Colony in Space

It's funny how often the people who made Doctor Who forgot how to do it. The series eventually became so entrenched in its own myth that often this itself was used as a blueprint for making more of it; but if you were to follow this mythology by the letter you'd end up with a story featuring Banto Zame from "The One Doctor", or "The Curse of Fatal Death". These are both deliberate pastiches, but it's surprising how often the real thing has been drawn up in line with this unreal, cardboard cut-out perception of Doctor Who.

The TV Movie is the best example, possibly because it arrived at a time when the myth was all there had been in recent memory. So, like a generic novel written by an eleven year old with too many Terrance Dicks books, the Doctor wanders around with his sonic screwdriver, eating Jelly Babies and being witty. The plot is more or less made up as he goes along, but the Doctor does things like dress all Edwardian and tell people what they're future is because THAT'S WHAT HE DOES. Often you look back on Doctor Who stories you have written as a child and think "yes, but WHY?". One often feels the same reaction as the end credits of the TV Movie thunder past.

Then there's "Colony in Space". Like the return of the Daleks the same year, the production team seem to have forgotten how Doctor Who did things previously and simply relied on the fact that there must have been a good reason in the first place. Thus for the Doctor's first return to an alien planet, it has to be a dreary old quarry. The Doctor and his assistant are separated, and there is a dispute between the indigenous population (men in funny masks) and some colonists (men in flares and Gail from Coronation Street). Even the Master turning up, which at least must have felt like a novelty at the time, is retrospectively a tired device. At least "Curse of Fatal Death" was less than half an hour long.

Perhaps we're being unfair on "Colony in Space". Maybe it was just bad luck that it fell victim to one of Malcolm Hulke's most boring ideas; heaven knows why "Doctor Who meets some colonists" was higher on his list than dinosaurs or interplanetary space war. Both those concepts would have provided a more interesting story to kick-start the return to space/time travel. "Colony" is, I suppose, innovative in its own way in that there is some new ground explored; or to put it uncharitably, there never really had been a Doctor Who story as boring as this one before.

It did, at any rate, miss the mark in understanding what it REALLY was that made great Doctor Who; decent monsters, some witty dialogue, a bit of imagination and unashamed escapism. If you try and write the future by imagining what the past was like - he often visited gravel pits and sorted out invasion disputes didn't he? - then you'll just come up with the sort of depressing runaround that, in the beginning, Doctor Who set out to overturn. A story not unlike "Colony in Space", in fact.