Survival

Doctor Who always experienced an odd sort of flirtation with the modern day. If you asked any fan to name the timeframe the Doctor visited most - past, future or present day, the answer would probably be the present day. We're used to the Doctor spending vast amounts of time in the present, not least due to the money saved in not having to build a futuristic city or dust off period costumes. It's well acknowledged that when Doctor Who wants to save a bit of cash, he pops down to see us for a while, usually triggering a flurry of alien invasions, the sod. But did Doctor Who ever actually visit the real present day?

For starters, the notion of stories set in the present is made ludicrous by the series time travelling nature. What we actually mean is that the Doctor, by some hugely unlikely chance, happens to land in the same time as us, the watching viewers, and absurdly often it's in the exact same year. It's easier to accept later on when the Doctor has regained control of the TARDIS - one might presume he has deliberately plotted to land Peri in 1986, the year she would be experiencing had she not met him, in "Attack of the Cybermen", either that or it's an insanely unlikely coincidence. But what are the chances of the TARDIS arriving in 1966 in "The War Machines" or even 1984 in "Resurrection of the Daleks", the exact years the shows in question were broadcast? Perhaps the TARDIS has some kind of 'real time' clock that became attuned to 1963 in the first episode and from then on drew the ship back to the corresponding time whenever it returned to the planet?

Then again, this affinity is overstated because the TARDIS really didn't return to see us that often. It was impossible or unlikely for one reason or another until "The War Machines", when we see "our" world in Doctor Who for the first time since Totters Lane at the beginning. It's an admirable, full-throttle depiction of the late sixties that perhaps put them off trying it again too often. In fact, when Doctor Who does return to Earth again in the Troughton era, it's much less the fun, buzzing London we know. The strolling policemen and buses have been replaced by silent black limousines and deserted streets, the late sixties production team preferring to opt for an unspecified near-future Earth more reminiscent of an Orwell novel than the park near where you live.

And for all its Earth-based stories, the Pertwee era didn't really capture the seventies in the way we see old episodes of "The Liver Birds" and "Bless This House" did. For a start, the Doctor spends most of his time with the hush-hush UNIT gang, and the period characters we do meet are eccentric, village-green people straight out of "The Avengers", like Bert the Miner or Miss Hawthorne. For all its invention and adeptness at conjuring up alien worlds, Doctor Who was never actually any good at showing us the world on its doorstep. "The Stones of Blood" almost takes us there, with sausage sandwiches and University academics. But before long it decides it wants to be about a spaceship trapped in hyperspace and an escaped war criminal instead. From then on, we rarely, if ever glimpse the "suburbia" that Doctor Who's viewers grew up in, almost as if the series was afraid of the pedestrian pace of real life. When the Doctor makes it back in "The Android Invasion", Earth is an alien planet in disguise, and in "The Awakening" everyone is pretending to be in a historical anyway!

"The War Machines" is just about the only story to preserve a snapshot of the popular culture of the time. Afterwards, expectations were confounded and subverted every time the world outside the police box doors got too real. The two exceptions are "The Hand of Fear" and "Survival". In the former, we get to see the Doctor hurtle through southern-England roads in an old Elegro, and Hill View Road might just be where you lived, the house with the car and bicycle outside. But of course there is nobody outside today and the Doctor dashes straight off anyway. In "Survival" we at least see the TARDIS materialise in a suburban close where a man washes his car on a Sunday and the corner shop is empty. It's deliberately a lifeless, sunny day, but it's the nearest Doctor Who ever got to visiting the world where I grew up. Just as the series was ending, he returned home - to his real home, the back streets and playgrounds of a million children - although ironically he'd never actually been there before.

There's something beautiful, fitting and at the same time slightly sad about the Earth the Doctor arrives on in "Survival". At the time, the story seemed loaded with menace and fresh originality, the mystery of that sinister cat bounding about and the strange distorted voice in the shadows. Viewing it a few years later, it seemed like Doctor Who had strayed irreversibly far from greatness and grandeur. It was impossible not to compare the hero that had once battled Sutekh and had adventures on Skaro, to the one now crawling about on a pavement with a tin of cat food. When the Doctor appears to have been killed in the motorbike crash, Ace screams "No!" and dramatically clutches his hat in remembrance. We discover moments later that he has instead been flung into a comedic position on a pile of old rubbish. It's like he can't even manage a heroic death. The Master laughs at him.

Yet "Survival" amounts to possibly the best story that the series could have bowed out on. How fitting that when the Doctor returns home to search for menace, it's no longer there. The streets are empty, the life has gone; how many times as a teenager did I switch off Doctor Who and return outside, to lay in the warmth of a sunny Sunday and stare up at the sky, imagining the worlds that might be out there. Then I'd go for a walk, patrolling the quiet streets and listening to the birds singing and the distant sound of hedges being trimmed. In "Survival" the Doctor arrives in just such a place, and the early parts of the story play with our expectations that at any moment he'll be lifted out of the mundane and once more prove that everything we long to escape to is true, just as the Fifth Doctor once shook off the disbelief of Sir Robert and showed him the TARDIS, and the First once proved to Ian and Barbara that it all wasn't all an illusion. The series is resplendent with examples of the Doctor looking like a fool in others eyes as he tries to insist the impossible is true. Here once again, he dashes around like a loony making out that stray cats can transport you to an alien world (the very idea!), but Perivale is almost too ordinary to convince us. Just as once I walked along deserted streets and tried to imagine that, high up in the sky, a tumbling black triangle might suddenly appear and sweep me away... it's never going to happen.

So one can envisage a possible alternative resolution to "Survival"; one where Shreela and Midge have just left because that's what people do when they grow up and away. Ace echoes childhood memories when she says that it was "just that time... we had a real laugh", but it can never stay that way forever. And those cats, well maybe they were just cats after all. This being Doctor Who though, there really is an alien world, and the Master is back... and the Doctor has proved that he can take you there even if it is a dull, sunny Sunday.

The final words spoken as the Doctor and Ace walk away were always worth far more than what they were - a few lines hurriedly penned in the wake of an absent series renewal. There are worlds out there... where the sea's asleep and the river's dream. Where a screaming black triangle can swallow you up and take you away. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Monsters, adventure, excitement. Danger. Injustice. It's all there if you imagine.

No wonder our tea's getting cold....