Planet of the Spiders

"The Death of Doctor Who", "Doctor Ommmm"

"The One with the Big Hairy Queen" (USA), "Radioactive Spiders Attack Tokyo" (Japan)

Doctor Who stops "the eight legs" from invading Earth. With imaginative self-promotion like that, it's a good job they didn’t take over.

*** - There's a chase and lots of puppet monsters. It's like a Best of Pertwee compilation except it's not very good.

Cho-je: "The old man must die, and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed."

Pertwee: "Hang on a second. Barry, is baldy here trying to tell me something?"

"Not all spiders sit in the pants"

The spiders sitting on peoples backs were the inspiration for the current wave of novelty animal rucksacks.

Doctor Who is at its best when the guest cast are so bad that they make the regulars look good.

It is well known that the actor who played Tommy went on to create & write Terry and June. It is less celebrated that the actor playing K’Anpo would discover the shocking truth about Velcro and be censored by the corrupt BBC shortly before his expose series ‘The Shocking Truth about Velcro’ was due to air.

Two major religious cults have sprung up around the worshiped image of Gareth Hunt. The Gareths believe that the New Avengers is the word of God while the Hunts believe that coffee beans are the root of all happiness. Neither has more than eight members.

The Doctor’s greatest fear may have been facing the Queen Spider thing but Jon Pertwee’s was having to say ‘I’m not a sausage sucker, I’m a sausage sucker’s son and when I’m not sucking sausages, I’m sleeping in the sun’. Having already vetoed it from Terror of the Autons, Mind of Evil and The Green Death, but was unable to remove it from episode three of this story. Fortunately, he almost drowned saying the line and it was eventually abandoned as ‘a joke gone too far’.

The lengthy chase sequence was not a result of Jon Pertwee’s gadget fetish but rather because the episodes were grossly underwritten and it was cheaper to film special effects sequences than dare to tell a member of the writer’s union how to do their job.

...is that Terry and June was the product of a "special" mind.

Si Hunt

"I wish to put the following on record. It was several months ago and I was standing upon my trusty wooden ladder removing the light bulb from the landing. It was the summer months and therefore any depressing of the light switch was a waste of perfectly good money. I was fumbling with the rather dusty shade when I felt a spider fall from the fitting and down the back of my shirt. I was rather startled by this and slipped off the ladder. Ian Devine opened his bedroom door to see what all the commotion was just as I fell. I was rolling about on the carpet attempting to remove my jacket, cardigan, tie, shirt and vest in an effort to locate and remove the spider. Ian Devine, thinking I had run mad, was grabbing me firmly in an effort to subdue me sufficiently for him to bind me in a straight-waistcoat. It was at this point that Mr Groovejet - the local estate agent - appeared on the scene with two potential buyers and saw what they assumed to be some kind of e-r-o-t-i-c interlude. Apparently he regularly shows people round as there is a common local fantasy that I have died and my estate is being sold off."

In 1985, Gareth LaBamba wrote a glowing review of Planet of the Spiders which included such praise as "the use of ground breaking technology to create frighteningly realistic giant spiders", "repressed humans living amongst a grimness not seen since the Daleks Invasion of Earth", "an epic final battle between the Doctor and the Queen spider which involved her four swords to his one", "the incredible transformation from Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker which defied explanation", "a chase sequence which was thrilling but seemed slow compared with the rest of the story" and "the always excellent Richard Franklin". In April 1991 LaBamba saw the BBC video of the story and was last seen trying to hitch a lift to a quiet part of Tibet where he could grieve in peace.