The Deadly Assassin

“The Deadly Killing Assassination Murderer”, “Yes Castellan”, “The Matrix”

“The One That Annoyed the Old Woman” (USA), “Damn – They Beat Us To It” (The Wachowski Brothers)

Doctor Who rather unsportingly defeats a disabled man and his friend Bernard Horsefall

*** - It does for the Time Lords what a microwave oven does for compact discs.

“Good heavens – it’s young Who – you still haven’t handed in your biology homework you know” (cut from the Doctor’s first meeting with Borusa)

"As I believe I told you long ago, Doctor, you will never amount to anything in the galaxy while you retain your propensity for vulgar pants"

DWAS originally hated this story and who are we to argue with the Young Conservatives of Dr Who fandom ?

The murdered president was played by a heavily made up Andi Peters Sr (father of current ex-tv presenter Andi Peters)

This story is a thinly veiled homage to the Marx Bros film ‘Duck Soup’

The big collars worn by the Time Lords was Robert Holmes’ satire of the 1970s fashions which he called “ugly to the point of deformity”

Mary Whitehouse started foaming at the mouth during episode three and had to be put down. A robotic stand in replaced her for many years until the price of petrol got so high that she was switched off for good.

Episode two was mistakenly recorded in black and white and the colour had to be added later by placing Quality Street wrappers over telecine cameras and transferring the whole thing to film.

Extras for the DVD release will include Tom Baker impersonating Churchill, Bernard Horsefall giving a lecture to a group of aspiring traitors, twelve minutes shot on set while everyone was at lunch, a facsimile of the menu in the canteen during the first recording block, a commentary by the man who played Runciman (in character), a recorded but untransmitted sequence where the Time Lords explain exactly how time travel works and the sketches that Tom Baker had done for his cabbage companion ‘K-bayge’. The release (unconfirmed by BBC Profit) is set for July 2007. RRP thirty Euros.

...is that you should always judge something on its merits rather than blaming it for the work of later talentless, ham-fisted hacks.

Si Hunt

“I remember interviewing Bernard Horsfall at a Doctor Who seminar in Blackpool. He was a little vague about certain fascinating technical details but came to life when talking about a theory of his.

'I'm pretty sure that the Time Lord characters I played in Doctor Who were all the same person' he told me.

'Don't be pathetically stupid' I quipped, 'you cannot produce one atom of evidence to support such a subnormal opinion. And even if you could, it is not your job to do so. Simply hiring the same meat-puppet twice does not constitute the basis of a telehistorical theory. If the two parts were the same character then there would be documented evidence which I would have found and which I would now own and since there isn't and I haven't and I don't then it wasn't.'

With that I stormed out of his hotel bedroom and, when I found myself tripping over the balcony and falling headfirst towards a flower bed, I realised I'd gone through the wrong door. I escaped the plunge with only superficial wounds to my face and a completely blocked left ear. It was several hours later that a particularly violent sneeze during the Story 6E symposium dislodged the obstacle. Fortunately it was a tulip bulb which was so wonderfully appropriate for Story 6E that I got a round of applause from the audience. Sarah Sutton still hasn't forgiven me for upstaging her that day. <shrug> It is her loss.”

DWAS famously hated this story when it first came out. The society's review has become the stuff of legend. It starts out by condemning the decision to demystify Gallifrey as "gobshitery of the first water", it considers the idea of doing a whole story without a companion as "trying to juggle with only one and a half arms", he opposes the concept of the Matrix because "it is palpably absurd that computers could ever produce animation of that calibre as there aren't enough pixels in the universe" and dismisses the political story saying "if I wanted intrigue I would get a job in an office". As for the return of the Master he decries "the wilful evaporation of the character's charisma, smoothness, personality and style." The one good thing about the story was "the establishing of the twelve regenerations rule gives a necessary finity to the character of Doctor Who and it is never going to cause the production team any headaches because it will give them sixty or seventy years of uninterrupted production."