The Time Monster

I’d read the Discontinuity Guide many times but their verdict on the Time Monster has always stuck with me.

"Like watching paint dry while being whipped with barbed wire: immensely dull and painful at the same time. It's as if the UNIT family are having such fun that they've forgotten that we'd like to have some, too. Episode four is intended to make the audience go 'Ooh, that's clever' but actually makes them fondly remember The Space Museum."

Like a lot of the wit in the Discontinuity Guide it is a tad over-written but the imagery sticks in the mind long after the occasional clumsiness of the phrasing has been forgotten. The internet tells me it came out in 1995 which would fit broadly with it falling after my excitable devouring of pretty much the entire canon in two years and before I started to rediscover stories on proper video. So I spent a while thinking the Time Monster wasn’t very good. I listened to conventional wisdom. Or at least the wisdom of a confirmed Pertwee-hater. I was foolish, naïve and all that Cretan jazz. Then when the video finally emerged – in a tin with Colony in Space and a metal collectable rendering of Roger Delgado’s face – it could take its place as one of the camp classics. Episode four is not rubbish – episode four is gloriously silly. The new Tardis set is silly, the script is silly, Pertwee’s attempts to play it straight are silly, Jo is silly – everything is silly. But the two things you can’t level at this most jolly of stories are dullness and painfulness.

Something you can level at me is that I only realised last year that Roger Delgado is putting on an accent when he’s playing Professor Thascales. At least he is some of the time.

The source of many early opinions

The Three Doctors

It would either have been 1990 or 1993 when we were upgraded on a flight home from America. My globetrotting parents are regularly upgraded these days as they are pillars of the community and entirely the respectable sort of people welcomed into the large chairs of business class. But it only happened the one time when they were with children. Actually, now I think about it, it happened twice but once they were offered upgrades for themselves and not for my brother and I. We were of an age where we could be left so they lived the high life and we slummed it. Still, we were small so the economy seats weren’t so cramped back then. Anyway, there we were – mother and self – in large (and in my mind furry) seats when somehow Doctor Who came up in conversation. There may have been something in the paper – business class seats let one read a broadsheet with ease. I gave her the curious fact that neither the Five Doctors nor the Three Doctors actually had that many Doctors in them. The Five were actually Four because Tom Baker wouldn’t do it (which is, by all accounts, true) and the Three was actually Two because William Hartnell had died (which is, by all accounts, false). To be generous to me it might simply have been my confusing the two specials – Hartnell was dead by the time they did the 20th anniversary special and he’d be the first to admit it. Mother also called Sylvester McCoy “the man who killed Doctor Who” which seems harsh with the benefit of hindsight.

I know the first time I saw the Three Doctors was one of the nightly showings. I also know I didn’t keep them. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I would creep downstairs about five minutes before it was due to start and wait. I caught the last few minutes of programmes I’ve long since forgotten, started the tape and went back upstairs to bed. I wouldn’t trust it to a timer recording. UK Gold were notorious in their early days for running massively away from their schedules. This was because they’d schedule a 30 minute programme for a 30 minute slot and bung in five minutes of adverts. You do the maths. The channel once claimed – either as a joke or a serious attempt to baffle a techno-illiterate public – that the delay was caused by the time it took the signal to go up to the satellite and come back down again. You don’t forget things like that and neither did I – I trusted UK Gold with the old video timer only when it was absolutely essential. And since I’ve always lived an empty life it was seldom absolutely essential.

Something else which makes me smile is Jon Pertwee’s description of how they incorporated William Hartnell (who was still alive) into the story. He gave the same background that Barry Letts does on the DVD (and probably in his book which I must listen to soon). Pertwee then says “They sat him down on a chair and shot him”. I know what he means but the way he delivers that line – especially the long pause at the end – has always made me picture Letts commanding a firing squad. I’m wicked.

The actors couldn't disguise the joy they felt at being in the Three Doctors

Carnival of Monsters

Back in my first year at University I settled on a routine – I would go into Coventry and hit shops on a Wednesday afternoon. There were never lectures on a Wednesday afternoon because that’s when the sporty people did sport and since sport hasn’t troubled me since upper sixth when I discovered I could opt out of games in return for playing dominoes with stroke victims once a week, I was free to go and participate in the capitalist economy. This week it would be the brand new Carnival of Monsters video. That was the plan. So I was rather surprised to find it in the local Tesco on Monday when doing my weekly shop. Tesco in 1995 wasn’t the entertainment juggernaut it is today. They had a small, almost token, video section with the odd blockbuster mixed with the odd cheap and nasty nothing tape. They certainly didn’t stock Doctor Who videos. Except this one time. And to make matters odder, it wasn’t £10.99. Nor was it £11.99 or £9.99. It was £8.16. I remember this because I found a uniformed chap and asked him to check it was right. It was. Eight pounds and sixteen pence. That would be a weird price to pay for something on eBay let alone from Tesco. But mine was not to reason why, mine was to get the hell out of there before they realised. If it happened today I would channel Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and have the Dick Barton theme in my head as I escaped. I got back to my room and watched episode one as quickly as I could. It was episode two that was the special one – not only was it slightly extended but it had the rare theme music on it. I was underwhelmed, obviously, as the Delaware theme is interesting but ultimately wafer thin.

Two men that would never have charged £8.16 for a video