The Tomorrow People - Original Series

Sometimes I think I must be living on another planet.  When I was a wee nipper, along with Ace of Wands, Lost in Space and Doctor Who, I watched The Tomorrow People ... a series about a 'future' race of humans who had telepathy and could teleport themselves around.

I was convinced that many of the episodes no longer existed - probably because all I could find from my friends was a black and white copy of the first story ...  but it seems I was wrong, and they do all exist. And what's more they have all been released on DVD ...  And so to the watching ...

SEASON ONE

Here we are introduced to our Tomorrow People ... there's John (Nicholas Young), who is sensible, wears polo neck jumpers and has sideburns. He's also the eldest. Carol (Sammie Winmill), who is prone to snivelling and pointing at things dramatically - not to mention teleporting herself into John's bedroom unannounced!  And finally Kenny (Stephen Salmon), a pretty useless black kid who has a lisp and who gets left to mind the base all the time. The base is run by a computer called TIM - with a brilliant voice (Philip Gilbert) - who knows everything and who can enhance the powers that the TPs have, allowing them to teleport further, talk via communal telepathic links and so on.

The first story ('The Slaves of Jedikiah') follows the breaking out of a new TP, Stephen (Peter Vaughan-Clarke), and how the others help him to understand and come to terms with his new powers. Mixed in around this is a plot by an alien called Cyclops (Robert Bridges) to try and escape from where he is trapped in his spaceship using a robot servant called Jedikiah (Francis de Woolf).  There's much to like here ... the acting from John and Steven is excellent, and sort of makes up for the dreadful overacting of Carol and Jedikiah, and the acting 'blank' that is Kenny. Helping Jedikiah are two thugs, Leftie (Derek Crewe) and Ginge (Michael Standing), and while Leftie is rubbish, Ginge is pretty believable.

The story sets everything up nicely, and director Paul Bernard does a good job of bringing it all together. This is like kid's Doctor Who in many ways - played more for laughs (the thugs all fall over themselves all the time) and not wasting time on explanations.

The second story is 'The Medusa Strain', and here Count Rabowski (Roger Booth) rescues the robot Jedikiah from space, and in a different, and much better acted, form (Roger Bizley), it tries to get its revenge on the TPs. There's a nice idea in the Medusa - a plant like thing which can mute the TP's powers, and lots of running about. Overall it's not bad, but let down a little by Count Rabowski who comes over as more like one of Lost in Space's comedy aliens rather than a serious threat.  Much of the cast spend most of the time locked in little cells here, and Peter (Richard Speight), the other captured telepath, and one of the Time Guardians, is very effete in his open-to-the-navel shirt and britches. At the end Jedikiah is sent to Mercury in the distant past ... a point which becomes important later on ...


The final story of the season is 'The Vanishing Earth', and this plays with some more nice ideas, introducing Spidron (John Woodnutt) as the main alien threat, assisted by the easy on the eye Joy/Sandor (Nova Llewellyn). Spidron is very creepy indeed - masked in a sort of Klu-Klux-Klan mask and with tendrilly fingers. His voice is sibilant and John Woodnutt does a brilliant job of making him credible and scary.  Sandor however is good when she's pretending to be a girl at the funfair (in Clacton of all places) but when she gets into her space-leotard, she goes all posh and forgets how to act. Topping the guest cast though is Kevin Stoney as Steen, another telepath who has been hunting Spidron.

There's some great scenes in the ghost train house and in an old drain at the end, and some nice location work too.


SEASON TWO

So Season Two kicks off with the producers apparently realising that Kenny and Carol were useless and so had to go ... to be replaced with Elizabeth (Elizabeth Adare), who is much better. Poor Ginge and Lefty get edged out too, to be replaced by Chris (Chris Chittell). More to the point, why does everyone play a character with the same name as the actor!

The opening story 'The Blue and the Green' is perhaps the best in the entire run of The Tomorrow People. It's an original concept - that an alien can affect the mood of people and turn them against each other via a 'weather' painting which can look peaceful or stormy ... and the idea of giving out badges which cause the wearers to side against each other in irrational anger and violence is pretty good too. The only weak element in the story is the old grandfather, played in doddery form by Nigel Pegram. The alien boy, Robert (Jason Kemp) is both creepy and sympathetic, and the idea that they are 'seeds' which need the violent emotional outburst from humanity to send them out into the stars is an unexpected conclusion. We spotted a very young Pauline Quirk as one of the schoolkids, and apparently Linda Robson is there also!

Next up is 'A Rift in Time' which brings Peter back - this time he has been captured by a creepy Roman official, Gaius (Stanley Lebor) and made to fight in Gladiator school in the 1st Century BC. The story is the first to introduce the Time Guardians, and Zenon (Stephen Jack) who is Peter's father. I guess this is their equivalent to the Time Lords of Doctor Who, only far more Children's TV than Doctor Who ever was. Here it's all silver space-outfits and beards ...  There's an annoying pile of dialogue and explanation when they try to overcome all the logical issues: how will they speak and understand ancient Roman? How will Chris come with them as he's not a TP? How will they look like the natives?  All this is covered off and is very much a McGuffin ... even when the plot demands that they lose their TP powers, John notes that, strangely, they can still understand the language and so on ... it's all a little laughable watching them twist and turn and try to explain it all ...  It's lovely to see Sylvia Coleridge making a cameo as a Museum Vase expert!  She's just as delightful as in her Doctor Who appearance in 'The Seeds of Doom' a few years later.

The story has some interesting ideas to share about changing history, but at the end, it's all resolved fairly quickly. Peter is obviously in the show for his looks as his acting is not much better than his first appearance, but the main leads are pretty strong, and even though Stephen fluffs every other line, you can let it go as it seems to fit in with the show.

The final story of Season 2 is 'The Doomsday Men' and ... oh dear ... in a move which will become increasingly prevalent, the writer, Roger Price, seems to want to put his kid actors in kilts now ... and there's a cringe-worthy scene where they talk about the fact that nothing should be worn under the kilt!  It's all a little sado-masachistic with poor Stephen being kilted and then bound and left outside in the cold ... not sure what any of this has to do with the plot mind you ...

The story as a whole is lightweight - there's a space station orbiting Earth with lots of nukes on it ... and a group called The Doomsday Men want to gain control of it to hold Earth to ransom. Quite why getting Stephen into a Scottish school helps is uncertain ... and the whole thing shudders to a weak ending.


SEASON THREE

We kick off with yet another Tomorrow Person 'breaking out' - this is Tyso, and he is as annoying as I remember at the time. He speaks in a fast falsetto and is another of the 'pretty boy' kids they liked to cast in this show.

What's most interesting for me, is that episode two is the title sequence I recorded the audio for off the telly all those years ago as I liked the title music and was compiling a sort of 'mix tape' of them for my own pleasure. Others on the tape as I recall included The Zoo Gang and the Armchair Thriller episode 'Quiet as a Nun' ...

The first story is 'Secret Weapon' and introduces a character called Colonel Masters (Trevor Bannister). Now whether this is another nod to 'the Master' on Doctor Who I have no idea ... but Masters has a creepy female sidekick (Ann Curthoys) and a plan to capture the TPs and use them as a weapon. The willingness with with Stephen reveals all their number and secrets to Professor Cawston is amazing, and the whole thing trundles off into military espionage territory - so the same sort of ground as 'The Doomsday Men'.

Next up is 'Worlds Away', and this is where some silliness starts to creep in, although the ideas that the story is playing with are good. The Tomorrow People are visited by Timus, a rep from the Galactic Federation (played by Philip Gilbert, who also voices the computer, TIM). The TPs head to a pyramid on Earth wherein there's some old equipment left by Khultan aeons ago which suppresses their powers. This is disabled, but then they head off to the planet Pyrie which has the same problem - only current. There they meet Tikno - also played by Philip Gilbert - and they have to avoid the 'Veshtakers' - Vesh being what TPs are known as on Pyrie - and destroy the pyramid. It's all good fun, though why there is a pool of water in the dungeon is anyone's guess - just to get the kids all wet I suppose!  This is the first time that the series goes to an alien planet - it's a shame it looks like Earth!  And there's a young Keith Chegwin there as one of the Vesh outlaws.

'A Man for Emily' is next and ... oh dear oh dear. I really can't decide whether this is a work of genius, or it's just the most execrably bad thing ever shown on television. A spaceship arrives around Earth carrying three humanoids: The Momma (Margaret Burton), Emily (Sandra Dickinson) and Elmer (Peter Davison). These three characters overact and ham it up so badly that it's painful to watch. With crazy ideas like 'tickling boots' to keep Elmer in line, the unlikely 'Doozlum Pin' for transporting to Earth, and the fact that they eat their mates after mating, the story is a mess of ideas and tone - the comedy is pronounced, but they also kill a shopkeeper (who Stephen brings back to life using his 'special powers'), intend to eat John alive, and can destroy the Earth. The Momma wears a silver leotard (and she's a *large* lady) while Emily wears a Tee Shirt and pair of hotpants ... Elmer meanwhile dresses in what looks like a onesey when he's not in cowboy garb. There's a comedy chase with police being bothered by bees (which is even speeded up at one point!), Tyso and Stephen mug and laugh their way through, while it's only John and Elizabeth who take it in any way seriously. It's a mad, crazy, over the top, totally irredeemably rubbish set of episodes, which only make sense in the context of children's television, where hammy overacting and throwing of mashed potato is deemed funny and acceptable. This set of episodes is so out of kilter with the rest of the series to date, that it really stands out.

The other thing which is becoming apparent is that they have no idea what to do with Tyso - he's done nothing significant since joining at the start of the season ... You can understand why Kenny was written out - he did nothing too, but he was there at the start, when presumably the dynamic was not known and understood. The show can easily be carried (and is) by John, Elizabeth and Stephen, so it's a mystery why they wanted to add someone else.

The final story of the third season is 'The Return of Jedikiah' and it's a return to the earlier stories. The robot Jedikiah was apparently rescued from Mercury by the Khultan and used to replace an Egyptian Pharaoh ... but was then mummified and discovered in the present day by an archaeologist who Jedikiah promptly kills and takes the shape of ... it then pretends to be Stephen and teams up with a magician (Ali Bongo) on the television talent show Opportunity Knocks (not sure why) and then, in this runaround episode, pretends to be just about every other cast member - leading to lots of people not knowing who anyone is, and the audience getting bewildered trying to follow the plot which back-references just about everything! Colonel Masters is shot dead (without even showing his face), the telepath, Tricia, played by Ann Curthoys reappears, as does Cawston, as does Timus and Tikno, even the original overacting Jedikiah makes an appearance (Francis de Woolfe), there's references to Peter and Kenny, the Time Guardians ... it's all crammed in here ...

The most interesting thing to me here are the similarities to the Doctor Who story 'Pyramids of Mars' which also features an alien enemy trapped in a Pyramid who can take over people's minds and bodies. The opening of the two stories is almost identical - a group of locals, along with an archaeologist break into a tomb, there's a strange light and all the locals run off in terror. The archaeologist enters the tomb and is promptly attacked and killed by the entity within who then uses their body to escape. Both stories even feature animated Egyptian Mummies! The Tomorrow People episode was transmitted on May 7 1975, and the Doctor Who story wasn't shown until 25 October 1975 ... Closer checking reveals that the location filming for 'Pyramids of Mars' took place on 29 April and 2 May 1975, with studio recording for episode one taking place on 19 May - by which time the scripts would have been completed. So it's probably just a really spooky coincidence ...

It ends the season with the Tomorrow People being taken off the Earth to attend the Galactic Trig, and, apparently, was intended as an overall end to the series. It certainly finishes in a fairly definitive way, with the Earth control room being darkened, and the credits playing against that image rather than the usual 'lava lamp' graphics.


SEASON FOUR

Another season, another new Tomorrow Person, and this time it's in the form of Pop Idol and drummer with the band Flintlock, Mike Holloway, playing Mike (where do they get the ideas for their names from!)  Mike gets involved with a Lord in the first story, 'One Law', and it's a simple affair really, with some running about, and another figure of authority in the form of the Policeman being made fun of as vain and incompetent, with some silly moments mixed in. Not really much to say about this. John Hollis plays a thug called Two Tone (he was also Sondergaard in the Doctor Who story 'The Mutants').

Next up is another good science fiction tale, 'Into the Unknown', where the TPs pick up a distress call from a rocket far out in space. They go to investigate and find a kid there Kwaan (Stephen Garlick). He is trying to get help (I think) for the FatherShip which is plunging into a strange hole in space. The commander is Tirayaan (Geoffrey Bayldon of Catweasel  fame) and the FatherShip has been taken over by sort of military thugs.  But it's not being drawn into the hole, it is being piloted there ... It's not bad this, but hampered by an episode of doing nothing but going through a wormhole, and an unexplained plot point of what actually happened to Mike at the start in the ship (he's apparently attacked by a statue but this is never referred to or has any relevance to anything else). I liked that the aliens spoke an alien language as well, but that the TPs could not translate it, and that they got cold even though they were wearing spacesuits (or Mike is anyway). This seems to be typical of the series that internal continuity is lost, forgotten or changed depending on how they feel. This is the first and only Tomorrow People story not to be written by Roger Price.

And that's it for the season ... two stories! 


SEASON FIVE

As usual we kick off with the hunt for another TP, this time a Russian spy called Pavla (played with a perfect English accent by Anulka Dziubinska who, I notice, also appeared in the horror film Vampyres!). 'The Dirtiest Business' is a strange story, very bleak and ending with something of a hardcore shock for the series as Pavla, who has had a bomb implanted in her, dies jumping from a window to save Mike's life. Not a happy ending at all!  Most strange here is that Stephen and Tyso are just not in it. Not even mentioned. I think that's a bit off to be honest - especially for poor Stephen who has been there from the start!

Following this we have 'A Much Needed Holiday' which is something of a strange piece where the TPs head for another planet for a holiday only to get embroiled in child slavery ... the kids are awful, the costumes fetishistic and the whole thing is just strange. And when two of the local kids are called Trig and Trog, you know they're just not taking it seriously! Interesting to me (at least) was that the aliens are called the Klepton - a name from the Doctor Who comics!

Finally we have 'Heart of Sogguth', a very silly story where a bunch of devil worshippers have an African drum and intent to take over the world and release a Demon from hell. It's all just daft, with Mike Holloway's real life pop group Flintlock making an appearance, and a camp and unbelievable 'manager' called Jake heading the plot to gain control of everyone except Elizabeth - even John gets affected!  There's an interesting sequence where a possessed John and Elizabeth have a stun-gun fight in the TV studio, and I felt there were shades of the Doctor Who story 'The Deadly Assassin' in Liz trying to destroy the Drum ('Assassin' was shown in Oct/Nov 1976, so 4 months beforehand) and in 'Talons of Weng-Chiang' for the studio fight (shown in Feb/Mar 1977, so just before transmission of this).

The series is now descending into the two-part format which typifies it's latter seasons, and the stories are just no good. There's no sense of purpose or of the show even taking itself seriously, and to be honest, the bleak horror of 'The Dirtiest Business' doesn't sit well with the childrens' television sensibility that the show is developing and increasingly moving towards.


SEASON SIX

Predictably, in 'The Lost Gods' we have another TP to find, and this time she's a Chinese girl, Hsui Tai (Misako Koba) who is to be sacrificed so she can be reborn in another baby - horrific undertones once more. However she really can't act and looks a lot like Fu Manchu's daughter Lin Tang (played by Tsai Chin) in the Christopher Lee films  For no good reason Liz is now offworld somewhere and out of the show - at least we get to see her on a screen and know that she has gone rather than poor Stephen and Tyso. And for no good reason John is teaching Mike to fly a glider ... It's got Bert Kwouk though so it can't be all bad. Unfortunately the classic TP underground base has been replaced with a really awful looking studio set, and the jaunting belts are now watches ... it's all going to the dogs!

'Hitler's Last Secret' sounds awful, but the story is not too bad. Michael Sheard plays Hitler, preserved in a cryogenic pod -m except Hitler is actually an alien. One of the Hitler Youth is played by Nicholas Lyndhurst off of Only Fools and Horses, and overall it's not bad. It again makes use of the theme of kids being taken over/possessed (aka 'The Blue and the Green' and 'Heart of Shoggoth') and Mike is of course the only one affected. Generally these two episode stories don't work - they are too short to develop anything and often end very abruptly.

The final story is 'The Thargon Menace' and this plumbs new depths with the most rubbish puppet robots ever seen on television, and with stupid Kids' TV character voices to boot. I wonder which meeting they were in when they agreed that these things (called 'Thing') were a good idea and good enough to show on Telly.  The plot revolves around a couple of kids who have escaped from Thargon justice ... Flyn (Michael Audreson) and Sula (Jackie Cowper) are terribly acted and barely believable ... and there's a Tin Pot Dictator too in the form of Papa Minn (Olu Jacobs)!

With each story you think it can't get any worse ... and with 'The Thargon Menace' it really hits rock bottom ... or does it!  These tales make 'A Man for Emily' look like Shakespeare!


SEASON SEVEN

'Castle of Fear' kicks off a new season with, yes you guessed it, another new Tomorrow Person. This is Andrew Forbes, a 13 year old Scottish lad who is creating ghosts at his father's Loch Ness hotel ... it's not a bad little story to be honest, nicely done, and with the main weak point being when Andrew and the other TPs stage a battle of imaginary Highlanders and Redcoats in the grounds. There's still nothing for Hsui Tai to do, and Elizabeth is now back with no explanations. Nigel Rhodes as Andrew is pretty good for his age and the tale doesn't outstay it's welcome.

Next up is 'Achilles Heel', another space adventure where a couple of aliens wanting to mine something called barlumin on Earth arrive in a ship and check in at Andrew's hotel (convenient). The barlumin removes the powers from TPs which is why the aliens want it, but they are kids' TV silly with malfunctioning translators and misunderstanding clothing and umbrellas. It all gets even dafter when all the TPs end up on the ship with their dog-faced pilot, and all have their powers removed. It's down to Andrew and his dagger to rescue the day!  I *think* the spaceship used here might be one from the Doctor Who story 'Frontier in Space' ... and one of the two aliens is played by Hilary Minster (General Klinkenhoffer from 'allo 'allo).

Finally we have 'The Living Skins' and in a bound, The Tomorrow People is back to doing what it does best - Earth-set adventures with creepy aliens and good ideas.  The idea is a retread of previous stories - teen fashion takes over the teens - so we're in 'The Blue and the Green', 'Heart of Soggoth' and 'Hitler's Last Secret' territory again, but it's well done, and the director even manages to make a bunch of orange inflatables look scary!  There's a very dodgy shot of Mike Holloway in his pants ... and the idea of John's cold defeating the aliens is taken from War of the Worlds but never mind. The idea of plasticky fashion jumpsuits being the spearhead of an alien invasion harks back to Doctor Who's Autons, and overall it's a good end to the season.


SEASON EIGHT

This season is an adventure long piece, with 'War of the Empires' taking up the whole thing. The Thargons are back - all gold this time and thankfully without a Thing computer/robot in evidence now - and they are at war with the Sorsons who look like mobile Aztec columns (they're also sort of Daleky in a way) and have silly comedy alien voices. They decide to use Earth as a base, so the TPs have to try and stop them. There's some nice stuff with Elizabeth and Timus at the Galactic Trig where we discover that the council members are a bunch of duvet-monsters with felt pieces sewn on - the sort of things that a bunch of pre-schoolers might create at playgroup one morning. Such a laughable shame - consider what Doctor Who managed some ten years earlier in 'The Daleks' Master Plan' story with the alien delegates shown there - they were imaginative both visually and audibly, whereas The Tomorrow People go for the bargain basement alien look.

The plot rambles a bit and it's very talky, but it's a sort of intelligent look at an intergalactic war and what the diplomacy might end up looking like. However for kids used to comedy aliens, bumbling policemen and hideous teen fashion, it might all be a little too po-faced.

I spotted musical cues from Doctor Who's 'Inferno' in this one too. Oh, and the Y-wing fighters (models by Martin Bower) look very Star Wars to my untrained eye. I guess that this significant and influential film is impacting on The Tomorrow People as it did with Doctor Who.


AFTERMATH

So we got to the end of the viewing, and I have to say that on balance I was pleasantly surprised. I had remembered much of the latter seasons as being unwatchable drivel, and while there are some real klunkers there, and some design and voice decisions which drag the whole thing down, overall it manages to maintain its head above water.

I think part of the problem is that the earlier stories are a) longer and b) better, so that they stick in the memory more than the latter ones. The first three seasons are pretty good ('A Man for Emily' excepted) but once we get further than this, the plots become sparce and patchy, and one wonders what Roger Price was doing all year if this was the best he could come up with for his series. The show is further hampered by some dreadful casting decisions for the leads. Nicholas Young as John is a rock throughout, a brilliant performance and very believable. Next best is Liz Adare as Elizabeth, who manages to do well despite leaving for a season to have a baby. Poor Peter Vaughan-Clark as Stephen though - excellent in the role, but dropped with no further mention of him having ever been there!  But the others ... Kenny was unfortunately poor from the start; Tyso was just annoying; with Hsui Tai ... of all the Chinese actresses available in the UK at the time, they manage to pick and cast one who can't actually speak English!  Her acting is forced and unnatural and because she is apparently speaking the words from the script phonetically (they wrote them out for her), her delivery is often hard to understand ... Andrew at the end is bearable, but like all of the non-lead TPs, they are constantly sidelined and left at the lab while John/Stephen/Liz/Mike go off and have all the fun. It's as though they thought they needed the characters there for some reason, but then had no idea what to do with them.

The show is also a strange mix of extreme Children's television with daft puppets, forced comedy voices, incompetent, bumbling police, traffic wardens and officials of all types ... but then you get some very creepy horror with young girls being walking bombs (who then die!), lots of threat and violence, and body/psychological horror of loss of identity and mind ...  it's like the show didn't really know what it wanted to be all along.

I'm so glad to revisit it though - it's been a pleasure. And now that it's being re-worked again for a 2013 audience, maybe it will manage to find the narrative consistency and drive again and deliver thrills and excitement as a whole new generation of Tomorrow People 'break out' and start to Jaunt once more.

Benton ... Daleks ... Master

Just a normal day at the office for me ... listening to some of the excellent Big Finish CDs in the car on long journeys ... here's a round up of some recent offerings, and some thoughts on each.

First off Council of War is the first Companions Chronicles release to feature the vocal talents of John Levene as Sergeant Benton. It's an interesting story, but one which for me is slightly unbelievable as 'fitting in' where the authors claim it fits. Benton is off doing some covert surveillance for UNIT, investigating some disappearances in the town of Kettering. Benton is portrayed here as some sort of ertzaz James Bond figure, and in my world of the third Doctor, this was never the case. He's not a dashing hero, he's a trusty sidekick ... but that aside, Levene does a good job with the material. I did wince a little at some of the asides from Margery Phipps about his manliness and so on, but perhaps this is meant as local colour ... Sinead Keenan (the female werewolf off of Being Human and the female alien with a green conker head from Doctor Who) does an excellent job of bringing Phipps to life ... her reading is clear and effective and complements Levene's male tones well.  The story is unfortunately a little forgettable and silly, with aliens in the far future kidnapping Phipps because she wrote a book that they based their entire culture on (of peace) and then when they get invaded, they have no way of defending themselves. Thus they blame Phipps and put her on trial!  It's just daft.

Next up is The Final Phase, one of the Tom Baker/Mary Tamm series of audios. I've not listened to all of these, and on this one I felt I was missing something. It seems to be a return appearance from David Warner as Cuthbert, a character who has joined forces with the Daleks. Warner is brilliant here, managing to toe a line between serious threat and incompetence as he realises that the Daleks he hired as a security force (what was he thinking?) actually have their own agenda and are after a sort of wormhole thing he has found in space. I liked the stylings of this, and the music is very Dudley Simpson from 'Genesis of the Daleks'. I did have a small problem with Tamm's voice, as she doesn't sound terribly like she did in the show, and Tom Baker too is perhaps playing it all with too much flippancy than would perhaps have been the case ... but then some of this is down to the script and the dialogue the character is given. It was an entertaining listen, but I did start to get bored the 100th time someone asked Cuthbert to explain his plan, and he found another reason not to ...  The Dalek voices are, as usual, excellent, and generally the sound design and production is top notch - but then Big Finish have a lot of experience of doing these things now.

Finally, another Companion Chronicle, Mastermind which features Geoffrey Beevers as the Master, along with Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso as a couple of UNIT (I think) operatives who are keeping the Master's body in a mysterious vault.  I really enjoyed this tale, it works perfectly in the medium, and does not overstay it's welcome. It's also got some lovely twists and turns in it, some excellent audio effects, and a nice, satisfying ending, all of which works within the concepts that the author (Jonathan Morris, contributing what seems to be his 26th CD for Big Finish's main Who ranges) is playing with. Beevers is brilliant as the Master, his voice moving from pitiful wheedling to powerful control as the play progresses, and I liked the time travel elements which were introduced as well. Overall this is the best of the three, a great, cracking adventure, and one which would actually work really well as a film - just three cast, limited sets, and lots of great ideas and sparkling dialogue.

Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor

Apologies for the long wait for this one ... it's just been such a hectic year and time to sit and pen thoughts has been limited. But here we are with some thoughts about the Doctor Who season finale for this year, 'The Name of the Doctor'.

There was so much hype around this episode, from the unexpected early release of the episode in America, to people discussing and wondering what the title meant ... and as usual these days I was pretty unexcited by it all. As I said in some blog post or Facebook status, the show for me has never been about the Doctor, and his name is monumentally unimportant in the wider scheme of the show ... so I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Of course, as it turned out, the title is misleading anyway and isn't about what the Doctor's name is in the first place (and I guessed this too - too many years of Steven Moffat's blindsiding to be honest).

So I came to the episode not really knowing what to expect. I had my own theory that Clara was the TARDIS as that sort of seemed to explain a lot of things ... but I was wrong on that too.

The opening sequence was excellent, very fannish, and very suitable for a fiftieth anniversary show ... Clara is integrated into old footage, and interacts with the first Doctor as he steals the TARDIS ... lots of clips of other Doctors too ... and we learn that she is the impossible girl, born to save the Doctor. This really is a magnificent sequence - so good that it's repeated - with some variations - later on in the episode.

This leads into the story proper, but as usual it's a bit of a mishmash of ideas and things which aren't explained and don't make much sense ... but you just have to go with them. There's a prisoner - Clarence DeMarco - killer of 14 women, locked in a prison on Earth in 1893. But somehow he knows of the Doctor, of his secret, and the space-time coordinates to the planet Trenzalore which is where the Doctor's grave is. There's much made of this ... the Doctor even breaks down and cries at one point - this is the place he must never, ever visit (why he should never visit is not explained, nothing really seems to happen when he does).

Madame Vastra and Jenny decide to set up a 'conference call' through time and space and bring themselves, Strax (who is in Glasgow on a fighting holiday or something), Clara (by means of a letter sent to her containing a sleeping potion) and River Song (yawn) together to discuss the problem. While they are all sleeping, the Great Intelligence in the form of Dr Simeon arrives at their Victorian house with some creepy suited monster things (Whispermen) and kill Jenny. He tells them that the Doctor must go to Trenzalore.

The Doctor finds Clara and realises that he has to go to Trenzalore to save his friends ...by breaking into his own tomb. How he knows this I have no idea ... but it's all good drama. The TARDIS doesn't want to go though and so the Doctor forces it down to the planet, which is all a creepy graveyard place for some reason. The Doctor's tomb has the TARDIS over it ... very impressive ... Then there's a pile of stuff with River Song's ghost which the Doctor can't see but Clara can ... and a fake tombstone for River there (which can't exist). The Whispermen attack so the Doctor and Clara fall through the grave into some underground tunnels.

Meanwhile Vastra, Jenny and Strax arrive by the tomb and Strax brings Jenny back to life with an electro cardio restart ... and then the Great Intelligence and the Whispermen attack again ...

This is all a little bit like 'The Five Doctors' now ... with various parties approaching the Doctor's Tomb/Dark Tower from below and above ... and they have to break in to get something undetermined.

But to open the tomb, the Doctor's name must be spoken ... and despite that Clara and the Doctor ascended through the basement areas of the TARDIS, they arrive outside it ... not sure about that. But anyway, the ghost of River speaks the Doctor's name and the doors open.

Inside the TARDIS, instead of the console, there's a flicker light thing which is apparently the tracks of all the Doctor's travels ... again not sure why. If the Doctor is dead and this is his tomb, then why is this light thing there?  Is it there for all Time Lords in their tombs? In which case why aren't more evil monsters and villains tracking down the tombs of dead Time Lords and then infiltrating their timelines like the Great Intelligence wants to do with the Doctor's

The Doctor collapses as the paradox of his being there is too much, or that he doesn't understand the script.  The Great Intelligence intends to infiltrate the Doctor's timestream and rewrite history so that he loses all his battles - the Doctor dies in all his incarnations ... but Clara realises that she can stop the GI ... time changes and Jenny vanishes, Strax is no longer friendly ... so Clara steps into the Doctor's timeline and starts to correct it all back again - everyone is restored ... except Clara.

Now these are all very nice ideas, but really make no sense at all! If none of this happened until Clara entered the Doctor's timestream, then why was she in 'Asylym of the Daleks'?  That hadn't happened yet!  And if she was in the Doctor's timestream all along, then why didn't he remember her as the strange girl who told him which TARDIS to steal from Gallifrey in the first place?  That's the problem with timey wimey stuff ... it needs to make a little more sense to really work ... and leaving it all hanging like this tends not to be too satisfying.

As I said, though, you have to just go with it.

The Doctor then decides he has to save Clara ... but before that he explains that he has always been able to see River - he was afraid that admitting that she was there would hurt him too much ... and she was a ghost because he had never said goodbye properly. What rot. And to cap it all he snogs her ... Oh dear.  This all makes no sense at all ...and so, probably to escape all the confusion in the plot, the Doctor steps into his own timestream. Not sure to do what though? To help Clara put right all the GI's meddling? To stop the GI? Or just to rescue Clara? How would he even know where she was? She was splintered throughout his timeline ... so who is the 'real' one anyway?

He finds Clara on the set of an episode of 'Lost in Space', smoky and surrounded by fake rocks. Echoes of the Doctor run past her (no idea why but it's a nice image). The Doctor sends her a leaf - her memory leaf - and she lets him save her.

Up to this point, despite all the incongruities in the plot, the sappish snogging and silly angst, the non-plots of the Whispermen (Who or what are they? Why are they there?), Jenny's death only to be resurrected by a Sontaran with a portable electro shock machine, and the whole Doctor must never go to Trenzalore thing, not to mention how this prisoner at the start was the only one who knew all about it ... despite all this, it's been a good, exciting watch. It rattles along, the visuals are great, and it does all sort of make some sort of sense as long as you don't think about it too long.

But we're all scratching our heads and wondering what 'The Name of the Doctor' has to do with anything ... but wait ... there's another man on the set of 'Lost in Space' with Clara and the 11th Doctor, someone that she has not seen before ... but everyone there is the Doctor ... so who is this? And why isn't he one of the incarnations that she recognises (given that she was integrated into the Doctor's entire timeline - and thus presumably knows all the future incarnations of the Doctor as well as the 11th and the previous 10 - I guess this means she knows all about the Valeyard too)?

Ah ... this is the one who broke the promise. What promise? He is the Doctor's secret. How can you have a secret from someone who has just accessed your entire timeline? In the name of peace and sanctity - but not in the name of the Doctor ...  apparently, as some captions on the screen inform us ... John Hurt as The Doctor ...

And we scratch our heads and say 'What?'

Indeed.

The last minutes or so really let the whole thing down. It makes no sense.  Obviously I appreciate that it's a lead in to the 50th anniversary special (or whatever they are doing) but it's so ham fisted (bun vendor) and awkward. It's meant to be all oooh and aaah but ends up being just rubbish and puzzling.

And now we have to wait until November to learn what on earth it is all about.

Spearhead from Space on Blu-Ray

I have long thought that the 1970 Doctor Who story 'Spearhead from Space', which introduced us to Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor, would be an ideal candidate for the 'Hi Def' experience. Unlike any other Who, it was all shot on film (rather than videotape) and so had the potential for remastering to give a better picture.  So I was rather delighted when it was announced that it would be released in the Blu Ray format, and remastered along the way too.

I was less impressed when I heard that 2Entertain had allocated next to no funds to actually do the remastering though, and this may be the source of my main (if minor) complaint about the story itself.

Seeing it in sharp and clear colour on the telly was magnificent indeed. And there's a little comparison documentary on the disk showing the different versions of the story, from VHS to DVD, to remastered DVD to this new Hi Def version.  I liked how filmic it all seemed, and the country colours of episode one, to the grey, waxy skin of the auton humans seemed new and fresh.

My main concern with the presentation, and it is picky indeed, is that in two scenes, there is what seem to be fluff or something in the film gate at the top of the frame. These are shots between Hibbert and Ransom in Hibbert's office in part two, and in the final scenes between the Doctor and Channing in part 4. Given the level of technology we have available, I'm not sure why these marks weren't digitally removed - even doing it frame by frame should be possible these days given the amazing work done by Stuart Humpreyes on the recent 'The Mind of Evil' release.

As I say, it's a small thing, but when you are promoting your release as being in Hi Def on Blu Ray, and digitally restored and remastered, this just looks like shoddy work.

The release has few extras on it. There's the aforementioned piece on the restoration; a 'coming soon' on the Pertwee story 'The Green Death' which just tries way too hard to make it look punchy and exciting - and all those fade to blacks render it almost unwatchable!  Seeing trailers for Classic Who done in the style of modern blockbusters was amusing at first, but now it just grates. It also perhaps raises false expectations in the minds of those who have not seen the story as to what it might be like.

The main two documentaries included on the disk are a piece on Jon Pertwee; and one on Caroline John.

The Caroline John Documentary, Carry On, is really good. It covers John's life through interviews with her husband, daughter and best friends and you really get a sense of the person that Carrie was. I liked the lady immensely ... I think if we'd spent more time together then we would have really got on. She was kind and funny and always laughing, and this comes over well in the documentary. I have to admit that I cried a little at the section where her family were explaining how she came to do her first ever convention - and they even had the video footage of exactly what was being explained. And so we could see the cheers and applause as she made her entrance to a packed room of fans, and realised that they all loved her and that her performance in Doctor Who had been something special. It's a shame that John Molyneux, who got her to attend, and who conducted the on-stage interview we see clips from in the documentary, was not credited. But it's a great piece overall, and good insight into the lady.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Jon Pertwee Documentary, A Dandy and a Clown - which is strange as it's from the same Director. This covers Jon's life, but his family are conspicuous by their absence, and it's left to about half a dozen showbiz pals, and one long-time friend, to reminisce about Jon, interspersed with some interview clips of him on shows like Wogan. Generally this is a very superficial look at Jon's life and career. Something of a wasted opportunity really. I assume that this is the documentary that I was contacted about some months back, where the Director wanted all my help, photographs, audiotapes and whatever about Jon, without paying a research fee or involving me in any way in the documentary (I declined), and for which he admitted extensively using the book I penned with Jon, I Am The Doctor, for reference (no credit was given to the book as a reference source at the end). This may be why I feel a little ambivalent about this piece ... so apologies for that.  It's nicely presented though, and I liked the idea of a timeline unfolding and the steps along the way being represented by photographs and clips - and there's lots of pictures here which I hadn't seen before, so kudos to whoever did the picture research.

Overall this is a lovely package. A chance to see some classic Doctor Who in tip top condition, and with a couple of Documentaries thrown in.  I'd have loved to have seen an isolated music track included, and more effort made to source interesting additional features, but I understand that the budget allocated to this release was minimal, and therefore they had to go with what they could get. It's still a shame though, given how much money these releases make for 2Entertain and the BBC, that they can't spend a little more and get a much better end product as a result.

Lakeland Bakeware

Every so often a new range of Doctor Who inspired goodies comes along which gets you all excited and enthusiastic. Lakeland, long one of the best places to go if you wanted cookware or kitchen items, utensils and products which were a) different and b) actually worked, now has a large range of Who themed items available, all at pretty good and keen prices too.

The lovely people there kindly sent me some of them to have a look at, and so here's some thoughts and comments on them!

First off is a trio of items for baking and displaying cupcakes!  What I really like about most Who merchandise is the care and thought that goes into the packaging - the bit that most people throw away! Thus with the Cupcake Kit, it comes in a nice little cardboard TARDIS ... but there's more. The TARDIS has opening doors which reveal the innards, protected by a clear sheet of plastic.

There are two sets of 12 cupcake baking cases: one with the words YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS written around it, and the other with BIGGER ON THE INSIDE, These are held in a silver card inner which also has four sets of six items each little wooden sticks with cardboard cut out photographs on the top. There's K9, a Gold Dalek, the TARDIS and the eleventh Doctor. It's a shame that these are only one-sided, meaning that you can only see the image from one side only. The aforementioned silver card inner, also has very subtle images of the TARDIS printed on both sides.

It's a lovely little set, put together with a lot of care and attention.

The other cupcake decoration set contains 24 cake wraps and 24 toppers - but these are Daleks! The pack contains wraps in differing colours for four of the new Paradym Daleks from the show: Red, Blue, White and Orange. The wrap is a simple card sleeve which sits around the base of the cake, and the topper is a 2-dimensional card image of a Dalek's 'head' which has a pointed card bottom and thus just sticks in the top of the cake. It's a shame perhaps that these weren't moulded from 3-d plastic, but from a single angle the cakes look pretty good.

The packaging here is a simple flatpack containing the wraps and toppers. The photographic imagery is nice though.

The final cupcake related piece is magnificent!  This is a large Dalek Cake Stand, which stands around a foot and a half tall!  The pieces to assemble it come flatpacked, and in true Ikea style, you have to push the various elements together to create a 3-D Dalek stand, with three levels of surfaces on which to place your Doctor Who cupcakes!  I guess it could also be used to display other things too, like little figures or models, or anything which fits!

It is a 2-D, 3-D model though and so elements like the eyestalk, and gun/sucker arms are actually flat cardboard, but it does the job in suggesting a Dalek quite well. The eyestalk even moves up and down, and the arms are likewise pivoted to move from side to side. It's a wonderful idea, and is pretty well executed too. Great for a Who themed party! And a bargain at only £7.99!

And if you're planning a party, you need a cake, and so Lakeland are to be congratulated on bringing out a proper Dalek cake mould!  No more trying to construct a Dalek from swiss rolls and icing, this silicon cake mould will turn out a perfect Dalek shape every time (of course subject to cake mix and cooking temperatures and conditions!)  It comes in a nice box with a die-cut Dalek shape in the front revealing the silicon mould in the box and images of a cake made from the very product.  I'm not sure how the cake can be made so that the balls, slats and head pieces come out a different colour from the body mind ... maybe you have to be clever and use two different mixes or something? Or maybe it just happens by the way the cake bakes in the mould?

As mentioned, Lakeland have a wide selection of items available, and here's the full list:

24 Dalek Cupcake Wraps & Toppers, Ref 18029, £9.99
TARDIS Cupcake Kit, Ref 18030, £9.99
Cake Decorating Kit, Ref 18028, £4.99
Cake Pan, Ref 18037, £12.99
6-Piece Dusting Set, Ref 18034, £3.49
TARDIS Chocolate Mould, Ref 18035, £4.99
Dalek Cake Mould, Ref 18036, £16.99
50 Dalek Cupcake Cases, Ref 18027, £2.99
Dalek Cake Stand, Ref 18026, £7.99
Cookie Cutters, £4.99 Each set
20 Napkins, Ref 18032, £2.99
12 Paper Plates, Ref 18031, £3.99
Garland, Ref 18033, £6.99
Ice Cube Tray, Ref 18039, £4.99
24 Straws, Ref 18024, £2.99

Available for sale from: www.lakeland.co.uk

Dalek Films on Blu Ray

I am a massive fan of the Dalek films. Always have been. I know they're a sort of 'side canon' if you like, but they are a great and entertaining pair of features, with some brilliant performances, and the best sixties Daleks this side of 'Evil of the Daleks'!

I had them on VHS, I had them on DVD ... and now I have them on Blu-Ray ... but to be honest, they are something of a disappointment.

First off, the picture quality just isn't up to what I would expect from Blu Ray. The pictures seem washed out somewhat, and the quality of the second film, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD in particular seems very poor. The opening scene of the robber in the car is all grey and washy ... not crisp black and colours. It's almost like it's a DVD copy and not a Blu Ray copy - I hope they haven't cocked up the initial release!

There are extras on the reconstruction work that was done, and they talk a lot about problems with the Technicscope format, and light bleeding from the top of one frame to the bottom of the next - well I see this in the second film - especially scenes on the Dalek spaceship where there are strip lights which then wash out the bottom of the frame as well.  But I thought they were fixing this?

Other extras include an interview with someone called Gareth Owen, who doesn't have a clue what he's on about!  All the Daleks for the films were built by Shawcraft and later used on the TV series too ... it's a shame that this interview is there as it's so incorrect and just serves to muddy the waters of proper research into the films.

Good to see the Dalekmania documentary on there, but why wasn't the black and white clip that was recently recovered included? Why no proper behind the scenes documentary about the films? Maybe we're so spoiled with the 2Entertain releases of the Classic Series, but it seems such a wasted opportunity that something could have been done and wasn't. There's so much that could have been included - archival footage of the Daleks at Cannes perhaps (assuming anything exists), interview snippets with Cushing ... it could have been narrated by Bernard Cribbins ... could have ... could have ...

So my initial reactions are muted. A great idea to clean up the films and give them a pristine release ... but it seems to not be quite so pristine ... and with no effort made on the extras, something of a damp squib. Such a shame :(

Recent Books

I want to talk about a couple of recent books which I got hold of ... both self-published by fans of Doctor Who and both very different.

The first is the second of Keith Miller's compilations of his old Doctor Who Fan Club magazines and newsletters. This is The Official Doctor Who Fan Club: Volume 2: The Tom Baker Years, and what it covers is pretty self-evident from the title.

In the first volume, we were presented with Miller's love affair with the programme, aided by production secretary Sarah Newman, and his encouragement by the BBC to run a fan club - even as far as printing up and mailing out the newsletters for him!

Here we see the shattering of his interest, as the show changed hands (Barry Letts gave way to Philip Hinchcliffe and then to Graham Williams) and the BBC's legal department got all heavy handed on a young fan.

The additional letters and correspondence are sparser here, though the set reports are welcome, and it's good to see that Elisabeth Sladen at least was a sympathetic ear. But the overall feeling is of loss of interest and drive precipitated by an increasingly distant BBC, and also by the, perhaps in hindsight, inevitable interest from the BBC legal department about the legality of publishing a fan magazine in the first place.

The book is, as was the first volume, a marvellous archive of the period, and Miller's magazine Doctor Who Digest, was certainly one that I looked up to at the time, and tried to emulate with my own early fanzine efforts.

More details about the book can be found here: http://www.odwfc.com/

The second book is a, frankly, impressive and amazing tome called Time & Space Visualiser, and it has been put together by the talented Paul Smith - I have raved about his earlier work on the Wonderful Book of Doctor Who 1965 and the pastiche Radio Times Special for the new incarnation of Doctor Who from 2005 onwards. Plus he did the Signature Collection books for Telos :)

The book is a collection of full colour graphical representations of facts and figures about Doctor Who. Now many books have published lists of viewing figures and AI ratings, transmission dates and times ... and so on - fundamentally the building blocks of a reference work! - but what Paul has done is to take these, and many, many more views of the show, and build graphical images around them. These are not pie charts or bar charts (though there are some like that here), but wonderful artistic representations of the figures.

Some examples picked at random: Charts of 'Writers and directors ranked according to popularity of their stories amongst fans'. This uses results from a 'Dynamic rankings' website to present the information as a barchart of coloured pencils (writer) and batons (director). We can see that Neil Gaiman is the most popular writer (followed by Phil Ford, Robert Shearman and Richard Curtis), while Hettie MacDonald is the most popular director (followed by Adam Smith, Toby Haynes and Nick Hurran).

'Significant Heights and Depths experienced in Doctor Who' looks at just that, with some lovely silhouette graphics. The lowest is the Silurian Base in Derbyshire (-250m), and the highest is the Det Sen Monastery (4,600m).

'The Dominance of the four-part story in Classic Doctor Who' explores that subject ... we can see that there are close to 100 four part stories, as opposed to 1 one part story, and 1 fourteen part story. Interesting facts here include that Four parts is the only story length that every Classic Doctor had!

And finally: 'Relative contributions of authors and artists to the Target range of Doctor Who novelisations' - this presents a bookshelf graphic, and cover sketches in relative size to show the stats. Thus Terrance Dicks has most as writer with 65 stories; Ian Marter is next (9) and Malcolm Hulke is third (7). On the cover artists: Andrew Skilleter did most (42), with Chris Achilleos next (28) and Alister Pearson third (23) - it notes that Pearson did a further 48 covers as reissues.

As you can see, the content is diverse and simply overflowing with facts and figures, numbers and charts - all fascinating to see in themselves, but also providing for thought provoking moments of realisation, when you discover that more episodes of Doctor Who have been transmitted on December 25th than any other day of the year!  Or that it would take you 231 days to watch the entirety of Doctor Who at one story a day, or 15.1 years to watch them all at one episode per week!

The book is available from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Space-Visualiser-history-visualisations/dp/0957606206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370775658&sr=8-1&keywords=time+%26+space+visualiser

And in the USA it's here: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Space-Visualiser-history-visualisations/dp/0957606206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370775692&sr=8-1&keywords=time+%26+space+visualiser

Although it is fairly expensive, this is a full colour, 120 page paperback that has been produced with such love and care by Paul, that if you can afford it, please buy a copy!

More information and some selected pages can be seen on the Wonderful Books website here: http://www.wonderfulbook.co.uk/visualiser.html

Recent CDs

Catching up again with some recent merchandise which arrived at Howe Towers and here are some thoughts on some recent CDs which have kept me entertained on some long car journeys.

First off, a Big Finish Companion Chronicles release, The Scorchies, which is read by the lovely Katy Manning, and aided and abetted by Melvyn Hayes (if you're wondering who he is, then cast your mind way, way back to a show called Here Come The Double Deckers on Saturday morning telly, and realise that he played Albert the street cleaner ... and also to a show called It Ain't Arf Hot Mum! in which he played Gunner 'Gloria' Beaumont - recently I see from IMDB he's been in EastEnders and was voices in Budgie the Helecopter and SuperTed, as well as appearing in the 'TV Miniseries' of Shada - not sure what that is, not aware there ever was a TV Miniseries of Shada. Looking closer I see it's Big Finish's Paul McGann version of the story ...)

I was looking forward to this release as the PR said it combined together the horror of kid's animated puppet shows with Doctor Who, and thus it does, with a cast of characters, all voiced by Hayes, who seem to have been ported in from other shows: thus we have Grizz Fizzle (a Muppet); Cool Cat (a pink cat reminiscent of Bagpuss); Professor Baffle (probably Professor Yaffle, again from Bagpuss); Hamble an ugly doll (from Play School but which wasn't 'alive' in that incarnation) and the Magic Mice (again from Bagpuss).  Unfortunately, and unlike many other reviewers I note, I felt it all fell flat.

Manning is brilliant. She doesn't really tell the story as perform in it - basically Jo is kidnapped by the Scorchies who are actually alien life forms which take over a world by being cute on telly - a little like the modus operandi of the Nimon - and she does it with aplomb.

Unfortunately the puppets don't work for me. Hayes' voices, while good, are all wrong. The main voice for Grizz Fizzle sounds so much like a comedy yorkshireman character from The League of Gentlemen or a million other shows, that it ends up being grating rather than entertaining. Cool Cat does nothing but say 'cool', and Professor Baffle, while starting out well (and having greater significance than the listener might thing at first) says he is baffled *every* time he opens his mouth. It's all too repetitive and samey, and not really reflective of similar characters on these shows. It's like James Goss has taken the basic characteristic of these characters and then presented them just as that - as one-dimensional tropes rather than as believable threats.

I also hated the musical numbers - all the same/similar beat and rhythms, and with unimaginative lyrics. Sorry guys, but this one showed so much potential in the idea, but the execution killed it. I suppose that's what you get when the Big Finish chaps, by their own admission in the sleeve notes, come up with an idea in a pub one night!

Moving on to the next three in BBC AudioGO/Big Finish's Destiny of the Doctor range. I looked at the first three in an earlier post here (http://howeswho.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-merchandise-keeps-on-coming.html) and so here's my thoughts on the next three.

The Fourth Doctor's era is represented by Babblesphere by Jonathan Morris, who seems to write about three Doctor Who scripts a month at the moment!  This is read by Lalla Ward, who does a very good job indeed in telling the story of a world taken over by it's mad computer, with a nice line in irony pointed at the current online trends for Facebook and Twitter, where every mundane thought is made available to the masses to see. This takes the idea to the limit, where participation is mandatory, and people are chipped to put them in constant contact with the hive-mind computer.

I enjoyed this one a lot. Morris managed to capture the fourth Doctor's era well, and the story was interesting and well told. There were quite a few clichés though in the writing, and the Doctor tended to come across as a walking pastiche of his own era - less is more in telling a tale, and perhaps Morris shouldn't have tried quite so hard to reference and namecheck all the tropes which have come to identify the era. Not quite as good as the Second Doctor entry, but certainly in second place for me so far.

Next up is the Fifth Doctor's entry, Smoke and Mirrors by Steve Lyons. Here we have Janet Fielding reading, and the immediate problem is that she can't do the voices! Tegan, as an Australian, is fine, but she retains her Australian twang whoever she is speaking as, and as the script doesn't identify the speakers well enough, it all gets very confusing as to who is talking and when. The exception is when she does the Master, and here Fielding manages to get over the menace and pomposity of the character. The idea of Houdini being involved is interesting, but somewhat falls flat for me, and the story is too complex for the space. I didn't really enjoy it that much I'm afraid.

Part of the trouble is that in this era, there are just so many characters: the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, Adric, the Master ... having Houdini there as well, and also a pile of circus Carny folk too makes for a complex adventure, which is hard to pull off well on audio - the story needs to be structured to split everyone up and for everyone to have things to do all the time ... complex!  This would perhaps have been better to have been a straight 'Tegan narrates' adventure, seen through her eyes only. This would play to Fielding's strength as the voice of Tegan, and play down the issues I mentioned above.

Finally, the Sixth Doctor, and Nicola Bryant reads Trouble in Paradise by Nev Fountain. Unfortunately this is a real stinker of a story. Unimaginative and boring, Fountain takes us on a trip to the old world where Christopher Columbus is busy discovering America. Peri comes over as a walking encyclopaedia about the man and what he did - convenient - and the Doctor speaks nothing like the Doctor. This is not helped by the actor playing Columbus - Cameron Stewart - who actually sounds like sixth Doctor Colin Baker so much, that I again on occasion thought that Columbus was the Doctor ... very confusing.

Then we get time-travelling buffalo people called the Bovine ... please. If there's one thing I dislike about science fiction, it's when the names of a people or their planet reflect the main identifying attribute of said race or planet. So when spider people are called Arachnoids from Arachnia, or if a planet is dry, it's called Aridius; or when all the females are bald, they are the Alopecians ... that sort of thing. Sorry folks, just didn't work for me. It's basically a timey wimey adventure where our Bovine chum goes back in time to try and stop himself ... yup, we're also in City of Death territory.

Bobi Bartlett RIP

Robina ‘Bobi’ Bartlett

Robina ‘Bobi’ Bartlett was born on 13 February 1939 and attended art school in Somerset before training in fashion design at the Royal College of Art in London. She then worked for three years as a designer for a number of large companies in the fashion industry before launching her own design label selling young, trendy clothes to large stores and boutiques.

Bobi designed the new Martian Leader for
'The Seeds of Death'
Image (c) Estate of Bobi Bartlett.

She eventually joined the BBC as a Costume Designer around 1967 as they were looking for designers to be specifically trained in the techniques of colour television, ready for the start of colour production. One of the first programmes on which Bobi Bartlett worked was the police series Z Cars, and this was followed by the first of many assignments to Doctor Who. This was the eight-part Patrick Troughton adventure ‘The Invasion’ in 1968. For this she not only redesigned the look of the Cybermen, but also provided the uniforms and badges for the military organisation UNIT in their first appearance on the show. ‘When I came to design the UNIT uniform, I tried to keep in mind the fact that it was for an organisation that was supposed to be an international taskforce under the command of the United Nations,’ she explained in a later interview. ‘It had to have an international look about it, and not resemble too closely the established uniform of any particular country. It also had to be very up-to-date and maintain the traditional macho, masculine image of the military.’

A Kroton.
Image (c) Estate of Bobi Bartlett.

After completing her work on ‘The Invasion’, Bobi Bartlett went straight on to work on the next story, ‘The Prison in Space’. Unfortunately the story was abandoned at a late stage, and Bartlett’s design work on it went unused. ‘I’d already completed most of my designs for it. I’d even started making up a few of the costumes. The plot involved a race of dictatorial women, and I was going to have them in a lot of very nice leather wear.’ The story that replaced ‘The Prison in Space’ was ‘The Krotons’, and Bartlett designed the crystalline monsters and other costumes for the show, as well as for the following story, ‘The Seeds of Death’, which saw the return of the Ice Warriors – including designs by Bobi for a new rank of the alien race: ‘The Ice Warrior commander hadn’t appeared in earlier episodes, so I designed an altogether smoother version of the head, and the rest of the costume also became more streamlined.’ – as well as several futuristic outfits for the cast.

In this period Bartlett also worked on episodes of the popular sit-com The Liver Birds and an episode of The Wednesday Play called ‘Emma’s Time’ starring Michele Dotrice, Andrew Kier and Ian Holm. A year or so later saw Bartlett again assigned to Doctor Who for a Jon Pertwee story called ‘The Mind of Evil’ which again featured the UNIT organisation. ‘There was a location sequence, early on in the story, which featured some children playing in a park in a London square, and I remember that my son Blake appeared as a little boy on a tricycle. He and some other children were asked to be extras, as the director had decided at the last moment that he wanted to have them there to complement the action. Very conveniently my son had come along that day to see Jon Pertwee performing his scenes as the Doctor.’

Bobi working on 'The Invasion'.

‘The Mind of Evil’ marked Bartlett’s last contribution to Doctor Who and subsequently she worked on episodes of All Gas and Gaiters (with Derek Nimmo) and Sykes (with Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques) before leaving the Corporation to go freelance. She went on to work on two television plays in 1975, an episode of One-Upmanship (with Richard Briars, Peter Jones and Frederick Jaeger) for the BBC in 1976, 1990 (with Edward Woodward) again for the BBC in 1977 and finally on the Worzel Gummidge series (again with Jon Pertwee), in 1979.

In later years she returned to teaching, including at the University of the West of England in Bristol, introducing a new generation of students to the art of costume design.


Bobi Bartlett died from a stroke in her home in Brighton on 9 April 2013. She was unmarried at the time of her death and leaves one son, Blake, from her first marriage.


David J Howe, with thanks to Stephen James Walker and Blake Bartlett. © 2013

White Witch of Devil's End

Delighted to announce this project, which I worked on last year with Sam. Reeltime Pictures have now issued the formal press release and so we can at last talk about it!

It was a great challenge to pull together a script like this, Sam first defined the overall story and then worked with the writers - including me - to deliver scripts for the production which were then all merged together to create the final screenplay. This was then revised and edited by Sam to make it work in terms of timing and details and so on.  Great fun!

Here's the details of the production:

WHITE WITCH OF DEVIL'S END

Reeltime Pictures are pleased to announce a new drama production for release on DVD to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

White Witch of Devil’s End is a spin-off from the highly regarded Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story 'The Daemons' and will star Damaris Hayman reprising her role as Miss Hawthorne.

At the grand age of 84 (in June this year), you’d expect Damaris would be happy to be enjoying retirement quietly in her Cheltenham home … but no! When approached by producer Keith Barnfather about the idea she jumped at the chance. “I shall retire, I think in my coffin!  Miss Hawthorne was my all-time favourite role and I was enchanted by the thought of being her again for a little while.”

“I was amazed and delighted that, as an octogenarian, Damaris was prepared to take this on,” says Keith. “We had recently recorded an interview with her for our Myth Makers series profiling actors who had appeared in Doctor Who and I already knew she still had a hunger to act. But I really didn’t expect her to be so keen.”

Although eager to take the project on, Damaris knew she had to pace herself, so in an innovative move, director Anastasia Stylianou decided to film the drama in a “talking head” style – adding dramatic cutaway material to bring Damaris’s words to life!

Says Anastasia; “I knew it would be a challenge. We needed to film a 50 minute drama at least, so I decided to make an asset out of a limitation.”

Primary filming has already taken place at a cottage near Damaris’s home. The crew collected and returned Damaris each day – allowing her to return home each evening to recover and study the next day’s script!

“We used autocue to help Damaris,” says Keith. “It was an impossible task for any actor to learn so much dialogue. Damaris was a true professional and took to it instantly.”

With a planned release date of 31st October, which is appropriately also Halloween, Anastasia hopes to have the project completed for the 50th anniversary celebrations. “It’s just getting all the dramatic cutaway material ‘in the can’ that is crucial. The drama is really an anthology – a set of connecting stories about Olive’s life told, as it were, in her own words.”

When considering who to approach to write these stories which would exist within an overall theme, Keith immediately thought to contact old friend David J Howe at Telos Publishing. “I thought it would be fantastic to ask individual writers knowledgeable in the occult and magic to write each story and David, through Telos, knew so many of the best young talent in the country.”
  
“I was delighted when Keith got in touch,” says David Howe, “and immediately started to think of who might be a good fit for the project. Along with my partner, the award-winning author Sam Stone, we contacted several authors who we felt would be sympathetic to the material and were pleased to get them all on board for the project.”

 
“I took on the task of outlining the whole story,” says Sam Stone, “and then asked the writers to come up with ideas which fitted that framework. We needed to tell stories at different points in Olive Hawthorne’s life, and the writers rose to the challenge and delivered scripts which exceeded all my expectations. I then worked with them to refine the scripts into the completed screenplay.”

The writers involved in the project are, as well as David J Howe and Sam Stone, Raven Dane, Debbie Bennett, Jan Edwards and Suzanne J Barbieri, with a final script-polish from Big Finish writer Matt Fitton. All have brought a unique perspective on Olive’s life, and the end result is an anthology of tales which will surprise, entertain and hopefully move the viewer.

Does Damaris have any regrets about throwing herself into such a big commitment? “Definitely not! I was enchanted to work with Anastasia and Keith again, who are great friends anyway. After a lot of working together consulting over the scripts, I’d subsequently never enjoyed filming more - and I can’t wait now to see the final result.”

RELEASED BY: REELTIME PICTURES LTD
PROD No: RTP0431
RRP: £12.99
PROVISIONAL RELEASE DATE: 31/10/2013
PRE-ORDER FROM: Galaxy 4: www.galaxy4.co.uk/product.thtml?id=3556&vts=geBkAgQ

Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver

Regular readers of my scribblings will be aware that I am a massive fan of the Cybermen. Always have been. For me, the background and ethos of them is far more interesting than that of the Daleks, and they have tended (until the new series unfortunately) to be well handled in the context of the series. I love the sixties stories, and even 'Revenge of the Cybermen' is good if you can overlook the fact that the logical creatures would not understand the concept of 'revenge'.

It wasn't until 'Silly Nemesis' (which I insist on calling the 25th anniversary story 'Silver Nemesis') that it all went a bit wrong for them, with a script that just wasn't up to par, and then in the new series, they reinvented them as robots, not even from Earth, but from a parallel dimension ... and now with this latest story they're back again.  Of course, 'Nightmare in Silver' is written by Neil Gaiman - who is a friend and a writer I greatly respect - and he is also a self-confessed fan of the creatures. I wonder then where it all went wrong.

I suspect it is something to do with the scripting and rewriting process, that some ideas get jettisoned and some end up half-formed and half-baked, the overall result being something of an echo of what the author intended. And here we have an echo indeed, a hint of what could have been a much better story ... and indeed, the opening seems to have been lifted from a Big Finish drama called The Silver Turk, written by Marc Platt. Poor Marc must be fuming at the gills. First they take his Big Finish adventure Spare Parts and use it as the basis for 'Age of Steel'/'Rise of the Cybermen'. Now they take his idea of a Cyberman being part of an automated chess-playing machine, and he gets no credit or involvement. You can see my review of the audio here - http://howeswho.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/turks-and-crusades.html - overall I found it disappointing, but the conceptual use of the Cybermen in it is good. Why can't Marc be asked to write for the show himself rather than just borrow his ideas?

The Doctor, along with Clara and two annoying kids - Artie and Angie - arrive at a place called Hedgewick's World - a fantastic amusement planet, and the Doctor has a gold ticket to the park. But it's closed and dead. So why didn't he arrive when it was operational? There's no suggestion at the moment that the Doctor can't control the TARDIS, so this seems a little strange. But for a dead world, there's a lot of people there! There's an army platoon run by Tamzin Outhwaite off of Red Cap, the vampire cop from Being Human as Webley, the owner of a waxworks sideshow, and the wonderful Warwick Davis off of Idiot Abroad and Life's Too Short as a character called Porridge!

So why are they all here? Not sure on that one. Webley shows off his exhibit to the Doctor and friends, and reveals an empty Cyberman shell which plays chess, controlled by Porridge sitting underneath ... so given that the place is deserted, how long has he been sitting there? And what do any of these people eat or drink or otherwise do all day? It's all very puzzling.

But there is something else there too: lots of little silver insect things, which are marvellous indeed. I love the idea of this: small little cybermites as the Doctor christens them, with audio and video capabilities, and something is watching them all.

Apparently Webley has three Cybermen in his collection, and these all look to be more like the Cybus-men from the parallel dimension. A shame they couldn't have been a mishmash of older costumes though. But then, unexpectedly, Webley is grabbed by his chess-playing shell (how? It's a shell!) and the cybermites get into him and part-convert him into a Cyberman. I'm not sure why the process stopped or why it didn't continue as the episode went on, but he stays like this for the rest of the time.

So now, the Doctor puts the kids to bed in the waxworks place and goes off to explore. So this is an alien planet, and he knows something's going on, but he leaves them there! Why not put them to bed in the TARDIS? Much safer ... Or just take them home.

Anyway, everyone eventually ends up at the barracks with the Soldiers, including the very annoying Angie, and suddenly there's a Cyberman there. It moves fast, like in The Matrix, and grabs Angie and is off!  Nothing can stop these new Cybermen, and for some reason they now sound like the Judoon. But this element is never used again, instead the Cybermen stomp around slowly for the remainder of the story. Maybe they forgot about this 'upgrade'.

Everyone thought the Cybermen were extinct, but now there is a live one on the planet. Sounds like they therefore need to blow the planet up with a handy implosion device the Army have. But the Doctor doesn't want the planet blown up just yet. He puts Clara in charge while he heads off to investigate. Clara therefore decides that the most defensible area is Netty Longshoe's Comical Castle, so they all head off there.

The Doctor finds a cybermite, hooks into a local transmit signal and transmits himself to Cyber-HQ, which does look very impressive. But where the heck is it? Hidden somewhere on the planet I guess, and looking very nicely like the Tombs in 'Tomb of the Cybermen' from the sixties.

The two kids (now in a Cyber-coma) and Webley are there, and Webley is speaking on behalf of the CyberPlanner - they need the children to use to build a new planner as their brains are better for this. But now they have the Doctor, they don't need the kids. He goes on to explain that the Cyberiad brought damaged Cyber-units to the park, to repair using any organics they could harvest, and now they want to create a new Planner. He throws some cybermites at the Doctor, and he is transformed into Locutus of Borg ... sorry, wrong series.

This is where it starts to all go wrong really ... the Doctor and the Planner set up dual conversations where both seem too like the Doctor for it to be convincing. Why isn't the Planner cold and unemotional ... instead he leaps around like the Doctor, using all his language and words and actions ... while the Doctor - in his own head at least - seems cold and collected. All very strange.

Now we see more Cybermen, and they start to kill/convert the soldiers. The army has one gun (with about 12 blasts left) a few hand pulsars (which will disable a Cyberman if you apply them to the back of their heads, assuming you can get close enough) and a bomb to implode the planet. Meanwhile the Doctor decides to play chess with the Planner, the winner getting the Doctor's brain. Except that the Doctor knows that earlier Cybermen Operating Systems had weaknesses due to cleaning fluid and gold, and the present OS still has elements of the earlier versions ... and so he slaps the gold ticket he has on his face and stops the Planner controlling him.

What utter rubbish. If you're going to reuse an old monster, at least get your facts right. The cleaning fluid reference, I assume, is to the story 'The Moonbase' when the Doctor's companions use a mixture of solvents to soften and dissolve the plastic in the creatures' chest units, suffocating them - nothing to do with Operating Systems! And the reference to gold is to 'Revenge of the Cybermen' wherein powdered gold clogs and coats their breathing system - so again nothing to do with Operating Systems. The Doctor putting a gold ticket on his face would make no difference to the CyberPlanner whatsoever.

And the Cybermen are not robots! So why can they take their heads off? And why does choreographer Ailsa Berk make them all walk and move like robots? Someone should sit her down and explain exactly what they are - humanoid bodies encased in metal shells. This is the biggest issue here - the creatures look fabulous, but they move all wrong, and are stompy again when they should be silent (or maybe reintroduce the weird buzzing noise from 'The Wheel in Space' or something). Anyone watching this story and not knowing the history would come away thinking the Cybermen are robots ... in which case why do they need the humans? And when there is a CyberPlanner anyway, why do they need to build another? And why do they need the Doctor's permission to do that? Why all the internal and external dialogue and arguing about it? Why would the Planner consent to a deal with the Doctor? That's not logical. They would just take what they wanted.

Moreover we learn that there are three million Cybermen on the planet. Three million! That's an awful lot of humans that have gone missing then ... no wonder the Fairground went downhill. And these Cybermen can upgrade themselves against electrocution and against the big blasty gun thing - they are just like the Borg from Star Trek (to be fair, the Borg were based on the Cybermen in the first place, so this is just Doctor Who returning the favour!) 

So ... for reasons I missed, the CyberPlanner releases the two kids from their Cyber-coma, and the Doctor makes the whole Cyber-mind think about a chess problem, causing them all - all three million of them - to stop mid-attack. Eh? This is Douglas Adams territory here (cv the Heart of Gold computer being asked why Arthur likes tea). The Cybermen are not a hive mind. They have always operated independently from each other ... so what's all this about? It's reinvention for the sake of ...

In the middle of the confusion of three million Cybermen attacking half a dozen humans (Why did they bother to attack them at all? And why build three million Cybermen but no spaceship to take them off-planet? No wonder they need a new CyberPlanner!) the Doctor gets rid of the Planner in his head with a jolt of electricity, Porridge is revealed as the missing Emperor (don't ask), he primes the planet-imploding bomb, and they all transmit to his spaceship which is in orbit (again, don't ask - if it was so easy for the humans to escape all along ...)  The Doctor asks for the TARDIS to be transmatted too.

And the planet explodes. Note that it explodes. Not implodes like everyone told us it would. Obviously someone in effects didn't read the script closely enough.

We close with Porridge asking Clara to marry him ... and she answers in her curious stilted not-real, chirpy way from earlier stories: 'I. Don't. Want. To rule. One Thousand. Galaxies.'  Grief ... *shakes head*

So the Doctor returns the kids and Clara home, and pontificates on her skirt being tight (very un-Doctorly) before we see a bit of Cyber-flashing light on the planet's debris ... perhaps they're not all destroyed after all. *Cue too loud and intrusive dramatic music by Murray Gold*

Okay ... so I've gone on a bit there about how badly the Cybermen have been handled ... and it's only because I care, and it's a shame when the script would seem to need a further polish - or perhaps less interference from elsewhere - to really make it all work and be coherent.

There's a great story struggling to escape here ... The Doctor and Clara could arrive on the blasted holiday world, expecting it to be all active, but it's not. In the wreckage they could find Webley with his remnants, and among them a lone Cyberman. Clara could give it power by mistake, and it vanishes, going underground to a vast Cyber-storehouse where it activates the Planner, and the Cybermen start making plans to emerge and conquer once more. Other characters could be there too - maybe some partially converted people taken from when the Fairground was active - Or we could have the Army people arrive to explore (shades of 'Tomb of the Cybermen' or even the Clerics from the Angels/River Song story in the crashed spaceship - the Bysantium was it?)  There's any number of ways that a story and ideas can be spun so that they actually make sense, show plot development and character interest, and lead to the same end-game - having to destroy the planet to kill the Cybermen off.

We really don't need the two kids - they add nothing to the drama, and do nothing anyway. And the CyberPlanner is really badly handled. Even 'The Invasion' with its collection of flashing plastic cups and rotating clothes dryer device is better than this vague Doctor-talking-to-Doctor approach.



A CyberPlanner. Yesterday.

But all this is conjecture. Overall I did enjoy much about 'Nightmare in Silver', but it's too fast and flashy for it to really work for me as a story. The Cybermen are disappointing - and moreso after the hype that they would be scary again, and move silently and so on. They're just not. I'm afraid that for me, this wasn't a Nightmare at all ... more an entertaining diversion. Other plus points are Warwick Davis, who is simply superb! And Jason Watkins as Webley is also really good - until he becomes a Cyberpawn, when he stands around and doesn't do much.

I like the look of the Cybermen, and I even like the idea that they can upgrade to overcome things. I loved the Cybermites, and the idea that the Cyberman's hand could operate independently of the body ... but all these individual elements need a strong plot and script to bind them together. And that, unfortunately, was what the episode didn't have.

Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror

There is a grand tradition in Doctor Who that when the production team recreate a Victorian setting, they do it really well. This results in stories as excellent and as rich as 1977's 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' as well as 1989's 'Ghost Light', and now we have another to add to the list ...

I loved 'The Crimson Horror'! I have to admit, on first viewing, its breathless pace and cornucopia of ideas left me a little bewildered, but a second watch confirmed that 99% of the explanations are there - they are just so fast! - and that the story as a whole packs so much into 45 minutes, that I was longing for a two-parter to really do it all justice.

What I like about 'The Crimson Horror' especially is that it brings a graphic novel approach to the storytelling, shortcutting things in a way to keep everything visual, but still managing to tell the story. Mark Gatiss has delivered, I think, the most clever and successful script yet to the show, and yet he manages to keep it all feeling fresh and original, while also touching on many inspirational elements from the world of horror films along the way.

Lets get going then, and see what 'The Crimson Horror' has to bring.

We open in Yorkshire in 1893, and another cool caption (I have a thing for these, and I love when they are integrated into the action! Probably my favourite use ever is in the film Zombieland ...) We find Mrs Gilliflower, perfectly played by Diana Rigg, with a brace of creepy girls, facing off against a woman whose husband ends up bright red on a mortician's slab. Shades of 'The Green Death' here. This death is, however, called the Crimson Horror! Mr Flower pays to see the body - it is his brother after all - and takes a photograph of the corpse's eye - an Optogram - as apparently you can see an image of the last thing the person saw recorded there. He then heads to London to secure the services of Madame Vastra (a Silurian for those of you who recall such things), but when she removes her veil to look closely at the photograph, Flower faints. But wait ... there's an image of the Doctor in the eye ... so Vastra and Jenny must take a trip up North!

There is so much story here already, and I think that to try and detail things as I usually do, will get long and complex, so I'll try and keep things short!

Back up North, Mrs Gilliflower is holding interviews for people to come and live and work in her new match factory, called 'Sweetfields'. Her daughter, Ada, is blind, afflicted by her husband in a fit of rage apparently, but has a speechless 'Monster' caged in a cell-like room (shades of Frankenstein and 'Ghost Light' here).

Jenny signs up for a place at Sweetfields ... acting as an insider for Vastra and Strax - who have a great line in humour threaded throughout - to see what's going on there.  I did notice at this point a poster on the wall advertising a 'Human Waxworks' run by someone called Carred Sam, and a poster advertising Circus freaks and 'Dastardly Donnai', but these seem to have no relevance to the story!

Jenny investigates, and finds that the sounds of machinery are just that - sounds - and sees people carrying jars of strange red liquid. She then discovers that the 'Monster' in the cell is actually a bright red Doctor! So she gets him out, and locks him in another cupboard where he returns to normal, apparently with the help of his sonic screwdriver. This is perhaps the one really unexplained thing about the story - how the Doctor, and later Clara, are returned to normal. A shame as there should have been something to explain how this happened.

I loved the vat of red liquid and the people being dipped into it - straight out of Carry on Screaming! 'Frying tonight!' - and the whole flashback where the Doctor explains what happened to that point was inspired. I loved the music for this sequence and the archive look and editing given to the pictures ... a very clever way of filling the audience in. Of course if this had been a two-parter, then all of this would have been in part one! I wish the Doctor hadn't snogged Jenny though! That seemed out of place.

Interesting too that Clara doesn't get a line until 21 minutes in! I was wondering if this was her 'episode off' and that we wouldn't actually see her at all!

We learn that Mr Sweet is Miss Gilliflower's 'silent partner' and that she is keeping people frozen under giant bell jars! So Clara and the Doctor are captured and 'dipped' - On Clara the process works, but on the Doctor it fails, and he would have been destined for the canal, but for Ada rescuing him and chaining him up in the cell.

It seems that Mr Flower fell into the vat (shades of Quatermass II) and then encountered the red Doctor, which is why the Doctor's image was in his eye when he died!

Meanwhile, comedy turn Strax gets lost in the streets and finds an urchin called Thomas Thomas (Tom Tom ... satnav ... geddit?) who can direct him. This fairly obvious pun is groan-worthy, but allows a respite from the fast-paced drama.

Okay ... The Doctor finds Clara frozen under one of the bell jars and puts her in the same cupboard he was in to save her - it works and she is fine!  Not sure at all how this works though - she didn't seem to have the sonic screwdriver with her this time!

Anyway, when Miss Gilliflower attacks with her creepy women (no explanation too as to who her 'pilgrims' are or why they are so subservient to her ... I assume she hypnotised them or something, but it's not explained), Jenny strips off to a black catsuit and kicks some ass (in true Diana Rigg/Avengers style, which is a nice touch) until Vastra and Strax arrive as reinforcements and drive them all away.

We now learn that the red liquid is a venom-like poison secreted by a red leech 65 million years ago ... but what is it doing in Victorian Yorkshire? Suddenly Clara mentions a chimney which doesn't blow smoke - now I might have missed something here. Was this mentioned earlier? I didn't make a note ... and if not, then I'm not sure how Clara comes to this assumption. Maybe something was lost in the editing here. Anyway, the chimney houses a rocket, and Miss Gilliflower intends to rain the poison down on the World! She also has a pipe organ (shades of The Abominable Dr Phibes) which hides behind it a control panel for the rocket.

So ... what's really happening here is that Miss Gilliflower has one of these red leeches on her chest, and she has been feeding it!  I loved that the creature was real and not CGI, and I like the rather rubbery look of it, suggesting films like Basket Case as well as various portrayals of freaks in the movies over the years. Somehow the leech has driven her mad, and she wants to wipe out humanity - all except those perfect specimens that she has dipped in the venom and which have survived. They will apparently awake several weeks later and inherit the world. Which is of course shades of 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'.

She had to experiment on her own daughter, Ada, to find the anti-venom to protect herself, a process which blinded the girl. A nice touch, and in keeping with the characters and story we are presented with.

So we move to endgame. Miss Gilliflower launches the rocket and it takes off, but Vastra and Jenny have removed the payload and it's therefore harmless. Not sure how everyone survives being in such close proximity to the rocket mind you ... Meanwhile Strax is atop the chimney, and fires down, causing Miss Gilliflower to fall to her death down the gantry. As she dies, so 'Mr Sweet' - the leech - leaves her body and is then beaten to a pulp by Ada as it tries to crawl away.

So all is well ... I guess the people turned into waxworks by Mrs Gilliflower will recover in time, and Vastra, Jenny and Strax return to London to continue their sleuthing. Then Mr Flowers arrives again, and seeing the TARDIS vanish, faints again ... another running thread of humour in the production, which I'm sure echoes a horror film, but I can't recall which. Where the detective faints away every time he's confronted by a body. I'm sure someone will tell me!

We end with Clara being returned home by the Doctor. I'm not sure about this. Why does she need to go home after each adventure? It's a little weird I feel. But anyway, doing this allows her to be confronted by the two kids she nannys for, who have found photos of her in all her adventures with the Doctor - including one of her as a Victorian Nanny, which of course isn't this Clara at all. They say they want to go time travelling with her, or they'll tell their dad that their nanny is a time traveller! Personally I'd have told them to do just that and see how far they got!

Now I'm sure this last bit was added by the production office as, for some reason, they wanted the kids in the following story ... but it's all a bit Sarah Jane Adventures/Tracey Beaker/CBBC for me, and not really necessary.

Overall then, a truly cracking and awesome episode, that actually makes sense from start to end - with only a couple of unexplained McGuffins - and which thrills and entertains too. There's great performances from all the cast, comedy from Strax, kick-ass catsuited women, Clara looking divine in a lovely Victorian dress and hair-do, and Dame Diana Rigg!  It's worth mentioning that Rachel Stirling who plays Ada, is actually Rigg's real life daughter, and she is also so good in this production!

It's a cracker, as they say, and while it could have benefitted greatly from more time, it stands as one of the best episodes yet presented for the 11th Doctor.