The Sensorites

My first brush with "The Sensorites" will always be a happy one. When I was nine, I was held at the ransom of anticipation by my Dad, who promised me a "treat" when we got home from swimming. I can remember buzzing around in excitement at the prospect of that unspecified something my friend Matthew had apparently got and now I'd got too. When we got home, I was presented with the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special in all its glory.

Oh, what treasure! The inside front cover, with its mysterious, blue-tinted title sequence screen grabs, unfamiliar pictures of people like Jo Grant, Jon Pertwee and Mary Tamm in what looked even from the close-range photo like a very scary tropical jungle. And, somehow more thrilling of all, two strange Sensorite creatures walking flat-footed through a dark and sinister tunnel.

What was nice about this gorgeous tour-de-force of photos was that every one of them was perfectly chosen so that the story in question seemed like the best adventure you'd never seen. Most were beautiful colour publicity photos (we know now), and even the black and white ones seemed as if they were artful glimpses of another time, like the sepia-tinted Macra Claw or the fearsome photo of Styggron who for some reason I thought was called Kroll. Even the pictures from the stories I'd recently seen made them seem better than they were on the telly. The crisp photo of Kamelion on page 31 casts "The Kings Demons" in the same beautiful air of mystery as all the others do, perhaps explaining my anticipation for the repeat later that year and, indeed, love of that story to this day.

There are subtle differences between the 20th Anniversary special and a magazine or reference book you might expect to pick up today. For one thing the photographs had obviously been carefully selected for one purpose only - to best represent their subject matter. Nowadays, the need for ever rarer or different photos would result in an impressive, yet thoroughly realty grounding selection of out-takes, deliberately inferior shots and photos that delight because of their rarity, rather than for what they actually look like. There also seems to have been an attempt in the 20th Anniversary Special to cloak the images completely in their fictional environment. Although we get an Anti-Matter creature devoid of its video effects and Kronos standing on what looks suspiciously like a bit of old carpet, for the most part the pictures are all in context. There isn't, for example, the unwelcome intrusion of a BBC camera or boom mike in the Morphoton photo in order to present a rare behind-the-scenes snap. And there lies the beauty. Every one of those photos was like staring into another world for me.

This effect was compounded by the minimal amount of technical information given, another fortuous side-effect of the magazine's innocent nature. Nowadays no fan would be happy without learning a myriad of illusion-shattering factual details about each adventure. Back then, the pictures were enough and so, sparse captioning aside (remember "Sara Kingdom - came to kill, stayed to become a friend"?) we don't learn anything about the strange images of clowns, robots or creatures in jars, leaving our imaginations to boggle at the adventures they might herald from. I could only wonder at what awaited the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and their strange gurning intruder friend on Page 6, although the golden beach on which they'd evidently just arrived was clearly some magical, exciting alien world. And I could only dream about how good the story where a Sontaran lumbers, "hot-foot" after Sarah Jane as she scrabbles up a stone wall was. Certainly that terrifying, stalking robot would never give up chasing her. Naturally neither the terrifying looking Sontaran chase sequence or Sarah Jane's perfectly blow-dried auburn hair-cut seen in the still ever showed up in an existing episode.

Best of all, the magazine set every story at an equal level. By choosing only the best available photos, "The Keys of Marinus" was as serious, crystal clear and gorgeously Technicolor as "Frontier in Space" or "Full Circle". The White Robot sat alongside the Voord and Solonian Mutant, and one had no idea that the stories were technological decades apart. Had some fuzzy, far more representative sixties stills (or, even worse, telesnaps) been used, these stories wouldn't have captured the imagination in the same way at all. As it stood, I can still look at those photos today and feel a pang of excitement.

I can still remember that scary adventure where the lady in a purple hat moves quietly through the jungle, or marvel at the elderly Doctor and his nurse on the beach. But greatest of all are those haunting Sensorites, strange orange-faced figures sliding quietly through the underground tunnels, their amorphous feet shape-shifting over the chiselled steps. I knew I'd never see the adventure, but that didn't stop me dreaming about how wonderful it must have been.