Curse of Peladon

"Doctor Who and the EEC", "Doctor Who and the Penis Shaped Alien"

"The One With the Dick in a Curtain" (USA),  "We Are Not Alpha Centauri" (France), "We're Not Alpha Centauri Either"  (Germany), "The Germans are Arcturus" (Italy)

Doctor Who goes to Peladon and finds that the castle is cursed by bad hair, more bad hair, bad facial hair and, in one case, bad fur.

*** - It's worth watching just to come over all Black Lace and sing a cunningly altered version of "Agadoo"

"Shall we worship gods ?"

"No - let's  worship that thing over there"

"The cute furry thing ?"

"That's no way to  speak about our god. I'm going to have to kill you".

Izlyr: "We reject all pants... except in self-defence."

Much BBC documentation has this serial listed as "The Cures of Peladon" and one file even bore the name "The Nurse of Peladon". Both are believed to be accidents as the BBC's obsession with all things medical didn't start for some years

David Troughton would go on to be Patrick Troughton’s son, Colin Baker’s boyfriend and Katy Mannings flatmate. Or vice versa.

The idea of nations coming together in a spirit of distrust and poor quality effects was copied from the Eurovision Song Contest (then called ‘Johnny Foreigner Sings’ by the BBC) and led to Terry Wogan suing Dr Who. His lawsuit is believed to be the birth of the phrase ‘intellectual property’

The Marmsbury Sandwich thought little of the EEC satire and said ‘next thing they’ll be giving them Marmsbury and doing so with a smile on their faces’.

Katy Manning brought a picnic in for everyone except writer Brian Hayles whom she described as ‘square to the point of deformity’. He responded by calling her ‘a silly blonde with more shoes than sense’. Tensions calmed when Katy was persuaded to give Brian an ex gratia sandwich of cheese and pickle.

The BBC’s audience research panel generally ‘hated’ this story with opinions ranging from ‘oh no’ and ‘save me from this noise’ to the more positive ‘I wonder if he’s single’, ‘I wish they’d invent the video recorder so I could watch this with my unborn children’ and ‘Wow!!!’ The consensus was listed as ‘fair to middling’.

...is that you shouldn't assume the baddies are the baddies even though they were before and they will be next time

Si Hunt

"For reasons which will be of no interest to you at all, Ian Devine and I were discovered by the head mistress in the gymnasium of the Bendaton Academy for the Daughters of Gentlemen, just as the clock was striking three a.m. "What are you two men doing here?" demanded Miss Yeast. "I can explain" I said, doing my bit and waiting for Ian Devine to share the workload. Miss Yeast pointed to the out of context fact that Ian Devine and I were wearing netball uniforms and demanded a second explanation without even waiting for the original one to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Inspiration struck and I explained at length that we were wearing a close approximation of native dress on the planet Peladon as we were rehearsing a theatrical evening in which Ian Devine and I recreate two thousand four hundred and thirty years of Peladonian history in just over two and three quarter hours. Miss Yeast looked a little sceptical, no doubt having reasoned sensibly that no kind of acceptable historical depth could be achieved in so short a time span and that compromise was the h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y of proper research. She invited us to perform an extract from the drama at their forthcoming theatrical season and I'm proud to say a lot of people learned a lot from us during the "Always Beware of Strange Men Arts Festival", even if what I can only assume was intrusive sponsorship did make it appear less prestigious than it actually was."

The Conservative Party Magazine, though not strictly a Doctor Who fanzine, devoted an entire issue to Curse of Peladon. "On the one hand" wrote Stoatley Goddard, "you have a fine old society and on the other you have a lot of war mongering Germans, some damn fool French John Thomas and a damn Italian in a box who is obviously suffering the after effects of not being able to drive properly. Then a liar - obviously meant to be Belgian as he's got a funny voice just like that Parrot fellow in the murder books - turns up and tells lots of lies about how everyone should get along with each other. My god - it's like feeding radioactive heroin to our children letting them watch this allegorical rubbish."