Carnival of Monsters

In retrospect, it seems odd that Doctor Who's anniversary story should be so world-building, so forward-thinking, so unlike the stories of the First and Second, even to a large extent, the Third Doctor – only for the following story to encapsulate, in many regards, intrinsic qualities running throughout the series, and to reflect on them too. But that's what Robert Holmes, and the rest of the production team, managed to do.

It's not just that the Doctor and Jo are back in time and space. They went to the planet of the flea people last year, and the lost city of Atlantis not long after (Jo even got her hair done there). Carnival of Monsters, like my beloved Curse of Peladon, has a cosmic worldview, one that mirrors the unbounded multiplicity of a writer's imagination. Vorg the showman is really Robert Holmes in a false moustache: he can gather who he likes together, make them fight, pick them out of one world and drop them in another. As Jo says, at one point, 'I suppose we're due for monster bit in a minute.'

Like the Doctor (another double of his, in many regards) he's a figure who represents endless invention and mutability. If you can imagine it, the Tardis can take you there, and in this story multiple worlds are conjured up: Inter Minor, 1920s Earth, Drashiggia, and those places only gestured toward – the backwaters and fairgrounds that Vorg and Shirna tap dance in and out of, the Doctor's home planet, where he once ran a political campaign, and the worlds of Ogrons, Cybermen, Prehistoric Earth. In the Miniscope (which is, what – the story, the telly, broadcast media in general?) they can be interwoven.

It's all imagined and woven together so apparently effortlessly, each with its own little narrative, that the viewer really thinks – yes, the Universe really is a big place. And yes, it really is all one thing. Either because we can make it one narrative, or because we can bring it all together and look at it, or because we can travel between them all – these many worlds are all combined in us, our minds, our lives.

Holmes makes the continuity of worlds part of the colour and liveliness of the story. Alien travellers in the far future still use polari – in fact, they sometimes work fairgrounds on Earth (and do we realise they are not Earthmen when we see them?). Grey people called Shallak can fall for the same old cup-and-ball routine you see in old movies. Shirna, the hoofer from beyond the stars, even shares the viewer's POV, entertained by the Doctor's heroics, lifted out of her despondency by the magic of the Tardis dematerialisation at the end.

But it's all one thing in a serious way, too. We are shown that the actions of the audience are not disconnected from the lives of the people they watch, or the governing body that permits the show to run. The personal is political.

This is really a satire on how storytelling runs the world, the unreal representing and sometimes governing the real – from the romantic novel read by a man of the Empire ('Good heavens, a memsahib!' he exclaims, on discovering Jo) which ends disappointingly with a character becoming a missionary, to the machinations of the grey people to make bad news for the President (and play down bad news about the working masses). Power, oppression, pleasure, are all in the same industry.

The Three Doctors has no real story: its pleasure is all in the interplay of Doctors, companions, Omega himself. The problem at the heart of the story is a sad paradox: the freedom of the Time Lords is founded on the suffering of one man. The question is never asked, Is it worth it, or Can we find a compromise? Omega has already gone mad and tried to destroy the universe – the cartooniness of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, which works in its own way – leaves us nowhere to go but a big bang and a scream. In Carnival of Monsters, the oppressive Miniscope is partially transformed into a Tardis, a symbol of liberation. Then it's destroyed – and everything is changed.

Even Vorg becomes temporarily heroic. But like the Doctor, he finishes the story as a man of words rather than status – a vagabond, exactly as the Doctor identifies himself, surviving on his wits.

What's distinctively Doctor Who about this story, is the lightness of touch. It's a complex story, but deftly presented for a general audience: playful rather than self-important. Visually, it's a treat - and it's actually funny. The little guys win the upper hand, and not just by escaping a dimensional compression field. When the Doctor faces the Tribunal at last, he beats them immediately on the strength of his rhetoric – a Doctorish victory more persuasive than the combined Three Doctors managed last story, and a brilliant moment for Jon Pertwee.

Just when you start to think the show has changed completely, or that in leaving UNIT behind it might fall back on old stories, it reminds us why this show means something: invention, reinvention, liberation and alienness.

Can it last...?

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 Mutants

I don't know how she does it.

Josephine Grant manages to make her job at the United Nations look frightfully glamorous, but I wouldn't want to be in her platform boots. Continual stresses, violations of health and safety, working with two of the most patronising men in Tarminster (three, if there's an 'r' in the month and the Master's dropped by). The hours are decidedly odd, too – some of them are in the future, and when she's there she witnesses the most miserable visions of life on Earth. Yet somehow she remains buoyant.

In The Mutants, she has her second glimpse of the future life of humankind (the dystopia of the Daleks doesn't count because – we assume – it doesn't happen). And it's shit. Earth itself is all concrete and car fumes. Its colonists don't even have the pioneer spirit of Gail Tilsley and co., who were making a fairly miserable job of farming a mudball, shortly before their ship was blown up by venture capitalists. 

At least Gail (and Tlotoxl) were co-existing peacefully with the inhabitants of the planet, even if they are all blown up a papier-mache gnome with a super-weapon at the end of that story. In The Mutants, the project of colonising the galaxy has inevitably begun to implode. The Marshall, expertly performed here by Paul Whitsun-Jones, is a variation on Morris Perry's similarly vile Captain Dent: adding to Dent's avariciousness over mineral rights, the crazed despotism of a business executive. Nevertheless, they are equally inhuman, equally capable of corruption on a galactic scale and cold-blooded murder.

If you were Jo, you might almost wonder if it was worth struggling to save the Earth of the present day. Despite the fact The Mutants evinces the strongest influence of 'Star Trek' yet, it paints a rather less optimistic version of the future.

But Jo just can't help herself. She heedlessly throws herself into the action, and does a good job of convincing the Marshall that she and the Doctor – together with the authorities – have got him on the run. This is before the authorities turn up, in their gold lame judges' wigs, and nearly dither the Solonians (and the audience) into an early grave.

She sees some amazing things, too. A firestorm viewed from the mouth of a cave. Giant flea people who lurch out of the shadows. A cave of pure Colour Separation Overlay which sends her into a slow motion spin. A mutant viking falling through a spaceship wall into the void. Last, but not least, a multicoloured butterfly man who can fly through walls and talk through his eyes.

It's a shame that the Time Lords, as a thank you for risking their necks over the planet's fate, couldn't take the Doctor and Jo to the future of Solos, where the air is presumably thick with butterfly people. But, no. Giant fleas and being locked in a radioactive fuel cell. Then home. You've had your fun.

This is a strange story for the Time Lords. It's never very well explained just what they're doing, and why the Doctor's doing it for them, which wouldn't matter if it wasn't a big part of the narrative. Everyone's behaving out of character, intervening in the affairs of Solos for no particular reason. Jon Pertwee sells it with all the star power of his Doctor, but sometimes you can feel him wondering – what exactly am I after, here?

Call me a fan wanker – you won't be the first – but one's imagination is tantalised by the appearance of George Pravda, Deadly Assassin's Castellan Spandrell. The headwear of the Earth authorities recalls that story too. Mad as it might seem, I long to write a revisionist Target novelisation where the dodgy Earth colonists are mixed up with shady Gallifreyans. I could hardly resist popping a Season 6B incarnation of the Doctor in there somewhere, too.

An alternate fantasy would be to hoover all the Time Lordy bits of the story out, hopefully reducing the whole thing down to four episodes. (No more six episode stories. No more.  I won't stand for this.) I think The Mutants, with its atmospheric locations, mad characters, eerie music, amazing monsters and unguarded political sentiment would be immediately taken to viewers' hearts. Pertwee's outfit is particularly nice this story, too. Like Quentin Crisp in space.

As it is, I don't quite know how Jo and the Doctor have the strength to crack a joke in the closing reel, but it's a hallmark of this era that they try. They're a class act, this team: stylish, playful and outspoken. Long may they reign.

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...

The Curse of Peladon

            What is it about The Curse of Peladon?

            I enjoyed much of Season 8. I admired The Dæmons. But I was enthralled by The Curse of Peladon. I watched the first episode in a state of delight. Just the thought of it put me in a good mood. Having just finished Episode 4 with much the same feelings, I find it's probably - very possibly - my favourite Pertwee story so far (tied with Spearhead and Dæmons).

            What's so special about it?

            The Doctor and Jo Grant arrive on the world of Peladon, in a dreadful storm, when Jo really should be sipping Pernod and Black with Mike Yates in one of Tarminster's more happening wine bars. Instantly, this story has a sense of occasion. It's Saturday night on Earth, and like other teenagers in Great Britain, she has to spend a bit of time with Doctor Who before she can escape to the discotheque, for Labbi Siffre's It Must Be Love and Cilla's even more pertinent Something Tells Me Something's Gonna Happen Tonight.

            The Tardis is lost - no way out - and they are impelled up a mountain, through a secret passage, into a citadel built into the very fabric of this inhospitable world. We happily accompany them, because they're written with a lightness of touch and because Pertwee and Manning have a sublime rapport by now. The Doctor's tetchiness is wreathed in smiles and affectionate teasing.

            So we are drawn into this strange space: the cosy refuge from the storm. Inside a mountain, outside our world, out of the storm, into danger. All the lives and history of this world, boxed up in one excursion in the Tardis, parcelled up inside Jo's Saturday night on Earth. The castle on the mountain encapsulates all that is Peladon, and tonight it even seems to encapsulate the galaxy, with representatives from distant stars gathered all together.

            As the Doctor and Jo move deeper into this world, there's that cosy feeling of a world imagined entire: the world of the story. Perhaps it feels more this way because of its fairy tale quality: the castle on the mountain, the boy king who has to prove himself, the magician with his mysterious princess.

            Of course, this is an old-fashioned Doctor Who feeling, one we've had to do without for a while. It used to be that every Episode One began with our heroes walking into a new narrative and a new world. With the canvas blank again each time, the Doctor and his companion can be the vehicle for any kind of story, and any/every law of the universe is potentially unstable: we flirt with a feeling of total otherness. Normally, this is dismissed quite quickly by someone in a PVC nappy jogging across a quarry, but the challenge can inspire stories like The Celestial Toymaker (by someone called Brian Hayles). It's the televisual equivalent of 'Once upon a time, there was...'

            What deepens the pleasure of this fairy tale world is the arrival in it of the Ice Warriors. We've taken a side-step into another world,  but - a very particular world. The world of Doctor Who! Where cold-blooded cyborg viking dragons swish haughtily about, sometimes with evil plans involving space mushrooms, sometimes on diplomatic missions to Narnia. And not only that, but as soon as they turn up (looking fabulous onscreen, which is a relief after the doddery Daleks) the Doctor is once again a man who has lived and died twice. The sort of man who can remember visiting future Earth buried under ice age, as well as he can remember Elizabeth I's coronation.

            None of this is interferes with the actual story. You could watch and follow this story knowing nothing about the show - but you'd be constantly aware that it's a show about friendship over isolation, rationality over superstition, looking your best and holding your own and trying to do what's best, even when you're completely out of your depth. There's a hermaphrodite with six arms, a gremlin covered in slime riding on top of a drinks machine, and a fey young man in an outfit that could have Jacqueline Pearce saying, 'Mm, it's a bit much...' - and they all want to get along.

            Well, not the gremlin on the drinks machine. He wants exclusive mineral trading rights with a man who looks like a badger.

            The audience can follow it. The actors know what to do. The direction is fluid. Firelight flickers. It doesn't just work - it unfolds.

            At one point, the Doctor points out to Jo how drastic the situation is: it's not about a bomb about to go off. It's about a vast, diplomatic conflict. The Doctor and Jo, taking the roles of politicians, have to engage in arguments and win the support of querulous cephalopods, not to defuse a machine but a situation bigger than any of them.

            Come to think of it, that's the threat posed in The Mind of Evil and Day of the Daleks, too. But in this story - particularly because Hepesh and Peladon are well-intentioned men who make bad decisions - the story really convinces you of that threat.

            And brilliantly, in a huge progression from all her other stories so far, Jo Grant is instrumental in saving the day! The Doctor sends her into the delegates' conference to persuade them to do what she thinks should be done. Jo is an active participant in the story. She talks to everyone, argues about everything, falls in love, pleads for the Doctor's life. She doesn't just react to the action, she goes right inside that story and makes stuff happen.

            Now, perhaps I'm being sentimental, but there is something special about a writer returning to Doctor Who. Yes, of course, I'm being sentimental - I've read Robert Holmes' biography, the story of a man who kept being called back to silly old Doctor Who because it was easy to write and paid well enough, while his own personal writing projects pootled along, or more often petered out. But there is something about a writer like Brian Hayles (or indeed, Holmes or Terrance Dicks) who writes the series in acknowledgement of its basic absurdities, its impossibility, its openness.

            In the previous story, the Doctor zapped an Ogron with a ray gun. In this story, the humanoid characters are the most murderous, and even the Ice Warriors are friendly. This is a story which belongs to the world of the Doctor: transcendental, absurd, cosy, and full of ideas.

            What's up next...?

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'...