The Krotons

“Doctor Who and the Education Machines”, “Gond with the Wind”, “Gond But Not Forgotten”

“The One with the Brain Machines” (USA), “The Top Prize in our Design Contest” (Blue Peter)

Doctor Who and his clever friend foil the plot of some evil robot things that come from liquid while his less clever friend flirts with native girls

*** - It is the second best Philip Madoc story of the sixth season and no mistake

“It’s called HADS – Hastily Added Dialogue Segment – but you don’t need to remember that as we’ll never use it again.”

"'Great jumping pantstoppers!"

The idea of an education system with no mention of science was described by the current Education Secretary as “rather cost effective”.

It was during the making of this serial that Patrick Troughton decided his name would be pronounced “Trout-on” rather than the previous “Truff-ton”. He is believed to have made the change for tax purposes.

The moral of this story is to carry an umbrella but only to carry an old one which you won’t mind seeing disintegrated.

The Loughborough Lancet called this story “Impressively bland” and went on to recommend “they invent a machine which will let us watch this once a year if we want to”.

Wendy Padbury made eight script suggestions during rehearsals. BBC documentation shows that four of these were “laughed off”, two were “briefly considered”, one was “accepted in heavily amended form” and one was “used as the basis for a future serial.” The serial in question is believed to have been Pyramids of Mars for which she received an ex gratia payment of five guineas.

Kroton towels, models, figures, t-shirts, soap, novelty records, tree decorations, cakes, spin off novels, clocks, board games, comics, colouring books and shoes were produced for Christmas 1975 and were a big success in Estonia.

Si Hunt

"I was once listening to a discussion about Story WW - it was light on technical details but it wasn't entirely childish - when one of the speakers observed that it was an inauspicious start to the writing career of Robert Holmes. His colleagues agreed with him and described Mr Holmes as a writer of considerable merit. "Don't be pathetically stupid" I quipped from my wheelchair, borrowed for the day to save five pounds on the excessively high entry fee. "Writers are utterly unimportant if they choose to focus their energies on "fiction". The only writers of any worth at all are people like me who keep to completely factual matters. There is no place for imagination in television." The speaker looked at me for a moment before stuttering out a feeble reply. "But if it wasn't for writers writing scripts, you wouldn't have anything to write your dreadfully dull books about" he smirked. "What a subnormal remark" I quipped again, "that is exactly the same as praising a-r-s-onists for the efficient job done by the fire brigade. Such opinions are not only beneath contempt but actually offensive to me." I got up and was almost out of the hall before the burly convention organiser grasped my sleeve and demanded I give him an extra five pounds for my ticket. I cleverly told him I had no loose change about my person and that he could keep the wheel chair instead. Luckily the old man from whom I borrowed the contraption never came round to my house to claim it back."

"Kroton" seems to mean something in Dutch...

...and Italian too