Planet of Giants

When they first invented Doctor Who, they decided that it should consist of a mixture of three different types of story: the future one, the past one and the 'oddball' adventure.

We all know that 'Planet of Giants' is, to come over all Verity for a moment, the EPITOME of oddball adventures. They seemed determined to do a 'little people' story right from the outset, although it was never clear why. Perhaps they got offered a gigantic sink on the cheap, or maybe (as other chapters in Doctor Who's history suggest) someone delighted in putting the designers out in an attempt to thwart the final product.

It's not hard to see the flaw in this simple blueprint for Doctor Who. There was a potentially inexhaustible supply of past and future stories because, well, there were no shortage of times the TARDIS could visit. But, bar the hidden planet story that never got made, it's a job to see which other dimensions the good Doctor could have visited in future 'oddball' stories. A Universe made of cheese perhaps? Or a dimension where Susan was a man.

It's most likely that we'd have got more subtly educational tales of traversing the human body and the like. Such ideas immediately prompt a groan, as Doctor Who was never really there to teach you anything, except perhaps dubious morals like girls generally get in the way and people dressed in black are evil. Another well intentioned but ultimately flawed series remit knocked on the head then. So what other key feature of 'oddball' stories stands out? Well, they inevitably cost more, probably even more than the sci-fi tales of the time. You can re-use alien city sets and sliding doors, but the whole point of this short-lived third genre of Who story was that it showcased something different, something unexpected.

The sets in "Planet of Giants" are masterful, proving that if Raymond Cusick was a pedestrian designer of alien monsters, he could more than hold his own at life-size Bunsen burner models. But they must have cost an arm and a leg, a factor no doubt made even harder to swallow by them losing a whole episode of the story late on when someone decided it was too boring. Perhaps this person was on holiday when they made "The Space Museum" six months later.

It was a nice idea to plan for every third story to be set in neither the past nor the future (presumably the present day was vetoed at this point, lest they have to think of a reason for not losing Ian and Barbara), but Doctor Who was never going to be shackled to a set of three pigeonholed definitions for very long. Thankfully they soon gave up trying to shoehorn this already out-of-the-ordinary series into deliberately bizarre situations and allowed the weird and fantastic to evolve by themselves.