The Green Death

She's off.

It feels like ages since Jo Grant came into the Doctor's life and began changing things. In those earlier stories, she quite often bears the brunt of his bad temper – and she in turn doesn't quite 'get' him. It's not until Colony in a Space that she can accept the Tardis is real, that he's not a fantasist. And to be fair, even a mad alien scientist in an Edwardian cape is a bit of a leap to one who travels  in time and space.

Perhaps it's a change of view for Jo – that scientists can be as heroic and crusading as soldiers. After all, her original ambition, facilitated by her Uncle, is to join the services – and before falling for Professor Jones, she tries dating Captain Yates. (Can't quite see that relationship going places.) Since then, she's been a humanising force on the Doctor, who has generally cheered up and calmed down. In return, she's become a woman of the universe, to the extent that she can reject the Master's hypnotism and generally talk down to him, before walking out of the Tardis doors, alone, into the alien night of Spiridon...

I still don't think she was ever quite on the same page as him though. Not like Zoe, for instance, who bravely stowed away in the Doctor's old sea-chest to discover the Universe. Jo's travels in time and space tend to be accidental and slightly reluctant. She's not fazed by them – she disputes with planetary colonists and rude-looking aliens without hesitation. Jo is always self-assured, passionate and morally certain: to coin a phrase, down-to-earth. But generally that's where she wants to be. 'There's only one little world I want to see right now,' she says, almost wearily, after all the fun on the Planet of the Daleks. 'Home.'

We're so used to show-runners' arcs these days, the original series can seem rather rackety and thrown together by comparison. But this season, beginning with The Three Doctors' liberation of the Tardis and its crew, travels rather satisfyingly to this announcement of Jo's. The Green Death is the story in which Jo Grant leaves not just the Doctor, but UNIT – and if it wasn't for Professor Jones, it might not have been such a clean break. The Doctor is clearly on the threshold of a new life away from Earth, and one feels rather certain that's not a life Jo would have joined him in.

From the Dawning of Aquarius to her stack-heeled boots and now, her passion for environmentalism, she's associated with the here and now. 'Well,' she says about the Tardis in Frontier in Space, with flippant prophecy, 'I'm never going in that thing again.'

Not that she hasn't learned from her adventures. I've reflected a couple of times on the visions of future Earth she's had: over-developed, uninhabitable, unsustainable, even ungovernable, threatened by fear and greed and waste. These are thematic connections rather than literal ones – Jo never even witnesses the ministerial self-interest that hands complete control over to Global Chemicals in Episode Two. But a lot of care has been taken with references back to Jo's arrival. Only the production team of the time and fans of today can really appreciate these: when Jo talks about her job description being 'tell the Doctor how brilliant he is,' for instance, she's quoting a line from three years earlier!

It feels a far cry from some of the 1960s seasons, where individual stories shine but the lives of the regulars – and their ongoing stories – are treated with ambivalence. The overriding feeling with the Jo Grant era, for me, is that the writers believe in the strength of their leads, in the security of this family (in part, because of the actors performances), and enjoy throwing them into new situations. In all the years I've been watching Who in sequence, this is a moment when it really feels like a series rather than a show. It would have made a perfectly fitting last story for the Master, too. As it is, it brings to an end the chronicles of that UNIT family.

What about the Doctor, though? If Jo Grant was a reluctant traveler in time and space, the Doctor has been reluctant to leave without her. After bridling so long at his confinement, it feels as if his main tie to the Earth and his main excuse for not returning to a bootless existence among the stars has been suddenly taken away – and after his solitary voyage to the fabled Metebelis 3 (has nobody ever said how brilliant that planet's name is?) he seems grateful to scramble back to Earth, to a world of mines and silly disguises and mathematical flautists called Nancy. Where exactly does he belong?

Yes, he's changed. He's at risk, you might think, of losing his Doctorishness, his capacity to transcend the present day. Yet that's exactly what his extra-terrestrial, mystical blue sapphire connotes: a very 70s sort of transcendentalism, requiring a physical bauble (whereas in the 60s they just did it, lived it, breathed it) but still effective. His conversations with BOSS, where he seems to take real pleasure in disdainfully scuppering its plans, are good to see and great to watch. And despite the coming departure of his longest ally, Pertwee seems more comfortable than ever in this scene – baiting a disembodied voice (but what a voice!).

So perhaps, he's off too. Perhaps this is just what he needs. But to where, and with whom? Who could possibly take the place of Katy Manning's consummately performed Josephine Grant...?

Scarier than any story this season, but also cosier and camper (escape in milk float to hippy commune, for example), this is a strong story by a team with real fondness for the world they've constructed - and a forlorn recognition that nothing goes on forever.

The Three Doctors

Season 10 is an interesting time for Doctor Who to be introspective. For all that Patrick Troughton's era has a different emphasis to William Hartnell's, superficially it's still just, 'But Doctor, where have we landed this week...?' It was noticeable as early as Spearhead in Space that the producers were courting a new audience, and we've made it through three seasons with no glancing back, no references to successes of recent memory (Yeti, Cybermen, Jamie's hairy legs). There was one encounter with the dreaded Daleks, and the one with the Ice Warriors saw them in a new light.

The format of the show has changed, of course ('But Doctor, who is it that's landed where we are this week...?'), but the much bigger difference is the complete reimagining of Doctor Who into Doctor Time Lord; the man of mystery becoming the man who ran away from Shangri-la, who grew up on a mountainside, talking to hermits, went to school with a kid who grew up to be the universe's most dedicated moustache-twirler, and now lives in exile, doing occasional cosmic courier work and driving vintage cars down country lanes at twice the speed of sound.

Quite strikingly, while it celebrates the past, this is a story it would be impossible for the show to have told in any previous era.

With this story, we get a potted history of his home world, not to mention an insight into Time Lord society: when their President foresees the loss of their 'time travel facility', he fears becoming 'as vulnerable as those we are pledged to protect'. They are the ultimate, the omniscient superpower, not 'intervening' but nevertheless 'Lording' it up. Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts have steadily developed this culture to the extent that practically everything the Doctor is or does is within its context. This cosmogony - a spectrum of enlightenment with the portentous President and Chancellor at one end, the Brig and Benton at the other, and Jo and the Doctor in the middle - seems bound to keep producing stories about magic, technology and god. What is the best way of seeing the world? What is the nature of power?

The result has been a new version of our hero with wants and cares. The First Doctor, for example, was never seen to think particularly of redemption of the Monk, as the Third  does of the Master. The Third Doctor is pained by Omega's impossible yearning to be free: for only a second, but a second longer than the Second Doctor ever considered his adversaries.

Omega is the Doctor seen through a CSO effect darkly: stranded on an alien world by the Time Lords, driven insane with resentment and pride, and Master of all he surveys. He is not content to be a hero, like Jon Pertwee. He quite fancies being a God. Perhaps the Doctor should tell another little anecdote, about Azal and the Daemons, and how they ended up.

There is a case for saying that these ideas remain under-developed in favour of daring escapes to inevitable dangers, and it's a strong case. I must say it would be good to see the Third Doctor envying his younger self's cavalier attitude to time travel, to see Jo disputing with the President of the High Council, or have the Brigadier say goodbye to his scientific adviser as if he means it ('Wonderful chap - both of him,' being more than adequate, I suppose). But equally, the show's treatment of all these ideas would be nothing without the lightness and irreverence they receive here. Troughton's performance is emblematic, but Manning and Courtney know their stuff too, and the whole shebang has genuine charm. Even Hartnell, perhaps my favourite Doctor, is included in the warm glow. I love the way he calls everyone into the Tardis at the end, sounding more 1970s grandad than 1890s grandfather: 'Everything okay?'

And then, in one tiny scene, the story arc of three seasons is resolved. The Doctor is given his Tardis back. Even though the script is rather awkward about it, Jon Pertwee knows what this means to his Doctor, and Katy Manning is on the same page. The show has been entirely rewritten, and the reward is a feeling of narrative progression, expansion of the Doctor's character along with his universe, and all in what could have been the most self-indulgent, self-regarding story of the series.

But Doctor, the question is, where next...?

The Time Monster

In my blog last week, I talked about the unsinkable Jo Grant, and her ability to remain sunny in the continually reconfirmed knowledge that planet Earth in the future is a cosmic shithole run by total bastards. How does she remain so buoyant, I wondered, when others like myself find it hard enough to deal with an office job and the daily round of news headlines? Then this week, Jo unexpectedly crumbled.

'What happens if the Master wins?' she asks the Doctor. Chaos, he explains, on a grand scale, and it depresses Jo. 'Makes it all seem so pointless, doesn't it?' she says. Perhaps the banality of the Master's evil has hit home – the imminent catastrophe doesn't only mean death and destruction: it's a universe without meaning.

This is the prelude to the Doctor's childhood reminiscence, the story of how his blackest day was redeemed by the hermit on the mountainside, who taught him to see 'a heaven in a wild flower'; that is, the 'daisiest daisy'.

It's the first casual chat the Doctor and Jo have had since The Mind of Evil, and it's a rare moment of the Doctor dropping the 'Who' for a moment. In referring to past troubles, it recalls a fatherly moment in the tombs of planet Telos; in describing the countryside of home, it connects with a much earlier tale of burnt orange skies. We have a better sense than ever of who the Doctor is – paternal, happy in that role (he looks entirely at ease, telling stories in that prison cell), drawing on a lifelong wonder at the universe, empathy with the figure of the mountain hermit.

Here's the anchorite in his new form, perched on the side of the mountain that is our planet in a single era. Does that 'black day' he's so cagey about still threaten him? He worries at his circuitry and drinks his tea. Or reassures his friend with a story. Meanwhile, upstairs, his childhood friend is seducing Ingrid Pitt and planning the death of the actual Minotaur in order to – what?

It's not clear. The Master has a Tardis – i.e., the run of Universe – and can inveigle his way into any position he likes. He begins the story by trying to tame a god-like being from outside space and time. It does seem like an awful lot of hard work, especially given how things when he tried it last month, and that he must know the result will probably be chaos anyway, a mirror of his own megalomania. This is a story where Roger Delgado really lets rip, strutting up and down and cackling to himself. Entertainingly, but not becomingly. 

What's the nature of this madness? It's a story about messing about with time, and produces some of the most surreal and comic images of the whole series. There's capacity for exploration of some huge ideas, about how we use time and chronology to sort the Universe into order, to give our lives meaning. 'The whole of creation is very delicately balanced, Jo...' 

Or perhaps chronological narrative is a fantasy, and the Master plans to liberate himself from an illusory world into a state of naked existence. True enlightenment?

This is a sort of sequel to The Daemons. The Doctor was rather adamant in that story that science was a superior way of looking at reality, but in this story he can remotely interfere with the Master's Tardis by balancing a cup of tea on a wine bottle and making some mystical passes. The Tardis itself – pressed into use in a climactic moment that makes it suddenly seem more wonderful than it has since the 1960s – is indestructible, telepathic, illogical. The authors of this story leave us in no doubt: it's not just a spaceship – it's an idea that has somehow gained material form.

Now, The Time Monster is a bit over-extended, and sometimes the dialogue is a bit weird (like someone who's seen a lot of TV but never met a human being), but it has some amazing performances, from Dean Lerner and Miss Babs to Roger Delgado and Ingrid Pitt. It has that audacious Doctor Who spirit ('Who cares if the money's run out? We're going to have a bird-god-monster from another dimension destroy the city of Atlantis!') and the real sense of camaraderie that is unique to Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning ('Glad to have you aboard, Miss Grant.' 'Glad to be aboard, Doctor!').

And even if it doesn't really explore those ideas about time, meaning, madness, the life of the mind ('I shouldn't listen too hard to my subconscious thoughts, Jo, I'm not too proud of some of them'), it nonetheless suggests that there are two responses to the meaninglessness of existence and the daily toll of unhappy feelings. You could try and Master it, by chucking out the structure and narrative. Or you could tell a story about it. Better yet, you could throw yourself in and Doctor the story. Same mountain, different view.

There's also bags of extreme CSO. I think it really is the Pertweeiest Pertwee story.

The Sea Devils

Isn't it strange how few Doctor Who stories happen around the sea? For me it's the ideal location for the show, heady with historical atmosphere, from the formation of the land to smugglers of old. A liminal space, ebbing and flowing, frequently strewn with mist, fog, rain and waves. A Saturday outing sort of place. And then there's the deep mystery of the waves. I was rather thrown when I realised one of the guest cast here was Maggie, the seaweedy Linda Blair of Fury from the Deep.

What's going on, I wondered. Is the sea itself a recurring villain, disgorging infernal kelp one season, angry reptile people the next? Was Zaroff of Atlantis driven insane by something in the water? Is this, perhaps, Doctor Who in its element? (We are, at least, back in the astounding 1960s era of 'special sound', and I love it.)

I hadn't seen The Sea Devils before and I wasn't sure quite what to expect. In preparation, of sorts, I read David A McIntee's novel, The Face of the Enemy, which takes the genius step of imagining what was happening on Earth for the Master, the Brigadier and (for some reason) Ian and Barbara, while the Doctor and Jo are hobnobbing with giant phalluses in outer space. It even manages to deliver an unexpected, fully justified sequel to a prior Third Doctor story.

I wouldn't say it went to the sorts of places I would have liked it to go – despite seemingly focusing on some of the side-characters of the show, McIntee doesn't spend much time on exploring their characters or the dynamic between them. They remain side-characters. On a grander scale, though, it's a cynical, down-to-earth, 'gritty' story. It almost feels like a straightlaced response to the childlike naivety and colour of the story it parallels.

The oddest thing, following it up with The Sea Devils, is that half its raison d'etre – imagining the Master's incarceration, before the story in which he (spoilers!) escapes – makes no sense. If the Master had just managed to liberate himself/be rescued/kidnapped from a remote prison, would the Brigadier really pop him in the lax security establishment seen onscreen? Would the Doctor and Jo approach him with the same guilelessness, the mix of goody-goody opprobrium and forlorn sympathy?

The weird thing being, onscreen it reads very well. In the novelisation (which I picked up in Bromley at the same time...!) it reads even better. In the novel, a fisherman rowing the Doctor to the island makes it clear he feels the Master, a criminal celebrity (although nobody's heard of the Doctor: a nice touch) should have been executed. The continued references to 'the chateau', wrapped in red tape and not much else, produce a perfect setting: serene, stuffy, ripe for corruption and in fact destruction.

And yes, here's the Doctor feeling sorry for the Master, a man who (a couple of months back) was running a real black magic coven. Sympathy for the devil, indeed! The Master wasn't performing some petty fraud. He was trying to inherit the power of Satan (the actual Satan) and destroy the world.

If Curse of the Peladon is the story where Jo really springs to life, The Sea Devils lavishes some time on the Master and it's hugely rewarding. At the start of the story, he's already in control, and not because of a hypnoray but through the force of his personality – we see him at work. The Doctor is soon the prisoner of his mortal enemy, with Jo running desperately around a British prison where the guards have been told to shoot to kill. I've never heard anyone describe this as Who's take on The Prisoner, but it seems that way to me.

The Establishment takes more than one knock in this story – no sooner is the childlike prison governor Trenchard dead (and read the Target novelisation for how it really happened!) then his role is taken up by warmongering minister, Walker (just one letter away...). He's not evenly used in the story, but he does deliver one of the more pointed lines in the story:

Murder? War always is, my dear. Where on Earth's that girl with my toast?

It's almost a pity the Sea Devils have to turn up at all. The Cybermen are never in the right stories. What do the Sea Devils represent here? Upright seahorses with turtle faces, wrapped in netting (one of them, in a sort of fishnet cape, taking things a step too far) who begin with some light sabotage and quickly fall back on nuclear war.

When I was watching my latest Pertwee adventure, I happened to be reading Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, or to be more exact, re-reading. Hoban, who passed away just a couple of years ago, was a prolific novelist of the eccentric variety, and his birthday is celebrated by fans every February 4th. I was re-reading Turtle Diary, in fact, for the third time I think. It turned out to be strangely resonant.

In the novel, two rather melancholy individuals independently decide to liberate the sea-turtles of London Zoo. There is nothing glib about the book. They simply realise, slowly, that the reality of the turtles' captivity is intolerable. The thought of liberating the turtles, once accepted as possible, is intolerable to suppress. The turtles represent all animal life – birds, gibbons, water-beetles – in their capacity to deal with the world as is, directly, not synthesised into, for example, cute animal stories or turtle soup.

Animals, like shamen, experience a higher level of reality. Not only that, they respond to it instinctively: 'A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy.'

The turtle-like, even child-like Sea Devils complicate Hulke's narrative. The story of the Master's takeover of his own prison is the story of a nation state that is weak and self-interested enough to be led, by the devil himself, into corruption and violence. Perhaps there is something about the minister's ability to bomb an enemy he can't see. But what actually excites us about these tadpole-men from the deeps? Are they inhuman, un-human, better than apes? What a shame the story resolves in so bizarre a mirror of The Silurians. What about the Doctor? Is he alien? Inhuman? Doctor who?

And next - The Mutants! Another story I've never seen...

Day of the Daleks

They recast the Doctor, created a new environment for him, found the formula for ratings success. Having iced the cake, it's time to stick a few Daleks on top. But are they the delicious glacé cherries that add the real flavour to the cake, or just glittering candles to add a bit of sparkle to the ensemble?

To stretch my delicious metaphor a little further, this is a story with brilliant ingredients. Coming after the "Magic!" "Science!" "Magic!" "Science!" dialectic of the previous story, here the Doctor cheerfully assures us that ghosts are possible. Not only that, but when he's around, you get a rare kind - ghosts of people who haven't been born yet. Perhaps even ghosts of people who'll never exist! And where better to encounter them than an old stately home?

This era's gothic urban landscape - factories disgorging Satanic slime, laboratories whose doors are frequently kicked in by monsters, B-roads patrolled by murderous automata - is expanded to include railway tunnels infested with ape-men. Its seething background of political drama - glimpsed in The Mind of Evil - returns as imminent World War. And slowly we uncover more about the world after the war - a stylish dystopia to rival Inferno.

Plus, the Daleks strap the Doctor to a mind-scanner and, thrillingly, summon up images of his earlier selves. Their mortal enemy, stretching back through eternity, or a generation of television viewing (which is similar)!

Unfortunately, the result is a crushing disappointment. If it was a cake, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood would be looking extremely miffed.

The performers are all fantastic. Jo Grant is trusting and good-hearted. Aubrey Woods is wonderfully sinister, a human being with all his humanity eaten away (I always thought there was something iffy about that sweetshop owner in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). His zombie dollybirds are extraordinary, and under-used. You couldn't ask for more from Jon Pertwee, particularly in his scenes with Woods. The Controller is 'a quisling, a traitor!' - the victims of the regime are 'old men and women, even children': in one argument, we feel the force with which the Daleks' regime grinds down.

This is necessary, because we don't feel much of it elsewhere. When they appear onscreen, the Daleks are a shadow of their former selves. What's the sound equivalent of a shadow? A poorly modulated bleat? That too. Much as it's an impressive way of presenting them - already the masters of Earth, no shilly-shallying like the villains of Seasons 7 and 8 - they're really not integrated into the story, and criminally there are no big confrontations between them and the Brigadier or the Doctor, or even Jo.

I mean, come on. These are the effin' Daleks!

The direction's limp, with the modern day particularly lacking in atmosphere. A hint of  The Daemons' Dennis Wheatley theatrics would have come in handy for the ghosts at the mansion, which is lit like something out of a sit-com. But having presented them as looking simply like terrorists who have travelled through time, the script takes ages to explain that this is the case. Yes, I know that's okay - we can assume the audience picked it up for themselves - but it misses every dramatic use of time travel, and Aubrey Woods might as well be in a space ship with a transmat hovering overhead.

Equally, the Daleks could have been anyone. There's no sense that there are living beings wiggling those egg-whisks. The whole story would be improved for having Aubrey's zombie dolly-birds as the dominating evil regime. Can't you just see them marching towards that manor house, flanked by Ogrons?

Well, it was nice to look forward to. I'll just have to accept it didn't work out. The nice thing about Doctor Who is that the story has a sort of after-life in the memory: I fancy reading the novelisation at some point, too. Meanwhile, it's time to get really 'out there'...

All Together Now ... Season Eight

Here we go, then; like a murderous doll coming back to life in a warm car, like Jon Pertwee lassoing a psychic, psychotic machine with copper wire,  I am taking charge of this blog. I am channelling all the power of the Nuton Energy complex back into the space vampire that is my life. Eko! Eko! The Dandy!

Yes, I skipped a couple of stories. Well, a whole season. And what a season! Let me bring you up to speed...

I must say, Dr Who sometimes seems his own worst enemy. Exiled to live life one day after another on the same planet, does he exorcise any of his wanderlust by traversing the globe, exploring the places he hasn't visited: Berlin, San Francisco, Tokyo? No, he hunkers down in Tarminster, chucking in a couple of trips out to a prison or a power station. The weather's usually dreadful, wherever he goes. Perhaps it's why he's eternally snappish?

A couple of incarnations ago, of course, he was hardly Prince Charming. As an impetuous young grandfather, he could hardly stop himself being tetchy in order to be patronising. What's the difference here? Perhaps it's that Pertwee (51, here) seems so much the younger man, for all that his curling white hair is his own, unlike Hartnell's (55 in his first story). His mind is pin sharp, and so is his tongue - and everyone ends up on the wrong end of it, eventually.

Of course, he's going through a difficult period. As if exile to the Home Counties wasn't bad enough, at the start of this season his side-kick Liz Shaw has just quit his company after what sounds like a row: later that day he finds a criminal megalomaniac has moved into his territory. The Master's like the neighbour from hell, except he's really just passing through - his vehicle isn't metaphorically sitting on a pile of bricks in the garage. Soon, everybody's  asking 'Who is this Master guy?' All the Doctor gets is grief from civil servants.

Of course, the Doctor isn't so badly off. Liz may have gone off to handle her own test tubes in Cambridge, but UNIT has a new recruit in the form of Josephine Grant. I should note here that I didn't watch her first story, Terror of the Autons (not enough stories with Terror in the title these days, I find) on DVD, or VHS, or at all. I've leant it to someone, and I know it backwards anyway - so I decided to try Terrance Dicks' novelisation. And it's brilliant!

It's light on its feet, effortlessly sketching in the backgrounds of characters who essentially appear on telly in order to be terrorised by Roger Delgado and his blank-faced henchmen, including Jo Grant herself: he spins a real story out of the TV version’s cavalcade of set-pieces (in retrospect, the TV version is just four episodes of cliffhangers) (but what cliffhangers!). On Jo's first day, she's already heard of the Doctor - you picture him as something of a public figure - and Dicks draws a real narrative out of her First Day from Hell.

I have to admit, though, I don't get a strong sense of Jo after her first five stories. Everything feels quite new to her - in Colony in Space, she doesn't even believe the Tardis can fly through time and space (so goodness knows what she thought was going on in The Claws of Axos, when much is made of the Doctor's vanishment in a cosmic huff). The Dæmons gives her some fun dialogue, baiting the Doctor - she even saves the day - but in many ways she still feels a supporting artist: someone to ask questions and lug trees out of the way of Bessie. The Brigadier, by comparison, is barely involved in the story proper but gets constant character notes and moments of triumph.

Katy Manning is, of course, fantastic - her finest hour being, probably, The Mind of Evil, when her compassion for Barnham is a nicely played counterpoint to the vicious machismo exploding at every hand. She also has to take care of the Doctor after he is nearly destroyed by the nightmares induced by the Keller Machine. This story features one of the only real character moments for the pair of them - until The Dæmons, which is in quite another register - with the Doctor reminiscing about his travels to his young companion. If she thinks he's Baron Munchausen at this point, she's more than prepared to humour him. It's the kind of scene you'd get constantly now - the fact that it's so rare here only makes it more cherishable.

She also gets quite a lot to do in Colony in Space, although much of it involves being held hostage and rescued. I love the moment when she and a colonist are chained to a bomb in a cave. 'What do we do now?' he asks her. She shrugs, almost blithely: 'Escape?' It's a rare moment of strength for Jo, and Manning's performance is entirely adorable. Her performance - innocent, frequently outspoken - is just crying out to be matched by Roger Delagado's.

Delgado is perfect in every story. If it was hard to ever imagine Patrick Troughton as a Lord of any kind, the Master oozes the confidence and glamour of the aristocracy. The universe is a giant costume party for the Master, and whilst he might start this series masquerading as an electrical engineer, it's not long before he's a High Court Judge In Space, a vicar and the leader of a black magic coven. It's a shame we always see him at work - it would be fabulous to observe the Master on holiday.

And it doesn't hurt at all that he's in every story. It would be thrilling if there was causality between his multiple appearances, but there's not, and his repeated appearances are gloriously camp, even comic, as in Colony in Space. Yet there are cracking scenes between the pair of them throughout the series. The Master sincerely wants to share the power of the Doomsday weapon with the Doctor, and doesn't raise Azal casually: he wants to rule. One big scene in Peter Capaldi's Death in Paradise reconnects with that idea - the Master doesn't just see the Doctor as weak, he thinks him petty and small-minded.

One final note - I only knew two of these stories. But in story two, I knew where I was. There's an aesthetic to the Pertwee era that is quite addictive, all on its own: lurid visuals, big performances, music and sound effects that make your TV sound like it's going to blow up. There is some fabulous writing here too, but I think this is what I particularly adore about this era. It's cosy. It's creepy. But it's also out of control - like so many machines in these five stories, it constantly sounds like it's about to overload and self destruct.

And here we are on the threshold of Season 9, and the return - four and a half years since their 'Final End' - of the Doctor's real arch-enemies... 

Oh, and I didn't mention Miss Hawthorne...!