The Invasion

Second only to my love of absorbing Doctor Who in its many forms down the years has been a desire to imitate the creation of that art. Even more exciting than watching Doctor Who or reading about it is the idea of making, writing, drawing or constructing your own. "The Invasion" brings back memories of screen grabbing, lining up frames and grappling with memory limitations. It was the missing story I tried to make a reconstruction of.

I've no doubt that my loftily ambitious mind had already planned out amazing productions of "The Celestial Toymaker", "The Massacre" and "Galaxy 4", but "The Invasion" seemed like the best story to choose to do first for a number of reasons. Firstly, there were only two episodes missing so it wouldn't be too daunting a task. Secondly, most of the images could be drawn from the existing episodes, and TARDIS scenes from other stories. Thirdly, nobody had yet reconstructed this one and, having helped out on scanning and magazine-scouring duties on a few of the original recons, I was in a position contact-wise to get what might hopefully be the very first reconstruction of "The Invasion" in circulation. The challenge was a big one, but the rewards would be great!

Unfortunately I wasn't blessed with a top of the range Mac and glitzy desktop publishing package. I was using no less than an Amiga A500 Hard Disk, a wired in tape recorder, a slideshow package and, my secret weapon, a digitiser and editing software package that I had purchased for the princely sum of £100 some time before. My resources were fairly feeble by today's standards, but I figured that by hooking in my video recorder I could commit the recon to tape in small sections, and could therefore get away without masses of memory. Trials with my fictitious Amiga TV channel "ATV" had proved this was achievable.

I got underway by digitising in images from the existing parts of "The Invasion" and "The Mind Robber". Luckily a large part of the first "Invasion" episode was set in the TARDIS and followed straight on from the previous story, so pictures from it could be borrowed without worrying about different costumes. The sequence of the TARDIS breaking up from "The Mind Robber" was even reprised in reverse as the ship reformed, so I set my digitiser up to grab this entire sequence at a rate of one frame per second, and then programmed my slideshow software to display it in reverse. To enhance the illusion of this being a new episode, I also stole some frames from "The Web of Fear" episode 1, manually airbrushing Victoria out of the TARDIS set and pasting in Zoe instead. I was particularly pleased with my structuring of the sequence where a missile strikes the TARDIS (using a grab of the ship in space, again from "Web" Part 1) and when subsequently the ship lands in a field, again a reversal of the sequence where it takes off from Part 8.

It was going well. I'd managed to sync up the first 5 minutes of my reconstructed episode with the off-air soundtrack and it looked fantastic! I'd even affected a smooth frame-by-frame reconstruction of the Troughton title sequence, enabling me to hand-add the "Episode 1" caption on the appropriate frame. The only problem I'd run into was with the scene featuring the Lorry Driver - and as the only cast member not to appear in subsequent episodes, I'm sure reconstructer's that followed in my footsteps later experienced exactly the same problem with him. Luckily however, the character appears in a photograph that the Brigadier shows the Doctor in a later episode - so I somehow managed to cut the man out of the photo and create a frame out of what I had.

However. You will notice when you next visit the Loose Cannon website that the name sitting proudly next to their "Invasion" reconstruction isn't mine. Disaster struck my knackered old monitor and it breathed its last. The work was halted, and I was unable ever to continue. Ironically, there was (and as far as I know still is) nothing wrong with the hard disk itself. But we never got another monitor with the same specific cable connection to that ancient old Amiga Hard Drive. Theoretically, my recon still exists, sitting in coded magnetic bits deep within a dusty Hard Disk in my parents old loft. Like a masterpiece painting locked inside a dark room, my magnum opus would live on, half-completed, forever without ever being able to be seen.

David Palmer eventually completed the first "Invasion" reconstruction. He used a similar approach for Episode 1 as I did, but managed to find some rare pictures of the Lorry Driver that I didn't have. And he finished his. But for a few weeks, I made Doctor Who and what fun I had. And if I never got to see my name 'in lights' on a recon web site, at least I can live with knowing that my dark side of the Moon missile attack was much better than anyone else's.