or less did for the series, which would otherwise have run through to mid-September. Small wonder, then, that it's almost impossible to accurately pinpoint exactly how many editions of The Mersey Pirate actually went out - and indeed how much of each one went out - between 2nd June and the last TV Times-billed edition on 25th August 1979.


The Mersey Pirate had certainly been given a high profile launch, with prominent TV Times listings and a coveted Look-In cover feature, but even that wasn't enough to stop it from being washed overboard. Yet even aside from the technical problems and the sheer bad luck, its biggest stumbling block was that it was in many ways both behind and ahead of the times. The show did its best to capitalise on the rise of a new wave of Liverpool-based pop acts but was literally a couple of months too early for this; and at the same time it harked back to nostalgia for an era that even many of the Merseybeat region's own inhabitants had yet to get properly nostalgic for. In many ways, it was an unsuccessful attempt to do what the similarly-inclined The 8:15 From Manchester would manage to pull off a decade later, proving that there maybe is something in this rivalry business after all. Some of the cast would show up in character in local panto later in the year, but to all intents and purposes that was the end of The Mersey Pirate. Granada would try again the following year with Fun Factory, a gag-heavy and decidedly indoors effort that retained Billy Butler and Therese Birch alongside newcomers Gary Crowley, Jeremy Beadle and Kurt Knobbler the robot, which proved successful enough to return in 1981. After that they perhaps wisely decided to leave Saturday Mornings to their competitors.

Unfortunately, there are apparently only two and a bit editions of The Mersey Pirate still in existence - reportedly due to technical issues preventing the live broadcasts from being satisfactorarily recorded (cue a deafening chorus of archive TV obsessives getting angry about salt water on forums) - and neither and a bit of them appear to feature the 'Open Day'. Meanwhile, the poor old Royal Iris was taken out of active service in 1991, upon which it was bought by a business consortium who intended to turn it into a 'floating nightspot' but were denied planning permission, and has basically just sat around rusting ever since. In 2010, it was reported that the RNLI had disturbed some intruders on board the boat; presumably, Scully and Mooey's alibis are intact.


You can find lots more about bizarre TV shows that history forgot in my book Not On Your Telly.

It's always a mistake to assume that you know everything about popular culture of the past. Doubly so if it's regarding a long-wiped television show. No matter how hard you think you've looked, there's always something new to find, and sometimes you'll find it by accident and in the most unlikely places.

If you've been rifling through the amazing archive of old episodes of Desert Island Discs that the BBC have made available as free downloads, then you'll be aware of just how much of a treasure trove of context and trivia they really are, especially the early editions from the fifties and sixties. Pick a random one and you might stumble across, say, Arthur Askey stating that while he can't stand pop groups, there are some young new chaps called The Beatles who conduct themselves like entertainers and could go on to do something rather interesting. Or, more hauntingly, Benny Hill freely admitting that his humour has a shelf life, and with that in mind he was wanting to move towards becoming a writing and directing mentor for younger comics, but was having trouble convincing the TV bigwigs that this was a good idea. And you might even chance upon something that offers a new angle on one of your longstanding obsessions.

If you've read my book Not On Your Telly, then you'll probably have seen the chapter on Madhouse On Castle Street, the long lost BBC TV play from early 1963 starring a then little-known Bob Dylan, of which only a partial off-air audio recording now survives. This was originally commissioned for a book to accompany an academic presentation on 'Rock In Film' or something vaguely along those lines, which fell through for dull admin-y type reasons that I can't really recall. As such, I had pulled out all the stops to try and make it as informative and accurate a piece as I could, and felt at the end that unless an actual copy of the finished programme turned up - in the introduction I alluded to then-current rumours that it was amongst Philip Morris' supposed haul of lost TV shows, which still hasn't been clarified one way or the other - I would have needed whatever the research equivalent of a tension-leg deepwater drill was to find out much more of any practical contextual use.


On the 18th October 1980 edition of Desert Island Discs, actor Brian Glover chose Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone as one of the eight records he'd like to be cast away with; a popular selection with guests on the show, which also made the lists of Greg Dyke, Andy Kershaw, Jack Vettriano, Adrian Noble, Paul Hogarth and Professor Peter Piot. Like Dyke and Vettriano, Glover also picked Like A Rolling Stone as his favourite of the eight, alongside his chosen book Card Games by John Scarne, and as his somewhat impractical luxury item an MG TD Series sports car. Talking about his reasons for choosing the track, Glover told presenter Roy Plomley about how he had become a fan of Dylan very early on in his career, after hearing his music in small clubs while travelling the UK working as a professional wrestler. After the record had played, quite unusually for Desert Island Discs, Glover volunteered an extra bit of anecdotage about Bob Dylan - namely that he'd seen him perform live at The Troubadour Coffee House on Old Brompton Road, while he was in the UK "to make a film for TV, for the BBC, before he actually made it".

Sure enough, it turns out that Dylan did indeed play at The Troubadour on 29th December 1962, the night before the original intended recording of Madhouse On Castle Street; due to the harsh adverse weather conditions that had swept across the UK, this had to be abandoned and production was remounted on 4th January. His setlist for that show is sadly not on record, though given that he was about to perform them on camera and this gig was to all intents and purposes a warm-up, it's more than likely that he would have thrown in renditions of Hang Me, O Hang Me, Cuckoo Bird, Ballad Of The Gliding Swan and the newly-composed Blowin' In The Wind. Dylan is also known to have introduced himself onstage that night as 'Blind Boy Grunt', doubtless provoking a laugh of recognition from the pseudonym-toting wrestlers in the audience.

Accurate details of any performances that Dylan had made during the production of Madhouse On Castle Street had proved frustratingly elusive back when I first wrote the article, but there you have it; one throwaway mention from someone you wouldn't necessarily have expected, and there's a whole new bit of context and detail that could have gone into the piece. Don't let that put you off Not On Your Telly, though, as the original writeup is still pretty darn good, and there's loads more on creaky old black and white TV like Play School, R.3 and Doctor Who, not to mention features on sixties theatre and mono pop music. Though nobody's chosen it on Desert Island Discs yet...

This isn't going to be a 'tribute' to Gordon Murray as such, mainly because I feel that the various lengthy pieces I've written about his work stand up perfectly well as 'tributes' in their own right. If you're interested and haven't seen them, then let's just get them out of the way in a brisk Fire Brigade Roll Call style - first episode of Camberwick Green, last episode of Chigley, middle episode of Trumpton, how Radio Times covered the launch of Camberwick Green, where Jimi Hendrix got the idea for The Wind Cries Mary from, article on forgotten 'fourth' show Rubovia, review of the Camberwick Green LP, in-depth look at the making of all three series, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb. And indeed 'pheep'.

Instead, I'm going to be asking for your help in paying an even bigger and better tribute to Gordon Murray - helping to track down a long-lost bit of his television history...

On 20th October 1979, Gordon Murray was the main studio guest on BBC1's Saturday Morning show Noel Edmonds' Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. This came about largely as a result of his later puppet comedy shows aimed at an older audience, Skip And Fuffy and The Gublins, having been used as inserts in Swap Shop; a number of viewers had written in asking how they were made, and given that Noel and company were always enthusiastic about the idea of taking the audience 'behind the scenes', it made perfect sense to get him on to talk about them. He also brought along a number of puppets and props from Camberwick Green, Trumpton, Chigley, Rubovia and even some of his earlier productions, and gave away a Gublin as a prize in a write-in competition.

I remember watching this and being absolutely fascinated by the explanations and demonstrations of how stop motion animation worked, how he came up with characters and names, how Brian Cant ended up as the narrator and so forth. I didn't win the Gublin, though. Incidentally that week's show also featured an interview with Tommy Steele as well as a Debbie Harry lookalike contest, and a report on 'Trotting' as a potential new sport. Sadly, Gordon's views on any of the above are not recorded.

Literally not recorded in fact. Sadly, this is amongst the many editions of Swap Shop that were not retained by the BBC, and so far no off-air recording has surfaced. As far as I'm aware, this was the only occasion on which he was interviewed about the shows at this length and in this depth, so it would be nice for everyone to be able to see it again. If by some slim chance you've got a copy, please let me know and I'll make sure that the right people get hold of it. And now, if you'll excuse me, there's the Six O'Clock Whistle...

Doctor Who's third outing in 1966-67 marked something of a turning point for the show, featuring the first ever change of lead actor, and what at the time was intended to be the last ever appearance of The Daleks. That would-be farewell appearance came at the end of what many consider to be the finest story of the entire sixties, which shared its intricate plotting and eerie old-skool sci-fi atmosphere with another similarly lauded Dalek story earlier in the run. And those three factors have overshadowed pretty much everything else in the series; this includes the debut and first return appearance of The Cybermen, the last 'pure' historical adventure, and three stories about which comparatively next to nothing is known. Oh and The Underwater Menace, which is fantastic and not rubbish like you thought. Once again, there are huge visual gaps - most importantly, we've no way of knowing why Polly suddenly has The Doctor's hat on at the end of The Underwater Menace - but in most cases there's enough left to get at least a sense of what was going on, and in any case, there's huge swathes of the series that don't get written about enough. So let's not waste any more time and get on with making up for that...


Jimmy Savile References For You, And You And You And You


In the previous instalment, we tried our hardest to swerve discreetly around the blatant reference in The War Machines to that most now-discredited of former Radio 1 DJs, Top Of The Pops presenters and general Fixers of 'It', TV's Scrawny Old Bastard. Nicely averted, you may have thought. Neatly swept under the carpet. Now we can move quietly and happily on and not have to think about him ever again. Well, not until The Two Doctors at any rate. Imagine the 'surprise', then, when The Tenth Planet opened with Dyson at Mission Control requesting that the astronauts change their communications channel to 'J For Jimmy', complete with suspiciously familiar vocal tremulance and audible quote marks. If you're in any doubt, Williams immediately repeats the line aboard the rocket in an ordinary voice, and the difference couldn't be clearer. There's probably a serious point to be made in there somewhere about how these sorry individuals were once a part of everyday life, but 'serious' isn't really the point of this exercise, and in any case, he's part of the reason behind why we're in the mess we're in right now and would probably be quite pleased if he could see the chaos he's caused, so let's just move on. Hmmm, really not doing too well at this 'not serious' business there. We can but hope that something ridiculous is coming along soon. Maybe even in the same episode...


Krrrrrrrail And Krang The Finest Cybermen You Ever Wanna Meet


One of the most pleasing developments in 'Old'Doctor Who in recent times has been the rehabilitation of the original Cybermen. Time was when - largely on the basis of a handful of not particularly unfuzzy publicity photos - the cloth-faced variants with their impractical chest units were at best the target of derision and at worst as good as written out of Cyber-History; it's possible that David Banks might have given them a fairer crack of the whip in that breakfast bar-sized book he wrote about Cybermen, especially as one of the tie-in audiobooks had a little-known 'Lucozade' variant on the front, though experts are still divided on whether anyone has actually read it. When people actually got to see what's left of The Tenth Planet in halfway decent quality where you can tell the blizzard-set scenes apart from the rest of it, though, everyone suddenly realised that they looked quite good after all; the more 'human' approach to their design makes them all the more chillingly believable as cyborgs gone too far, not least because in glorious Restoration Team-ed up quality you can actually see their hands and eyes ghosting through. There's only one problem with this. Whenever they appear on the screen, their arrival is heralded by a stock music-derived bit of electronically-treated trumpet, which picks out the exact same notes as the opening fanfare from Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite. True, it's not like we then get a claymation Hartnell leaping about the screen singing "wellllllll, look about look about look about look about ooo-eee!", but once you've noticed it, it's hard to hear it without laughing. And while we're about it, why were The Cybermen so intent on invading The BBC Globe? And why does the computer text in the opening titles say 'NXOZ' over and over again? Well, you might find the answers hidden somewhere amongst a load of analogue data if you press that whopping great 'LOAD' button over there, as...


They Didn't Half Like Their Big Spools Of Tape


One of Doctor Who's most noticeable weak links, especially in the seventies and eighties, was in its attempts to predict how 'future' technology might look and function. In the sixties, however, it wasn't quite so bad; although there are still some famously risible examples, the 'computers' tended to involve little more than blank flat surfaces, minimalist switches and buttons, and occasional blinking lights. In all honesty this was probably borne more out of budgetary concerns than any attempt at accurately anticipating the microchip revolution, but while they don't exactly look like computers as we recognise them now, they do at least feel a little less comically antiquated and outmoded as a result. That said, they do tend to be liberally decorated with gigantic stop-starting tape spools, whirring merrily away with chunky ferric thickness and nowadays not so much suggesting lightning-speed processing of huge blocks of data as they do George Martin furrowing his brow over those Beatle boys' latest krazy sonic innovation. This was particularly prevalent in Patrick Troughton's first series for some reason, reaching its apex (or indeed Ampex) with the 'four spools to a terminal' madness of The Moonbase, suggesting that they'd have been much quicker in stopping The Cybermen if Brian Wilson had just come in and pressed a few buttons before shouting "top, please". Actually, you can't help but notice that despite some prominent attempts at moving forwards in late sixties Doctor Who, it really does tend to be men who get to press said buttons. Although that said, over in another corner of The Moonbase...


That 'Sexist' Bit Isn't Actually As Sexist As Everyone Seems To Think


She might not look too much like the original Cybermen, but another welcome development in recent times has been the rehabilitation of mid-sixties assistant Polly. Once not so much misrepresented as just plain ignored, to the extent that an official book about 'The Companions' dismissed her with a single sentence that literally said nothing more than that she was in the Tardis once, the fact that it has since become possible to see what's left of her episodes (and hear what isn't) has done much to restore her reputation as something a bit more than just stripy tops and over-washed hair. True, we're still missing some key visual moments like her active plot-dominance in The Smugglers and The Highlanders, and those creepy operating theatre scenes in The Underwater Menace do nobody any favours, but on the other hand there's still her arguing ethics with The Cybermen in The Tenth Planet, puzzle-solving in (if you count that BBC Audiobooks reconstruction) The Power Of The Daleks, and at least halfway entertaining over-the-top screaming in the few surviving seconds of The Macra Terror. And then there's that blisteringly good first episode after The Doctor regenerates, which is largely given over to Polly and Ben fretting about who this mysterious stranger wittering about his fingernails really is. The most frequently seen footage of Polly, however, comes from the second episode of The Moonbase, and is usually deployed to illustrate allegations of rampant patronising sexism in early Doctor Who. These allegations are not without rock solid foundation, it has to be admitted, but this isn't really the right clip to underline them with. On face value, of course, the exchange "You've found something?" - "Oh Polly, I only wish I had... why not make some coffee to keep them all happy while I think of something?" looks about as pat-on-the-head leave-it-to-me-dear mansplainy as it's possible to get. That's when you just look at the exchange itself, though. In actual fact, it comes at the end of a scene where The Doctor has been constantly interrupted by tinfoil hat panic merchants (some of them actually wearing tinfoil hats) babbling nonsense while he's trying to analyse a mystery virus striking down the base's crew, and while a more respectful and sensitive way of expressing it could have been found, he's actually enlisting Polly's help in distracting them while he concentrates; something that is entirely in keeping with her espionage-trained subterfugal shenanigans in other stories, even if it is a poor use of her talents. Also, although we don't know this yet, The Doctor wants some coffee made so he can test his theory that it's actually responsible for spreading the virus. This is far from being the most gloriously progressive moment in the entire history of Doctor Who, but it's also not quite what it gets made out to be either. And while we're blithely raising hackles about sensitive subjects...


No, He Reinforced Stereotypes Of His Own Accord


The Tenth Planet boasts a notable first for Doctor Who, with sixties TV regular Earl Cameron becoming the first black actor to appear in the series in a straightforward supporting role with absolutely no allusions whatsoever made to race, discrimination or background. And that lengthy qualifier is there because the story before that, The Smugglers, features poor old Elroy Josephs in a role that is absolutely nothing of the sort. Starey-eyed, maniacally laughing, insultingly named and ignorantly superstitious, 'Jamaica' fills out Captain Pike's motley assortment of cut-throat privateers in a manner that, while certainly far from offensive or bigoted, would look decidedly uncomfortable on modern television. In fact, given that the story also features liberal use of daggers and a morally dubious position on seafaring lawlessness, it's probable that The Smugglers would cause some serious headaches if it were to be suddenly returned to the BBC now. In fairness, it's probably a realistic depiction of how a real-life 'Jamaica' would have acted, and he does get what sounds like a fantastic scene playing cards with William Hartnell, but it's still a tad unnerving and in some ways it's sad that Josephs - a fine actor and choreographer, an academic, and an individual who did much to change race perception in the arts - is really only known to any significant number of people for this role. Still, maybe we shouldn't expect better from a run of episodes that includes the line "Polly, you speak foreign". Though we should at least be grateful that they never went with Patrick Troughton's original suggestion that he should black up as washerwoman or whatever it was. Anyway, on to slightly less sensitive subject matter...


"You'll Find That The Whole Plane Conforms Strictly To The International Standards Of Air Safety"


Tee hee hee, say Pappy's Fun Club and their ilk on snorty point-and-laugh clip shows. Doctor Who always had cardboard monsters and rubber walls or something, not like when it came back and it was good. And we say bollocks, frankly. Go away and actually watch some of it, then do a considerable amount of reading about the wider context of television production in the sixties and seventies, and then make up some original jokes that are actually funny and have some semblance of a basis in reality. And then go and jump in a bin. Though, let's be honest about it, there's some occasions when you just have to throw your hands up and admit it. In Episode Three of The Faceless Ones, there's a scene in which Captain Blade - who we don't yet know is actually a seaweed-faced alien planning to repopulate his home world with humans - is trying to assure suspicious DI Crossland that Chameleon Tours have got nothing to do with the disappearing planeloads of Club 18-30-type revellers. This he does by boasting about how well constructed their planes are, while standing in front of some flimsy-looking panels complete with a gap between two of them that you could fly a Laker Skytrain through, and as an air hostess hefts some luggage onto an already buckling overhead compartment which responds by, putting it mildly, bouncing. Perhaps if they wanted to fool the puny Earthlings into believing that the cunning replicas of their friends and relatives were the genuine article, they ought to have started by using a more convincing-looking plane.


There Is No Such Thing As Macra!


As you may have gathered from the introduction, I have gone on and on and on many times before now about how much I like The Underwater Menace, including an entire chapter in Well At Least It's Free. So if you want to read my rather forceful singing of its praises, you're probably better headed for there (and it's got loads of other stuff in it about early Doctor Who too). Of course, since Well At Least It's Free was first published, a whole other episode of The Underwater Menace has been found, and there has been much talk of how this has done much to restore the story's previously Atlantean-depth low reputation; although a quick glance at Doctor Who Magazine's 2014 'every story ever' poll reveals that it is still languishing at a shockingly undeserved 224 out of 241. Clearly quite a few things in the world can stop it now. It's interesting to note, though, that with the exception of the two Dalek stories - which we'll be coming back to in a moment - not one story from this series actually appears inside the top one hundred; not even the one with the first regeneration and the first appearance by The Cybermen. Clearly the fact that so little from it still exists - in fact, it's now the only series without a single surviving full story to its name - has some bearing on this, though equally that makes it all the more puzzling that fans aren't more curious about the more tantalisingly obscure stories, and in particular The Macra Terror. On face value, it would seem to have everything; sinister Orwellian overtones, the over-vaunted 'Base Under Siege' format, Nerve Gas-toting giant crabs, the Tardis crew divided by TV and Muzak-propagated mind control, and Polly roadtesting a brand new Mod Girl 'pixie cut'. And yet, although it got more than respectable ratings and even provoked a bit of controversy with the usual planks writing to Radio Times asking why Dr. Who couldn't ever meet some nice aliens on his travels and share his pie with Itchy and then they both have pie, The Macra Terror now might as well just not have existed in the first place. In many ways and on many levels, this is the closest that sixties Doctor Who gets to that tantalisingly lost demo take of The Girl I Knew Somewhere with the newly-recruited Monkees playing their own instruments, and yet to so many fans it's seemingly just something that's there. Or was there, rather. Frankly, this says a lot about the pointless obsession with 'milestones', 'landmarks', 'classics', 'anniversaries' and all of the other ultimately meaningless labels that dictate what we should and shouldn't be taking notice of, and it would be nice to see it found and watch the story leap up in everyone's estimation like The Enemy Of The World did. But whatever you do, don't send drunken texts from the pub ordering certain individuals to sodding well give their copy back to the BBC...


What Did The BBC Have Against The Highlanders?


And speaking of entirely wiped stories, The Highlanders might well have been the last of the 'pure' historical adventures, but it was also the first ever story for which the VT transmission masters were wiped. What's more, all four of them were held up against a giant magnet on 9th March 1967, which those of you who have such trivia indelibly drilled into your subconscious will have noticed was less than two months after they were transmitted. Even allowing for the fact most fans just won't accept that wipings were basically a matter of course and down to a combination of technical necessity and nobody realising that anything might have any use beyond one repeat (and even they were rare), this seems suspiciously quick, especially considering that there were dozens of other Doctor Who master tapes knocking about that hadn't been used in up to three years. What could possibly have offended them so much about a fun costumed runaround that looked halfway atmospheric, gave Polly a Hannah Gordon-portrayed sparring partner to get up to girly hi-jinks with, and introduced a young clan piper called Jamie McCrimmon who proved so popular that he was quickly installed as a new regular character (once his accent had 'mellowed' to 'TV Scots', that is)? Well, the answer of course is 'nothing' - BBC Enterprises had already made their film copies (which they held on to until at least 1974), and had placed a 'Retention Order' on earlier stories apparently in order to make better copies using a newer system; once these had been made, the bulk of the preceding adventures were wiped within weeks. True, this isn't quite as exciting as someone somewhere making some obscure artistic point about the lack of popularity of the historical stories, but in some respects the sheer by-the-book form-filling mundanity of it all is all the more chilling. Solicitor Grey would have been proud. As for why that BBC Audiobooks Telesnap/audio reconstruction never actually came out, though, well that's another story. Although we did at least get to enjoy...


Medley: Mr Sludge The Snail/Can You Sew Cushions?


Along with his not-actually-that-'Beatlesque''Beatlesque mop', and the not-actually-that-loud 'loud' orange and black check trousers that were apparently 'taken in at the rate of an inch a week' (presumably resembling Spandex by the end of his run), the blue and white striped recorder was one of The Second Doctor's most recognisable visual characteristics. Even if inattentive writers and directors kept calling it a 'flute'. That said, he never actually seemed to be that proficient on the instrument, appearing to spend the majority of the time picking out shrill random notes in a manner akin to Roland Kirk collaborating with AMM. However, according to production documentation, he did actually play two recognisable melodies in the first episode of The Power Of The Daleks, which had the preposterous titles Can You Sew Cushions? and Mr Sludge The Snail. Some have speculated that songs with such ludicrous names could never actually have existed, but close investigation reveals that they were all too real, if slightly arcane choices. Can You Sew Cushions? turns out to have been a traditional Scottish folk song, which after posing that thorny question goes on to enquire whether the lyrical target can also sew 'sheets' and something about going 'hee' and 'haw' at a lamb. Mr Sludge The Snail, on the other hand, was written especially for the BBC Schools' Radio programme Time And Tune by producer and occasional Radiophonic Workshop extra pair of hands Jenyth Worsley, and its inclusion here was presumably an early nod towards cross-platform postmodernism that didn't quite come off. The lyrics, in case you were interested, were essentially concerned with the fact that Mr Sludge was 'medium-sized', which you have to admit in the snail scheme of things doesn't really mean very much at all. Meanwhile, you may have noticed that the colour of Troughton's trouser check and recorder stripes will have been completely immaterial to black and white viewers, thus rendering the entire history of fan cliche lexicon invalid. As you were.


DALEKS-CONQUER-AND-DESTROY!


Series Four doesn't quite start with a Dalek story, but it certainly ends with one, and between the two they not only overshadow most of sixties Doctor Who, but a good deal of what's come since as well. In that Doctor Who Magazine poll we mentioned earlier, The Evil Of The Daleks sits at number thirty four, and The Power Of The Daleks at number nineteen, voted there by a readership who, for the most part, cannot possibly have seen anything of them bar the lone surviving episode of the former. In some ways, it's not surprising that they enjoy such a lofty reputation. Both stories transplant The Daleks to tremendous effect into atypical styles of storytelling; claustrophobic Cold War-evoking fifties-style far future thriller for Power, and eerie Robert Louis Stephenson-esque Victorian horror for Evil. They are, in many senses, the last stand of the original vision for Doctor Who. What little visual material survives from the lost episodes looks ever so slightly exciting. And above all, they've got absolutely tons of Daleks, even if they do appear to be working to some form of 'only three to be seen at any one time' rule and the majority are either photographic blow-ups or literally blown-up models. But are these positions really warranted? Not so much from the perspective of asking if they are actually any good, but rather would they still have quite as much across-the-board appeal if they suddenly turned up now? These are, after all, thirteen episodes of mid-sixties studio-bound television drama recorded more or less 'as live', and particularly wordy, moody and ponderous ones at that. Given that a worryingly large proportion of Doctor Who fans seem utterly unaware that there were any other television programmes ever, it's hardly surprising that a lot of them don't seem to grasp the context and (cough) 'grammar' of early television, and then on top of that there's those that do get it but just simply - and entirely reasonably - don't like it. If they had to sit through over seven hours of the stuff, how many of them would even make it to the end? Yes, the sort of fans who would gleefully set fire to every last second of television made in the last twenty years to get hold of a single episode of R.3 or On The Margin would be too excited for words, but how many others would be so underwhelmed that both stories immediately plummet to the bottom of the poll to keep The Macra Terror company? Well, we've no way of knowing. It's not like anyone has found them and is refusing to give them back, is it?

Meanwhile, you may have noticed that there have been no further additions to the ongoing They Like Big Butts And They Cannot Lie saga. This is purely because so much of this series is missing that it's proved near-impossible to find any examples, though it's a fair bet that the booty-crazy cameramen would have been falling over themselves to get to the rear of the majorettes in The Macra Terror...


Anyway, join us again next time for Jamie presenting The Clothes Show, "AND-YOU-WILL-BE-THE-NEXT", and of course Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava and not forgetting Padmasambhava...

In March 1996, a bunch of law graduates moved into a shared house in Southwark. Over the next two years, BBC2's rare excursion into credible and likeable youth drama This Life kept us all hooked (well, all of us except snorting drama-ier-than-thou bores) with a whirlwind of casual sex, criminal behaviour, industrial-strength quantities of cocaine and that sodding Sneaker Pimps song again and again and again and again and again, all of it brilliantly undramatically underplayed by a talented cast of relatable characters who couldn't really give a toss one way or the other, frankly, and still managed to get up for work in the morning. Then BBC2 opted to pull the plug and end the series on a high, and it was never seen again. No it wasn't. Shut up.

Although few could claim it was really a realistic depiction of their own lives - let's face it, the majority of the target audience could probably have found more to identify with in The Adam & Joe Show - This Life was notable for treating 'vices' as low-key everyday pursuits, for its accurate evocation of the effects of the switch from three years of dossing around to a high-powered work environment, and for talking to rather than down at the sort of viewers it sought to attract. And surely pretty much everyone had a housemate who just wouldn't sod off from the front room when they'd brought someone back and were hoping for a bit of privacy. But how well does it really stand up now? Well, Ms. Forbes, if you will present your findings to the jury...


This Life Was Better Than Our Friends In The North


Well, what better way to start a look back at an edgy and controversial drama series than by being edgy and controversial? To this day, mentioning This Life within the earshot of self-designated 'cultured' individuals will generate a slowly building chorus of "aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh, but Our Friends In The North, do you not see? aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!", which refuses to abate until you throw in the towel and pretend to concede that the adventures of Daniel Craig and some ropey wigs was a televisual landmark of such importance and significance that it should eclipse all mention ever of another show that had the audacity to be on around the same time and have a similarly young cast. Whether or not this extends to other programmes that were also on around the same time, and that references to The Girlie Show, Crapston Villas and that thing where Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey were New Romantics or something must be similarly shouted down, has sadly not been clarified. Well, enough of that nonsense. Our Friends In The North may have had a heavyweight cast and a staggeringly good decade-straddling script that skilfully and effectively tackled every major sociocultural issue in British life from the sixties to the rise of New Labour, but This Life was, plainly and simply, more fun and had better jokes and better music. No not aaaaaaaahhh!


Put Some Bloody Clothes On!


Part of the aforementioned 'fun' of This Life was in the regular characters' alarmingly relaxed attitude to nudity, and even when they weren't actually having sex they could be constantly seen walking in on each other getting changed, or just generally wandering about the house in the absence of key items of clothing. Quite surprisingly and progressively for the time, the overwhelming majority of said nudity was male, too. But how times change, and while time was when Kira flashing her bra at a departing Moore Spencer Wright head honcho would have fulfilled your unexpected erotic thrill quota for an entire week, nowadays there's so much digital nakedness available on tap that it all just looks a bit unnecessary. As nice as Anna's arse may be, it is possible to get too much of a good thing and by the end of the series you're left wondering if Daniela Nardini had to be treated for the effects of exposure. Plus we also had to put up with the decidedly less visually palatable likes of Mr. O'Donnell and Egg's dad getting in on the act and out of their clothes, which nobody either wanted or needed. No matter how many furious letters to Points Of View may have been inspired by Milly's apparent inability to remember the concept of 'pants' at the time, sometimes what seemed shocking way back when just looks boring now.


Anna And Miles Are More Likeable Than Milly And Egg


Rewatching This Life, you get the distinct impression that you're supposed to find the stable, reserved, relatively career-focused couple more admirable and aspirational than the non-couple made up of an arrogant prejudiced public schoolboy with no money worries and the self-destructive sexually voracious Caledonian bruiser. On face value this is probably largely true, except for the fact that Miles and Anna freely accept that they are the cause of their own problems, are never afraid to charge headlong into difficult situations, and despite their expletive-fuelled cynicism generally have a more positive outlook on the world. Whereas Milly and Egg - both of whom, in a clever and subtle scripting touch, are going by handles that purposefully distract from their birth names (Djamila and Edgar, in case you were wondering) - are underneath it all basically just a paranoid moaner and an aimless drifter who hide their heads in the sand, allow seething resentment to build up unchecked, and continually mislead each other about even the most minor and trivial thing, and yet still manage to blame everyone else in the world for everything that ever happens to them. It's no wonder poor old Warren spent so much time in that therapist's office.


The Minor Characters Were All More Likeable Still


Remarkably for a show that already boasted a fairly large regular ensemble cast, This Life featured an even larger assortment of friends, colleagues and enemies (oh and 'Quasi') who hovered on the periphery of the various house dramas and indeed frequently on the periphery of the house itself. Jo, Kira, Ferdy, Kelly, Lenny, Nikki, the ever-mysterious Graham, Miles and Anna's downright odd boss Hooperman, various brothers and sisters and parents and even the odd 'dealer' all wandered in and out of various storylines without ever losing their sense of positivity or their somewhat more relaxed and less self-absorbed grip on reality. For some viewers, their assorted comic mishaps with careers, relationships and, erm, finding somewhere to get a sandwich were even more enjoyable than the main action and it's little surprise that they are in some cases remembered every bit as fondly as - if not more than - the main five. Well, apart from Dale. Oh, and while we're on the subject...


Was Rachel Really All That Bad?


Captain Black sided with The Mysterons after Earth had blown up their home city for no good reason. Mike Teavee had the temerity to enjoy the output of a medium Roald Dahl was a bit sniffy about. Raggerty's sole crime was wishing Rupert Bear would go away. And then there's Rachel from This Life, a divisive and suspiciously android-like individual who continued to inadvertently pour oil on troubled waters until Milly smacked her in the face in the last episode. But was this really warranted? Was any of it even her fault? Well, although there's no denying she was well and truly locked in a six-of-one passive-aggressive war of workplace attrition with Milly, wasn't afraid to use promises of never-actually-delivered sex to get what she wanted, and was as ambitious and opportunistic as they come, it's also true to say that she was helpful and supportive to those that bothered to reach out to her (notably Warren), seemed genuinely hurt when Milly launched into the 'I don't like you' rant, made more than enough genuine-seeming overtures to her office enemy, and occasionally dropped worrying hints of dark goings on in her family home. There's even a case for claiming that her 'telling' Egg about Milly's affair was vague enough to have been a 'you'll lose her if you're not careful' pep talk gone wrong, and that perhaps her desperate cry of "I didn't tell him!" wasn't quite so much of a load of Not-Talkin'-'Bout-Shaft-style baloney after all. The jury's still out, really, although they've already returned their verdict on one particular pillock...


O'Donnell Is A Jerk


"Never trust a hippy", mused Egg of the gang's law firm mentor Mr. O'Donnell, occasioning an eye-roll from Milly who was presumably fed up of his hero worship of John Lydon and thought that Tracy Chapman and Michelle Shocked said it all much better and without swearing at that nice Bill Grundy either. But said hippy's untrustworthiness went way beyond his encouraging Milly to become a very different kind of 'legal partner', from his shabby attempt at winning back favour after firing Warren by sending a crate of booze to his leaving party, to his gleeful favourite-playing indulgence in the volley of glares between Milly and Rachel, to his general treatment of Kira and Kelly as more or less on a par with a couple of footprint-embossed McDonald's cartons that had blown in to the office on a muggy day, all of it cunningly framed behind a Tony Blair-esque calm voice, proclamations of fairness and friendliness, and waffly talk of positivity and 'how we move forward from here' and blah and bleh and yawn yawn yawn. Well, no, it doesn't work on the audience mate - O'Donnell is a solid-state jerk through and through. If Moore Spencer Wright were so vocally concerned about their reputation that they dismissed Warren for being gay in a built-up area and gave Kelly a written warning for opting to urinate in the lavatory rather than on the floor of the reception area, would they really have wanted this tosspot conman on their board of partners?


Put A Tim From The Office In It


One frequently overlooked aspect of This Life is the presence of a then-unknown Martin Freeman as shifty, annoying Ocean Colour Scene lookalike Stuart. His most memorable moment comes when, having successfully half-inched a couple of House Tenners when nobody was looking, he pauses to take a celebratory swig from an open can of lager. Little does he realise that Egg had earlier relieved himself into it (presumably deploying near-supernatural levels of directional accuracy), occasioning Mr. Freeman to pull a 'shocked' face and spit it out exaggeratedly in glorious shakycam stutter-o-vision. There are those who would suggest that this has since informed his entire approach to acting, from Watson to Arthur Dent to Bilbo Baggins to That Bloke In Meet The Robinsons to, well, Tim From The Office himself. We of course could not possibly comment. But as for certain other employees of TV's Hilarious Wernham Hogg...


What Did Ricky Gervais Do All Day?


One aspect of This Life that nobody ever gets an opportunity to overlook is that Ricky Gervais took time out from going to see The Spin Doctors at the Civic Centre to act as the show's official 'Music Consultant'. This technically involved working out what sort of music the characters' real-life counterparts would have listened to, and indeed which scenes and circumstances might have been best underscored by which songs. What this actually translated to was picking one or two artists per character and relentlessly cueing their best known numbers in again and again and again, giving the strange illusion that the house existed in a sort of weird alternative universe where nobody had ever made or received a compilation tape. In fairness sometimes this works, and every so often you get a welcome reminder of terrific forgotten songs from the era like Anywhere by Dubstar, while having Kira as a Kenickie fan was certainly a neat touch. On the other hand, though, you get the fact that Miles likes 'jazz' - i.e. he mentioned John Coltrane once - denoted by Corduroy's Out Of Here being played in literally track by track over the course of the series. Must have taken hours of 'consulting', that one.


How Long Had Warren Actually Been Travelling For?


Partway in to the second series, his dreams of a high-flying legal career having been temporarily derailed, Warren takes off for a spot of global sightseeing with the aid of a pair of ruby slipper-esque DMs from his housemates. Australia and America both seem to be on the itinerary, though he still manages to get back in time for the very last scene, showing up to witness Milly and Rachel clawing at each other's faces while sporting a vague hint of a beard and a Hawaiian shirt that indicates he's beamed in directly from whichever beach he'd ended up on without having time to change. However, even allowing for possible onscreen skipping over of unseen events, it can only be at the outside three weeks between his departure and the wedding, suggesting that his plans might not quite have been so grand after all. Then again, how would Miles and Francesca's courtship and wedding have fitted into that short a timeframe? Do any of the things that happen actually add up in any logical way at all? Can I go back to trying to work out what happened in wiped Doctor Who episodes please? No? Oh alright then. There's just one last thing to say...


This Life + 10 Did Not Happen


BBC2's decision to end This Life on a high and with viewers wanting more was a shrewd and successful one, as it left the show's reputation intact and untarnished. We can be glad, then, that nobody ever saw fit to mount a revival nobody asked for which undid all of the good character work of the original, indulged in unfunny 'ha ha ha we're all comfortable thirtysomethings just like you!!' non-humour, made absolutely no mention of what became of Jo, Kira, Kelly, Rachel or even a piss-spluttering Martin Freeman, and generally achieved such a low standard of drama and entertainment that it made A Very Polish Practice, Further Up Pompeii! and Doomwatch: Winter Angel look like high art in comparison. Because that did not happen. Not even slightly.