The Claws of Axos

"Doctor Who and the Pasta Dish", "The Ax-Filers", "Chinny Reckon"

"The One With the Real Patriot" (USA), "The Pastabator" (Italy)

Doctor Who beats the Master for the third time in a row so gets to keep the trophy.

*** - It was all going so well until Pigbin Josh was killed. Then it got a bit silly.

"Overweight, underpowered museum piece... Might as well try to act with a second hand gas stove"  

(Roger Delgado had fallen out with Jon Pertwee over the last piece of Swiss roll at lunch and the row was clearly playing on his mind)

Pigbin Josh: "Furge thangering muck witchellers rock throbblin' this time o' day Ur bin oughta gone put thickery blarmdasted pants about, gordangun, diddenum? Havver froggin' law onnum, shouldnum? Eh? Eh? Arn I?''

In order to add authenticity to proceedings, the director insisted that the atomic power station set contained real atoms.

The appearance of the Axons is generally credited with starting the short lived "Glam Rock" fashion. Pigbin Josh inspired the even more short lived "Tramp Rock" which only survives today thanks to the sterling work of Bob Geldof.

Bill Filer was named after Bill Shatner (consummate American hero) and a filing cabinet (a roughly equal use of space)

John Levene discovered during the making of this serial that Katy Manning's knickers were paid more than he was. He tried complaining to management but was told that the knickers had a better agent and he should just put up or shut himself away.

The BBC's internal technical magazine described this serial's use of Colour Separation Overlay as "frequently optional" and recommended they ditch blue in favour of yellow as it was less likely to be mistaken for the sky while recording in studio.

Several viewers wrote to the BBC to complain about the Doctor Who production team blowing up a nuclear power station at the end of the story. The Director General wrote back to reassure them that the Doctor Who production team was only a model.

...is that you should never trust foreigners or Civil Servants or foreign Civil Servants or Civil Servants with foreign names

Si Hunt

"The destruction of the power station at the end of Story GGG reminds me of the time I was polishing William Hartnell's frozen body and noticed he was becoming rather soft at the extremities. I dashed out of my cryogenic unit fearing the worst. I slammed the door and pressed the big, red "Fast Freeze" button and the entire chamber was filled with an icy jet. Unfortunately it must've required rather a lot of energy as all the lights in my house went out for a moment. I have a private generator which kicked in (since it would literally be a national tragedy if my continual video recording archives were disrupted). The rest of Bendaton didn't have my sensible foresight and they were without electrical power for four months. To show you how mean spirited the proles can be, they seemed to hold some kind of grudge against me for my pre-planning. They even went so far as to verbally abuse the local boys I hired to collect wood for my generator. People can be so selfish. Ian Devine on the other hand is terribly witty and within an hour of the incident he'd made a spaghetti bolognaise which you could spray green and swear was a Krynoid <vbg>"

"Rassilon's Log" (writing in 1979) urged the BBC to sue the American Academy Awards prize giving for the blatant copying of the Axon male for their "Oscar" statues. The Academy's president wrote to the magazine to apologise and said it wouldn't happen again. The next issue of "Rassilon's Log" (published in 1981) exclusively revealed that they were lied to. Andrew Pervy (writing for "Primord's Pantry") said he "would happily watch this story again one day" but only gave it six marks out of ten. His conclusion was "'happily' might have been too strong a word. Shall we leave it at 'content'?"