Home  Up One Level  Updates  Email

Doctor Who, What, Where, When, Why and How
A personal Doctor Who viewing memoir

The Leisure Hive

This one left me cold – the novelty of its radical newness was lost because I’d already seen Logopolis so the new music, titles, costume, science and electronica were pretty familiar. I remember the pods dropping from the head of the elderly and thinking it was silly. I can’t even use my usual excuse of watching it when I wasn’t in the mood – we went out for the day and I fitted it in later in the week between bouts of revision. I don’t remember buying the video – one day it was just sort of there. I don’t even remember buying the DVD even though I think there was a frisson of excitement because it was Lalla’s first commentary. Though it might not have been. I do know that when I wrote the original episode guide (before it was the Matrix 2.0) entry for the Leisure Hive, the trivia section was a list of points about how nothing interesting happened during the making of the story.

Even the photo used to illustrate the Leisure Hive is dull

Meglos

Unlike its predecessor I felt strongly about Meglos. I hated it. I hated the incredibly long recaps at the start of each episode (UK Gold didn’t trim them even though they lasted for several minutes – either they respected their audience too much to edit Doctor Who or they cared so little that they didn’t notice). I hated the baddies, I hated the earth man, I hated the religious nutters, I hated the waste of Jacqueline Hill. And boy did I hate that wretched cactus. I hated how the script kept trying to be witty but failing so utterly. The writers seemed to be trying to ape the style of Holmes and Adams but without even a fraction of the talent needed to pull off even a rip off. I hated the dodecahedron and the singular lack of explanation as to what it was. I want to know a little more about a magical object than how many damned sides its got. I hated the time loop thing they were stuck in – I even hated Tom’s deliberate pratfall which became so painfully obviously fake as we saw him carefully trip over his own feet time and time again – and I hated the ridiculous way they escaped from the time loop. I sat there on the floor (I’ve never been one for watching television sitting on a chair) getting more and more baffled at how bad this unfolding mess was. It’s one of the few things M’love and I ever disagreed about – Meglos being rubbish, Trial of a Time Lord being four stories and that suicide is a valid way of solving ones problems.

It's a shame Meglos still exists - making a recon
would be a piece of piss

Full Circle

I didn’t really understand Full Circle first time around. Word thinks “Full Circle” is an address for some reason and is offering to find it for me on a map. It was only later that I realised it is a truly magnificent tale. First time around I let things like the woeful spiders which came out of the fruit distract me. It was during either second year exams or possibly finals that I rediscovered Full Circle. In those days my revision technique was three fold. First I would take the notes I’d written in lectures and rewrite them in a more colourful, hopefully more logical and certainly more readable form. Then I would record those notes onto audio tape and listen to them for hours at a time. Sometimes concentrating on what I was hearing, other times deliberately trying not to listen to them so they would slip in subconsciously. While doing stage one – the writing of the notes – I would usually have a Doctor Who video on. I might’ve been trying an early experiment in subconscious association – by taking something familiar like Doctor Who and writing about something unfamiliar like contract law I might’ve been able to link the two together – the marsh men burst in and that happened while I was writing about a particular legal verdict then by running through the events of Full Circle I would be able to remember all the important cases. I don’t know if that was the theory or if I was just bored. Either way, Full Circle got a few airings during that first note taking stage.

Something like this but more untidy and more colourful

State of Decay

Long before I saw State of Decay, my beloved’s best friend – who I sort of inherited as a chum – leant me an audio tape of Doctor Who which she’d found in a cupboard. It was Tom Baker reading State of Decay. I still think I used to have that tape as a child but it has never turned up. There is something about Doctor Who and vampires which goes back a long way. Of course I might’ve seen bits of it when it was first shown. My little niece, Banana, watches Doctor Who and she’s about the same age as I was when State of Decay was on. Maybe in thirty years time she’ll write about how she always thinks of wasps when she reads an Agatha Christie book and how she must’ve been on a picnic when she was small and her daddy swatted… no – that wouldn’t happen… her mummy swatted a wasp with a copy of Murder on the Orient Express. The only audio book I am absolutely sure I had as a child was called “Lion Men of Mongo” which I’ve just Googled and could buy from eBay for a fiver. I won’t bother.

State of Decay was also an important landmark because it meant I now had every single Tom Baker Doctor Who story on video as of the middle of 1994. My diary wouldn’t lie – not about this anyway – so my entire chronology may be a bit off. Anyway, I was pleased and took this as something to celebrate.

CASS-ETTE TAPE~!