The Face of Evil

“The Day Tom Went Mad”, “Philip Clarke 1977”, “Sevadream Sevateem”

“The One with The Big Face” (USA), “Doctor Who and the Face of Niceness” (The Campaign To Shield Children From Anything Nasty)

Doctor Who corrects a mistake he hasn’t made yet.

*** - It’s more of a table wine than a vineyard.

“I had to prepare for playing a god by learning humility” (Tom Baker in his autobiography “Tom Baker, Who Art in Heaven”)

"Now drop your pants or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly baby"

This entire story was written at the last minute after Tom Baker blew the BBC’s pension fund on a huge sculpture of his own face.

Tom Baker and Louise Jameson hit it off instantly – he affectionately nicknamed her ‘sod off’ and she dubbed him ‘uncle grumpy’.

Two cameras went missing during the second studio session. The production team insisted it was a publicity stunt by the Blue Peter team but they denied it. The fact that an unnamed member of the cast came to work that day in a quite exceptionally big coat (and left in rather a hurry) was hushed up.

During one take, Tom Baker shouted ‘can’t you at least try to be more like a cabbage?’ and Louise, lacking a stinging retort, hit him with a nearby midget. Ex gratia payments of fifteen pounds each were given to all those present.

The Virgin New Adventure ‘Andromedium’ speculates that this story takes place after Robots of Death. We’d have more details but the book is currently nine hundred pounds on eBay and we aren’t stupid. Well, not that stupid. All the time.

The tapes of this story were due to be blasted into space in 1987 until NASA realised their mistake and sent a satellite up instead.

...is that human beings will become really rubbish if and when they ever colonise other worlds.

Si Hunt

“I know from first hand experience how much trouble one can have from a computer which has been given ones personality. Some years ago I was persuaded to boost security at Brent Towers. This was after I'd spent a sizable sum purchasing a kilogram of Maureen O'Brien's discarded skin and was worried that some hoodlum might see the chance of making an easy buck. The engineer convinced me to spend the equivalent of three hundred grams of Miss O'Brien's tissues on a system whereby the burglar alarm was made more secure by adding a copy of my personality into the circuits. I was lucky in that, apparently, it normally takes several weeks to accurately convert a person's personality into digital form but mine only took fifty six seconds. I must've had a particularly intelligent artisan.

Alas, he must've made a programming error as the machine was obnoxious, petulant, patronising, smug, verbose, childish, aggressive, insulting, tactless, mean-spirited and grumpy. Ian Devine tried to gain access via the backdoor but found that my guard was resolute. After two weeks living in the potting shed I finally considered it worth the horrific expense of making a mobile telephone call and demanded that the engineer remove the system.

To make matters worse, the skin fragments turned out to be from the seller's own dermas and therefore had absolutely no value what so ever. Sometimes it is so hard to be me.”

Sebastian Bastard, writing in "Neeva's Glove-cum-Hat", summed the story up in glowing terms. "It is essentially a psychological parable for the modern 1970s as we face the inexorable challenge to reconcile our intrinsic animalistic and primitive religio-ignorant nature with the unimaginable and exponential rise in our technological development. But the good news is that it has a swinging piece of totty dressed up like Raquel Welsh." The editor was swamped with letters asking for more details on the "unimaginable and exponential rise in our technological development" and whether it would let them own more Doctor Who. Most of those letters included a post script saying it is actually 'Welch' not 'Welsh'.