Mindless Ones

All is not well at the Wenley Moor underground atomic research station: there are unaccountable losses of power-output; nervous breakdowns amongst the staff;
and then—a death!

UNIT is called in and the Brigadier is soon joined by DOCTOR WHO and Liz Shaw in a tense and exciting adventure with subterranean reptile men—SILURIANS— and a 40 ft. high Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!

‘DOCTOR WHO, the children’s own programme which adults adore…’ Gerard Garrett, The Daily Sketch

Steven Moffat once said of Doctor Who that it “was a great idea that happened to the wrong people”. Some might think that this says more about Moffat than about Who (in my experience writers who think of ideas as ‘happening’ to other writers, rather than being produced by those other writers, tend not to have very many ideas of their own) but in some cases one can see what he means. The Three Doctors, and in general all the work of writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, tends to be a case in point.

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You can’t change history, not one line…

But you can change the future.

People often think these days that Russel T Davies was the first auteur to run Doctor Who.

But nothing could be further from the truth

And so we get the start of a new show, which for some reason has the same title as that old programme Doctor Who.

It was the end…but the moment had been prepared for.

Far more than The Tenth Planet, The War Games was the end not just of a Doctor, but of Doctor Who itself as it had been known up to that point.

Sometimes the best creative work comes from having to work within restrictions imposed from outside. The Mind Robber is a perfect example of this. The story before, The Dominators, was originally meant to be a six-parter, but had to be cut down to five (thankfully, as it’s the most awful mess imaginable from every possible standpoint).

For some reason the scene above is a favourite of straight men, but few others…

I’m back after an extended Christmas and not-being-arsed break! Only one photo this time though as my hard drive is knackered and I’m busy recovering all my files (have you any idea how difficult it is to recover a 2TB hard drive with about ten thousand non-contiguous bad sectors? Thank heaven for ddrescue). I could only get the one image before catastrophic failure.

Which is appropriate really…

What do you get if you cross Doctor Strangelove with The Thing From Another World?

The template for pretty much everything Doctor Who would do for the next forty years.