THE FIVE KNOCKERS

By Eric Sordid

PART ONE

We open in the TARDIS console room. Saintly and sanctimonious Vicar’s son Doctor Who (Simon Thomas) is polishing his equipment. Bolshy old Tegan (Yvette Fielding) wanders in.

Tegan: “By ‘eck, Doctor, have you finished it yet?”

Doctor Who: “Yes – rather splendid, isn’t it?

Tegan: “It looks reet proper. Will it work?”

Doctor Who: “Oh ye of little faith Tegan. After all, in the good book, does it not say that it work like a charm?”

Tegan: “What book?”

Doctor Who: “The Blue Peter Book, 1971.”

Doctor Who tries to open the door. The controls have failed to work.

Tegan: “Bloody ‘ell, do you blame me, or what?”

Doctor Who smiles oddly, and delivers a hefty wallop to the console. Something breaks, but the doors open anyway. The Doctor sighs.

The TARDIS has landed at a battered old church somewhere in Wales. Doctor Who’s other companion, hunky athlete Turlough (Tim Vincent) is pretending to draw the landscape. He hands the Doctor a picture drawn earlier by Margaret Purnell, and the pious old Time Lord laughs falsely. Tegan staggers out, dressed like a tart’s breakfast.

Turlough: “I feel so calm and relaxed.”

Doctor Who: “It’s that zonked out hippie sat on the rock smoking a massive joint.”

Tegan: “It’s like Earth, on the fourth day of the Glastonbury festival.”

Doctor Who: “Same cause and reason.”

Meanwhile, in a hidden control room many light years away, a tall athletic figure dressed all in black is fiddling with something, cackling away to himself. On a screen, we see Doctor Who’s crotchety old first incarnation (Christopher Trace) hobbling around the Blue Peter garden with Percy Thrower.

First Doctor: “Bloody roses are all dead. And what’s all that shit in the pond? Do you want to get sacked, you old gimmer?”

Suddenly, an enormous Blue Peter badge flies from the heavens, swallows the Doctor up, and whisks him away through time and space.

Percy Thrower: “Oo-ar.”

An unconvincing model of the old man arrives in the hidden control room. The black-garbed figure puts it on a model as unrealistic as Blue Peter’s famous Tracey Island.

Back at the Welsh church, the Doctor yelps in pain.

Turlough: “Are you alright?”

Doctor Who: “Just the pin from my Blue Peter badge sticking through my shirt, I suppose. As if something was trying to remind me of something immensely important that I’ve forgotten. Or lost.”

Tegan: “Give over, yer soppy sod.”

Doctor Who: “I’ll thank you not to use that absurd mongrel dialect, Tegan.”

Tegan: “Hmph.”

Meanwhile, at the “secret” headquarters of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart (Peter Purves) is having a drink with his replacement, Crichton (Christopher Wenner).

Brig: “You know, I can’t tell you how much I was looking forward to this reunion… old friends, old faces… perhaps a quick feel of Konnie Huq after she’s had a few gins.”

Crichton: “There was one fellow we tried to find - used to work with you for years on end, climbing up an enormous column, wearing his wife’s knickers…”

Brig: “Michael Sundin?”

Crichton: “No, you know, the popular one.”

Brig: “Oh yes...”

Meanwhile, outside in reception, there is a kafuffle. A cosmic hobo (John Noakes) is trying to get past a suspicious UNIT receptionist (guest star Johnny Depp).

Receptionist: “I’m sorry sir, you’re not allowed in there.”

Second Doctor: “Get down, Depp.”

Receptionist: “Groan.”

The Second Doctor bustles in.

Second Doctor: “Purves, you old dog.”

Brigadier: “Good heavens – is it you?”

Second Doctor: “Yes, for once I managed to steer my Morris Traveller without ending up on a dreary moor waffling to camera about my schooldays. And who is this?”

Brigadier: “Colonel Crichton, my replacement.”

Second Doctor: “Yes, mine was pretty unpromising – some ignorant young farm boy from Detthick.”

Brigadier: “Come along, Doctor, we’ll take a little stroll around the grounds.”

They wander off, arm-in-arm. Crichton looks positively baffled.

Crichton: “What the blazes is going on? Who was that peculiar little man?”

Receptionist: “John ‘Go With’ Noakes, sir.”

Crichton: “Who?”

Receptionist: “That’s what the kids say when they wheel him out for all the Blue Peter anniversary specials.”

Out in the lovely garden, the two old chums reminisce.

The Brigadier: “Oh yes, the Blue Peter steam locomotive, the Lifeboat appeal, we’ve seen some times, Doctor.”

Second Doctor: “And Lulu – don’t forget Lulu.”

Brig: “As if I could.”

Second Doctor: “And those dismal National Power commercials…”

Brig: “Eh?”

Second Doctor: “Oh they occurred in your future. Well, I must go old chap – I shouldn’t be here at all. I’m not breaking the terms of my parole, but I am bending them a little.”

Suddenly, a big Blue Peter badge appears in the sky.

Brig: “What is it?”

Second Doctor: “I think our past could be catching up with us – I owe Biddy Baxter a fiver for a round of drinks. RUN!”

They leg it, but being old and infirm, they are no match for it, and the big badge scoops them up into who knows where. Another set of crap mannequins appear in the mysterious control room.

Elsewhere, the third Doctor (Valerie Singleton) is driving a very sensible car to a discreet meeting of like-minded individuals. Suddenly, the big Blue Peter badge appears menacingly above her.

Third Doctor: “Great private parts of fire!”

The Doctor tries to outrun the terrifyingly large piece of cheap plastic, but to no avail. Another figurine appears on the crappy model in the dark figure’s control room.

Back at the church, the two companions are very concerned for their hero, Doctor Who, who is in considerable pain.

Tegan: “I say, knock him out and run for it.”

Turlough: “I wonder how much money he’s got on him?”

Doctor Who: “I am being diminished, whittled away piece by piece. A television star is only as good as his predecessors, a Blue Peter presenter more than most. ”

Meanwhile, in a suspiciously outdated piece of footage, the Doctor’s fourth incarnation (Peter Duncan) and Romana (Katy Hill) are enjoying a leisurely punt down the river Cam, looking at the University.

Romana: “Some of the great minds have studied here – Waterhouse, Heggessey, Newton…”

Fourth Doctor: “Oh, definitely Newton.”

Romana: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Fourth Doctor: “No vibrators, erotica, or Viagra. Just two strong arms, a long pole, maybe a probing finger…”

Romana: "So, you have to make the hole nice and juicy so the pole will slide in easily."

Fourth Doctor: “Oh yes. There was no limit to Isaac’s filth.”

Suddenly, the menacing badge once again rears its scariness in the sky.

Fourth Doctor: “Spare me the madness!”

But it’s all too late, as the badge plunges out of the sky, and lifts the two Time Lords from their punt. But as they’re whisked across the continuum, something goes horrendously wrong, and instead of arriving where they’re meant to be, they get sucked into a Time Eddy, causing dimensional instability and a run on the pound. In the secret control room, the black clad figure hits his console in an agony of frustrated rage, and then cries quietly in the corner like a schoolgirl.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sarah Jane Smith (Anthea Turner) is about to leave her incredibly glamorous home to do something incredibly glamorous. She is at the garden gate when she hears a noise behind her. It is her robot pet, K9 (Lulu the Elephant).

K9: “Danger mistress, do not go out.”

K9 starts pissing up Sarah Jane’s legs.

Sarah: “You’re supposed to be drinking it, K9.”

K9: “Danger levels much higher, mistress. And the Doctor is involved!”

Sarah: “Now I know you’re being paranoid.”

K9 starts wheeling uncontrollably around the garden.

Sarah: “Get off me foot!”

K9 does a poo.

Sarah: “Oh, I’ve trodden in it.”

Sarah rushes out of her incredibly glamorous garden towards an incredibly unglamorous bus stop.

K9: “Danger – poopie – Danger.”

As Sarah rushes to the bus stop, she is caught unawares by a massive (and not very glamorous) Blue Peter badge and disappears.

Meanwhile, back at the old church again, Tegan and Turlough have got their weakening Time Lord pal into the TARDIS. He sets the co-ordinates for somewhere, then collapses.

Doctor Who: “I must find…”

Turlough: “Yes?”

Doctor Who: “…my other selves… I must be a complete whole...”

Tegan: “You already are a bloody ‘ole…”

The Doctor starts fading in and out of sight. Tegan and Turlough look at each other shiftily.

The TARDIS materialises on a wild and windswept plain – the final pieces are put on the board by the nasty man in the black clobber. The game can now begin.

END OF PART ONE