The Airzone Solution
The Airzone Solution was, if you were a Who-starved fan in the early 90s, probably the most exciting thing that happened in fandom since that leotard picture of Nicola Bryant emerged.
Featuring four ex-Doctors and a host of other Doctor Who talents it's fairly explicitly a rip-off of Edge of Darkness down to its plot, themes and even incidental music. The pre-occupations of the narrative are easily identifiable from the period, namely environmental collapse and corporate/governmental conspiracies.
Peter Davison plays investigative journalist Al Dunbar; Colin Baker is star weatherman Arnie Davies; Sylvester McCoy is nervous eco-warrior Anthony Stanwick; and Jon Pertwee plays journalistic legend Oliver Trethewey.
It is rather peculiar mix and it's hard to imagine anyone who's not a fan taking a huge interest. Nevertheless there's a lot of good stuff here. Colin Baker is particularly good in another opportunity to show how good he can be and the other leads are solid and throw themselves into it; Nicola Bryant is a million miles away from whingey Peri.
There's a nice cameo from Michael Wisher and a very good turn from Alan Cumming as Mandelsonian spook. Look out too, if you dare, for a sex scene between Nicola and Colin; one of the worst bits of acting ever from Gary Russell; and Bill Baggs managing to assemble four Doctors together on the programme's 30th anniversary – something the BBC notoriously failed to do to any real extent.
The music by Alistair Lock and some directorial flourishes from Baggs also catch the eye but unfortunately the production is undermined by some of the amateurish moments in the script, plot, direction and general production. There are no howlers but the overall impression is of something decidedly fannish.
Further, the production values don't stand up at all. The sound is particularly poor; the lighting, while better, doesn't always look right either and the quality of the picture typical of early 90s videotaped dramas.
Nevertheless, with the prospect of new Doctor Who as remote as ever – this being a time when it seemed Who might be gone for good – the Airzone Solution was a welcome addition to a Who-less world.
I suspect that BBV – Baggs' production company – envisaged potential sales to an ITV franchise, or a commission to base similar series with a larger budget, but it never came to pass.
Still, these are fascinating curios from Doctor Who's dark days. The BBC offered up the risible Dimensions In Time in 1993 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of what is now its flagship show. Idiots.
Watch it here:
Colin Baker is on Twitter
As Probic Vent cannily predicted, Colin Baker is apparently the first Doctor to take the plunge and hit Twitter.
While Matt Smith appears to be avoiding the Twitterverse (a bit like E-Space?), the Sixth Doc has been broadcasting tweets for a couple of days now and seems to have got the hang of it fairly quickly.
Who will be next? Can't really imagine Tom, or Peter or Sylv. Definitely not McGann or Eccles. Tennant or Matt Smith for our money.
Oh, and Frazer Hines is also tweeting, very intermittently.
Hush, child, you’re addlepating me!
Sydney Newman wanted to turn Sylvester McCoy into a woman, the Torygraph 'revealed' today in a report on what a spot of archive research turned up while the extras for Time and the Rani were being shot.
Thing is, I'm 99 per cent sure all of the stuff in the newspaper's report was already well known. I remember reading all of this some time ago, in what I imagine was one of Andrew Pixley's comprehensive Archive pieces in DWM or possibly the Howe-Stammer-Walker 80's book. Either way I reckon it's a good 15 years since this research first came to light.
Newman, recognised as the person who can lay most claim to being the creator of Doctor Who (not Terry Nation or Vere Lorrimer!), was drafted in to reboot the series at the end of Colin Baker's tenure.
Unfortunately Newman's ideas for a rebooted series were utterly abysmal, consisting of a time-warp back to the early sixties where Patrick Troughton would be brought back in with a couple of children as companions; one of whom would brandish a trumpet whose sound would herald the start of battle.
The one thing I clearly recall is that Newman suggested that the new Doctor should say ‘Hush, child, you’re addlepating me!’ whenever the young companions were talking too much, or something.
One of the story outlines he details is a literal lift from Planet of the Giants too, while another suggestion involved the three regulars being shrunk and injected into a human body. Two ideas about 40 years past their sell-by-date.
This has always suggested to me that Newman scrawled down a load of old tat on the back of a fag packet during a boozy lunch – and if people thought the last three years of Who during its original run weren't that good, they would pale into insignificance if the car-crash television envisioned by Newman had come to pass.
The headline element to it all, of course, is the suggestion that the Doctor should be turned into a woman, something I've always thought of as a horrible, senseless gimmick that not even JN-T or RTD ever seriously considered.
The Telegraph article ends with a quote from some 'women in science' group who reckons - surprise, surprise - that the next Doctor should be a woman for some reason too tedious to explore any further.
I suppose this story has broken in the national press now because 2Entertain are trying to flog Time and the Rani; a desperate task by any standards. Ed Stradling was apparently 'astonished' by the contents of the Newman letter; something that must come as a surprise to Doctor Who fans.
Anyway, the release of Time and the Rani should give us time to reflect on all of this. I personally think that it's a story of totally unremitting dross, with literally nothing to redeem it.
It's become fashionable to call Pip and Jane Baker's nadir (I know, I know!) things like 'wonderful and silly' and 'lovely and fluffy' by people who should know better. It's utter shit and hails from a period when Who was almost totally lost.
For my money it got somewhere near back to its best over the next two seasons - with some obvious exceptions - and it's a huge relief that we got stuff like Ghost Light, Remebrance, Fenric and Survival instead of Newman's addlepated vision.
Good old Syd. We have a lot to be grateful for. But, by God, a rebooted Newman series in 1987 may well have killed off Who for good.
Is Matt Smith on Twitter?
A lot of people are turning up at the blog seeking an answer to this question.
The answer, as far as I know, is that he is not. Neither are any of the other Doctors to the best of my knowledge, though I'd guess Colin is the most likely of all of them to take the plunge.
Some other Doctor Who types who are on Twitter include Murray Gold, Sheridan Smith, Noel Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Jason Arnopp and Paul Cornell.
I've compile a list below of some types you might want to follow.
Doctor Who types on Twitter
• Ben Cook
Feel free to suggest any I've missed.
Regenerations, reactions and LSD: The Changing Face of Doctor Who
There's a great article on the BBC website today about documents uncovered from the BBC archive relating to regenerations, the first example in particular.
It reveals that Troughton got something of a rough ride from viewers at the time – and that the regeneration process was conceived as some sort of horrifying acid trip.
I've always thought the whole regeneration thing may just have been a back-of-an-envelope kind of thing that could have gone either way.
On several occasions the series has only just escaped cancellation as one of the leading actors takes his final bow, but the transformation between Hartnell and Troughton must have been especially tricky.
It's interesting to posit a world where Doctor Who went the way of Adam Adamant or some other fairly small-fry cult sixties series – and a derisive snort from a big wig at the Beeb could have nixed the resulting 44 years.
There's also some more information on viewers' reactions to new Doctors and press clippings and the like. Seems no-one really gets to grips with the new Doctors at first, though that's a trend that remained throughout all of poor Colin Baker's tenancy, at least until Big Finish rescued Colin and his Doctor.
Much of it presumably derives from the sort of stuff Andrew Pixley used to dig out of the archives, but is worth looking at nonetheless.
Anyway, this new find comes from a dedicated Changing Face of Doctor Who section on the BBC website about unarchived Who stuff, which is well worth leafing through.
• There's also an existing section on the start of the series, called The Genesis of Doctor Who
Vampires of Venice Hartnell library card squee
Nice clip from Vampires of Venice, as shown of Jonathan Ross. Hartnell appears on a library card.
I'd've preferred it if it had been Colin or Sylv.
Colin Baker at videoGaiden 2006
I found this video of Colin Baker, in full sixth Doctor mode, presenting the videoGaiden awards in 2006.
Watch out for a neat bit of tie-in scripting among the award for Chuckie Egg and the DS in a pleasingly surreal vid.
Ten moments of shocking violence in Doctor Who – by the Doctor
It was pretty refreshing to see the Eleventh Doctor punching some bloke's lights clean out on the new series trailer than showed back in January, following a few years of sanctimonious stuff from RTD and Ten about how 'violence is bad, m'kay?'.
So much so that it stirred my mind back to a simpler time when The Doctor would casually dispatch villains in a variety of ways, including blasting them with guns, pushing them into acid baths and gassing them with cyanide. The good old days, as I like to call them.
So, I've compiled a list of ten moments of shocking violence in Doctor Who - perpetrated by the Time Lord himself.
1. An Unearthly Child
The original and the best. The First Doctor is stopped by Ian, seconds before he stoves in the head of a wounded caveman with a rock.
2. The Dominators
The Second Doctor places a nuclear device on the Dominators' ship, blowing them out of the sky.
3. Inferno
The Third Doctor smilingly explains to the Brigadier than the Venusian grip he has applied to Stahlman will soon paralyse him for life. Similar venusian chops, kicks and jabs pepper the Third Doctor's era.
4. Day of the Daleks
The Doctor casually blasts an approaching Ogron, blowing Ten's 'be the man who never would' speech out of the water.
5. The Brain of Morbius
The Fourth Doctor gasses Solon with cyanide, in a move that could easily have left him and Sarah sealed in a crypt forever.
6. The Seeds of Doom
Four punches out a henchman with a thinly-disguised relish. Later on he twists Scorby's neck, as if to break it, after punching him in the gut.
7. Arc of Infinity
The Fifth Doctor simply shoots Omega.
8. The Twin Dilemma
The Sixth Doctor tries to strangle Peri to death.
9. Vengeance on Varos
Take your pick. Doc Six maneuvers two guards into a BATH OF ACID and leaves two different booby traps involving stinging plants and a laser to kill two cannibals and a guard.
10. The Two Doctors
The Sixth Doctor chloroforms Shockeye to death.
I've got nothing on the rest, barring the Seventh Doctor's disabling of Patterson in Survival and the Ninth Doctor's knocking out a guard in the one where Rose turns into the Time Vortex, or whatever the hell it is that happens in that episode.
Have I missed any obvious ones? It wouldn't surprise me to discover that Hartnell stabbed someone in the neck in one of his less obvious stories.
Telegraph journalist forced to read Script Doctor
Andrew Cartmel's memoirs of his time on Doctor Who as script editor between 1978–1989, Script Doctor, have somehow fallen into the hands of a journalist at the Daily Torygraph.
Incredibly, the journo in question has churned out a piece of work even more absurd than Cartmel's opus (in which he revealed that he spent most of his time on the show lusting after Sophie Aldred) by revealing that the seventh Doctor's tenure was, in fact, a secret attempt to bring down Margaret Thatcher's government.
Some quotes of Cartmel's from Script Doctor are recycled, and added to some obviously less-than serious stuff from Sylvester McCoy on why it seemed like trying to overthrow Thatcher by making Silver Nemesis was 'the right thing to do'.
Add in two killer blows in this fearless expose – the fact that Ben Aaronovitch is the son of Sam Aaronovitch and the fact that Rona Munro once worked on a film with Ken Loach – and the case looks pretty watertight.
But wait, there's more. In what is almost certainly the first time anyone in the world has heard of it, the Telegraph dredges up the fact that the antagonist in the spin-off novel Turlough and the Earth Link Dilemma antagonist is called Rehctaht – 'Thatcher' backwards.
It's left to the Daily Mail to deliver the hammer blow:
The revelations appear to confirm claims that the 1980s BBC opposed Mrs Thatcher's government, with the then Tory chairman Norman Tebbit claiming it was in the hands of a 'Marxist mafia'.
Indeed they do. But Probic Vent can reveal that the conspiracy ran far deeper than Cartmel's Masterplan. Other Dodgy Doctor details uncovered by us reveal:
• Cartmel originally wanted to replace Bonnie Langford with ARTHUR SCARGILL as McCoy's companion when the former bowed out.
• Marc Platt spent three months as a guest of the KGB while writing his second draft of Ghost Light in 1988.
• Sophie Aldred had an affair with LES DENNIS in the early 90s
• McCOY, along with COLIN BAKER, PETER DAVISON and TOM BAKER meet regularly at a number of hotels around the country to hold emotionally-charged rallies for their followers
Most damning of all, the ultimate aim of Cartmel's conspiracy was to replace The Queen as Head of State with John Nathan-Turner.
Time Out Lord
Knockout collector item or cynical cash-in? Make your own mind up about Time Out's Doctor Who In London special, complete with ten different cover. Guess, if you can, what's on them.
Yup, the whole damn lot of them in a number of Doctor+London image pictures of varying quality and relevance.
All the covers attempt to picture the various incarnations of the Ka Faraq Gatri in front of a London landmark that supposedly bear some relevance to one of their adventures, so for Hartnell it's the Post Office Tower; Troughton Saint Pauls; and McGann, er, the Houses of Parliament.
The Grauniad has gamely attempted to match a bit of spiel about each Doctor to the various covers, referencing the fraction of a second parliament is glanced in the TV Movie.
In fairness DWM does the multiple cover routine on a fairly regular basis these days, and the London connection is an interesting one. Whether the associated articles are remains to be seen, but the dubious quality of a couple of the badly-Photoshopped cover doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Still, there's interviews with Tennant and Matt Smith, and no doubt another modest and self-deprecating piece with the admittedly-entertaining RTD, plus a map of Who locations and a FREE POSTER!
I wonder if there's an advert for ERIC?
• You can buy the whole set here for £21, which could conceivably be a good investment if you stick them in your loft for 20 years.